About Valeria
Born and raised in Northern Virginia, much of my childhood was spent engaged in two passions that remain to this day: being out-of-doors and reading. The long hours playing amongst the dogwoods and wading in creeks seeded in my consciousness a deep reverence for and love of the natural world. Latent within this engagement with the fecundity of nature was also a profound somatic education: the sounds of the cicadas in summer, the feeling of damp mud between my toes, the mystery of gazing at the moon while surrounded by fireflies, the taste of honeysuckle blossoms straight off the vine.
Since a young age, a formative aspect of my path has been to walk with existential questions around meaning and purpose. My formal education has included undergraduate studies in government and biology, a master’s degree in Integral Counseling Psychology, and a doctorate in East-West Psychology. These questions, as well as my search for their answers have fueled peregrinations of body, heart, mind, and spirit. What began as an attempt to rectify a crisis of faith (though I would not have termed it as such at seven years old) has taken me spiraling ever more deeply into a mystical calling. I have had the great luck and privilege of studying with a number of extraordinary teachers and mentors along the way, in lineages of nondual Shaiva Tantra, shamanic & psychedelic medicine, somatic psychology, Visionary Cosmology and Tarot of the Spirit.
Currently I live in Northern California with my husband and daughter, in Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo territory. I teach in the Integral and Transpersonal Psychology department at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and consult with a variety of groups and organizations involved in the burgeoning field of psychedelic medicine. Currently, my work in the world is focused on writing a book, undoing my own patriarchal white supremacist conditioning, and further elucidation and conscious stewardship of Somadelics.
About Somadelics℠
Somadelics is a contemporary path of spiritual awakening, a weaving that is inspired and informed by the traditions of classical nondual Tantra, modern psychedelic medicine, and somatic psychology. Somadelics synthesizes luminous practices for awakening radiant embodiment. A path of practice that emphasizes the alchemical possibilities of the body and the embodied nature of awakening, Somadelics makes use of the power of expanded and psychedelic states of consciousness to transform trauma. Grounded in an understanding of the needs of the world that emphasizes the relationship between spiritual practice and social justice, Somadelics takes no authority from any one lineage and instead understands lineage as a dynamic, complex, interdependent and adaptive living system.
“In the age where the guru’s unwavering authority has demonstrated many shadows: Valeria is committed to radical honesty and radical love. I believe this is the foundation of the revelation(s) she has experienced. Part of her medicine, to me, is this diamond like power: the alchemy of staying with and being transformed by the truth of things, even the painful truths. She has walked the path of self-empowerment, of self-making and self-claiming. She isn’t selling a fairy tale or a way to stop the pain, she will ask you to do, as she asks and has asked of herself, to show up in the inglorious and demanding task of uncovering the veils in your heart to yourself, your divinity and this divinity that unites us all and manifests in this wild and precious world.
The path of Somadelics, as I understand it, is human and it is trans-human. It is a wisdom path that draws into it the facets that have previously been shadowed in spiritual and philosophical work: embodiment, the feminine, the wild call of the spirit and the grounded reality of what this all means for us, in these bodies, in this time, in this one, precious world and the honesty of our interconnectedness.”