Oh! Money in this too?
Why paying for your Sadhana is an act of dignity.
A comment appeared on our platform recently: “Oh, money is involved in this cause, too.”
A small, cryptic sentence. It carries the weight of a profound misunderstanding, and I feel responsible for addressing it, out of what Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, called “Indefinite Responsibility”: a man is responsible for everything he does, and for everything everyone else does. I carry that weight. This mission is responsible for the millions of Indians who have lost touch with the soil of their own tradition.
The Bhagavad Gita was spoken on a battlefield, not in a hermitage. Arjuna’s clarity arrived in the most uncomfortable place possible. Ours arrives here.
The Miasma of Ignorance
We are living in a miasma of ignorance. The quiet, well-dressed kind. The kind that drives to work on time and posts gratitude reels on Sunday morning.
We see families living in self-imposed mutual conflict. We see husbands and wives climbing the corporate ladder with gruelling intensity, only to realise, decades later, that the ladder was leaning against the wrong wall. Their personal space is shrinking. Their nervous systems are under siege. Their children are growing up in homes where there is proximity without presence.
It happened because an entire generation was handed a set of values that looked like progress and felt like freedom, and by the time they noticed the weight of them, they had already passed them on.
The Paradox of Value
Let me show you something about the modern Indian mind.
You pay 8,000 rupees a year for a gym membership. You accept, without protest, that the locker is extra, the personal trainer is extra, the group fitness classes are on a different tier. You accept all of it, partly because the gym has exceptional lighting, partly because that Sunday morning reel came out well, and partly because going to that gym means something in the language of your building complex and your office floor. Nobody questions the 12,000 rupees.
But here is the honest question: is Instagram the reason your body is getting stronger, or is it the reason you cannot sit in silence for four minutes? Is it the reason you cannot finish a single paragraph without checking your phone, or have one meal with your family where at least two screens are not present?
You hold three OTT subscriptions simultaneously. Netflix, Prime, Hotstar. That is somewhere between 1,500 and 1,800 rupees every month, spent without deliberation. You will tell anyone who asks that you have no time. But you have three platforms.
You have paid 22,000 rupees for a weekend wellness retreat in Coorg. Two nights at a property that uses the word “detox” in its brochure. A sunrise yoga session led by a facilitator who completed their certification in a 200-hour program. A juice menu that photographs beautifully. You returned on Sunday night, and Monday’s commute was exactly as it was the week before.
You downloaded Calm. You downloaded Headspace. You paid for both, used them for five days, and forgot about them. They still charge you every month. It slips past, quietly, every billing cycle.
Now, when a disciplined, research-backed, lineage-rooted system asks you to support this mission for the same amount you spent on food delivery last Friday, something in you says, “Money in this, too?”
This is the colonial mindset in its most ordinary form. We have been trained, across generations, to believe that the things that erode us deserve payment and the things that restore us should be free. A meal that harms your gut is worth 600 rupees. A morning practice that steadies your nervous system and returns you to your own tradition is somehow suspect for costing anything at all.
When you pay for a meal that harms you, you are a consumer. When you support a Sadhana that restores you, you become a stakeholder in your own life.
The Exchange
In our tradition, Dakshina was never about the amount. It was about the gravity of the commitment. The Gita names this in the third chapter: Yajna, purposeful offering, is the original architecture of exchange. The cycle nourishes both the giver and the receiver. Every exchange outside that spirit becomes extraction. Every exchange within it becomes abundance. This is Shubh Labh. This is what this mission operates on.
The first step of this mission is to reach the next woman whose world is closing in on her. The second is to reach the next family, the next professional who has been climbing the right ladder in the wrong building. Every rupee that enters this mission is fuel for that reach. Fuel, offered in service.
And this mission has given away what it could have charged for.
We have gone into two residential schools, one in Karnataka and one in Himachal Pradesh, and spent ten consecutive days sitting with children on the floor: no stage, no fee, no receipt. We hold space for people who are terminally ill, because a person standing at the edge of their own life deserves to know that their tradition held answers long before the hospital entered the room. Students come to this Sadhana without financially supporting it. This is Sewa. And sewa costs everything. It simply does not ask for money in return.
You are In, or You are Out
We are building a tribe. And the rule of a tribe is simple: either you are in it, or you are not.
We are at war with the cortisol spike, with the quiet epidemic of families who share an address but no longer share a life, with the nervous system that has been trained to need constant stimulation just to feel present. That war requires resources.
Perhaps when we are 10,000 members strong, when we have steadied the nervous systems of a generation, we can afford to be less direct about this. Today, we cannot.
The door is open. It will remain open. We will be here. The question is: are you ready?
That comment asked: “Money in this, too? Yes. And so are three years of this practitioner’s life. And the ten days in those school courtyards. And at 6:10 AM, every morning, without fail, for every person who showed up. Money is the fuel. The fire was already burning.
If you would like to begin, we meet every weekday morning at 6:10 AM, live on Zoom. For those who rise a little later, we are also on YouTube Live. The session is twenty minutes. The rest of the day is yours.
Hari Om Tat Sat