Gurani Anjali Joseph1, affectionately known to her students as GuruMa, arrived in the United States in the 1950s for the height of the civil rights movement and the counter-cultural revolution. Having been born in Calcutta in 1935, she grew up in an atmosphere of the resistance movements in India. She was influenced by the independence movement resulting from Gandhi’s Salt Marches and supported the concept of cottage industries. She absorbed the work of revolutionary-turned-philosopher Sri Aurobindo and the stories and teachings of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda.
At the age of eight, she began formal training in classical Yoga under the guidance of a store-front teacher by the name of Krishna. As part of her training, she was assigned to work with a girl her own age who was afflicted with autism. This experience gave her great patience and faith in her ability to find ways to connect with those with tremendous challenges.
Gurani Anjali also studied and performed Bharata Natyam dance as a girl and young woman. Her father, Inti Gurumurthi, arranged for her to see all parts of India, from Kanya Kumari to the Himalayas, and from her home in eastern India to the west.
One day a sadhu (ascetic/sage) came to the door of her home, asking for food. As she presented some rice to him, he predicted that she would travel abroad and become a spiritual teacher, an idea that at the time seemed highly unlikely to her! However, in the 1950s she arrived in the United States for nursing training. While continuing her studies at Brooklyn College, she accepted a marriage proposal from Hyman Joseph, and raised three children on Long Island, New York.
Eventually, the depths of her Yoga training percolated to the center of her consciousness and Gurani Anjali experienced a life transforming state of Samadhi, of the sort described by Swami Vivekananda in his book Raja Yoga: “There is no feeling of I, and yet the mind works, desireless, free from restlessness, objectless, bodiless. Then the Truth shines in its full effulgence, and we know ourselves–for Samadhi lies potential in us all–for what we truly are, free, immortal, omnipotent, loosed from the finite.” This passage was quoted famously in William James’ classic The Varieties of Religious Experience (James: 315).
After this transformation, the young mother, now in her 30s, decided to honor her teacher by teaching Yoga, first in the attic of her 18th century farmhouse and then through Adult Education at Massapequa High School. A group of fervent students found a thousand square foot hayloft that had been used as an artist’s studio on Merrick Road in Amityville on Long Island’s South Shore. They rehabilitated it to form the first dedicated Yoga space on Long Island. In the fall of 1972, Yoga Anand Ashram was born; a non-profit organization registered with the State of New York for philosophical, educational, scientific, and cultural endeavors. Read Gurani Anjali’s Mission Statement. The Ashram continues to offer training in the practices of classical Yoga as found in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra.
As she had witnessed the liberation of India from the shackles of British colonial rule, she also saw the need for the liberation of all human beings from their various forms of bondage, internal and external. Gurani Anjali cited Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech as the mark and product of someone who had attained a very high level of consciousness. Gurani Anjali rooted much of her spiritual vision in connectivity with the earth and with the sufferings of ordinary people.
Gurani Anjali was one of the very first women from India to teach classical Yoga in the United States and articulated a path of Yoga that reflected her own observations on life as a woman and as a mother. To share her insights into the feminine aspects of life, she gathered the women of the Ashram and community to form Women United for the Preservation of Womanhood (UPW), also known as Shakti Sangam the International Conscious Women’s Society (ICWS).
As with earlier traditions, she emphasized both memorization and philosophical dialogue as important parts of her teaching method. Gurani Anjali firmly believed that each individual contained the sacred within and sought to teach in a way that allowed for it to be known and made manifest.
Hundreds of her guided meditations and educational lectures presented at Yoga Anand Ashram, while in the position of Director, have been recorded and are being transcribed for publication (listen to audio excerpts of meditations presented by Gurani Anjali). She also composed scores of inspirational songs and poems. As a profound thinker and composer, she worked with the raw experience of the human condition and fashioned a new mode of expression. Her music is a blend of Indian melodies and rhythms mixed with English lyrics that reflected her philosophical insights, grounded in a universal spiritual language.
1. Gurani is a title for a female guru.↩