Asha was born in Los Angeles. She learned to drive at an early age and was one of the first female lifeguards in California. After much adventure she became an artist, educator, and community builder. She cofounded USCO, an innovative and influential multimedia art collective in New York City where her first child Dakota was born. In 1964, she and her then husband Steve Nooruddeen Durkee, moved to New Mexico and founded The Lama Foundation—one of the first spiritually motivated communes of the era to distinguish itself as an center for education, service and practice without a single teacher or belief system. Asha’s other children Shanti, Aurora and Savitri were born in New Mexico. Lama was and is a thriving community. Asha continues to serve as a board member.

After 12 years at Lama, Asha and her four daughters joined a group of friends and moved to Charlottesville, Virginia. They found a rural property and began building homes in what is now known as Miran Forest. The families developed a thriving, loose knit community, and raised many, many children. 

Asha had numerous occupations while raising her children—teacher, nurse, writer, administrator, principal, and artist to name a few. She worked at a Women’s Support center called FOCUS and started what became a large-scale hospice care program in Charlottesville. When she was in her 40’s she went to nursing school after which she spent 25 years working the medical floors at the University of Virginia Hospital—primarily in Oncology. She has helped many people die in and outside of hospital. 

She began studying Japanese Tea Ceremony in the late 60’s and has enjoyed the worldwide tea community and each of her students at The Heartwood Tea School.

After her children were grown, Asha turned more fully to her spiritual practice, embarking on a solo, yearlong spiritual/anthropological expedition around the world, engaging in a 40-day retreat in the mountain cabin above her home, attending and hosting many intensive studies of varying lengths, and practicing daily meditation (which she deems most fruitful). During this time, she also became a murshida in the Sufi Ruhaniat International. She has been teaching meditation and practices of presence for decades and has a community of wonderful students around the world. Asha advocates for life through practice, love and just being.

Throughout her life Asha tended her creative garden— from the screen print studio she built in 1962 which continues today as the Lama Flag Company, to elaborate ceiling murals created in exchange for dental work, to her untamed garden. Her studio-home is full of drawing, painting and small sculpture from all phases of her life (gallery). They span realistic large scale paintings, whimsical drawings, watercolors, dry brush and, notably, book chronicles which emerged from her spiritual practice—Forty Days Alone, The Angel Book and The Meditation Card Deck. She is happiest when her art hangs in the homes of people who love it. 

"I do not know" is Asha’s position on dogma, fairness, and reward and punishment during and after life, although she feels 99% sure that there is Consciousness everywhere out of which everything emanates.Tuning into it is among her favorite pastimes. Her teaching focuses on awakening to the awesome nature of Reality both inside and out and through the process integrating the inner and outer life.