Asha Nayaswami

Asha Nayaswami is a teacher in the Kriya Yoga lineage of Paramhansa Yogananda. As a twenty-two-year-old student at Stanford in 1969 she went to a talk by Swami Kriyananda, who had been a close disciple of Yogananda himself, and stayed close to him for the next forty-five years as student, assistant and in time a teacher herself. She was among the first residents of Ananda Village, the community he founded in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California, and since 1987 she has been a spiritual director of Ananda Palo Alto, helping to build its temple, schools, bookshop and meditation groups. In 2009 she took vows in Ananda's renunciate order, which is why she wears blue; her earlier books carry the name Asha Praver.

Her teaching is warm, frank and non-sectarian. She draws on the Bhagavad Gita and the Gospels side by side and applies them to ordinary problems of work, family and relationships. Most of her talks are free on YouTube, including long series on the Gita, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras and the chakras, and she leads Sunday services in Palo Alto that are streamed online. She has taught in more than two dozen countries. Her books include Lightbearer, a biography of Kriyananda drawn from decades of notes, and Ask Asha, a collection of answers to readers' questions.