Hello, I’m Sunyata Kopriva. My friends call me Sun. Thank you for taking the time and energy to connect with my story.

I was born with a yearning and sensitivity for attunement - empath level sensitivity. Attunement with my family, friends, the soil in my backyard underneath my favorite oak tree, snails, dogs, and the water in my swimming pool. I rarely felt the same level of attunement back with people, and this caused a lot of inner conflict. From an early age, I became what many would call a “wounded healer”. I tell my story because more than any degree, certification, title, or role (of which there have been many), my story best describes my medicine - one radical choice at a time.

Beginnings: When I was about 7-years-old I had a recurring nightmare. In the nightmare, I was running away from a shadowy figure chasing me in an enclosed, multilevel, building with many doors. I would try to escape through one of the doors, but because I was so scared and my hands were shaking too badly, I couldn’t get the key in the lock to open the door. The shadowy figure caught up with me and I would scream myself awake. I did what I could to soothe myself and sought help from my parents, but the nightmare didn’t stop. So, I made a new plan. Instead of running away, I would confront the shadowy figure. One night, the same nightmare started again. At the point when I was at the door and trying to put the key in the lock, I stopped and turned around to face the shadowy figure. As the shadowy figure approached it’s face became clear. It was me. I awoke without screaming. I didn’t have the nightmare again. I had no idea this nightmare would set the course for the rest of my life.

A few years later, at the age of 10, I started talking with local Hmong families about their forced displacement from the mountains of Laos. I loved listening to their stories, eating meals with them, listening to their traditional music, and getting to understand what they had been through. It didn’t take long for me to foster this passion further. I graduated high school early and set off to experience the world.

Walking the path of whispers: Since the age of 16, I have lived and worked in some of the most impoverished communities in the world, and with some of the most extreme cases of trauma. In late adolescents, I was overcome with hopelessness and struggled with addiction and suicidality. From somewhere unknown I heard a whisper, “You have to choose life or death, but you are not going to live half alive.” So I did. I chose to marry myself and fully live. For the next twenty years I built an incredible life of adventure, community, creativity, family, spirit, travel, sobriety, healing, insight, and service. Then the tides changed…again. My life as I knew it unraveled, dissolved. The person I had become didn’t matter anymore. It was another dark night of the soul. I soon heard another whisper, “Don’t just build another life.” I got very good at moving around and setting up home wherever I was. I can build a beautiful, meaningful, life like most people choose an outfit. This shift was something entirely different. I built a life that I wanted, and now it was not only time to let it go, it was time to learn how to not just pick the pieces back up and carry on. It was time to time to experience something much bigger than myself and my life. I knew at this point that my life was not my own anymore. For six intense years, I unraveled every millimeter of myself and my life. No stone was left unturned. I worked with incredible healers and leaned fully into my community. Recently, I heard another whisper, “It is time to go.” Stay tuned…

Meaning Making: The entirety of my life has been spent running straight towards the horrors of man-made atrocities like genocide, apartheid, abject poverty, addiction, mass incarceration, and childhood sexual abuse. I have lived and worked in small West African villages, state psychiatric hospitals, American urban housing projects, prestigious universities, rural farms, Indian monasteries, and cafes. I have held children and animals as they died, confronted parents who sexually abused their children, listened to the grief of people that need to shoot up heroin in order to dull all the pain, and navigated the political humanitarian world with queer African youth who were terrified to return home over fear they would be murdered for their identities.

Everything I have experienced and navigated in life has been made possible by one thing- Dharma. Dharma means truth. Not subjective truth, but the truth of all of reality. Dharma is not owned by Buddhism, but Buddhism is my lineage, my first family. For the last 25 years, I have been a dedicated student of Tibetan Buddhism under the guidance of a qualified Tibetan lama. For me, being connected to an authentic lineage - one in which knowledge is kept alive and tested generation after generation - is really important. I am not a teacher of Dharma, I am a practitioner. My feet are in the mud. I have completed years of retreat and currently hold a strict annual retreat and daily practice schedule.