The Method
Shripur, in its founders’ words.
A way inward through sacred geometry, breath and light, held by a guide. What it is made of, how far it goes, and where it comes from.
Every tradition that went inward drew the same map.
Rings within rings around a single point of light. The Śrī Cakra in India, the mandala in Tibet, the star in Isfahan, the rose window in Chartres, the labyrinth on its floor. Different hands, one map.
The map was drawn from the inside. Close your eyes under soft light and the shapes come on their own: tunnels, spirals, lattices, webs. A century ago they were named; twenty-five years ago they were traced to the wiring of the visual cortex. The traditions did not invent the geometry. They recognised it.
Shripur is a path into that map, and it has five parts.
A map
The nine enclosures of the Śrī Cakra, from the world at the gate to a single point at the centre, in the order and with the names the Yoginīhṛdaya gives. The Path
Texts of origin
Every journey has one: the Yogatārāvalī for aware rest, the Vijñāna Bhairava for open space, the Yoginīhṛdaya for the map itself. We translate them and publish them. The journeys
A yantra
Each journey’s own geometry and colours, drawn on paper, to contemplate before the light and to carry home after it.
A light
An instrument that reads breath, heart and brain and shapes a field of light to you while you lie with your eyes closed. The method is whole without it. The Instrument
A guide
A certified person who holds every session from beginning to end, and whose read of you is the final word. How guides train
No score, and no promise.
Inner work is not a game to win, and nothing in Shripur turns depth into a number. What it offers is a deep inner journey. What it asks is less than you might think: a quiet room, a closed eye, a guide, and a willingness to be still.
It is not a treatment, and it does not diagnose, treat or cure any condition. It is not for everyone: who it is not suitable for is set out on Safety and suitability, and the same list appears wherever someone can join, apply or ask to come. Many people respond little to light. The practice, the stillness and the guide’s care are the heart of it.
Where it comes from.
We both teach in the Iyengar and Śrī Vidyā traditions. Shripur began with one question: what if light could be shaped not to dazzle, but to accompany a person inward, and step aside the moment it is no longer needed? The answer is an instrument, patent pending, built in India, and a method that is whole without it.
Neha and R.K. Luthra
How far it goes.
The map has a gate and a centre, and the path is walked in that order. Each step opens after the one before it.
1 · anyone, after screening
Open
The geometry and its colours, the yantras, steady gazing and time under the light, always with a guide. Most people begin with a Discovery journey.
2 · after Discovery
Deepening
Longer journeys with your guide, each built around one figure of the map, and the daily practice at home between them.
3 · within the tradition
By invitation
Taught person to person, when a student asks and a teacher agrees. It is not offered here, and it is not sold.
One map, many hands.
Six geometries, drawn here in one hand. Five are what the traditions saw. The sixth is what the eye makes on its own, under light, with the lids closed.
The Śrī Cakra
India. Nine triangles around a point, in two rings of lotus, inside three squares with four gates.
The mandala
Tibet. A palace with four gates inside rings of lotus and fire. Drawn in sand, then swept away.
The eight-fold star
Islamic geometry. Two squares turned through one circle; the lines carried across the whole surface.
The rose window
Gothic Europe. Twelve petals of stone tracery around a centre of light, read from inside the dark.
The labyrinth
Chartres. One path, eleven circuits, to the centre and back, walked on the knees.
The form constants
The visual cortex. Tunnel, spiral, lattice and cobweb: the shapes closed-eye light makes, in most people.
Klüver named the form constants in the 1920s. Bressloff, Cowan, Golubitsky, Thomas and Wiener (2001) traced them to the architecture of the primary visual cortex. Allefeld, Pütz, Kastner and Wackermann (2011) catalogued which of them flickering light brings. More on the What we know page.
In our time, the map is still being drawn.
Hilma af Klint painted it from 1906, in rings and spirals, decades before abstraction had a name. Carl Jung drew a mandala most mornings for years and came to read them as pictures of the whole self. In 1959 the painter Brion Gysin and the engineer Ian Sommerville set a slotted cylinder turning around a bulb, to be watched with closed eyes. The anonymous tantric painters of Rajasthan went on making the oldest version of all: a single form, a single colour, on a page the size of a hand.
Shripur stands in that company. Its light is not an object to look at: it listens, and it leaves.
Where to begin.
The first door is a Discovery journey: a few days with a guide, the map and the practice that walks it, in India, from 2027.