A pond is centered at the heart of Isha Institute of Inner-sciences. The water is fresh, feeding and flowing into nearby waterfalls. Waterfowl, fish and even a small turtle make their home in and around the pond, but this wasn’t always the case. When a group of seven Isha volunteers came to the 1,400-acre site to build a retreat center in 2006, the pond was dry, swampy and stagnant. So they infused the pond with freshwater, placed fish in it and the turtle. And over the years, they happily watched the pond come back to life.
Mahima
Situated on the Cumberland Plateau in McMinnville, Tennessee, the Isha Institute is the only one of its kind in the United States. As I drove the rolling, winding TN-111 toward my destination, I was hoping for a rejuvenating day away from the office, but truly I didn’t know what to expect. Preliminary research on the web told me the 1,400- acre retreat center sprung out of the Isha Foundation, a worldwide nonprofit based in India and founded by a mystic, humanitarian and yogi named Sadhguru. According to ishafoundation.org, it’s “a unique space created for human beings to deepen their experience of life, and to reach their ultimate potential.”
To be honest, I didn’t really know what that meant, and it isn’t every day I wander to the middle of nowhere, miles away from civilization, for the sake of a story. My coworkers had been joking for a week that if I didn’t return from this outing, they would send in a search team. I laughed away any concern, but then my editor Mark asked me repeatedly, “You’re going alone?” and I started having doubts.
Upon arrival, I was immediately put at ease by friendly, professional faces and a steaming cup of herbal tea. “We are primarily a yoga center; our focus is classical yoga and meditation,” Isha outreach volunteer Alison Murry explains. Alison, national outreach volunteer Kathy Campbell and I were chatting in the visitor welcome center, the walls of which consisted mostly of windows. The bright sun cut through the frigid day and warmed everything in the lobby, including a young key lime tree growing right up through an opening in the floor tiles. “It’s an opportunity to retreat into nature and get back in touch with that source of stillness that’s within somebody, so that you can go out into the world and feel like you are functioning from that place,” she adds.