A travel guide that explores over 500 places of spiritual interest for the modern traveller
By Ganesh Dass The day was ending at Madhuban Ashram, as the sun’s last golden rays shined out as it nestled its way down between the peaks of the Himalayan valley. Just miles from Kainchi and Nainital, Madhuban, the Himalayan branch of the Shri Aurobindo ashrams, posed a logistical launching point and picturesque backdrop for …
Paramahansa Yogananda: Inner Culture, October, 1935. All knowledge comes from the inner source, from the soul without limitation. How are you going to find out all the mysteries of the body and all the mystery of divine things in one short span of human life if you do not tap your inner source, which is omniscient? …
Inspired by Ginsberg, writer Akanksha Singh visits India’s meditation capital. Rishikesh is many things to many people. It is where the Ganges is, in some sense, the purest – having just slowed its path from the meltwaters of the Gangotri. To Hindus, Rishikesh is a site of pilgrimage. To aspiring yogis, it is the world’s …
BBC News 12 Sept 2020, by Soutik Biswas, India correspondent A Canadian backpacker’s meeting with The Beatles in a spiritual retreat In India half a century ago is the subject of a new documentary. For filmmaker Paul Saltzman it was a “life-changing” experience. When a 23-year-old Canadian man arrived at an ashram near India’s holy …
BBC News 14 may 2015 by Soutik Biswas BBC News, Rishikesh. In the wooded hills near India’s holy city of Rishikesh, a 67-year-old British man trudges gingerly through a forest. He is on his way to a derelict ashram where his musical idols once stayed. He first saw the Beatles in the summer of 1963, …
Thursday, 26 June 2014. It hosted the world’s most-famous popstars as they went on a journey of spiritual awakening that transformed their music forever. It was the home of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, guru to the Beatles, who they visited in 1968 and where, it is thought, they penned most of the White album, including …
Anna writes that by the end of March 2007, one of my long-wished dreams came true – I spent a week in Rishikesh, India. In this blog I would like to tell you the exciting story about searching and finding the ashram where about 39 years ago The Beatles, their relatives, friends and girlfriends arrived …
Do you want to know what my daily life was like in India, what it is like to stay in a Hostel, to know more about Rishikesh? A new video has arrived, for us to continue the vlogs of our travel routine and our travels around the world! Rishikesh is a major center of study and …
Extract from Ashrams of India Volume 2 Chundiwala Mataji Ashram Ashram of a breatharian monk who has lived without food and water since 1940, saying that the goddess Amba sustained him. Ambaji Area: Near Gabbar Hill Saint: Prahlad Jani aka Mataji (13 August 1929 – 26 May 2020). Indian Saint Prahlad Jani was formally known …
The epic story of how Buddha Bose, Bishnu Ghosh and Yogananda took yoga from Calcutta to the rest of the world. In Calcutta Yoga, Jerome Armstrong deftly weaves the multi-generational story of the first family of yoga and how they modernized the ancient practice. The saga covers four generations, the making of a city, personal …
By Steve Paulson. What’s not widely known is Brilliant’s remarkable backstory. To say he was an unlikely candidate to lead a global campaign against smallpox is an understatement. In the 1960s, Brilliant was a young doctor caught up in the wave of political activism and then the Summer of Love in San Francisco. “It really wasn’t fair …
By Mike Rubin. May 2 2017. Surya Botofasina, 39, a keyboardist who lives in Brooklyn, has fond memories of growing up at the Shanti Anantam Ashram in Agoura, Calif., which was established in 1983 by Alice Coltrane, the jazz pianist, harpist and widow of the saxophone immortal John Coltrane. Mr. Botofasina’s favorite times were Sundays at …
From the diary of American ashram resident and devotte Thelma Benn (later Rappold), who spent three years with Ramana Maharshi from February 1948 until Summer 1950. The Mahakumbhabishekam celebration from the 14th to the 17th of March was a big affair. Thousands of people came from all parts of India. Special trains were dispatched from …
A devotees hotel from the past, the Bombay Ananda Bhavan Hotel, an oasis set amongst the Raj-era bungalows in the cantonment of Bangalore, India. The Bangalore cantonment of bungalows, gardens, race courses, clubs, barracks and parade grounds for its mixed civilian and military population, was established in 1809, separate from the city. Many devotees of …
A devotees hotel from the past, the Hotel Evelyn in Nainital, India. Hotel Evelyn, The Mall Road, Nainital – 263002, Uttarakhand, India. Hotel Evelyn is among one of the oldest hotels in Nainital and has a rich history of hospitality. It has been serving guests even before the town became a retreat for city-weary folk. …
Series: Westerners in India. The following article is an excerpt from Ashrams of India. Cuban-American writer Mercedes de Acosta (1893 – 1968) travelled to Arunachala to meet Ramana Maharshi in 1938 after reading Paul Brunton’s book A Search in Secret India, and stayed for three days. This visit made a tremendous impact on her. She later wrote in her 1960 autobiography Here Lies the Heart that these were the three most significant days of her life…
Series: Westerners in India. The following article is an excerpt from Ashrams of India. The Razor’s Edge It is thought that sometime in the late 1920s, a young traveller from America bumped into Swami Ramdas one night at the Meenakshi Temple in Madura, the two of them had previously met three years earlier in the …
This article was first published in The Mountain Path, 1988, pp. 239-45. In January 1938 Somerset Maugham, the British novelist, visited Sri Ramanashram for a few hours. The brief contact he had with Bhagavan inspired Maugham so much, he decided to use him as the model for a fictional Guru in The Razor’s Edge, a novel of …
Letter from India. By David Shaftel July 22 2010. Books about Westerners seeking enlightenment in India seem to be everywhere these days, including in India itself. In Mumbai, Elizabeth Gilbert’s juggernaut of a memoir, “Eat, Pray, Love,” is prominently displayed in street corner bookstalls and hotel bookstores. Bootlegged copies are hawked to tourists stuck in …
In 1911, Frank Humphreys, a policeman stationed in India, became the first westerner to discover Sri Ramana Maharshi. He wrote articles about him which were first published in The International Psychic Gazette in 1913. Sri Ramana only became relatively well known in and out of India after the publication of two books in 1934 and 1935 by Paul Brunton, who had first visited him in January 1931. Some of the foreign visitors included …