A life story about love longing, yoga and Self-Realization

Shivaratri – How I saw God is a story of personal and spiritual development, as well as testament to a passage from bad karma to good. The author alerts us to the existence of an intelligent force that moves everything in the universe, and to the fact that suddenly anything in our lives can change.

With her mind completely lost after a troubled life, Susana decides to travel to India where she is charmed and somehow feels reborn into a new life. Her experiences in the main religious centres of Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism; a meeting with the Dalai Lama; and a whirlwind of emotions that cause her immense inner suffering, motivate her to improve herself spiritually. 

Meanwhile, Susana meets her twin soul who ends up leaving her. But fate is pragmatic, insisting on coincidences and discreetly pointing the way to Africa. The action of this story takes place amid the bustle and smells of India, the magic of Africa and chaos of a Portugal submerged in financial crisis.

Yoga and Transcendental Meditation appear as an escape from reality by the author who lives immersed in an ocean of existential questions. The answers to all these questions come to her through karmic astrology, past life regression and two trips to Uganda. Finally, Susana returns to India where meets her Guru who invites her to plunge deeper into Transcendental Meditation and to see the Divinity.

This book tells a wonderful story that is not just a story of life guided by delivery and abandonment, love and loneliness, altruism and disappointment. This story is also about self-knowledge, Karma, Dharma, Faith and evolution of the soul. It is above all, a story that shows us how meeting with our spirituality becomes a refuge in our everyday problems.

About the Author

Susana Franco is a Yoga teacher who graduated in History from the University of Lisbon. She worked in real estate for ten years, but a lack of fulfilment in her life made her decide to travel to India and then to Africa. After those trips she was not the same.

Concerned with the extreme poverty in some African countries and poor access to education by African children, Susana engaged in raising funds for SAMA, an NGO that promotes gender equality all over the world in support of an educational project in Uganda.

This involvement led Susana to climb Mount Kilimanjaro and to engage as a volunteer in a country that is widely known as “the pearl of Africa”. After that adventure, she embarked on a spiritual restructuring trip to India and to Southeast Asia. Along the way she met an Indian guru who radically changed her entire vision of life and taught her a new way of being.

Currently, Susana is instructor of Yoga Therapy and sponsors a pre-school in Uganda. Yoga and meditation are part of her daily routine, as is writing about spirituality. She believes we should always follow the heart as it is the messenger of the soul, and that each soul is a piece of the Divine on earth: we all have power enough to change our reality.

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