A Light That Was Always There

Veronika’s path began long before she had language for it.

As a young child, she remembers standing on the back porch of her childhood home, feeling one with the apple trees, peach trees, grass, sky and all of life. Even when her early home life was painful and uncertain, she sensed a larger presence holding everything. It gave her a deep sense of courage and aliveness.

At six, while singing “This Little Light of Mine” in Sunday school, she felt the Divine glowing through her. As a teenager, she continued reaching toward that presence through prayer, guitar and private devotional songs. These early experiences became quiet seeds for a lifelong devotion to healing, spiritual remembering and helping others recognize the light within themselves.

At 17, Veronika left home and began a new life in California with $30 in her pocket. She felt she would die if she didn’t get out.

She entered college as an art major, carrying a deep creative spirit, but soon discovered psychology and knew she had found her life’s work. From the beginning, she was drawn not only to healing trauma but to helping people recognize their deeper potential and capacity to live with greater meaning and presence.

From Psychology to the Relational Field

After earning her master’s degree in Counseling Psychology, Veronika was invited at just 24 to teach at California State University, Fullerton, where she went on to teach and mentor for many years in Human Services, crisis intervention, group process and practice, grief and loss, ethics, psychotherapy and fieldwork supervision. She also taught at the master’s and doctoral levels in counseling psychology, marriage and family therapy and clinical psychology, helping form future therapists, social workers, coaches and helping professionals.

Group work became sacred ground for Veronika. Through experiential teaching, facilitation and mentoring, she saw how deeply human beings share a common emotional language beneath their differences — and how healing often happens in the relational field. Long before meditation became mainstream, she brought contemplative practice into her teaching and watched students respond with openness and relief.

Her clinical work expanded across private practice, schools, hospitals, organizations and communities. Over decades, she developed expertise spanning trauma intervention, disaster response, employee assistance programs, EMDR, clinical hypnosis, neurofeedback, CISD critical incident stress debriefing and Somatic Experiencing. She responded to workplace deaths, severe injuries, bank robberies, earthquakes and natural disasters, often meeting groups in the immediate aftermath of crisis.

Those years deepened one of her guiding principles:

“What is injured in relationship can be healed in relationship.”

When Psychology Was No Longer Enough

Over time, Veronika came to understand that psychology alone could not hold the full depth of human suffering, resilience and transformation.

During what she describes as a dark night of the soul — marked by professional burnout, grief, infertility and the recognition that something in her life had to change — she turned more deeply toward meditation, nature and spiritual practice.

She moved to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, entered a period of profound inner listening and began coming home more fully to herself, her Divine Self and a deeply mystical life.

The experience changed how she approached healing. Veronika does not rush to take people’s pain away. Instead, she helps them listen for what the pain may be revealing.

She often says:

“Pain points are turning points.”

Pain, in her work, can become not simply a problem to fix but a doorway into deeper truth, spiritual maturity and alignment with the Higher Self.

From Spiritual Intelligence to SPIRIT™

In 2009, Veronika discovered the SQ21 Spiritual Intelligence framework developed by Cindy Wigglesworth, which gave language to something she had already been living and teaching: the movement from ego self to Higher Self, from reactivity to wisdom and compassion and from inner fragmentation to spiritual maturity.

She became a Certified Spiritual Intelligence Coach and Trainer and, since 2013, has taught SQ21 Spiritual Intelligence Coach Certification through Deep Change University. Her exploration continued through adult development, embodied practice, leadership maturity, somatic healing, meditation and decades of clinical and relational work.

Her leadership studies also included the Leadership Maturity Framework, developed through research associated with Harvard University, further deepening her understanding of how human beings develop increasingly mature ways of thinking, relating and leading.

Veronika came to understand that the ego itself is not the enemy. Rather, unhealed ego patterns can create the reactivity, defensiveness, self-doubt and drama that keep people from accessing their deeper wisdom. Her work helps clients recognize those patterns with compassion, heal what is ready to be healed and strengthen their ability to live from the Higher/Soul Self.

Over four decades, these once-separate strands of psychology, trauma healing, spiritual intelligence, adult development, embodied practice and conscious leadership began forming an integrated body of wisdom that ultimately became her SPIRIT Framework™ and Coming Home to Your Soul Self™ program.

Over four decades, Veronika came to see that the fields she had studied and practiced were illuminating different parts of the same human journey. Psychology could support healing, spiritual intelligence and spiritual practices could deepen awareness beyond the reactive ego, somatic practices could bring that awareness into the body, and adult development and leadership maturity could help people grow in how they understand, relate and respond. Yet no single approach held the whole.

At the heart of her work was a question that continues to guide her research and teaching: How do we find our way to our deepest, truest Self—and live from there? Her answer became the SPIRIT Framework™ — an integrated, living path for developing the inner capacities to do just that.

Rather than a rigid sequence, SPIRIT describes six dimensions that participants revisit and deepen throughout Coming Home to Your Soul Self™:

• S — Seeing with New Eyes

• P — Practice

• I — Inner Knowing: Wisdom & Compassion

• R — Relating

• I — Integrating

• T — Taking It Into Life

The framework brings together psychological growth, spiritual intelligence, embodied practice, adult development, polarity management and conscious leadership, supported by practices including Veronika’s GRACE Practice™ for meditation, presence and nervous system regulation.

Coming Home to the Soul Self

Today, Veronika’s work helps women in the second half of life move from automatic ego reactivity toward Soul/Higher Self-led living, bringing together psychology, spiritual intelligence, embodied presence, adult development and conscious leadership.

Her broader body of work includes Consciousness NOW TV, Consciousness NOW Coaching, and Raising Consciousness NOW, through which she has advanced conversations about spirituality in the workplace, conscious leadership, and emotional and spiritual maturity. She also serves on the leadership team of The We ONEing, an online spiritual community centered on shared presence, relational attunement and “As We” consciousness, and has co-hosted international women’s retreats in Costa Rica and Baja, Mexico.

Her public teaching has included appearances on The Stumbling Mystic and Spirit of EQ podcasts, as well as workshops, retreats and spiritual communities. Her writing continues with her forthcoming book, Coming Home to Yourself: An Embodied Meditation Practice for Those Who’ve Tried Everything Else.

Across these expressions of her work, the thread remains the same: helping people access the wisdom already within them and develop the capacity to meet themselves, their relationships, leadership and life with greater presence and compassion.

Veronika lives near the ocean in Southern California with her husband. A longtime spiritual practitioner, she finds renewal through yoga, meditation, writing, spiritual community, beauty and creativity.