About Author

About the author: My passion for yoga turned my attention away from teaching biology in secondary schools. I taught yoga for 30 years and loved the wonderful energies it provided. Later, after some revelations and experiences that I had not expected, I trained as a Natural/Spiritual Healer and took a diploma course in psychotherapy and counselling to help others on their journey to healing and inner peace. Eventually, my love of yoga developed into writing, resulting in this blog and ‘The Great Little Book of Yoga Stories’, where you can find original short stories about the life of Guru Guptananda. 

A bit of my writing history: After teaching yoga for 15 years. Swami Guptananda came into my mind, while I was meditating; I was asking for help with teaching my yoga classes as I was stuck for information on the Chakras.  He ‘arrived’ and told me I should not be teaching people about spiritual matters unless they were following the ‘Rules of Life’.  These are like the Ten Commandments of the Bible.  I was ashamed to admit that I could not remember them all, to my surprise he offered to help me.  I then found myself writing a story about one of these Rules, or Yamas and Niyamas as they are called in yoga.  It was about the Swami when he was a small child and was wanting more than his share of the sweets!  The Rule or Yama illustrated was ‘Non greed’.  I was amazed as I hadn’t written any stories since I was 12 years old!! I read the story to my classes.  Guptananda had provided me with an approach to teaching Yoga Philosophy in a light hearted and gentle way. This helped me to avoid the embarrassment of trying to tell my students, often many years older than me, that they should be doing this or that. The stories continued to flow.

I was asked to write stories for an Education scheme for children, based on the Buddhistic principles of Love, Peace, Truth, Right Action and Non Violence.  The publisher asked me for stories from other parts of the world, not just India.  Not sure if this would be possible, I went into a meditative state and asked for a story – a Chinese child came to me and told me about his life, illustrating acceptance and forgiveness.  You can find it if you search for ‘Deng Zhang’ in my search tool.  I have now written over 100 stories for various purposes, for the scheme, for friends, for counselling clients and in answer to requests on this blog. They are to be found on my blog here, and they come from all over the world.  The stories come into my head in English, although they originate from many different countries!

I published my first Yoga Stories book, Guptananda’s Stories, in 2008 as an online book for teachers, yoga students and young people.  There were 43 stories.  I am now releasing an edited version of it in two parts, in paperback and as an ebook. Book 1 is about the Yoga Rules of Life, or Yamas and Niyamas, published Oct 2019 and Book 2 is about the Eight Limbs of Yoga (Activities which guide one towards ‘Enlightenment’), the Chakras (Energy Centres) and the Gunas (States of Being).   Published in 2022. 

Below is a picture of Guptananda as seen by the psychic artist Patrick Gamble.