We practice together.
Unfortunately for me, my goal when it comes to this practice is making myself obsolete. I don’t want to become a teacher that you can’t practice without, I want to be the teacher that inspires you to take your practice wherever you want. Whether that’s to another teacher, to a far off country, or simply into your own personal practice, I want you to step into an embodied awareness of your own movement and body that supports you for a lifetime.
I don’t sugarcoat the truth, I trust your agency and resilience to move through hard things together. You won’t get spiritual bypassing, high vibes, tiny girls in matching sets yoga from me. I want all the parts of you, and your practice.
Where it began.
I (Victoria, she/her) began my relationship to death and grieving from a young age. Always fascinated with my own ancestral connections, the idea that those who have died are still in relationship to us as living people felt natural to understand. Because of my intuitive ancestral connection, death and dying never made me fearful, but rather has imbued me with a respectful curiosity and deep capacity for feeling that is the benchmark of my work.
The work found me.
In my 20s, I was a dependent caregiver for a family while living in California, which put me face to face with the realities of patient advocacy, comfort care at the end of life, and watching a community grapple with the decision to surrender to the death process. At the start of the pandemic, family and community deaths from COVID-19 reawakened a desire to serve grievers in their most tender time.
I completed my death doula training in 2022 through Going with Grace, led by Alua Arthur, as well as hospice volunteer training through Beacon Health in South Portland. I've also been running monthly grief workshops on the last Friday of every month at Portland Yoga Project since 2022.
Grief Dwellings
Creating Grief Dwellings has been a loving culmination of these experiences, coupled with a deep desire to truly see and hold the hurts of people who are battered by life's many changes. Creating a home for our grief in the body as an act of resilience and community building is some of the most purposeful and fulfilling work that I've ever been a part of.
The practice.
The development of my yoga practice alongside these lived experiences has allowed me to find a depth of presence and practice that work symbiotically. Raised in the very diverse town of Maplewood, New Jersey, I have always had a connection to spirituality, movement, and social justice. I completed yoga teacher training with Amazing Yoga in Costa Rica, at the Kripalu Yoga Center, and with Zuna Yoga in Bali, and spent 4 years teaching yoga in Los Angeles before moving to upstate New York. Leading weekend-long retreats, workshops, and teaching weekly classes, I continued to develop hands-on experience with all types of bodies through the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Shifting to online offerings for the first time, I led online yoga nidra and collaborated with brilliant teachers and organizers to offer weekend-long workshops to uproot white supremacy from wellness spaces.
In the room today.
My classes are a mix of exploration, acceptance, and rigor. Connecting breath and body, my goal is to facilitate each student in finding the root of her or his own practice, getting what they need from every class. Centered in love, class becomes a practice of kindness and gratitude for the body and soul. Empowering others and guiding students back to the truth of their heart is my full time job.
Liberation that isn’t for everyone isn’t liberation.
My practice exists for one thing: collective liberation. Every vehicle I use — death work, grief, asana, meditation — is an invitation into a world where people can be free and free others around them.
The practice is innately abolitionist — inherently inclusive of all genders, races, orientations, and religions.
