“Gather together, those of you who share high ideals. Pool your resources. Buy land out in the country. A simple life will bring you inner freedom. Harmony with nature will bring you a happiness known to few city dwellers. In the company of other truth seekers you will find it easier to meditate and think of God.”
— Paramhansa Yogananda
Herbs and wildflowers being planted around the Triveni (shown here in 2022)
The Hermitage is working with the land in the way that Swami Kriyananda spoke about and saw established at Ananda Village: in harmony with nature. With growing food, we are using natural and organic gardening techniques. We have also planted several hundred trees. The number of trees and their diversity has already brought back the birds, insects, and other creatures that were absent four years ago, when we just had barren land.
We have already planted:
- more than 220 landscape trees (approximately 40 different species) for shade, windbreak, diversity, bird and animal food/habitat
- over 160 fruit trees of 38 different species
- over 400 landscape shrubs
There are paths throughout the land and the beginning of a meditation forest that will be an area preserved only for meditation.
Entry to the Meditation Forest, and area planted with sacred trees
Permaculture practices include storing rainwater in the soil itself by digging swales that ‘make the water walk’ and soak into the soil. These techniques have already been proven effective in arid parts of India.
Vegetable beds will eventually be scattered all over, interspersed with the trees and buildings — rather than large scale farm cropping. This way of working with the land has been proven at Ananda communities in the United States, and locally by our close neighbors and friends at Aanandaa Permaculture Farm.
A forest path on the northern perimeter
“We are people who like the shelter of trees.”
Mahavatar Babaji in Autobiography of a Yogi
See The Forest to learn more more on how we are working with trees.
“Increasingly the earth is beginning to rumble — if we want to be its enemy it will shake us off like fleas. We may be headed toward great natural calamities merely because we haven’t yet understood how we can live in harmony with nature.
“The religion of the future will be a religion of harmony, not of persecution — a religion of expanded awareness that includes higher and higher realities. It won’t lock God up in a church but will see Him in the trees. It will see the whole world as a church — and show us that wherever we go we can worship Him.
“This is what we must all try to do — bring God back to life in the world around us by our appreciation of it. Naturally He will come where He’s appreciated and come where He’s called. Naturally He will absent Himself where He is ignored. That is why this planet is going through such upheavals today. These upheavals will continue until man finally wakes up and realizes that this religion — which I say is the religion of the future — will be an all-embracing one, a religion above all of love and of joy.”
— Swami Kriyananda
