Due to all sorts of immunity problems and a kidney disease, as a child Erika knew a sterile hospital bed better than her own. Erika Gombosova, now based off the Halsey L stop, likes to think that her sickly growing up in communistic Czechoslovakia was like a shaman initiation. She didn’t particularly enjoy it but it made her who she is today.
Erika, driven by the inner deep desire to help people and their health, became a nurse. Shortly after graduating from nursing school in the early 1990s, she immigrated to the US. “If you told me I’d get into this kind of stuff, I’d think you were kookoo!” Erika says, smiling and gesticulating dramatically. She practices energy work, holistic health and nutrition consulting.
“I relate to everything through the lens of energy,” Erika says. “Everything is energy, and I feel that working with energy gives me the ability to work with what is real, true and at the core of it all. When you work with the core you are not wasting any time.” Erika is giving me a tour of her apartment, where she also practices. It is a pretty standard railroad apartment that she lives in with her husband and two rescue dogs. One is a Jack Russell named Velcro who sounds like he’s growling all the time. “His fake growling made people think he is aggressive and nobody wanted to adopt him at the shelter,” Erica explains. The other is a super cuddly Matilda who was kicked out from a puppy mill after shortly after she had puppies. The dogs follow us to the middle room, where Erika has a massage table, lit candles, Buddha statue, and stereo set to Zen channel. In this seemingly modest but intimate setting, Erika makes her clients’ lives better.
She uses a lot of essential oils in treatments. She says, “I am really impressed with how easily and effortlessly [the oils] help to release the accumulated emotional baggage from the body and ones energy.” But it really isn’t easy to define her and her practice. When you visit her you will receive a massage with essential oils, but to call her a masseuse would be grossly inaccurate. Erika is an empath. You don’t have to do anything, and she will tap into your energy long before you even lay your foot in her apartment. She says, “I get a lot of surprised faces when I start telling people things that come through without them ever opening their mouths. I love that about my work! I find this work fascinating, rewarding, humbling and amazing.”
She attributes the unleashing of her empathy abilities to her studies of holistic medicine and energy. “We were required not only to learn but also to do our own work. For the first time in my life I started to look, explore, connect to how the experiences of my childhood shaped me, how they impacted the person I became. Throughout the program I started to release my old wounds, reclaim parts of myself that were pushed to the corner simply because I didn’t know anything else. As this was happening, my old gifts started to resurface. My intuition got strong, my empathetic abilities came back and I was able to use them in my work.”
In her early 20s Erika was new to New York, and her health problems didn’t cease. In fact, her mother was sending her packages of antibiotics and other prescription pills she needed all the time. Erika was young but she had a medical history of an 80 year old. When she found a lump in her breast, she fell apart. “I knew I had to change something. I had to do something different than keep going to do doctors, consume endless amount of pills and go through all kinds of procedures,” she recounts her breaking point. She wasn’t exactly sure how and what to change and, guided mostly by her inner knowing, she slowly changed her diet, the products she was using, and enrolled in a holistic health school and an Ultrasonic Core Group. Her physical appearance changed dramatically. She lost a lot of weight and the lump in her breast disappeared. Erika told me, “People who knew me started coming to me for advice and guidance…”
Today, Erika is helping all sorts of people – from people with back pain to people who want to lose weight to people who are simply looking for their purpose in life. Erika perceives human body, soul and mind as a single unity; the parts are inherently connected and interdependent “In order to heal and get what we desire, we have to start to incorporate all of them in the healing process and in life.” Erika feels strongly against traditional medicine that creates separation between these, and heals only symptoms. She says, “Any time you compartmentalize and separate what is whole you can only deal with symptoms, because you truly can’t see what is happening. The fragmentation of the medical system is perfectly portrayed in how our hospitals are set up. Internal medicine is on one floor, neurology on another, psychiatry on the next and they don’t talk to each other.”
In a session with Erika, you will do a lot of talking, but it might be what you don’t tell her that Erika will find relevant. With her, you may find out that your back pain is directly related to an old argument with your disapproving father that you haven’t even thought of for years…
Erika believes that our bodies store negative experiences and unprocessed energy. Over time, this accumulated energy may resurface as a disease or another problem. She will help you to (maybe painfully but definitely) process this energy, and when you get up from her table you will feel like a different person. Some people say they feel full of energy, relieved of pain right away; others may take longer to process. “The body gets rid of an old pattern but it may take some time to create the new healthy pattern instead,” she says.
It is an intense experience to go through the hands of Erika but her own life and health can convince the sceptic. Erika seeks to empower people, help them to find their success, health and happiness. According to Erika, the best results happen when she doesn’t force a person to be someone they are not, but rather helps them to reach the next level of themselves by upgrading who they already are. This includes looking at their current life style, at the food they consume, at cosmetics and body care they use, what they clean their house with, what they wash clothes with, nutritional supplements as well as the ways they navigate stress. Erika says, “It is all a unity…”
To get in touch with Erika, email her at naturalwomanblogATgmail.com