Diane Divya Ladd with Swami Satchidananda at the LOTUS, early 1990s.
Rose Diane Ladd—known to the world as the acclaimed actress Diane Ladd and to the Integral Yoga community as Divya (“Divine one”)—passed away peacefully at her home in Ojai, California, on November 3, 2025, at the age of 89. Her daughter, actress Laura Dern, was by her side. “She was the greatest daughter, mother, grandmother, actress, artist, and empathetic spirit,” Dern said in tribute. “She is flying with her angels now.”
For most of the world, Diane Ladd was the Academy Award–nominated performer whose work in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Wild at Heart, and Rambling Rose made her one of America’s most admired character actors. But to those in Integral Yoga and Yogaville, she was much more: a seeker, a healer, and a devoted student of Sri Swami Satchidananda (Sri Gurudev).
Meeting Gurudev
In an Integral Yoga Magazine interview from 2005, Divya recalled her first encounter with Sri Gurudev in 1977 at a retreat in San Francisco. Invited by her friend, actress Sally Kirkland, she arrived heartbroken from a recent divorce. “I was emotionally depressed,” she remembered. “During Gurudev’s opening meditation, I silently prayed, ‘Swamiji, please help me.’ Instantly all the pain went away—it was like someone was waving a cool fan over me.”
When the meditation ended, Gurudev looked directly at her and asked, “Are you feeling better now, Diane?”—even though they had never met before. The next day she was unexpectedly invited to receive initiation. “I didn’t know what that meant,” she said, “but I trusted him completely. Later Gurudev told Sally that I had done this before in another life, more than once, and he was simply initiating me so my soul would remember.”
From that moment, Divya’s connection with Gurudev was profound and lifelong. “More than once, when I needed someone to put their hand out toward me, Gurudev was there, and I always will love him in all my lifetimes,” she said.
Photo: Hollywood reunion during a program at the Yoga House, LA, mid-1990s. L-R: Laura (Laxmi) Dern, Diane (Divya) Ladd, Gurudev, Sally (Satya) Kirkland, Lainie Kazan.
Holywood and Hollywood
Diane often reflected on how Gurudev had taught her to “find the holy in Hollywood.” When she and Nirmala Heriza (director of the Integral Yoga center in Los Angeles) purchased land at Yogaville, Gurudev humorously suggested she name it Holywood —in contrast to her professional home of Hollywood. She loved that reminder to bring light wherever she was.
“I had to stay in Hollywood and make my own Holywood,” she explained. “Anyone can do it anywhere. It may be easier in an ashram, but who’s to say? Buddha did it under a tree. Krishnamurti did it in California! We have to look in our own mirror.” For her, the real work was inner transformation: “If I do Yoga in the morning, I’m so much more detached during the day. Irritations just roll off my back.”
She saw Hollywood as a mirror of consciousness: “Show business is called ‘show’ because we are to show a mirror of culture. The real actors—the ones who have been given a gift and develop it—are the most spiritual beings I know.” She admired Gurudev for moving easily between worlds—between the ashram and the studios, between Hollywood and Holywood—without ever losing balance.
A Mother and a Seeker
Her daughter Laura Dern also met Sri Gurudev as a young girl. “As we knelt before him,” Divya recalled, “he gave Laura an acorn saying, ‘Out of a little acorn great trees grow.’ Twenty years later, when she returned to Yogaville, she brought that same acorn back to show him.”
Laura would go on to embody her mother’s values of compassion, truth, and depth of spirit—traits that shone through in their shared projects and their 2023 joint memoir Honey, Baby, Mine: A Mother and Daughter Talk Life, Death, Love (and Banana Pudding).
Author, Healer, and Minister
Beyond acting, Divya was a holistic health practitioner, ordained minister, and author. Her 2006 book Spiraling Through the School of Life: A Mental, Physical and Spiritual Discovery (Hay House) wove together insights from Yoga, nutrition, and prayer—an invitation to growth and healing that reflected her own journey.
She saw money and success as energy meant for spiritual evolution, not ego. One Christmas, she purchased several cases of Gurudev’s book The Golden Present to give as gifts to fmaily and friends. In a Christmas letter she wrote:
“We are all in this together. Let the children of this world stand on our shoulders in the hopes that they may see further than we have. Let us and our children be kinder, hold the door open for the next one, less judgmental, regardless of race or religion or the size of the ‘pocketbook.’ Money is energy to allow us the time to evolve, not the other way around.”
Her life was a living example of that philosophy—an integration of art, service, and spirit.
Photo: Diane Ladd (right) and Nirmala Heriza (left), with Gurudev in Yogaville, early 1990s.
Service and Friendship
In the 1990s, Divya and Laxmi became especially close to Sri Gurudev and the Yogaville community. Diane helped organize programs for him in California and Virginia, including Integral Yoga’s celebration “Feel the Spirit, Heal the World” for his 80th birthday on December 3, 1994, at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Performing Arts Center in Charlottesville. Both mother and daughter served as MCs for the event, welcoming hundreds of devotees and friends from around the world. She hosted Gurudev at her home in California and remained a supporter of his teachings, especially through her close friendship with Nirmala Heriza.
When asked why she was drawn to Gurudev, she said, “I’m seeking. I don’t want to go to some cult. I’m looking for truth and for teachers with good reputations. More than once, when I needed someone to put their hand out toward me, Gurudev was there.”
A Legacy of Light
Diane Ladd’s career spanned over six decades and more than 80 film and television roles, earning three Academy Award and three Emmy nominations. But her greatest performance may have been her embodiment of the principles Sri Gurudev taught—seeing God in all, serving with love, and turning work into worship. She once summed up her path in simple terms: “Please pray for me to stay in Holywood while living in Hollywood.”
In gratitude for her life and light, the Integral Yoga community remembers Divya as a true artist of the Spirit—one who used her voice, her heart, and her fame to remind the world that holiness can be found anywhere love is present. Our deepest love and condolences to daughter Laura (Laxmi) Dern, and to her grandchildren, Jaya and Ellery Harper.
