Nayaswami Padma McGilloway

Nayaswami Padma is a disciple of Paramhansa Yogananda through his direct disciple, Swami Kriyananda, whom she met at the age of nineteen in 1970. Her leadership and teaching skills were honed over her forty-three years as his student and friend, until his passing in 2013. During those years living in the spiritual cooperative communities he had founded, she served him closely in a succession of leadership positions, and learned from him also through thousands of opportunities to enjoy his company in more informal settings.

Padma and her husband Hriman joined the original community in California in the 1970s, where they raised their two children. They led retreats, taught classes, and were ministers and counselors as well as leaders in various aspects of Swami Kriyananda’s work throughout those years.

During the period when Swami Kriyananda published many of his 150 books, Padma was the head of his publishing house, Crystal Clarity, Publishers. For some twenty-six years she represented him at the annual publishing trade show in Frankfurt, Germany, through which his books have been published in over fifty languages.

In 1993 Padma and Hriman accepted Kriyananda’s invitation to become the co-spiritual directors of the community in Seattle that he’d founded. They continue to live and serve there, offering classes and spiritual counseling to help people go deeper in their spiritual lives. And as a Kriyacharya (one who initiates people into Kriya meditation practice), ordained by Swami Kriyananda, she has developed and directed highly successful training programs in this highest technique of spiritual liberation that Yogananda taught, one that he described as the “jet airplane” path to God.