|
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. See Gopita’s page there: Click on www.EnergyMedicineDrectory.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
|
| Gopita with her daughter |
Gopita is married, has a teenage daughter, and is the
proud mother of three dogs and one cat. Having formerly lived in New York City for twenty years, Gopita spends her free time hiking with her Labrador
retriever, Homer Hanuman Ram Dog.
|
