As she writes
in this book:
…” I “woke up” in 1989.
I was walking down Third Avenue in New York. I tell the story that my breasts were leaking as I
was late in nursing Chrissy (who was 13 months), but I do not know if that was really true, or if that is just the way I have
told this story the last fifteen years of the telling.
I do know that there was a body which was still filled,
it seemed, with pregnancy fatigue and lactation, with extra pounds and extra fatigue and irritability, and then suddenly,
there was no body, no mind, no one to whom this description could be tethered to.
The sudden loss
of identity was accompanied, unbidden, by a wave of ecstasy and love that cannot be described. It needed
no object to which to attach. It just was. This experience of love had been coming for
months. First it was experienced as pure white light in a meeting. A sense of the room
melting, and an exquisite love for others that was delightful and pure, the sweetest feeling imaginable. This
feeling morphed into an awareness that everyone reflected back to me my own sweetness, and as I beheld another, I could only
say within the realms of a silent heart: ‘Oh, you sweet, sweet darling, you dear, dear One.’
It was as if the heart could not contain the maternal care with which it was consumed. It was
God as Grandmother. God as Grandfather. God as doting sweetness, formless, and infinitely
vast….”
This awakening experience eventually took Gopita to her true teacher, in Ganeshpuri,
India, and over the years has led her to a life of service, and to the various modalities of work she offers today.
Gopita
pursued graduate degrees in Psychology at New York University and went on for further studies as a psychoanalyst at the New
York Psychoanalytic Institute. Having many health crises over the years, and enduring a serious wake-up
call in 1990 with a tumor on her ovary, Gopita healed her body through the principles of macrobiotics. This
inspired her to begin, and ultimately complete, a rigorous ten-year training to become a Macrobiotic Cook and Counselor, training
at the Kushi Institute in Becket, Massachusetts, and the famed Vega Institute in Oroville, California.
She
also studied Applied Kinesiology with Dr. Phil Maffetone, a protégé of Dr. George Goodheart, the founder of
Applied Kinesiology.
Gopita became the first minister Ordained in the Church of Living Essence,
after pursuing over 600 hours studying facilitation in hypnotherapy and cathartic regression with the Living Essence Foundation.
www.LivingEssence.com (Click on “Practitioners”). The
Living Essence approach, formerly called the Hypno-Dharma Facilitation, paved the way for Gopita to formulate
the modalities she uses with clients today. She calls her work “Spiritual Emergence and Integration.”,
and happily guides people in sessions through regression, relaxation, hypnotherapy, or energetic catharsis.
As
a spiritual teacher, Gopita combines many modalities of meditation instruction, and in her scriptural teaching, she has endeavored
to specialize in the texts and scriptures of Kashmir Shaivism, as embodied in many texts and teachers in the Advaita-Vedanta
tradition.
In 1999 Gopita met the unbelievable Donna Eden, whose work synthesized her love of Energy Medicine and
meridian and chakra balancing. Donna, one of the most skilled and sought after healers of our time, has
encouraged Gopita to work as a healer, and has been instrumental in helping Gopita appreciate and trust not only her scientific
knowledge, but her intuitive skills. Donna’s website, www.Innersource.net is an amazing resource for this work. Gopita is listed on Donna’s
directory of practitioners at www.EnergyMedicineDirectory.com
Gopita attended and staffed three nine-day School for the
Work, with Byron Katie, and is proud to be a facilitator for The Work, Byron Katie’s radical, completely life-changing
method of self-inquiry. She is proud to facilitate this modality for those who are really on a spiritual
fast-track, and offers sessions over the phone, on-line, and one-on-one, with the most brilliant form of “ illusion
busting” on the planet! Byron Katie’s web site is www.thework.org
