As part of the fellowship program, we were treated to a week’s retreat in the Satkhol Ashram. And so, fellows from around the country converged through trains and planes and automobiles, to wind our way up to the ashram, nestled in the hills of Uttarakhand. It seems that ashrams, like all good superheroes, are not complete without a badass origin story. The story, according to Satish Tiwari, the ashram manager, goes something like this. Chariji, the then Heartfulness Global Guide had been looking to start an ashram somewhere in the Himalayas. Many abhyasis had found land around Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh but none attracted Chariji. He was enamoured with a place called Almora, although he had never visited there. The amount of land that they were looking for was notoriously difficult to locate en bloc . However, when he came to know that there was land near Almora he became excited. Plans were drawn up and he came to visit it in the 1990s. At this time there were no roads a