Jyotirgana
ज्योतिर्गण
A firefly does not wait for the night to end.
It carries its own light, and by that light it finds the others.
अभी बुरा लग रहा है? Feeling bad right now? Nine short practices, three to eleven minutes →
The one who walked out of the dark knows the way back in.
Jyoti is light. Gaṇa is a host, a gathering, a constellation. One firefly is a flicker over a black field, easy to miss. A thousand turn that field into something you can walk across.
No doctor, no counsellor, no well-meaning relative understands the pull of a substance the way someone who has obeyed it does. Who has woken at 3 a.m. bargaining with it. Who has promised, and broken the promise, and promised again.
That person is not damaged goods. That person is the most qualified guide alive.
Jyotirgana is built on that single conviction. We use Integrated Yoga Training to rebuild a body that has been borrowed against and a mind that has forgotten it can choose, and then we ask the recovered one to turn around and hold out a hand.
In western Rajasthan, opium is not a foreign vice. It is culturally embedded, socially sanctioned, offered at gatherings, passed between elders. A programme that arrives condemning the culture is refused at the door. Yoga is not refused. It is already theirs.
An exit is shown, a road of hard escape
From the sorrow and the darkness and the chain;
But how shall a few escaped release the world?
A Jyotirgana is not simply somebody who got out. It is somebody who found the light that was in him the whole time, and would not accept his own escape as the end of it. What it takes →
Opium, in the villages of western Rajasthan.
We began here because this is where the darkness was thickest and the least was being done. Everything below has been measured, published, or lived by someone we can name.
There is a meaning in each curve and line.
The practices are for doing. These pages are for reading slowly, and coming back to. Savitri comes first, because everything here was read there first. Nothing in any of them asks you to believe anything.
Savitri
Lines that were not written about opium, and that hold it exactly. Three passages, each given a page of its own.
- 1On what it takesNobody is going to thank you.
- 2On relapseYou started again.
- 3On what comes afterEarth grew too narrow
Becoming Jyotirgana
Why the years in the dark are the qualification, not the wound. The Protector Paradigm.
Read it →भीतर से · From withinWhat you are
Seven things this whole site stands on, each beside the passage of Sri Aurobindo that says it better.
Read it →कार्पण्य · One verseIt was smallness that struck me down
The fault of a closed hand. One verse of the Bhagavad Gītā, where a man gives his own condition its name.
Read it →The campWhat it takes to be a Jyotirgana
Thirteen photographs from a month in western Rajasthan, and what is in each that you would never see.
See them →We tested it. Then we published the numbers.
Men in the camp completed a one-month residential programme of twice-daily, instructor-led breath-based yoga. Lung function was measured by spirometry before and after, to international (ATS/ERS) standard.
No serious adverse events were reported.
Roj AR, Siddh S, Sharma H, et al. Breath restored: yoga-based training lowers estimated
lung age among individuals with opium dependence in a residential pre-post study.
Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2026.
Read the paper →
Department of Yoga, Central University of Rajasthan, Ajmer.
Ethics approval: Institutional Human Ethics Committee, Central University of Rajasthan.
Trial registration: CTRI/2025/07/089999.
What that looks like in one life.
Numbers are how we check ourselves. They are not how anybody decides to change. This man is not in the study above. He came to a later camp, and his own data belong to research still underway. But what he describes had already been measured in the men who came before him.
The Man Who Was Reborn at Seventy
"He arrived with nothing. The clothes he stood in, and an asthma pump. He had not told his family he was leaving. There was no one left to tell."Read the full story
150+ practices. Each one chosen for a reason.
This is not a general yoga class pointed at addiction. Every practice was matched to a specific complication that opium produces in the body and mind: the breathlessness, the ruined sleep, the pain that has nowhere to go, the craving, the flattened mood, the body that has forgotten how to generate its own energy.
Each practice then passed two filters. Subject experts in yoga and in addiction medicine rated it for relevance to the complication it was meant to address. Then the participants themselves, men living with opium dependence, rated it for whether it was actually doable in the body they had. A practice that satisfied the experts but defeated the participants did not survive.
Complication first. Practice second. That is the whole design.
Sūkṣma and Sthūla Vyāyāma
सूक्ष्म एवं स्थूल व्यायाम · WAKING THE BODYEvery joint asked to move, from the crown downward, and then the whole body. This is where a man who has run on a borrowed chemical for years asks his own body to work for him, and finds out what is still there.
Five gross practices are on this site →Breathing Practices and Ṣaṭkarma
श्वास अभ्यास एवं षट्कर्म · CLEARING THE PASSAGEClearing the passages the substance has fouled: the nose, the throat, the stomach, the breath. These are also the first practices a man feels working on the same day he does them, which matters more than it sounds.
Nine breathing practices are on this site →Āsana
आसन · STRENGTH AND STEADINESSReturning strength to a body that has been borrowed against. The first honest tiredness in a long time.
All nine groups are on this site →Prāṇāyāma
प्राणायाम · THE BREATHThe most measured part of the protocol, and where the lung findings come from. Craving also arrives in the breath before it arrives in the mind.
Both kinds of breath are on this site →Dhāraṇā and Dhyāna
धारणा एवं ध्यान · ATTENTION, AND WHAT IT MEETSOne phase, not two. Addiction is attention captured; concentration is attention taken back, one deliberate minute at a time. And then sitting with whatever the substance was covering, which is the hardest part and the one that decides whether the rest lasts.
The education of the senses is on this site →Peer Leadership Training
समवयस्क नेतृत्व प्रशिक्षण · TURNING ROUNDThe phase the whole project is named after. The one who has come out is trained to go back in: to sit with the man three days into it, to lead a session, to be the proof in the room. Nobody else can do this, and no programme is finished without it.
How the sixth phase is built →
The reasoning is written down, and so are its limits.
Every practice in this protocol is here because of something. Not because it is traditional, and not because it sounds right. Each one is traced from the complication it addresses, through what opium does to produce that complication, through how medicine treats it now, to the place where the same effect has been obtained without a drug. Where the evidence is thin we say so on the page, in the same size type.
काया · The Body
Sleep that repairs nothing. A gut that never settles. Pain the medicine made worse. Strength and bone. Wind. Memory. Nothing feeling good any more. Being alone. The first days off it, and the craving. Each at its own place on a map of the body, with what is known and what is not.
Read by complication → Start from the practiceशिक्षा सत्र · The educative sessions
Why the third group does everything twice, once on each side. Why the seventh visits its highest posture only once. Why nothing in the eighth pushes the ground. Ten sessions, each at three depths: कहानी, कारण, प्रमाण.
Read by group →Both end in practice. Each complication now has a practice of its own, put together from every phase of the protocol (all twenty-three), and each session belongs to a practice that is on this site in full.
You can start before you contact anybody.
Practices from the first four phases of the protocol are on this website, and all of it is free. No account, no payment, no waiting for a camp.
If you are on your own with this, start with yourself →
आसन · The Body
Nine groups. Each is done in three ways: first as they come to you, with nobody correcting you; then with the breath, until movement and breath are one thing again; then slowly enough that the attention can walk the whole body. Begin at the first, which asks the least, and stay in it as long as you like.
Begin the practice →प्राणायाम · Prāṇāyāma
Two kinds of breath, and they are not a ranking. Counted on its own, निर्गर्भ: yogic breathing, sama vritti and kapālabhāti. With a seed in it, सगर्भ: the mantras and the stotras, carried on the breath aloud, whispered, or in the mind.
Begin the breath →काया · A practice for each complication
Twenty-three complications, and for each one a practice put together for it alone, out of every phase of the protocol, each part at the hour of the day it belongs to.
The first daysCravingSleepPainThe gutShame, and being alone
All twenty-three →It is free because the people who need it most cannot pay, and because a practice nobody can reach is not a practice.
And when you want more than one practice.
The full protocol is written down. You do not have to travel to Rajasthan, and you do not have to wait for a camp. Start where you are, and add support as you need it.
The book of practices
All 150+ practices: how to perform each one, why it is there, what complication it addresses, and the reasoning behind it. The protocol, in your hands.
Recorded video sessions
Videos you can keep and follow at home without needing a connection every morning. Built for villages, not for cities.
One-to-one online sessions
A trained instructor, your body, your history, your complications. Adapted to what you can actually do today.
Group online sessions
The camp's real ingredient was never only the yoga. It was a room of people doing it at the same hour. This is that, at a distance.
Tell us where you are and we will point you to the right starting place.
Write to usYou do not have to wait for any of this. Call now.
Free. Confidential. 24 hours. In your language.
Govt. of India 14416 Tele-MANAS
Mental health support 1933 MANAS
Narcotics Control Bureau
Please read this. Yoga is powerful and it is not a substitute for medical care. In our study it was delivered within a residential de-addiction programme, alongside standard treatment, not instead of it. Withdrawal from opioids, alcohol and some sedatives can be dangerous and occasionally fatal without supervision. Do not stop a substance abruptly on your own. Call 14446 or see a doctor first.