About Me & This Space
Welcome to The Session Series, version 2.0
As we’ve shared in our brand narrative, The Session Series began as a grief-informed and trauma-sensitive sanctuary for healing and embodiment. We reference the somatic practices, holistic resources, and curated growth spaces that were established to support humans in transition, recovery, and personal reclamation. It’s me, I’m ‘humans’.
The roots of this work are deeply personal to me as each brick that has been laid, aligned, and in some cases re-aligned, came from my lived experiences and learnings. The point of life - or at least my life - is not to present the polished ‘perfect’ version and pretend my identity. That’s not where my value lies, and I’d argue that perfection holds no inherent value.
Getting comfortable with the uncomfortable has been the work of my life; taking apart the engine of shame and evolving out of the need to ‘be’ anything for anyone else, prescriptively, has been the most valuable thing I have ever committed to in my entire life. It was transformational and life-saving for me, and expanding that value to support and others is what The Session Series exists to provide. It is a safe space to explore, learn and expand ourselves without judgement or shame. It is the permission to be, exist and know our inherent power and live in our truth – the full truth.
Safe spaces create support, but not enablement. Creating passive containers to allow cycles and mind-made-lies to go unexamined and unchallenged is not doing us service. To have a space to do the work with the support and a community of others who have known similar challenges and have committed to the work is the entire purpose, free of marketing verbiage, of The Session Series’ inception.
As we’ve shared through our pivot, over the last few years The Session Series has evolved into a powerful platform for embodied business strategy, conscious leadership, and sustainable growth. We are, and always will be, rooted in deep nervous system awareness and trauma-informed values, and now provide more transformational coaching, community, and tools to support embodied personal growth and leadership development that is authentic and sustainable. Why? Because there’s a gap in what’s available to us, and we need to bring the silos together to empower each other, to live in more connected and embodied selves and communities. That is healing, and that is where the power is.
If you’re new here and new to my story, the very condensed version is that I spent years (decades) in a dysregulated state. I didn’t know any differently, and I had enough privilege and perfectionism running through my life that it was easy to appear aligned, productive, and ‘healthy.’ Red flags were mowed over by perception and storytelling; explaining away my own behaviors, or those of others. Repetitive patterns and trauma responses were covered by achievement and ‘functional’ chaos.
The answer to the case, I believed and society supported, was to cope with wine, obsessive fitness routines, doing-more, and my absolute favorite path which was over-thinking and over-intellectualizing as if I were on trial with myself and always my own defense lawyer. While I thought I was winning, I was really just winning on technicalities and losing on appeals, racking up unsustainable financial and emotional expenses.
Over the years, I ‘successfully’ built and ran close to a dozen non-profits and small businesses and boards, while also building my corporate career. I achieved, and over-committed to pretty much everything, to force a narrative that felt safe and secure mentally while my body and nervous system was absorbing all the shocks. I pushed myself, and let others push me, to the absolute limits of my own survival in pursuit of the storyline and not at all my health or happiness. And I almost lost the will to sustain any part of this battle to live, many times.
While there are a lot of threads to pull there, and things to unpack, that will come over time and is ever-present in the work that we do through The Session Series. What matters here, and today, is to simply say to you - to anyone reading this who may be relating, curious, and most likely scared - is that I understand, I see you, and I’m here for you with everything I have lost, loved, learned and rebuilt and will help you do the same.
It doesn’t matter where you’re starting from - it matters where you want to go and how committed you are to getting there. Everything else will grow from that.
So, welcome to The Session Series. I’m Val, and I am thrilled to share this space with you.
