Anand Mehrotra, Sattva Yoga.
Anand Mehrotra, the Rishikesh-based founder of Sattva Yoga Academy, teaches yoga as an approach to living rather than a set of postures to complete. His work asks a question a stopwatch or a pose cannot answer: what happens to a practice once a student leaves the mat and returns to work, relationships and daily decisions of everyday life?
The everyday emphasis is, by his own account, the most demanding part of the proposition. A class has a defined beginning and end. The situations his teaching addresses do not arrive on a timetable - they recur in decisions and conversations, giving practitioners repeated opportunities to test whether the practice has become part of how they live.
Mehrotra's own training began in the Himalayan oral tradition, under his guru known as Maharaji, and combined meditation, breathwork and philosophical inquiry rather than physical technique alone. In 2012 he brought that training together into a system he calls Sattva Yoga - from the Sanskrit sattva, meaning wholeness, truth or purity - intended as an integrated approach rather than a style focused on any single element.
That starting point shapes how Sattva Yoga Academy frames the first course taught is an invitation to examine attention, motivation and conduct, not only to learn a sequence of postures. "Move from karma through kriya to dharma," is how Mehrotra has put the arc of the practice - action, technique, then purpose.
In videos published on his website, Mehrotra applies that inquiry to familiar situations - receiving criticism, handling pressure, making decisions that affect other people. Awareness, in his framing, is the opportunity to examine an initial reaction before choosing a response. Understanding patience as an idea is one thing; exercising it during a disagreement is another. It is that second, harder test that his teaching points toward.
Mehrotra's public appearances suggest a willingness to take on uncomfortable questions rather than deflect them. In a recorded conversation with psychologist and podcast host Dr Lauren Tober - sponsored by the industry body Yoga Australia and recorded at a Sattva event on Bundjalung Country, Australia - Mehrotra was asked directly about what he thinks non-Indian teachers should understand before sharing yogic practices with their own students. It is a live, sometimes uncomfortable debate inside contemporary yoga, and one a teacher exporting the Himalayan tradition to a global audience cannot avoid indefinitely. That he addresses it on the record, rather than only in promotional material, is itself a data point about how he positions his own authority.
His teaching circuit extends beyond Rishikesh: he has taught at the International Yoga Festival in Rishikesh and at Wanderlust, a US-based yoga and wellness festival circuit, placing him alongside a broader field of internationally touring teachers rather than positioning Sattva as a solely local phenomenon.
Mehrotra has also published a series of books through Sattva Publications, including interpretations of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras (This Is That and That Is This, covering all four padas), Liberation, an interpretation of the Isha Upanishad, and 18 Insights on Life, drawn from the Bhagavad Gita. These position textual study alongside the practical teaching associated with Sattva. A book allows a reader to return to an argument and sit with a difficult passage - a different relationship with a teaching than the immediacy of a group class offers.
Who is Anand Mehrotra?
Anand Mehrotra is a Rishikesh-based yoga teacher, author and entrepreneur, and the founder of Sattva Yoga Academy and the Sattva Yoga system, known for an integrated approach to yoga that combines meditation, breathwork and philosophical study with everyday application.
What does Anand Mehrotra teach?
His teaching applies yoga philosophy to ordinary situations such as receiving criticism, handling pressure and making decisions, alongside published books interpreting texts including Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, the Isha Upanishad and the Bhagavad Gita.
What is Sattva Yoga?
Sattva Yoga is an integrated system developed by Anand Mehrotra and formally introduced in 2012, combining kriya, pranayama, meditation, Kundalini and vinyasa-based asana movement with philosophical study, taught primarily through Sattva Yoga Academy in Rishikesh.
