Naples resident Ivette Gomez, a licensed mental health counselor, had an early and unique start on her path to personal growth and awakening. Her immediate and extended family members had a wide range of intellectual, metaphysical and spiritual pursuits. From an aunt that was part of a group that founded the Unity Church in Puerto Rico to a mother who was practicing Unity principles in the 1970s, an astrologer, sky watchers that kept up on UFO encounters, elementals and nature spirits, yoga practitioners with a copper pyramid, vegetarians, a scientific spiritualist, followers of Indian philosopher, speaker and writer Krishnamurti, and followers of Edgar Cayce, the “sleeping prophet”. Awakening was inevitable.

“I received my first metaphysical book, The Little Me and The Great Me, at the early age of 4. It explained the duality of humans. I inherited Krishnamurti’s books, which were all about his core teaching which was, ‘Truth is a pathless land. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection.’ The first book of his that I read was Education and the Significance of Life. 

“Scientific spiritualism is based on the work of French philosopher and astrologer Nicolas Camille Flammarion. I also remember my uncle’s conversations about Giordano Bruno, an Italian philosopher, poet, cosmological theorist and esotericist, and things beyond religion and the spirit world. My dad’s father wanted to prove that the energy of the soul could be measured.

“Family members opened me to ways that were different at a young age. I read my uncle’s collection of Edgar Cayce books that he kept for bathroom reading at the age 12. From them I learned a lot about reincarnation, Atlantis and other civilizations. He was also interested in paranormal things such as Kirlian photography and the remote viewing experiments being done in Russia. He created mind reading games that we played at home.

“In high school, I got to study Emerson and Thoreau, transcendentalists whose lives were interesting to me. I wanted to self-explore and investigate spirituality. That's why my first master’s degree was in literature. I thought through literature and poetry we can know ourselves. This led to my interest in psychology. I think of all the psychologists that I studied, Jung is the one most connected to spirituality and collective unconscious, the concepts of shadow and light, and bringing everything to the light.

“My husband, Jose Maria Castillo, and I decided on the path that we wanted to pursue together, daily meditation, yoga and raising our children in the style of the Oak Grove School, in Ojai, California, that Krishnamurti founded in 1975. Today, I have a holistic private practice where I use energy psychology, emotional freedom technique (EFT), yoga and meditation.