Faye Wright was an unassuming Mormon teen in Salt Lake City until Paramahansa Yogananda, an Indian mystic, came to town in 1931, preaching a combination of yoga meditation, Hindu principles and Christian ethics.
Dazzled by what she saw as divine love, Wright, the descendant of handcart pioneers and granddaughter of an architect of Salt Lake City’s Mormon Tabernacle, gave up everything familiar to follow him to Los Angeles, where he changed her name to Sri Daya Mata. Three years after Yogananda’s death in 1952, Daya Mata succeeded him as president of Self-Realization Fellowship, an unusually important post for a woman at the time and one she held for the next 5½ decades.
Daya Mata died Tuesday of natural causes in Southern California at one of the fellowship’s monasteries for females.
She was nearly 97 and lucid to the end, Lauren Landress, the group’s spokeswoman, said Friday. Daya Mata had spent the past few years meditating and “communing with God.”
Daya Mata means “Mother of Compassion” in Sanskrit, Landress said, and that was an apt description of the leader herself.