Indra Devi was a student of Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, the legendary guru who gained worldwide attention for stopping his heartbeat for two minutes. At a time when yoga was almost an exclusively masculine pursuit, she was his first female student.
Like two of his other students, B.K.S. Iyengar and K. Pattabhi Jois, both men, she took his essential teachings and built a style of yoga accessible to Westerners. It was characterized by gentleness. At the time of her death in Buenos Aires, Argentina she was 102, she was studying and writing about Sai Yoga. In 1966, she became captivated by the teachings of the guru Satya Sai Baba.
She dedicated her life to bringing yoga to all people. At age 100, she was still practicing Ardha Sirsasana, Janu Sirsasana, Ardha Matsyendrasana, and Padmasana.
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Indra began her world travels at a young age. She attended drama school in Moscow as a girl. She lived through the bloody Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which brought the communists into power. She and her mother escaped to Berlin in 1920.
A trained actress and dancer, she became part of a theatrical troupe and toured all over Europe. In Berlin, she became an actress and dancer. Her fascination with India began at 15, when she read a book by the poet Rabindranath Tagore, then some books on yoga.
In 1927, she sailed for India. Under the stage name Indra Devi, she became a rising star in Indian films. In 1930, she married Jan Strakaty, commercial attaché to the Czechoslovak Consulate in Bombay. Through him, she met the Maharaja and Maharini of Mysore, who maintained a yoga school in their palace where Sri Krishnamacharya taught.
She asked the master for a lesson. He refused, on the grounds that she was a Westerner and a woman. But she persuaded the royal couple to prevail upon the guru, and he reluctantly consented, said Fernando Pages Ruiz, a freelance writer who interviewed her.
Rather than the cursory lessons he had at first intended, Sri Krishnamacharya taught her for a year. When he learned that her husband was to be transferred to China, he trained her to be a yoga teacher.
In 1927, attracted by India's culture and spirituality, specifically the teachings of J. Krishnamurthi, she decided to relocate on the subcontinent. Under the stage name Indra Devi, she became a rising star in Indian films, marrying the Czechoslovakian diplomat, Jan Strakaty, who was posted to India.
Due to a cardiac illness, she started practicing yoga under the tutelage of Sri Krishnamacharya at the palace of the Maharaja of Mysore in South India. Some of the great exponents of yoga today were fellow students, including B. K. S. Iyengar and K. Pattabi Jois. After experiencing a complete recovery, she was urged by her guru to teach yoga the first Western lady to do so in India.
She befriended many, including Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore and Jawaharlal Nehru.
In Shanghai, she taught what was thought to be the first yoga class in modern China, Mr. Ruiz said. Her husband, she said in a 1996 interview in Yoga Journal, was "dead set against" her yoga courses. It was also the time of the Japanese occupation.
For a time she held five classes of 25 students a day in the bedroom of Madame Chiang Kaishek, wife of the nationalist leader and a new yoga enthusiast.
After the war, she returned to India and wrote her first book, believed to be the first book on yoga written by a Westerner to be published in India. She also became known as the first Westerner to teach yoga there. Her husband, meanwhile, had been ordered back to Czechoslovakia, where he died in 1946.
She returned to Shanghai to recover their belongings and was unsure whether to go to India or the United States. She bought tickets for both destinations and resolved to take whichever ship sailed first. America won.
She found her way to Hollywood, arriving in January 1947. She discovered ready students among movie stars, who found yoga's breathing and relaxation techniques useful to their work. Indra Devi realized it wouldn't be easy to promote yoga in America. Fortuitously, she received the support of Elizabeth Arden, the well-known cosmetology expert who by then already had her famous and fabulously successful line of beauty products and spas. Elizabeth, one of America's wealthiest women, familiar with the virtues of yoga, soon became a follower and advocate of Indra Devi's yoga methods, incorporating them in her upscale health spa programs. This helped Americans learn about Indra Devi's work and open themselves to the ancient Hindu science. Shortly thereafter, noted and troubled actress Jennifer Jones arrived at Mataji's studio in Los Angeles.
Recommended by her psychotherapist, she was in search of tranquility and peace. Indra Devi, also once an actress, felt an immediate empathy and through asanas and meditation was able to help her young disciple attain better equilibrium. That success quickly elevated Indra to the teacher of great stars of the day, such as Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson (one of her best friends), Ramón Novarro, Linda Christian and Robert Ryan.
In 1953, she married Dr. Siegrid Knauer, who preferred preventive medicine to antibiotics. After becoming an American citizen, she legally changed her name to Indra Devi.
Dr. Knauer bought her a 24-room estate in Tecate, Mexico, at which to give training courses for yoga teachers. He died in 1977.
She went to the Soviet Union in 1960 and became known as "the woman who brought Yoga to the Kremlin." India's ambassador to Moscow arranged for her to meet the top Soviet leaders, including Aleksei Kosygin, the premier, Andrei Gromyko, the foreign minister, and Anastas Mikoyan, chairman of the Supreme Soviet. After she spoke to them of the benefits of yoga, it was legalized in Russia. As with most yoga teachers, she did not directly promote Hinduism. She once said, "I do not belong to any religion. Everything is between God and myself." In 1966 she became a devotee of Satya Sai Baba and began calling her teachings "Sai Yoga."
She conducted a meditation in Viet Nam in 1966 and traveled frequently to India. Also in 1966, she became captivated by the teachings of the guru Satya Sai Baba. This resulted in a new form of yoga that she called Sai Yoga.
She traveled tirelessly around the world giving multiple conferences, aided by her fluency in five languages English, Spanish, Russian, French and German.
In 1982, she visited Argentina, where her popularity snowballed after a single television appearance.
Argentina would be the next chapter in her life. When Doctor Knauer, her second husband, passed away in 1984, Mataji was living in Sri Lanka. Despite being eighty years old, she felt she should continue her same intense teaching. Argentina became her choice, for when she first visited in 1982, in her own words, she "fell in love with the country and its people." According to a New York Times report, "Her popularity snowballed after a single television appearance." She settled in Buenos Aires.
As soon as she arrived in her new homeland, she was showered with invitations to conduct conferences throughout the country. She hardly grasped the phenomenon that was generated around her. Lecture halls had no room for all the people wanting to hear her words. She soon established a studio that was crowded with visitors, not only to attend classes, but also to see her, seeking comfort, looking for happiness, tenderness and hope.
In 1987, Francesca Baldi, who helped Mataji during her first days in Buenos Aires, could no longer continue as her aide. Indra Devi, who did not enjoy taking care of the organizational phase of her work, found a competent assistant in David Lifar, the husband of a dear disciple, Iana Lifar. With him by her side, she established the Fundacion Indra Devi (www.fundacion-indra-devi.org/), dedicated to promoting her teachings in the art of living healthy and in full. During the 15 years she lived in Buenos Aires, she continued to travel around the world spreading the wise principles of love, enlightenment and peace.
The Indra Devi Foundation is a non-profit organization devoted to the study, diffusion and teaching of Classic Yoga. The Indra Devi Foundation was created on March 1988, and today, with a ten years' existence, it is an Institute devoted to the Teaching of Yoga. Under Mataji Indra Devi's spiritual guide, it follows the principles of Patanjali's Yoga, adapted to bring a practical and illuminating message to our unserene and nervous Western part of the world.
She formed a foundation to spread her yoga methods. At the time of her death, it operated six studios. Her legacy, which transcended all kinds of frontiers, will always be present through the Indra Devi Foundation. In six major centers they run yoga courses for adults, children, youth, pregnant women, elderly, executives. They teach anti-stress techniques and they certify teachers.
The Foundation helps the community by offering free classes, visiting prisons, and donating clothing and food to disadvantaged families. Thus the legacy of Indra Devi continues into the third century after her birth.
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Gems from Mataji's gentle yogic teachings:
"We women must listen to our inner voice. It is easier for women to do this as they are not afraid to say what they feel. We must keep both our femininity and our strength. Men have to descend from their pedestal and learn how to be more broadminded and spiritual.
"A human being's full freedom is to find himself (i.e., be loyal to himself), with independence of judgment, thinking and being flexible and malleable in order to reach harmonization and mental peace. Freedom is living without chains. Yoga is a way to freedom. By its constant practice, we can free ourselves from fear, anguish and loneliness.
"Yoga is an art and science of living. Yoga means union, in all its significances and dimensions. Through a certain amount of physical and mental disciplines we can learn how to stay healthy, alert, receptive and to improve our perception of the external world in order to feel internally harmonized, with a better life condition and spiritual balance.
"Movements in yoga are harmonious, slow, soft, plastic, relaxed, always conscious, and require a permanent and active mental participation. The whole work rests on the dialectic tension-relaxation. It's important to stimulate, turn elastic, tonify, to make oneself conscious of limbs, superficial and deep muscles, joints, and spine, achieving a gradual and progressive limb decontraction, loosening and relaxation.
"Nonviolence (Ahimsa) is one of the keys of yoga, and we should begin it by ourselves. Learning to recognize and respect our own peculiar rhythm and working on that base is essential.
"Try this visualization: Look at the sky and at the stars. Choose one, the one you like the most. You want that star to guide you, it's so pretty! Looking at that star, you would like it to get down. Then you think on really getting this star down as much as possible, going more and more down and down, until you feel it on your chest, disappearing in your heart, and your entire being fills with joy because this is the day in which a star got into your heart and stayed to live there. Now you realize you need to change many things in your daily life for it to stay there; otherwise, it will slowly go away, leaving a huge empty space. Suddenly you feel so happy, knowing you've got a light in your heart which can get bigger and bigger, shining through our eyes, deeds, words and thoughts. We realize we'll never be alone anymore. We've got our own daylight to get bad thoughts away, and we talk with that light—our star in our heart. We take away what's unimportant. If it's the divine will, we ask it to guide us to what we have divine and eternal in this life and in the next one. And let the light in the heart carry us."
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Indra Devi's published writings:
Forever Young, Forever Healthy
Yoga for Americans
Yoga for You
Renew Your Life Through Yoga
Pilgrims of the stars
Sai Baba and Sai Yoga
Yoga for Americans: A Complete Six Weeks' Course for Home Practice
Yoga for you : a complete 6 weeks' course for home practice
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