Lifestyle
The Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine was surrounded by flames. Then a family came to its rescue
Tales of the miraculous have always encircled the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine.
The story of its 1950 founding goes that the spiritual guru Paramahansa Yogananda purchased the 10-acre Pacific Palisades property from an oil company president, after the oilman had a vivid dream in which his land became a “church of all religions.” Yogananda then established the grounds as a place of peace, solace and sanctuary for people of all faiths.
Swans on the lake at the Self-Realization Fellowship site.
(Self-Realization Fellowship)
The spring-fed lake in the center of the compound is its defining feature. Swans glide across its surface, new mothers push strollers around its perimeter, and people of many faiths and backgrounds meditate quietly along its shores.
The lake also played a key role in the shrine’s unlikely escape from the Palisades fire, as a family of three devotees used its waters to extinguish threatening flames.
Self-Realization Fellowship president and spiritual leader Brother Chidananda, in a livestream address to the group’s international membership, recounted the efforts of Billy Asad and his two adult children, Gabriella and Nicky, who came to the property’s rescue.
The Asads, he said, were “the divine instruments of God and guru who literally saved the Lake Shrine.”
It was the soot-covered swans, so dark they almost looked black, that first struck Gabriella Asad when she arrived at the Lake Shrine on the second day of the fire. Then, the lack of other animal life. No koi fish rose to the surface to greet her. The turtles that usually sun themselves on the scattered rocks were gone.
The Self-Realization Fellowship’s lush Pacific Palisades grounds include a historic houseboat, where guru Paramahansa Yogananda lived and wrote while directing the work around the Lake Shrine.
(Self-Realization Fellowship )
Looking around the smoldering grounds where she was baptized as a baby and now volunteers in the gardening department, Gabriella, 20, resisted the urge to fall to her knees in despair. Instead, she grabbed four fire extinguishers and, through her tears, set to work alongside her father, Billy, 54, and brother Nicky, 19.
As embers the size of golf balls pelted the property, she put out spot fires and hosed down the wood-shingled roofs of the Lake Shrine’s historic buildings.
“Just the way the sky was, all the smoke, the way the swans were covered,” she said with emotion in her voice. “It took everything in me to do the best I could.”
Her father, a former yoga teacher who lives on a houseboat in Marina Del Rey, had been tracking the explosive Palisades fire since soon after it broke out the morning of Jan. 7, when a monk spotted flames in the nearby mountains. As a longtime member of the Self-Realization Fellowship, Billy knew what was at stake: the lush meditation gardens open to all, the historic houseboat where his guru lived and wrote while directing the work around the Lake Shrine, the thousand-year-old Chinese sarcophagus containing some of Mahatma Gandhi’s ashes.
“It’s not just this beautiful garden with a lake,” Billy said. “It’s a vortex of light and love and peace and harmony and healing.”
Billy is not a certified firefighter, but as the founder and owner of WDA Fire Protection, he helps get businesses and homes fire-ready. He’s also a certified Regulation 4 tester under the Los Angeles Fire Department, which allows him to inspect and assess fire doors in L.A., and he’s licensed under the Office of the State Fire Marshal to service and test portable fire extinguishers. His father was a firefighter for 30 years and taught him about fire behavior. Over the years, Billy passed his knowledge on to his kids.
He began visiting the Lake Shrine’s paradisiacal grounds 25 years ago after a friend gave him a copy of Yogananda’s seminal book, “Autobiography of a Yogi.” He still remembers walking onto the property for the first time.
Billy Asad, left, with daughter Gabriella and son Nicky.
(Billy Asad)
“It was that ah-ha moment,” he said. “I knew it was my path.”
His kids were baptized in the Windmill Chapel, which abuts the lake and looks as if it had been magically transported from the Netherlands.
Gabriella and Nicky attended Sunday school at the temple and went on teen retreats with other Self-Realization Fellowship members. As they got older, they became regulars at the hourlong services held on the property each week. Nicky used to work as a chef at the Lake Shrine, cooking for the monks and lay people at the retreat center. Gabriella volunteers with the gardening department.
Billy Asad hoses down the hillside at the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine, where morning services are held every Sunday.
(Billy Asad)
“Ever since I can remember we’ve been going to Lake Shrine,” Nicky said. “It’s our home. It’s everything to us.”
By 10 a.m. on Jan. 8, Billy had tracked the fires long enough to know the Lake Shrine was in danger. Along with Gabriella and Nicky, he loaded his Toyota Tacoma TRD Pro with helmets, gloves, fire coats, eye protection, steel-toed boots, respirators, radios, axes, shovels and about 30 fire extinguishers. Then they headed north to the property.
Flames raged around them as they climbed into Pacific Palisades. Telephone poles crashed to the ground near the truck. There were checkpoints along the way, but Billy showed his fire credentials and was allowed to pass through.
When they arrived, the Lake Shrine had been abandoned, the 14 monks who live on the grounds safely evacuated. There was a firetruck in the parking lot, but the two firefighters there were focused on a three-story apartment building adjacent to the Lake Shrine that was consumed by flames.
Moving quickly and coordinating through their radios, the Asads rushed to extinguish spot fires crackling at the base of trees, in a patch of bamboo and on the many railroad ties that serve as stairs throughout the property.
“That’s exactly how everything starts,” Billy said. “A tree falls and catches another structure on fire.”
To prevent future ignitions, they also set to work wetting the roofs of all the buildings. Because of her volunteer job, Gabriella knew where the garden hoses were located, although a few had already melted. She took care of the visitor center. Nicky was charged with soaking the place of his baptism, the Windmill Chapel.
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Meanwhile, Billy spotted an unexpected tool: a gas-powered water pump on the lake’s small maintenance barge. It was new to him, but that didn’t matter.
“I know fire pumps,” he said. “I know hoses. I know attachments. So within five minutes after seeing it, I had the engine started and we were spraying bamboo on fire from 100 feet away.”
As it happens, a few months earlier, a resident monk of the property, Brother Bodhananda, had purchased the pump in case of future fires. Before being evacuated, he brought the pump out of storage and moved it onto the barge.
“It’s a credit to him and the maintenance manager, Bill Lackner, who works there that they had the temporary fire pump set up,” Billy said. “We jumped on the barge and immediately started using it. I have boating experience and my son does too. It was all part of this amazing divine plan.”
The Asad family worked for seven hours before pausing, including taking a moment to gently rinse some of the soot clinging to the swans’ feathers.
That evening, Nicky and Billy came back and stayed until 4 a.m. the next day, hosing down the property and continuing to extinguish spot fires that were igniting all over, sometimes repeatedly in the same place. It was blindingly exhausting work, and they believe it was the prayers and wishes of devotees across the globe who empowered them to do it.
The Lake Shrine towers were at risk as the Palisades fire raged on the hillside last week.
(Nicky Asad)
For the next three days they kept returning until the fire danger had passed. Even now, as the initial fire threat has ended, they continue to patrol the grounds daily.
On Sunday in his livestream, Chidananda shared the results of the Asads’ work. The Gandhi World Peace Memorial is unharmed even as the vegetation on the hillside behind it is gone. The houseboat is safe, as is the Windmill Chapel, where weddings, christenings and memorials are held.
The Court of Religions, where small monuments to each of the world’s major faiths welcomes visitors to the grounds, is intact. The towering pillars and crossbars of the Golden Lotus Temple were hosed down by the Asads and are once again gleaming white.
There were, however, some structural losses. The visitors’ restroom near the property’s entrance, for one. Even as, just 20 feet away, the Lake Shrine museum and bookshop with artifacts from Yogananda’s life still stands.
The living quarters of the 14 monks who reside on the property also took a hit. An ashram where half of them lived sustained slight damage to one window. The Old Santa Ynez Inn, which housed the other seven monks, burned down, taking with it the office and apartment of the Lake Shrine’s spiritual director, Satyananda.
“I’m an unhoused evacuee, but I’m doing quite well,” Satyananda said. “We adapt and move forward.”
One of the few structures lost on the property was the visitors’ bathroom.
(Self-Realization Fellowship)
Witnessing what took place at the Lake Shrine was a spiritual experience, Chidananda told fellowship members in his address, but he added that he doesn’t plan to talk about it much more.
“You know why,” he said, smiling gently. “Because it’s too easy to become proud or smug, or feel that we are better than others who didn’t fare as well. Our guru would have abhorred any sense of superiority complex based on the fact that we were spared while others suffered. That’s completely opposite to the spirit of his life.”
Instead, he said, the spiritual community’s consciousness should revolve around one question: What can we do to help?
He’s already asked fellowship communities in Southern California to organize food and clothing drives, while monks and nuns at the group’s center in Mount Washington are offering spiritual counseling over the phone.
Thanks to the Asads, the Lake Shrine community will also continue to offer an open, inclusive and beautiful space for anyone seeking a quiet sanctuary for spiritual reflection, renewal or meditation — just as soon as it’s able.
“To me, the survival of this beloved shrine means so much because of what it represents,” Chidananda said. “It represents our faith that spiritual life, a higher consciousness of love and unity and harmony, will be able to endure in this world, despite all contrary forces of maya [illusion], delusion and destruction.”
The property remains closed to the public for now, but Billy said he’s already welcomed a few firefighters and police officers to take their breaks on the Lake Shrine grounds.
“They walk around the lake and take a break from the chaos,” he said. “And you’d just see it in their eyes: ‘What is this place?’ ‘We had no clue this was here.’ ‘We’re coming back.’”
The Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine property remains closed to the public for now.
(Self-Realization Fellowship )
Meanwhile, Gabriella is relieved to see that the swans are back to their snow white color. The turtles have started sunning themselves again.
Lonnie Bunch III is the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian. He’s pictured above in September 2017.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
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J. Scott Applewhite/AP
In a memo addressed to staffers sent Tuesday, the secretary of the Smithsonian, Lonnie G. Bunch III, defended the institution after the White House issued a 162-page report that characterizes the National Museum of American History as a place which has become “subject to institutional capture by a radical, activist ideology that is fundamentally opposed to telling the noble, honest story of the great country we know and love.”
In his email, which NPR has obtained, Bunch wrote in part: “While there will always be room for improvement, this report is not a fair characterization of the work and totality of the National Museum of American History. At the Smithsonian, our work is driven by scholarship, accuracy and an uncompromising commitment to tell the fullness of America’s story. As public servants and the keepers of this institution, we are charged with helping a nation find understanding, hope and clarity and as part of that duty, we are dedicated to excellence, reflection and growth.”
He continued: “We remain focused on what grounds us: a steadfast commitment to scholarship, nonpartisanship, independence, accuracy and integrity. For nearly 180 years, the Smithsonian has worked alongside partners across government — from the White House to Congress to our governing Board of Regents — guided by our enduring mission to increase and diffuse knowledge. That purpose remains: to pursue knowledge with rigor and to serve the American public with clarity and care.”
The White House report was issued on July 4 by the Domestic Policy Council under the title “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage.”
The council faults the National Museum of American History on a multitude of fronts, saying it underemphasized the Founding Fathers and early colonial and Revolutionary history; was not sufficiently celebratory of the country’s 250th anniversary; and that it engaged in “anti-white,” “illegal alien” and transgender activism.
It also accuses the museum of trying to “indoctrinate” teachers and students through its exhibitions, programming and teaching resources.
In the report, the council also specifically criticizes museum director Anthea Hartig, who has led the National Museum of American History since 2019 and is concurrently the president of the Organization of American Historians, calling her “an activist advancing an ideological agenda contradictory to the museum’s founding purpose of fostering patriotism.”
The Trump administration has made the Smithsonian museums one of its primary targets in its efforts to reshape cultural narratives to align with its viewpoints. In August 2025, the White House requested a “comprehensive internal review” of eight Smithsonian museums, including the National Museum of American History, following an executive order issued by President Trump in March 2025 in which he called for the removal of “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian’s offerings.
According to the Smithsonian’s charter, all of its 21 museums, 14 education and research centers, and the National Zoo are meant to be run independently of the federal government. The Smithsonian is overseen by Bunch and a board of regents, which includes Vice President Vance, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and other members appointed by Congress.
In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Bunch spoke about the Smithsonian’s 250th anniversary special exhibition at the Smithsonian Castle, which is called “American Aspirations.”
He told NBC: “It’s really important for people to understand that America is much an ideal as it is a place, that it’s a series of aspirations that have really shaped who this country is. And so for me, what is so powerful is to say, ‘Let us honor the words of Thomas Jefferson and the founders, but let us use those to challenge us to be better.’”
Jennifer Vanasco edited this story.
It was after the death of her son, Laith, that Esme Saleh decided to become a folk artist.
She had always been creative, experimenting with watercolors and learning to sew and embroider at a young age.
“I had a creative inkling,” she said, “but I never pursued it.”
Everything changed on Aug. 17, 2013.
In this series, we highlight independent makers and artists, from glassblowers to fiber artists, who are creating original products in and around Los Angeles.
When Saleh was nine months pregnant, she woke up with stomach pains and presumed she was in labor. She and her husband, Nasim, immediately went to the hospital, where doctors checked her and put the baby on a heart monitor. Saleh’s blood pressure was high, however, and the baby’s heart rate kept dropping. After about an hour, his heartbeat stopped. Doctors rushed her in for an emergency C-section, but it was too late. Laith did not survive.
Saleh lost a tremendous amount of blood and developed postpartum HELLP syndrome, a dangerous form of preeclampsia, but doctors were able to stabilize her.
When she woke up, the first thing she asked was, “How’s my baby?”
After losing her son in 2013, Esme Saleh left her job as a television producer. Since then, she has sold her hand-painted candles to local designers in Los Angeles and to LVMH in Paris.
“Aug. 17, 2013, was the most difficult day of my life, and Aug. 22 was the second most difficult, the day we drove home with an empty car seat,” she said of her and her husband’s new reality.
They named their son Laith Finn Saleh.
“His first name means ‘lion’ in Arabic. His middle name is an ode to Huckleberry Finn — sharp wit, kind heart, strong moral compass — all the attributes he’s imparted on us in spirit,” said Saleh, 45.
After such a devastating loss, she found it difficult to trust the world again. “It was hard to trust anything,” she said. “The medical system. Myself. It made me realize the fragility of bringing anything to life. We take so much for granted.”
So after years of working as a television producer, Saleh left broadcast journalism and leaned into her creative spirit.
She grew up in San Diego. Her mother was raised on a farm in Mexico, and her father moved from Tijuana to Los Angeles to be near her mother, who started working for a family in Sherman Oaks at 16. They eventually settled in San Diego, where Saleh’s father, now a church deacon, worked as a car salesman.
“The word Mystic has also become a driving force of what this journey means to me,” Saleh says. “A magical, otherworldly journey that has led me to some beautiful friendships, projects and unlimited well of curiosity. When I paint each pair of candles, it feels like I’m imparting a piece of that magic.”
“He always wanted to be a weatherman on TV,” she said, explaining how he hoped to get his big break on television by doing a weather report from the car lot.
Saleh wanted to be a broadcast journalist as her father had. After graduating from San Diego State, she interned in the sports department at CBS affiliate KFMB-TV although she didn’t know much about sports. She enjoyed sharing information with people, learned how to write plays of the week and felt she had found the right career.
But during a summer class at Mesa College, she started to think journalism might not be for her.
Saleh’s home is filled with her artwork. “My home expresses a lot of the things that I do,” she says. “If it works here, then I feel like I can put it out in the world.”
“I’m an empath — a sensitive soul — so when I was reading news about death and destruction, my eyes could not lie,” she said. Her professor told her, “This may not be your thing.” But when she arranged flowers on camera, she really came alive. She decided to work behind the scenes as a producer.
Her professor helped her get her first network news job in 2003, and she moved to Los Angeles, working on hard news and entertainment coverage.
After losing Laith a decade later, she couldn’t keep doing red-carpet interviews and acting like everything was fine. “It all felt so different, superficial and hard,” she said. “I felt like there was a bigger purpose out there for me. It’s in the small things that we find the big things.”
She started by painting folk art-inspired invitations for a friend’s baby shower. She painted delicate flowers, oranges and leaves on glass, leather and even lampshades. She created a logo. “I was just trying to say yes to things that were really scary,” she said. “Laith gave me the courage to do that.”
“I was just trying to get out of hole,” Saleh says of taking up painting after her son died.
Her first son, she said, became “a catalyst for painting.”
Then, at the first Thanksgiving during the COVID-19 pandemic when people could gather again, she had a light-bulb moment. “I was setting the table and didn’t have flowers or anything to add to decorate, so I thought, ‘I have these candles. I’m going to paint them and make them fancy,’ ” she said.
Her guests were impressed.
As time went on, painting taper candles helped her find joy again, and others noticed too.
“The one thing I hear when people pick up a pair of my candles is, ‘This makes me so happy. It makes me feel like there’s life here,’ ” she said.
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1. Saleh sometimes leads painting workshops where participants can decorate items like ornaments and lampshades.
2. Leather napkin rings Saleh has painted for Nathan Turner. 3. Saleh’s hand-painted candles retail for approximately $42 to $50.
One of the hardest parts of losing a child “is that you’re not just grieving the person, you’re grieving the future you imagined with them,” said Chicago-based grief specialist Carla Harvey. “A lifetime of love suddenly has nowhere to go. Creating art doesn’t erase grief, but it can become a way to carry it.”
Saleh created her brand Mystic by Esme in 2021, but it took her some time before she could gather the courage to try to sell them.
When she brought a shoebox full of samples to Nickey Kehoe, the L.A. store agreed to carry her candles. “I was beside myself,” Saleh said.
“Her candles were absolutely beautiful, and she had a fantastic spirit that made selling them a no-brainer,” said interior designer Todd Nickey, co-founder of Nickey Kehoe.
Saleh gets a surprise kiss from her dog Olive while painting candles at her dining room table.
Saleh viewed her new side project as a way to earn extra money for piano lessons for her 11-year-old son Linus, who is an entrepreneur like his mother. “I felt proud painting the candles while he was in lessons in the next room,” she said. “It became this circular economy, and it led to bigger opportunities for me.”
Last year, luxury conglomerate LVMH commissioned Saleh to paint 465 pairs of candles, or 930 candles in total, for its Chaumet jewelry brand. The collection was unveiled at an elaborate event at the Abbaye des Vaux de Cernay, just outside Paris.
“It was fun,” Saleh said about the process, which took six months from conception to delivery. “I felt like I was dressing my candles up for a party.”
Always a hard worker, which she attributes to being a first-generation child of immigrant parents, Saleh has now created a candle collection for Pierce and Ward in Los Feliz, leather napkin holders for interior designer Nathan Turner and pomegranate wrapping paper for Olive Ateliers. The candles retail between $42 to $50 for a pair, and recently, she developed a handsome pewter candle shaver that will be released in the winter.
Her dining room can sometimes feel like “an assembly line,” Saleh says.
Saleh holds a pair of candles she has embellished with florals.
Occasionally, she leads painting workshops, and she loves helping others tap into their creativity. The most meaningful one for her was an ornament workshop attended by several victims of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires. “Without saying anything, we understood each other,” she said. “I understood that they were trying to create memories.”
Saleh knows what it means for things not to last — “impermanence,” she calls it — whether it is homes, candles or life itself.
She paints every day in the art-filled dining room of her home (unless it’s Little League season), surrounded by her family, candles and her two dogs, Lennon and Olive. ”Painting is like meditation,” she said. “You can sit in your dining room and tune everything out and just be in the moment.”
Even the family’s summer bucket list receives an artistic flourish.
An arch inside Saleh’s home receives a personalized touch.
She knows painting candles isn’t new, but she believes her motivation and the care she puts into each candle makes them special beyond their looks.
She has learned to look at the world that way, that painting in her dining room has offered her healing and joy, that she can trust herself and her body, that continuing to be inspired by her two boys — “one in spirit and the other here on Earth” — means that Laith will always be with her.
Many people think healing means moving on, said grief specialist Harvey, but “it’s really about finding ways to move forward while keeping the people we love woven into our lives. That’s what I see in her candles, not an ending, but an ongoing relationship with her son.”
“I feel like my son is channeling through this medium,” Saleh said, her voice breaking as she painted a taper. “He’s whispering to me, ‘Mom, this is your path.’ That has been my driving force. We’re going to grow this together.”
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