Holistic coach and healer Noemi Sparks turned her own struggles with anxiety and depression into a powerful practice that blends Clinical EFT, yoga, and plant medicine. In this candid interview for Mystic Mag, she shares how tapping into emotional truth, reclaiming cannabis as a healing ally, and embracing rest as resistance have become the foundation of her work—especially for Highly Sensitive People seeking safety, clarity, and self-worth in a demanding world.
How did your personal journey with anxiety and depression lead you to create a holistic practice combining EFT, yoga, and plant medicine?
I struggled with anxiety and depression from adolescence through college. I tried traditional talk therapy, medication, silent meditation, yoga, and many other spiritual modalities that helped a little—but when I wasn’t actively practicing, I continued to feel unlike myself.
Cannabis was the first plant medicine that helped me feel present in my body. She became my main plant ally as I continued seeking tools to help me feel good.
In 2020, a month before lockdown, I discovered Tapping. It helped me feel like me without needing any substances or a long practice time—which, as a woman in Silicon Valley where time is a luxury, was a crucial reason why I stuck with it.
As the pandemic unfolded, I continued using Tapping and introduced it to my team at my corporate job. By then, I was already teaching yoga regularly, so adding Tapping before asanas was an easy addition to my teaching repertoire.
In 2021, I was laid off from that job and transitioned into coaching people like me—folks who had tried different modalities and loved cannabis but still struggled with anxiety when not high.
As I deepened my knowledge of Tapping, I found a school that taught a strategic, well-studied system of nervous system regulation tools to actually clear trauma—like anxiety, depression, and PTSD—from the body.
I enrolled in EFT Universe and had a 1:1 session during training that opened my eyes to the potency of Clinical EFT (strategic Emotional Freedom Techniques). Until that session, I believed I was just an “emo and anxious” person. But I remembered something bad that happened when I was 4 years old and realized I had been carrying fear and shame ever since.
In that session, I was able to express and release that shame—and the next time I was in a situation that would’ve made me anxious, I felt present and safe in my body. WOW.
That’s when I realized the other tools I’d tried—even Vipassana meditation and teachings from spiritual guides like Gabby Bernstein—hadn’t healed me because they didn’t include my emotional body.
I pivoted my business to helping people with their feelings and never looked back. Today, all my offerings serve to help people feel more present in their bodies through releasing expired emotion and finding safety in the present moment.
What distinguishes Ganja Yoga from traditional yoga practices, and how do you see it supporting emotional healing?
Ganja Yoga, as created by the revolutionary Dee Dussault, is a style of yoga that infuses intentional plant medicine with biomechanical poses to help restore the body from the modern workday.
My style of Ganja Yoga includes Tapping to help people release shame related to intentional cannabis use and to reclaim rest as a practice of presence.
By acknowledging the deep harm that still surrounds plant medicine use, we can begin to unwind our own beliefs about self-care and about being in altered states of consciousness—in community.
How do you support Highly Sensitive People in reprogramming internal narratives of unworthiness and emotional overwhelm?
Internal narratives about worth are rooted in systemic metrics about what makes people “valuable.” The idea that worth is based on how hard we work or how much we produce is a tenet of plantation-era slavery. This belief underlies much of Western culture—especially in the U.S. and Canada—and it isn’t going away anytime soon. So it’s up to us to deprogram how we feel about ourselves outside of how busy we are.
For HSPs (and really, all people), healing requires acknowledging the internalized programming around worthiness. This is almost always rooted in early childhood—how we were praised, and how we received love and acceptance from our primary caregivers.
For me, this meant recognizing that my parents raised me to keep my emotions to myself in order to receive love. It wasn’t intentional on their part—but as a baby, I was shown that if I cried, I’d be ignored. So I learned to keep things in. Of course, I grew into an anxious and depressed adult from a lifetime of repressing my feelings.
Now, I teach HSPs how to understand their feelings as signals about their needs, and how to discern what’s theirs from what they’re picking up from others—so they can finally regulate their nervous systems.
Can you share how Clinical EFT and psychedelic integration complement each other in your approach to mental health and trauma recovery?
Clinical EFT is a powerful tool to prepare for and integrate the experience of psychedelic expansion.
During medicine work, emotions are freed and memories resurface—often holding unprocessed emotional energy. Clinical EFT helps people prepare their bodies to surrender to the experience before the journey, and helps to gently release whatever arises during and after.
It also helps to clear internalized conditioning around how we “should” feel and express ourselves.
Psychedelic journeys alone aren’t enough for lasting healing. True healing happens when people reclaim the parts of themselves they were taught to exile, in the presence of a compassionate, nonjudgmental witness.
Pairing feelings with expansion is a beautiful, gentle recipe for reclaiming our true selves.
What does “Collective Rest” mean in your work, and why is rest a revolutionary act in today’s productivity-driven culture?
Rest—outside of sleep—is the practice of being present in the body, mind, and spirit. It’s when you’re here, fully. Not thinking about the past or future. Just being.
Resting with others is what makes it “Collective Rest.” We’re not supposed to heal alone. In fact, loneliness is one of the greatest predictors of early death. Resting together is more necessary now than ever.
What makes rest revolutionary is that, under toxic capitalism, rest is seen as a reward for work—and a tool to recharge so you can work more.
In the U.S., toxic capitalism has brainwashed people into believing that busyness is a badge of honor. That our productivity reflects our worth. This false equivalency is rooted in plantation-era slavery, where Black people were considered capital—and their productivity determined their value.
Only two generations after slavery, we still equate worth with productivity. It’s just been rebranded as “hustle culture,” “rise and grind,” “boss bitching,” and “leaning in.”
It’s radical to see rest not as a reward, but as the foundation of wellness. It’s revolutionary to choose rest in a world that demands your labor but does not honor your body, voice, or choice.
