Our Story

La Maison VEDA was born from a journey of transformation, a return to essence, and a calling to live in harmony with body, mind, and soul.

I grew up in the heart of the Cognac region, surrounded by the beauty of the French countryside. On the outside, my life seemed successful: studies in Bordeaux and a decade in the pharmaceutical industry. Inside, I felt disconnected, just another number in a world where humanity seemed to fade. The stress drained my nervous system and took its toll on my health, my digestion above all. I burned out.

Determined to take my life back, I left for India. I trained there as a hatha yoga teacher in Rishikesh, at a school that has kept faith with traditional teaching, then spent two months studying Ayurveda in a clinic alongside a doctor who loved his craft. Everything began to shift. I learned to listen to my body, to nourish it and to heal it. Discovering my gluten intolerance was only the beginning: the real transformation came from reconnecting with my breath, my soul and my inner truth.

I did not choose Sri Lanka. My airline collapsed while I was still in India, I had one day of visa left, and the decision had to be made that same day. After two months in the Himalayas, I wanted to go down towards the sea. That is how we make the most important decisions of our lives: without knowing that we are making them.

I landed in late April 2019, two days after the Easter bombings. There were ten of us on the plane. The army escorted me to my hotel through an empty city, and I slept there alone. Everything about that evening told me to go home. I took a train east instead, and I have never really left this island since.

This country cannot be planned, it offers itself. I taught yoga at an Italian woman's hotel in Trincomalee, I ran three villas by a beach, I launched a colonial house in Ahangama on the south coast — without ever asking for any of it. Every door opened before I had thought to knock.

Then the world stopped. There were six of us, first by the sea in Ahangama, then inland, in the jungle, on islands cut into the river. The airport stayed closed for two years, and we went out one morning a week. Elsewhere, freedom was suspended; there, something was becoming unconditioned. Cut off from the material world, we built another life out of what each of us knew how to do — yoga, reiki, dance, the body in all its forms. Each of us taught our own practice in the shala, and by the end there were fifteen of us. We were not enduring that suspended world: we were inventing another one, together. From those years came a spiritual family that holds to this day.

Kundalini arrived in 2021, in Mexico, with Gurmukh, who studied under Yogi Bhajan. It is called the yoga of awareness, and I understood why within days: you meditate a great deal, you sit with yourself with nowhere to hide, and you change quickly. I had never wanted to teach. After my hatha training I had passed on almost nothing. Kundalini left me no choice: you do not receive an inheritance like that in order to keep it. It settled on me, and all I had to do was obey.

It also gave me the strength for something mad — restoring a Charente farmhouse from the turn of the last century, two hundred and thirty square metres of stone by the water. People gave me two years; the place was standing in six months. I did not do it alone. People came, hands were offered, everything fell into place as though someone else were holding the plan. I keep a whole gratitude from it that I cannot say any other way: it was magic.

La Maison VEDA opened there, in a village of two hundred people where nobody knew yoga, and still less Kundalini. They came anyway, by word of mouth — marketing has never been my strong suit. For two years I watched them open and change in front of me. It is the most moving thing I have ever been given to see. Today Laure teaches there in her turn.

But the island had never left me. One day everything fell into line again, with no plan and no calculation: from a village in the Charente to a house beside a Sri Lankan lake.

I built the villa, and on its roof a shala open to the water. You wake there to birdsong; monkeys pass through, monitor lizards cross the garden. Everything here is alive, all the time. I need water in order to breathe — not the sea, too restless, too mobile, but this still lake I stand facing every morning.

I will not pretend the path has become smooth. The obstacles are still there, and so are the trials. But these tools have changed the way I move through them: realisations come faster, I understand better what is at play within me, and I lose my balance far less when life shakes me.

Perhaps that is what has changed most — the way I welcome the highs and the lows. Today I feel deeply that every challenge helps me grow. And that is exactly what I want to pass on here.