What OMJOOMSUH Offers
Everything below grows out of the same daily rhythm. Nothing here is required to begin, and the first thing on the list is free and open to anyone.
The practices
The morning mantra. A small group meets on Zoom every weekday at six o’clock and chants three mantras together, one repetition on each long out-breath. The Mahamrityunjaya settles the body. The Gayatri settles the mind. The thirty-two names of the Goddess Durga work on the patterns that run below thought. The order matters, because a shaken body cannot steady a mind. It takes about fifteen minutes and you need not know any of the mantras beforehand. The sound carries you. This is the ground of the whole work, and it costs nothing.
Weekend yoga. Asana taught in person, Saturday and Sunday mornings, eight to nine thirty, in a small studio in Vasant Kunj, Delhi. It runs as a syllabus of nine stages rather than a class you drop into. You learn to sit and to breathe before you learn anything strenuous, and you move to the next stage when your body is ready for it. The ninth stage is where your own daily practice begins. You do not need to be flexible and you do not need to have practised before. The room is small and women only. The cleansing practices, jala neti and shankhaprakshalana, need supervision and a washroom, so they are taught one to one by appointment and sit outside the weekend syllabus.
NEEV. Neev means foundation. It is a sixteen-week practice for women whose bodies are moving through hormonal change, through perimenopause, menopause, or thyroid trouble. It meets live on Sunday evenings, online from anywhere in India or in the Vasant Kunj studio, and every session is recorded. Each week adds a short home routine, so the practice builds instead of resetting. The cohort is deliberately small, around fifteen women, and a welcome kit reaches the house before the first Sunday. NEEV works at the root, on a nervous system that has run on stress for years, rather than symptom by symptom. It begins with a reading of where a woman actually is, so the practice answers her body rather than a general idea of a body.
The evening darshana. A few minutes before sleep, looking back at the day as it actually felt. You turn the phone sideways and set each part of the day where it belongs. It asks nothing to be written or explained. Over weeks of doing it you begin to see what stirs your anger and what stirs your envy, and the seeing itself steadies you.
The instruments
These four read something back to you. They are mirrors. None of them scores you against another person, and none of them is ever sold or shared.
The Health Balance Score Card. A reading of where you sit today, taken from Samkhya — one of the six classical systems of Indian philosophy, and the oldest surviving account of how mind, body, and constitution fit together — and then checked against your own blood work. Your reports show the effect. This looks for the cause underneath them. It arrives as a printed document you can hold and as the same reading on your phone. Everything else is shaped around it, because it turns “this food is nourishing” into “this food is nourishing for you”.
The Annamaya Index. The opposite pole of counting calories. One reading out of a hundred on how well the food fed the body you have, in this season, in the place you live. It reads four things: how many different plants reach your plate across a week, how whole the food is, how it was cooked and in what vessel and with which spices, and whether it suits your own reading. It counts up, it forgives, and it never shames. The fuller seasonal form follows the six ritus — the six seasons the Indian tradition maps into the year — and reads what is fresh in the markets near you.
The Niranjan Index. What the evening darshana produces. It follows Manah Prasad — the serenity of a day — and sets Samatva — its steadiness through what the day brought — quietly beside it. Steadiness is never averaged in, because a steady hard day is still a hard day. The reading is yours alone and is never shown or compared.
Swasthya Kosha. A treasury of your own health, kept by hand. A paper journal, a few lines each morning across sixteen weeks, in three movements: Sthirta, settling; Avalokana, watching yourself day by day without judgement; and Swadhyaya, reading back what you wrote and taking your own next step. What forms is a record in your own handwriting that no application can give you. It arrives inside the NEEV welcome kit and is also available on its own.
Swasthya Yatra. A health journey, for members carrying a long-running condition. It gathers the markers a woman is already tracking in a notebook, along with her weight, onto one screen, so she can see how they have moved over months. From it she can generate a one page note to carry into her next appointment. It states what the numbers are and what has happened. It never advises. Her doctor decides. Health data of this kind is held under lock and is visible only to her.
Where the words live
The wiki. This site. A reference for every concept the practice touches, written so you can look something up the moment it comes up.
The newsletter. A weekly essay, sent by email, on the body, the self, the household, and the tradition. It is the long-form half of the work.
The application. A quiet home for the practice at app.omjoomsuh.com: the morning session, the recorded rounds when you cannot make six o’clock, your evening, your Annamaya, and your own courtyard where nothing is shared or compared.
What this is not
There is no weighing. There are no calories and no leaderboards. Nothing here is medical advice, and nothing here is a substitute for your own doctor. If a number on a scale is the only measure of health you are interested in, this work will frustrate you.
Return to The Door.