Gurumayi Chidvilasananda


Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, born as Malti Shetty, is the current spiritual head of the Siddha Yoga path. She is formally known as Swami Chidvilasananda or more informally as Gurumayi. The Siddha Yoga lineage was established by Bhagawan Nityananda, whose disciple and successor, Muktananda was Gurumayi's guru.

Life and career

Swami Chidvilasananda is the monastic name of Malti Shetty. She was born near Mangalore, India on 24 June 1955. Malti was the oldest child of a Mumbai couple who were devotees of Muktananda in the 1950s. Her parents took her to the Gurudev Siddha Peeth ashram at Ganeshpuri for the first time when she was five years old. During her childhood, her parents brought her, her sister, and two brothers to the ashram on weekends.
She received spiritual initiation from Muktananda at age fourteen and moved to the ashram as a formal disciple and yoga student. At age twenty, Muktananda made her his official English language translator and she accompanied him on his second and third world tours.
On 3 May 1982, she was initiated as a sannyasin into the Saraswati order of monks, taking vows of poverty, celibacy and obedience, and acquiring the title and monastic name of Swami Chidvilasananda,. At this time Muktananda formally designated her as one of his successors, along with her younger brother Subhash Shetty, whose monastic name was Swami Nityananda.
Muktananda died in October 1982, after which Chidvilasananda and her brother became joint spiritual heads of the Siddha Yoga path. However, Chidvilasananda's brother left the Siddha Yoga path in 1985. According to his 1986 interview in Hinduism Today, Nityananda left by his own choice, deciding to cease to be a Siddha Yoga Sannyasi but wishing his sister well as sole guru.
In the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, Chidvilasananda gave lectures and conducted Siddha Yoga Shaktipat Intensives in India, United States, Europe, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, and Mexico. Through Shaktipat Intensives, participants are said to receive Shaktipat initiation and to deepen their practice of Siddha Yoga meditation. Since 1989, the SYDA Foundation - the organization that "protects, preserves, and facilitates the dissemination of the Siddha Yoga teachings" - has sponsored the Siddha Yoga Shaktipat Intensive given globally each year.
Between 1989 and 2006, Chidvilasananda wrote nine books of spiritual discourses, three books of poetry and three books of spiritual stories for children. These books were published by the SYDA Foundation, a US organisation that holds copyright to all Muktananda and Childvilasananda works. Chidvilasananda also records spiritual songs.

Philanthropic work

In 1992, Chidvilasananda's humanitarian initiative, the PRASAD Project, was incorporated in the United States. The PRASAD project is an NGO in Special Consultative Status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. The PRASAD Project assists "people to achieve lives of self-reliance and dignity by offering programs of health, education and sustainable community development in India, dental care in the United States and eye care in Mexico." In the treatment of cataracts, PRASAD de Mexico has "performed free eye surgery on 26,087 adults and children."

In 1997, Chidvilasananda founded the Muktabodha Indological Research Institute which now has its own publishing imprint, Agama Press. The mission of Muktabodha, based on Chidvilasananda's original intention for the organization in 1997, is "to preserve endangered texts from the religious and philosophical traditions of classical India and make them accessible for study and scholarship worldwide."
Through the SYDA Foundation, Chidvilasananda also supports the Prison Project, originally created by Muktananda in 1979. The Prison Project makes the teachings and practices of the Siddha Yoga path available to incarcerated individuals. There are "six thousand students in over fifteen hundred prisons in North America, Europe, Canada, and Australia."

Publications

Reporters for Salon.com and The New York Post have speculated that Chidvilasananda was the guru featured in Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir Eat, Pray, Love and its film adaptation. Gilbert became a devotee of this guru after seeing a photo of this "radiantly beautiful Indian woman." She later went to the guru's ashram in India as part of a year-long sabbatical. Gilbert has not identified by name the real-life ashram and guru featured in the book.