Davina Delor

Davina Delor (born Martine Lahary; 1952) is a French dancer, choreographer, writer, and famous for her popular TV show Gym Tonic who adopted monkhood as a Buddhist nun in 2004 after meeting the Dalai Lama. After ordination, she changed her name to Gelek Drolkar. She converted her country home at Haims into a Buddhist monastery, and along with three other nuns, teaches Buddhism to students and lay persons. She has published a number of books on yoga and Buddhism, one of which is titled Le bonheur selon Bouddha (The Happiness according to Buddha) which explains the precepts of Buddhism.

Biography Davina Delor was born in France in 1952. In her formative years in Haims, a commune in the Vienne department in the Poitou-Charentes region of western France, under the guidance of her mother, she was provided a Parisian Catholic religious education, and studied yoga and Hindu dance forms from India in addition to classical and contemporary dance. She took up a career of dance, yoga, and creative gymnastics.

Concurrent with her career, she pursued studies in traditional Chinese medicine under the direction of Dr. Trinh Quan Ngoc and became a certified acupuncturist at the Asian Acupuncture Centre in Paris. She did research in psychopathology and graduated from the College of Health-Medicine and Human Biology of Paris XIII with a degree in alcoholism and drug addiction.

In 2003 Delor's career took a dramatic turn when she met the Dalai Lama, the spiritual head of Tibetan Buddhism at Bercy and was influenced by his teachings.

Publications Delor has authored several books on yoga and the philosophy of Tibetan Buddhism. Besides her Le bonheur selon Bouddha, published in 2012, in which she says that "to be happy, we must first learn to suffer less" and to "free ourselves of our sorrows by dealing with our failings", Vivre Sans Dépendance (1999) Qi gong, santé parfaite (1993) Madhevi Le Roman Du Corps (2002)