who we are
A spiritual home in Rishikesh
A place to learn, to practise, and to belong.
We’re a community drawn to bhakti — the yoga of the heart. Not a belief to sign up to, but a practice: a way of remembering who you really are, and reawakening a love that’s been in you all along. We share it however it’s welcome — weekly gatherings, retreats and ashram life, a yearly festival of song, and the ordinary company of friends on the same path.
our story
A family, and a path
Bhakti Yoga Rishikesh began the way most good things in Rishikesh begin — a few friends, a harmonium, and an evening nobody wanted to end. It has grown well past that evening since.
Today we’re a community and a place to practise: weekly gatherings of song and wisdom, a 21-day ashram experience, retreats, a yearly festival of song, journeys to holy places, and the ordinary, daily work of living this way together. Longtime residents and first-time travellers, practitioners of forty years and seekers of forty minutes — you come, you take part, and somewhere along the way it starts to feel like family.
Everything we offer is freely given, in the spirit of bhakti.
what is bhakti
The yoga of the heart
Bhakti is devotion — the oldest and simplest of the yogas, and in some ways the boldest. The meditative paths work to quiet the mind; the bodily paths work to master the body. Bhakti goes straight for the heart, because it begins with an unusual claim: that you are not your body or your mind at all, but the conscious self within them — and that this self is made for love. The practice is simply the reawakening of that love, and the turning of it toward its source. The methods are wonderfully ordinary:
Sing
Kirtan
The names of the Divine, sung together, until the room becomes one voice.
Repeat
Japa
A quiet, personal meditation: the maha-mantra on beads, one name at a time.
Listen
Satsang
Sitting with wisdom — readings and talks from the Gita and the bhakti texts, honest questions welcome.
Share
Prasad & seva
Food offered with love and then shared, and the simple joy of being useful.
“If one offers Me with love and devotion a leaf, a flower, a fruit or a little water, I will accept it.”
Bhagavad-gita 9.26
Notice the “Me.” Bhakti’s Divine isn’t a blank force or an empty silence — it’s someone, who receives what’s offered. That’s the whole difference between bhakti and simply emptying the mind: you’re not trying to dissolve into the absolute, you’re getting reacquainted with it.
our roots
An ancient, living lineage
At Radha-kund · photo: Vrajacandrika, CC BY 2.0
What we practise is not new. Kirtan as we know it — sung together, with drum and cymbals, everyone invited — took shape among the wandering singers of fifteenth-century Bengal, who taught the boldest version of this path: that the surest way home is simply to sing the names of the Divine, together, with no one turned away.
That practice has been carried for five centuries, teacher to student, to the present day. Our own community owes much to the modern teachers who first sang it to us, and brought many of us to bhakti.
We hold it with love, and share it the same way. Whoever you are, wherever you begin, there’s a seat for you beside us — the chant meets you there.
the family
Faces from our community
Some of the smiles you’ll meet — come add yours.
Come meet us in person
The best introduction to bhakti isn’t a page about it — it’s a little time among people who live it. Tell us what you’re drawn to, and we’ll help you find your way in.