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Avtar Kaur Khalsa is a Level 1 and Level 2 Professional Teacher Trainer and Karam Kriya consultant and trainer based in Germany. This interview is part of SDI’s ongoing Sikh Women in Action series.
Born in Nice. Raised in France. Called by Guru Ram Das. Now living her dharma near Frankfurt.
There’s a particular kind of woman who doesn’t become a teacher or a leader because she set out to. She becomes one because the path simply kept asking her to, and she accepted this Seva.
That’s Avtar Kaur Khalsa.
Born in the south of France to a Swiss mother and an Italian father, Avtar Kaur grew up moving across the country: Nice to Toulouse, Toulouse to Paris and eventually back to the coastline near Biarritz, where the Atlantic surfers gathered and the energy was very much of the sea. She studied journalism in Paris, worked as a journalist and press attaché, and by most external measures was building a full and capable life. Something, though, was missing.
She had felt it since she was 11. A quiet pull toward something more. In the early 1980s in her corner of France, there wasn’t much space for that kind of longing. You had the Catholic Church, or you had not much at all.
Then her life shifted.
She experienced two stillbirths. Each one, she says, arrived like a messenger. Not as punishment, but as angels. “Two angels who brought me to the path of myself.” After the second loss, something in her stopped resisting. She started listening to her soul.
Around this same time, a friend brought her to a yoga class in the southwest of France, taught by a woman who had spent years in China studying internal martial arts, learning Mandarin, absorbing Tai Chi and Chinese sword, and who had returned to France without a penny and was teaching Kundalini Yoga and all the other ancient artforms in a garage with a gas heater and one worn cassette tape on loop. Avtar Kaur walked in, sat down, and knew.
I’m at home. I found my home.
After her first 40-day sadhana, she went directly to a Master’s Touch course in France, where she met Yogi Bhajan for the first time. The great teachers of that era were all there: Gurmukh, Guru Dass Singh, Shiv Charan Singh. She was, as she put it, like a fish in the water.
On Becoming Sikh
Avtar Kaur doesn’t romanticize the transition from Kundalini Yoga practitioner to Khalsa. She’s honest about the resistance.
“My ego was saying, yeah, but what am I going to do? I’m living in the south of France. Surfers everywhere. And now a turban?”
But through the practice, things had already begun falling away on their own. She stopped drinking. Stopped smoking. Stopped eating meat. Stopped going to parties. “Like a funnel,” she says, “eliminating, eliminating.” She was already living the life she was being asked to commit to. There was just that one last thing: the needle hole.
The moment of decision came at a Gurdwara at the European Yoga Festival. She walked in, looked at a picture of Guru Ram Das, and it was love at first sight. Not the kind she had gone looking for. The kind that finds you.
“It’s not my love for Guru Ram Das. It’s the love of Guru Ram Das for me.”
She surrendered her driving license to the Guru that day, placed it in the Gurdwara. Literally. “Now you’re driving my life. I don’t want to drive anything anymore.” Someone chased after her with it. She told them she didn’t want it back.
Shortly after, she met her husband, Gurbasant Singh Khalsa, a committed Sikh and gifted musician whose shabad singing would one day become the soundtrack of their children’s childhoods. She moved to Germany. Months later, she traveled to Amritsar and took Amrit at the Golden Temple, becoming Khalsa. She was in the middle of filming a documentary on Kundalini Yoga and Yogi Bhajan. The moment called, and she answered.
On Karam Kriya and the Mind
Alongside her Kundalini Yoga practice, Avtar Kaur has been a student and trainer of Karam Kriya, the school of applied numerology developed by Shiv Charan Singh, for nearly 30 years.
What draws her most to Karam Kriya is what it teaches about the mind. The first thing students’ study, she says, is how the mind works, because the mind can be your best friend or your deepest enemy. “With these techniques, you can only be authentic to your own soul. It’s difficult to cheat.”
She didn’t choose Karam Kriya. She says it chose her. “Once I started, there was no way back.”
On Raising Children in Sikhi
Avtar Kaur and Gurbasant have two children, both raised in the dharma: Siri Amrit and Sarab Jot. She spent the first six years with them at home, a choice she made deliberately and with full support from her husband. She integrated the children into everything: Japji Sahib in the mornings, Guru Ram Das lullabies at bedtime, kirtan at the Gurdwara, the whole rhythm of Sikh household life woven into the ordinary fabric of growing up.
She changed her own name legally to Avtar Kaur, anchoring her identity. And she made sure the children’s full names were always used in full. When Sarab Jot once mentioned that some people called him just “Sarab,” she was clear: “If you remove the Jot, you remove the light. That doesn’t work.”
The goal wasn’t to make them Sikhs. It was to give them a foundation. “The message of Guru Nanak is for humanity. We made our choice. What they do afterwards is their choice.”
Both children eventually attended Miri Piri Academy, a wish Avtar Kaur and Gurbasant had held since visiting the school together in 2000, before either child was born. They walked around the campus and said to each other: we’d like to send our children here someday.
On Leadership as Seva
For over a decade, Avtar Kaur served on the boards of 3HO Europe and 3HO International. She was also on the SDEI board and served in various capacities in the European sangat. She and Gurbasant co-founded Satnam Europe, an Ayurvedic and yoga products company built on a principle of dharmic service, offering over 5,000 products in four languages at its height, along with a publishing arm and music event organizing, including tours for Mirabai Ceiba, Sat Kirin and Snatam Kaur.
She never describes any of it as leadership. Not really.
“I never wanted to be a leader. I was happy with my family, my dog, my walks. And yet I’m very nourished when I teach, when I give back what I received.”
Her understanding of leadership is quietly radical. “A true leader is the one who doesn’t want to be. It falls on you, out of service.” She saw her years on those boards as holding a space, specifically the space between generations: making sure the younger sangat still felt invited to be part of something worth showing up for.
“In leadership, one has to be careful not to put too much shadow on the light of the others.”
She also describes a deeper motivation behind her advocacy for European representation within our global institutions. The sangat here has its own strength, its own diversity, its own long history. She wanted that seen.
Advice for the Younger Generation
When asked what guidance she would offer younger women and the next generation, Avtar Kaur spoke less about achievement and more about learning to trust the inner voice beneath the noise of modern life.
She reflected on how overwhelming today’s world can feel, especially for young people constantly moving between opinions, impressions, and expectations. Rather than searching endlessly outside ourselves for certainty, she encouraged returning inward.
Her advice was simple, though not always easy: listen to the call of your soul.
Again and again, she returned to the importance of trust. Quoting Guru Arjan, she shared a line that has stayed with her through life:
“Where there’s love, there’s no question, and when there’s question, there’s no love.”
“Trust the love,” she said.
A Note on Who She Is
When Prem first suggested this conversation, she described Avtar Kaur as a teacher, a mother, and a community leader. All three things are accurate. But sitting with her for nearly an hour and a half, what comes through most is something harder to name.
She is genuinely curious. She asks questions back. She laughs easily. She speaks about her children with a warmth that fills whatever room she’s in. She holds hard truths steadily, without drama, without performance. And she has a journalist’s instinct for what matters in a story, which is probably why she was the one asking the questions first.
Avtar Kaur has dedicated herself to the Khalsa Panth with humility and consistency for over 25 years, creating programs across Europe in corporate counseling, women’s camps, and teacher trainings, and has served on the boards of SDEI, 3HO, 3HO Europe, and the French NKYTA. In Summer 2024, she was ordained as a Sikh Dharma Minister.
She lives near Frankfurt with Gurbasant Singh, her husband and musical partner.
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