Meet Valeria Mccarroll

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Valeria Mccarroll. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Valeria below.

Hi Valeria, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?

The question of purpose is a fascinating one – the driving “why” behind what we do. There have been moments in my life, particularly in my teens and late twenties, where I struggled with a lack of a sense of purpose. This is perhaps on one level a reflection of the privilege I grew up with. My basic needs physiological needs for food, water, and shelter were consistently met without worry. My family valued and promoted access to education. I was aware from a young age of the discrepancy that lay between what I had and what many other people did not. This gave rise to within me a desire to be of service to the suffering in the world, a profound sense of guilt around my own privilege, and a nagging sense of uncertainty as to how I could best be of help. These factors, in conjunction with a classic “dark night of the soul” in my early twenties, led me to pursue a graduate degree in counseling psychology. Nearly simultaneously, I also trained as a yoga teacher – and from that conjunction in my learning unearthed a great love of and respect for the wisdom of the body.

This affection for “somatics”, as body-centric awareness modalities are termed, led me to my interest in psychedelics. Psychedelics are a class of substances affected by both set and setting that are known to induce profound alterations in one’s experience of oneself. Today, there is a resurgence of interest in their capacity to address symptoms of trauma, depression, anxiety, and eating disorders. At the time I became aware of their therapeutic potential, I was experiencing a great frustration with the limitations of talk psychotherapy. I knew what in my life needed to change. I had spent hours talking about it. I just couldn’t seem to change it. Psychedelics brought concepts that had felt entirely theoretical into a bodied ground in my life. I began to actualize the change I longed for. Psychedelics supported me in uncovering a sense of purpose within myself. This happened through the profound sense of connection to the earth that they facilitated in me. We know from contemporary research on the healing potential of psychedelics that this is part of where their therapeutic agency lies – in recohering a sense of connection to self, to other, and to the world.

What I’ve come to accept over time is that for me, purpose is an emergent phenomenon – which is to say that it’s responsive to time, place, and space. For example: the first time Trump was elected, it shifted my sense of purpose profoundly. I had been content in my work as a therapist, and after his inauguration, I felt a call to become more visible, to make my work more public. Today, purpose for me centers around re-awakening a collective awareness of interdependence. That we are all deeply interconnected, inherently woven.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I’m a psychedelic educator, writer, and speaker. While I’m formally licensed as a marriage and family therapist and trained as a psychedelic guide, my work today centers around teaching. I teach classes to doctoral students and supervise dissertations at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), where I’m also currently developing a Master’s degree in psychedelic studies. I’ve recently completed a draft of a book that’s been many years in the birthing process, and I’m on the hunt for the right publisher. When I’m not writing or teaching at CIIS, I lecture and speak internationally on psychedelics, nondual wisdom, somatics, and social justice. I could not imagine a more satisfying and fascinating intersection of topics to be perpetually professing on and in dialogue about.

I also have a very small private practice where I offer consultations to organizations in the psychedelic space, as well as individual consultation and spiritual guidance. Forthcoming, I’ve got my first online course that I’m in the process of putting together – on joy as a practice of cultivating resilience.

I love my work – I’m a deeply creative person and more often than not, the various titles I hold allow for a lot of creative space. I have a deep sense of being in service to something larger than myself, while also shaping the future directions of a field (psychedelics, consciousness) in a way that hopefully supports the recognition of interdependence at a global scale. This feels deeply needed at this moment of collective cataclysm and ecological disaster so rampant across the planet.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

First is discipline. I’m an incredibly disciplined person by nature. You could blame it on Chinese astrology – I’m an Ox. We love work. But behind that discipline is a fierce drive to be of service in the world. I’ve had to unlearn the idea that discipline is about punishment. That’s a misconstruction of the deeper roots of the world. To have discipline is to be a disciple to something, or of something. Apprenticing to a value as a path of spiritual practice in the world. I’m a discipline to my core values: beauty, truth, balance, and love.

Second is a body-based awareness. This is something that can be cultivated through practice, like yoga, qi gong, or dance. I stay rooted in my joyful capacity to be of service through staying “in myself”. Dance isn’t just something I do for fun, it’s a mandatory self-care mechanism in my life. When I teach, I almost always start out with a grounding meditation, bringing attention to the body. The body, in many nondual spiritual traditions, is the vehicle by which enlightenment is received. To have a human birth is a precious gift, because without it we’re stuck in the wheel of samsara, endless suffering. So much of the time, the world would like us to deny, ignore, or denigrate the wisdom of the body. But the body is a gateway to presence, and a doorway to freedom.

Third I’d have to say nondual wisdom traditions broadly. I was an initiate in a school of classical Kashmiri Shaivism for many years, which is a path of practice akin to forms of Tibetan Buddhism. My study and practice within that school had a deep impact on my consciousness – it gave me a framework for understanding reality that didn’t have me ascribe to beliefs in my own fundamental sinful nature or badness. I’ve then gone on to study in schools of Kabbalah and Tarot, and those teachings have also been profound in how they have helped me make sense of the world. Having these lineages of orientation and practice have been essential to my own development and growth – I’d be lost without them.

What has been your biggest area of growth or improvement in the past 12 months?

The past year I have been really learning to love my shadow. Shadow, according to Carl Jung, is the part of self that lies beyond conscious awareness. For a long time (and even as a therapist), I oriented in a very subtle way to the shadow being “bad”, because often what lies outside of our awareness are the parts of self that have been denigrated by our parents, caregivers, and culture as children. Doing shadow work, i.e. bringing awareness to the parts of the self we’ve been told are unwanted, can feel very threatening to one’s psychic integrity and sense of wholeness. Shadow, though, is future gold. It’s the rocket fuel of spiritual awakening – if we can turn towards it with compassion. If I deny and push away my shadow, I deny my own wholeness. I deny the possibility of healing. To turn towards one’s shadow isn’t necessarily pleasant or fun, but its essential work in the face of a dominant paradigm that thrives on a story of individual powerlessness. For me, this has meant really reconciling with my capacity to cause harm, the parts of myself that are angry, aggressive, or violent. The parts that I judge in other people when I read the news. The past year has been a deep process of internal alchemy, of coming to befriend the darkness in myself as a friend and guide.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.valeriamccarroll.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/valeriamccarroll/
• Linkedin: Valeria McCarroll

Image Credits

In Her Image
Diana Jex Photography