Healing the Helpers
Trauma-Informed Healing
Welcome
We are medical professionals and holistic practitioners with a combined 80 years of experience, and we built this practice for one reason, to help heal the helpers.
You spend your days holding space for others' pain, trauma, and healing. But who holds space for you?
Healing the Helpers is built on one belief, you cannot pour from an empty cup. We help helpers rebuild the inner capacity to keep giving without losing themselves. Whether you come alone, with a partner, or alongside fellow helpers in retreat, our work begins in the same place. With you, your nervous system, and what you have been carrying for far too long.
Our approach integrates evidence-based healing modalities, including ketamine, a legal medication increasingly used in trauma healing. Ketamine-assisted healing is powerful, but it is not for everyone. We provide a thorough medical screening and offer trauma-informed work and retreats with and without medicine. Every path to healing is valid.
Meet the Team
PA-C | Trauma and Psychedelic Practitioner | Founder and Lead Practitioner, Healing the Helpers | Certificate in Trauma Studies | Relationship Coach | Love Coach Mara
Mara Adelman
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Mara Adelman brings over two decades of medical expertise as a Physician Assistant combined with training as a Psychedelic-Assisted Healing Practitioner and Relationship Coach. She integrates evidence-based medicine, sacred plant medicine wisdom, and somatic awareness to create transformative healing experiences for helping professionals navigating burnout, secondary trauma, and existential grief.
As a Western medical provider and former first responder, Mara is particularly passionate about supporting her colleagues in processing the profound physical, emotional, and spiritual toll of a life spent in service to others.
Medical Expertise Meets Sacred Healing
Mara's unique approach bridges conventional medicine and psychedelic-assisted therapy. As a graduate of the Integrative Psychiatry Institute, she combines rigorous medical knowledge with the profound insights gained from her own sacred medicine journey to facilitate deep healing and transformation.
Her trauma-informed practice addresses the mind-body connection, recognizing that years of holding others' pain manifests physically in the nervous system. Through her integrated approach, helpers can finally address how their professional trauma lives in their bodies and their relationships.
Relationship and connection work with Mara supports couples navigating relational strain and guides individuals toward healthier, more authentic partnerships. She understands that healing professionals often sacrifice their own relational needs in service to others.
The Experience
Imagine being met by a provider who understands both the medical reality of burnout and its spiritual dimensions. Mara holds space for the full spectrum of your experience: the physical symptoms, the emotional depletion, the relationship ruptures, and the existential questions that arise from years spent witnessing suffering. In her presence, you can finally be the one receiving care.
Background
Mara's personal journey through autoimmunity, menopause, anxiety, medical trauma, and profound grief has profoundly informed her professional work. Her encounters with loss and illness transformed her understanding of what it means to heal. She brings not just clinical expertise but the hard-won wisdom of someone who has walked the healing path herself.
Her commitment to helping healthcare providers, first responders, educators, and other helpers is rooted in both professional responsibility and deep compassion for the invisible burdens this work carries.
Mara is the founder of Healing the Helpers. She brings her medical expertise, psychedelic-assisted facilitation, and trauma-informed coaching to support helpers in integrating the full spectrum of their healing journey, from nervous system restoration to relational repair to existential transformation.
"Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you." Gabor Maté
Please connect with me at: www.Lovecoachmara.com
Dedication
I dedicate this work to my mother, Susan Adelman, a lifelong nurse and the ultimate helper, who gave of herself quietly and completely. This is what I wish someone could have offered her.
And to my father, Gordon Adelman, who taught me that perseverance furthers. Despite losing his sight in his later years, his unwavering spunk and resilience showed me what it means to keep going when the body falters.
My mother's autoimmune journey and my father's determination are the bedrock of this work. When I am depleted or struggling with my own autoimmune health challenges, I remember their example and find my way back to purpose.
This retreat is for everyone like them, the quiet helpers and the fierce survivors whose stories deserve to be witnessed and honored.
Certified Nurse-Midwife | Registered Nurse | Perinatal Mental Health Counselor | Trauma Healing Specialist | Birth Processing Coach | Grof Breathwork Facilitator | Certificate in Trauma Studies
Bekah Wheeler
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Bekah Wheeler brings decades of compassionate care as a Certified Nurse Midwife combined with specialized training in trauma healing and somatic processing. She holds space for people to face, feel, and heal all kinds of traumatic wounds, with particular expertise in birth trauma, sexual abuse, fertility grief, pregnancy loss, and existential trauma around creation and loss.
Bekah's evidence-based approach integrates Hakomi, Somatic Experiencing, Grof Breathwork, and other trauma healing modalities to facilitate nervous system reset and the completion of trauma cycles that get interrupted or fragmented by overwhelming experiences.
Birth Trauma and Somatic Healing
Bekah's unique expertise lies in supporting people to process traumatic births, whether the trauma was experienced as a laboring parent, as a healthcare provider witnessing difficult deliveries, or as someone whose birth story became medicalized or violent in ways that fractured their sense of safety and agency.
Her method recognizes that birth trauma lives in the body. Through somatic work, breathwork, and trauma-informed processing, she helps people release the nervous system imprints of difficult births and reclaim their bodies as sources of wisdom and strength rather than pain and shame.
Somatic experiencing work extends beyond birth to include sexual trauma, grief, and any experience where the body has learned to protect itself by disconnecting, freezing, or dissociating. Bekah teaches the body that it is now safe to feel, to move, to release, and to return to wholeness.
The Experience
Imagine being met by a skilled clinician who understands that your trauma lives not just in memory but in your nervous system, your muscles, your breath. Bekah creates a container where your body can finally complete what it could not complete in the moment of trauma. In her presence, you are invited to slowly, gently reconnect with your body's own wisdom and healing capacity. Within just a few sessions, you can begin to move through the trauma and re-enter your life feeling whole and confident again.
Background
With decades of experience sitting with people at the threshold moments of life, birth, and loss, Bekah understands that these are not small things. She has witnessed the profound vulnerability required to bring new life into the world and the shattering that can occur when that process becomes traumatic. Her commitment to supporting helpers extends from her recognition that healthcare providers, midwives, doulas, and other birth workers carry the cumulative weight of bearing witness to birth and loss without adequate support for their own processing.
Bekah's trauma-informed approach honors the body as a source of healing and recognizes that complete recovery is always possible when we create the conditions for the nervous system to trust again.
Bekah is an integral part of the Healing the Helpers team, bringing her clinical midwifery expertise, somatic trauma specialization, and deep compassion to support helpers in processing birth trauma, grief, and other somatic wounds that fragment their sense of safety and wholeness.
"The body keeps the score." Bessel van der Kolk
Please connect with me at:
www.rebekahwheelerhealing.com
Hannah Johnson
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Hannah Johnson, RN, BSN is a registered nurse with over a decade of clinical experience and a deep passion for mental health and whole-person wellness. She began working with ketamine-assisted therapy in early 2022 and has witnessed firsthand the profound healing that can occur when evidence-based medicine is combined with intentional emotional support and meaningful integration.
Hannah has always been drawn to the mental health field, believing that true wellness involves the nervous system, the body, the mind, and the spirit. Her nursing background has taught her to hold space with clinical precision and human compassion—a rare combination. She understands the physical and emotional landscape of healing and knows how to guide people through it with both competence and tenderness.
The Experience
In addition to her clinical background, Hannah has a lifelong love of music and creative expression. She believes healing can be found in many forms—through medicine, movement, connection, music, and the simple act of being truly witnessed. She brings that integrative philosophy into every space she holds, creating an environment where people feel safe to be vulnerable, to heal, and to discover their own resilience.
Whether checking vitals, providing clinical oversight, offering a listening ear, or sitting in quiet presence, Hannah's work as a nurse in ketamine-assisted therapy represents the future of healthcare—one that honors both the science and the soul of healing.
Hannah is an integral part of the Healing the Helpers team, bringing her clinical expertise, deep compassion, and commitment to whole-person wellness to support helpers in their healing journeys.
Background
A lifelong student of human connection and healing, Hannah draws from her years of bedside nursing where she has witnessed both the fragility and extraordinary strength of the human spirit. Her training in psychiatric nursing, medical assessment, and patient care is grounded in the understanding that healing happens when people feel truly seen, safe, and supported.
Her transition into ketamine-assisted therapy work reflects her evolving commitment to expanding what healing can look like—moving beyond crisis management toward true transformation and renewal.
"Medicine opens the door. Presence walks through it. Connection does the healing."
— Hannah Johnson
RN, BSN | Ketamine-Assisted Nurse
Certified Yoga Teacher (E-RYT 200) | Massage Therapist (CMT) | Integrative Lifestyle Medicine Educator
Sierra Wagner
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With 29 years of dedicated study and 24 years of guiding students through transformative practices, Sierra Wagner brings deep expertise as a trauma-informed movement specialist and integrative lifestyle medicine educator. She specializes in evidence-based movement and bodywork practices specifically designed to help regulate the nervous system, the same system that becomes overloaded when managing trauma, stress, and the emotional weight of helping others.
Sierra understands that helpers typically live in a state of nervous system activation, trained to stay alert and respond quickly to demands. But when that activation never fully switches off, it becomes chronic stress manifesting as insomnia, anxiety, physical tension, and burnout. Her evidence-based, trauma-informed modalities work directly with your nervous system to create actual physiological calm, not just mental relief.
For the helper who has spent years in service, whose body holds the accumulated hypervigilance and depletion of responding to others' emergencies, Sierra's work offers a pathway to genuine nervous system regulation and embodied healing.
Trauma-Informed Movement
Sierra's classes encompass a wide spectrum, from deeply restorative and meditative practices designed to calm your nervous system, to invigorating mindful flows that build strength and presence. She draws from multiple evidence-based traditions including Hatha, Restorative, and Therapeutic yoga, each approach offering different gifts for how your body processes and heals from trauma, stress, and everyday overwhelm.
Whether you are managing chronic pain, navigating a body that does not move the way it used to, or simply feeling disconnected from yourself, these trauma-informed modalities meet you exactly where you are. Sierra knows how to guide your body toward healing and regulation, no matter what limitations or challenges you are working with.
The Experience
Imagine being met in your body with complete acceptance and safety. Moving gently under Sierra's skilled guidance, you reconnect with what it feels like to inhabit your physical self without judgment or pushing. Whether guided through a restorative sequence or a dynamic flow, Sierra's teaching is informed by her deep commitment to accessibility, safety, and the transformative potential of mindful movement.
You learn that your body is not the enemy but your most faithful ally in healing. Through movement, breath, and awareness, you gradually remember what it feels like to be at home in your own skin. True healing happens when we reconnect with our bodies, when we move with intention, breathe with awareness, and allow our nervous systems to find balance and regulation.
Background
A lifelong student of the healing arts, Sierra has spent nearly three decades exploring how the body carries wisdom, resilience, and the capacity for transformation. Her training in yoga, massage therapy, and lifestyle medicine is grounded in the understanding that healing happens in the nervous system, in the muscles and fascia, and in the conscious relationship we develop with our own physical being.
Through her trauma-informed guidance, participants discover how somatic practices, body-based healing, help us live more authentically, deepen our capacity to love and connect, and move through life's challenges with greater ease and grace.
Sierra is an integral part of the Healing the Helpers team, bringing her expertise in nervous system regulation and trauma-informed movement to support helpers in their healing journeys.
"Yoga teaches us to cure what need not be endured and endure what need not be cured." B.K.S. Iyengar
Please connect with me at:
www.sierralaurelyoga.com
Sound Healer | Breathwork Facilitator | Clinical Hypnotherapist (HMI 700-Hour Diploma) | Master Hypnotist (CMH) | Yoga Instructor
Eostar Kamala
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Eostar Kamala brings over two decades of experience as a devotional musician, sound healer, and Clinical Hypnotherapist, integrating evidence-based modalities with intuitive healing to create transformative experiences for helping professionals navigating burnout and secondary trauma.
Eostar specializes in Internal Family Systems (IFS) and parts work to gently access and integrate fragmented aspects of self that emerge from chronic compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma. Her trauma-informed approach honors the nervous system dysregulation common in healthcare providers, first responders, educators, and other helpers.
The Healing Modalities
Sound Healing Journeys guided by Eostar create a container for deep nervous system regulation. Through carefully orchestrated frequencies and overtones from instruments including 36-inch Chau Gong, didgeridoo, kalimba, crystal bowls, tank drums, Tibetan bowls, and her intuitive overtone singing, participants access transpersonal states where conscious awareness can safely meet stored emotions, memories, and trauma held in the body.
Breathwork using the Vyana Vayu technique is an active meditation that achieves in minutes what years of sitting meditation may not accomplish. It produces rapid nervous system reset, access to suppressed emotions, and reconnection to intuitive knowing. Breathwork paired with sound healing creates the ultimate synergy: breath opens the door, sound carries you through it.
Clinical Hypnotherapy with Internal Family Systems integration allows direct dialogue with exiled parts, the wounded aspects of self that have been rejected or hidden away as survival mechanisms. In the safety of hypnotic trance, these parts can finally be witnessed, understood, and compassionately integrated back into wholeness.
The Experience
Imagine yourself held in a safe, trauma-informed container where the accumulated weight of years spent holding others' pain can finally be released. Lying comfortably, you access a heightened state of relaxed awareness. The carefully chosen frequencies and overtones of sound healing instruments guide your nervous system into deep parasympathetic activation. If emotions arise, grief, rage, longing, or joy, they are met with unconditional presence. If downloads of insight appear, you receive them. If bliss emerges, you surrender to it. Your experience is always perfect, always uniquely yours.
Through this work, helping professionals reconnect with their own capacity for self-compassion, reclaim exiled parts of themselves, and restore the inner coherence required to continue showing up authentically for others without depleting their own vital reserves.
Background
Born in Hungary with a lifelong devotion to sacred music, mysticism, and consciousness exploration, Eostar has spent over two decades offering sound healing and music to audiences across the West Coast and South America. Her training spans yoga, pranayama (traditional breathing techniques), sacred plant medicine ceremonies, shamanic traditions, and formal hypnotherapy education from America's only nationally accredited college of hypnotherapy (HMI).
Eostar recognizes that trauma is held in the programming of the subconscious mind, which expresses as deep grooves of the brain's neural pathways and manifests as stored tension in the nervous system, muscles, connective tissues, and organs. Her evidence-based, trauma-informed modalities create the conditions for helpers to finally receive the healing they so generously offer others.
Eostar is an integral part of the Healing the Helpers team, bringing her expertise in sound healing, breathwork, and clinical hypnotherapy to facilitate nervous system healing and parts integration for helpers on their recovery journeys.
"Allow the river to take you wherever your Breath and the Sounds guide your way." Eostar Kamala
Please connect with me at:
Eostar.net
Our Offerings
Whether you are ready to heal in community, deepen your relationship, or do private one-on-one work, we have a path for you.
Healing Retreats in Sonoma County
We believe healing happens best in community, among people who know exactly what it's like to carry what you carry. Our immersive day retreats bring together an intimate group of 4 to 10 helping professionals for a full day of deep, holistic care in Sonoma County.
Through ketamine-assisted healing and clinically supported modalities including yoga, art, meditation, and sound therapy, you will finally have space to tend to your own healing.
Couples Healing Sessions
Healing together can be one of the most profound things two people do. Our couples sessions create a guided, supported space to deepen connection and work through what has quietly accumulated between you. Ketamine-assisted and non-medicine approaches are both available, woven together with other therapeutic and complementary modalities tailored to you and your partner. Couples sessions are available in person and remotely.
Individual Sessions
For those ready to do deep private work, individual sessions are available with Mara, both in person and remotely. This is space held specifically for you, to explore your own needs, desires, and intentions at your own pace.
Medicine-Free Healing Paths
Non-medicine individual sessions are also available with all the members of our healing team. Reach out directly to learn about practitioner availability.
Not sure which path is right for you schedule a call.
Retreats
Our day retreats are designed for deep healing in an intimate group of 4-10 fellow helpers. People who know exactly what it's like to carry what you carry.
The retreat includes a rigorous medical intake, followed by a personal one-on-one preparation session, just you and your guide, to explore your intentions, answer your questions, and help you feel grounded and ready. You will also have the opportunity to join your fellow participants for a group preparation session to meet each other and align on what to expect, so that when the day comes, you arrive as a community, already knowing you're with people who understand.
Healing the Helpers
Ketamine-Assisted Healing Retreat
Morning of Your Retreat
6:00 AM - Light Breakfast
Have a light, nourishing breakfast. This will be your last meal before the retreat.
Before You Arrive
Spend time in nature, journal your intentions, take a gentle walk. Arrive grounded and ready to receive.
Retreat Schedule
10:00 AM
Check-In
Welcome to your healing day. Settle in, meet your facilitators and fellow participants.
10:30 AM
Welcome & Overview
Learn what to expect, set the container for our sacred time together, and hear about the transformative power of this work.
11:00 AM
Altar Building & Intentions
Create a communal altar with meaningful items. Share what brought you to this retreat and set your intentions for healing.
11:30 AM
Restorative and Mindful Movement Practice
Get into your body with gentle movement. No yoga experience needed. Somatic and body-based practices help you reconnect with your physical self, releasing what the nervous system has been holding so you can be fully present for your healing day.
12:00 PM
Sound Offerings & Settling
Bio break, then settle onto your mat with eye shades and blankets. Let the meditation and healing sound carry you deeper into readiness.
12:30 PM
Medicine Journey
A 2.5-hour supported ketamine experience with curated music and full medical supervision. This is your time to heal.
3:00 PM
Integration & Nourishment
Gentle emergence with warm, nourishing soup. Time to ground, rest, and begin processing your experience.
4:00 PM
Sharing Circle
An invitation to share your insights and experiences with the group. This is where individual healing becomes collective wisdom.
5:00 PM
Closing Ceremony
Candle lighting, blessings, and final reminders that your only job moving forward is to care for yourself.
6:00 PM
Close
Departure with your candle, gift, and heart full of healing.
What to Bring
Participants are asked to bring a matt, blanket, pillow, water bottle, eye shades, an item of special meaning to add to the altar and something to hold during medicine session if desired.
This is your day to restore your capacity for joy, presence, and connection.
After Your Retreat
Plan for a gentle weekend in nature with minimal obligations. We recommend taking the next several days off work if possible.
Join us for a group integration Zoom session Monday evening at 6:00 PM to process your experience and support one another.
We ask that you also consider engaging in therapy, as this has been shown to accelerate change. See our trusted referral partners below.
Windows Health Clinic is a collaborative therapy practice based in Cotati, CA, offering a rich and diverse team of licensed and associate clinicians whose collective expertise spans trauma, mood disorders, addiction recovery, psychedelic-assisted therapy, somatic healing, adolescent and family care, and more. Each team member brings their own unique clinical lens and lived experience to the work. What sets Windows apart is their intentional client-therapist matching process: rather than simply assigning the next available clinician, the team thoughtfully considers each client’s presenting needs, goals, therapeutic preferences, and personality to connect them with the provider who is the best fit for their healing journey. Whether someone is navigating complex trauma, seeking psychedelic support services, or looking for culturally affirming care, Windows Health Clinic is committed to ensuring every client feels seen, supported, and well-matched from the very first step. Learn more at windowshealthclinic.com.
We are excited to help you on your trail to wellness.
Individual Ketamine Session
$1100
Includes:
$300 Medical intake
$200 Preparation session
$400 Ceremony
$200 Integration session
Ceremonial Elements Included
Couples Ketamine Session
$1700
Includes:
$300 Medical intake per person ($600 total)
$300 Preparation session
$500 Ceremony
$300 Integration session
Healing together is its own kind of magic
Full-Day Healing Ketamine Retreat
$1500
Includes:
$300 Medical intake
½ hour private remote preparation session
1 hour remote group preparation
Full-day healing retreat with ceremony, holistic modalities, nourishing food, and sacred space
1 hour remote group integration
Ketamine-assisted healing is powerful but not for everyone. We provide thorough screening and offer trauma-informed retreats without medicine. Both paths are valid healing journeys.
Unfortunately we are not taking Insurances at this time.
We believe healing should be accessible. A limited number of sliding scale spaces are available for helpers experiencing financial hardship. Reach out to inquire.
If you are interested in our services or wish to join our referral network, please reach out. We invite you to forward this to all those in your community who could benefit from this deep, restorative work.
We are also available for professional peer to peer consultations and speaking engagements.
Contact us to start your journey towards healing.
We want to ensure you that all responses are 100% confidential.