Urmila Devi Dasi

Urmila Devi Dasi (, ; also known as Dr. Edith E. Best) (born 10 May 1955 in New York City) is an American educator. Her father was president, and later CEO, of the Manischewitz food company, founded by his grandfather. She joined the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) in 1973 in Chicago and became a disciple of A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the founder of ISKCON.
She and Pratyatosa, (Howard Best), married in 1973. They have two sons and one daughter; eight grandsons, six granddaughters, and two great-grandsons. In 1996 Urmila and Pratyatosa entered the renounced ashrama of vanaprastha (retired life).
Her primary work in ISKCON has been in the area of education. Urmila has also been involved in the debates on women's place in ISKCON.
Urmila Devi Dasi has a of School Administration and a Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Urmila is also the chair of the Sastric Advisory Council to the Governing Body Commission of ISKCON. she published her three-volume set Dr. Best Learn To Read, a program consisting of a set of children's reading books, teacher guides, and student activity books to take a young child from learning the English alphabet to fluent reading. The reading books are all stories about Krishna or related to Vaisnava/Vedic culture. Aimed at ages 3-8, The Talking Books have the text in English and can be listened to in the following languages, page by page: English, Hindi, Gujarati, Telugu, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, Mandarin, Thai, Japanese, Persian, Hebrew, Afrikaans, Croatian, Finnish, Portuguese, Italian, Slovenian, Slovak, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Hungarian, and Dutch. She has also published a book on mantra meditation, The Great Mantra for Mystic Meditation. In 2016, she published a new edition of Raghunatha Dasa Goswami's Sri Manah Siksa Available at these sellers. This two-volume set features 12 new full-color oil paintings and 120 new black and white drawings, Bhaktivinoda's prose commentary, never-before published Bhaktivinoda's songs on Manah siksa, and commentaries by Jayadvaita Swami, Sivarama Swami, Sacinandana Swami, and Bhaktivijnana Swami. She published a spiritual novel, Essence Seekers.

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