The Founders' Story
Rishikesh Yogpeeth began in 2005 with two childhood friends, Digamber Nautiyal and Roshan Singh Kukreti.
Photo slot · Founders' photo: Digamber and Roshan together at the ashram (or an early photo of the two friends in Rishikesh). Set it as the page's featured image, landscape 4:3, at least 1600×1200.
Chapter 01
Both grew up in Rishikesh, a place where Yoga was not merely something to be taught, but part of the environment they had known since childhood. Their friendship eventually grew into a shared interest in understanding and sharing Yoga with others.
They came together with a simple intention: to create a place where people could come to Rishikesh not merely to learn Yoga as a physical practice, but to experience it as a way of understanding themselves.
That intention became Rishikesh Yogpeeth.
What followed was not a carefully predetermined journey. The institution evolved through the strengths, responsibilities and experiences of both friends.
Digamber took responsibility for building and managing the institution. Roshan gradually became its academic and teaching spearhead, devoting himself to Yoga philosophy, meditation and the deeper questions behind the practice.
They were different in their responsibilities, but the direction was shared.
Over the years, Rishikesh Yogpeeth grew from a small beginning into an established school of Yoga, welcoming students from around the world.
But the story of the two friends did not end with the growth of the institution.
In fact, one of the most significant chapters was yet to come.
Chapter 02
As Rishikesh Yogpeeth began to grow, the responsibilities of the two friends naturally took different directions.
Digamber Nautiyal became the person behind the institution. He took care of its management, administration, finances and development, making sure that the vision they had started with could become a functioning school. Over the years, his role expanded with the institution, and he remained closely involved in its day to day functioning and long term development.
Roshan Singh Kukreti moved increasingly towards the academic side.
Teaching became his primary engagement. He taught Yoga, philosophy and meditation, and spent much of his time with students, exploring the questions that arise when Yoga is taken beyond the physical practice.
For many years, Roshan was at the centre of the academic life of Rishikesh Yogpeeth. His days were often spent teaching for several hours, meeting students, discussing philosophy and examining how Yoga could be understood through direct experience rather than merely through information.
At one point, his teaching schedule reached almost nine hours a day.
The two roles were different, but they supported the same institution.
Digamber was building and sustaining the space in which the work could happen.
Roshan was deeply involved in the teaching and inquiry taking place within that space.
Together, they carried Rishikesh Yogpeeth through its formative years and into a period of considerable growth.
Then, in 2020, something neither of them had planned changed the course of the story.
Chapter 03
In 2020, the world changed.
Yoga schools closed. Students returned home. Travel stopped, and the daily rhythm of teaching that had continued for years came to an abrupt end.
For Roshan, this meant something he had rarely experienced before: he had to stop teaching.
For years, teaching had filled his days. There was always another class, another student, another question to explore. His engagement with Yoga had largely been expressed through teaching and interaction.
Now there was none of it.
At first, the interruption was simply a consequence of the circumstances. But as the world gradually began to open again, Roshan found himself unable to return to the same rhythm.
Something had changed.
The questions that had accumulated through years of teaching had not disappeared when the teaching stopped. They became more persistent.
What is Yoga beyond what we have been taught to call Yoga?
What is understanding?
What is thought?
Who is the one experiencing all of this?
What happens when we stop looking for answers and begin examining the question itself?
Instead of immediately returning to teaching, Roshan remained with these questions.
What began with an external event became an unexpected period of contemplation.
For almost six years, he remained largely away from the academic life of Rishikesh Yogpeeth.
While he was stepping away from the visible role he had played for so many years, the institution still had to continue.
Chapter 04
While Roshan remained away from the academic life of Rishikesh Yogpeeth, Digamber found himself in a very different situation.
For years, Digamber had been the person primarily responsible for the management and development of the institution. He was deeply involved in administration, finances, planning and the many practical responsibilities required to keep a growing school functioning.
But management was never the whole of his engagement with Yoga.
From the very beginning of Rishikesh Yogpeeth, Digamber had carried his own questions. His interest in the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedas, the Upanishads and Yoga philosophy had been developing alongside his work in management. The questions were always there. He simply had responsibilities that demanded his attention.
Then came 2020.
The school became almost empty. Students had left. Teaching had stopped. The world had become uncertain. And for the first time since the beginning of Rishikesh Yogpeeth, Digamber found himself without the people and circumstances that had occupied so much of his daily life.
Even Roshan, his companion through the entire journey of Rishikesh Yogpeeth, was no longer there.
For almost two years, the circumstances of the pandemic left Digamber largely alone with the institution, his responsibilities and his own questions.
Something began to change.
The person who had spent years managing the institution increasingly found himself drawn towards the subjects that had always been present in the background of his life.
The questions became more important.
The study became more serious.
And gradually, his role began to change.
Digamber began taking a much more active academic role, studying and teaching the Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita and Yoga philosophy.
It was not a sudden transformation from a manager into a spiritual teacher.
The foundation had been there from the beginning.
Circumstances simply gave those questions the space to come forward.
While Roshan was drawn into contemplation away from the institution, Digamber was drawn deeper into study within it.
In very different ways, both friends were now being shaped by the same interruption.
Rishikesh Yogpeeth continued.
But the two people who had started it together were no longer standing in exactly the same place from which they had begun.
Chapter 05
For Roshan, the years away from teaching did not become years away from Yoga.
They became years of looking at what had been underneath his teaching all along.
For almost fifteen years, he had spent much of his life teaching Yoga, philosophy and meditation. He had explained concepts, answered questions and observed thousands of students trying to understand themselves through Yoga.
When the teaching stopped, there was no longer a classroom in which those questions could be discussed.
There was only the question itself.
The period that followed became an extended process of contemplation.
He began to examine the assumptions behind what he had been teaching and, more importantly, the instrument through which any understanding takes place: thought.
What is a thought?
Where does a thought come from?
Why does one thought lead to another?
Can thought be observed without immediately believing it?
Do we use thought to understand, or are we being directed by what we think?
And if Yoga is concerned with understanding the nature of the mind, then what exactly is it that we are trying to understand?
These were not questions that needed immediate answers.
They needed to be lived with.
The six years that followed gradually became a continuation of the work that had begun through teaching, but in a different form.
Roshan was no longer primarily asking how to teach Yoga.
He was asking what it means to understand.
And somewhere in that process, another possibility began to emerge.
Perhaps the next expression of his work did not need to be another conventional Yoga school.
Perhaps it needed to begin earlier, with the very tool through which we try to understand anything.
Thought.
This contemplation eventually reached a point where remaining silent was no longer enough.
The questions had begun to take a form that could be shared.
And that became the beginning of Rishikesh Vidyapeeth.
Chapter 06
Rishikesh Yogpeeth began with two childhood friends and a shared interest in Yoga.
Over the years, their paths within the institution took different directions.
Digamber built and sustained the institution, and eventually stepped into a deeper academic role, studying and teaching the Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita and Yoga philosophy.
Roshan spent years teaching Yoga, philosophy and meditation before circumstances brought that teaching to a halt. What followed was almost six years of contemplation, during which the questions that had accompanied his teaching became the centre of his own inquiry.
Their journeys had changed, but the original search for understanding remained.
Today, under the guidance of Digamber, Rishikesh Yogpeeth continues its journey and has grown into one of the leading Yoga Teacher Training centres in India.
And from Roshan's period of contemplation, another expression has emerged.
Rishikesh Vidyapeeth.
It is not a replacement for Rishikesh Yogpeeth, nor a separate beginning.
It is an extension of a journey that began in 2005.
A place to examine the questions that arise when we look beyond what we already believe we know.
A place where the inquiry begins with something very ordinary, yet fundamental:
Thought.
If Rishikesh Yogpeeth represents years of learning, teaching and experience, Rishikesh Vidyapeeth represents the questions that emerged from that experience.
The journey continues.