ABOUT V

I am. A soft place for my ancestors to land.

Perhaps central to my identity is that my mother was killed by wounded men. My sister and I survived. We alchemized betrayal into prosperity. We thrive, alongside my daughter, who carries my mother’s name and the next generation of her brilliance.

My work is born out of collective memory and blossoms from blood soaked soil to cover the earth in love.

-LaVoya Woods (ve/ver)

Genderqueer, homofluid, neuro-expansive, and living with disability, V Woods studies and practices black womanist care, liberation psychology, quantum mechanics, and decolonial education, all within a queer afro-diasporic cosmology. Ve applies what ve learns to ver own life and creative practice and helps others curate their optimal timeline. V does not believe that we can find safety and joy by assigning ourselves to the confines and torture of white supremacy culture, “I want to live outside of that imagination and my co-conspirators across time, space, and intention want that for themselves too.”

Get into the receipts, boo. ↓

    • Doctorate in Educational Leadership (EdD), concentration in Organizational Leadership — University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (in progress)

    • Master of Social Work (MSW) — University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

    • Bachelor of Science, Summa Cum Laude — City College of New York (Early Childhood Education & History, Culture & Society)

    • Reggio Emilia Approach Field Study — Reggio Emilia, Italy (direct basis for Play by the Park curriculum design)

    • Black Europe Summer Fellowship — Amsterdam, Netherlands (exploring the discipline of Black Europe through an anthropological and critical race theory lens)

    • Licensed Clinical Social Worker Associate (LCSWA) — North Carolina

    • Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy — Medical University of South Carolina

    • Critical Race Theory and Psychotherapeutic Practice — UNC Clinical Institute

    • Certified Behavioral Health Coach — Headspace Health

    • Gottman Method Certified

    • Play Therapy Training

    • Eco-Therapy/Eco-Psychology Training

    • 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Certification

    • Reiki Level 1 & 2 (Master Level in progress)

    • Decolonizing Psychotherapy: Exploring African Cosmologies to Disrupt the Modern Function of Colonial Systems on the Body, Mind, & Spirit — American Academy of Psychotherapists Annual Conference, New Orleans, LA · 2024

    • Rituals for Healing Systemic Harm — NC State University, multiple keynotes · 2022–2024

    • Building a Liberation Ecology Through Community Healing — Woods Collective Workshop Series, Durham, NC · 2023

    • Nature is Queer: Unmasking Your Authentic Self — Community Workshop, Durham, NC · 2023

    • Ecstatic Dance: Somatic Release of Systemic Harm — Eco-Institute Workshop, NC · 2023

    • Speak Up: Conversations to Build Community — European Association of Schools of Social Work Conference, Madrid, Spain · 2019

    • Trauma-informed organizational change — integrating equity, decolonial theory, polyvagal neuroscience, and culturally responsive practice

    • DEI/DEIB strategy and consulting, national-scale (corporate, higher ed, healthcare)

    • Executive and leadership coaching

    • Experiential curriculum design — arts-based, ecologically grounded, ability-diverse

    • Critical Race Theory applied to clinical and educational practice

    • Adult learning and professional development design

    • Community mental health and trauma-informed clinical care

    • Somatic and embodiment modalities — yoga, Reiki, ecstatic dance, eco-therapy

    • Arts-based and participatory action research

    • Public speaking, keynotes, and large-group facilitation

    • Painting and visual art practice — Black Psychedelic Becoming

    • Published writing — The Euphoria Lab, The Deep End blog series, peer-reviewed research

    • Community Mental Health

    • Marginalized Populations

    • Critical Race Theory

    • Trauma-Informed Care

    • Evidence-Based Practice

    • Discrimination & Oppression

    • Intergenerational Trauma

    • First Generation & Immigrant Narratives

    • Racial Identity & Socialization

    • Family Systems & Attachment

    • American Academy of Psychotherapists — Post-Graduate Scholar, 2019 Institute & Conference, Savannah, GA

    • Linda M. Summer Scholar — UNC School of Social Work, 2018–2019

    • Armfield Fellowship Scholar — UNC School of Social Work, 2017–2018

    • Ada Sheperd Award in Fiction Writing — City College of New York

    • Edward Rivera Prize for Autobiography — City College of New York

    • QUEST Award for Leadership, Scholarship & Community — City College of New York

    • Managing Editor Appointment — The Grate, City College of New York

    • UNC School of Social Work Contact Magazine — Student Feature

    • UNC Grad Impact Feature

    • Publication Award — Midnight & Indigo (Black Women Writers Publication), 2024

  • Peer-Reviewed

    • Deck, P.G., Strom-Gottfried, K., Woods, L. & Aylward, A. (2019). Exploring the Relationship Between Professional Values and Social Work Professional Identity: A Systematic Review. Social Work Education.

    Professional

    • Woods, L. (2026). The Euphoria Lab. Substack.

    • Woods, L. (2026). Insights — Luxury Leadership: A Radical Response to DEI Collapse. Co-Creating Inclusion.

    • Woods, L. (2023–2025). The Deep End Blog Series. Co-Creating Inclusion.

    • Woods, L. (2018). Grad Impact: Finding Community and Helping Society. Carolina Grad School Magazine, UNC-Chapel Hill.

    Creative Writing

    • Woods, L. (2025). "Whiskey Sour Moon." In Midnight & Indigo: Sixteen Speculative Stories by Black Women Writers, Issue 15.

V’s Four Fields Of COHERENCE

Many of us are building a new internal and external reality with no earthly guides and not enough capable elders. This is one of the greatest thefts of colonialism and capitalism: the loss of longevity of life, and the myth that we are without wisdom, without tradition, without ritual because our elders have been stolen too soon. But the gag is, we are and have always been deeply, cosmically, ancestrally connected.

V Woods has incarnated this cycle to disrupt oppressive timelines and expand individual and collective vibration. Ver work happens at the cellular level, where epigenetic recoding, metabolized within the individual, becomes the mechanism of disruption. This offers us opportunities to resist the binary logic and oppressive constructs that have shaped Earth's current evolution.

The Four Fields of Coherence methodology holds that all change happens within, between, and around relational fields: our relationship and communication with ourselves, each other, the Earth, and the divine. Rather than stopping at self-regulation, individual healing, or self-actualization, V supports the development of coherent relational fields that slowly, but irreversibly alter our collective experience.

Field 1: beyond brokenness

You are not broken. You are not a problem. Healing is re-membering wholeness in a broken system. Or rather, a system operating as designed, curated to convince the earth’s first people of their own brokenness. Brokenness, like victimhood, is outside of our cosmology. By releasing the mythology of brokenness we can notice and honor what is trying to unfold instead. Re-membering opens us to the vast inner universe we carry, and often abandon to survive.

Field 2: our body

We understand how the body holds history, builds protection, and carries the capacity for joy. We work with the nervous system, sensation, fascia, movement, and breath to liberate our cells from past harm, in order to make friends with the unknown bright future. As we evolve in our own body, we begin to see it in balanced relationship with the human, plant, animal, and earth body around us.

FIELD 3: OUR LINEAGE

The engine of white supremacy culture is shame. As children we adopt the strategy of shame to survive violence, internalizing the enemy’s voice and turning it on ourselves. Naming how systems - racism, colonialism, homophobia, transphobia, patriarchy, capitalism, imprint on the nervous system across generations can help us externalize and eradicate our oppressor. We become lovers of our inner selves, conduits for our ancestors, and enemies of the culture instead, interacting with our inheritance from a place of safety and compassionate love.

Field 4: our relationships

We all need love. Love is a sacred place to land in a world where violence is currency. Relationships can be a safe space to blossom and a place of harm and erosion of trust. Early bonds, ruptures, and longings forever shape our present life. The magic of the portal of unconditional love (of self, of others, of the earth) is that new patterns of intimacy, trust, and repair can make us new again.

Get in Touch

lavoyawoods@pm.me

queer therapy → woodscollective.com
speaking & press → Speaker Kit
substack → The Euphoria Lab
everything else → https://vwoods.carrd.co/