Hello, I'm Sunyata Kopriva. My friends call me Sun.

I have spent my entire life courageously walking toward what most people walk around.

At 7, I turned to face the shadowy figure chasing me through my nightmares and discovered it was me. At 10, I crossed into my Hmong neighbors' living rooms to learn what the world looked like from the other side of displacement. At 16, I came out as queer and made a photo essay about trans youth because I needed language the culture hadn't given me yet.

I went to South Africa to trace the origins of human life, to Burkina Faso to hand cameras to women and girls who had never been asked to tell their own story, into the most segregated neighborhoods in D.C. and St. Louis, into a state psychiatric hospital, into a children's mental health center where I fought a broken system for children it had already decided didn't matter.

I have worked as a researcher, teacher, artist, social organizer, and clinical director — inside universities, governments, NGOs, nonprofits, and private practice. I understood early that the problem of human suffering doesn't live at one level of the system. It lives at all of them simultaneously. I learned different languages, listened to stories, organized protests, wrote policy, held the dying, cooked and planted fields with people. None of it has been a career, it has been a relationship. I have never believed the division sowed by the few to control the many to be real, and I have never operated out of the dominant power structure. I have literally given my entire life to understanding how to help people; develop a world that is better for every being.

At 39, everything I had built began to unravel. For six years I explored every nook and cranny of myself and my life, and came out as nonbinary. Then, one quiet morning while experiencing deep grief, I heard a voice say: "You never abandoned yourself. You stored away the most precious parts of yourself so that they would be ready now." That sentence turned my entire view of what was happening inside out. What I had mourned as self-betrayal was revealed as the most loyal thing I had ever done.

My courage to refuse the world offered to me and fight for what is real, has been made possible by one thing: Dharma. Dharma means truth. Not subjective truth, but the truth of all of reality. For the last 25 years I've been a dedicated student of Tibetan Buddhism under the guidance of a qualified Tibetan lama. Being rooted in an authentic lineage — one where knowledge is kept alive and tested generation after generation — matters deeply to me. I am not a teacher of Dharma. I am a practitioner, feet in the mud. I hold a strict annual retreat and daily practice schedule.

I built Dynamic Trauma Integration because I needed a framework that could hold everything I had learned — clinically, anthropologically, contemplatively, and through the direct experience of forty-five years of refusing every incomplete version of myself and the world.

At the center of it is something the camera taught me at 15 and every room since has confirmed: perception is not passive. Trauma doesn't just hurt you, it changes what you see, what you believe is possible, and who you think you're allowed to be.

Strongly rooted in my own path, my work in this world is for people who have already done real healing and know something is still missing. For the queer kid who felt chaotic and unloved. For the leader holding everything together while privately falling apart. For the activist who has fought every external frame and is only now turning that same courage inward. For the person who, somewhere along the way, stored away the most precious parts of themselves to keep them safe, and is ready, finally, to find out what they've been holding.

If that is you, I am ready to sit in that room with you.