Frequently Asked Questions

About The Open Underground

The Open Underground is a coaching and wellness ecosystem for high-achieving women who are done with hustle and ready to build a life rooted in rest, intuition, and deep self-trust. It's not a program in the traditional sense — it's a constellation of experiences designed to meet you wherever you are and take you as deep as you're ready to go.
At its core, The Open Underground is a counter-cultural space. We believe that rest is not a reward — it's the foundation of everything. That slowing down is sophisticated, not soft. That the life you want is built from the inside out, through subconscious repatterning, nervous system regulation, and the kind of honest self-inquiry most approaches never reach.
Whether you're stepping in gently through a self-paced audio library or committing to deep one-on-one work, you belong here.
Start Sooner Go Slower is both the name of Amber's proprietary methodology and the operating philosophy of everything at The Open Underground.
'Start Sooner' is about permission. You don't have to finish your to-do list, fix your life, or wait until things calm down before you're allowed to begin. You start now. In the mess. In the fullness. Right where you are.
'Go Slower' is about how. The work we're doing here is deep — subconscious repatterning, nervous system healing, energetic recalibration. That kind of change doesn't respond to urgency or force. It responds to presence, consistency, and spaciousness. We slow down because that's how we go far.
Together, it's a complete counter-cultural stance: begin before you're ready, and take your time when you do.
Most coaching stops at mindset or action steps. The Open Underground goes underneath — to the subconscious patterns, the nervous system, the somatic experience, and the energetic body. We don't just change what you think. We change what your body believes is safe.
A few things that set this work apart: we plan inaction as deliberately as action (what you stop doing is as important as what you start). We use yoga nidra to reach the subconscious at a depth that mindset work alone can't access. We integrate astrology as a living map of your energy and timing. And the entire ecosystem is built around nervous system safety — which means nothing here is designed to pressure you, rush you, or make you feel behind.
This is also founded by a pharmacist who chose the underground path — someone who has lived inside the systems that burn women out and built a rigorous, evidence-informed, and energetically potent way through.

The Offerings

The Open Underground is a constellation — three overlapping circles, each its own portal, none more important than another. You choose your depth.
The Lantern Library is where many women begin. It's a self-paced collection of recorded yoga nidra classes and audio content — accessible, monthly subscription, no schedule required. A lantern in your pocket.
The Immersion is a seasonal group container centered on play, rest, nothingness, and intuitive life design. It runs in a weekly virtual meet-up format — a community space for women who want to practice together and return to themselves regularly.
The Integration is the deepest level of one-on-one work — a personal container combining energy work, astrology, somatic coaching, and the Start Sooner Go Slower Method. Reserved for women ready for a complete repatterning.
The Arcade is a virtual space for both free and paid pop-up events centered on rest, repatterning, play and intuitive life design. Join a la carte when it works for you.
Single sessions with Amber include distance reiki and astrology sessions. This is for the woman wanting an energy work reset or a deeper understanding of her unique astrological chart.
The Lantern Library is a curated collection of yoga nidra recordings and audio-based teachings — the entry point into The Open Underground for women who want to begin with spaciousness, on their own time, at their own pace.
Think of it as a library of lanterns. Each recording is a practice that illuminates something — rest, clarity, subconscious repatterning, nervous system regulation, intuition. You move through it at whatever pace your life allows. You come back whenever you need to.
The Lantern Library is a monthly subscription. First month is always free
The Immersion is a seasonal group container built around the things most high-achieving women never give themselves permission to do: play, rest, do nothing, and design a life that actually feels like theirs.
It runs in a weekly virtual meet-up format — live sessions on Zoom, a small and intimate community, and a recurring invitation to come back to yourself. The Immersion isn't about adding more to your plate. It's about learning, in community, how to take things off.
Each season has its own energetic theme. The Immersion is also the primary community space within The Open Underground — the place where women gather around shared practices and support each other's becoming.
The Full Integration is the deepest and most personal level of work available at The Open Underground. It's a one-on-one container with Amber that combines energy work, astrology as a living map of your timing and design, somatic coaching, yoga nidra, and the full Start Sooner Go Slower Method.
This is for the woman who knows something needs to change at a root level — not a tweak, not a new strategy, but a full repatterning of how she moves through her life. The Integration is not a short-term fix. It's an investment in who you are becoming.
Clients in The Integration receive deeply personalized support, sessions on Zoom, and direct access to Amber throughout their engagement. Space is limited and held with care.
The Arcade is a virtual play space for women ready to heal through rest and creativity. This space is designed a la carte. Pick and choose which pop-up events to join and which events to put on pause. Some events are free and some are paid.
The Arcade includes the FREE monthly AstroNidra gathering. A monthly rest practice to support the current astrology transits moving through your chart and your life.
Paid pop-up events include The Pause & The Promise, Choose to Chill, and Joy Union. All designed to create a world that is more inclusive and sustainable and on your terms.

The Work and the Method

AstroNidra is a creative merging of astrology and yoga nidra. Yoga nidra is an ancient meditative practice sometimes called 'yogic sleep' — a guided state of conscious rest where the body is completely relaxed and the mind is at the threshold between waking and sleeping. In this state, the subconscious is extraordinarily receptive, making it one of the most powerful tools available for repatterning deep-seated beliefs and restoring the nervous system.
In The Open Underground, yoga nidra is not just a relaxation technique. It's a portal. Each practice is used intentionally — to imprint new beliefs, release emotional residue, activate the body's energy, and create the internal spaciousness that makes lasting change possible. It's the anchor of the Start Sooner Go Slower Method and the practice that sets this work apart from any coaching approach that lives only in the cognitive mind.
You don't need any prior meditation experience. You simply need to be willing to rest.
Subconscious repatterning is the process of identifying and dissolving the beliefs that run underneath your conscious awareness — the ones that were formed early, often in survival mode, and that continue to shape your behavior, relationships, decisions, and energy long after they've outlived their usefulness.
Most of the women who come to The Open Underground have tried hard. They're intelligent, motivated, and self-aware. And they still feel stuck. That's because the patterns keeping them stuck aren't located in their thinking mind — they're in the body, the nervous system, the subconscious. You can't think your way out of a pattern that doesn't live in thought.
Subconscious repatterning, as practiced in this work, uses yoga nidra, energy work, somatic inquiry, and the Start Sooner Go Slower Method to reach those root patterns and dissolve them — not manage them, not work around them, but actually change them at the source.
No. What you need is curiosity, honesty, and a willingness to slow down. The practices we use — yoga nidra, energy work, somatic inquiry, astrology — are introduced in a way that meets you where you are, whether you've been meditating for years or have never tried it before.
Many of the women who find The Open Underground describe themselves as 'spiritually curious but skeptical' — drawn to this kind of work but uncertain whether it's for them. That healthy skepticism is welcome. You don't have to believe in anything other than your own experience. The practices speak for themselves.
No. The Open Underground offers coaching and wellness experiences, not therapy or mental health treatment. This work is deep and transformational, but it is not a clinical service and is not a replacement for therapy, psychiatry, or any form of licensed mental health care.
If you are in an active mental health crisis, experiencing severe depression or anxiety, or need trauma processing support at a clinical level, I will always encourage you to work with a licensed professional — and I'm happy to refer you. Many women work with a therapist alongside their time in The Open Underground, and that combination can be incredibly powerful.
This work is best suited for women who are fundamentally resourced and ready to go deeper — not women who are in survival mode.

Is This For Me?

This work is for the high-achieving woman who is done. Done performing. Done over-functioning. Done postponing herself until the calendar clears, the kids are older, the job settles down, or some imagined future arrives where she finally has time.
More specifically: you might be a healthcare professional, a corporate leader, a business owner, an educator, or anyone who holds significant responsibility and whose competence has become invisible armor. You're spiritually curious — you've sensed that there's something deeper available to you, even if you haven't been sure how to reach it. You've done some personal growth work and you know there's a layer underneath what you've accessed so far.
You are fundamentally resourced — not in crisis, but ready. Ready to go deep, to slow down, to do the real work of becoming the woman you already sense you are.
The Open Underground is not for everyone, and that's intentional.
This work is not for you if you're looking for a quick fix, a 5-step system, or someone to tell you exactly what to do. It's not for you if you're not willing to feel your feelings, be honest about your patterns, or sit with temporary discomfort in service of lasting change.
It's not for you if you are currently in an active mental health crisis or need clinical support — please reach out to a licensed professional first.
And it's not for you if you're attached to hustle culture, if you measure your worth by your productivity, or if rest feels like something you'll pursue once everything else is handled. We'd love to have you eventually — but this work meets you where you are, and it works best when you've already begun to sense that slowing down is the answer.
I hear this often, and I take it seriously. Most coaching — and most self-help, therapy lite, or mindset work — operates at the level of thought and behavior. It helps you identify patterns, set goals, take action. That is genuinely useful. And for many women, it's not enough.
The reason it's not enough is that the patterns keeping you stuck aren't primarily located in your thinking mind. They're in your nervous system. Your subconscious. Your body's threat-response. You can set a goal every day and still find yourself unable to move toward it — not because you lack discipline, but because some part of you that lives below thought believes it isn't safe.
The work at The Open Underground reaches that level. Yoga nidra, energy work, somatic inquiry, and the Start Sooner Go Slower Method work with the whole of you — not just the part that makes lists. That's why this feels different. Because it is.
Yes. And also — the fact that you're too busy to take care of yourself is exactly why you're here.
Everything at The Open Underground is designed with your real life in mind. The Lantern Library is self-paced and requires no schedule commitments. The Arcade offers flexible drop-in access. Even the deeper containers are structured to support your life, not add another layer of overwhelm to it.
The work itself is about creating spaciousness — so it would be a contradiction to deliver it in a way that creates more pressure. We start where you are. We go at the pace your nervous system can actually integrate. And we trust that even small, consistent doses of this work create real change over time.
Yes. Healthy skepticism is genuinely welcome here.
You don't have to believe in anything ahead of time. What I ask is that you stay curious, bring honesty, and be willing to notice your own experience. The practices speak for themselves — and yoga nidra, in particular, produces effects that are felt in the body long before they're understood by the mind.
Astrology, in this work, is used as a map — a language for understanding your timing, your design, and what might be trying to move in your life. You don't have to believe it's cosmically ordained to find it useful. Many women who arrive skeptical leave with a very different relationship to both.
That said, if the spiritual and energetic dimensions of this work feel deeply misaligned for you, The Open Underground may not be your fit. And that's okay.

The Philosophy

Because rest is where repatterning actually happens. The nervous system heals in rest. The subconscious receives new information in rest. The body integrates change in rest. We have a culture that treats rest as a reward for productivity — something you earn after you've done enough. The Open Underground treats rest as the foundation everything else is built on.
This is not a soft position. It's a physiologically grounded, subconsciously supported, energetically aligned position. Rest is not laziness. Rest is the most sophisticated, counter-cultural, genuinely productive thing a high-achieving woman can choose.
And it's the thing most of them have never been given permission to do. That permission starts here.
It means we do not participate in the dominant narratives around success, productivity, and achievement that burn women out.
We don't glorify hustle. We don't manufacture urgency. We don't create pressure or false scarcity. We don't use shame to motivate. We don't believe you have to suffer to grow or sacrifice yourself to succeed.
We believe the opposite: that ease is available to you. That your intuition is reliable. That rest accelerates your becoming. That a life built slowly on a regulated nervous system and genuine self-trust is more sustainable, more satisfying, and ultimately more impactful than any achievement you've ground yourself down to reach.
The Open Underground is underground because this isn't what the mainstream is selling. But it's what your body has been asking for.

Practical Questions

All coaching sessions and live group experiences take place virtually via Zoom, making The Open Underground accessible to women wherever they are in the world. The Lantern Library is hosted on Teachable — accessible from any device, at any time.
Amber is based in Nebraska and teaches yoga nidra locally, but her coaching work is entirely virtual and serves women across the United States.
A good starting point is the question: how deep are you ready to go, right now?
If you're curious and want to experience the work before committing to more, The Lantern Library is your entry point — a self-paced library of yoga nidra and audio practices that you can move through on your own time.
If you want community, regular live practice, and the experience of returning to yourself in the company of other women, The Arcade is calling you.
If you're ready to go deep, you sense that something fundamental needs to shift, and you want personalized, one-on-one support — The Integration is for you.
If you've already done some of this work and are ready for an intimate, small-group container — reach out about The Immersion. I’ve priced this on a sliding scale to meet you where you are and make this work as accessible as possible.
If you need to push the reset button on life - a single distance reiki session may be right for you.
If you’re curious about your astrological chart and want to know how to work with your unique planet placements - a single astrology session can expand your understanding and give you answers to both the biggest challenges and where the most supportive aspects live in your chart.
And if you're genuinely not sure, that's what a conversation is for. Reach out. We'll figure it out together.
Pricing across The Open Underground ranges from accessible entry-level experiences through premium one-on-one and small-group containers. Because this work is personal and the right fit matters more than a transaction, specific pricing is shared through direct conversation for the higher-touch offerings. Free offerings live here, sliding scale pricing lives here and scholarship opportunities live here too. If this work is calling you, let’s make it happen in a way that is financially sustainable and supportive for you.
If you're ready to talk numbers, reach out and we'll have an honest conversation about what makes sense for where you are.
Start sooner than you think you're ready. Here's how:
If you want to ease in — find The Lantern Library and begin with the first recording. Let the practice do the introducing.
If you want community and live experience — join The Arcade and the waitlist for The Immersion and be the first to know when the next seasonal container opens.
If you're ready for deep one-on-one work — reach out directly to begin a conversation about The Integration.
If none of these feel exactly right yet — stay in the newsletter. The Open Underground shows up in your inbox with practices, reflections, and invitations. Let it find you at the right moment.