THE FOUNDER OF DIVINE INDWELLING
Swaady Martin
A life given over to God —
before, during, and underneath everything else.
Writer, teacher, spiritual director, and contemplative. Twenty-seven years on a dedicated spiritual path — not as a new season, but as the center that was always there.
SPIRITUAL DIRECTOR AND COUNSELOR
CONTEMPLATIVE WRITER AND TEACHER
FOUNDER, DIVINE INDWELLING
PHD CANDIDATE, RELIGIOUS DERADICALIZATION AND COUNTERTERRORISM
THE FOUNDATION
One center.
Every season.
Swaady Martin chose her faith consciously. She was not born into it — raised instead with the freedom to find God herself, by a mother who understood that a spiritual journey had to be taken as part of growing into a mature adult. She met God on her own terms. At twenty-six she was baptized into the Christian faith — a deliberate adult commitment, not an inherited habit.
From that moment, God became what she calls the VERB of her existence. Not a background belief. Not a Sunday practice. The framework of meaning itself — the orienting center of every decision, every venture, every season of life. The corporate career, the businesses, the awards, the transition into spiritual mission — none of these were separate from her faith. They were expressions of it.
She named her African luxury tea company YSWARA — a name inspired by Ishvara, the Sanskrit word for God, the Lord. The spiritual center was not added later. It was there from the beginning, written into the name of the company itself.
“The moment I realized God existed, I knew I could not do otherwise than live for Him alone.”
“God has been my compass since I was twenty-one. The companies, the awards, the titles, the ups and downs of life — those came and went. The compass stayed.”
ONE LIFE. THREE SEASONS.
God at the center
of every chapter.
Corporate life as formation
Swaady spent thirteen years at Fortune 500 company GE, building skills and acquiring experience she would carry into every season that followed. Her last role at the company was General Manager of GE Transportation for Africa and Acting CEO of GE South African Technologies, making her one of the youngest women to lead a multinational in Africa. Through those years her faith was simply there, present in how she worked, how she led, and how she cared for the people around her.
CORPORATE SEASON
Entrepreneurship as vocation
Swaady founded YSWARA African tea company, named after Ishvara, the Sanskrit word for God, and built it into one of Africa's most admired luxury brands. YSWARA was the first African food brand to be retailed at Selfridges and Harrods in London, and received numerous awards for excellence including the 2015 Emerging African Brand award by Brand Africa. Swaady was named among Africa's Most Influential Women in Business and Government, one of the 40 women on Oprah Winfrey's O Power List, and one of the 20 young Africans building Africa's future by Forbes. Through all of it, God remained the center — the framework of every decision, the ground beneath every venture.
ENTREPRENEURIAL SEASON
Mission as gift
Swaady is now fully given over to the work she was always preparing for. Through Divine Indwelling she brings together writing, teaching, spiritual direction, and community in service of one purpose: genuine inner formation rooted in God. She has written 20 books, 13 of which are published — some translated into French and Arabic. She founded the Tounché Global Consciousness Summit, led racial healing and reconciliation circles, peacemakers circles, and interfaith peace prayer marathons. She holds an Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellowship, a lifetime recognition from the African Leadership Institute. She offers all of this not as a career, but as a vocation.
TRANSMISSION SEASON
WHY PEACE
Where a lifelong commitment
to peace was born.
Swaady was born and grew up in West Africa during decades of regional instability — civil wars, coups, and crises that shaped the entire subregion. Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire, and neighboring countries lived through upheaval across her entire childhood and adolescent years. She grew up alongside conflicts, watching peace collapse overnight and understanding from the inside what that costs a society, a generation, a child.
Every day at school in Côte d'Ivoire, she recited the words of Félix Houphouët-Boigny — the first president of Côte d'Ivoire and one of West Africa's greatest statesmen — who taught an entire nation that peace is not an abstraction. His words became part of her formation before she had words for formation itself.
This is why the World Peace Garden, the interfaith harmony work, the religious literacy for peace, and the PhD in Terrorism Studies and Deradicalization are not intellectual projects. They are the adult expression of something planted in childhood — the unshakeable conviction that inner transformation is the only root of lasting peace between peoples.
"La paix, ce n'est pas un vain mot, c'est un comportement."
FIRST PRESIDENT OF CÔTE D’IVOIRE, 1960 TO 1993 · WORDS RECITED DAILY IN IVORIAN SCHOOLS
This sentence was Swaady's earliest formation in peacemaking, repeated until it became a way of seeing the world.
Peace is not an empty word — it is a behavior.
FÉLIX HOUPHOUËT-BOIGNY
~30 YEARS OF FORMATION
Learned from within,
across every tradition she has touched.
Swaady's spiritual formation spans nearly three decades of lived practice across the world's great wisdom traditions. She has read more than 1,500 books on religion and spirituality. She spends a minimum of two to eight weeks in a monastery every year for contemplation, study, and monastic life. She has visited most of the leading Christian pilgrimage centers in the world. She has lived for eight years in Bali — a Hindu community and one of the world's most significant New Age hubs — in daily proximity to a vast spectrum of spiritual teachings and practices. She grew up in West Africa in an animist culture. Her formation reaches across Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, animism, and the many spiritual currents she has encountered through decades of living, traveling, and studying with genuine attention.
Jesuits, Carmelites and Benedictines | Extended time in practice and residence within these three great contemplative orders — Ignatian discernment, Carmelite interior prayer, Benedictine lectio divina. The foundation of her contemplative Christian formation.
Dominicans and Vincentians | Formation in the preaching and intellectual traditions of the Dominicans and the Vincentian charism of service to the poor — connecting the interior life to the call of the world.
Hindu community and Buddhist temples | Eight years of daily life in a Hindu community in Bali, alongside time in residence in Buddhist temples. A formation received through proximity, participation, and genuine relationship.
Islam, received from the inside | Her late father was a Muslim scholar, writer, and teacher. Her encounter with Islam was familial and deep — received through a lifelong relationship with someone who lived the tradition with integrity and love.
Animist roots | She grew up in West Africa within an animist culture, which gave her an early and embodied sense of the sacred as present throughout creation — a formation that preceded all her formal religious study.
"I have spent countless hours in monasteries, practicing with monks and nuns, learning and being formed. My spirituality is not new. It is twenty-seven years old and still deepening."
SWAADY MARTINWhat Wayne Teasdale called interspirituality — the recognition of the living current of wisdom that runs through all great traditions — is not, for Swaady, a theological position. It is a description of how she has actually lived. The breadth of her formation is what makes her teaching genuinely interspiritual. She brings to Divine Indwelling not a survey of traditions but a life shaped by genuine encounter with each of them.
ACADEMIC FORMATION
The mind formed
alongside the soul.
Academic formation has always run alongside contemplative practice — each deepening the other.
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Harvard Divinity School
"Making Change" Executive Education Program — drawing on the world's religious traditions to form leaders for social change, interfaith understanding, and peace.
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Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellow
A lifetime fellowship awarded by the African Leadership Institute — recognizing leaders who embody the connection between inner integrity, service, and the long work of building a more just and peaceful world.
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Spiritual Direction Formation
Wisdom Tree Collective Certificate in Spiritual Direction and Interfaith / Interspiritual Wisdom Certification with the Spiritual Guidance Training Institute . Fifteen years of accompaniment, formally and informally.
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PhD in Terrorism Studies and Deradicalization
Doctoral research at EUCLID — an intergovernmental treaty-based university — connecting spiritual formation and religious literacy directly to the urgent global challenge of radicalization and violent extremism.
WHAT THOSE SHE HAS ACCOMPANIED SAY
Words from those who have
encountered Swaady.
Ready to walk
the path with a guide?
Swaady accompanies people one-on-one through spiritual direction and counseling — online, available globally. Whether you are navigating a turning point, deepening your prayer life, or seeking a companion for the journey, the door is open.