About Volare
Helping People Find the Safety to Rise
Volare — meaning “to fly” — was born from a simple conviction: people don't need to be fixed. They need to feel safe enough to expand. When the nervous system is regulated and the heart feels held, transformation happens naturally.
“You can stay with yourself and still rise.”
Andrea Cruz
MA, LMFT
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist
Meet Andrea
Andrea Cruz, LMFT
Mental health counselor, visionary founder, and creator of Volare
Andrea Cruz, LMFT is a mental health counselor, visionary founder, and creator of Volare — a platform dedicated to helping individuals reconnect with themselves and break patterns of self-abandonment. With a deeply integrative approach, Andrea blends clinical expertise, somatic practices, and emotional intelligence to support healing at both the psychological and nervous-system level.
Through Volare, she offers therapy, coaching, group experiences, and educational programs designed to help high-functioning, self-aware individuals move from insight into embodied change. Her work is rooted in the belief that true transformation happens not through force or perfection, but through reconnection, self-trust, and internal alignment.
Andrea is known for her heart-centered yet grounded presence, creating spaces where clients and communities feel both deeply seen and empowered to evolve. Her mission is to redefine healing as a process of coming home to oneself — again and again.
Andrea has experience developing programs, group therapy models, and client-centered service offerings that prioritize both clinical integrity and accessibility. She is passionate about creating systems that support both practitioners and clients — bridging the gap between traditional mental health care and innovative, growth-oriented solutions. In addition to her clinical work, Andrea is actively expanding Volare into a multi-dimensional platform that includes digital products, memberships, and community-based experiences. She is particularly interested in collaborating with aligned professionals, clinicians, and strategic partners who are committed to advancing meaningful, human-centered approaches to mental health and well-being.
Our Approach
Group Facilitation Meets Integrative, Holistic Therapy
Volare is built on a simple but research-backed conviction: the people who heal fastest do it in community, with guides who treat the whole person — body, mind, relationships, and spirit. Our model braids two threads that the rest of the industry too often keeps separate: the depth of clinically-trained group facilitation, and the breadth of integrative, holistic care.
Why Group Facilitation Works
Decades of outcome research — including the American Psychological Association’s meta-analyses — show that well-run group counseling can match or outperform individual counseling for anxiety, depression, trauma recovery, addiction relapse prevention, and grief. The reason is structural: a skilled group facilitator doesn’t just deliver intervention from the front of the room. They orchestrate a healing ecosystem where every member becomes both witness and mirror for the others.
In a Volare circle you experience things you simply cannot get one-on-one: co-regulation of your nervous system through proximity to a calm group, the relief of hearing your private struggle named out loud by someone else, the rapid pattern recognition that comes from watching family-of-origin dynamics play out in real time, and the accountability of showing up for people who have learned to show up for you. We cap our circles to keep them small and deliberate, train every facilitator in the Volare protocol, and build progress checkpoints into every program so growth is felt, not imagined.
What “Integrative, Holistic & Whole-Person Care” Means at Volare
At Volare, we believe meaningful healing requires looking beyond a single diagnosis, symptom, or treatment modality. Your mental health is connected to your body, your relationships, your environment, your circumstances, and the systems that support—or sometimes complicate—your life.
That is why Volare takes an integrative, holistic, and multidisciplinary approach to care.
We bring together behavioral health, functional and medical perspectives, and practical support so that you don't have to navigate complex challenges alone.
Integrative Therapy: A Personalized Approach
Integrative therapy means we don't believe one therapeutic model is right for everyone.
Our clinicians draw from multiple evidence-informed approaches based on your individual needs, goals, history, and circumstances. Depending on what is clinically appropriate, your care may incorporate:
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for identifying and changing unhelpful thought and behavior patterns
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) for emotional regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness
- Internal Family Systems (IFS)-informed approaches for exploring internal parts, protective patterns, and self-compassion
- Somatic and nervous-system-informed practices for increasing awareness of the connection between emotional experiences and the body
- Trauma-focused approaches, including EMDR when appropriate, for processing traumatic experiences
- Mindfulness and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)for resilience, values-based living, and psychological flexibility
- Humanistic and existential approaches for exploring identity, purpose, relationships, values, and meaning
Our clinicians maintain professional training, supervised clinical experience, and continuing education so that the therapeutic tools we use continue to evolve with the field.
Holistic Care: Looking at the Whole Person
At Volare, you are more than your diagnosis.
Your emotional wellbeing doesn't exist in isolation from the rest of your life. Sleep, nutrition, movement, relationships, stress, work, finances, spirituality, medical concerns, and daily routines can all influence how you feel and function.
Our holistic approach encourages us to ask:
What is happening emotionally?
What is happening physically?
What is happening relationally?
What is happening environmentally?
And what might be contributing to the bigger picture?
Rather than simply asking, “What symptom are we treating?”, we also ask, “What might your whole system be telling us?”
Integrating Mental Health With Medical & Functional Medicine Perspectives
One of the ways Volare expands upon traditional behavioral healthcare is by recognizing that mental and physical health are deeply interconnected.
Our multidisciplinary team includes mental health clinicians, a Nurse Practitioner, and a physician, allowing us to bring medical perspectives into the conversation when appropriate.
Our medical team can help evaluate health concerns that may intersect with emotional and psychological wellbeing and determine when additional medical assessment, testing, treatment, or referral may be appropriate.
Through a functional medicine-informed perspective, we may consider the broader factors that can contribute to how someone is feeling and functioning, rather than looking at symptoms in isolation.
This can include consideration of areas such as:
- Sleep and recovery
- Nutrition and lifestyle
- Stress and nervous-system regulation
- Energy and fatigue
- Hormonal and metabolic considerations
- Medication and supplement considerations
- Medical history
- Physical symptoms that may overlap with psychological concerns
- Lifestyle and environmental factors
Functional medicine does not replace conventional medical care. Instead, when appropriate, it can provide an additional lens for understanding the individual and identifying areas that may warrant medical attention or collaboration with other healthcare professionals.
Our goal is not to assume that every symptom has one cause. Our goal is to look more comprehensively at the person and connect the appropriate professionals when additional evaluation or care is needed.
A Team Instead of a Fragmented System
Many people find themselves moving between therapists, doctors, specialists, and other providers—having to explain their story repeatedly and trying to connect the dots themselves.
Volare's multidisciplinary philosophy is designed to help create a more coordinated experience.
With appropriate consent and within each professional's scope of practice, our team can collaborate with:
Therapists • Physicians • Nurse Practitioners • Psychiatrists • Primary-Care Providers • Somatic Practitioners • Spiritual Professionals • Other Qualified Specialists
When a concern falls outside our scope, we believe in appropriate referral rather than trying to be everything to everyone.
Because good care isn't about one professional having every answer.
It's about building the right team around the person.
The Volare Difference
We don't believe healing happens in a silo.
Sometimes you need a therapist.
Sometimes you need medical evaluation.
Sometimes you need a different perspective on nutrition, sleep, stress, or lifestyle.
Sometimes you need psychiatric support.
Sometimes you need practical assistance navigating a complicated life circumstance.
And sometimes you need several of these supports working together.
At Volare, our goal is to help connect those pieces while keeping the individual—not the diagnosis—at the center of care.
You are a whole person. Your care should reflect that.
Clinical care. Medical perspective. Functional medicine-informed thinking. Practical support. One coordinated vision for the whole person.
Volare: Because healing isn't one-size-fits-all. And neither are you.
Faster, more durable progress
Combining group accountability with integrative tools means clients move from insight to embodied change in weeks, not years. Skills practiced in the room get reinforced by the group between sessions.
Less expensive, more accessible
Quality clinical care without the insurance maze. A 4- or 8-week group can cost less than a short run of 1:1 sessions and reaches eight to twenty people at a time.
Treats the nervous system, not just the story
Somatic and polyvagal-informed practices teach your body how to feel safe again — the foundation every other modality is built on.
Anti-isolation by design
Loneliness is now considered as deadly as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Group counseling rebuilds the social fabric that traditional 1:1 therapy can’t.
Identity-affirming and culturally aware
Our clinicians come from varied backgrounds and our circles are structured so members aren’t the only person of their identity in the room.
Whole-life integration
Sleep, body, relationships, faith, finances, and routines all get a seat at the table. We address the actual ecology of a human life, not a slice of it.
What a Volare Program Actually Looks Like
Every program follows a clinically-paced arc: assessment and intake, four to eight weekly 90-minute group sessions led by a licensed counselor, weekly between-session practices tailored to the integrative tools your facilitator is teaching, optional 1:1 add-ons, and a graduation step that lands you in continuing-care community or 1:1 coaching so the work doesn’t evaporate the day the program ends. Groups are kept small and intimate so every voice is heard, and every facilitator follows the Volare protocol — a written clinical playbook that defines safety norms, intervention pacing, and escalation rules for moments that need 1:1 attention.
Behind the scenes, every Volare clinician is in continuous group supervision with our clinical team, peer consultation runs weekly, and outcome data is reviewed monthly so we know what’s working and what needs to be tightened. Healing in community isn’t a slogan here — it’s the operating model, and it’s under continuous quality control.
The Journey
From Treatment Center to Movement
Clinical Training
Master's in Marriage & Family Therapy. Intensive clinical training in trauma, addictions, family systems, and humanistic existential therapy.
Clinical Leadership
Years of clinical leadership experience designing treatment programs, leading clinical teams, and witnessing firsthand the power of community-based healing.
Specialization
Deep expertise in trauma recovery, nervous-system regulation, somatic practices, and humanistic existential therapy.
Volare Founded
Launched Volare to make counseling accessible, community-driven, and free from the limitations of insurance-based care.
Our Values
What Guides Everything We Do
Safety First
Healing begins when the nervous system feels safe. We create environments where vulnerability is met with warmth, not judgment.
Community Over Isolation
We believe you heal faster in connection. Group counseling breaks the myth that you have to figure everything out alone.
Evidence + Heart
Every approach is rooted in clinical evidence and delivered through a lens of deep compassion and human warmth.
Expansion Without Self-Abandonment
Growth shouldn't mean losing yourself. We help you expand from a place of self-trust — not self-sacrifice.
Begin Your Journey
Whether you're seeking healing for yourself or looking to join as a clinician, the door is open.