Nithya Shanti
Nithya Shanti is a mindfulness teacher and teacher of conscious living based in Pune, with a biography that does not follow a straight line. He completed an MBA at XLRI Jamshedpur and spent time in the corporate world before a different pull took hold. In 2002 he was ordained as a Buddhist monk and spent six years as a forest meditation monk, living with the kind of sustained quiet that most people only glimpse on retreat. When he stepped out of the robes in 2008, he brought that depth with him into a new role — sharing what he had learned, in plain language, with anyone willing to listen.
Since then, Nithya Shanti has taught in classrooms, boardrooms and retreat halls around the world, reaching audiences that span CEOs and government officials, schoolteachers and young people. His signature offerings include happiness joyshops — gatherings that treat cheerfulness not as a mood but as a skill — alongside meditation retreats, self-inquiry courses and practical emotional-healing practices drawn from EFT, Ho'oponopono and Byron Katie's The Work. He has spoken at four TEDx events and delivers corporate trainings and youth programmes alongside online courses and a Treasury of Teachings that makes his material available year-round.
What sets Nithya Shanti apart is a quality that is genuinely rare: the capacity to speak about awareness and inner peace without making it sound either effortful or ethereal. His teaching centres on attention, intention and foundation — words that are simple on the surface and quietly demanding in practice. He does not trade in private language or require prior spiritual experience. His grounding in six years of forest monasticism gives him something to draw from, and his years of worldly engagement since have taught him how to translate it. People leave his sessions, by most accounts, feeling that happiness is closer and more workable than they had assumed.
The Nithya Shanti Foundation, the non-profit through which much of his work flows, holds a clear intention: to reawaken a heart- and earth-conscious culture built on wisdom and joy. If you are drawn to mindfulness practice but find yourself wary of the ceremonial or the theoretical, or if you simply want to understand your own mind better and move through daily life with more ease, Nithya Shanti is worth meeting. His retreats, online programmes and teachings are accessible through his website at nithyashanti.com, where you can find current offerings and his broader archive of courses.