Swami Radhananda was the president of Yasodhara Ashram from 1993 to 2014. Appointed by Swami Radha to be her successor, she carried forward the Saraswati lineage with heart, creativity and practicality.

Born in Princeton, BC in 1941, Swami Radhananda (Mary Ann McDougall) was the eldest in a family of 8 children. She studied education at UBC and took her first job as a teacher in Lillooet. She lived in a communal house in Vancouver in the late 60s and in a geodesic dome in Robert’s Creek while pregnant with her first child. In 1970, she was a scholar’s wife in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, then a young mother of two in Cambridge, England, and finally, she settled with her family in Lethbridge, Alberta.

In Lethbridge in the mid 1970s, she helped start an innovative daycare centre, Children’s House. She joined a women’s consciousness raising group, where she met her friend (now Swami Jyotihananda) who would introduce her to Yasodhara Ashram.

She first came to the Ashram in 1977 and became a lifelong student of Swami Radha. She completed a Masters in Education in the 80s and became an early childhood education consultant for Alberta Ed. She was also the director of the Yasodhara Yoga Centre in Lethbridge from 1986 to 1990.

She moved to the Ashram in the winter of 1990 and was initiated into sanyas in 1994.

Swami Radhananda opened the way for the next generation of yogis and yoginis to embrace the rewards of spiritual life. She updated the Ashram’s teaching style to become interactive and experiential. Under her stewardship Yasodhara Ashram thrived as a harmonious community built on the spirit of generosity and inclusion. Her teachings encouraged practitioners to live their yoga in daily life and to realize their potential through self-inquiry, service and devotion.

She was a living example of the quality and integrity of the yogic teachings. She believed that a meaningful spiritual life was possible for everyone because she experienced it in her own life. She wrote a memoir about her time with Swami Radha, Carried by a Promise: A Life Transformed by Yoga, and a book of inspirational essays, Living the Practice.