Where the name came from, and the school after it
Aithein is a Greek word. It means to rekindle — to burn again — and the school was named for what it hopes happens to the people who come.
The word
‘Aithein’ is said to be Greek, and to mean to rekindle, or to burn again. Read a little further and it carries something more like to make someone young again. That is the sense the school took it in: students are here to rekindle the power already in them, so that they can go and heal other people with it.
When the Greeks used the word it was not about a phase that passes. It meant something that settles in and stays with you. That is the intention here too — to help a person build a working relationship between their body, their senses, their mind and their soul, and then to send them out to bring some vitality into other lives.
The organisation
Aithein was started by Gagori Mitra and her husband Nikhil Gupta. They came from software and management and wanted to be part of something with more in it, and this was the answer.
It was established in 2005 with a plain objective: to heal and transform people’s lives. The way the school does that is by turning individuals into healers, through theoretical and practical training across all four aspects of a human being.
The confidence to say that comes from years of research and teaching, and from a lot of close attention to how people actually live. The courses put art and science next to each other. Over the years the responses have come back from students, therapists, doctors, healers and yoga teachers alike.
Transformation
A radical change — in appearance, in nature, or in character. There are very few moments in an adult life that honestly deserve the word.
The school’s ambition is that the healing here is not only peaceful but permanent: that something is different afterwards, and stays different.
What it looks like
Rekindle, not install
The name is a quiet claim about how this works. Nothing is being put into you that was not there. Whatever capacity you have to help another person with your hands, you already have — it has usually just been buried under a working life that never asked for it.
Most people arrive fairly sure they are the exception. Very few of them still think so by the end of the first week.
More about the school
- The two people who run the schoolAithein is Gagori Mitra and Nikhil Gupta. She teaches; he built the school around her teaching. Both of them left other careers to do it.
- What the school is for, and what it will not trade awayThe mission, the vision, and the eight things Aithein tries to actually do rather than print on a wall.
- How the teaching actually works hereEverything at Aithein starts from one idea: a problem in the body has a cause somewhere, and finding it means looking inward rather than harder.
- Where the school is goingMore courses, more healers, and an honest read on why the world is going to need them.
Come and see for yourself
The courses run October to April on Agonda Beach. Tell us roughly when you could travel and what drew you here.