I built a career on making complex systems work.

Then I started noticing what wasn't working in me.

I hold two energies that rarely coexist in the same person. Twenty years as a management consultant, an MBA from Duke's Fuqua School of Business, and a PhD in Environmental Science. The work of making complex systems legible and actionable. And alongside that, training as a Massage Therapist, a Reiki practitioner, a registered yoga teacher — with ongoing focus on integrative somatic trauma therapy. The body as a system with its own logic. Ritual as a technology for attention. Plants as allies with their own histories.

Racing between time zones and PowerPoint decks, I was good at being useful. And quietly starving for something else. Peace, maybe. Or just the feeling of being actually alive.

So I went looking. Reiki. Yoga. Gardens. Kitchens. Meditation. A decade of Costa Rica journeys that stopped being trips and became something closer to a compass.

Consulting sharpened my mind. The healing path restored my nervous system. Terra Vitae was born from that overlap — the place where logic meets soul, and you finally exhale.

This isn't about finding yourself. You're not lost. It's about remembering the parts that got buried under deadlines and burnout.

With Love,

Valentina Fomenko

Founder