The Joy of Uber Driving: A Wild Ride to Self-Love

Yamini Redewill is an Uber driver in San Francisco—one of a growing number of rideshare drivers around the world. What makes her unique is that she’s a seventy-nine-year-old single woman who views her Uber driving as a form of spiritual practice!

The Joy of Uber Driving chronicles the unexpected corkscrew twists and turns Redewill encounters on the road to love and happiness. How could she know that all those fabulous dreams she cherished as a younger woman were just illusions on the way to reality and would vanish like dust in the wind? But ultimately, her wild ride through life—which includes obsessive love on Catalina; sex, drugs, and alcohol in Hollywood; eleven years of celibacy in Buddhism, and Tantric sex and spirituality in India—helps her wend her way to her authentic self and to creative fulfillment in the winter of her life. In The Joy of Uber Driving, Redewill shares the wisdom that comes from living a full life of heart-centered passion, as well as the self-awareness that has allowed her to be the happy, confident, creative, and young “old broad” she now finds herself to be.

Born Frances Hamilton Redewill in 1939 in Oakland, CA, Yamini Redewill was given the name Ma Veet Yamini, meaning “going beyond the night,” by Bhagwan Shree Rashneesh in India in 1981. Redewill attended UC Berkeley and graduated with a BA in Fine Arts from UCLA in 1964. After first pursuing a career in acting and singing, she later rose to prominence as the head of wardrobe at CBS-TV and later as a freelance costumer and designer at various Hollywood studios. She later became a photographer and women’s empowerment advocate who created a new niche in photography with her Natural Goddess portraits of women over forty in nature. In 2014, Redewill compiled her best goddess portraits into a self-published book called The Natural Goddess: Portraits of True Beauty in Women Over 40, which included portraits of Diane Ladd, Connie Stevens, Marla Maples, and Stephanie Powers, along with such notable authors as Barbara Marx Hubbard, Ariel Ford, Lynn Andrews and others.