My name is Gopes Niraula. I was born and raised in Nepal and Nepali and English are my primary languages. I’m 42, married and have two children. For the past ten years, I have lived in Washington, D.C. By profession, I am an IT systems’ analyst. I began stuttering with my first words as an infant. It has improved over time, but it has continued to haunt me, raising its ugly head at the worst possible times. Being raised as Buddhist, I am a devotee of meditation, and I have meditated a great deal about my speech. When I came upon Lee on line and discovered his book, “Stuttering & Anxiety Self-Cures” in January 2017, I was immediately attracted to it, because half his book deals with mind training and, specifically, auto suggestion and self-hypnosis, which are kissing cousins of meditation. I emailed Lee and asked him to Skype with me, and we have done so a number of times, and I have found his methods and suggestions extremely helpful. In fact, his advice about life, in general, has struck a resonant chord with me.
Since reading Lee’s book and Skyping with him repeatedly, my speech has improved a great deal, and I can fairly say that strangers no longer view me as a stutterer. I am continuing to give myself auto suggestion treatments daily, and I use Lee’s crutches when needed, and the bottom line is that my stuttering has become more of a bad memory than a current problem. So, I pass SAA’s threshold self-cure test; that is, strangers no longer view me as a stutterer. I am still working on becoming the best speaker in my peer group and on being able to say that stuttering was “my life’s greatest blessing”, as Lee proudly does, but I’m getting there, too.
When Lee and some of his other self-cured PWS decided to form Speech Anxiety Anonymous, I was honored to be invited to join them as a co-founder. As I told Lee, since I took control of my speech this year, I have been helping some other PWS on my own. I am particularly interested in helping PWS from my country of birth, Nepal.
I firmly believe in this quote, “You make a living by what you get, but you make a life by what you give.” So, I want to help as many PWS as my time and circumstances will allow. I also want to thank Lee for his generosity. He is one of the few people doing great things to make a difference in people’s lives, and I’m honored to join him in those efforts.
Gopes Niraula, Nepal-D.C.