Velina was born and raised in a small California town where her father’s family settled in 1938 after leaving their farms in southwest Texas. They came from Mexico around the turn of the century to escape Pancho Via and the dangers there. They found a better life in California. She was blessed to grow up in an extended Mexican-American family where she learned about her father’s culture and got to know her great grandmother, who was the matriarch of her large family and a Medicine Woman/Healer in the community.

When Velina was 12, she was asked to babysit her cousins, late on the 4th of July. Her beloved uncle and God Father who lived down the street, was a Vietnam war veteran. She was told her uncle needed to go to the hospital. She arrived and found him with a blanket wrapped around him, shaking and looking into space, his eyes looked gray and far away. That moment never left her and began her compassionate journey of understanding trauma.

She had no idea until she was much older, that she, too, had deep trauma and that her journey had profound meaning in the process of healing herself as a necessary step in carrying out her life mission.