Sivananda Radha Saraswati

Sivananda Radha (born as Sylvia Demitz,[1] and during her marriage known as Ursula Sylvia Hellman) was born in Germany on March 20, 1911.[2] She became a creative writer, photographer and a solo concert dancer early in life. She lived through both wars in Berlin but learned from her experiences that life can be cruel and came to question the existence of God.[3]

Her first marriage ended when her husband, Wolfgang, was executed at Buchenwald for helping Jewish friends leave Germany. She married again in 1947. Albert Hellman was a composer and violinist, but he died after one year of marriage. She also lost both parents in the war. "Thoroughly sick at heart with the brutality and stupidity of the world", she survived and, in 1951, emigrated to Canada settling in Montreal, finding work in the advertising department of a chemical firm, and becoming a Canadian citizen.[4]

A search for the meaning of life through yoga and meditation took her to India to Sivananda Saraswati of Rishikesh.[4]

Sivananda challenged her to think deeply about the purpose of life. ‘He used every moment to teach you something’. His commitment to selfless service made a deep impression on her and Karma Yoga became a key practice in her own life and subsequently in the running of her Ashram. She was initiated into sanyas and given the name Sivananda Radha Saraswati on 2 February 1956. In her publications she described extraordinary events that followed her initiation: she writes that she met the legendary yogi Babaji, the deathless avatar described by Paramahansa Yogananda in Autobiography of a Yogi, the first time in a visionary experience in Montreal.[5]

Upon return to Canada, interpreting her initiation into sanyas as a commitment to abstain "from all actions which arise from ambition and selfish desire … giving up mental and emotional attachment to life in this world" she began a new life in Montreal with no money or employment, learning to live on the charity of others. However, she quickly attracted attention in her orange sari, with her unconventional life-style, and through her willingness to speak publicly about her experiences in India. Within a few months, she was offering yoga classes, had been interviewed on CBC radio, travelled to Ottawa to speak, and been sponsored by the Canadian-India Association to fly to Vancouver to lecture on Indian philosophy.[6]

Within a year, in 1957, in Burnaby, British Columbia, she founded Sivananda Ashram, in an old ten-roomed house, where she offered classes, meditation and satsangs. She also opened the Yoga Vedanta Bookstore on Robson Street in downtown Vancouver. In 1963, the Ashram moved to its present location and was renamed Yasodhara Ashram. Sivananda Radha also gave sanyas initiations to the young men who accompanied her and worked with her to establish the Ashram, beginning a new, Western based lineage, honouring the traditions of the Saraswati Order.[7]

For many years she focussed on establishing the Ashram, making forest cabins habitable, constructing new buildings, corresponding with students, establishing yoga teaching programs and publishing a newsletter to raise funds and draw people to the Ashram. ‘In the early years of the Ashram … traveling … was necessary to give workshops and lectures to “put the ashram on the map” as she called it.’ She visited England, the Netherlands and Germany, and frequently toured throughout North America. She lectured in many North American universities and, in 1976, co-led a conference with Herbert Guenther at Yasodhara Ashram on the role of gurus in the West. At a time when understanding of the relationships between Yoga, science and psychology were in their infancy, Radha took an active interest. In Minneapolis, she participated in biofeedback experiments with Dr. Jose Feola, exploring the nature of the effects of spiritual practices, and she contributed to Scientific Conferences, such as the Council Grove Conference in Kansas. Discovering the need for students to deal with their psychological and emotional obstacles before embarking on intense spiritual practice, she also embraced transpersonal psychology, becoming a faculty member and graduate teacher at California Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, and developing a course on ‘Psychology towards Higher Consciousness’ that she taught at Antioch College, Seattle.[8]

In the 1980s and early 1990s her organizational legacy took shape. Sivananda Radha opened yoga centres [9] in North America, Mexico and England where classes and satsangs were offered by teachers trained at Yasodhara Ashram. A Temple, dedicated to the Light in All Religions, was opened at her Ashram in 1992. She died peacefully at her teaching centre in Spokane, in Washington State, in the early morning, 30 November 1995.[10]