Cultivating the Seat of the Guide

A 10-MONTH JOURNEY OF PERSONAL AND COLLECTIVE TRANSFORMATION

 
 

October 4, 2022- July 11, 2023

 
 

For those who feel called to embody the mystery

 

Join me for a transformational journey across 10 months. During our time, you will:

 

Explore what it means to be a guide: A guide is a person who illuminates a path from trauma to liberation, from oppression to freedom. A guide knows the value of moving deeply into the pain and suffering that every person holds. A guide practices centering themselves, again and again. A guide knows how to create particular containers that support a person or group of people in midwifing their most liberated selves into being. A guide is an alchemist of trauma and a midwife of the soul.

 
 

Clarify your values as a guide: how does your own journey shape your path to liberation? What does it mean to be a guide who grounds themselves in principles of abolitionism, restoration, repair, and social justice?

 
 

Find your seat: cultivating the seat of the guide is a process and a practice. What is your unique medicine as a guide? What gifts do you carry? What shadows are left for you to uncover? How can you ground who you feel called to be in an ethical expression of wholeness and visionary creativity?

 

FORMAT: primarily online, with a three-day in-person retreat during the ninth month (June 2023). Each month you’ll receive a series of readings and video lecture to digest at your own pace. We’ll meet on Zoom for a depth Council to practice and process. In between, you’ll have access to an online platform for weaving continued connection and questions. Each month will have a different theme. Sample themes include:

  • The Role of Desire

  • Embodying Ethics

  • Practicing Wholeness

 
 

WHO IS IT FOR: Anyone involved in the healing arts: counselors, organizers, abolitionists, therapists, guides, and visionaries alike. This is not a beginner’s course (though we will certainly approach it with a beginner’s mind). Those who feel called to participate will already have done a certain depth of work on themselves and feel ready to engage in deep work together. 

 
 

WHY NOW: What is abundantly clear to me in over a decade of practice as a trauma therapist, consciousness guide, somatics teacher, and spiritual practitioner is that we never really arrive (in the permanent sense) in these titles we call ourselves. I am instead perpetually stepping into, aligning myself more fully with the identity of “consciousness guide”, of “trauma therapist”, of “spiritual practitioner”. These titles are energetic frameworks, particular containers which we can consciously choose to inhabit to learn more about our unique being, to clarify our sense of purpose and vision in the world. Not only that, but as we live into these titles, we learn more about them, and we evolve their future meaning. Inhabiting an archetype is a co-created relationship. This is the practice of cultivating one’s seat.


It is my belief that we are in a time where we have a dire need for guides, and simultaneously a vast misunderstanding about what “a guide” actually is. It is my intention to create a transformative learning space that invites every person into walking deeply with the question of what it means to be a guide for their unique self in their unique circumstances in this particular time and place in which we live. As such, the container we will be working in is grounded first and foremost in principles of social and transformative justice, a somatic understanding of internalized oppression, and a consent-based orientation to practice. My prayer and intention is that a space emerges in which we transform the understandings of “guide” that lie rooted in systemic oppression into embodied expressions of “guide” that truly meet the variety of crises the world faces today. That we transform what it means to be a guide, even as we ourselves are transformed by being guides. Together, the co-created magic happens: magic, from the root word magh, meaning “to make”. To cultivate our practice, to arrive over and over in our fullest expression of the innate visionary capacities we have to create the world we see in our innermost hearts. 

 
 

WHY DO THIS WORK WITH ME? I (Valeria) have been deeply immersed in the healing arts for two decades, in a variety of forms. Licensed as a marriage and family therapist, I teach somatic and transpersonal psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). I have studied psychedelic medicine in formal and informal containers for over 14 years and am a graduate of CIIS’s Certificate in Psychedelic Therapies and Research. Formerly I was part of the Center for Consciousness Medicine, and today work part-time at the Synthesis Institute. I am a registered yoga teacher, Reiki Teaching Master, artist and creative who is passionate about the intersections of social justice, psychedelic medicine, and spiritual practice. My work centers around the use of expanded states to transform the traumas of embodied systemic oppression, and innovating liberative systems to deconstruct the patriarchy. I carry a lineage of traditional nondual Shakta-Shaiva Tantra, and my background in nondual philosophy strongly informs how I hold space and create container. I am here for liberation: mine, yours, ours, understanding that these are intimately connected and interdependent.

 
 

Enrollment for Fall 2022 is FULL.

Interested in signing up for the waitlist, or being notified of future offerings? Reach out below.