Rudrani Devi
Healer's faith grows as she heals herself
by Janell Ross
The Tennessean.com
They were in India, the place where thousands of people go each year to search for enhanced yoga and meditation skills and, ultimately, inner peace.
So it took Nashville's Rudrani Devi and her dinner companions a moment to realize the sounds they heard were gunfire.
She remembers telling the people at her table to get under it. She remembers placing her hand on a frantic friend's head, making eye contact and silently willing him to be still. And she remembers feeling him go limp when he was shot in the head, his blood sprayed across her hair and face.
Terrorists' bullets pierced Devi's arm and leg and grazed her neck, leaving her critically injured on the floor, unable to escape. A hotel worker dragged her to safety.
That moment and the six months of healing that followed could have shaken Devi's core beliefs about the power of peace and intuition or left her riddled with fear.
Instead, she says, it's become a transformative time that reinvigorated her commitment to a more balanced, spiritually aware and — some might say — unusual way of life.
"I was born for that moment. Everything in my life up until that moment prepared me to be there," Devi said. "And I see now that I was prepared, really well prepared, to heal when it ended."
Devi, 45, was born Andreina Varagona. She is the fifth of her Italian immigrant parents' six children — the first born and raised in Oak Ridge, the birthplace of the atomic bomb.
Long before she became Rudrani Devi — a name, given to her by a meditational guru, meaning "one who takes the pain away from others" and "goddess"in Sanskrit — something about her was different. A relative told Devi's mother that she would have a prophetic child.
Before she was 10, Virgin Mary statues appeared to animate when she looked at them. And while she does not consider herself psychic, she comes from three generations of female mediums.
"I think I have eyes that see things that other people don't," Devi said.
Restoring balance
She worked as a music video and entertainment producer before building a small holistic health empire.
Until February, Devi and a partner had a clinic in the eco-chic and high-rent section of 12th Avenue South. There, Devi sold a line of balance-restoring oils, candles and other materials, and helped a star-studded Nashville clientele with meditation and other spiritually oriented health practices.
Before the shooting, she spent a minimum of three hours a day in meditation, having studied the art for more than 20 years.
She explains her vibrational healing this way: A good masseuse can identify areas of tension that the client didn't necessarily know were there before getting on the table.
Like a masseuse, Devi senses areas — be they physical, emotional, mental or spiritual — that are out of balance. She works through something a lot like prayer to correct the imbalance.
"The issues are in the tissues," Devi said.
She counts among her clients Tamara George, a former member of the group SWV, and former Titans tailback Eddie George. Eddie George was already a student of Devi's meditational teaching and chakra-balancing essential oils when he introduced Devi to his wife.
Tamara George said she brought her niece to see Devi about a year ago, when the 17-year-old's hair was falling out in clumps and her self-esteem was in the subbasement, George said. The medication doctors prescribed — including hormone shots to the scalp — wasn't working.
By that evening, stubble had begun to sprout in the bald spots, George said. Today, her niece has a full head of hair.
"What happened was certainly enough to convince me that whatever Rudrani is doing, it's not only something real, it's something right," she said.
Studies indicate that over the last 20 to 30 years, Americans have become much more accepting of alternative health-care approaches, said Wendy Cadge, a sociology professor at Brandeis University. She is working on a book that will be titled Paging God: Religion in the Halls of Medicine.
"People often guess at what treatments would be the most helpful," Cadge said, "or gather ideas informally from friends and people they know."
'Extraordinary' survival
Devi says she saw and pushed aside signs the trip to India wasn't meant to be.
Her flight was canceled because of weather. When Devi and travel companion Linda Ragsdale were rerouted though Kuwait, Devi said, she began to doubt whether she should continue. It was a Muslim country for which neither Devi nor Ragsdale was properly dressed or had a visa, but Indian men translated and handled rerouting them to Mumbai.
When Devi and Ragsdale finally arrived, their luggage followed a week later.
Devi's plan was to study meditation, intensify her own understanding and practice and buy essential oils and herbs.
On Nov. 26, Devi was staying at the Oberoi Hotel and went to the hotel restaurant for dinner. Devi's quail arrived at the table at 10 p.m. Her friend Alan Scherr was already eating ice cream.
When terrorist group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba's attacks on various locations in Mumbai were over, 170 people were dead, including Scherr — the man Devi was touching when he was shot — and his 13-year-old daughter.
Devi spent 12 days in a Mumbai hospital before she could sit for takeoff and landing.
Santos Lopez, Devi's husband, had come to believe that his wife is just one of those special people, shamans who have existed in every culture to help with pain and disease long before what we today consider traditional medicine.
At their 2003 wedding, he took a vow to protect her with his life.
After receiving a trans-Atlantic phone call from Devi saying she had been shot, arriving at the Mumbai hospital where she was treated and walking past a child wrapped like a mummy, he expected to find his wife with missing limbs or unable to talk.
Instead she was sitting up in bed, smiling.
"When you consider surviving it as she has … with your spirit and your capacity to give, your capacity to love remaining intact, it is just extraordinary," Lopez said.
'Every moment is divine'
Other survivors, including an actor who was under the table with Devi, have reported post-traumatic stress disorder-related ailments.
Not Devi.
"If anything, it's reinforced my belief that every moment in life is divine," Devi said. "That there is meaning in everything and from every experience something that we can take away. What I know now is that I'm ready to die, so I fear nothing. There is no need."
But her physical injuries still have to be overcome.
Her right femur sustained a bullet hole and a series of cracks that put her in danger of shattering the bone with simple activities, said Dr. Burton Elrod, Devi's orthopedist, who also serves as the Titans' team physician. She also had an infection.
"She suffered a critical — I mean critical — injury," Elrod said. "It very easily could have taken her life if she didn't have the bone density that she does."
And Devi is a patient with something else that aids in healing, Elrod said, although it's difficult to explain. As a positive thinker, she has the mindset for healing.
"The mind is a very powerful thing," Elrod said.
Marathon is in plans
For Devi, healing has been, at times, a humbling experience.
In 1984, she was featured in the April edition of Newsweek, part of a cadre of University of Tennessee-Knoxville bodybuilders. The story includes pictures of a mildly ripped, purple-bikini-and-baby-oil clad Devi and a pronouncement that she was part of a generation of young feminists casting off traditional notions of beauty.
Just before she opened the clinic, Devi ran a self-directed half-marathon every Friday.
Today, when she goes to move her right leg — the one with the dent that is visible even through jeans — it doesn't bend beyond a certain point. At an Easter Seals restorative yoga class last week, the woman on the mat to Devi's left was 83 years old. But Devi was first in the class to utter a deep-stretch-induced "Ow!"
"I've done a lot of visualization of muscles working again, of bone regeneration," Devi said. "I'm planning to run the Boston Marathon in 2011.
"… But, in yoga, I don't know if I will ever be able to lotus again. But I'm alive and I can, at least, make plans and state my intentions with hope."
No time to waste
Devi's days have been reoriented toward healing herself.
There are enzyme shakes full of vitamins and minerals, and time in a sauna, a hot tub and the Easter Seals' heated pool. She saw a physical therapist several times a week until the insurance ran out — now it's less. With $50,000 in medical bills, she's unsure how much she can afford.
Her vitamin and mineral regimen includes pills from at least 15 bottles.
There's an hour with the home sonogram machine prescribed by her doctor for bone growth and then 30 minutes with an electronic muscle stimulator.
Then, there is the stationary bike and the time she hopes to begin putting in on her home treadmill.
She has started doing about four remote vibration healings a week from home.
In the months since the attacks, Devi also has learned just how much her husband loves her, that she has been the subject of many people's prayers and that so much of what we focus on each day, is, in fact, too small to be of import.
"We live our lives like we have time to waste," Devi said. "If we didn't, we might all watch more PBS instead of CBS or something, you know, really do things differently.
"For me, Mumbai made that clear, clearer than it's ever been."
Posted 05/26/2009
So it took Nashville's Rudrani Devi and her dinner companions a moment to realize the sounds they heard were gunfire.
She remembers telling the people at her table to get under it. She remembers placing her hand on a frantic friend's head, making eye contact and silently willing him to be still. And she remembers feeling him go limp when he was shot in the head, his blood sprayed across her hair and face.
Terrorists' bullets pierced Devi's arm and leg and grazed her neck, leaving her critically injured on the floor, unable to escape. A hotel worker dragged her to safety.
That moment and the six months of healing that followed could have shaken Devi's core beliefs about the power of peace and intuition or left her riddled with fear.
Instead, she says, it's become a transformative time that reinvigorated her commitment to a more balanced, spiritually aware and — some might say — unusual way of life.
"I was born for that moment. Everything in my life up until that moment prepared me to be there," Devi said. "And I see now that I was prepared, really well prepared, to heal when it ended."
Devi, 45, was born Andreina Varagona. She is the fifth of her Italian immigrant parents' six children — the first born and raised in Oak Ridge, the birthplace of the atomic bomb.
Long before she became Rudrani Devi — a name, given to her by a meditational guru, meaning "one who takes the pain away from others" and "goddess"in Sanskrit — something about her was different. A relative told Devi's mother that she would have a prophetic child.
Before she was 10, Virgin Mary statues appeared to animate when she looked at them. And while she does not consider herself psychic, she comes from three generations of female mediums.
"I think I have eyes that see things that other people don't," Devi said.
Restoring balance
She worked as a music video and entertainment producer before building a small holistic health empire.
Until February, Devi and a partner had a clinic in the eco-chic and high-rent section of 12th Avenue South. There, Devi sold a line of balance-restoring oils, candles and other materials, and helped a star-studded Nashville clientele with meditation and other spiritually oriented health practices.
Before the shooting, she spent a minimum of three hours a day in meditation, having studied the art for more than 20 years.
She explains her vibrational healing this way: A good masseuse can identify areas of tension that the client didn't necessarily know were there before getting on the table.
Like a masseuse, Devi senses areas — be they physical, emotional, mental or spiritual — that are out of balance. She works through something a lot like prayer to correct the imbalance.
"The issues are in the tissues," Devi said.
She counts among her clients Tamara George, a former member of the group SWV, and former Titans tailback Eddie George. Eddie George was already a student of Devi's meditational teaching and chakra-balancing essential oils when he introduced Devi to his wife.
Tamara George said she brought her niece to see Devi about a year ago, when the 17-year-old's hair was falling out in clumps and her self-esteem was in the subbasement, George said. The medication doctors prescribed — including hormone shots to the scalp — wasn't working.
By that evening, stubble had begun to sprout in the bald spots, George said. Today, her niece has a full head of hair.
"What happened was certainly enough to convince me that whatever Rudrani is doing, it's not only something real, it's something right," she said.
Studies indicate that over the last 20 to 30 years, Americans have become much more accepting of alternative health-care approaches, said Wendy Cadge, a sociology professor at Brandeis University. She is working on a book that will be titled Paging God: Religion in the Halls of Medicine.
"People often guess at what treatments would be the most helpful," Cadge said, "or gather ideas informally from friends and people they know."
'Extraordinary' survival
Devi says she saw and pushed aside signs the trip to India wasn't meant to be.
Her flight was canceled because of weather. When Devi and travel companion Linda Ragsdale were rerouted though Kuwait, Devi said, she began to doubt whether she should continue. It was a Muslim country for which neither Devi nor Ragsdale was properly dressed or had a visa, but Indian men translated and handled rerouting them to Mumbai.
When Devi and Ragsdale finally arrived, their luggage followed a week later.
Devi's plan was to study meditation, intensify her own understanding and practice and buy essential oils and herbs.
On Nov. 26, Devi was staying at the Oberoi Hotel and went to the hotel restaurant for dinner. Devi's quail arrived at the table at 10 p.m. Her friend Alan Scherr was already eating ice cream.
When terrorist group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba's attacks on various locations in Mumbai were over, 170 people were dead, including Scherr — the man Devi was touching when he was shot — and his 13-year-old daughter.
Devi spent 12 days in a Mumbai hospital before she could sit for takeoff and landing.
Santos Lopez, Devi's husband, had come to believe that his wife is just one of those special people, shamans who have existed in every culture to help with pain and disease long before what we today consider traditional medicine.
At their 2003 wedding, he took a vow to protect her with his life.
After receiving a trans-Atlantic phone call from Devi saying she had been shot, arriving at the Mumbai hospital where she was treated and walking past a child wrapped like a mummy, he expected to find his wife with missing limbs or unable to talk.
Instead she was sitting up in bed, smiling.
"When you consider surviving it as she has … with your spirit and your capacity to give, your capacity to love remaining intact, it is just extraordinary," Lopez said.
'Every moment is divine'
Other survivors, including an actor who was under the table with Devi, have reported post-traumatic stress disorder-related ailments.
Not Devi.
"If anything, it's reinforced my belief that every moment in life is divine," Devi said. "That there is meaning in everything and from every experience something that we can take away. What I know now is that I'm ready to die, so I fear nothing. There is no need."
But her physical injuries still have to be overcome.
Her right femur sustained a bullet hole and a series of cracks that put her in danger of shattering the bone with simple activities, said Dr. Burton Elrod, Devi's orthopedist, who also serves as the Titans' team physician. She also had an infection.
"She suffered a critical — I mean critical — injury," Elrod said. "It very easily could have taken her life if she didn't have the bone density that she does."
And Devi is a patient with something else that aids in healing, Elrod said, although it's difficult to explain. As a positive thinker, she has the mindset for healing.
"The mind is a very powerful thing," Elrod said.
Marathon is in plans
For Devi, healing has been, at times, a humbling experience.
In 1984, she was featured in the April edition of Newsweek, part of a cadre of University of Tennessee-Knoxville bodybuilders. The story includes pictures of a mildly ripped, purple-bikini-and-baby-oil clad Devi and a pronouncement that she was part of a generation of young feminists casting off traditional notions of beauty.
Just before she opened the clinic, Devi ran a self-directed half-marathon every Friday.
Today, when she goes to move her right leg — the one with the dent that is visible even through jeans — it doesn't bend beyond a certain point. At an Easter Seals restorative yoga class last week, the woman on the mat to Devi's left was 83 years old. But Devi was first in the class to utter a deep-stretch-induced "Ow!"
"I've done a lot of visualization of muscles working again, of bone regeneration," Devi said. "I'm planning to run the Boston Marathon in 2011.
"… But, in yoga, I don't know if I will ever be able to lotus again. But I'm alive and I can, at least, make plans and state my intentions with hope."
No time to waste
Devi's days have been reoriented toward healing herself.
There are enzyme shakes full of vitamins and minerals, and time in a sauna, a hot tub and the Easter Seals' heated pool. She saw a physical therapist several times a week until the insurance ran out — now it's less. With $50,000 in medical bills, she's unsure how much she can afford.
Her vitamin and mineral regimen includes pills from at least 15 bottles.
There's an hour with the home sonogram machine prescribed by her doctor for bone growth and then 30 minutes with an electronic muscle stimulator.
Then, there is the stationary bike and the time she hopes to begin putting in on her home treadmill.
She has started doing about four remote vibration healings a week from home.
In the months since the attacks, Devi also has learned just how much her husband loves her, that she has been the subject of many people's prayers and that so much of what we focus on each day, is, in fact, too small to be of import.
"We live our lives like we have time to waste," Devi said. "If we didn't, we might all watch more PBS instead of CBS or something, you know, really do things differently.
"For me, Mumbai made that clear, clearer than it's ever been."
