Nubia Teixeira

Nubia Teixeira is a yoginī, dancer, and author who has spent more than 35 years teaching Bhakti yoga and Hatha practices through the lens of the Divine Feminine. She founded Mother Goddess Yoga and the Bhakti Nova School of Yoga & Dance, organizations built around making classical Indian yogic and devotional traditions accessible through embodied, feminine-centered pedagogy.

Her teaching draws from two interwoven lineages: Bhakti yoga, the devotional strand of Indian spiritual practice, and Odissi, one of the eight classical dance forms of India originating in the temples of Odisha. Where many Western yoga teachers foreground asana and alignment, Teixeira structures her classes around mudras, pranayama, and mantra, layering movement vocabularies from Odissi into sequences that honor the goddess traditions within Hinduism. She teaches that the body itself is a site of devotion.

Teixeira is the author of Yoga and the Art of Mudras, published by Mandala Publishing. The book synthesizes Bhakti devotion, Odissi dance, and Hatha Yoga practice, offering a manual on the symbolic hand gestures used in both yogic ritual and classical Indian performance. It positions mudras not as decorative flourishes but as technologies for channeling prana and invoking specific qualities of consciousness.

She began practicing and teaching yoga at 18, an unusually early start that has allowed her to build a decades-long body of work outside the circuits of celebrity teacher training franchises. From the outset, her focus has been on recovering the voices and narratives of female deities and practitioners within yoga, a tradition whose texts and modern global presentation have been dominated by male gurus and male-centered cosmologies.

Teixeira offers weekly Mother Goddess Yoga classes, one-on-one mentoring, and retreats. She has also released pranayama recordings and mantra songs, formats designed to support home practice for students who may not have access to live instruction. Her teaching is structured to welcome practitioners at all levels, from those new to yoga to advanced students seeking deeper study of devotional and dance-informed practice.

Her current work continues through the Bhakti Nova School of Yoga & Dance, where she trains teachers and leads immersions that combine asana, chant, movement, and mythology. She remains active as both a solo teacher and a voice within the broader conversation about how yoga is transmitted, adapted, and preserved outside India.

For someone encountering her work today, Teixeira offers a model of yoga practice rooted in devotion, gesture, breath, and the reclamation of feminine spiritual authority within one of the world's oldest continuous traditions.