TodoForest
The First Living Forest Campus of TodoForest · Canacona, South Goa · Est. 2026
Forest · School · Table · Community
Five acres of riverfront land in South Goa — where ecological restoration, classical yoga education, and community life are being built together on the same ground, over the same long time.
What Is Ṛtavan
Canacona
South Goa, India
TodoForest
A place where the forest, the school, the food, and the community are being built together — not as separate programs, but as parts of a single intention.
Ṛtavan occupies five acres of riverfront land in Canacona, South Goa. The site came with over two hundred coconut palms, mature mango and cashew trees that have fruited here for generations, and a tidal river on its eastern boundary. The land was not empty. It had structure, relationships, and a logic of its own. The work at Ṛtavan deepens what is already here — rather than replacing it.
The land is being ecologically restored — Miyawaki native species reforestation is underway within the existing canopy of palms, fruiting trees, and riverside vegetation. A food forest is developing. The ecology deepens with time.
Dakshinamurti Yoga School now operates from its permanent campus at Ṛtavan — teaching classical yoga and Advaita Vedanta philosophy in the Dakshinamurti tradition. Programs are active. Students are here.
Gaonfornia is the campus kitchen and gathering space — built around local ingredients, slow preparation, and the kind of hospitality that requires time. Opening 2026.
Ṛtavan is not a retreat center. Not a resort. Not a school with a garden attached.
It is a place that has decided to take a long time to become what it is meant to be.
The Campus
Five acres of riverfront land in Canacona, South Goa. The site came with an existing canopy of two hundred coconut palms, mature mango and cashew trees, and a tidal river on the eastern boundary.
Miyawaki native species reforestation is underway within the existing landscape. A food forest is developing. Dakshinamurti Yoga School operates from its permanent campus here. Gaonfornia Café is opening. The land was not empty when the work began. It will not be recognisable when the work matures.
The Living Forest Campus
A living forest campus is a place where ecological restoration and human life develop on the same land, over the same time, as part of the same intention.
Ṛtavan is not a forest with a café attached to it, and not a yoga school that happens to be near trees. It is an attempt — serious and long-term — to build a place where the forest, the practice, the food, and the community are genuinely interdependent.
Whether that works — whether the forest, the school, the culture, and the community can be made genuinely interdependent — is the question Ṛtavan has committed to answering over time, as the first Living Forest Campus of TodoForest.
How It Is Organised
Ṛtavan is the place. Four distinct systems operate within it — each with its own purpose, each answering to the same underlying intention.
Ṛtavan
The Living Forest Campus · South Goa
Dakshinamurti
Education
Classical yoga education. Now operating from its permanent campus at Ṛtavan.
Forest Restoration
Ecology
Miyawaki planting. Food forest development. The existing landscape deepening.
Gaonfornia
Culture
Slow food, local ingredients, open tables. The social and cultural life of the campus.
Community
Social
Members, residents, practitioners, and stewards. People who are part of the place.
TodoForest — the institution that develops Living Forest Campuses where ecology, learning, food, and community are brought together in one place. Ṛtavan is its first.
Every civilization that endured built institutions rooted in living land — places designed to mature across generations, not quarters.
Whether that institutional form can still be built today is the question TodoForest exists to answer.
The Living Forest Campus is the model TodoForest is developing. Ṛtavan, in Canacona, South Goa, is the first. The question of whether this form of institution is viable — ecologically, philosophically, economically, across generations — is what this campus exists to answer.
A Day
The road to Ṛtavan is not marked. You pass through Canacona, through the particular light of South Goa in the late afternoon — amber through palm, dust on laterite, the smell of the river before you see it. Somewhere between the last junction and the property gate, the quality of air changes. The forest, even in its early stages, announces itself before you arrive.
Your first evening is not structured. There is no welcome briefing, no orientation schedule. Someone will show you where you are sleeping. Beyond that, the evening is yours.
Most people find themselves at the riverfront before dark. The water moves slowly here — tidal at this point, the river aware of the ocean it will reach. You may sit longer than you intended. This is the beginning of what Ṛtavan is trying to do.
The light arrives slowly through the coconut and forest canopy — not sudden brightness, but a gradual disclosure. Birdsong precedes everything. By the time you are fully awake, the land has been awake for an hour.
The yoga practice happens before the day has decided what it is. Dakshinamurti's approach does not offer sequences or transformation claims. It offers sustained encounter with the body's actual condition — not the condition you wish to have, but the one that is present, this morning, in this place.
The practice is slow. Precise. At times uncomfortable in the particular way that honesty is uncomfortable. This is considered appropriate.
A walk through the existing landscape — through mature coconut palms, past fruiting mangoes, toward the river boundary. The Miyawaki zone is marked but not performed. The naturalist who tends to Ṛtavan knows the name of every species on the property. She will tell you if you ask. She will not perform the knowledge if you don't.
Dinner is unhurried. The kitchen uses what is local, what is seasonal in South Goa at this moment. The table is long. Conversations happen between people who arrived as strangers. By the second evening, they are no longer strangers. The café does not have a posted closing time.
The afternoon is yours. The riverfront in the afternoon light of South Goa in October — post-monsoon, the land saturated and green — makes an argument for the existence of Ṛtavan that no text can fully make. You will not find language for it immediately. The land does not require you to.
The Name
In the Rigveda — composed before civilisations had names for themselves — Ṛta is the principle of order underlying all existence. Not a deity. Not a belief system. A description of how things actually organise themselves.
The pattern by which seasons turn, rivers run, and forests develop — without needing instruction.
Ṛta is the order that precedes language. Van means forest. Together: Ṛtavan is The Forest of Cosmic Order — a place where people, land, learning, and community are cultivated in alignment with that deeper order.
The Ṛtavan Manifesto
Written to outlast the people who wrote it.
A forest is not a collection of trees. It is a community of interdependent organisms that have learned, over millennia, to support each other's survival. We are learning from this.
Health is not the absence of illness. It is the presence of relationship — to land, to food, to community, to the body one inhabits.
Silence is not empty. It is the medium through which attention becomes possible.
Regeneration is not a return to a previous state. It is the emergence of something more complex and more resilient than what existed before.
We are not the owners of this land. We are its current stewards — responsible for the condition in which we leave it.
A meal shared at a common table is an underestimated technology for building trust between strangers.
The body knows things that take the mind years to understand. Practice is the slow work of closing that gap.
Community forms around shared work — around doing something difficult together, over time, in the same place.
The forest will outlast everyone who plants it. This is not a problem. It is the point.
Speed is a mode. So is depth. They are rarely available simultaneously. We have chosen depth.
Ṛta does not require our belief in order to operate. Our participation in this order is a choice — and Ṛtavan is an act of making it.
We make no promises about transformation. We offer conditions. What happens within them belongs to the person who arrives.
A place that asks nothing of you will give you nothing in return.
Every tree planted here will outlive the planter. We find this appropriate.
We will know we have succeeded when the forest no longer needs us.
The Horizon
A statement of institutional intention. Not a business plan. A record of what was hoped for, written at the beginning, so that those who come later can judge whether it was achieved.
Stage One
Establishing
The Forest Takes Root
Miyawaki planting takes hold. The food forest becomes productive. Dakshinamurti deepens its roots on the campus. Gaonfornia becomes a genuine community institution. The first generation of members and residents arrives, stays, and returns. The social fabric of Ṛtavan begins to have a history. These are not milestones to be checked. They are conditions to be grown.
Stage Two
Deepening
The Institution Accumulates What Cannot Be Planned
The forest canopy closes. Biodiversity expands — measurably, visibly. Dakshinamurti develops a serious body of graduates. The first generation of students becomes the first generation of teachers. The institution accumulates memory, character, and trust. The relationship between ecology and education begins to be documented — not as a template, but as a record of what was attempted and what held.
Stage Three
Stewardship
The Institution Outlives Its Founders
Ṛtavan outlives its founding conditions. The stewards who come next inherit something with a history — and the responsibility to understand what it is before changing it. This is the stage most institutions fail to plan for. TodoForest considers it among the most important. An institution that cannot be handed on is not yet an institution.
Stage Four
Beyond Ṛtavan
A Question of Readiness, Not Ambition
Whether TodoForest develops another Living Forest Campus is not a question of ambition. It is a question of readiness — of the land, of the stewardship, of the community willing to commit to the same long duration. Not because a timeline demands it. Because something real has been proven, and somewhere else is ready to receive it. This may happen in a decade. It may happen in four. The institution should not be in a hurry to find out.
The goal is not to become large.
The goal is to become deep.
Stewardship
Ṛtavan is not owned by its founders. It is held in responsibility — by the people who tend it, the community that uses it, and the commitment that established it — for those who will come after.
Four governance principles are designed to outlast the people who wrote them. The legal structure to enforce them is being built. The people who carry this responsibility now are its two stewards.
Ways to Participate
Visit the Campus
Come to Ṛtavan. Walk the forest. Eat at Gaonfornia. Sit by the river. What to expect, how to arrive, and how to begin.
Plan Your Visit →Study at Dakshinamurti
Classical yoga education at Ṛtavan's permanent school. Daily practice, teacher training, and immersive programs in the Hatha and Advaita traditions.
Explore programs →Become a Member
A sustained relationship with a living place. Entry begins with a conversation, not a transaction.
Visiting, volunteering, studying, restoring, partnering — all the ways to participate are detailed on the Visit page.
Ṛtavan is already underway. The school is teaching. The land is being tended. The forest is beginning to establish itself. What comes next depends, in part, on who arrives — and who decides to stay.
Ṛtavan · Canacona, South Goa · Est. 2026 · TodoForest · Brahmodya