About Sam Starr
I’m Sam Starr, a psychosynthesis psychologist, EMCC-accredited coach, and advanced tarot practitioner. My work brings psychology, spirituality, and tarot together to help coaches, therapists, and reflective practitioners explore their inner world in a grounded and meaningful way.
I’d love to tell you a bit of my story – not because it’s extraordinary, but because it’s typically human. Like many people drawn to depth work, I’ve spent much of my life learning how to find steadiness in the unpredictable, how to live honestly with imperfection, and how to stay open to something greater than myself.
Grounding amid uncertainty
Much of my adult life has been about finding steadiness in uncertainty. For years, I looked for it through work – building a business, raising a family, doing all the things that make life look successful from the outside. But underneath, I often felt unanchored.
When I began studying psychosynthesis psychology, something shifted. It gave me language for the inner patterns I’d been living – the parts of me that tried to hold everything together, and the quieter parts longing to be heard. Around the same time, I joined Al-Anon, the 12-step recovery programme for friends and families of alcoholics. Working those steps alongside psychosynthesis became a kind of double framework for healing – one that taught me how to create loving distance from chaos and how to live more compassionately, one day at a time.
Over time, both paths helped me recognise the stories I carried about needing to be perfect, polished, or in control. They helped me meet that part of me with understanding instead of shame.
These days, when life starts to feel a bit wobbly, I go back to simple things – a bit of quiet, a walk, pulling a card and just sitting with it. Those small things remind me that steadiness isn’t something I have to go out and find; it’s something I can come back by just remembering to slow down and connect.
MY STORY
Chapter 1: Learning to Let Go
For a long time, my life was exactly how I thought it was meant to. I co-founded a business with my husband, raised two children, and built the kind of stability I’d always wanted. From the outside, I probably looked all “together”, but inside, it didn’t feel that way.
In 2015, I began studying psychosynthesis psychology and joined Al-Anon, the twelve-step programme for friends and families of alcoholics. My mum’s drinking – and later my brother’s – had left its mark. I’d spent much of my life trying to hold everything together, to be the reliable one, the steady one.
Psychosynthesis and the twelve steps helped me start loosening that pattern… learning how to care without caretaking, and how to love without rescuing.
It wasn’t a straight line. It was messy and uncomfortable, but it was real. Over time, those two paths gave me a different kind of ground to stand on – one based on honesty, acceptance, and compassion.
In 2019, I left my marriage, and in 2021 I sold the shares in my business. It was both a relief and a reckoning. I’d built my life around being someone’s wife, someone’s boss, someone who always had the answers, and suddenly I wasn’t any of those things. I didn’t know who I was if I wasn’t all that.
Psychosynthesis and Al-Anon helped me keep going through that in-between space, reminding me that identity isn’t something to hold onto, it’s something that unfolds when you stop trying to control it. I had to get used to living with existential uncertainty and to pare it all back to “Let It Begin With Me.”
Connection, community and diversity
As I began to rebuild my life, connection became everything. The twelve-step rooms, psychosynthesis training, and later the tarot spaces I joined all taught me that belonging isn’t about fitting in, it’s about showing up and being real.
Psychosynthesis showed me that we all hold many parts, each with its own voice, story, and value. It helped me understand difference, in myself and in others, as something to be honoured, not managed or tidied away.
Al-Anon gave me community and a place where I could sit alongside people from completely different walks of life and see that love, loss, and longing are universal. And mostly, to feel that I was not alone in my story.
Inclusivity and diversity matter deeply to me. They remind me that our wholeness is woven from contrast and that every person, every background, and every story adds colour and texture to what it means to be human.
Chapter 2: How Tarot found me
I’ve been pulling cards since I was young. My dad died when I was 18, and my mum was drinking a lot back then. The cards were a way of feeling that maybe something bigger was out there, guiding me, when I felt all alone.
Then, years later, in 2020, my brother died from alcoholism and cancer and I felt utterly devastated and bereft. With the small inheritance I got, I joined a Tarot Academy. I don’t think I’d ever have spent that kind of money on myself otherwise, but I could almost hear him saying, go on, do it!
Soon after that, I got Covid while travelling and ended up stuck in a tiny hotel room in Germany isolating for ten days with my new tarot deck and a notebook. I got curious about card spreads and whether I could map them onto the psychosynthesis models I was studying.
Something clicked – the cards stopped feeling scary or mystical. They started to make sense in a way that spoke plainly to my story and the larger perspective. A way to bring it all together: psychology, spirituality, recovery, loss and hope.
Finding the Right Words for My Work
For a long time, I thought I was supposed to be a leadership coach. It made sense as I had the background, the business experience, the credibility. But something about it just didn’t sit right.
In 2024, I went to a female leaders’ conference hoping to find new clients. When it came to my turn to introduce myself, I said the words, “I’m a leadership coach,” and inside I felt like a total fraud! This isn’t me kept rolling around in my head. I was hiding my love of Tarot and trying to be credible.
And the whole conference was about authenticity and blah blah.
So I changed it up.
The rest of the afternoon I switched it to “I’m a tarot coach” and it felt so good.
Some people leaned in, curious. Others smiled politely and said, “Oh no thank you, that’s not for me.” And that was ok.
Because for the first time, I felt free. I wasn’t pretending to be someone else. I wasn’t trying to sound respectable or palatable. I was just being me.
That’s when I fully owned my place in the tarot space – bringing together psychology, spirituality and archetype work in a way that felt completely aligned. This is the work I love, and this is how I want to walk alongside others.
Chapter 3: The Ground & Rise® Approach
Ground & Rise® grew out of everything that came before – the business years, the unravelling, the recovery, the learning, the loss. It isn’t a method I designed; it’s a practice that revealed itself through lived experience.
At its heart, it’s about learning to ground before we rise – to be with what’s here before we reach for what’s next. It’s both psychological and spiritual, rooted in psychosynthesis and expressed through the symbolic language of tarot.
Each card becomes a mirror, a conversation between the many parts of the self – the wise, the fearful, the curious, the unseen. The work isn’t about fortune-telling or prediction; it’s about presence, reflection, and meaning-making.
When we work together, we explore the archetypes and patterns that shape our inner landscape, using the cards to trace what’s moving beneath the surface.
Sometimes it’s about uncovering an old story that’s asking to be released.
Sometimes it’s about finding the part of you that’s ready to rise.
Whether we’re meeting in a one-to-one tarot consultation, a CPD coaching space, or a training circle, the aim is the same – to listen inwardly, to reconnect to the Self, and to bring that awareness gently back into life and work.
Ground & Rise® is how I make sense of things when the world feels uncertain. It’s also how I’ve learned to help others do the same
What is psychosynthesis?
Psychosynthesis is sometimes called a psychology of the soul.
It recognises that we are more than our habits, roles, or defences – that we are whole beings, capable of healing, growth, and conscious choice. It’s the framework that holds all of my work and keeps it grounded in compassion, relationship, and meaning.
What is the tarot?
For me, tarot isn’t about prediction or performance, it’s a symbolic language – a set of archetypes that mirror our inner world and help us listen to what’s moving beneath the surface.
Each card invites reflection rather than certainty, helping us translate intuition into awareness, and awareness into gentle action.
When psychosynthesis and tarot meet, something beautiful happens:
Psychology gives tarot a grounding;
…and tarot gives psychology a soul.
One Last Story
My dad was a hot-air balloonist. When I was little, I used to run underneath him as the balloon lifted off, shouting “bye! bye!” while he waved down, calling “bye! bye!” back. For years, that memory felt sweet and sad at the same time with me on the ground, him floating away.
What I hadn’t realised was that underneath that scene was fear – a small girl terrified of losing her dad, worried he might never come back. Our mum had been in a ballooning accident, so she was always anxious and cross when he flew, and it would have rubbed off on me I’m sure.
It wasn’t until much later, when I allowed myself to ground into that memory and meet the fear and anger of that little girl within me that something shifted.
In my mind’s eye, I could finally rise up with my dad into the balloon – calm, free, and together again.
That moment became a living image of my work: we have to ground first, gather what’s frightened or left behind, before we can rise up into our future.
TRAINING, QUALIFICATIONS & ACCREDITIONS
2023-2024: Dip. Coach (Psychosynthesis Leadership Coach), Institute Psychosynthesis
2017-2022: M.A. Psychosynthesis Psychology, Middlesex University
2017-2022: Diploma Psychosynthesis Psychology, Institute of Psychosynthesis
2021-2022 : Advanced Tarot Practitioner, Tarot Academy, Angie Banicki
2017-2020 : Dip. Coach (Psychosynthesis Life Coach), Institute of Psychosynthesis
2017-2022 : Diploma Meditation Teacher, BSY Group
2017 : Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course (MBSR), Mindfulness London
2010 : Leadership and Management, Dale Carnegie Training
2004 : Stage II Certificate Montessori Teaching Training (MBE)
1995 : BSc(Hons) Psychology, with French minor
