Vanessa Viola works with women who are really good at looking like they're okay. The ones who say "I'm fine" so often they almost believe it, until something cracks. A marriage. A truth they always sensed. A night they can't sleep.

 

She is a shamanic energy healer and the founder of Co5mosis and She Trusts Herself, a small, year-long group for women who are done abandoning themselves to keep the peace. She also created Liberated Soul Activation, her 90-day one-on-one container.

 

She grew up in Chualar, a farming town in California's Salinas Valley, where her parents ran a farm labor camp. She spent 15 years as an actor, and worked as a photographer and a recruiter. Then, in 2015, Reiki found her, and everything changed. A few years later, a hard season in her own life led her to a shaman. That led to Ecuador, then Peru, where she studied with Juan Núñez del Prado and, in 2025, was initiated as a fourth-level paqo in the Andean tradition through the Lloq'e Hatun Karpay. She trains through Green Tara College, where she will teach its Foundations in Shamanism course.

 

She pairs that ancient lineage with depth psychology. She is enrolled in the Contemporary Analytical Psychology & Neo-Jungian Studies Certification Course at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Jung's work shows up in how she sees people: not as one problem to fix, but as many parts, some running the show, some locked away. She works with the subconscious and the superconscious, the parts that hold the old story and the part that already knows the way out. She is also trained in breathwork, NLP, hypnosis, EFT, kundalini activation, and sound healing.

 

She isn't there to hand women a new identity. She helps them come back to the one they left behind, and trust what they already know.

 

Vanessa is an Executive Contributor at Brainz Magazine and speaks on self-trust and the cost of "fine." She sees clients in Studio City, Los Angeles, and virtually. She is also a mom.