Alakananda Ma is an internationally respected teacher and practitioner of Ayurveda. A graduate of St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College, London University, and a NAMA professional member, she has been practicing and teaching Ayurveda since 1988. She is the founder and principal of Alandi Ayurveda Gurukula and senior practitioner at Alandi Ayurveda Clinic. Ma served for many years on board of NAMA, the National Ayurvedic Medical Association, including a term as President. In addition to her skill and experience in Ayurveda, Ma is a beloved spiritual teacher who embodies the love and compassion of the Mother in a humble and unpretentious way.
Alakananda Ma was born in 1951 in Melton Mowbray, U.K. and was raised in both the Jewish and Christian faiths. In 1976, Alakananda graduated as a physician from St Bartholemew's Hospital Medical College, London University. She spent five years in Catholic convents and Abbeys, making her novitiate in Holy Cross Cistercian Abbey, England, before traveling to India to study with Father Bede Griffiths at Shantivanam. There she met Sadananda who introduced her to Raghudas Maharaj, the hidden master who was to be her guru. She also met Dr. Vasant Lad, her Ayurveda teacher, in Poona in 1980. Through her studies with Dr. Lad, Alakananda became one of the first graduates of Western medicine to take up Ayurveda, and became one of Dr. Lad's first students.
Alakananda's subsequent adventures during the five years on pilgrimage in India are described in her book Pilgrimage to the Mother. During this time she stayed at many temples, ashrams and shrines, studying yoga, Hinduism, Sufism, Jainism, Ayurveda, Homatherapy and Hindi. Alakananda studied devotional singing with Sadananda and lived as a wandering renunciant or sadhvi. At one point she ran an experimental therapeutic community for psychotic Western youth at Om Yeshu Niketan in Goa, and served as "Physician to the Hippies”. At the conclusion of pilgrimage, she was told by Pujya Ganguthai, a kanya disciple of Upasani Maharaj, and by Kamalabai, the chief disciple of Raghudas Maharaj, "Go to the United States and there make an ashram for Raghudas Maharaj".
Arriving in the United States with eighty dollars in their pockets and two Indian musical instruments, Alakananda and Sadananda came to Boulder, Colorado, where they founded their first ashram in a tipi. Alakananda practiced homatherapy and learned astrology. Moving to Tucson Arizona in 1986, they re-started Alandi Ashram in a two-room, back alley apartment.
Again moving in 1988 to a remote cabin in the Rocky Mountains, Alakananda made numerous Rocky Mountain wildflower essences, becoming the first physician since Dr. Edward Bach, discoverer of flower remedies, to research and make her own flower essences.
In August of 1990 she and Sadananda restarted Alandi Ashram in its current location in Boulder, Colorado. In 1997 the Ashram grew into a residential community, having nine resident members and an additional three full time student participants. In 1998 they began to develop Alandi Ayurveda Gurukula.
Alakananda is a co-founder, spiritual mother, teacher, Ayurvedic doctor, flower essence maker and storyteller. She is also an accomplished writer with many published articles. Alakananda has written and is self-publishing her autobiographical trilogy Patchwork Mandala. The first two volumes, Pilgrimage to the Mother, and The Rainbow Bridge, are available and well-loved.
