Guest: Maritza Schäfer, Founder of Bruja School & Creator of the Liberation Magic Method
Connect with Maritza: Website | Instagram | Facebook | Newsletter
In this episode we explore:
Why manifestation culture is incomplete — and what’s actually missing
Magic as the craft of transforming reality, not wishful thinking
The three axioms of liberation magic
Why witches have been vilified throughout history, and why that’s not a coincidence
The connection between personal transformation and systemic change
Liberation as an inside job — but never a solo path
How paradox is the organizing principle of life, not just a feature of it
🎵 Music credit: Intro and outro music: Madre Ayahuasca by Arkawa
Used with permission. More at arkawamusic.com
🌐 Visit www.goddessintraining.online for more tools to support your intuitive journey.
I have a confession.
I use the word magic all the time. I always have. But for a long time, I said it a little quietly. Like it was something I believed in the way you believe in a dream you’re not quite ready to say out loud — hedging it with manifestation or intention or energy when I was in certain company. Using the safer words. The ones that come with a neuroscientific footnote attached.
My conversation with Maritza Schäfer shifted something in me.
Maritza grew up in Chile in a family of witches. Her grandmother initiated her into brujería. Magic wasn’t a belief system she adopted or a practice she found later in life during some searching season — it was simply the air she breathed. The sky-is-blue fact of her childhood. And when she moved to the United States at 18, she encountered something she genuinely hadn’t anticipated: a world that had forgotten how to work with the unseen.
She told me she looked around and thought, oh, you poor babies.
I laughed when she said it. And then I felt it land somewhere true.
Because here’s what I’ve been sitting with since our conversation ended: we have not been taught to work magic. We’ve been taught to produce. To optimize. To measure outcomes and justify every expenditure of energy with a legible result. And somewhere inside that system, we learned to distrust anything we couldn’t explain — including ourselves.
Maritza makes a distinction that stopped me cold. Manifestation, she says, is a subset of magic. It’s spell casting — identifying a desire and working to make it real. And that matters. But it’s only one piece. Liberation Magic, the framework she’s developed and teaches through Bruja School, holds that humans have four aspects: body, mind, heart, and spirit. And the reason so many of us feel stuck, she argues, is that we’ve been living almost entirely in two of them.
We are obsessed with the material world and the intellect. We have neglected the heart. We have abandoned the spirit. And the mess we are in — personally, collectively, ecologically — is the direct consequence of that abandonment.
She’s not gentle about it. I appreciate that.
What I find so clarifying about the Liberation Magic framework — and what I’ve been turning over since our conversation — is that it doesn’t offer escape from reality. It offers deeper contact with it.
One of the three axioms Maritza teaches is this: paradox is life’s organizing principle. Not a feature of life. Not an occasional inconvenience. The foundation. The thing underneath everything.
We live in a culture that desperately wants paradox to resolve. We want the clean answer, the guaranteed outcome, the proof before we take the leap. And what that costs us — what I have watched it cost me — is the willingness to act in the presence of the unknown. To cast for the improbable, as Maritza says, when the impossible still feels out of reach.
We’re not casting for impossible. We’re casting for improbable. And once the improbable becomes real, the impossible becomes merely improbable. That’s how you scaffold a life you couldn’t have imagined before.
I know that scaffolding. I’ve lived it. Where I am now would never have appeared on any vision board I made ten years ago — not because I wasn’t dreaming, but because I didn’t yet have the aperture for it. The imagination had to open first. The work opened it.
This is where my own path as a transition doula keeps meeting conversations like this one. What I witness again and again — in the thresholds people cross, in the deaths and the rebirths both literal and metaphorical — is that transformation doesn’t happen because we force a new reality into being through sheer willpower and a Pinterest board. It happens when we stop fighting the one we’re actually in. When we face it. When we let it move through us instead of around us.
Maritza talks about this in the context of the nonprofit world, a world we’ve both inhabited. She spent decades running social justice campaigns, leading global advocacy work, restructuring organizations that were quietly breaking apart at the seams because the humans inside them were disconnected from themselves. And somewhere in that work she arrived at what her best friend — a social worker — had been trying to tell her all along: you cannot have mass transformation without individual transformation. And individual transformation does not happen in isolation.
We need both. We always need both.
The personal and the political are not in competition. They are in conversation. And the women who understand their own magic — who have stopped waiting for permission to claim their power — are the ones who change the room they walk into.
Late in our conversation, Maritza told me about a skydive.
She had gone up on her grandmother’s birthday, years after her grandmother had died. And somewhere in the freefall — thirty, maybe forty-five seconds of open sky — her grandmother came. They had a conversation. Vivid and real and utterly outside the logic of what we’re told is possible.
And then, in the moment that a small part of her started to doubt it, the parachute exploded.
Not catastrophically. She had a reserve. She was fine. But the message was unmistakable, at least to her: I needed to give you a sign you couldn’t explain away.
I believe her. I believe her not because I can prove it, but because I have learned — slowly, stubbornly, and with a lot of resistance — that waiting for proof before I trust what I know is its own kind of spiritual poverty.
Antibiotics worked before anyone understood how. Magic works whether or not the science has caught up.
We are living through what Maritza calls a painful transition. The systems are crumbling. The certainties are gone. The old ways of measuring worth — production, output, the legible outcome — are failing the vast majority of us, and we are finally starting to say so out loud.
And I find, in that, something that feels almost like relief.
Because maybe the unraveling is the invitation. Maybe this is exactly when more of us are willing to ask the questions we’d been deferring: What do I actually believe? What do I actually know? What would I do if I stopped waiting to fully understand it first?
That’s the work. The beautiful, non-linear, paradox-holding work of becoming who we actually are.
Maritza is doing it. She’s teaching it. And she will tell you — warmly, without apology, with that particular freedom that comes from a few decades of not giving as many fucks — that it’s not even that hard.
It just takes everything.
I work with women in the threshold — those navigating the profound passages of midlife, loss, and becoming. If you’re feeling the pull of that deeper work, I’d love to connect. Learn more about my transition doula and plant medicine facilitation work at goddessintraining.online.
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