The beginning

When I was 7, something started chasing me in my sleep.

A shadowy figure. A building full of locked doors. My hands shaking too badly to get the key in the lock. Every night, the figure caught me. Every night, I woke up screaming.

My parents would come. Their comfort helped, but it wasn't enough. The nightmare kept returning — and I knew, even at 7, that comfort wasn't going to solve it. Something in me went quiet and determined. I was going to walk the road into it. I was going to make it stop.

The next time the nightmare started, I didn't run. I stopped. I turned around.

As the figure approached, its face became clear.

It was me.

I woke without screaming. The nightmare never came back.

I didn't have language for what had happened. I just knew I had done something — made a choice that changed something — by turning toward what was chasing me instead of away from it. I have been making that same choice, in larger and larger rooms, ever since.

What I didn't know then — what I'm still learning now, in meditation, decades later — is that walking into fear and making it stop is only the beginning. I got very good at that. So good that somewhere along the way I became a little distant from the raw experience underneath. Resolving the pattern is one thing. Staying present with what's alive inside it is another. That's the road I'm still on.

I am Sunyata Kopriva. My friends call me Sun.

The first locked door appeared when I was 10.

I started crossing into my Hmong refugee neighbors' living rooms — eating their food, listening to stories of forced displacement from the mountains of Laos. The culture I grew up in had a door between us. Nobody questioned it. I couldn't make myself stay on my side of it. What I found on the other side were their story quilts — textiles stitched to hold the experience of moving from a life that is known, to oblivion, to known again in a new way. Something in me recognized that movement before I had a name for it.

At 15, my grandfather gave me a camera. The year I turned 16, I came out as queer and made my first photo essay — about trans youth, in 1997, when the culture had almost no language for it. I wasn't only documenting something outside myself. I was finding the outer edges of a language for my own life the world hadn't given me yet. The camera taught me what every door since has confirmed: perception is not passive. The angle you choose, the frame you draw, the moment you wait for — these are decisions about what is real.

At 16, the same year I came out, I graduated early from a town where former slave houses still stood up the road from my school. People lived in them. Nobody questioned it. I wouldn't occupy the role of a white person who didn't notice. The day I graduated, I left.

I moved to Washington D.C. and started building community in some of the most segregated parts of the city. I ran a poetry program with teenagers whose words became a book — Lifting as We Climb — at an age when most people around them had already decided their stories didn't matter. And in that same period, feeling chaotic inside — newly out, not yet loved — the chaos deepened into addiction and suicidality. The building felt full of locked doors and I couldn't find the key to any of them.

A whisper arrived from somewhere I couldn't locate: "You have to choose life or death — but you are not going to live half alive."

I turned around. I chose life. Fully, for the first time.

The doors kept appearing

I kept turning toward them.

At university, I co-founded one of the first student-led conferences on gender identity in the country — now one of the largest in the Northeast. I served as Outreach Director for LGBTQ+ youth in Vermont. And I went to South Africa to trace the full arc of humanity from its source — ancient archaeological sites, the spread of early peoples across continents, how that same humanity was then subjected to colonialism, slavery, and apartheid. I learned Xhosa and some Zulu to get closer to the living inheritance of those ancient people. I sat with families a decade past the official end of apartheid and asked what "we" meant now — after everything the old "we" had been built on. What I found wasn't a clean answer. It was something more useful: the understanding that suffering at this scale doesn't happen to people because something is wrong with them. The door was never theirs. It was built around them. And the key was taken before they ever had a chance to hold it.

After university I went to Burkina Faso — one of the three poorest countries in the world — with the Peace Corps. For three years I lived without electricity or running water, operating entirely in French and Mooré, two languages I learned there. I did not have the typical Peace Corps experience. I went all the way in. I lived with and learned from shamans and traditional healers whose relationship to healing, to land, to community, and to the invisible world had been kept alive for generations. I spent two years building a photography program with women and girls who had never been asked to tell their own story, handing them cameras the way my grandfather had handed one to me, and helping them setup photography businesses so that they could earn their own money. I partnered with local psychiatrists, a psychiatric hospital, and schools to bring care to children who had none. I extended my service to establish about 20 new volunteer sites nationally. Burkina stripped me down in ways nothing else had. It made room in me I didn't know I needed.

After Burkina, I went to San Francisco and supported LGBTQ+ refugees seeking asylum — people who had fled countries where being who they were could get them killed. I knew something about locked doors by then. I knew how it felt to stand in front of one the world had built around you without your consent.

I designed my own way deeper

I created my own MSW emphasis in developmental and complex trauma at Washington University in St. Louis — because the existing program didn't go where I needed to go. During graduate school I created my own clinical internship at Hawthorn Children's Psychiatric Hospital — the last remaining state psychiatric hospital for youth in Missouri — and then got hired on. I worked there for years. Hawthorn admitted the children no other system could hold: youth who had been through every level of care and still couldn't find solid ground. Suicidality, homicidality, severe trauma, self-harm, psychosis. The most serious cases the state produced. I didn't observe from a distance. I went all the way in — the same way I had gone all the way into Burkina Faso, the same way I had gone all the way into the nightmare at 7.

The intensity of Burkina and the intensity of Hawthorn were the same thing in different forms. Both were total immersion in what it costs to be human when everything has been taken. Both stripped me further. Both made the hollow bone.

From Hawthorn I moved to a children's community mental health center in one of the most under-resourced parts of St. Louis, where I was a clinical supervisor. Every week I had to choose between giving a child the care they actually needed and pushing numbers to keep the doors open. There was rarely a version where both were possible. A 9-year-old Black girl with childhood schizophrenia was told she couldn't be seen for four months. I fought for her anyway. I fought for a lot of children that way, inside a system that had built the locked door on purpose.

What that cost has a name: moral injury — the wound of being forced, again and again, to act against what you know is right, not because you are weak, but because the structure you're inside has taken the key. That moved me out of community care. And it moved me to build something that wouldn't ask anyone — client or clinician — to choose between integrity and survival just to keep functioning.

I have held children and animals as they died. I have sat across from parents who abused their own kids and had to find the humanity in the room anyway. I have listened to people describe needing heroin just to survive being alive, and to queer African youth terrified to go home because they could be killed for who they are.

I have seen it, touched it, tasted it, done it, or heard about it.

And I am still here.

None of it was research. It was relationship. What it taught me, in every room, in every country, at every level of the system, is that the locked door is never the end of the story. Suffering doesn't disqualify someone from wholeness. It is the doorway to it.

This is the room I want to sit in with you.

the building changed from the inside

For a little over thirty years after that first whisper I had built an extraordinary life — adventurous, sober, purposeful, full of community and creativity and service. A life that looked, from the outside, like someone who had found all the keys.

And then everything fell away. The marriage, fertility treatments and adoption paperwork, the career, the house, the land. A second whisper arrived in the wreckage: "Don't just build another life."

For six years I didn't. I turned the same unflinching attention I had spent a lifetime directing outward and aimed it directly at myself. No exit taken early. No stone left unturned. The building I found inside was full of doors I had been walking past for decades — doors I had gotten very good at locking, because I had learned early that resolving a pattern and staying present with what's raw underneath it are two very different things. I had stopped the nightmare. I hadn't yet fully met what was inside it.

Over the course of my entire life I have used many methods to study perception — to understand what we see, what we can't see, and what changes when we change where we're standing:

• Cultural and interfaith exchange

• Scientific learning and research

• Teaching

• Meditation and contemplative practice

• Art and photography

• Psychological philosophy and healing practice across varying degrees of psychological health

• Intergenerational exchange

Every method taught a different layer of the same truth: the key is always perception. Change what you can see, and the door that looked locked reveals itself as something else entirely.

At 40, one of those inside doors finally opened. I came out as nonbinary — a lifetime of living in the between of a gender identity the world kept trying to resolve for me, finally arriving at a name. It didn't feel like revelation. It felt like recognition. The shadowy figure's face, becoming clear again. It was me. It had always been me.

One morning, crying on my sofa, a third voice arrived from somewhere deeper than thought: "You never abandoned yourself. You stored away the most precious parts of yourself so that they would be ready now."

It felt like a bone clicking into place. A lifetime of shame, instantly gone. Just truth — clean and weightless. What I had mourned as betrayal was revealed, in an instant, as the most loyal thing I had ever done.

Recently at 44 a fourth whisper: "It is time to go."

I am only beginning to understand what it means. Not a destination. Not a plan. Something more like an opening — the cocoon of six years of turning inward becoming, gradually, an emergence. This work. This page. This medicine being offered to the world. Something is moving through me that I did not design and cannot fully name. I do not feel like my life is my own anymore — and I mean that as the most peaceful thing I have ever said. I am a vessel. A conduit. A hollow bone. Whatever life wants to do with me, I am here for it. I trust the unconditioned life.

For 25 years I have been a dedicated student of Tibetan Buddhism under the guidance of a qualified Tibetan lama — rooted in an authentic lineage where knowledge is kept alive and tested generation after generation. I am not a teacher of Dharma. I am a practitioner, feet in the mud, holding a strict annual retreat and daily practice schedule. Dharma — the truth of all of reality, not subjective truth but the truth underneath everything — did not give me peace by helping me accept the locked doors. It gave me the capacity to keep turning toward them. And to stay present, hollow and open, in what I find when they open.

Dynamic Trauma Integration was built from the inside

Not from studying locked doors at a distance. From standing in front of them, hands shaking, in a childhood nightmare, in post-apartheid South Africa, in a state psychiatric hospital in Missouri, in a children's mental health center in St. Louis, in the middle of a six-year unraveling, on a sofa on a Tuesday morning when a voice said something true.

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. It makes the building feel like there are only locked doors. The work of Dynamic Trauma Integration is learning to do what I did at 7: stop running. Turn around. Discover that the figure's face is yours. And that it has been trying to come home to you all along.

Whatever you are carrying — I have seen it, touched it, tasted it, done it, or heard about it. I am still here. And I want you to feel, reading this, that it is possible to live this big. To go all the way in. To walk the road into the nightmare instead of waiting for someone to make it stop.

The door you are standing in front of right now — the one your hands are shaking in front of, the one the world built around you without your consent — is not a dead end.

It is the one that opens from the inside.

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 stored away the most precious parts of themselves to keep them safe — and is ready, finally, to find out what they've been holding.

That face becoming clear?

It's yours.

I am ready to sit in that room with you.