August 2025 | Guru Kripa Forest Hermitage

A new monastery is rising from the ground!

Guru Kripa Forest Hermitage is showing visible and beautiful progress! The first five monk cottages now have walls, ceilings, and floors. The hundreds of trees we’ve planted are quickly growing. One more acre of land has been formally added to the Change of Land Use (CLU). More details and updates are shared below.

The main Chela Bhavan building (kitchen, dining, living room, patio, laundry facilities) with the first four monk kutirs behind and to the left.

The first Hermitage buildings

Two monk kutirs in different stages of construction. A water tower for residential and agricultural use is in the background.

Five monk kutirs (cottages) will soon be ready for interior finishing: windows, cabinets, bathrooms, and more. Foundations are nearly complete on two more kutirs.

The walls are up on the Chela Bhavan house. This building will have a kitchen and dining room large enough to feed many monks, along with a living room and a rooftop laundry facility. Design work on the kitchen is nearly complete. Stairs next to the kitchen already lead down to a large root cellar for food storage. Construction will be begin soon on an outdoor dining patio.

Recent months have seen significant infrastructure work completed. A water tower has been built, and electrical lines, water lines, sewage and grey water lines have been installed underground. The water tower provides enough capacity and pressure for residential expansion and all of our agricultural and landscape needs.

Meeting at the Hermitage led by Nayaswami Shankara with our large team.

To speed up development, we recently hired more workers for the foundation, walls, and ceiling/roof work. The photo on the left shows our very large team meeting at the Hermitage, led by Nayaswami Shankara (speaking in Hindi). The circle includes our monks, our team of three architects from Chandigarh, the contractors and site engineer, approximately 20 workers from Bihar who specialize in masonry, brick, and rammed earth, and our local village team who help with the landscaping and gardening.

Land, Trees, Gardens

One-year old papaya tree

We have planted well over 300 trees during the last three years. Their growth is inspiring to watch. The 100+ fruit trees planted last year have benefitted from favorable weather earlier this year. The perimeter landscape trees — which provide privacy, windbreak, and noise/air filtering — are also thriving. Some are already 30 feet tall!

We’ve begun our annual monsoon planting of more trees. Over 40 additional fruit trees, many landscape trees, and a few hundred landscape shrubs are now going in the ground. Last year, we planted over 700 strawberry plants. The harvest was abundant — we are still enjoying frozen strawberries. The vegetable gardens continue to produce food and offer ongoing education for our monks.

We recently planted a Meditation Forest in the most secluded section of the land. Sacred trees have been planted there, and it will be screened off to provide a space dedicated solely to meditation for current and future monks.

The sacred triveni has grown from a few feet tall to over twelve feet tall in under two years!

Two years ago we planted a sacred triveni (three trees): a banyan, neem, and peepul. The banyan tree was grown from seeds we collected from the sacred banyan tree described in Autobiography of a Yogi — the tree where Mahavatar Babaji appeared to Swami Sri Yukteswar. Our triveni has grown from a few feet tall to over 15 feet in just two years. The meditation temple will be built next to the triveni.

Bougainvillea flowers

The hundreds of bougainvillea vines planted along the perimeter fence now provide abundant privacy, security (with their large thorns), and beautiful flowers. Many other flowers bloom every day, as you can see in the slide show below.

Looking ahead

The government recently approved the addition of one acre to the Change of Land Use (CLU) already approved for the first 4.5 acre purchase. This is similar to a zoning change in the west and is not easy to obtain.

The additional CLU allows us to meet all our building needs, including future growth. It also extends the time allowed to complete all construction. A new site plan will be submitted to the government soon — these are typically much easier than CLU permissions. The plan includes 16 monk cottages, a small Temple of Light for daily meditation, a large kitchen and dining complex, an office for the monks’ online work, and a caretaker cottage.

Everyone wants to know, “When will first monks move there?” We hope to have our current seven monks move to the monastery by spring 2026. The digital sketch below shows the northern residential section of the land. The office will be built to the south. Over 100 fruit trees have been planted in the central and southern portion, along with vegetable gardens.

This is a digital plan of the residential section of the Hermitage. The eight buildings to the right of the Temple of Light are all under construction.

Our Monks

It’s important to remember that the monks didn’t relocate to Chandigarh as a way of escaping or saying, “Goodbye, world!” The monastery will be a true Hermitage, as Swami Kriyananda envisioned — a very private place with no visitors or guests. This will provide the environment to train new monks and support all of our monks in their many travels and outreach throughout Asia.

In the last three months alone, groups of our monastery monks have traveled to lead programs such as:

Pan-India Kriyaban Retreat in Bangalore
Spiritual fair and kriya initiation in Kolkata
Kriya retreat with initiation in Pune
Satsang and meditation at Ananda Jalandhar
Programs in Singapore and Malaysia
Kriya retreat in Ludhiana
Kriyaban retreat for the Ananda Bangalore centre
Sunday satsang at Ananda Chandigarh
Hindi language kriya initiation in Delhi

During this time, the monks also conducted 50+ online classes from beginner to advanced level, leading up to kriya initiation.

The Hermitage will support the monks in their inward and inspired lives, enabling them to share these divine teachings worldwide. Many years ago, Swami Kriyananda wrote the following words in a letter to his monks. He beautifully expresses the purpose and concept behind this new kind of monastery:

“Ah, my brothers and sisters, would it not be wonderful if more of us were on fire with love for God? How many weep for the Divine Mother as Master wept when he was a boy? Our greatest work in life should be to express that divine yearning, that love. When we can reflect it, we shall be able to work ten times as hard, and a hundred times as effectively, as we do when we draw only on our own scanty powers.”

The slideshow below includes more photos of the construction, as well as scenes showing how the kutirs and forest will be integrated. Flowers bloom nearly every day in the small flower garden, along with the many flowering trees and bougainvillea.