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.