Golzow, Germany Website
“Longing until you belong…“ - Sister Mary Louisa Coutinha “Amma“ (1933-2017)
Rahmana was born 1961 in southwest Germany into a family from paternal side as war refugees coming from Poland and from her mother’s side with unrevealed hidden Jewish roots. She very much feels connected to the Slavic part of her soul, her ancestors line going way back to a rural life as shepherds in Rumania and the traces of Yiddish-ness in her.
In the young age of 23 she found the home of her soul in India and met her first spiritual teacher the Benedictine monk Father Bede Griffiths (1906-1933). His Saccidananda Ashram and the connected Ananadaashram founded by her most beloved Amma Sister Mary Louisa Coutinha “Amma “ (1933-2017) are her refuge and her spiritual family in the east. She is blessed as an oblate of both places and has founded a charity trust to support the sisters work and a rural school.
To this feeling of having arrived home and belonging added the gift of her sufi path which unfolded when she returned to the west in 1984. Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan had been an ongoing blessing and initiated her as a Mureed, Cheraga and into the Healing Order. For decades the Dances of Universal Peace had been in the centre of her mission with a special focus on integrating this embodied form of spirituality into everyday life and all realms of social and cultural areas.
As a mentor she started the first training programs of DUP in the German speaking countries, and also developed various training formats for the application of the dances in combination with different arts and creative tools, collaborating with schools, kindergartens and institutions for curative education. In 1989 she brought the dances to Poland, Czech Republic and former communist part of Germany the GDR, founded the MIR-Project and has been teaching worldwide since.
She has shaped and led the children’s area of the annual German family dance camp over 20 years and is actively engaged in her local community with cultural activities for kids and young people. She is associated to Ziraat and feels blessed to live on a beautiful piece of land in an UNESCO-protected area close to the polish border northeast of Berlin. Her seminar house Ananda is a retreat place, guest house and part-time home for many people…. a place where she also loves to welcome regularly her most beloved guides and spiritual companions Murshida Mariam Baker, Pir Shabda Kahn and Murshid Saadi Neil Douglas-Klotz.
In loving enthusiastic alliance with her long-term guide and heart friend Murshida Mariam Baker, she hosts the annual “international council of women” at house Ananda, as the ray of feminine wisdom and together they have been traveling the globe with “Soulwork on wings”.
Her greatest gift in life is her beautiful daughter Aisha who also joined the sufi path in the age of 15.
https://www.haus-ananda-brandenburg.de/
