About

Rebuilt, and still building.

they/them

I'm the founder of Beyond BARS Coaching, a nonprofit walking alongside people rebuilding their lives after incarceration, rehab, and group homes, and the Sober Rebel Club, the community connected to that work. I'm also an Alcohol Recovery Coach on the Reframe app (affiliate link coming soon!).

This site is home to the REBEL Method — my personal 1:1 coaching and yoga offering, built for anyone exploring a more flexible, cutback or alcohol-free approach (no all-or-nothing required). It's separate from Beyond BARS, where sobriety is the goal, no questions asked. Both are held by the same Three Pillars — Nourishment, Self-Care, and Personal Development — and the same F.A.S.T. Method — Foundation, Accountability, Support, Tools — just shaped to fit each path. I also bring this coaching and yoga into nonprofits and recovery centers like Voices of Recovery.

Everybody's welcome here — every body, every background, every identity. I don't have it all figured out. I just keep showing up, keep learning, and bring people along with me.

So glad you're here, and again — welcome to the REBEL Method!

You don't have to be finished to be worthy of the next step.

My Words

Everything I'm working out on the page.

One writing home - the gentle and the fired-up, sorted by what you're in the mood for.

latest

Work with Me

Come heal, gently and for real.

Body, mind, and nourishment - meet me wherever you are.

In order to truly heal, you have to be brave enough to feel.

Veeeee's Rebel Method

Five stages we move through together - from rooted to leading. It spells R.E.B.E.L.

ways to work together

free yoga library

Retreats · always alcohol-free

Come back to yourself.

Gatherings for women's wellness and sober rebellion - rest, movement, and real connection, never a drink in sight.

Speaking

Book a voice that's been there.

Bring me to your institution, conference, or community to share my story - honest, unflinching, and built to move a room toward hope. I travel nationwide.

signature topics

Guest-speaker packages and pricing on request - with my books, A Hard F#&%ing Left and The Sober Rebel Guide for Women, available to feature as they release.

My Books

The words, bound.

Where my writing lands when it grows into something you can hold.

Beyond BARS workbooks

The Beyond BARS workbooks are part of my nonprofit's program - available through Beyond BARS Coaching.

My Music

The gift I stopped hiding.

Songs from my own little room - the voice I'm finally letting out.

Tracks coming soon. For now, this is the space I'm holding for them.

reflections

Welcome to My World

If you've found your way here, welcome.

This is the corner of my world where I get to stop being only the coach, the founder, the human with the framework — and just be Vanessa, the one still becoming.

So let me tell you how I got here, because it was anything but a straight line.

It started with massage therapy — my first real lesson that the body holds our stories, and that healing can move through touch and care. Then I walked into a yoga class at my community college, and something in me exhaled that had been holding its breath for years. That one class made me a yoga instructor. Yoga carried me to the water, to SUP yoga, balancing on a board with the whole sky open above me.

Somewhere along the way I worked with a health coach, and had the lightbulb moment that changed everything. She asked me questions no one had ever thought to ask. And I remember thinking: if someone had asked me these when I first came home from the group homes, the entire direction of my life might have been different. So I signed up to become a coach myself — to be that person for someone else.

Then COVID came, and the world got quiet enough for me to finally hear myself. At the end of that year — December 9, 2020 — I decided to change my relationship with alcohol. It's the day I count from now.

From there the path came into focus. I enrolled at the California School of Herbal Studies and learned to make plant medicine without alcohol (there may be a book about that on the way… but you didn't hear it from me 😉). I completed my Prison Yoga Project training, and my 300-hour teacher training with the incredible Susanna Barkataki. These days I volunteer at a local rehab center teaching trauma-informed yoga and recovery-coaching practices, and at Voices of Recovery in Redwood City, walking people through Your First 90 Days Beyond BARS.

Over the years I've gathered a whole stack of certificates in holistic wellness — but what I share here won't come from a certificate. It'll come from my own experience, my own adventures, my own hard-won truth.

I'm not writing from the top of the mountain. I'm writing from the trail — muddy boots, half a map, still climbing. Some of it will be tender. Some of it will have grit. All of it comes from my heart.

Because everything I've been through led me to this exact moment: to share who I am, what I believe in, and how the world looks from where I stand.

In order to truly heal, you have to be brave enough to feel — and we can do it together!

Thanks for being here!

reflections

The Call That Changed My Life

There's a version of my story I used to keep folded up small, tucked where no one could see it.

It goes like this: group homes. Rules that were never mine. Learning to make myself smaller to survive rooms I didn't choose. Then the day I got to "go home" — except home had become a word with no fixed address. For a stretch of my life, I was unhoused. I don't say that for shock. I say it because it's true, and because I spent too long believing it made me less.

It didn't. It was messy. It was painful. There were nights I'm still learning how to talk about. But somewhere in the middle of losing nearly everything, I found the one thing no one could take: the decision to keep going.

That decision had a voice. It came through a phone call.

It was my junior high counselor — the human who had been my fairy godmother all through the group homes, and my steadiest ground when I came back home. That call was my lifeline. I don't say that lightly: it is the reason I am still here today.

She believed in me long before I knew how to believe in myself. She co-signed the loans for my Massage Therapy program. She opened her home and let me live with her for nine months while I found my footing and started my brand-new career. She taught me how to drive and sat beside me while I practiced for my test. She fed me. She quietly handled the thousand small things a person needs just to survive. I called her Grandma D, and she loved me like family — which meant more than she could have known, because family was something I'd learned to live without.

When those nine months were up, she told me she was moving back to Iowa. Before she left, she helped me find work: a live-in role at an adult group home — room, board, and $500 a month. It gave me a place to sleep and food to eat, and it planted something I couldn't see yet. I loved that work. I had no idea how deeply it would shape where I'd one day land.

I'll be honest about the hard parts too. The day my family kicked me out, I bought my first pack of cigarettes and my first bottle of hard liquor — the beginning of a relationship with alcohol I would spend years learning to heal. It was Grandma D who later told me my family had packed up some of my belongings, and that I needed to come get them or they'd be given away. I remember standing there, not knowing how to feel. I was so used to not living with them, not belonging to a family, that even that felt like a language I didn't speak. I don't blame my family for any of it. I can see now how those parts of my journey had to happen in order for me to be here, who I am today.

Through all of it, Grandma D kept me focused. She held the thread when I couldn't hold it myself.

I'm sober now. December 9th, 2020 is the day I count from. I have a home, a garden, dogs who need me, and work that matters — the very kind of work Grandma D first pointed me toward. I didn't arrive here in a straight line. I took the long way. The hard way. A hard, unrepeatable, only-mine way home.

If you're still on that road: I won't tell you it's easy. I'll tell you it's possible. Somewhere out there, someone can be your Grandma D — and one day, you just might be someone else's.

You don't have to be finished to be worthy of the next step.