Kriya Yoga Acharya - Chandradevi

Acharya Chandradevi in Italy - Profile

I lived many lives and had many jobs in a small part of north Italy, before dedicating to my family’s internet web agency for the last 15 years.

I always sought the meaning of suffering, while in suffering itself and while overcoming it. In 1997 I found myself in a seminar where I practiced my first meditations and glimpsed at something unknown that freed me from an ancient sense of guilt. It was clear I had to look for something and began to explore reality beyond appearances.

I had heard Babaji's name as a teenager, from a local sadhu friend who told me a story of an encounter he had with Babaji in the mountains in North India. The Autobiography of a Yogi was always there on a shelf. I had opened it but never read it.

In 2003 Yoga stopped me on a street, literally, so I started practicing Hatha Yoga and learning about Raja Yoga. In 2008 some seemingly random events brought me to Babaji's Kriya Yoga and the little I knew about yoga made sense, with a new and broader perspective. Something made me feel home.

I found myself studying and teaching Yoga for 10 years, distributing a brand of Rudraksha malas, supporting Acharya Arjuna for over a decade of initiation seminars, translating some books on Kriya Yoga and organizing distribution of Babaji's Kriya Yoga Publications, even changing home, always realising only afterwards how it all was connected to visions in meditation, to the creative power we can tap in.

After the gift of third initiation in India I withdrew from yoga classes to integrate and deepen my study and personal practice, and perhaps to step out of a role. I began to see the way major changes and challenges appear, and how to deal with them, as yogic sadhana in action. The idea of the separation of practice and life began to fade.

One of the many treasures I have found in Kriya Yoga is a degree of detachment. I accept joy and sorrow equally, knowing they come and go. I see the space where things get shaped by themselves, I try to follow the signs, to be available without interfering and to allow a greater Will to drive the play of life.

To this Will I entrust myself and bow to the power of Kriya Yoga to transform the perception and meaning of life experience. What I have seen happening around me and to other practitioners inspires in me a moral duty to serve Guru's social and global mission. Jai Babaji! Om Sharavana Bhava!