About
What is vast earth?
Education, Integrative Healing, and the Wisdom of Earth and Body
Rachel Pfotenhauer, M.A., holds a master’s degree in counseling and has spent many years working as a licensed professional counselor, supporting individuals through a wide range of life challenges. Her background includes extensive experience with emotional regulation, trauma-informed work, relational dynamics, EMDR, and somatic approaches.
Her work has evolved to integrate her clinical background with somatic awareness, intuitive perception, and connection with the energies of Earth and Sun. A central focus of Rachel’s work is helping people move beyond longstanding patterns of survival and toward a greater internal sense of safety, groundedness, and capacity. Through nervous system support and restructuring, somatic awareness, and embodied presence, she works with clients who may understand their patterns intellectually yet continue to experience anxiety, fawning, hypervigilance, over-functioning, reactivity, or other deeply established responses.
Rachel’s approach recognizes that insight alone does not always change the way the body and nervous system respond. Her work supports greater awareness of internal patterns, more space between an experience and the response to it, and an increased ability to make grounded choices rather than automatically responding from older survival strategies. Sessions emphasize deep listening, embodied awareness, and strengthening a person’s connection with their own inner knowing.
Earth and Sun connection is also an integral part of Rachel’s work. She facilitates live online sessions on the first and third Wednesday of each month at 6:30 pm Pacific Time. These sessions offer a space to slow down, receive, and connect with the grounding and restorative energies of Earth and Sun. The first Wednesday of each month also includes Rachel’s intuitive energetic read for the month ahead.
Rachel works with clients remotely and in person at her office in Soquel, California. In addition to individual somatic, intuitive, and psychic sessions, she offers small four-week Beyond Survival nervous system groups when there is enough interest to form a group. These groups are intentionally kept small, with a minimum of four and maximum of seven participants.
Rather than maintaining a continuous schedule of groups and retreats, Rachel is now gathering interest and allowing these experiences to form when enough people are interested. When a group reaches the minimum number of participants, she will contact those on the interest list to coordinate dates for the four-week series.
Rachel is also gathering interest for future retreats. When enough people express interest, she will consider offering an immersive retreat incorporating nervous system support, somatic and energetic work, Earth and Sun connection, nature, rest, and integration.
Those interested in a future Beyond Survival group or retreat are invited to join the interest list. When enough interest has gathered, Rachel will reach out with possible dates and additional information.
The Earth is calling. Her message is clear, and it's urgent. She is alive, conscious, and feeling, just like us. Our souls came here to be in a symbiotic relationship with her, but for generations, we've been walking disconnected, unaware of the depth of that bond. Now, more and more people are beginning to wake up and reconnect. But Earth needs more than passive awareness. She needs people to connect with her consciously, energetically, and intentionally. Over the last six years, Earth has released enormous density that was held in her body for millennia. This density was the result of our collective violence, racism, hatred, and intolerance. She has released most of it. Although it may take years before we see her visibly shift toward balance, she is already the new Earth. We humans, however, need her help. We were always meant to live in a symbiotic relationship with her. We need her energy to help clear our fear, to evolve, and to expand. Her energy teaches us how to become more tolerant and compassionate. She needs us, and we need her. When you connect with her, truly and consistently, you access the most powerful healing source we know. And in doing so, you not only heal yourself, you help restore balance to the Earth.
