THE FOUNDER OF DIVINE INDWELLING
Swaady Martin
A life anchored in God, across every season.
Writer, teacher, spiritual director, and contemplative. God has been the anchor of her life and work for nearly three decades.
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 raised 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. Her first intentional enquiry into God began in junior high school. For the next eight years her relationship with God remained largely intellectual, until a deeply experiential encounter with God in her final year of university opened a new and intimate personal relationship with Him. At twenty-six she was baptized into the Christian faith — a deliberate adult commitment entered with full awareness.
From that moment, God became what she calls the VERB of her existence — the framework of meaning itself, the orienting center of every decision, every venture, every season of life. Making God the frame of reference for her life has been, in her own words, her saving grace — the anchor that makes meaning of a world the mind might otherwise perceive as absurd and without direction. She is clear that this spiritual discipline has been the backbone of everything that followed, both as a corporate executive and as an entrepreneur.
The corporate career, the businesses, the awards, and the transition into spiritual mission were all possible thanks to that same spiritual discipline. She named her African luxury tea company YSWARA — a name she created, and one that also carries a deeper resonance: Ishvara, the Sanskrit word for God. The spiritual center 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 SEASON
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 Africa Technologies, making her one of the youngest women to lead a multinational in Africa at that time. 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.
ENTREPRENEURIAL 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.
TRANSMISSION SEASON
Mission as gift
Swaady has entered the second half of life with a quietness of spirit that comes from having nothing left to prove and nothing left to chase. For nearly three decades, her spiritual life ran as a deep undercurrent beneath a demanding professional life — the disciplines, the practices, the formation, the study, always present but rarely at the forefront. Now, retired from her companies, that undercurrent has become the main current. What was the backdrop has become the offering.
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 — through her publishing house LovingKindness Boma. 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 nearly three decades of spiritual discipline, practice, and lived formation to those who are ready to receive it.
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.
FÉLIX HOUPHOUËT-BOIGNY
"La paix, ce n'est pas un vain mot, c'est un comportement."
Peace is not an empty word — it is a behavior.
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.
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. Swaady remains an active fellow.
ALMOST 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 monasteries. 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-eight years old and still deepening."
SWAADY MARTIN"Her discernment and spiritual precision are rare and deeply transformative. She arrives with exactly the right guidance — the right prayer, the right fast, the right word — always at the right time."
MYRIAM, ENTREPRENEUR, MALI
ACADEMIC FORMATION
The mind formed
alongside the soul.
Academic formation has always run alongside contemplative practice, each deepening the other.
"Making Change" Executive Education Program — drawing on the world's religious traditions to form leaders for social change, interfaith understanding, and peace.
Wisdom Tree Collective Certificate in Spiritual Direction. Interfaith / Interspiritual Wisdom Certification with the Spiritual Guidance Training Institute. Fifteen years of accompaniment, formally and informally.
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NYU Stern, LSE, HEC Paris and HEC Lausanne
Business and strategy formation at four of the world's leading institutions — the academic grounding for a career that prepared a life of spiritual mission. Swaady also holds certificates from the Said Business School at Oxford University, and INSAAC, Institute National Supérieur des Arts et de l’Action Culturelle.
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.
WITNESSED IN EVERY SEASON
Those who worked alongside her
in the world.
The people best placed to confirm that God was truly the center of Swaady's professional life are those who were there — in the boardroom, in the office, in the daily reality of work.
“
During the years Swaady worked with me at General Electric, one of the things that always stood out was the depth and sincerity of her spiritual life. Her relationship with God was not something separate from work or daily life. It was simply part of who she was and informed the way she led, supported others, and navigated challenges. Prayer was a living practice for her. What impressed me most was that her spirituality was embodied — visible in her compassion, her service, and the consistency with which she lived her faith. Her connection to God was something people around her could genuinely feel.
SWAADY'S FORMER MANAGER AT GE
“
Working with Swaady at YSWARA was unlike any professional experience I had before. The company carried a soul and a deeper purpose present in everything we did. The name YSWARA itself was inspired by Ishvara — God in Sanskrit — and that spiritual orientation could be felt throughout the company culture. Meetings, projects, products, and daily interactions all carried meaning and intentionality. Working with Swaady showed me that business can be an expression of faith, care, and service — and that leadership can come from a place of reverence and love.
SWAADY'S FORMER EMPLOYEE AT YSWARA
WHAT THOSE SHE HAS ACCOMPANIED AND/OR COUNSELED 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.