“A Keeper of the Light”

The daughter of world-renowned painter and sculptor Gerald Squires, Meranda grew up with her sister and parents at the Ferryland lighthouse along the eastern shores and ragged cliffs of Canada’s most easterly province. After graduating high school, her mother asked her about her plans for the future. Did she want a husband? To teach school? …have children? “I want to become enlightened,” Meranda responded.

Two years later, Meranda packed up a few belongings and set out for the Himalayas, where she met her guru, Swami Shyam, and enrolled at the International Meditation Institute in Kullu, HP India. She dove quickly and deeply into her practice, and swiftly became a devout student of meditation, yoga, and Vedanta philosophy. She remained in India the next seventeen years, to only return to Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, in 2000 when she felt called to open her own metaphoric lighthouse -The Lotus Centre in downtown St. John’s. She has helped train and guide local teachers along their yoga and meditation paths ever since. Continuously expanding the scope and depth of her spiritual work, today Meranda, through The Lotus Centre, offers everything from Yoga lifestyle community group sessions such as meditations, yoga classes, dyads, yoga philosophy, chanting to private mind clearing sessions to empowerment weekend workshops and 5 day Summer Laya Yoga Meditation retreats.  Part of her offerings are 3-Day and week-long Enlightenment Intensives which combine a yoga communication and contemplation process called a dyad with many aspects of a silent retreat. 

In 2007, Meranda and her friend, the naturalist Ian Goudie, envisioned “The Tree of Life Sustainability Retreat Centre”. Located in Salmonier, St. Mary’s Bay, in southeastern Newfoundland, The Tree of Life is an off-the-grid spiritual retreat destination for those in the know, providing spiritual practices immersed in Nature. Outfitted with such sustainability features as gravity water plumbing, solar panels and micro-hydro, this retreat centre features natural building techniques, sacred geometric designs and tiny house designing. Nestled in five acres of an ancient Newfoundland and Labrador boreal rainforest, it maintains fruit and vegetable gardens through the summer and fall months of the year.