I interviewed my yoga teacher at Yoga West LA, Alexandra Aitken, the British actress, in February of 2009.
The Telegraph reports Oct. 6, 2013:
…Alexandra Aitken’s marriage had hit the rocks, her father has confirmed that that she is living separately from her husband, the Sikh warrior Inderjot Singh.
“I think they are apart,” says Jonathan Aitken, the former Conservative Cabinet minister. “There is uncertainty. She has been in contact with him recently. They are not divorced, but they have, obviously, hit a rocky patch.”
Aitken, who was not able to attend the couple’s 2011 wedding, in a 4am ceremony witnessed by 150 holy men from the Nihang sect, adds, in an interview with the Daily Mail: “They are not, officially, separated, but they are going through a bad patch.”
The 33-year-old former “It girl” stunned her family when she announced in 2010 that she was to be married to Inderjot, swapping the nightclubs of Mayfair for the holy village of Anandpur Sahib, in the Punjab.
She remains devoted to the teachings of Gur Gobind Singh. Aitken discloses that when his daughter returned home this summer she refused to sleep in a bedroom.
For years she had a reputation as a hedonistic party girl. Now Alexandra Aitken, daughter of former government minister Jonathan, has married a devout Sikh and changed religion, too. How did her transformation come about? Here, Alexandra, 30, tells her intriguing story . . .
I looked at Kabbalah — the fashionable offshoot of Judaism — I read about Islam, about Buddhism, but it wasn’t until about four years ago when I went to a Kundalini yoga class in Los Angeles, after I moved out there from London, that I started to look at Sikhism.
I’d tried various different types of yoga before, but never Kundalini, which comes from the Sikh tradition and incorporates mantras or prayers into the classes.
The people I met through Kundalini just seemed to be so amazingly happy that I felt compelled to ask why.…Sikhism. Everything has been a very natural and organic process, things evolved step by step.
Part of that process has been meeting Inderjot Singh, the man I’ve called my husband from the day we met — though of course it’s only just become official.I first saw him, about a year ago, on the roof of the Golden Temple in Amritsar and just knew we were going to get married.
Six weeks later, I flew back to Los Angeles and we’d still not said a word to each other, but somehow I was in love with him.
I just knew I had to go back to India to find him, so I did. I can’t really explain it. I was just praying he didn’t live in a tent on top of a mountain, because I knew that even if he did I was going to marry him anyway.
