Victoria Bradbury, Independent Licensed Ishtara Teacher

Welcome! I’m Victoria and am delighted to introduce myself. I am an artist, an embodiment coach, intuitive empath and spiritual teacher.

 

With a highly sensitive nervous system, I’ve lived most of my life feeling lost in crashing waves of emotions, whipped around in the storm without anything solid to grab onto. I coped by numbing my body and creating external chaos in my life in order to survive the internal storm.

​

Think Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. What I was embarking on was a full circle adventure that arrives where it started - “you had the power all along”.

 

My primary education was in a Waldorf school, where the central teaching is that all of life is interconnected. We can learn about ourselves and the world through observation, exploration, experimentation, play and creativity. I didn’t know then that this early foundation would be a cornerstone of my healing.

 

In my early teens I was diagnosed with depressive bipolar and spent ten years on medications, feeling helpless and hopeless that I was condemned to be dependent on others for the rest of my life. But there was a small voice inside me that refused to believe this. In my mid-twenties, I began to seek out various healing modalities, traditional and nontraditional. Talk therapy, religion, mindfulness, meditation, manifestation, plant medicines, shamanic practices, energy work, yoga, qigong, non-dualism, esoteric spirituality - my journey has included all of it. Along the way, I’ve had the privilege to work with master teachers from many different living lineages and traditions, each of them providing me with a vital piece of the puzzle.

 

It wasn’t until my early thirties that I learned that much of what we in the west consider mental illness, is actually unprocessed trauma that is stuck in the body.

 

The key to my healing was to come back to the elemental awareness not only of what my mind was thinking, but what my body was feeling. And this led me to Ishtara, where I learned the practice of embodied self-awareness.

 

With genuine embodiment work, in a small group that was trauma informed and held me accountable to myself - all the pieces started to come together. Everything I had studied for decades began to integrate. I nurtured a profound relationship with my body, and connected to her natural wisdom. The idea that I needed to keep seeking “out there” for an answer subsided. I developed a deep trust in the magic of life itself unfolding in perfect timing. This is what I had been looking for - a truth that transcends the ideas of the mind. I embraced all parts of myself, I celebrated every perceived flaw. And while I am still learning and growing, I experience myself as whole, complete and divine. Right now.

 

This is embodied self-awareness, to be fully alive and present in the now moment.

Having a healthy, strong, regulated and resilient nervous system is the key to running the powerful creative energy of emotion through our physical being. It is the key that I now carry and it is my pleasure to pass it along to you. I woke up in my body. And I would be honored to guide you as you do the same.