Meet Valdon Ross

Today we’d like to introduce you to Valdon Ross.

Valdon, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I am an Artist + Performer and a Creative Life Counselor. I provide counseling for mental health, personal growth, emotional balance, and well-being while specializing in issues unique to creative individuals and the creative process. I also create visual art, paint murals, and perform stories (mostly folklore, faerie tale, and mythology) as an otherworldly canine clown – Fox Son of Wolf. Currently, I am building an Imaginarium – a mobile immersive art gallery and intimate event space that is a sanctuary for creativity, wonder, and self-expression.

How all this fit together, however, was not easy to figure out. It was a series of stumbles, missteps, and bold forays into a misadventure. It took a lot of experiments about what I wanted to do with my life and how I wanted to be in the world. Some of these experiments went quite well; others were total failures. Throughout my life, I have embraced many passions, and I always felt choosing one meant abandoning the others. This internal tension felt like a nagging sense of never truly being myself. I was plagued by feeling unfulfilled. I could sense a deep, untapped potential that I had no idea how to contact. It was often overwhelming and would derail my activities.

Eventually, I took the time to engage a deep healing process of self-exploration to truly understand my values, my voice and vision, and what brings me joy. While these discoveries didn’t make the journey less hard, it made it easier to persist, rejuvenate my spirit, and trust the process. I had begun to contact that untapped potential, and the feelings of being unfulfilled began to fade. From there, my path began to unfold much more naturally. What I learned through the process is that everything has its time and place. Everything I invest my time and energy into, every experience I have, builds a foundation for a future endeavor in the most unpredictable way.

My long-abandoned interest in theater – which had evolved into my interest in psychology and counseling due to a shared focus on human behavior and motivation – remerged as a love for oral storytelling and improv. Storytelling gave a new thread to what my visual art represents, and I was able to weave those two together. I began creating my signature “sprayed glass windows” – trash objects assaulted with spray paint that imitate stained glass chapel windows – and designing otherworldly murals to support the realm of wonder and imagination expressed through the stories I tell. And I discovered that I am a clown – an undomesticated canine trickster named Fox Son of Wolf.

At the end of this process, I understood how to use my fascination with creativity and the creative process to help others engage a similar process of deep self-exploration and healing in order to live the unlived life buried within repressed longings and untapped potentials.

Today, my path is not confusing or overwhelming. I’m more excited about what I’m doing than I have been ever before, and I’ve never felt more deeply myself. I see how all my passions weave together and I have a vision that puts the ups-and-downs of day-to-day life into context.

It takes boldness – to take risks, act foolishly, and learn from mistakes.
It takes bravery – to be honest, accountable for my unconscious behavior, and practice vulnerability.
And it takes being myself – fearlessly, regrettably, and unapologetically.

This is the process that I help others go through.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
No… and yes. The creative process is not linear– it doesn’t go in a straight line. It takes detours, stumbles into dead ends, and circles back on itself to start fresh again in the most peculiar ways. When I speak of the creative process like this, I am not talking only about art or other conventionally “creative” things, but also the act of “creating yourself” and “creating your life.”

One of the most important events in my life was unconsciously sabotaging an early stage of my career in a way that prompted taking a break to learn more about myself. Though I didn’t know it until I reached the other shore, this event initiated the deep, healing work of “Creating my Life.”

Wounding is something that we all carry. We cannot escape our wounding – the parts of our personality that we unconsciously compensate for and ignore – until we acknowledge it and begin to heal. The brilliant thing about this is that our wounding will also unconsciously steer us towards the exact situations that we need to experience so that we can begin to heal. We will then be compelled to act out our wounding until we become conscious of what is happening on the deeper, unconscious level of our being.

Once you become wise to your wounding, you start to see how these wounds truly just want to heal. Until you recognize this pattern, though, you will find yourself making the same sorts of mistakes over and over but in slightly different ways. After doing the work to heal, you’ll discover how to access that immense reservoir of untapped potential.

Please tell us more about your work. What do you do? What do you specialize in? What sets you apart from competition?
I specialize in counseling for creatives because I believe that you do not have to suffer to be an artist. I also believe the emotions and experiences we encounter in our creative process mirror the issues we encounter in our daily life and vice versa.

There are a lot of damaging narratives that pervade the collective consciousness about being creative. Some examples are the “tortured artist” idea that insists you have to be miserable to make great art. Another is the idea that you need to be drunk to be a brilliant writer, or an addict if you’re a musician. There is even a lot of scientific research on creative thinking and its correlation with mental illness – as if creativity itself is a disease, which is absolute bollocks! These things are not true, yet these toxic ideas can latch onto our wounded parts, fills us with shame, and prevent us from healing.

We also face unique issues, such as how low motivation and creative blocks look similar but can be different things. They often share the same solution, but one is related to a general lack of inspiration and the other is an inability to engage in our creative discipline and access our muse. I have found when a creative person is struggling with depression it can have both of these impacts on their life, yet when turned into an act of self-exploration and healing the creative process itself can become the antidote.

For some creatives, talking about their art and articulating their creative vision is very difficult. A classic example is a visual artist who struggles to write an artist statement to accompany their exhibit. Perhaps it is related to confidence, maybe it is related to social anxiety, or maybe it is something more nuanced and personal. Learning about your own voice and your vision and becoming empowered by it is such a beautiful thing, and it is honestly one of my favorite topics to work with people on.

Sometimes, when highly inspired, our experience can appear very similar to mania. If a creative has a history of actual mania or bipolar, it becomes important to have the self-knowledge, symptom management skills, and risk awareness to be able to access the creative flow without it devolving into a destructive episode of mania.

I understand these sorts of issues intimately because I am an artist and performer who happens to also be a therapist.

Before ending, I would like to add one thing about the importance of counseling for creatives: One of the moments that solidified my need to start helping other creatives was when Chris Cornell committed suicide in 2017. He was a huge inspiration for me, and I took solace in how he survived the grunge era when a lot of my favorite musicians from my teenage years died in 90s. Cornell’s death served as a warning that I really needed to take a deeper dive into my own healing than I assumed, while also making me realize that my fellow creatives do the same and I could help them. The “Be Yourself” part of my slogan is an homage to him and Audioslave’s song by the same title.

Right now, the music industry is beginning to recognize the need to connect musicians, roadies, band managers, and families with mental health providers. There is a great organization that is tackling this issue called Backline Care (https://backline.care/) – and I believe we need more of these services for the creative community as a whole.

What is “success” or “successful” for you?
Success is living by my own values and acting with integrity while remaining my own best friend — which is to say that my definition of success doesn’t devolve into an excuse to shame myself when I don’t live up to such noble ideals.

More “conventionally,” I believe it is vital to define success as something that I am capable of influencing. I can control my choices and my behavior. Everything else is beyond my control. So rather than getting hung up on the outcomes of things beyond my control, I focus on me and what I can do to influence the situation. This is especially necessary for those of us who are creatives. When working with clients, I find it necessary to emphasize how important it is for you to define success in terms of what you actually have power over.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.valdonross.com
• Phone: 720-600-4824
• Email: valdonross@protonmail.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/valdonross/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/valdonrossltd/

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