Sri Sri Ravishankar

Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, founder of the Art of Living Foundation, has built one of the largest volunteer-based humanitarian and spiritual organizations in the world around a single breathing technique he says arrived to him during a period of silence — Sudarshan Kriya, now practiced by an estimated hundreds of millions of people across more than 150 countries, making Ravi Shankar among the most globally reached spiritual teachers of the contemporary era.

A child prodigy in Vedic study

Born in 1956 in Papanasam, Tamil Nadu, to a traditional Tamil Brahmin family, Ravi Shankar showed extraordinary early aptitude for spiritual study, reportedly able to recite portions of the Bhagavad Gita by age four and frequently found in deep meditation as a young child. His first teacher, Sudhakar Chaturvedi, had a long personal association with Mahatma Gandhi, connecting Ravi Shankar's earliest spiritual formation to India's independence-era spiritual and reform movements. By age seventeen, in 1973, he had completed dual degrees in Vedic literature and physics — an unusual academic combination that foreshadowed his later career-long effort to present ancient yogic wisdom through a lens compatible with modern scientific sensibility.

Association with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Before founding his own movement, Ravi Shankar worked closely with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the Transcendental Meditation movement, gaining early exposure to the challenges and opportunities of building a large-scale, internationally organized meditation-based movement. This formative association is generally understood to have shaped his later approach to building the Art of Living as an accessible, structured, course-based organization rather than a more loosely organized guru-disciple lineage.

The ten days of silence that produced Sudarshan Kriya

In 1982, in Shimoga, Karnataka, Ravi Shankar entered a ten-day period of complete silence. By his own account, he emerged from this period troubled by a specific problem he had been contemplating: despite years of teaching yoga and meditation around the world, he felt people's spiritual practice remained disconnected, compartmentalized, from the rest of their daily lives. During this silence, he has said, the specific rhythmic breathing pattern that became Sudarshan Kriya arrived as a kind of spontaneous inspiration — "nature knows what to give and when to give it," as he later described the experience. The first Art of Living course, built around this new technique, was held later that same year in Shimoga, marking the practical beginning of what would grow into a global organization.

Building the Art of Living Foundation

The Art of Living Foundation, formally established as a non-profit educational and humanitarian organization, structured its outreach around accessible, standardized multi-day courses teaching Sudarshan Kriya alongside supporting yogic and meditative practices — a format that allowed the organization to scale rapidly across dramatically different cultural and linguistic contexts. In 1997, Ravi Shankar co-founded the International Association for Human Values to extend this work into sustainable development, human-values education and formal conflict resolution, reflecting an increasing emphasis on applying meditative and yogic principles to concrete social and political challenges rather than confining them to individual practice alone.

An unusually active role in international conflict resolution

Beyond his role as a meditation teacher, Ravi Shankar has developed a distinctive public profile as an informal peace broker, credited with playing a facilitating role in negotiations and dialogue efforts connected to conflicts in Colombia, Iraq, Côte d'Ivoire, Kashmir and Bihar, among other regions. His approach in these contexts generally emphasizes his position as a religiously neutral figure whose sole stated agenda is peace, allowing him access to opposing parties who might be reluctant to engage with more conventionally partisan mediators — an unusual extension of a meditation teacher's public role into the realm of formal diplomatic engagement.

Recognition and continuing reach

Ravi Shankar was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India's second-highest civilian honor, in 2016, in recognition of the scale and reach of his humanitarian and spiritual work. Today, decades after that ten-day silence in Shimoga, the Art of Living Foundation continues to operate across some 180 countries, with Sudarshan Kriya remaining its central offering — a single breathing technique that has become, by most measures, one of the most widely practiced structured meditation methods to emerge from contemporary Indian spirituality.