Amma meeting Gia — one week before she passed. 💞

How do you find words for someone who was everything to you?

I've been sitting with that question for almost four years now. And the honest answer is: you don't, really. You just try. You gather the pieces — a laugh, a smell from the kitchen, the weight of her arms around you — and you arrange them as carefully as you can, knowing they'll never quite add up to the whole.

My Amma — Vijayalaxmi Anand — was my second mother. From the day I was born, she cared for me like I was her own. Unconditional love isn't a phrase I use lightly, but with her, it was simply the truth. It was the air in the room wherever she was.

She was the matriarch of our family — mother to four incredible children, grandmother to seven, great-grandmother to ten and counting. She started a family at sixteen and led her entire family to the United States, building a life from nothing, rooted entirely in devotion and love. She never made it look like sacrifice. She made it look like purpose.

That was her. The home was always open. People came from everywhere — not for a class, not for a program — just to be near her. Her capacity for love was unmatchable. She had this gift of making everyone who walked through her door feel like the most important person in the room. And then she fed them. Because for Amma, love was always something you could taste.

She led kirtans in our home, filling every corner with devotional music that felt less like performance and more like breathing. She prayed every single day — not as ritual, but as relationship. Her devotion wasn't something she practiced. It was something she was. And being around it changed you. That's what transmission means — it doesn't get taught, it gets transferred. Through presence. Through being.

She embodied yoga on every level. Not the poses — the life. The way she moved through the world, the way she treated people, the way she held her family together while holding herself together, the way her laugh could shift the energy of an entire room. Yoga is not what you do on a mat. Yoga is how you live. She never said those words. She never had to. She just lived them, every single day.

I think Amma was at peace. I think she needed to hold Gia before she could let go. There was something complete about it — a passing of the torch so quiet and so full that I'm still understanding it. Every time I say my daughter's name, I feel her. Every time Gia laughs, I look for her in it.

The legacy she leaves behind is like a bright light. That's not a metaphor — I mean it literally. There is a light in the people who knew her. You can see it. She put it there. Through her cooking, her kirtans, her prayers, her arms, her laugh that was medicine, her presence that was home.

I am here because of her. This site exists because of her. Everything I am still becoming — as a leader, a mother, a yogi, a cook — traces back to her kitchen, her devotion, her example. She shaped me into the human I am. And I am still, every day, trying to be worthy of that.

Amma — anand. Bliss. She was exactly that, and she gave it away freely to everyone she met.

Rest in peace, dear Amma. I will miss you every day. 💞