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Article: Meet Our Muse: Victoria

Meet Our Muse: Victoria

This month we are thrilled to feature Victoria de Vall. Victoria is a Women's Coach, Influencer, and host of the extremely popular podcast, “Victoria's Thoughts”

Beyond her accreditations (of which there are many), Victoria is an embodied woman, putting all that feminine goodness out into the world in order to move past generational trauma and cyclical patriarchal hate to a place of security, confidence, radiance, and empowerment. I mean really, what more could we want in a muse?

Hello Victoria! We are thrilled to get to know you better today. I love the phrase that you're an “embodied woman”. Please tell us, what does that mean? 

Being an embodied woman in my perspective means that you know yourself. You've done the trauma-informed work, you have standards, you are comfortable in your solitude. And really it's just being comfortable and secure in your own essence. I know myself, I know what I want. I'm not going to settle. I only accept nourishing friendships, romantic relationships, whatever it is into my life. And that to me is being an embodied woman. And helping other women come into that. Helping other women find who they are and, and be confident in that, not put it down. Women need to claim what they want and be confident in themselves. 

Wow. That's beautiful. Where does that come from? Is it life experience, age, therapy? 

It comes from being comfortable in your solitude, doing trauma-informed work and knowing yourself. So for me, I teach celibacy intentional singleness, which is a term that one of my mutuals coined. So taking that period by yourself to get to know who am I? What are my desires? Fasting from male validation, fasting from male connection, and really learning to fill yourself up from within, learning to validate yourself from within. And that allows you to then come to life, come to dating, come to friendships, come to whatever self sourced. And then from that space, you can show up to your connections to like authentic, genuine confidence, secure, etc.

Absolutely. And what a way to fill up your cup of self-love by doing that. We, women especially, have this skewed view when it comes to pleasure and desire, it's very much male focused. The word “pleasure” itself is not sexual. But tapping into pleasure seems completely alien.

Yes and that's one of the reasons that I talk about fasting for connection. Because we're conditioned as women to center other people's pleasure, other people's priorities, other people's experience. Everybody else besides our own. And so part of recentering yourself back into your life is pleasure. And it's interesting because in celibacy, people think, it's like this religious purity kind of thing. And it's not. I advocate for self-pleasure rituals, like continually learning how to self-pleasure, how to experience sensuality, which is apart from erotic culture. Sensuality, like the way that you put on your lotion, just adorning yourself with jewelry, treating yourself in a way that makes you feel alive to me is really kind of what pleasure is. A lot of women are very numbed out, very disconnected from themselves in their entirety. And that's a result of being the patriarchy. It's a result of trying to navigate that. But that's the reality. 

Because pleasure, regardless of if it's erotic or platonic, it starts with feeling safe; and feeling unsafe can manifest in many different ways. It doesn't just look like, previous trauma or physical danger. Feeling unsafe can be feeling really burnt out at your job, and that makes you feel unsafe in your life and insecure in your life. And then pleasure kind of goes out the door because our basic need of safety isn't met. So a lot of times it's about centering our safety and then allowing ourselves to learn how to connect with ourselves from that safe space. 

That makes perfect sense. I feel like a lot of these things are like drawing a direct line to therapy. You mentioned trauma-informed therapy. 

I'm a women's coach and I do a lot of trauma informed work with my clients, but that's not a replacement for therapy. I have both a coach and a therapist. I highly recommend therapy or doing trauma informed work with some sort of healing practitioner. Traditional therapy is a space that can't be replaced by coaching or by other avenues. The difference between therapy and coaching is that through coaching it’s like I have a place that I want to bring you to and this is how we're gonna get there, and this is the trauma informed work that we're gonna do to get you there. It’s guided. Versus therapy: let's take it slow. Let's move. There's no goal, there's no place to get to. Let's move through all of this together.

So they're very different, but they work very well together. 

Yes, exactly. 

Another big factor in your work and how you present is the female connection. As humans we are wired for connection, but using this feminine lens as an affirmative, in this positive, connected way is so empowering. Can you tell me more?

A lot of my work is about bringing femininity and healing into the feminism space. And those things are very often seen as contrary to one another. They're seen as mutually exclusive, and they're not, they're compliments. I was just talking about it on TikTok, but right now there's a very unfortunate movement where on the one hand women are coming back into their femininity, but as a result, they're feeling better than other women. They're feeling like, I am an embodied woman and I have standards, and I have this and that — and you don't, or you're setting us back. And that's a problem. Seeing women who are in unbodied situations or in difficult situations as harmful and you as healed is simply incorrect. You have not done the work. You are still coming from a sisterhood wound. And there's only one of two reasons that you would shame a woman who is in a bad situation. The first one is that you have a sisterhood wound, and that you feel triggered when you see women treated badly because you in some sort of way have not healed the part of you who has been treated badly by other women and this is an outlet for you to get that feeling out. Or they're seeing other women, and not only have they not sat with their hatred for other women and the experiences of other women, they also are coming to the sisterhood wound and trying to use that as a way to gain male validation.I'm better than her, therefore choose me. So emphasizing healing the sisterhood wound is so important in these spaces because so many women have had really adverse experiences with women. Mom figures, friends, and that can scar us. And so we need to sit with that pain that comes up, we have to sit with the beliefs that we formed as a result of our pain. And when we can sit with that without forming the beliefs, then we can really heal our sisterhood wound. 

Yes and we know first hand here at Mary Young the absolute power of having a female first audience and community. It’s like a forcefield. It’s so safe.

I was just talking to someone about this; about how having a majority female audience really creates such a safe space to express and to exist. I used to have a majority male audience when I first started off online.

Oh, interesting. 

And I realized it's because I was viewing myself through that male gaze. I was unintentionally putting out male-centered content, even though I was trying to cater to women. And that was part of my celibacy journey was learning how to view myself from my own gaze. What feels authentic and genuine and safe for me. And when I started really healing, everything changed. The floodgates opened for me. My business became extremely successful. I blew up on TikTok. I became extremely successful in my podcast. I am in the top 100 in my podcast in the world. 

That’s amazing. 

And that was huge. I changed the way I am, I started dressing and it was this real self-discovery of who I am outside of viewing myself from this male gaze. I realized before, I was always trying to make sure my butt looked good. I was always trying to make sure my body looked flattered in my clothes and so I could never actually express my style. 

Yes, feeling comfortable as you — that’s all we ever want. 

For the first time in a long time, these last couple years, for the first time ever, I feel secure and genuinely beautiful and authentic in the skin I'm in. Before I always felt like my face wasn't enough. I wasn't pretty enough. And as I started actually coming home to myself, now I feel so beautiful in the skin I'm in, and I'm not dressing the way I thought I had to be, to feel secure. And it makes me more able to express myself as well because I’m being authentic to myself. 

Victoria is wearing the Greer Top and Landry Pants in Sage Rib and the Kaela Long Sleeve and Orly High Brief in Citrine.

Photographer: Stefan Trotman

1 comment

Good read

Lexi

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