‘Beautiful flower’ dies in riptide
Slatington yoga studio owner moved to island 6 months ago
The waves were calm and peaceful when Surely Miller and her partner Karan Bindra first got into the water at Sosua beach late Tuesday afternoon.
Living so close to the ocean’s beauty was among the perks of moving six months ago from Slatington to the coastal province of Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic, where the couple came with barely any money and turned it into a growing yoga practice and a new home for them and her three sons, Bindra said Thursday.
“We were playing around having fun,” Bindra said about Tuesday’s trip to the beach with two other friends. “Before we knew it, we were both sucked
into a current and were being swept away from the beach into a large coastline of sharp rocks.”
Bindra survived the intense waves by “surrendering to the ocean,” but Miller, 40, was caught in the riptide and was swallowed by the sea. Bindra yelled for help but could only watch helplessly as she floated away, he said.
The next day, Miller’s body was spotted by a fisherman, about two miles from the coast of the municipality of San Felipe de Puerto Plata, according to Enfoque De Las Noticias, a Dominican online news outlet.
Bindra said she was found about 35 minutes away from where they entered the ocean.
While he is saddened to lose the woman he described as “a beautiful flower, a woman who impacted thousands of people,” Bindra said she will always be with him.
“She’s in my heart,” he said. “She is no longer just a person. She is love. She is everything she manifested in this world.”
Miller had a yoga studio in the 3000 block of Shady Nook Road near Slatington, where she taught Ashtanga, hot yoga, and Vinyasa Flow styles, according to a biography on her website. She studied in New York, Miami, Orlando, Allentown, Washington, D.C., Mexico, the Dominican Republic and south India, according to her biography.
Her mission, she wrote on the website, was “help others to intelligently know and heal their bodies, and source their own power to heal through their practice.”
“Yoga means life and she credits it with saving her own,” her biography reads. “In the chaos of life, she nearly lost herself until she reclaimed her strength through yoga.”
Milton Carrero, a journalist and songwriter based in Puerto Rico, met Miller about a year ago when she invited him to perform at her studio. He recalls performing over a weekend and watching as she went from workshop to workshop with her clients, taking maybe 15 minutes in breaks during that time.
“She was exhausted at the end of the day, but she was happy,” Carrero said.
Miller was a gritty New Yorker who was proud of her Dominican heritage and loved the island. While she studied all over the world, Carrero said Miller would help anyone, often catering her techniques to her clients, such as those dealing with addiction and depression.
“She transformed the lives of people, not only in Slatington and New York, but all over the world,” he said.
Bindra met Miller years earlier when his work at the Himalayan Institute in Wayne County led him to her practice in Slatington.
“We grew close and we knew we loved each other very much,” he said.
About six months ago, with $5,000 between them, he and Miller moved with her three sons to the Dominican Republic. “The plan was to follow our heart,” he said.
They quickly grew a clientele, which developed into a fullfledged community of yogis, healers and artists, he said. They lived with the children in the coastal town of Perla Marina.
On Saturday, the family was at the beach to celebrate her son’s 13th birthday, where he got surf lessons and a surfboard as a present. Miller posted several photos to Facebook showing the beachside celebration and a video of her son cruising on a wave before twisting into the water.
Three days later, she would be back at the beach, this time with Bindra and two of her girlfriends. Bindra said it had been a beautiful day that ended in tragedy.
“The waves looked so inconspicuous, we never had an idea that we were in any danger,” he said Thursday.
As the waves thrashed at them, Bindra said he lost Miller in the water when she panicked and tried to swim to shore. He said a wave crashed down on her and he lost her to the ocean.
Bindra said he floated on the waves, and “completely at the mercy of the ocean, I barely escaped death.”
He landed in a small patch of sand between a large stretch of sharp rocks. When he regained himself, he yelled to their friends for help, but they couldn’t hear him, he said.
Bindra said he tracked Miller’s body as long as he could, but he had to run toward the friends, who were also in the water, to warn them.
By the time he got back to where he last saw Miller, she was gone, Bindra said.
Bindra said the tragedy at the beach serves as a reminder that sometimes the most important things in life are the simplest ones, like remaining calm. He advised that all people should learn basic survival strategies.
Anyone caught in a riptide should try not to panic, but swim parallel to the shore until the current subsides, experts say.
Bindra said the tragedy is also a reminder that love is the only thing that matters in the world.
“I only have loving experiences of Surely,” he said. “That’s why I shout out to all the lovers and companions of the world to love your partner completely. That is the only thing you are going to remember.”
A GoFundMe account was established to help Miller’s three children.
“Surely has blessed so many of us with her warm healing touch and the best thing we can do for her now is make sure her children are taken care of,” the fundraiser says.
Miller’s death is the latest in a string of tourist deaths in the Dominican Republic and the second involving a Lehigh Valley woman.
Miranda Schaup-Werner, 41, a psychotherapist from Whitehall Township, suffered a heart attack on May 25 and died at the Luxury Bahia Principe Bouganville, according to Dominican officials. A family spokesman said she collapsed after getting a drink from the minibar.
Days later, at the same resort but different hotel, a Maryland couple was found dead. Officials said Edward Nathaniel Holmes, 63, and Cynthia Ann Day, 49, appeared to have suffered respiratory failure and fluid in the lungs. Their deaths are still under investigation.
“I only have loving experiences of Surely. That’s why I shout out to all the lovers and companions of the world to love your partner completely. That is the only thing you are going to remember.” — Karan Bindra, Surely Miller’s partner