Born into the princely family of Burdwan, Usha Devi Rathore studied at the Walsingham House School for Girls in Bombay. After attaining a distinction in the Indian School Certificate exams, Usha did a BA honours in Philosophy at St. Xaviers College, Bombay. Usha studied TV and Film in education at Hornsey College of Art, London and undertook work experience in film editing in Soho. She later returned to Bombay in 1974 to work on the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment for a year as an assistant producer.

From 1987 to 1995, Usha was the vice-president of the South Asia Council of the English Speaking Union. They initiated language projects in Sri Lanka and India, offering affordable English courses to the local people using the Callan method.

As a practitioner of yoga since the age of 13, Usha trained as a yoga teacher at the Bihar School of Yoga. She continued practicing Hatha Yoga and tried various meditation techniques, such as Vipassanna and TM Transcendental meditation, but settled for all the integrated practices of the Bihar School of Yoga. Usha first started teaching children at her son’s school and then the mothers. In the early days, Usha ran a weekly class at the Bhavan, and she taught at the Hale Clinic for 10 years.

Through the years, Usha has done quite a lot of yoga therapy and has worked with people with many stress-related ailments like asthma, blood pressure, Krohns disease, back problems etc. One of Usha’s students had breast cancer, and she has taught in the Haven, a holistic refuge for women with breast cancer. The holistic yoga she teaches is a process where one does yoga postures to get rid of physical tensions; the pranayama, or breathing practices, to regulate the brain; and yoga nidra, a tantric technique where the student is guided into a deep state of relaxation and various visualizations aid healing and unlocking ones creative potential.

Usha has had her clients for many years, including Koo Stark and Bianca Jagger. Other celebrities who have been taught by Usha include Richard Gere and Stella McCartney. Usha has filmed a video on yoga for pregnancy with one of her students, the TV presenter, Clare Beckwith.

As a member of the International Yoga Fellowship founded by Swami Satyananda Saraswati, Usha promotes yoga worldwide as she believes it to be essential in the fast-paced modern age. Usha maintains that “unless we evolve spiritually real progress cannot take place; as long as Man is selfish the best political and economic systems will fail as history has shown time and again. The practices of Yoga were devised to help man evolve spiritually and remove the ignorance that limits us and help our consciousness to expand.”