We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Zoe Vlastos a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Zoe, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Was there a moment in your career that meaningfully altered your trajectory? If so, we’d love to hear the backstory.
Yes! Oh, there have been so many moments that have made me the human I am, which makes me the professional I am. A couple of such moments jump to mind right away, probably because they pertain to the work I’m doing now.
One was summer 2018. I was on a mountaintop sitting in a circle of early morning light and young women, each of whom held hope and heartbreak, bravery and connection in her heartstrings, in her unspoken words and in the unshed tears sparkling in her eyes. We had woken before dawn, heading the call of challenge – of our physical selves to find the summit and our emotional selves to share vulnerably in this circle. That group was the culmination of leading a group of adolescent girls and another guide through the challenges of a week in wilderness therapy – bowdrilling fires, building shelters against surprise hailstorms, creating personal ceremonies, backpacking many offtrail miles, and finding healing and connection amidst it all. As I looked around the circle of faces on that mountain top knowing I was only a few weeks away from leaving wilderness therapy to pursue graduate school, I made a promise to myself: “I will be back here.” By here I meant the sense of homecoming together, I meant creating from my most alive self, I meant holding space for others from my own deep wild essence.
That moment stands out because five years later I’ve created a business that is built on offering others space to experience a sense of homecoming together and wild essence. It also comes to mind because as I completed my Master of Arts in Mental Health Counseling, experienced the COVID-19 pandemic while completing my internship at a safehouse for survivors of domestic violence, and took a job treating severe eating disorders, I have held onto this memory and the promise it contains. When the crush of city life and isolation led my mind down fearful paths of never returning to my dream of leading therapeutic groups in the mountains again, I would hold onto the memory like a flashlight in a dark cave. Even in the deepest self-doubt I knew I would eventually come home to myself and my own unique way of holding others.
The other moment that stands out right now was this past February when that knowing of an eventually started to become reality. I found myself again sitting in a pool of mountain sunshine, this time with a good friend and colleague, Elizabeth W.D. Collgray. For the first time in my life I had booked an airbnb for the weekend just for myself, giving myself much needed space to focus entirely on the creation of my new business – SolVida Psychotherapy & Connections. I spent the weekend connecting with the soul of my business: playing with values and website content, going on long snowy walks and sitting quietly alone, connecting with my own deep knowing and allowing inspiration to flow through me. And inviting my friend, Elizabeth, to join me for an afternoon. For the past few months we had been tossing around the idea of creating a workshop or retreat together. In that bright mountain air we asked, “What do we want to create?” In the next few hours our ReWilding Retreat was born…and my promise of almost five years earlier was rekindled. The sense of homecoming together and deep wild essence was refreshed and alive again.
Just recently, in August 2023, the seeds we planted that February day blossomed into a full retreat where I had the deep honor and pleasure to co-lead a group of six women for four transformative days in the Rocky Mountains. The experience solidified in me an even deeper commitment to myself that I will keep creating and giving to the world from my own unique wild essence. Now, the blossoms continue to grow! I’ll be co-leading a group on conscious living and emotion embodiment through the Evolutionary Power Institute this fall. And I’m thrilled to have multiple retreats and a therapeutic backpacking trip on the drawing board for 2023-2024. Stay tuned as I continue to create from this place of mountaintop-like aliveness!
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Hmm…who am I in the world? Right now I would say that mainly I hold space. In my work as a psychotherapist and a group facilitator I create big, open, wild spaces in which my clients can fully be themselves and explore their experiences without judgment. I use the wilderness as my role model for holding space because nature is such a loving yet impartial force. It’s such tender and beautiful work, which I’m so very honored to do. My path to becoming a psychotherapist was non-linear, of course. When I entered my undergrad studies I majored in Music (piano performance) and pre-Med. I knew that I wanted to help people so I figured I would become a doctor. Everything changed for me during college as I witnessed mental health struggles – in myself and others – and then the subsequent strength of self that came from the journeys to wellness. While living in Argentina for six months I got another culture’s perspective on wellbeing and entirely fell in love with studying people and being with people. By the time I returned home, I had shifted to majoring in Neuroscience and Psychology with new dreams of becoming a psychotherapist. After college I threw myself into a variety of different experiences including being part of a team doing brain imaging and behavior research on eating disorders at Anschutz Medical Campus, returning to Argentina to study tango dance, hiking the Colorado Trail with my mom, working at a number of alternative summer camps, retreats, and a children’s home, falling head over heels in love with my now husband, and guiding at Open Sky Wilderness Therapy for a number of years. Throughout these experiences I found myself returning again and again to my awe in the strength of the human spirit and my own growing desire to more deeply understand creating space for healing and growth. So, I eventually packed up my guiding backpack, moved back to Boulder, and dove into graduate school at Regis University.
As you may have noticed by now, I’m a lover of life. My name actually means life in Greek so I guess that makes sense. I simply love experiencing life, which often means I don’t do just one thing at a time. While in graduate school I attended the School of Womanly Arts’ Mastery Program in New York City, co-founded a weekly women’s group (which, three plus years later is still running cocreatively), and spent as much time as possible in the wilderness. After my internship at the Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence I took a job at La Luna Center working in Partial Hospitalization treatment for eating disorders while also training at the Evolutionary Power Institute as a Body-Centered Transformation practitioner. Then, in a weaving together of all my previous experience, I launched my own private practice in early 2023.
SolVida Psychotherapy & Connections is part psychotherapy practice and part community creation space. I see individual clients and couples as well as run retreats, groups, workshops, and (coming soon!) therapeutic backpacking trips. Experiencing the pandemic right after moving back to the front range really put the need for community right in my own face. As I created my own community, I found myself drawn into spaces where I could support others in connecting to themselves, others, and the world more deeply as well. One of my greatest joys in life is creating brave, open, wild spaces for people to connect because I profoundly believe that connection is what our world needs most right now. I offer people the space to explore the blocks that get in the way of connection – traumas, pain/loss, internalized narratives, unconscious commitments, stuck emotions – and learn tools to shift from living in stuckness to living from essence. I deeply believe in the wisdom of the body and the intuition that lives within each of us. My goal as a psychotherapist is to support each person’s unique process of reconnecting to their own deep authentic knowing. I often use somatic tools, emotional experiencing, inner parts work, and time in nature. Overall I deeply trust that with support, tools, and wild open space, we each have the ability to create what we truly want in our lives.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
Similar to many in our culture, especially women, I discovered that I had internalized narratives that are untrue and no longer serve me. One of the trickiest narratives for me to unlearn has been: “Be perfect and productive, then you will be worthy.” I’m all too familiar with the pressure of doing-doing-doing, preparing, preening, and over-focusing on what I think others want me to be. At some point I’ve realized just how unhelpful – and even dangerous – this narrative was for myself and my career. For me, perfection is the antithesis of being a good therapist. If I am focused on being productive and perfect, then I’m not honoring my own or my client’s complex and unique lives. I’m not open to learning or being human, which are, in my opinion, cornerstones of the therapy process. My clients are the experts of their lives, not me, so I need to be open to learning from their deepest knowing. I now turn towards being a human with a squishy feeling body so that I can use somatic wisdom to be present and feel into what wants to happen next. In unlearning the link between productivity and worth, I’ve found my process to be most supported by time in nature and surrounded by community. I strive to create these types of spaces for my clients and groups, because unlearning can be such a vulnerable, painful, and also enlivening process. My mentor says something along the lines of “others help us to imagine the impossible,” which really speaks to how much having the support of other peoples’ nervous systems can help us to get unstuck and move into living more consciously. More and more, I find myself grounding in a new narrative: “Be Wild and Choose to Belong.”
Do you think you’d choose a different profession or specialty if you were starting now?
Oh, what a fun question! If I could go back and experience five different life paths I probably would, just because the experience of being a human is so fascinating. But in all honesty, my true answer is twofold. On one hand I sometimes wonder where I would be if I had allowed myself to be fully swept away by my discovery of anthropology and ethnographic research during my senior year of college. For my honors thesis I created a digital storytelling project on how technology was impacting romantic relationships and love. Talking to people during my interviews and doing research on the topic was captivating, plus I found myself in the anthropology and communications departments surrounded by a bunch of really cool people. I could totally see myself traveling the country and/or world to study and learn about the role of connection in different cultures – Brene Brown style. I get chills just thinking about it. In a way I think that the work I do now is similar, I get to be with people and groups in the realm of connection. On the other hand, I love my life and my work so I probably wouldn’t actually change anything. Even the most challenging and soul-wrenching parts of my own experience have made me who I am and allow me to do the work I do. I don’t want to mess with that magic!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.solvidatherapy.com/
- Instagram: @zoevlastos
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zoe-vlastos-021993203
Image Credits
Elizabeth Woods-Darby, Teya Rose Media, & Micaela Peker.