my story

Woman with brown hair, wearing glasses with a pinkish frame, large feather earrings, and a colorful top, standing in front of a white brick wall.

My name is Valentina and I am a Somatic Permaculturist. 

What does that mean?

Well, it means I am a yoga teacher, body worker and wellness consultant with 15 years of hands-on bodywork experience in aesthetic therapies, yoga, herbalism, permaculture and ceremony.

I am building a healing practise to assist all folks who need support navigating the decolonization of their nervous systems and space to integrate their own healing work in intersectional and unconditionally loving ways.

As a practitioner of yoga and bodywork, I am creating pathways for people to adapt their personal practise in a trauma informed, nourishing capacity via classes, workshops, bodywork, dance, ceremony and plant medicines.

This is the journey it has taken me to get to that…

 

While my peers chose delineated adult professions and strategy, I’ve always fallen forward into life, following my heart and her whims, the songs on the wind-seemingly void of course. Sometimes I have fallen on my face. Often, I have flown.

The road has been long and winding and seemingly going nowhere, when, in fact-the course was steering ME.

I didn’t quite understand where my education and professional path were leading.. 

Until now.

Let me share my story with you!

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I have always been a nontraditional student.

Human. I started community college at seventeen. I dropped out of high school, got my GED in less than an hour and spent two years juggling English and Art classes with lots of family difficulties. At nineteen, I fell in love and by age 22, I had two small children. By my late 20s, I got professionally licensed in Esthetics and I maintained a spa and makeup studio.

At 30, I went back to Uni to finish a degree in Socio-Cultural Anthropology and got obsessed and terrified in the world of Linguistics.

After that, I went rogue and started amassing certifications. I completed immersions and coursework in Sanskrit, Clinical Herbalism, Traditional Herbalism, Permaculture, Nutrition, Massage, & Yoga.

I studied within a lineage and with eldership- the language of Nahuatl, the Mexica and Taino cosmology and the Tonalamatl-based on the Borgia codices.

Within all of this mothering, learning, squirreling away knowledge and information, I was also experiencing much hardship.

So much so, that little by little, I started stepping away from my creative and professional adventures and became very small. I stopped performing, creating, studying, having the capacity to be in the world doing what I was destined to do. I let others convince me that I was not worth the life that I dreamed of.

Like so many who experience life like this, my nervous system became so dysregulated that I was unable to fully potentiate.

In vain, I tried all traditional methods and a few nontraditional ones to ease my depression, my panic, my rage. I found modern tools limited in properly assessing and treating generational trauma and the physical components of such.

I was personally at a loss, until I started discovering somatic theory. Suddently, everything just CLICKED.

Somatic theory is, in my opinion, the missing piece in modern medicine-uniting the body and the mind by addressing nervous system tone. A very valuable science that is bridging the gap between old and new ways and giving terms for what ancient lifeways have always known.

By understanding physiology in a more holistic way, how our nervous system and fascia and connective tissues all communicate-we are able to access deep body wisdom in a way that aligns us with our one wild and precious life.

I have studied many things and rediscovered my lineages root ways. I have experienced every type of healing modality you can think of and by using somatic regulation in combination with my ceremonial & plant practise, I have been  able to ‘fix’ issues that nothing else was able to touch. It is my opinion that this convergence of healing is a very powerful key that can unlock a lot of personal healing and empowerment for a lot of people, when accessed and applied in safe and practical ways.

Everyone is different. Everyone heals and adapts to trauma in very different ways. Somatic therapies don’t heal everything. But they do allow us deeper capacity to change our physiological being and recalibrate the way we move within the world

I share all of this because I feel very passionately about the future of medicine and our powerful capacity to save lives.

My years of experiencing trauma and now holding tools for deeply healing that trauma, gives me the responsibility to share those tools with others.

I am deeply prepared, passionate, and finding mastery in this profession. Most of all, I am excited about helping folks get unstuck.

Folks who are deeply creative and generously loving, neurodiverse, those who have experienced great intergenerational violence. Those who need support navigating the decolonization of their nervous systems and space to integrate their own healing work in intersectional and unconditionally loving ways.

My sacred and effective practise respectfully synthesizes various schools of thought and the bodies of wisdom. I hope to honor my highly respected teachers and years of hard work.

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