Sadhguru: the mystic with a global megaphone

The Isha Foundation

In 1992 he established the Isha Foundation, headquartered at a sprawling ashram and yoga centre near Coimbatore, at the foot of the Velliangiri Hills. At its heart sits the Dhyanalinga, a meditation shrine consecrated in 1999. From that base Isha grew into a global operation run very largely by volunteers, offering yoga programmes, running schools and rural-revitalisation projects, and building an enormous online presence.

Inner Engineering

Isha's flagship is "Inner Engineering," a programme of yoga and meditation aimed squarely at stressed modern professionals, taught in person and online around the world. Sadhguru reckons that some fifteen million people have passed through Isha's programmes, and his books — Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy and Karma: A Yogi's Guide to Crafting Your Destiny — have been New York Times bestsellers, carrying his teaching well beyond the ashram.

The Adiyogi

In 2017 Isha unveiled its most arresting landmark: the Adiyogi, a 34-metre (112-foot) bust of Shiva as the first yogi, at the Coimbatore centre, recognised by Guinness World Records as the largest bust in the world. Floodlit and colossal, it became an instant pilgrimage site and a piece of branding visible from miles away — spirituality at monumental scale.

The ecological turn

Over the past decade Sadhguru has increasingly fused his spiritual message with environmental campaigning. After earlier drives such as Rally for Rivers and Cauvery Calling, he launched Save Soil in 2022, riding a motorcycle on a 100-day, 30,000-kilometre journey from London to southern India to lobby governments on soil degradation. The campaign drew partnerships with the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification and the World Food Programme, and memoranda of understanding from several governments — an unusual reach for a yoga guru into international environmental policy.

A global following

The scale of his audience is what sets him apart. Sadhguru commands tens of millions of social-media followers and routinely tops online engagement among Hindu spiritual leaders, drawing young professionals and Western seekers with slickly produced videos in fluent, witty English. He has spoken at the United Nations, the World Economic Forum at Davos, and universities from Oxford to Harvard — a guru as comfortable in a TED format as on an ashram veranda.

The controversies

Such prominence has attracted scrutiny. Critics have questioned the commercialisation of Isha's programmes and the environmental and land-use record of its Coimbatore expansion, parts of which sit near an elephant corridor and protected forest. In 2024 the foundation faced a habeas corpus case in the Madras High Court, brought by a retired professor who alleged his two adult daughters were being held at the ashram against their will; the women told the court they were there of their own free will, and the Supreme Court later closed the case. Isha has consistently denied any wrongdoing.

A guru for the secular age

Whatever one makes of the spectacle, Sadhguru represents a distinct modern phenomenon: the guru as global media figure, packaging an ancient yogic tradition for a secular, English-speaking, professional audience that might never set foot in a temple. He has made meditation feel less like religion and more like self-optimisation — and in doing so has carried Indian spirituality to an audience, and a scale, that his more reclusive predecessors could scarcely have imagined.