What Is Sadhana? What I Learned in an Ashram in Almora

Sadhana is often understood as a spiritual practice or disciplined effort, often associated with meditation, prayer or other forms of inner practice. But what does sadhana actually mean? I first began to understand the word differently during my stay at an ashram in Almora, when a simple conversation with Swami Nirgunananda made me look at my own restless mind in an entirely different way.

What is Sadhana?

“Sadhana” — the word had always seemed to belong elsewhere. To ochre robes drying in mountain sunlight. To caves, silences, withdrawn faces. To men who seemed to have stepped outside ordinary wanting. Certainly not to indecision. Not to trunks being packed, departures delayed by thought.

The Afternoon Before Leaving Almora

The afternoon before leaving Almora Ashram for Chandigarh returns to me now less as memory than as atmosphere. I had arrived there months earlier in the middle of what, at that age, I could only have called wandering — moving from place to place without any clear idea of what I was looking for.  

In those months I had drifted through towns without staying long anywhere. A few days here, a week there. Cheap lodges near bus stands, long journeys without conversation, tea at railway stalls that all began to taste the same after a while. I was not searching for anything I could have named clearly then. I only knew I could not yet return to the life I had left behind.

Somewhere during those wanderings, I arrived at an ashram in the hills of Almora and stayed far longer than I had intended. The ashram had begun quietly to feel like home.

A pale light over the hills. The faint smell of incense that had already burned itself out. My trunk corded shut near the wall. I had already packed most of my things. A shawl folded once, then folded again without reason. Somewhere below, in the courtyard perhaps, the dull metal sound of a bucket being set down. In the silence that followed, the weight of the previous night’s telephone call returned to me.

The previous night, I had telephoned home. My grandmother, whom I loved deeply, sounded weaker than I had ever heard her, though even then I could not entirely tell how much of it was illness and how much was simply the desire to have me home again.

She had never asked me directly to return before. That was perhaps why the call unsettled me so deeply. Even as a child, I had known that beneath her ordinary questions — whether I was eating properly, whether I was sleeping enough — there was always another concern she rarely spoke aloud.

You Are in Sadhana Right Now

I went to Swami Nirgunananda for permission before leaving, though I lingered outside his room for a few moments before entering.

Even while speaking, the mind would not remain still. Stay a few more days. Leave now. Remain here where the hours moved softly and without edges. Return to the old life waiting beyond the mountains. One thought entering quietly while another withdrew. Like someone uncertain at a doorway after dusk.

He looked at me for some time. Then, bypassing my unspoken dilemma entirely, he asked, almost casually, 'Do you know what sadhana is?'"

I began answering with more confidence than understanding. Meditation, perhaps. Discipline. Sitting still somewhere, cross-legged, gathering the scattered mind inward.

Before the thought had settled between us, he smiled.

“No, Aashish,” he said gently. “You do not realize it, but you are in sadhana right now.”

I didn't quite understand what he meant. Outside, someone was sweeping the stone pathway. The dry leaves made a faint circling sound before collecting again near the corner wall.

“Look carefully at the mind,” he said after a while. “It moves first one way, then another. Stay. Leave. Stay. Leave.”

Then silence.

Not the silence of conclusion, but the kind that continues after words.

I lowered my eyes. After some time he said quietly, “Learn to remain there in the middle of it. Watch it.”

What I Understood Later

I travelled back home that night ruminating on his words. I thought I understood them then, though I would return to them many times before I truly did.

There were years afterward when I hardly thought about that afternoon at all. Life became busy in the ordinary ways lives do. Work, responsibilities, the slow accumulation of practical concerns. 

Yet the words would return unexpectedly, often in moments that outwardly seemed insignificant — at railway platforms after midnight, at office windows long after the building had gone quiet, in the silences that sometimes followed difficult conversations with those I loved, in the small inward pauses before decisions we pretend are practical but know are not.

Over the years, I began to recognize how persistently the mind longs for certainty, and almost every time I sensed that restlessness returning, I would remember the leaves outside his room, gathering again in the same corner each time they had been swept away.

---

The conversation has stayed with me because it changed, at least for me, the meaning of the word.

Perhaps sadhana is not always something we do in a particular place or at a particular time. It may begin simply with noticing what is happening within us — watching the mind as it moves between stay and leave, wanting and not wanting, certainty and doubt.

I still wouldn't claim to have a complete definition of sadhana. But I think I understand what Swami Nirgunananda was trying to tell me that afternoon. Sometimes the practice is not to resolve the conflict immediately. Sometimes it is simply to remain there in the middle of it. Watch it.

That way of looking at the mind also takes me back to some of the verses of Kabir that I have returned to over the years

Kabir - जैसे पूर्णिमा के चाँद !!