Meet Deva Arani

Today we’d like to introduce you to Deva Arani.

Deva Arani is a certified life coach, mindfulness practitioner, KRI certified yoga instructor, and the author of Integration Alchemy. Her intention is to serve people who are committed to living authentically by helping them tune into their own internal wisdom. She believes that integration is the key to making transformational retreat experiences a part of who we are in our everyday lives.

Her life has unfolded as a beautiful healing journey that has allowed her to experience and explore many ways of being and living. She has a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and a Juris Doctorate in Law from the University of Colorado. An award-winning attorney, she practiced law for 20-plus years, first representing the indigent through Legal Aid and then with her own law firm, focusing on estate planning and small business representation. She is a certified mediator.

She has recently retired from the law to devote herself to helping others experience and integrate their own experiences of themselves as they seek healing and self-understanding. She specializes in the integration of transformational experiences and serves as a life coach, meditation mentor and is also a KRI Certified Kundalini Yoga instructor. It is her passion to help people find and implement meditation practices that are right for them and their lives so that they can start or enhance a daily practice of going in.

She feels blessed to be able to explore, experience, practice and share many different modalities of self-awareness and meditation. Over the last decade or more she has attended, staffed, organized and lead transformational retreats all over the world. She is committed to her own healing and self-knowledge. She lives in the mountains above Boulder Colorado with her partner Samir and yellow lab Ben. She loves her long daily walks in the mountains where she lives and is deeply connected to the mountains of Colorado that she calls home.

She recently published her first book. Integration Alchemy, which became a #1 New release on Amazon. She wanted to write a book about retreat integration because she noticed that spiritual retreats were becoming a “thing” that we as westerners “do” or consume. She feels that integrating the spiritual retreats we are so blessed to experience is the key to raising our level of consciousness and becoming the change that we need in this world.

Deva Arani’s book launch is happening at the Boulder Bookstore, September 18 at 7:30 pm and she is following that up with a meditation/integration workshop on Saturday September 21. Reach out to her if interested.

In Chapter Two of Integration Alchemy, she shares her story of how she is integrating her own retreat experiences into her real life. Here is an excerpt:

The first major transformational retreat that I committed to and participated in was the Path of Love. The Path of Love (POL) is a ten-day retreat that creates a space for growth and authenticity in a very challenging and supportive process. It changed my life and the way I see myself and my journey, and it was a true gift.

But before I get into my retreats and how I integrated them, I want to share with you why I became a seeker and started my journey home to myself – why I signed up for that retreat in the first place. My childhood was traumatic and very difficult to navigate. I learned to act, on the outside, as if everything was okay because it was necessary for my survival.

When I turned forty, I realized that I couldn’t continue in the life I was living because that life was a lie. I was living as who I thought I was supposed to be and had no idea who I was beyond that. Through meditating, this had become so clear – I had to choose. More than anything, I wanted me back. My authentic self – the true me.

I spent more than two years living alone, in a tiny house in a new town, meditating, journaling, working with my therapist, learning to take care of myself. When I moved into this house, it was a time that I imagined as being full of light energy, but it was actually a time of deep sadness and grief and feeling completely unhinged and tired – oh, so very tired! I didn’t just turn over a new leaf. I had to dig in and burrow beneath the soil, and at times it felt suffocating and overwhelming. I let go of the persona that was my anchor, and that created a huge gap. I had no idea of how to bridge that gap other than keeping to myself, so I did.

This is something that we fellow human beings all share. We all have childhoods that require us to put on masks to fit in and be loved. Our stories are different, and even if we have the perfect parents, we have to become someone we are not in order to fit in, to survive in our society. We are one person for our parents, another for our siblings, another for our peers. We mold ourselves in order to belong, but we are not taught to know ourselves from the inside. Whatever our story, we tend to define ourselves by our relationships with others and lose the capacity to listen to our deeper inner truth.

When I was ready, I found myself at my first retreat – the Path of Love. I was terrified. The whole first five days, I just wanted to go home. But I was also determined to give 100%, and I did, and it was such a gift. Among the myriad of gifts that I brought home from that retreat was a sense of belonging to my fellow humans, a sense of being accepted for who I am right now, an experience of being held and supported with unconditional love, and a sense of determination to keep my fire burning. When I got home from the retreat, the first few days, I felt this enormous joy, this huge overwhelming excited sense of self-love and love for others and hope. It lasted only a few weeks, and then my abandonment issue naturally came back like a boomerang. My fellow participants in the retreat had gone back to their own lives and I was still stuck in mine.

At that time, I was working in my private law practice, and though I had changed, everyone around me had not. There was no-one who really wanted to hear about the POL, and it felt like I was crashing and burning. What to do? I booked a flight to India. I went to Pune and staffed the POL there, and then signed up for another retreat – this time a ten-day intensive called Primal. Another chance to be real and start to really heal my childhood trauma. I had the same experience of coming out of that retreat and being in my mojo. I intended to stay at the ashram for an indefinite time thereafter. However, after a few weeks I got sick, and I started to feel the burn and sting as the unconscious ways of relating from my past crept back into my interactions with my fellow travelers. My authentic, openhearted retreat self was drowning, and I came home feeling bereft and lost, sick and tired. What to do? The thing is, I knew I could not go back to my old way of being and living in the world, and I didn’t yet have firm roots in the new world I was seeking inside of me.

After these initial retreats, which now seem like many lifetimes ago, I continued to work on my own journey with the help of my friend and teacher who challenged me to be real and present. More retreats followed. I took another extended trip to India and did a three-week Gurdjieff sacred-movement retreat; I went to Costa Rica and staffed the POL. I did Satori retreats; then several more POL retreats, both as a participant and serving as staff. I also spent considerable time in South America working with the lineages and wisdom keepers on sacred traditional retreats in the Amazon and in the mountains of Peru. After every retreat that I have been on, I came home and had to integrate that retreat into my life, into who I am now. I have found that there is a big difference between having the “peak” experience and actually installing it into my life.

What I have come to realize is that it’s not the retreat that actually heals and transforms. In a way, the retreats were like my going to law school or running a marathon. It’s in the installation, in the chopping wood and carrying water of my daily life, that the real transformation and healing occurs. For every beautiful, enlightening, transformative experience I have had in the various retreats I have been so blessed to participate in, there has been a post-retreat process, an integration process where the real work happens and the real transformation takes root and starts to grow. It’s important to note that all of the retreats and post-retreat integrations did not happen in a vacuum. I had a law practice that I had to show up for and be responsible in, and this also became a part of my process.

And my world is different now, and I am grateful.. Every time I was ready, another door opened for me and I said yes, despite fears or trepidation or discomfort. The result is that I am now living my life with a life partner who is also showing up and doing his work in a beautiful way. Our relationship is based on the understanding that we are each on separate journeys and responsible for our own beings. We can support and love each other unconditionally from that space of freedom to be ourselves. I am surrounded by friends and family from all over the world who know the real me and accept that me and love me. I have healed or am healing the wounds from my childhood and have found that I am not only worthy of love, but I am love. The retreats I have been on were doorways into the home of belonging. The belonging came through applying and revisiting and reworking – integrating those experiences into my home, my life.

I still go on several retreats each year. I have served as a board member and lead weekly meditations at the Osho Leela Meditation Center, here in Boulder, for over ten years now. I have been doing kundalini yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan for many years as part of my own journey inward and appreciate so very much this 5000-year old technology of self-knowing. It’s powerful and it works. I recently completed the seven-month KRI-certified kundalini yoga teacher training and am aware that that process in itself was like an intensive retreat, and I am continuing to integrate it into my world.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The struggle to move through the unknown and awkward gaps of change and maintaining the commitment to my inner journey were at times overwhelming. One step forward, two steps back felt like a never-ending pattern as I navigated into my more authentic self.

Tell us about what you do – what should we know?
Deva Arani is an author, integration alchemist, life coach and meditation mentor. Her primary niche is focused on helping people integrate their spiritual experiences so that they can then become a part of the person’s day to day life. One of her main areas of focus is helping people design daily meditation practices that they can actually stick to. It is her passion to help people design meditation techniques and practices for their individual needs and personalities that they can then apply in their daily life, whether it’s an active meditation, a yoga kriya, a sitting meditation, breathwork, etc. As a life coach, her process examines what is going on in your life right now, unpacking and understanding the obstacles or challenges you face, and formulating a course of action to help you make the changes needed to live a more authentic and heart-centered life. Her sessions focus on self-inquiry and empowering you to find the answers within yourself. It is her understanding that you are the expert of you and by learning to tap into your own inner wisdom you will be able to live a more fulfilled life by letting go of what doesn’t serve you and bringing in what actually does serve you with your own inner light.

Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
My commitment to my own journey and authenticity allow me to come from a space of openhearted acceptance and compassion, which allows my clients to trust and open up into honest self-inquiry.