Devika Gurung was one of my first yoga teachers. I met her while traveling to India to study Yoga. But Devika had just returned from India and opened a Yoga Centre in Pokhara, Nepal. I decided to spend 6 weeks with her helping her with her Yoga Centre and learning English and in exchange I lived with her like she lived in the Ashram in India. We practiced Jala Neti in the morning, meditation, asana twice a day, karma yoga, yoga nidra, and pranayama. It was an incredible experience and helped me on my path towards a daily yoga practice. She is an incredible inspiration to women and yoga teachers everywhere. I was particularly inspired by her dedication to helping Nepalis study yoga.
Below is an article published by the Guernsey Times in Australia and highlights her work with the Nepali Women’s Yoga Project. The Nepali Women’s Yoga Project is dedicated to addressing the socio-economic problems and discriminations facing many of the women in Pokhara, Nepal. The Project targets destitute women who have often been abused by their husbands, family or others, or have been thrown out of their homes, harassed by employers, raped, sold into prostitution and victimised by society.
DEVIKA GURUNG is a woman on a mission.
This independent Nepalese lady not only runs her own yoga centre, but is hoping to improve the lives of thousands of people. She wants to empower her nation’s women to stand on their own two feet and, through founding the Nepali Women’s Yoga Project, she is doing just that.
Devika, 31, was born in Jomson, a rural village in the mountainous Annapurna region. One of six children, she was forced to leave school at 15.‘I started working on a construction site at the airport, carrying stones in a basket,’ she told me.She stuck it out for two months and earned 160 rupees a day, just over £1.
‘I would see students in their dresses going to school and it made me realise I could do more,’ she said.
Devika did manual work in an orchard, made carpets and worked as a housekeeper, during which she learnt English, before joining her brother, a monk, at the Buddhist Meditation Centre in Pokhara, Nepal, where she worked as a receptionist.She was 18 and it was there that she met two Australian yoga teachers who took her under their wing –this chance meeting was to change her life.
‘I didn’t know what yoga was or what its benefits were at the beginning,’ said Devika.For the following three months, she was taught hatha yoga twice a day, every day.
Although she said it was hard work, she was hooked and spent the following four months studying the form at The Natural Health and Yoga Centre in Kathmandu. Although hatha originated in Nepal, it became more widely recognised as coming from India, because that country produced a series of high profile teachers.
By the end of the year, and with the financial help of a friend and her Dutch godparents, Devika had established her own base, The Nepali Yoga Centre, at Lakeside Pokhara.
The centre is a member of the Yoga, Nature Cure and Alternative Medical Council in Nepal and has since featured in the Lonely Planet guide to the country.
‘It was very difficult when I started running the yoga centre. Sometimes I didn’t have enough money to pay the rent or even buy food. It was quite challenging, but I was determined to make a success of it.
I didn’t see any alternative. I had to be strong because nobody else was going to help me,’ she said. There were moments of self-doubt but they were fleeting and the centre was about to receive an international boost. An Australian tourist travelling through the area wrote about Devika’s centre for Lonely Planet.
‘Slowly, over the following three years, things have got better and now, at last, we are able to pay the rent,’ said Devika.
In 1997, she returned to the centre in Kathmandu and obtained diplomas in hatha yoga therapy, Ayurvedic massage and health food management. She had been supporting her family but when her own health took a turn for the worse in 1999, everything changed.
To read the rest of the article, please visit This is Guernsey.com
