Baker, editor, spirituality-seeker all rolled into one: Meet Karen D'Souza

By Amrita Paul, SheThePeople.TV

Novelist D.H. Lawrence had once said, “A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.” And almost swearing by this, is 32-year-old Gurgaon native, Karen D’Souza, who manages to practice and teach yoga, whip up cakes for friends and family while maintaining her full-time job as an editor at a travelogue published by one of the leading media houses in the country.

Karen started practicing yoga, when she moved to Dubai a few years ago and realized that work was keeping her unusually busy.

“The company was cutting down their staff when I joined, so what I was doing was ideally three people’s work. My friend advised me to start acroyoga, which is a combination of acrobatics and yoga and it helped me de-stress and also uplifted my spirits,” says Karen, who quit her job a year later and came back to India and trained for one month in Dharamshala to be a yoga instructor.

Karen D Souza

Today, even if she is not training other people, Karen ensures that she does yoga at least for half an hour everyday as it relaxes her mentally and physically and also concentrate at work. She has also started practicing Reiki in the last two months.

While yoga happened by serendipity, baking was initiated into Karen’s life, as a last resort, when she was 16-year-old.

“In my family, everyone has a sweet tooth. So, one day my mom just got tired and said she is not making any more cakes for us. That’s how I picked it up, and even today, I try and bake once every weekend,” she adds.

Karen's Cakes

And if you thought, that was it, Karen still finds time to catch up on her personal reading after coming back home from a job which requires her to read for most of the day. Although she is fiercely attached to the concept of reading an "actual" book, with her experience in publishing, she feels that the industry is inching towards making it presence felt through the online medium.

Karen, while growing up studied in seven different schools because her father kept shifting bases as an officer in the Indian Air Force. Needless to say, she still loves travelling and pursuing her various interests which makes her happy.Proud parent of two cats, she also volunteers with a Delhi-based rescue and rehabilitation organization, Umeed.