Personalized Pain Management
Pain doesn’t need to hold you back.
In three steps, you’ll uncover what’s happening in your body, learn techniques to change your pain threshold, and walk away with evidence-based tools you can rely on:
Clarify your pain system — Understand what’s helping and what’s keeping you stuck.
Rewire your body’s response — Learn techniques to reliably modulate painful sensations.
Build lasting independence — Leave with tools and confidence to manage pain long after our work together ends.
3-Minute Reset
for Pain Flare-Ups
When pain spikes, your system goes into threat mode. This short guided audio helps you interrupt the loop, settle your nervous system, and feel more in control — in under three minutes.
Enter your email for the audio.
We’ll send the audio link and infrequent notes on resolving pain.
Pain Fermata supports people living with:
Persistent musculoskeletal pain
Old injuries. Back, neck, shoulder, hip, knee, or jaw pain–especially when you’ve tried PT, stretching, and massage, and it still feels stuck.
Headache and migraine patterns
Including one-sided pain, tension-associated headaches, stress-triggered migraines, or headache patterns that feel unpredictable.
Nerve-related or radiating pain
Symptoms such as sciatica, tingling, burning, or electric-like sensations—especially when symptoms fluctuate, migrate, or don’t clearly correspond to findings on imaging.
Widespread, shifting, or difficult-to-classify pain
Pain associated with burnout or prolonged stress, or symptoms that move around and resist a single, stable explanation.
Pain that closely tracks with stress, emotions, or life context
Pain that reliably worsens during periods of overwhelm, fear, shame, or fatigue—and eases, even temporarily, when the nervous system feels safer or more regulated.
Pain that persists despite “normal” test results
Pain that remains very real and disruptive even after imaging, labs, or specialist evaluations fail to identify a clear structural cause.
You’re already working hard to keep your pain from taking over. Let’s make it easier.
Managing your pain shouldn’t feel like a full-time job. I’ll guide you through proven strategies that calm pain signals. Within a few weeks, many clients report experiencing stretches of pain-free days—a reminder of what life can feel like when pain isn’t in control.
You have a team of excellent providers, but your pain isn’t meaningfully improving.
Pain medicine is fractured, and most people end up ricocheting between specialists, collecting conflicting opinions, and feeling discouraged. Pain Fermata offers what’s missing: an advocate who can see the whole picture and guide you forward—working with the person in pain, not just the symptoms.
This practice is different.
With a PhD in medical sociology and over 20 years working directly with people in pain, I bring both research and hands-on experience to this work. I don’t diagnose or prescribe—I help you sort through the noise, make sense of what’s happening in your body, and find what actually works for you. Using evidence-based tools and steady support, my goal is to help you reclaim agency and feel more in control of your life again.
“Working with Sara was utterly life-changing. Through her compassionate support and skillful guidance, I completely reshaped my relationship to my pain and developed ways to experience more joy and pleasure. It had a profound impact on the way I move through the world, through the lens of chronic pain and beyond. I cannot recommend her enough!”
About me
I know how exhausting it is to live with pain day after day—I’ve lived it and walked alongside many others in it.
With a PhD in medical sociology study pain research, plus two decades of experience, I help people rebuild trust in their bodies and experience relief that lasts.
I’ve done the academic route
I have a PhD from University of California, San Francisco where I dedicated myself to uncovering how chronic pain was being mismanaged in the wake of the opioid crisis. My research took me into rooms where various brain-based pain interventions were being studied in neuroimaging labs and taken up in hospital settings. In addition to the knowledge I gained, I also gained a facility with research and the myriad of methods for treating chronic pain, as well as the physiological and psychological mechanisms underlying them.
I’ve done the bodywork route
With a 12 year practice as a clinically-trained bodyworker, over thousands of sessions I treated hundreds of patients suffering from different stages of persistent and chronic pain and facilitated a way for my clients to effectively and fully re-inhabit the bodies that they were so desperately trying to re-engage with comfortably.
…and I can relate
Like everyone, I’ve faced challenges with persistent discomfort and pain. I dealt with my own chronic condition and was forced to take a hard look at existing approaches and determine my own way of navigating the difficult and complex circumstances of persistent and chronic pain and the industry at large. I have found that with practice, the pain you are feeling now can become an opportunity—for new dialogues with parts of ourselves, for expanded awareness of our form and structure, and for deep insight into our own resilience.
Get In Touch
Clients are often surprised by how few sessions it takes to start seeing results.
If you’d like to explore whether this approach could be a good fit for you, please share a bit about what you’re experiencing. I’ll be in touch soon.
Services
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These 30 minutes are for me to get to know you and how you currently manage your pain. Together, we’ll get clarity on whether working together makes sense at this time.
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For those who prefer to book session by session, or who want to start with a single meeting before committing to a package.
Sometimes, a single session can help identify gaps in care and refine how you’re working with your pain. Each session lasts 50 minutes and can be done via Zoom or phone.
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A four-week package that includes weekly 50-minute sessions and on-call support between meetings.
Most people opt to work with me weekly for approximately one month, at which point many clients report that pain is no longer a central focus of their lives. We’ll work from a holistic, biopsychosocial approach—addressing the somatic, emotional, and social components of pain and discovering new ways to relate to and release discomfort.
During this month, I’m available for on-call support at the moment of a flare-up; intervening at the height of sensation can often lead to the biggest breakthroughs.
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If you have a loved one or close friend living with ongoing pain, these sessions can equip you with tools, resources, and frameworks to navigate that relationship with more understanding and ease.
Caring for someone in pain can be its own form of discomfort—these 50-minute sessions provide support and guidance so you can show up more fully resourced.
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It’s often the people most in need of support who are least likely to reach for it. When you’ve lived with pain for a long time, frustration and disappointment with failed solutions can become the norm.
This practice is different.
If you know someone who could use a new way of relating to their pain, consider giving them a session or package to make it easier for them to begin this work.
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I understand that finances are a consideration, especially for those living with pain. I offer a needs-based sliding scale as well as a payment plan for multi-session packages.
What is Pain Fermata?
In music, a fermata signals a pause—an intentional moment of stillness held at the performer’s discretion.
Pain Fermata offers that same kind of pause for people living with persistent pain: a space where you choose to stop, reflect, and relate to pain on your own terms.
Schedule a Call
Book a free intro call so that I can learn more about you and get a sense for what’s been working as far as pain management—and what hasn’t.
Together we can determine if this process is the right fit for you, or if there’s another path that makes more sense.
