Victoria Kessel

Japan Trip Host

Hello! My name is Victoria. You will most likely find me hiking the Camino in Spain with Billie Eilish in my ears, standing a little too long in a café deciding if I really want another cortado, or choosing an onigiri at a neighborhood Lawson in Tokyo.

Have you ever ‘felt in between’? Between cultures, roles, seasons of life, or versions of yourself? I know that terrain.

I am part Cherokee and half Japanese. I grew up between Florida and Tokyo, in houses where suitcases were never far away. Early on, I learned how to read rooms, how to adjust my posture and tone, how to sense what was being asked without anyone saying it. I learned how quickly “different” becomes something you have to account for, and how a space can tell you, without words, whether you are meant to take up room or step aside.

For over three generations, my family has run ‘Sentō’ — the neighborhood public bathhouses of Japan. I grew up in places where shoes are lined at the door, where steam rises from tile floors at dusk, where strangers sit shoulder to shoulder in warm water and no one needs to explain themselves. Attentiveness was not a concept. It lived in how towels were folded and how water was offered.

My uncle was a Kendo master. Under his guidance I learned to bow before speaking — to wait — to let a room settle before I engaged in it. Discipline was quiet. Presence mattered more than display.

As a young adult, my life centered on movement. I became a Broadway dancer and toured across the United States, Canada and Brazil. Dance gave me a way to speak without explaining. Later in New York and Los Angeles, I carried that same rigor into my work in media, technology, and finance. From the outside, everything was going well. But on the inside, something within me began asking for a different pace.

Self-inquiry entered my life out of necessity. After leaving my career, relocating to Germany and learning to live inside a new language and family, the ways I had always relied on no longer held. That’s when I found ‘The Work of Byron Katie’ and it offered a place where I did not have to perform or translate myself.

Now, I am a certified facilitator and a member of VTW, the German association for ‘The Work’. I am also a Birdie Ambassador for the Nightbirde Foundation. These are not titles I stand on, but places I practice from.

Today, I live in Germany with my husband, within a family that stretches across the Americas, Germany, and Japan. These lands now feel like rooms in the same house. Moving between cultures is not something I do occasionally — it is how I live.

I know what it is to step into a room and pause — wondering how to be. I also know the relief of not having to perform.

That is how I walk with women, now. I am at ease in first steps, pauses, edges, and those crossings that feel unfamiliar. I walk alongside, especially when the ground is new.

This is what I bring to our journey — from the first bow to the last ‘onsen soak’ — I share the Japan that shaped me. Ancient and alive in neon, ordered through form, and beauty in small gestures. Even ordinary moments — a train ride, arrangements of flowers, a sip of sake — are treated as crossings. Past and present sit together. You move in-between.