MEET THE FOUNDER

Sara Olivier (Avtar Kaur)

Meet Sara Avtar Olivier, creator and founder of Shakti Dance – a yoga discipline for the modern world.  Also called the yoga of dance,  Sara  combines the creativity, human interaction and joy of dance with the principles of yoga – specifically Kundalini yoga. In doing so a new and very special form of yoga has been developed.

When asked, Sara says she has always been a dancer since she can remember. She discovered Kundalini yoga when she was 19 and became a Kundalini yoga teacher shortly after. As her personal teaching style developed she found herself drawn to incorporating more and more dance-like stretches into the opening stages of her classes. She became known as the teacher whose warm ups were often longer than the kriyas themselves and students would look forward to this. As her practice of kundalini yoga and dance began to weave together and merge, it became apparent that a new form of yoga was developing.  In a meeting with Yogi Bhajan(Siri Singh Sahib), the master who brought Kundalini yoga to the West, Sara showed him what she had been developing and he approved of it, and gave his blessing as he proclaimed that she should “develop the whole of this dance as a discipline in itself.”

With his blessing Sara has proceeded to do just that. She has been developing, teaching and training Shakti Dance over the past 15 years. To experience a class with Sara is a real privilege as she is an artist in movement and a true master in her own right. She transmits the essence of Shakti Dance in such a beautiful, inspiring and powerful way that it’s difficult not to get hooked immediately.

Sara also has an amazing singing voice and musical talent. She has also released two of her own CDs of Shakti Dance mantra music – Shakti Lila and Mantric Grooves.

She regularly gives Shakti Dance workshops in Europe, facilitates on all the Shakti teacher training courses, and lives in Italy with her husband and son.