The Shanti Yoga Centre offers community and companionship with like-minded people who have similar spiritual, health and cultural interests. In addition to the sense of belonging, this provides the potential for great spiritual growth and profound healing and transformation. All are welcome to join our community events and outings - many of which are free of charge.

During this time of unprecedented, evolutionary change, many people find themselves alone with their questions and challenges. With traditional religion no longer fulfilling spiritual needs, scientific materialism presenting soulless, exploitative, competitive explanations, and not finding respite from current relationships, people today need an expanded community of others to share the journey with.  Your tribe is gathering.

At the Shanti Yoga Health Institute Australasia we encourage you to come together in an extended family to talk about some of the topics we table, such as health, spirituality, mindful parenting, quality relationships, evolutionary change, environmental actions, emotional wellbeing, helpful perspectives on ageing, death and dying, or whatever you find of interest. This is a wonderful way to make new friends and to learn from one another.

Shanti Gowans presents a platform and organises regular, one time, and ad hoc activities that engage real life, local people and visitors to meet in-person and genuinely share in her passions, interests, identity and group activities, building face-to-face connections and the community (sangha).

The Shanti Community (sangha) is based on a vision of the universal principles of peace, harmony and the spiritual unity of all beings. This vision offers possibilities for a radical paradigm shift – not a utopia, but a culture in which life’s challenges are met with kindness, generosity and courage, directly cultivating who and what we are as human beings. With the great problems facing human society, it seems increasingly important to find simple and non-sectarian ways to work with ourselves and to share our understanding with others.

In action, the Shanti community is both a spiritual path of study and meditation that helps us work with our minds, as well as a path of serving others and engaging with our world. The universe is fundamentally whole. Benevolent aspects of this holistic nature can be beneficially developed in the daily life of every human being, so that it radiates out to family, friends, community and society. Vital and timely teachings open the door to the compassionate care of ourselves and others while on the road to enlightenment. We practice in mutuality, truly deepening our life, community and practice.

The Shanti community is based upon a deep, simple and natural principle - that people joining our community would have an unequivocal and deep sense of service. This confidence is not based on competitiveness or arrogance, nor is it tinged with paranoia. Underpinning belonging to this community is the aspiration to be awake and enriched by the most inexhaustible principle - creating enlightened society by being the change in the world we want to see - spirituality in action.

Dare something worthy…The Nirvana wellness vision is one such attempt to encourage a wholesome existence for ourselves and others. Every aspect of the community, from its natural environment, location, landscaping and design is developed to draw together the Shanti community in the fields of education, health, contemplation and culture, in order to bring our vision to fruition. You are invited to participate. What we know and understand is that community (sangha) is not something that some people make available and then others partake of. Sangha is a cooperative. We all own it. We all share in it. We are all responsible for it. We all benefit from it. We all belong to it. Giving and receiving goes in all directions. The planet does not need more successful people. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, gardeners, storytellers, music makers, dancers and lovers of all kind.

Some of us in the sangha have been together with Shantiji nurturing health, evolutionary growth and shining a healing light on the shadow aspects of our mind for many years. We've been individually and collectively lit up with a sense of possibility for our world, and a yearning for more beautiful, authentic ways of being. We have been involved in a life of significant studies and practices, most rewarding conversations and meaningful connections, in a space of intelligence, love, vibrant ideas and aliveness.

The broad brushstrokes of our services include:

• Wellbeing programs for the community such as relaxation, yoga, meditation, breathwork
• Complimentary therapies including lifestyle and dietary advice, Ayurveda treatments and medicines
• In-house Ayurvedic treatments, massage and Ayurvedic beauty
• Weightloss programs
• Moving art, such as Bollywood dance classes and performances
• Natural through Walking tours, retreats, Vegetarian-Vegan workshops and meals
• Dance and Culture
• Drama Games, Improvisation, Voice and Public Speaking
• Sacred Art and Spirituality
• Spiritual cinema
• Philosophy, spirituality, meaning and values education
• Stress reduction and personal wellbeing to the corporate and community human services sectors
• Corporate Yoga and Meditation
• Retreats

People who come to our centre may have different faiths, follow different spiritual traditions, have different paths of practice and opinions, including political views. They are of different genders, different sexual orientations, and physical, perceptual and mental abilities. What we share as a community is a genuine connection to contemplative practice, a desire to lead sane, dignified, confident lives, and the aspiration to realise a more wakeful, sane society. To provide an environment in which awakening could flourish in the West, in the early 1970s, Shantiji presented the spiritual journey in the cultural context of yoga, via a personal and societal vision of awakening that is accessible to everyone, all the time, even in the midst of busy, daily life.

Believing that there is a global community of people committed to actively creating a more compassionate and enlightened world, together with her encounter with the Western world, and based upon the specific wisdom imparted from Vedanta, Yoga and Buddhism, as a resource for individual and cultural virtue, Shantiji set out to create a place in the world in which enlightened world citizens can lead meditative lives of bravery, gentleness and intelligence, where they act with responsibility and delight in caring for one another.

The Pure Shanti view is that every human being has wholesomeness, warmth and intelligence as their fundamental nature. This nature can be cultivated through the wisdom practices of yoga and meditation and it can be further developed in daily life, so that it radiates out to family, friends, community and society. Through the Shanti Yoga practices, we cultivate the capacity to be fully open to our experience, and the ability to respond to everyday life situations with greater clarity and respect.

Whilst, during the course of our lives, the wholesomeness can easily become covered over by doubt, cynicism, fear and egotism, the journey of becoming fully human means seeing through those habitual patterns and waking up to our natural intelligence. Shanti Yoga does not promote, encourage, actively facilitate or endorse harmful, threatening and violent behaviours towards others or oneself.  It takes kindness to ourselves and others, and courage to wake up, when we are so deeply asleep. However, when we do, we discover the world to be naturally sacred, wholesome and full of interest and beauty. We begin to clearly see and acknowledge the wholeness and wisdom of others, and to feel compassion to help them in myriad ways.

Inspiring enlightened society, the Shanti community exists to support for those who aspire to follow this path. Members feel part of a connected community devoted to a way of life worth spreading and the pursuit of their unique 'one wish to change the world'.