My experience: Rishikesh Yogpeeth’s Yoga Teacher Training Program (300-hour) in India

Namaste friends.

It’s been a few months since I finished my 300-hour Yoga Teacher Training (YTT) program at Rishikesh Yogpeeth, a gorgeous ashram tucked away in the Himalayan foothills of northern India, and I wanted to take a moment to detail a few thoughts about my ashram and program.

Buckle up- this is a bit of a long one!

I’ve been avid yogi since 2011. I finished my 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training program at a CorePower Yoga location in Chicago back in 2018, and I’ve been teaching on-and-off since then. Most recently, I’ve been on the schedule at my local YogaSix location here in Flagstaff, where I’ve been teaching twice a week for two and a half years.

I made the decision early last year to pursue advanced yoga teacher training in India for myriad reasons, and I ended up choosing Rishikesh Yogpeeth after doing a good amount of online research.

A quick note: Rishikesh Yogpeeth has two ashram locations: Yogasutram, which is its newest budget option located in Rishikesh proper, and the Abhayaranya ashram, which is the original location I studied at.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: the ashram is stunning. While many ashrams in India are all housed in a single multi-story building squeezed along a narrow crowded street in town, Rishikesh Yogpeeth’s Abhayaranya ashram is set up more like a campus. There are separate buildings for the yogshalas (yoga halls), front office and library, cafeteria, cafe and shop. There were terraced dorms cut into the mountainside, lush sprawling gardens and lawns, and nearby hiking trails.

Looking at photos online is one thing, and I was a little worried that the photos I saw of the ashram wouldn’t really convey teh setting in-person. I’m happy to say that the ashram did not disappoint. It’s even more stunning, even more peaceful, even more serene in person. It’s borderline indescribable. Even now, months after leaving Rishikesh Yogpeeth’s Abhayaranya ashram, I still tear up just thinking about what an incredible space it was. The photos didn’t do the space justice and can’t capture the absolute sense of bliss and inner contentment I felt at the ashram.

It is by and far the most beautiful space I have ever had the privilege of practicing yoga in.

The location was a bit outside of Rishikesh proper and could only be accessed by a combination of taxi and then foot, which might not be for everyone. We were quite a bit isolated from town which meant it took a good amount of uphill hiking (and cab fare) to get to and from town on our off days. We were a ways away from the Ganges River and other holy sites BUT because our location was a bit more secluded, we didn’t have to deal with traffic noise, unwanted visitors or other distractions. Plus, we were so busy anyway that I wouldn’t have had time to explore Rishikesh before/ after classes. More on that later.

The facilities were also very, very nice. Granted, I didn’t stay at any other ashram so I don’t have much of a frame of reference short of photos I looked at online during my ashram search before booking Yogpeeth, but I had no complaints. My bed was a little firm but comfortable. Our rooms were spacious and well-decorated, and our bathrooms were clean. Plus – we had shower curtains! Which are a bit of a novelty in India.

I felt fully immersed in the culture of India throughout my program. My training was really less of a training and more of an experience. The staff at the ashram went above and beyond to give us as much India and as much yoga as they possibly could during our short time in the program. I was really pleased with the unexpected Diwali celebrations we ended up having partway through our YTT, and was pleasantly surprised to find out there was an Ayurvedic doctor at the ashram for consultations and treatments.

You might think, “wow Randi, how much did this fancy high-end yoga program cost?!” Surprisingly, my YTT program was really affordable! While Yogpeeth’s Abhayaranya ashram is one of the more expensive programs in Rishikesh, I booked a shared room at the early bird rate, and I ended up paying about $1,800 total for the experience: My tuition, room and board, meals and sundries.

For comparison, many 300-hour YTT programs here in the U.S. cost about $4,000 for tuition alone.

If you wanted to find a cheaper ashram in Rishikesh you certainly could! I saw some programs for as low as $900 — but I felt like I definitely received more than my course fee’s worth.

The food was incredible.

We had breakfast, lunch and dinner every day, and the food was really, really good. Rishikesh as a holy city is entirely vegetarian, so I was able to eat everything that the ashram put in front of me. I don’t have any dietary preferences (short of not eating meat which was already accommodated) so I wasn’t picky, but several of the other students at my ashram had various dietary restrictions (vegan, gluten-free) and the ashram was easily able to accommodate them as well.

I also appreciated the photos. The ashram was there taking photos of us throughout the program, so most of us walked away with some really great photos of our experience.

This was especially nice because some of us were on a digital detox, and weren’t diligent about carrying our phones/cameras around. The ashram’s willingness to take photos of us really helped me stop focusing about documenting the experience so I could focus more on living the experience.

The entire program was really intense. I know this is just kind of an unavoidable side effect of cramming Yoga Alliance’s mandated 300 hours of training into one short month, but by week three, I was just exhausted. We had one day off a week (and the bells would still chime at 5:30 a.m., so there was no sleeping in), and only a one-hour break every day. Our schedule kept us insanely busy from 6 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., so there was very little downtime. I struggled to find time to journal, to connect with other students and to touch base with friends and family back home.

Plus, we were practicing asana (physical yoga) for three (if not more) hours every day. I was pretty sore most days!

I know it’s a bit of a Catch-22: Part of the reason I wanted to undergo my 300-hour YTT overseas was so I could fully immerse. I just didn’t think about how taxing that would be.

I was talking to a few of the other students, and we kind of felt like our time was a Venn diagram: Classes and lessons, sleep and self care, community and connection: Choose two.

Side note: The students were amazing! There were only three of us from the U.S. in my cohort. We had students from all over western Europe and eastern Europe, the Americas, Australia, the Middle East, Central Asia — almost everywhere! I loved hearing all the languages being spoken.

I struggled a bit with the larger class sizes. My 200-hour YTT program had nine students, which allowed us all to form really close relationships with each other, and our 300-hour class at Yogpeeth had 27 students enrolled, which made it a bit more of a challenge.

I was able to have one-on-one conversations with almost every student, and I forged some meaningful relationships with a few students (shout out to my roomie Valerie!) but it was still tough to really connect with everyone in my class.

Plus, my 300-hour cohort arrived at the same time as the 200-hour cohort (21 students), so we did our introductions together, spent meals together, did some non-classroom activities together — some of us even shared rooms with the 200-hour cohort. So there were about 50 of us for three weeks until the 200-hour cohort left, and was replaced with a second 200-hour cohort the very next day.

Plus, the Abhayaranya ashram is expanding. Three new housing buildings (which contain two dorms each and can accommodate between six and 12 more students) were under construction while I was at the ashram.

It felt like a lot of rotation and felt a little impersonal at times.

In terms of the classes themselves, my experience was totally different from my 200-hour experience! My 200-hour YTT program came with a syllabus, a course outline and a manual developed for the class. We had clear requirements in terms of class attendance and exams, and the manual guided us through the syllabus in a very organized and defined way.

On the other hand, my Rishikesh Yogpeeth program was quite a bit more unstructured! We were given a daily schedule and a stack of textbooks, but we all seemed to struggle with finding a rhyme or rhythm to our lessons.

Our philosophy classes loosely followed one of our textbooks, but then deviated to other books, and — outside of our alignment and adjustment workshop — a lot of our classes weren’t really interactive. They were formatted more as informal lectures.

It wasn’t until halfway through our third week when our anatomy teacher dropped a slide deck in the class WhatsApp group that we actually noticed there was a topic structure of sorts — it just hadn’t been shared with us.

I think my structured Western brain probably would have loved knowing each class’s topic up front so I could better prepare.

None of this was bad, per se — it just wasn’t what I was used to or expecting!

Furthermore, a few of the students in my 300-hour YTT program told me that they’d taken their 200-hour YTT program at Rishikesh Yogpeeth as well, and many of the lessons — notably anatomy/ physiology and philosophy — were the exact same for both the 200-hour and the 300-hour students.

Those students said that while the asana portions of our training were much harder, and we learned different adjustments for more challenging postures, the bulk of the training was the same between the 200-hour and 300-hour students.

This didn’t bother me too much since I took my 200-hour YTT elsewhere (so a lot of what we were learning felt new to me), but it would probably bother me a bit if I had taken both my 200-hour and 300-hour trainings at Yogpeeth.

Something that also caught me off-guard was the lack of practice teaching. I didn’t teach at all during my 300-hour program until my final exam.

This didn’t phase me too much because I’ve been teaching for years and I’ve become quite confident in my yoga teaching, but the 200-hour YTT students didn’t practice teach either.

One of the girls in my 300-hour YTT had taken a 200-hour YTT in her home country (England) before coming to Yogpeeth, where she took her 200-hour (again) before her 300-hour.

She explained that there wasn’t any practice teaching in the 200-hour YTT either, and that she wouldn’t have felt completely confident teaching a Western-based asana class if she hadn’t already taken a 200-hour YTT program during which she practice taught.

She went on to say that a few of the students in her Yogpeeth 200-hour program even went so far as to say they felt less qualified to teach after taking the program just because they had no idea how much yoga truly encompassed until they took a teacher training.

I don’t know that I would have felt confident as a yoga teacher if I hadn’t practice taught during my first YTT program, so take from that what you will.

While my overall experience was overwhelmingly positive, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a few of the slight inconveniences and downsides I encountered during my program.

While I luckily had a smooth and issue-free booking experience, a few of the students at my ashram let me know they had a bit of a tough time when they booked. One student said she was originally slotted into the wrong class period and they kept messing up her program dates during communication, and a few of the students in my cohort were actually given an incorrect program end date. They’d booked flights according to the dates they were given, so they missed our graduation. They handled it with grace, but I was pretty upset on their behalf.

The ashram had also overbooked. One student had booked a single room and was told upon arrival that she’d have to share for a portion of her program because they had registered more students than they had space for.

There was also a bit of favoritism at play. Two of the students in my program had done their 200-hour YTT at Yogpeeth and came back for their 300-hour. Those students had actually gotten married during their 200-hour program, and were still really close with the ashram staff. Which is really cool, don’t get me wrong, I’m all about it, but sometimes it just made things feel a bit uncomfortable for the rest of us in the program. Our end-of-program party ended up centering around their wedding video which was weird if not a little frustrating. I’d been looking forward to spending my last night at the ashram celebrating the past month with people I’d grown close with- not watching footage of a wedding I didn’t go to.

And, while our ashram staff was great at taking photos of us during the training, they definitely took more photos of some students — like the aforementioned couple — than the other.

Some opportunities at the ashram also weren’t really fairly presented to students.

For example, some students were given the opportunity to go into town for a night (with free accommodations) to celebrate Diwali, and then to do yoga by the Ganges in the morning as part of a marketing photoshoot, but that opportunity wasn’t presented to everyone — so five of us were told we had to remain at the ashram and couldn’t partake in the festivities.

Finally, while Yogpeeth told us they would book optional activities for us on our day off — temple tours, rafting trips — that didn’t really happen. They organized a temple outing during our first off-day, but then we were all pretty much left to our own devices after that.

Which was fine. I can entertain myself. But one of the other students and I wanted to go rafting on the Ganges, and were struggling to do the admin-level planning work while also trying to, yunno, complete our lessons and stick to our schedule.

None of those were a huge deal, just something to keep in mind if you do end up booking a YTT program at Rishikesh Yogpeeth.

Despite the few challenges, and set-backs, I still accomplished everything I set out to do at Rishikesh Yogpeeth. My goals were to have a once-in-a-lifetime experience, to gain additional yogic knowledge, to deepen my own yoga practice and to receive my 300-hour certificate — all of which I readily accomplished.

I truly felt like my YTT program was less of a training and more of an experience.

With all that said, would I go back to Rishikesh Yogpeeth in retrospect, knowing everything I know now? 100% yes. No questions, zero doubts. I really believe I left a piece of my soul at the Abhayaranya ashram, and even though yoga encourages detachment, there’s no way around it: I got attached.