Anita Rangaswami - Founder & Instructor

I have been practicing Bhakti Yoga for over 30 years, and my own spiritual journey began several years ago, in the quest for inner peace and harmony. A profound spiritual awakening which happened in early 2007 led to a wonderful quieting of continuous thoughts, allowing me to look beyond changing the external environment and relationships to look deeper inwards and bring mind, body, spirit in balance.

During my meditations and reflections, I was inspired to share this knowledge and experience with others which resulted in starting Prana Gyana®, a company focused on holistic mind, body, and spirit integration techniques. I have also developed the Nava Shakti® program for Holistic Health which includes Weight and Stress Management.

I have a strong passion for learning and generating new realities from concepts and ideas. With an Engineering and Business degree from ASU, about 20 years in the corporate world as an engineer, manager, and technical skills trainer, I bring an eclectic mix of knowledge and experience to my yoga and meditation classes.

I learned yoga and pranayama for the first time when I was hardly 6 years old from my father, a disciple of Maharishi Swami Gitananda of Ananda Ashram in Pondicherry, India.  I was the “little” one who could deeply relax in Shavasana, while the adults were fidgeting around “trying” to relax. While my father managed to continue his yoga and meditation practice for several years through his long military career, my practice had its starts and stops during college, work and raising a family.  My maternal uncle has also been my mentor and guru since my college days. During Christmas ’04 and a surprise visit to Phoenix AZ, he gave me the gift of a lifetime – “Practicing the Power of Now” by Eckhardt Tolle.  It sat unread, on the coffee table, for all of 10 months! I kept thinking I would get to it someday ……when the kids get older, when I have some free time, when I can squeeze it into my busy schedule.  It didn’t happen for a while, but once I read the book and began to earnestly practice the techniques, there was no going back!

By incorporating yoga and meditation into my daily routine, I learned to become more mindful or conscious of what motivates our major life decisions as well as how we perceive and react to life situations and people around us. Being an engineer, there was a tendency to analyze the experiences through the thinking mind, but then I realized that not everything can be explained rationally through the five senses and the thinking mind. I recognized that fear had been a big player in my life, and continued to influence much of my decision-making. This insight and the practice of being mindful of when fear was present, allowed the ability to make decisions from a different place, from my heart. It is not that the feelings of fear disappeared with this insight, but rather I was able to recognize and work with the fear and not be run by it.

Being a focused achiever in the corporate world, and balancing a corporate life along with raising three wonderful boys had inadvertently built stress, which manifested as  chronic lumbar and neck pain, with little relief from traditional methods. I have been doing advanced/high impact aerobics and other fitness training for the last 15 years, but the pain remained. In the last few years, getting back to my disciplined exercise regimen along with a regular yoga and meditation practice has relieved all the physical symptoms of pain and totally re-energized my mind, body and spirit – where I really feel like a 25 year old!

By incorporating yoga and meditation into my routine, I have learned to become more mindful or conscious of what motivates major life decisions as well as how we perceive and react to life situations and people around us. I have lost more than 25 lbs using the 9 components of the Nava Shakti® program.

Mentoring and teaching has always been a calling for me, and my role as a teacher has manifest in several forms right from my early years: as an English student teacher during my Jr High and High school years teaching English to under privileged children and adults in India, as a youth group coordinator teaching organization/time management skills, as a mentor and teacher of sciences and life skills for my own children, and as a technical skills trainer in the corporate world.

I am a Chopra Center Certified Instructor in Primordial Sound Meditation, which is an ancient technique that allows us to take our awareness from the active level of the mind to quieter levels of the thinking process. We enrich our lives by bringing some of that silence and awareness into our daily routine and activities. I am also a certified Ayurvedic consultant through the Chopra Center and am a 6th generation Reiki Master from the lineage of Reiki Grand Master Mikao Usui. I have been teaching in the Chandler/Tempe area after completing a Yoga Teacher Certification from Inner Vision in the USA, and am a member with the Yoga Alliance. In addition, I practice ancient Chakra Balancing techniques to remove physical and emotional pain from the subtle bodies, and restore wellness in the mind/body system. I am a member of the International Yoga Therapists Association and the International Yoga Association. My experiences have helped me truly internalize “being the change you want to see in the world” and my key mantra is to “let go” of unnecessary rubbish that we tend to collect in our mind, body, spirit on a daily basis to “feed” our egos. I encourage students to get centered through yoga postures, breathing and meditation, or simply by learning to quiet the mind a bit, focus inward, and let it go.