Gabby Bernstein

Gabrielle Bernstein was born November 18, 1979 in New York City. Her early career was in public relations and nightlife promotion in Manhattan, where she developed a lifestyle of substance dependency that she has written and spoken about in detail across her books. She got sober on October 2, 2005 — a date she marks publicly every year — and credits the sustained recovery period with every subsequent development in her life.

In 2011 she published her first book, Add More ~ing to Your Life, while building a meditation teaching practice in New York. She was featured in Oprah’s SuperSoul 100 list of thought leaders and became one of the most visible younger-generation voices in the Oprah-adjacent spiritual-teacher cohort alongside Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, and Eckhart Tolle.

Her 2016 book The Universe Has Your Back became her commercial breakthrough — a #1 NYT bestseller that established her platform. She followed with Super Attractor (2019), You Are the Guru (2022), Happy Days (2022), and Self Help (2024). Her Spirit Junkie Masterclass online training platform has trained hundreds of thousands of meditation guides, life coaches, and spiritual practitioners, making her one of the most influential builders of the modern spiritual-teacher ecosystem.

In 2020 Bernstein completed her certification in Internal Family Systems (IFS) — a trauma-informed therapeutic modality developed by Richard Schwartz — and has since integrated IFS work throughout her teaching. Her 2022 book Happy Days was written specifically around this integration, making it one of the first major bestselling spiritual-teacher books to explicitly blend therapeutic trauma work with spiritual practice.

She hosts the Dear Gabby podcast, which regularly ranks in the top spirituality and self-improvement podcast charts globally. She is married to Zach Rocklin and has one son, Oliver. She lives in Connecticut and New York.

Her central teaching, compressed: the universe has your back — but you have to do the inner work to be able to receive what it is already offering. Forgiveness (in the A Course in Miracles sense), daily meditation, honest examination of your own parts, and the specific practice of letting the spiritual unconscious become conscious — these are not optional extras. They are the prerequisites to any life of sustained peace. You are not the broken parts of yourself. You are what notices them with love.