More About Val
Growing up I had always felt like I was the odd one out, when all I wanted was to fit in and connect. I consistently felt I was a burden in life and that I needed to be something I wasn’t in order to be seen and appreciated. I remember believing that some people were born with a dark cloud over their heads and some weren’t, and resigned to the fact that I had been.
Confidence and self-love were not my strongest suits. As a matter of fact, I lacked them so much, I constantly berated myself, ‘checking out’ of life with food, alcohol, working out, men, work or making other people and things more important than me.
When I was 17, I picked up the Celestine Prophecy, and it was as if I had returned home. I felt it hit a deep space within myself that I had been unknowingly yearning for. It was then I embarked on the journey of peeling back the proverbial onion of self-love and discovery.
I have always been passionate about self-development and helping others. What I didn’t realize until 2014 was I was more of a “human doing” than a human being. I had lived a majority of my life racing through it at the speed of light, constantly filling it with work, people and accomplishing, making myself available to everyone and everything 24/7. This came to my attention when I was diagnosed with something called bone marrow suppression, which is a decrease in white and red blood cells responsible for providing immunity, carrying oxygen and normal blood clotting. (I later discovered I have had Lyme Disease, since 10-years-old.)
At that point of my life I was traveling weekly from one state to the next with my clients as a healthy lifestyle coach, leading international retreats to India and Costa Rica and working twelve hours a day regularly. I hadn’t heeded the practitioner's advice and instead operated from the hardwired belief, “Well, if I just do more (meditation, yoga and service, and eliminate more food), I will get better.” On the contrary, what I needed was exactly the opposite.
I needed to do less and connect more with me.
In 2010, I founded Hanuman Yoga and Music Festival. Creating the festival was one of the hardest and most rewarding experiences of my life, it also became the catalyst for a huge wake-up call.
I started to realize a part of me was stifled or for all intents and purposes, dying. Being an event planner did not feed my soul and if anything, began to burn me out. Working 12 to 14-hour days, running from one meeting to the next, I began to repeat unconscious, unhealthy survival patterns, which once again affected my health, my intimate partnership and my friendships. I finally got truly honest with myself, decided I was no longer willing to tolerate this way of being in the world, ended a six-year relationship, sold Hanuman Festival and moved to a small town to learn how to slow down, connect with my feminine essence and live in self honor.
Was it a quick fix? Absolutely not! Having been so conditioned over years with unhealthy habits and patterns, it was a slow unraveling, while I simultaneously began integrating new healthy patterns.
Overtime, the value of establishing an authentic relationship with myself started to take form. Not just the parts of me that are shiny and bubbly, all of me, even and especially the parts of me I thought needed to be fixed in order to be loved. I started to establish a relationship with this beautiful being inside me, so worthy of love and of tremendous value to the world.
I started to remember what I am.
I have cultivated an unwavering commitment to consistently tune to my energetic resonance of empowerment, releasing false perceptions and limiting beliefs, and step into the extraordinary life I am here to create.
Over the years, I have chosen to take on new beliefs which have generated a perspective in life that allows me to strengthen my connection with Self, with Spirit and with those I love.
Here are just a few of those chosen beliefs:
Belief number 1:
I am never given more than I can handle; as a matter of fact, I’m given precisely what I can handle.
Belief number 2:
When I see beauty in something or someone, that means that beauty resides within me.
Belief number 3:
I am the creator of my life.
Belief number 4:
Money is energy in constant flow, available at all times to everyone.
Belief number 5:
In all moments, life has me.