ENLIGHTENED PERSPECTIVES: Deva Premal & MITEN: HOW Mantra Heals

DEVA PREMAL and MITEN are partners in love and music. German-born Deva (née Jolantha Fries), a bodywork practitioner, and British native Miten (né Andy Desmond), a former rocker who opened for bands like Fleetwood Mac, met at an ashram devoted to the teachings of Indian spiritual leader Osho in 1990. Together they create community through meditative musical gatherings, chanting retreats, and Zoom rooms. The symbiotic duo's albums, including 2018's Grammy-nominated Deva, reverberate with her sonorous voice and his harmonic compositions. Eckhart Tolle, Cher, and the Dalai Lama are fans. The couple's version of the Sanskrit Gayatri Mantra is the gold standard. In advance of a world tour that will take them to the U.S. for the first time since 2019, they recently shared with contributing editor KAREN BRAILSFORD how mantras heal—and why their relationship still sings after all these years.

- BY KAREN BRAILSFORD

KAREN BRAILSFORD: There’s an American children’s series called Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? So, where in the world are Deva Premal and Miten?

MITEN: We’re in Deva’s birthplace, in Nuremberg, Germany.

KB: I see you living the dream life because you get to travel from place to place. Is this the life you envisioned?

DEVA PREMAL: There was a natural flow where we wanted to travel with the music. Pretty quickly a migration pattern emerged where we would stay two months in Greece and three months in Australia, and then a few months in Europe and a few months in America, sometimes South America. We just loved it. We never missed having a home or felt like we wanted to stay just in one place.

M: We never set out to create what’s happened to us. It just happened. And the music, especially the mantras and the Gayatri Mantra, has taken us on its wings.

DP: And then when corona happened, we found ourselves in Costa Rica.

M: For a program. And we never left.

DP: We never left. And now we’ve built a house in Costa Rica. So, we actually have a home in Costa Rica.

M: At last.

DP: For the first time in our lives, we actually have a real home.

KB: Of course, you would end up in Costa Rica, a spiritual hot spot!

M: We’ve been going there 20 years. We’ve watched many gardens blossom in different parts of the world after all these years, but the Blue Spirit resort in Costa Rica is where we bring people for groups. It’s in the jungle. We have monkeys as friends. It’s becoming a little more commercialized, so people get to know about it, but the animals are there. You just have to be quiet and let them come to you.