The two people who run the school

Gagori Mitra

Co-founder · Ayurveda and bodywork

Gagori co-founded Aithein and does most of the teaching. For her the connection between the body, its senses, the mind and the soul is not a subject — it is how she lives, and she teaches it from her own experience rather than from a syllabus.

She was six the first time she encountered massage. To break a bed-wetting habit her father worked from a book on marma therapy, applying the points it described. Within two months it had stopped. When she was older she would rub her father’s feet and shoulders, doing it for fun, and it was he who noticed she could actually shift something in people with her hands. Her mother and sister had bad headaches; ten or fifteen minutes of pressure on a few points on the forehead and they were gone.

The Ayurveda came from her mother, who had it from hers. In her family the knowledge has simply been handed down.

She was studying HR when a friend, Aditi, had a headache cured by one of her massages and told her plainly that she had a gift. Gagori joined a multinational, left it, and completed 300 hours of professional bodywork therapy. That course was where the connection between body and mind stopped being an idea and became something she could see in a person — cause and effect, health and illness, written into how somebody lives.

She is still a student. She studies under her Guru, Choyin Dorje; born into a Hindu family, she follows the Buddhist lineage and its practices. Almost everything she knows came to her through Guru–Shishya Parampara, the old way of learning by sitting with a teacher.

What students tend to remember about her teaching is not the technique. It is that she makes a room where it is safe to not understand something yet, and to say so.

Nikhil Gupta

Co-founder · sound healing and retreats

Nikhil co-founded Aithein. He took a degree in Computer Engineering at MIT, Pune University, and spent his first working years in IT.

The turn came through training rather than through crisis: a Tony Robbins workshop in the USA, then Core Empowerment Training and Advaya Yoga, and a Kundalini Yoga workshop with Gurmukh Khalsa and Gurshabd Khalsa at the International Yoga Festival in Rishikesh. What he wanted afterwards was to bring that kind of transformation to people properly — as real training, with quality behind it, rather than as a weekend.

His own path went job, then business, then management, then healing. Somewhere in that he understood how much difference it makes to actually change a person’s life rather than to optimise something. He and Gagori started Aithein on that, and on a plain foundation of values, ethics and an open heart.

He runs the school: the strategy, the operations, the alliances, the long view. He also teaches the sound healing course and holds the retreats.