My Story

Hey there,

I’m so glad that you have found your way here. I want to share with you some highlights along my journey toward becoming a Vedic meditation teacher, with the intention of letting you know just how much this practice means to me. This practice, in many ways, saved my life and to this day, offers me a tool and a touchstone into the truth of who I am amidst the flux.

My decision to teach was born naturally out of my own personal healing. In my early years, I experience a significant amount of trauma and lacked the skills to regulate my nervous system. By fourteen, I had fallen into suicidal depression, social anxiety, and bulimia that eventually led to hospitalization.

I found myself in and out of facilities and treatment programs into my sophomore year of college. During my first year of college, I developed an addiction with cocaine in an attempt to regulate my binge cycles. I was grasping for all the wrong lifeboats. I longed to feel safe again, and did always maintain this belief that it was possible, but for years I was drowning in a sea of far too much stimulation, complete dissociation, and a never ending rollercoaster of mood swings.

My bulimia took me on a wild ride of dopamine spikes, followed by deep droughts that truly left me feeling crazy. I couldn’t finish sentences. At one point, I lost the ability to walk. I felt completely out of touch with sensation. I didn’t know one emotion from the other. I felt powerlessness, disorganized from within, and paralyzed by the shame of how much harm I continued to inflict upon myself despite my longing to love myself.

As terrifying as this chapter of my life was, it offered me the opportunity to wake up. I’ve contemplated the mechanics of the mind and the way the state of our nervous system impacts our sense of agency and grasp on reality ever since I was a little kid.

When I moved to Boulder, Colorado, I found an outpatient treatment program that I could attend while studying psychology part time at the University of Colorado at Boulder. It was there that I stumbled upon the practice of yoga. I’ll never forget the feeling of being in my body again. I had lived every day numb for so long. The sensation of warmth under my lungs— actually feeling my breath in my body— felt like ecstasy. Even the wetness of tears streaming down my face— was a gift. It was like waking up and being born all over again. Every day, breath by breath, I started to feel again.

Yoga gave me the experience of being beyond the mind. At some point within my practice, I'd experience the flow state and this is where I felt safe to have an experience of myself and how safe I was to feel that wasn’t owned my by fearful narratives. It was the one space where I felt like I was free. And it became the one hour of each day I actually took responsibility to put into practice what I was studying and learning in therapy. I started to create new narratives of self love, interconnectedness, and trust. The practice really supported me in strengthening a new mind-body connection where I was befriending my aliveness.

So much of my healing revolved around my relationship with my heart. Bulimia is very dangerous on the heart. The act of purging stops the muscle. After a decade of stopping my heart daily, it was very weak. And so much of my practice was, and still is today, about resting my attention at my heart, listening in. I’d talk to my heart, and say “you're safe” and “you can trust me now”. And then I’d feel shame and guilt and practice loving myself in that. So much of my healing has come from forgiving myself for the self harm I inflicted and about learning to trusting myself again.

This self trust muscle, I am still growing. I’ll still have moments in my life today where I put my hand on my heart and listen. I still have moments where I feel like an old narrative comes up of questioning myself, and so I talk to myself. I give myself the breathing room to feel how safe it is to be as I am— all it takes is space to let myself have an experience other than the old narrative to align with the reality of how capable and powerful I am. I think silver lining in having this lifelong practice of giving myself space to see what is really true, has allowed me to leap into my wildest dreams too. But back to the story…

As my practice of listening to my heart developed, I began to connect to the wisdom within this space. I had never before been taught that our heart has its own wisdom, its own voice. And realizing this, fundamentally changed how I live my life forever. My heart runs my life now. She is the main character, and the loudest voice within.

And so, naturally a passion grew to share this way of listening to the wisdom of our heart with those I loved. I began teaching yoga to hold the same space that saved my life. And, I started the jewelry brand Sankalpa, which means “your heart’s intention” or “heart’s deepest desire” in Sanskrit. This platform became a way to inspire my friends to listen to their heart, and then set an intention to honor what it said by tying on this bracelet and wearing it until it fell off. It was one of the most beautiful unfoldings of my twenties and grew into an online blog and global community of women sharing their story. During the pandemic, it was a space where women shared their practices and rituals for self care and regulation. Starting this brand gave me a vessel to take what I had been through and make an offering out of it.

Meanwhile, I became fascinated with healing my neurochemistry, and started studying neuroscience and somatic psychology in grad school. I had a yoga teacher that had a teacher in India and ended up traveling there to deepen my practice and understand the full breadth of the yogic system from where it originated many times in my twenties.

One time in Rishikesh, India, a transformative moment introduced me to the partner of a Vedic meditation teacher who had studied first-hand with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi for over 30 years, the founder of Vedic Meditation. I stayed connected with her, and that summer, she ended up moving to Boulder, Colorado and I moved in to help take care of her son. I remember it was my twenty-first birthday weekend, and she found me in the basement having a panic attack, and offered to teach me the practice. I nodded and seconds into her singing Puja, a ritual of gratitude that Vedic Meditation teachers sing before you learn, I felt this sweetness and love in her voice that soothed me.

She gave me my mantra, and within minutes, I was resting deeply. I came out of the first sit immensely shifted. I knew that night I would teach the practice. I’ve never in my whole life felt such a full body, soul, resounding knowing that teaching this technique was my life’s purpose. After studying so intimately so many various practices within the yogic system and within the field of psychology, Vedic Meditation felt like home. And so I apprenticed with my teacher for the next several years as I healed and used my own process as research for what the practice can unfold.

The first years, the practice addressed my brain chemistry imbalance and really offered me a felt sense of safety from within that was pivotal in learning to trust myself again. One of the main reasons it has worked so well for me is that the technique itself repaves our neural pathways. In essence, it’s a deep rest practice. The way we use our mantra and the nature of the mantra’s vibration take our body into the deepest rest state possible, called a hypo-metabolic parasympathetic state. It’s the exact place our nervous system needs to be in to release deep-rooted trauma and day-to-day stressors without re-experiencing them. I owe my life to this practice.

Then, the next few years I began to notice it creating space from quite dangerous narratives to start to have true agency over my triggers. I learned to apply the technique within meditation to living life. And it really offered me a roadmap for taking responsibility for my life. As the years went on, I started to see my creativity and confidence expand.

In the more recent years, my capacity to hold space and stand as a community leader and speaker is where I find the practice really supporting me. It continues to open my awareness to more and more subtlety. The experience a regular practice of Vedic Meditation offers is that of being in touch with the ever expanding present. It’s this true science of being that translates into a life of more flow and saying yes to life’s ever-unfolding newness.

Today, I truly have the most regulated nervous system of anyone I know. I am damn proud to own that. It’s been a lifelong, every day, process. And I am so deeply grateful for the way my path of healing has unfolding into a life of so much abundance, community, creativity, and a trust not only in myself but in nature and the whole.

There is nothing more important to me in this life than to share what has expanded my sense of self love and presence. When I moved to LA a couple years ago with the intention of teaching Vedic Meditation, I had no idea it would turn into the community that we have today. Nowphoria is truly this co-creation of all of our lived experiences and shared intentions to grow together. It is the greatest, coolest, gift ever to share this practice with you and to witness you love it just as much as I do. And it’s incredibly meaningful to me that when we come together each week for group meditation, we are able to be so vulnerable and real with one another.

Life is so meant to be shared. And I think the accountability fostered within sharing a practice, from where I come from, is truly remarkable. Because we are human and bound to have chapters of our lives where things feel hard, or we fall off our practice. And it’s so human. And it’s so okay. And we all get to know we have something and multiple someones to fall back on if need be. I am deeply grateful for this web we’ve got. And I’m excited to see where things unfold.

All my love,

Victoria