Revered Swami Settles In Spokane

A large portrait of Swami Sivananda Radha, a benevolent pixie in white curls and an orange sari, glows from the mantel in the Radha House prayer room.

On an altar beneath, a brass figure of Tara, the Buddhist goddess of compassion, stands, palms open, granting blessings and dispelling fear.

Five women have come to this room on a dark winter night to practice yoga at the Radha House, a turn-of-the-century home in Browne’s Addition.

Swami Radha, one of North America’s leading yoga teachers and authors, now lives in Spokane. Several of her followers live at the Radha House and publish a series of her books, tapes and videos through a company called Timeless Books.

Radha, 84, was listed with Ram Dass, Lilias Folan, B.K.S. Iyengar, and Richard Hittleman as one of the five most prominent leaders in American yoga by Yoga Journal magazine in 1993.

She now escapes life as the center of attention at her British Columbia ashram by quietly teaching and writing in an apartment in Browne’s Addition.

“Within the yoga community she’s well-known and respected,” says John Grimes, a lecturer on Hindu philosophy and author of an upcoming biography on Radha. He lives in the Catskill Mountains of New York.

Radha was born to a wealthy German family in 1911 and survived the horrors of two world wars in her country. Her name was Sylvia Hellman.

After World War II ended, she was a widow, in a dark period of despair, and she saw no purpose for living.

She left Germany, first for England and then for Canada. In Montreal she discovered yoga and connected with Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh, India.

The swami invited her to stay with him at his ashram, or spiritual center, in India. There she underwent initiation to become a swami, changed her name to Swami Sivananda Radha, and discovered that in yoga her life suddenly had a purpose.

“What no psychiatrist could do in Germany, or in England or in Canada, yoga could do,” Swami Radha says.

She returned to Canada seven months later and founded Yasodhara Ashram on Kootenay Lake in British Columbia. She began to combine yoga, western psychology and a devotion to the “divine feminine” of all religions. Soon followers began to come to the ashram to study with her.

Eventually, her Radha Houses for yoga spread throughout Canada, to Mexico and even Spokane.

“She has really built this from scratch,” says Dr. Stanley Krippner, a psychology professor at Saybrook Institute in San Francisco, who has known Radha for 20 years. “It was really quite an accomplishment.”

Now she lives in Spokane, where doctors treat her arthritis, and where she has come to spread a message: “Overcome your fear and become a helping angel. Avoid greed and selfishness. You must give back to life.”

Tonight, one of Radha’s followers, a woman named Yasoda, leads the yoga class in chanting “om.”

Yasoda moves the bellows of a harmonium, a small reed organ which emits an eerie vibrating tone. “AAAH-OOOO-OOMMMM,” the women chant, breathing alternately and filling the room with humming energy.

Yasoda admonishes the class, “Allow yourself to focus within, to listen to the wisdom of your body.”

She leads the class through various simple postures, a stretch at the wall, followed by a downward-facing dog pose. “Stretching in the body can be symbolic of our desire to stretch the mind,” she says.

Three of the women in this class are called renunciates, which means they have given up sex, relationships and material wealth in order to follow their spiritual path and discover their own internal wisdom.

They have the same calm eyes and makeup-free faces as cloistered nuns. They have no religious doctrine in which they must believe, but they do make a commitment to place “the divine” at the center of their lives.

People are not allowed to undergo the initiations without serious deliberation, says Swami Hridayananda, president of the Association for the Development of Human Potential, which owns Radha House and Timeless Books.

“You never give up who you are. You find out who you are,” she says.

Hridayananda is a former research chemist for Shell Canada. Her name was Linda Anne Seville.

She calls Swami Radha her guru, a spiritual teacher.

“You have many teachers in your life,” she says. “But generally your guru awakens something that was just a flicker before. Somehow he or she brings the flame.”

At the Radha House on this tranquil evening, the women sit on the rose-colored carpet and draw their feet together in front of them. As they extend into a posture, Yasoda tells them to imagine the areas of life where they can stretch open.

On a tape player, Swami Radha’s voice chants a Sanskrit mantra.

The women work their way through several gentle poses. They stand straight and tall in mountain pose and meditate on the word “mountain.” They ponder the question “What is my aspiration?” They sit cross-legged to write their answers in their journals, then share passages aloud.

This class features Swami Radha’s Hidden Language form of hatha yoga. It combines yoga, meditation and journaling.

Swami Radha has written a book called “Hatha Yoga: The Hidden Language.” Other books include the story of her 1955 journey to India called “Radha: Diary of a Woman’s Search,” “Realities of the Dreaming Mind,” and “Kundalini Yoga for the West.”

Says Georg Feuerstein, a California writer and yoga researcher, “She has done some extraordinary work.”

Tonight’s class closes with the women turning toward Swami Radha’s portrait, placing their palms together and bowing slightly. “Namaste,” they say. The translation: “The divine in me honors the divine in you.”

Finally, the women wrap up in blankets against the drafts of the old house, and lie on the floor in a relaxation pose.

Yasoda lowers the lights. The room becomes so still and quiet that the only sounds are stomach gurgles and the clicks of the steam radiator.

Soon the women depart, into their rooms in the house or out into the night. The room empties. Swami Radha’s portrait continues to beam.