Where this comes from
You do not need any of this in order to begin. It is here because you may want it later, and because you are entitled to know exactly what you are joining.
Raja Yoga
Heartfulness rests on Raja Yoga, the classical yoga of the mind rather than of the body. It is concerned with what attention does and where it settles. There are no postures to learn and nothing physical is required of you.
Sahaj Marg, the natural path
The particular system we practise is called Sahaj Marg, which means the natural path. It was shaped in India in the early twentieth century and its guiding idea is that a spiritual practice should fit inside an ordinary working life rather than ask you to leave one.
Transmission
The element that distinguishes this practice from secular mindfulness is transmission, known in Sanskrit as pranahuti. During a sitting, the trainer offers something that most people describe as a settling or a quietness that arrives more quickly than it would on its own. We do not ask you to believe in it. We ask you to sit three times and notice whether anything is different.
Shri Ram Chandra Mission
Heartfulness is the practice taught by Shri Ram Chandra Mission, which is a registered non-profit organisation operating in more than one hundred and sixty countries. Our current guide is Kamlesh Patel, known to practitioners as Daaji.
How it reached South Africa
The practice arrived here through Indian families, most of them Gujarati, with some Tamil and Telugu families among them. It has stayed close to those communities for several decades. That is how most spiritual practices travel, and it is also why this website exists, because a practice that only reaches the families it arrived with has not finished arriving.