About Lakshmi
My work is rooted in a tantric worldview—the Union of Shiva and Shakti, consciousness and embodiment, Spirit and Body, the spiritual and the material. Where they meet in our human design is in the heart.
I offer yoga as a practice of centering in the heart…and seeking balance, equilibrium. Rather than striving for transcendence, my work centers cultivating relationship—between the body, breath, emotion, and the essential Self beneath conditioning and noise. Cultivating intimacy with Self and with the World.
This orientation guides everything I offer: practices and learning spaces that support healing and liberation while staying grounded in reality.
Though I grew up with yoga, it wasn’t until a profound dark night of the soul in early adulthood that I understood its true power. It wouldn’t be hyperbolic to say that yoga saved my life. It helped me disentangle truth from conditioning, reclaim my agency, and knit my disassociated mind, body, and spirit back together. And it set me upon the long and sometimes winding but ultimately beautiful path of healing towards liberation.
Yoga taught me how to listen —to my breath, my body, my emotions, and the essential Self beneath the noise.
That deep listening is still at the heart of everything I offer.
The Ancestors At My Back
I was named after my paternal grandmother, an Ayurvedic physician and gifted healer. Though she passed away before I was born, her presence is something I feel deeply in my work.
Widely recognized as a gifted healer, she ran a healing clinic in Kerala while my grandfather worked to have Ayurveda formally recognized as a legitimate system of medicine in post-independence India, serving as the first President of the Ayurveda College of Trivandrum.
I hold my work as a continuation of both of their legacies:
my grandmother’s grounded, embodied care for people’s wellbeing.
my grandfather’s insistence that traditional medicine be honored as an act of decolonization and cultural
sovereignty
Their lives remind me that healing is both intimate and political—both personal care and collective responsibility.
I pray to my grandmother to guide me in guiding you with deep listening and discernment.
Experience & Path
I’ve been teaching and guiding yoga for over 20 years, with a long-standing focus on trauma-sensitive, nervous-system–aware practice. I’ve spent more than a decade offering yoga teacher trainings and learning spaces for communities who have often felt unseen or unsafe in mainstream wellness culture, through Satya Yoga Cooperative, a BIPOC owned and operated yoga cooperative that I helped to co-found along with my students, developed in direct response to the lack of racial, cultural, and political awareness in mainstream yoga spaces.
My approach is shaped by both lived experience, formal study, and passionate exploration of my curiosities.
20+ years teaching and guiding yoga
14 years specializing in trauma-sensitive and nervous-system–informed practices
12 years offering BIPOC-centered yoga teacher trainings
7 years studying, practicing and contemplating Hellenistic astrology as a symbolic, archetypal language
Graduate studies in South Asian Studies at UC Berkeley, grounding my work in historical, cultural, and political context rather than spiritual abstraction
This constellation of experiences allows me to work across multiple levels—somatic, emotional, archetypal, cultural, and systemic.
What I offer is yoga as a practice of agency, discernment, and relationship—rooted in embodied truth and oriented toward liberation.