Joan Radha Bridges
Joan Radha Bridges has been a seeker of truth from an early age. She was a student of spiritual metaphysics since high school, beginning to ask “the big questions” after her father died when she was eighteen: "Who am I?" Why are we even here, if the things we love are to be taken from us?" Driven by her thirst for the profound answers to these questions, she started by majoring in religion in college. However, disillusioned by religion's confinements, she graduated with a degree in art from The Lamar Dodd Institute of Art at the University of Georgia where she continued on her path. The summer before graduating, Joan survived a severe life changing automobile accident. Feeling she was spared for a reason, her resolve began with “laser focused” intensity: “I must find God!" This summed up her longing for deeper answers. This quest changed her forever, taking her to India multiple times. During the 1970's, she lived in Ganeshpuri India for years, under extremely harsh conditions for any westerner. Her friends described her as a "southern belle hippy turned spiritualist."
Joan Radha Bridges finished her fine art degree in 1974. It was during this time that she met the shadow guru, Swami Muktananda, who urged her to join his world tour as a devotee; finally she felt she had discovered her true purpose for living. While on tour with this dark guru from 1974 -1982, she lived not only in India, but also changed locations continuously across the United States. She and countless others toiled horrific long hours at a grueling pace, traveling from New York to Miami, to Oakland California and to many stops in between. All the while, Joan continued believing this spiritual asceticism would bring her the answers she sought so intensely for so long.
In recent years, she traveled twice to the silent Tomb of Meher Baba in Meherabad India: the first time was the catalyst for her leaving Siddha Yoga as she finally recognized the insidious and unethical sexual abuse by Muktananda; the second trip to this silent Tomb of Meher Baba was after her transition was complete. It was in the incredible pregnant silence of Meher Baba's Tomb that she could finally hear her own true inner voice, silenced by the left handed Tantric abuse of Muktananda for all those years." She finally had clear and clean access to her inner self and the answers she had sought for so long.
She felt picked up and turned around to face herself by this shamanistic journey taken outwardly, but finally experienced as inner freedom.
Joan Radha has been a practicing Reiki Master since 1985. During this period, she married a physician, began raising two children, which gave rise to certain material successes, including a “Holistic Clinic” she and her husband formed together. These worldly experiences gave her the chance to go deeply into the issues that surround addiction, recovery and codependency; issues that later would add depth to the journey she had begun. Understanding the call of the healer illuminated by her own personal difficulties allowed her to face her shadow self; she has since realized that the gift of self-recognition is the ability to separate the real and the false in one's life. Because of the depth of her own experiences, and the personal healing that came from facing her “shadows of denial” about these painful events in her life, Joan Radha now refers to her life?s path as "Beyond Reiki"; it is a form of “Catalyst Healing.” This is where she pulls deeply rooted patterns to the surface, and begins a “soul retrieval” process within the individual--a merging of the light and shadow self, which ignites unity of direction and of divine purpose.
All these forces have finally come together in her true life's work. She is now free to share her truth, educate cult survivors, as well as sexual abuse survivors--both in her “day to day” life?s work and with the production of her new "documentary film" entitled "Shadow of the Guru."