A Note From the Founder
I have spent years walking through spiritual spaces before deciding to build one of my own, and I have watched the same pattern repeat everywhere. A seeker arrives wounded, carrying something heavy. They find a personality who seems to have answers. Slowly, without anyone naming it, that seeker hands over their sovereignty — first their attention, then their judgment, then their will. The space calls this surrender "devotion." What it produces is dependency.
I have watched wealthy visitors get ushered to the front while others waited outside in the sun. I have watched rules bend the moment someone useful broke them, and tighten the moment someone powerless did the same. I have watched people mistake proximity to a leader for progress on their own path, year after year, decade after decade, never once being asked to actually change. None of this was hidden. It was simply accepted, the way people accept weather.
I do not want to build another link in that chain. I want to close it.
When I began this work, I was not chasing an idea. This land carries a weight that goes back further than my own lifetime — a story of Sati, of what was buried here, of what I understood, over time, my own part in uncovering to be. I will not lay out the whole of that story in a page of rules. But I will tell you this much: I did not choose to build a place of comfort. I chose, because I had to, to build a place of liberation. A mukti-sthala. And liberation, if it is real, is not gentle.
So before you walk onto this ground, I want to tell you plainly what I have decided it will be — not as commandments handed down, but as conclusions I reached the hard way, often by watching what I did not want to repeat.
I decided there would be no throne. I have seen what happens when a space is built around one human being's ego — it becomes a machine for feeding that ego, dressed up as spiritual community. I will not sit on that throne, and I will not let anyone else build one either. If you bow before the Devi here, bow freely — that is reverence, and it is yours to give. But I ask you not to hand over your heart and mind to me, or to anyone else who stands on this land. We are all equal here, including me. My role, and the role of anyone who helps run this place, is simply to keep the ground clean and the structure standing — nothing more.
I decided the work would start in the dirt, not in the clouds. I have sat through enough discourse to know that talk alone does not move karma. It took me physical labor — real, unglamorous, often unnoticed — to understand what tapas actually does to a mind. So the first thing I will ask of you here is not insight. It is sweeping. Farming. Keeping this place clean with your own hands. If that sounds beneath you, I understand — it was beneath me too, once. But I will not skip that step for you, because no one skipped it for me. The mind that resents this work is the same mind that will resent the deeper work later, and it is better to find that out on the first day than the hundredth.
I decided that wealth and status would buy nothing here. I have seen too many ashrams quietly run two sets of rules — one for donors, one for everyone else. Whatever you have built outside these gates, whatever name you carry, stays outside. Inside, you are a person doing the same sweeping, the same sitting, the same facing of yourself as everyone beside you. I would rather lose a generous donor than become the kind of place that needs one badly enough to bend for them.
I decided that words would not be allowed to substitute for reality here. I have watched too many communities bend their own rules for whoever flatters the leader or funds the ashram, where an apology is treated like a receipt that clears the debt. It does not. "Sorry" does not undo a broken boundary any more than years of narrating your pain undoes the work of actually setting it down. I have seen both mistakes made in the same rooms — communities that let a broken rule be forgiven with a word, and seekers who mistake describing their wound for healing it.
Muktisthala will not indulge either one. If a boundary is broken, the consequence follows regardless of what is said afterward — not out of cruelty, but because I have seen what happens to a space that makes exceptions. It rots from the inside. If a wound is named, the work does not stop at the naming — it continues until the wound is actually closed. I would rather this place stay small and intact than become one more space where talk is mistaken for change.
And I decided that my measure of success would not be how many people stay. Most spiritual institutions count their worth in followers who keep returning. I do not want that. I built this place to help you carry the weight your ancestors passed to you, face it, and set it down — so you do not pass it to your own children, or to anyone else. If you leave here no longer needing this place, or any place like it, to hold you up — that is the only outcome I am building toward. A teacher who has succeeded is one whose student no longer needs them. I would like, eventually, for this entire Peetam to be able to say the same of everyone who has ever walked through it.
I am not asking you to believe any of this because I said it. I am asking you to test it against your own experience of every other spiritual space you have walked through. If what I have described sounds like relief rather than harshness, you already understand why I built it this way.
I am not offering you comfort. I am offering you the chance to put down what you have been carrying, and to walk away from here able to stand on your own.
The ground is ready. When you are ready for that, the gates are open.
Share what you’re carrying. We’ll hold it with care and respond if you ask.
