Sage’s work is to offer nurturing and dynamic learning experiences for healing arts practitioners of all types to grow, evolve, transform and anchor in liberatory practices and the power of collaborative medicine.

Sage Hayes

For the past 25 years Sage has offered a unique integrated approach to therapeutic change and transformation.  Sage Hayes (she/he/they) is a devoted healing arts practitioner who believes wholeheartedly in individual and collective transformation.  Exploring lineage, embodied presence and emergent relational care are the threads braided together in Sage’s work.  Sage is a somatic experiencing practitioner of 17 years, a bodyworker with a massage and biodynamic craniosacral therapy background and a student of family/systemic constellations. Sage was a lead teaching assistant with the Somatic Experiencing Institute from 2019-2022 and an assistant since 2010. Sage also has been a practitioner with the Decolonizing Wealth Healing Collective and a facilitator with Healing Cycles of Harm program.  Sage co-founded Into the Woods, an annual restorative nature retreat for healing practitioners.

Before entering the field of somatics, starting in 1999, Sage worked as an educator and facilitator in schools and organizations towards creating proactive safer spaces of inclusion, equity and kindness for LBGTQQA+ people.  Sage’s personal experiences of being trans and adopted greatly inform their passion towards creating conditions, both one-on-one and in educational spaces, which nurture access and belonging for all participants. Sage co-created a wellness center in Portland, Maine called Justice in the Body, a collaboration project which explored the dynamic question of ‘how can we be free in our bodies in an unfree world?’.  From the micro to the macro, from the past to the future, sage believes healing begins and ends in the now, with care and in collaboration with forces of wholeness much bigger than us. 

As a life long somatic explorer, Sage did their 200hr yoga teaching training with Live Love Teach, got certified to teach cardiokickboxing and also DJ’d for the Portland Commuity Dance for many years. Sage has offered many different class offerings over the years including Queer and Trans Yoga for All Bodies, taught at Portland Power Yoga, offered kickboxing with marginalized communities to work out healthy aggression, taught Align Your Practice for Holistic Practitioners and more.

From 2010-2022 Sage assisted with the Somatic Experiencing Institute around the world, working their way up to the Lead Assistant Role and also as credit provider at all levels (personal session, case consultation and group case consultation) for SE students. Sage has published articles including in Frontiers Journal In Psychiatry & Mental Health:  Somatic Experiencing® Informed Therapeutic Group for the Care and Treatment of Biopsychosocial Effects on Gender Diverse Identity,  in Massage Magazine:  "These 4 Essential Skills Will Help You Practice Trauma Informed Massage" and in Somatic Experiences in Psychotherapeutic and Body Therapy Trauma Treatment: Building Courage and Capacity: Somatic Practice with Marginalized Populations (avail upon request).  Also a frequent guest at conferences and podcasts, Sage spoke at the Embodied Trauma Conference in 2020, the Sex Gets Real podcast on Embodiment, pleasure, and safety, and at the Pecha Kucha event in Portland Maine with a creative talk called Look for It. 

In June of 2018, Sage presented a lecture and workshop called Somatic Practice with Marginalized Communities at the SE European Conference in Potsdam and moderated the final panel with Peter Levine, Marianne Bentzen, David Reis and Heike Bill.  

Sage co-founded the SE Working Group on Racial Justice (SERJ) which recently raised $20,000 for scholarships for SE students of color. SERJ has over 1,400 members from around the world exploring the intersection of somatics, SE, racial justice, oppression and liberation at https://www.facebook.com/groups/2061531757415968/. 

When not traveling you can find Sage exploring the cusps of introversion and extroversion living on Peaks Island in Casco Bay, Portland, Maine, on the northeast coast of Turtle Island (U.S.). Sage spends a lot of time outside with their mountain cur pup named Thelma Jean connecting to tidal and seasonal rhythms. Sage is also a nature photographer, you can check out their work here. 

An interview with Sage.

Sage’s identities and lens:

• Pronouns: she/he/they - whatever your experience is of me

• Genderqueer, non-binary gender warrior

• Adopted

• Anti-racist and decolonial devotion as a white-bodied in the U.S.Gently exploring both family lineages - Italian, Greek, Swedish, German descent

• Grew up in New England, middle class family

• Rooted in natures fractal brilliance

• Deep reverence for love, justice, evolution and liberation

Major influences in Sage’s practice:

• Nature + biomimicry

• My clients and all they have taught me about courage, grit and transformation

• Biodynamic craniosacral philosophy and practices: inherent wholeness, non-doing, trust of the body, systemic listening

• Somatic Experiencing - theoretical underpinnings and skills of practice

• Family and Systemic Constellations intensive study with Francesca Mason Boring, Suzi Tucker and Gaye Donaldson

• Bayo Akomalafe and Vanessa Andreotti’s ongoing work

• People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond undoing racism work

• Liberation theory and practice

• Physiological thinkers and frontiers of non-binary evolution

• Quantum physics and fractal understandings

• Shamanic teachings and practices

• 5 Rhythms teachings and ecstatic dance practice

• Energy and vibrational medicine wisdom keepers

• Intuition

earlier background

While on the West Coast studying Somatic Experiencing, Sage lived and worked as the Director of Student Affairs at the Heartwood Institute near the Redwoods in Garberville, CA.  At Heartwood, Sage also studied biodynamic craniosacral therapy with two wonderful teachers, Margaret Rosenau and Marshal Amini Peller.  

Before pursuing bodywork and SE, Sage worked for the Maine Youth Action Network and the Muskie Institute as a training specialist, working with young people and advocacy.  Sage spent a speck of time working for the State of Maine Community Health program getting a more macro vantage point of public health policy and programming. First moving to Maine in 1999, Sage landed the famous job of Education and Outreach Coordinator for Outright, an organization dedicated to GLBTQ youth.  

In 1996 Sage graduated with a B.S. in Community Development from the University of New Hampshire. At UNH, Sage created the Wellness Project, a 10-week holistic wellness program for marginalized populations of students to explore holistic health and self-care. During college, Sage lived in Washington, D.C. for 2 years to intern with Public Allies, coordinating their 2nd Annual Tomorrow's Leaders Today at the White House.  The next year Sage became an Ally with the Public Allys' apprenticeship program for young people making social change and worked at the After School Kids Program, a mentoring program out of Georgetown University, with young people on probation.

Sage grew up in rural Charlestown, RI and then moved to South Kingstown, RI for teenage years. Growing up in Rhode Island gifted Sage with love of both ocean and woods.