The Door
Start here if you have never heard of OMJOOMSUH.
What this is
OMJOOMSUH is a small daily practice group run from Delhi.
Every weekday morning at six, a group of people sit on a video call and chant three old Sanskrit mantras together for twenty minutes. Every night at eight there is a short recorded practice to help you sleep. A batch runs for a hundred days. That is the whole of it.
I am Arjun. I lead the morning chant myself, every day.
Who is Arjun
I am not a teacher. I have no doctorate in yoga and no degree in yogic sciences. I am a practitioner, and so is my family.
What I know of yoga came from being around it. My father taught me asanas when I was five or six. At twelve I went to the ashram for the first time and was initiated into the guru shishya parampara, the line of teacher and student that this tradition runs on. My father has practised for more than fifty-five years. My sister for more than forty. We do not call ourselves teachers. We try to live it.
Most families, when they gather, talk about films or politics or food. Some talk about Dostoevsky or Kant. When my family gathers, the talk drifts to yoga. To Samkhya. To some pranayama one of us has been sitting with. It always has. That is the only real difference between us and any other household, and it is the whole of what I have to offer.
Yoga is not taught in a class. It is lived. The tradition counts six branches: hatha yoga, raja yoga, karma yoga, bhakti yoga, kriya yoga and jnana yoga. Most of what is sold as yoga today is one branch, sometimes two, taught by the hour. Whatever that is, it is a piece.
Thirty years of daily sadhana and I claim to have mastered nothing. What I do have is a sense of responsibility that will not go away. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky has an old monk say that each of us is responsible for everyone and for everything. I read that when I was young and it did not leave. This work exists because of it.
Where it comes from
Everything here comes from one tradition, the Bihar School of Yoga.
Swami Sivananda Saraswati, in Rishikesh, gathered the old yoga teachings and made them usable by ordinary people with jobs and families. His student Swami Satyananda Saraswati founded the Bihar School of Yoga in 1963, in Munger, on the Ganga, to carry that work on. His successor, Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati, leads the school now, and is my guru.
You can check all of this. The school is a real institution. Its books are in print. Its teachers are named. I pass on what I received, as I received it.
What we are trying to do
The first aim of this work is to reach a million Indian homes with the morning mantra practice. Twenty minutes, every day.
Most people in India today do not know what to do when they wake up. Some reach for the phone. Some go straight to the kitchen. Some are already in the office meeting in their head. Some go for a walk or to the gym. None of that is the first thing. The first thing is to put the mind in a state that radiates something good into the house, before the day gets hold of it.
That is all we do. We do not teach. I sit and chant, and people join me. There is no sermon. I have left sermons to television, WhatsApp and Instagram reels. I chant the mantras, which belong to everyone, and whoever is on the call chants with me.
What you actually do
Morning. Six to six twenty, Monday to Friday, live. Three mantras. The Mahamrityunjaya for the body. The Gayatri for the mind. The thirty-two names of Durga to clear what sits underneath. You do not need to know them. You chant along and get them right over time. Your camera is off. Nobody sees you.
Night. From eight, recorded. Eight minutes lying down, reviewing your day. Seven minutes of a humming breath called Bhramari. This is what brings the sleep.
The hundred days. A batch starts on the first of every month. The first thirty days are free. No card is taken. After that, if you want to stay, it is seven hundred rupees once for the rest of the hundred days, or three hundred a month. Nothing renews by itself.
If you miss two mornings, someone messages you. A person sends it, by hand.
People of several faiths sit in the circle. The mantras are chanted as sound, for the body and the mind. You are not asked to believe anything.
Why this site exists
The wellness industry sells methods it invented last year. This tradition is old and it is written down. This site is where you can look at the sources.
Every practice, every word and every idea used in the programme has a page here. Each page says where the thing comes from, what the old texts say, what modern research has found, and where the two do not agree. If you want to know why the morning is at six, or what a mantra does to the nervous system, it is here, with the sources named.
Nothing on this site is medical advice. For medical things, see your own doctor.
What comes after
Once you are settled in the daily practice, other things open up, and only if you want them.
Annamaya. A way to get out from under the nutritionists by looking at what your own body actually needs. It leads back to food that is grown near you, in season, and cooked the way it has always been cooked where you live.
The Health Balance Score Card. A report card of your energy system, read together with your blood work. It is done in person, over a long sitting, because there is no other way to understand it. The people who have taken it will tell you how closely it matched what they later found out about their health.
The evening review. The night practice, kept over weeks. It lets you step back from the stress you live inside and sleep deeper. You will not need a more scientific mattress. I can promise you that.
NEEV for women whose bodies are changing, and weekend yoga in a small studio in Vasant Kunj, run between batches. All of it is described at What OMJOOMSUH Offers.
Where to go now
To join the next batch, go to app.omjoomsuh.com and register. Your name, your WhatsApp number, your city. That is all.
If you would rather read first, the essays are at The Essays. If you want to look up a word or an idea, the reference pages are listed on the home page.
If you want to ask a person before deciding anything, WhatsApp +91 96670 25649.
Hari Om Tat Sat.