EPISODE 12

Jul 1

You’re Not Broken. You’re Living Someone Else’s Pattern. (Liz Velazquez)

Liz Velazquez is the founder of the Heart Center, a 30-acre sanctuary tucked into the last pristine county in North Carolina, where traumatized children, hurting adults, and seekers come to remember who they are.

It began with a contract. Years ago, on a 30-day meditative retreat, she made an agreement with God — she would build a center of peace, and in return she would be shown how. She kept her side of it.

But the calling started much earlier. As a ten-year-old in Colombia, she was pulled away from a servant's son and told they were too different to be friends — her first lesson in how society labels us into boxes that have nothing to do with our truth. As an immigrant teenager, turned away from a tennis match for arriving on a late bus in the wrong clothes, she promised herself she would one day build a court and teach kids for free.

In this conversation, recorded live at the Heart Center, Liz explains why the patterns we spend our lives defending are rarely who we are, why pain is a doorway rather than a wall, and why Reiki heals by teaching us to receive instead of perform.

She also breaks down the contract that started it all, the neuroscience of breaking your own conditioning, her free camp for foster and traumatized children, and the role silence and nature play in returning a person to themselves.

In the end, her work is disarmingly simple: stop performing the self the world assigned you, and remember the one that was always underneath.