The Sage Practice of Mindbody Empowerment:
Emerge from the shadow of pain and reclaim your life.
I founded The Sage Practice in 2020 to help people living with pain reclaim their lives. I know all too well what pain can steal from you, how helpless it can make you feel, and how small it can make your life. Recent neuroscientific research on chronic pain offers hopeful, evidence-based methods for soothing the nervous system and calming the symptoms. Finding these methods changed the entire course of my life. Owing to my own decades of experience with pain, my perspective is quite different than others in the field, but there can be no doubt about the transformative power of this kind of work.
Clients come to me seeking methods to ease their pain, but again and again, they report walking away with something far more powerful:
It is the discovery of your own agency that changes your life.
I help clients shift their thinking, change their behaviors, reframe their stories, and experience transformative insights. I witness them transcend all kinds of self-limiting patterns to become the strongest, kindest, and most powerful versions of themselves yet. There is nothing more rewarding than watching other people come alive at their own power.
“I got my life back, only better.”
I want that for you too. Whether you join a group, take a class, visit a workshop, watch a talk, purchase a personalized recording, or just take advantage of my vast trove of free resources, including somatic tracking meditations, please remember this:
You may feel helpless, but you are far stronger and more powerful than you know.
You can make your life bigger again.
You got this. I’ll help you. You will probably even have some fun along the way.
Lara Birk, PhD, founder of The Sage Practice, LLC
“It feels like Lara is a mirror to my best and highest self that even I hadn’t seen. She is truly gifted." — Rebecca Bauder
“Lara is among the very best teachers I have ever seen.” — David Karp, PhD
About Lara
After a misdiagnosis of a medical emergency in 1991, I required 17 surgeries that saved my legs but left significant structural challenges and decades of pain. The Curable app was my introduction to the empowering new world of pain science education. The changes I saw in myself were profound enough that I left my career as a sociology professor so that I could help other people in the work that has been so transformative for me. It is gratifying to now partner with Curable, the very people that started me on this path, and to be on their panel of Experts, giving talks, teaching classes, facilitating groups, leading live guided somatic tracking practices, and hosting live Q & A’s. It is wild to give talks at the same hospitals where I have been a patient. There is nothing like witnessing people discover their own agency and build back their self trust. When they begin to recognize how strong, resilient, and wise they really are, they even look different to me. Even on the other side of the Zoom screen, they seem taller, lighter, freer. I know we have truly gotten to a good place when a person who has been serious for weeks suddenly smiles and laughs for the first time. Honestly, what I am most proud of is that in building The Sage Practice, I get to be with people in that sacred moment of transformation: they often show up feeling desperate and helpless and leave empowered and motivated to get back to really living. Many clients say that in the end they legitimately feel *thankful* toward the pain. I know what they mean. I feel the same way: it was, after all, the beginning of my awakening.
