About Valerie
My life is dedicated to helping others align with their core sense of self, the unique energetic fingerprint that many call the soul, the transpersonal source of wisdom, truth, intuition, and love. For as we come to live from this faster vibrational plane of consciousness that some of us sense as our higher self, we radiate love in a way that is transformative not only for ourselves, but for others. In this way, we evolve…..by quantum leaps of consciousness and into wider and wider spheres of love.
I have always felt Presence, God, soul or whatever name we give to that which is really beyond any human conception or label. Perhaps because of that, living my felt sense of spirituality has steadily been my strongest passion in life. My sense of spirituality has been distinct from any sense of religiosity. While the latter is any devotional practice I do to honor the Creator God, my spirituality is my felt experience of Divine Presence.
Presence moves me, literally. I grew up in the Christian faith, but in adulthood felt moved to study all wisdom traditions to understand for myself which core teachings were basic to all religions. The answer I came to over and over was “love”. Simultaneously, I felt inexplicably called to read the findings from quantum physics, to explore what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”. I longed to know more about the nature of reality, and quantum physics held clues from its research findings that the field of Western psychology didn’t want to touch. Like about the nature of energy and consciousness, and how consciousness seemed to be what created the something out of the supposedly nothing of space and the quantum vacuum (I prefer the name quantum field of potentiality). I was intrigued by the concept that energy could appear as matter, or matter as energy, depending on the speed of light vibration.
I didn’t study psychology until my late thirties. I was thirty-nine when I entered the CACREP-accredited master’s program for counseling psychology at the University of Southern Mississippi. This after the Universe got on my case about it and began with the continuous synchronicities and messages about entering the field of psychotherapy, which I share in my book, Living in a Quantum Reality. I had first planned to get into a PhD program and ignored the repeated messages to “get out sooner rather than later”. But by the time I had completed the master’s, I better understood why my path was to be a practical one, and why a PhD would likely take me further from my calling as a psychotherapist and spiritual counselor.
Some people have asked me why I didn’t go into the field of psychology initially. When I was younger, the field of psychology was so oriented toward a materialistic view of reality, and toward a Freudian pathological and medical lens, that it did not resonate with me, though in high school the topic just came natural. So, I ignored the field at first to complete a BS in business administration, with a triple major in management, Spanish and French at the University of Florida. I had planned to go into international business eventually, hoping to help the world in a more globally collaborative way (today it’s being called conscious capitalism). However, when I graduated in 1982, it was the recession, and I did what I could to simply find a job and gain some experience. I was knocking on the door of any importer I could find, when one talked me into starting an imported chocolate distributorship with a partner. When that business arrangement didn’t resonate with me, I was able to go work for a larger beverage firm and learn more about the ways of the “big guys”. After a few years of business experience, hoping to make a difference from the inside out, I pursued work in the environmental engineering field, where I was a business development manager for many years.
As I was transitioning into the field of psychology, I worked in Gainesville, Florida for family court and the state attorney’s office to implement a restitution program, Project Payback, that required juveniles to receive employment counseling and maintain a job. There, I also spear-headed the start of a mentoring coalition, helped bring the PACE Center for Girls to town and served as a founding director on their Board. I also helped on the Board and as a volunteer for Adopt-A-River/Adopt-A-Shore.
While in school, I worked in community mental health, and for another program to help juvenile adolescents. After graduation from USM, I designed an independent living program for a residential treatment program in the Denver area of Colorado. But the practice of psychotherapy in institutional settings was so behavioral-oriented, and unfortunately too focused on punitive consequences, that for me it lacked the soulful healing setting I longed to provide. So, in 2006, I left to begin a private practice, where I could integrate Western-Eastern psychology, with spirituality and a quantum worldview. As it turned out, the Universe sent me all kinds of higher consciousness clients, who were struggling with their awakening, and it became my specialization. For them, I wrote Living in a Quantum Reality, which describes the many common issues faced by those with a higher or more inclusively loving consciousness.