It can dif­fi­cult to under­stand the mul­ti­ple ini­tia­tives that revolve around Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. Some are focused on India. Oth­ers are inter­na­tional in scope. Still oth­ers seem to cen­tered in the United States and Canada. The Indian wing of Inter­na­tional Art of Liv­ing Foun­da­tion is reg­is­tered as Vyakti Vikas Kendra.

• Art of Liv­ing Foun­da­tion ::: Mon­treal Ashram ::: Ban­ga­lore headquarters
• AOL has many local chap­ters: DC Chap­ter ::: United States ::: Some but not all chap­ters have their own web sites, but the site are not listed at the AOL web­site. Do a Google search.
• Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Human Val­ues has nine programs:
  • 5H – Health, Homes, Hygiene, Human Val­ues and Har­mony in Diver­sity is a sep­a­rate orga­ni­za­tion from the AOL Foundation.
  • APEX Course, stand­ing for Achiev­ing Per­sonal EXcel­lence, is given to cor­po­rate man­age­ment and staff. I know that APEX courses have taken place at the World Bank and the Inter­na­tional Mon­e­tary Fund.
• Care for Chil­dren is “an inno­v­a­tive school and ser­vice pro­gram for chil­dren and their com­mu­ni­ties in rural India.” It includes a dol­lar a day pro­gram in which donors promise to con­tribute to the daily sup­port of dis­ad­van­taged Indian children.
• Sri Sri Ravi Shankar con­tains more infor­ma­tion than first meets the eye. There are audio clips and lit­er­a­ture. How­ever, it seems that it has not been updated since 2002
• Sri Sri Ravi Shankar – The Way of Grace is a book site. In addi­tion to buy­ing a hard copy, you can get PDF chap­ters. Also see his small per­sonal site
• SriS­riYoga – this seems to be a new AOL ven­ture with a lim­ited num­ber of teacher train­ers. Teach­ers are in Canada, the US, Indone­sia and South Africa
• Shankara – Ayurvedic prod­ucts for facil, skin­care and aro­mather­apy, with prof­its going back into pub­lic ser­vice ventures
• Sri Sri Cen­tre for Media Stud­ies (Ban­ga­lore, India) has a 10-​​month entry-​​level train­ing pro­gram. Has the back­ing of sev­eral big-​​time Indian media.

Per­sonal Views

• Sounds Inter­est­ing: two senior instruc­tor in the Art of Liv­ing Foun­da­tion. Really inter­est­ing stuff, includ­ing videos
• Virat and Vasudha’s Yes!+ Team: work­ing with young peo­ple in India

Other ref­er­ences

• Life­Pos­i­tive: Art of Liv­ing Sec­tion and Slide show on ben­e­fits of Sud­harsan Kriya
• AOL Intro Course Expe­ri­ences: Bahrani and MIT arti­cle ::: Ashram retreat
• Yoga Jour­nal arti­cles: Emperor of Air orig­i­nally pub­lished in the September/​October 2002 issue and the best inde­pen­dent mag­a­zine arti­cle I’ve seen about Art of Liv­ing and Sri Sri ::: West­ern Sci­ence vs. East­ern Wis­dom orig­i­nally pub­lished in the January/​February 2003 issue ::: The Nat­ural Prozac orig­i­nally in the November/​December 1999 issue ::: Bet­ter than Prozac, orig­i­nally in the July/​August 2001 issue

A relaxed hand rests on a knee dur­ing meditation