Christina Lopes, DPT, MPH

Christina Lopes was born in Portugal and grew up between the Azores Islands and the Eastern United States. From her earliest memories, she has said publicly, she could see and feel things that no one around her — except her maternal grandmother — could see or feel. The gift was not welcome. Significant childhood trauma turned the open-heartedness into apprehension and fear, and by her teenage years she was carrying severe panic attacks, depression, and what she has described as a wish not to be alive.

She did the rational thing. She buried the spiritual sensitivity, threw herself at the academic side of her brain, and built a career on it. She earned her Doctorate in Physical Therapy from New York University and her Master of Public Health from Johns Hopkins University, and worked for a decade as a neuropediatric physical therapist — first in New York City, then in Washington, D.C. — treating children with neurological conditions. She was good at it. She was also, in her own words, miserable.

In 2013 the marriage she had been holding together collapsed. A spontaneous Kundalini awakening followed almost immediately — what she now calls a difficult spiritual initiation, with all the textbook physical and energetic phenomena that the Eastern traditions catalogue and modern Western medicine has no words for. She left clinical practice. She moved into roughly four years of near-total solitude, dividing her days between meditation, silent retreat, and the outdoors. By 2014 she was teaching publicly. By 2015 she had published her first book, and the YouTube channel that would eventually cross 37 million views had its first subscribers.

Over the Edge: How One Woman Learned to Channel the Universe (2015) is the memoir of those years — partly a personal story, partly a transmission of what she received during the long stretches of silence. It is the book to read first if you want to understand how she got from there to here. Walking with the Masters (2022) is the more advanced work — what she has learned about the ascended teachers, soul guidance, and the architecture of the awakening process from seven additional years of teaching and from more than three thousand private clients.

Her teaching today integrates several streams that most modern spiritual teachers keep apart. She is trained in the science (the DPT and MPH are not stage props — she still cites the literature on nervous-system regulation, polyvagal theory, and trauma physiology when it is relevant). She is also unembarrassed about what the science cannot explain — energy healing, twin-flame partnerships, Kundalini awakening, and the channeling work that began for her after 2013. She holds the two together without forcing either to apologize, and the audience that has gathered around her — heavily women, heavily clinical-or-academically-trained, heavily late-30s-and-up — is largely composed of people who have spent years feeling unable to speak about both halves of their experience in the same room.

The catalog beyond YouTube is built for that audience. AWAKEN is her flagship online course on the stages of spiritual awakening — the bliss stage, the dark night, the void, the integration — and it now has alumni in the tens of thousands. The private retreats in the Azores Islands run small, with a long waitlist. The “Heart Quiz” on her site is the gentle entry point for newcomers; the one-on-one work is the deep end.

She is also publicly out as a gay woman in a Twin Flame partnership with another woman — a piece of her teaching that she addressed head-on in 2019 and has not let the audience flinch on since. She lives between Lisbon, Barcelona, and the Azores. Roughly 98% of her teaching is given away free; the remaining 2% supports a “Pay It Forward” model that subsidizes services for clients who cannot afford them.

What makes Christina worth listening to is the particular rigor she brings to the spiritual side. The space is full of teachers who claim everything and prove nothing. Christina names the stages, describes them in clinical detail, and then tells you exactly how she navigated each one — what worked, what almost destroyed her, and what she now teaches her clients to skip. The result is a body of work that is unusually honest about how hard the path is, and unusually useful when you are halfway down it and looking for a hand.