A Hilltop of Happiness

I recently went to the Art of Living Retreat Center in Boone, North Carolina, a spectacular hilltop retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains that opened 10 years ago. But I’ve been curious about the Art of Living and its leader, Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, for decades. I first encountered followers of Gurudev at the International Spa Association convention in Las Vegas, where I met the creators of Shankara, an Ayurvedic skincare company that is now the heart of the Shankara Spa at the retreat center in Boone. Amidst the bustling Vegas convention, these followers of Gurudev created an island of calm.

Another introduction to the Art of Living came through Emma Seppälä, Ph.D., a former Spirituality & Health columnist and Buddhist scholar who now teaches at Yale and the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research. She’s been a practitioner, teacher, and researcher of the Art of Living breathing techniques for decades, and she’s written extensively about the remarkable successes she and others have had teaching these techniques to veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

So I knew that the breathing practices of the Art of Living are powerful healing techniques that are grounded in Ayurveda, a traditional holistic system of medicine and wellness that originated in India more than 5,000 years ago. I also knew that Gurudev has a network of teachers and millions of people who follow his practices worldwide. I finally had the time to experience what it was about.

The Big Wow!

What struck me first is that the hilltop retreat is vast. The dramatic main temple can accommodate more than 3,000 people, and several ancillary temples and halls each have space for hundreds. There are also hotel rooms, volunteers’ quarters, and condos totaling more than 350 rooms, and the dining hall has buffet lines capable of feeding large crowds. Nevertheless, the place felt intimate to me, probably the result of being designed along Vastu principles, a system intended to align buildings with earth energies and cosmic principles. It also felt empty—maybe 20 other guests were there along with me—and that gave a sense of grand isolation. Everyone I met—the volunteer who picked me up at the airport, the reception staff, the general manager who showed me around, and all the practitioners and teachers—seemed extraordinarily kind and happy.

My room in the spa building was simple and remarkably pleasant. They served good coffee at breakfast. (No alcohol but caffeine is fine.) Mornings and afternoons offered wonderfully gentle yoga sessions followed by lovely meditations. In between I lounged in the relaxation room of the Shankara Spa and watched clouds slide by through perfectly situated skylights, and I had a delightful Ayurvedic massage. I learned to make tasty balls of chia seeds, and I ate a variety of international foods in the dining hall.

This was all part of the center’s Rest & Relaxation Retreat, where guests come and do what they want: yoga, meditation, Ayurvedic cooking lessons, spa treatments, trail hikes, evening chanting known as kirtan—or nothing at all. And it was marvelous. A delightful retreat experience that is open to individuals, couples, and even large groups. Then on Friday evening, my R&R Retreat ended, and I joined a small group doing the weekend intensive Happiness Retreat to learn the special breathwork called the Sudarshan Kriya.

Another Story Starts

The grand retreat center was actually built for the Maharishi, the guru who brought Transcendental Meditation (TM) to America in the 1960s. In the early ’90s, the Maharishi flew over the Blue Ridge Mountains seeking the right energy to build a monastery, and he identified this hilltop—and that vision was enough for a couple of his followers to spend tens of millions of dollars building the grand temple complex.

In 2004, however, there was a falling out, and the TM practitioners packed up and left. The grand place sat empty, a mecca for local skateboarders, until it was sold at auction in 2012 to the Art of Living and brought back to life. What I didn’t realize until I got there is that Gurudev had once been part of the Maharishi’s organization. The Maharishi’s famous insight was the mantra of TM. Gurudev’s insight was the Sudarshan Kriya.

The Happiness Retreat is filled with hours of gentle yoga and meditation that lead into sessions of learning the breathing. It’s not “happy” time; it’s time of dedicated practice to get started on a path to happiness—said to take some weeks of about half an hour a day to really begin to sink in. The two retreat leaders, a married couple, each had decades of practice; in fact, one started teaching TM in the ’70s. What surprised me was that when it came time to actually learn the steps of the Kriya, the master teachers turned on recordings of Gurudev. Granted, the specifics of the breathwork are subtle. There is an advantage to learning from the source. But some of the guru’s recordings were in a language I do not understand—and that made me uncomfortable.

The message to me was that the retreat is an initiation to the guru as well as to the practice. By attending all the sessions, I was earning access to the network of teachers—as well as an app to support my practice anywhere. I was also gaining an early registration opportunity for the guru’s next visit to the retreat center, when the place fills up. As a newbie, I would likely get a chance to meet the guru in person.

But I didn’t come for a guru. I was raised Catholic and am now a journalist, and I’m leery of gurus. So I ended up back in the relaxation room of the spa going through a biography of the guru written by his sister. I was seeking to learn what made his personal teaching of the practice so special and important, and she describes not just his growing up in India and awakening to the Kriya, but also miracles that heralded the arrival of a new guru. One miracle made several stories come together for me: She looked through an open doorway and noticed her brother levitating!

The Art of Levitating

Back in the 1980s, I became curious about levitation because the Maharishi was teaching it. Brochures for his workshops had photographs of people sitting in the lotus position, six inches off the ground! So I called my mother, who had practiced TM and was convinced the meditation had saved her from a stomach ulcer. Of course, Mom had learned to levitate!

I then talked to Herbert Benson, M.D., the Harvard cardiologist who first studied TM and who wrote The Relaxation Response, which both demystified the practice and outlined its clear health benefits. He sent me to his videographer, who showed me a slow-motion video clip of a monk said to be the best levitator in Tibet. In the video I watched a monk in a loincloth sit on the floor in the lotus position until finally, all of a sudden, his legs unfolded explosively, launching him upward as he then folded back into full lotus. Captured with a still camera, the monk would appear to be levitating two feet in the air. In slow-motion video, however, the miracle is that the monk would ever walk again.

So I called my mom back, and this time she confessed it was hopping rather than levitating—and she barely got off the ground. A few years later, she had a knee replacement, and while I don’t know that her hopping was connected to her knee replacement, I could tell from the video that it was a really bad idea. Around that same time, medical researchers discovered that stomach ulcers—once a badge of honor for high-power, stressed-out executives—turned out to be caused by bacteria and could be cured with antibiotics. No longer a badge of anything, both stomach ulcers and levitating fell out of fashion—and that’s progress.

The irony is that gurus like the Maharishi and Gurudev leaned into science because their meditation and breathwork practices can work real “miracles”—and science proves it. But in terms of divinity, the same science cuts them off at the knees. What’s sad is that my aversion to guru divinity has blocked me from some healthy and happy-making practices. Levitation aside, my solution is to see these gurus as pioneering rock stars who figured out how to play the miraculous instrument of the human body in some ways better than anybody.

This article appeared in the Jan/Feb 2025 issue of Spirituality & Health®: A Unity Publication. Subscribe now.