Dandapani was born in Malaysia and is of Sri Lankan ancestry. He moved to Australia as a teenager and, after graduating university with a degree in Electrical Engineering, he left it all behind to become a Hindu monk under the guidance of one of Hinduism’s foremost spiritual leaders of our time, Sivaya Subramuniyaswami. For 10 years, he lived a life of serious personal discipline and training at his guru’s cloistered monastery in Hawaii. As a monk, he spent his free time working in the 50 acres of gardens at the monastery and developed his passion for plants.Today, he is a Hindu priest, international speaker and an entrepreneur living with his wife, Tatiana, in New York City.
Tatiana was born in Oregon to Russian Orthodox Christian refugee parents. Neither of her parents attended school beyond the eighth grade. She learned a strong work ethic as a child when around the age of five she, along with her siblings and cousins, were to put to work on the family berry farm during the summers in the poor farming town of Woodburn. She went on to attend Reed College in Portland on a scholarship and worked summers, weekends and holidays to make up the difference in her aid package. After graduating, she moved to New York City in 1998. She converted to Hinduism in 2006 and has since traveled to India on pilgrimage many times. Today, she is an entrepreneur, an Upledger and Barral Institute-trained cranio-sacral/manual therapist, and runs a busy private practice and holistic healthcare clinic in New York City.
