Student
Guidebook.

This knowledge has existed for five thousand years. It survived because teachers found students. Not the right students. Not the wealthy students. Not the students with the correct credentials. Students who were called.

Somewhere along the way, other schools built gates. Prerequisites. Application processes. Campuses you must travel to. Tuition few can pay. They meant well. But a gate that keeps out a healer in Ghana, a midwife in Brazil, a nurse in rural India, a single mother working two jobs in Ohio — that gate has cost the world something it cannot measure.

Yoga Veda Institute of Āyurvedic Medicine was built without those gates. No waitlist. No prerequisites. No country excluded. The financial model runs on trust — because we believe the people who find their way here deserve to be trusted. We built live classes because Āyurveda requires a living teacher, not a screen. We built a global community because this medicine does not belong to one culture, one country, one language.

It belongs to whoever is called.

You are reading this. That is enough.

Āyurveda means the knowledge of life. Not the knowledge of disease. Not the knowledge of treatment. The knowledge of life itself — how it moves, what it needs, how it falls out of balance and finds its way back.

It begins with a question other systems do not ask. Not: what is wrong with this person? But: who is this person? What is their nature? What season are they in? What have they been eating, thinking, fearing, wanting? The diagnosis begins long before the symptom.

This medicine does not separate the body from the mind, or the mind from the spirit. It does not separate the individual from the season, the season from the cosmos. Jyotiṣa is a clinical tool — the position of planets at birth tells a practitioner something medicine alone cannot. Vāstu Śāstra is medicine for the home. The subtle body is anatomy, not metaphor. The soul has its own pathology and its own cure.

You have felt this wholeness before. That is why you are here. You recognised something in this medicine that you had not found elsewhere — a system that sees the whole person, not a collection of symptoms. A tradition old enough to have seen everything, and wise enough to treat each case as if it has never been seen before.

This is what you will study. There is nothing peripheral in it.

A certificate is a record. Lineage is a living thing.

Knowledge passed from teacher to student carries something that cannot be written down. A quality of attention. A way of seeing. The particular understanding that comes not from study alone but from years of practice and the thousands of small corrections a great teacher makes before a student even notices they have gone astray.

The teachers at Yoga Veda Institute carry this. KP Khalsa has practiced herbalism for forty-five years. Dr. Resmi Rajagopal treats patients today in India using the same protocols she teaches here. Dr. Scott Roos learned Sanskrit at Berkeley and Jyotiṣa directly from Dr. Vasant Lad. Marek Sawicki trained under Dr. Vasant Lad and carries that transmission into every class. Christine Devlin Eck has attended thousands of births and postpartum windows. Burkhard Langemann has sat with the questions of the soul for thirty years. Corinna Maharani has worked with bodies her whole adult life.

These are not instructors. They are practitioners who also teach. There is a difference that you will feel from the first class.

Being an online school did not limit this faculty. It made it possible. Teachers of this calibre do not all live in the same city. They live in India, California, Germany, Portugal, Massachusetts. A school that exists everywhere can call all of them.

When you study here, you are not enrolling in a program. You are joining a line that runs from these teachers back through their teachers, and back through theirs, to the source of this medicine. Treat that with the reverence it deserves.

Āyurveda is lived in seasons. This program follows that teaching.

Three times a year — September, January, April — live classes begin. A new cohort arrives. A teacher opens a text. The transmission continues. Between these seasons are rest and integration. In summer, the school is quiet. No new modules. No live classes. This is not absence. This is medicine. The practitioner who cannot rest cannot teach rest. The student who does not integrate cannot deepen.

Within each trimester, the rhythm is simple. Twice a week, a live class with a faculty member. Not a recording — a room. Students from Nashville, Nairobi, Oslo, São Paulo, Bangalore, sitting together in the same hour, asking the same questions, hearing the same teaching land differently for each of them. That convergence is irreplaceable. Protect the live class when you can. When you cannot, every session is recorded, and the knowledge will wait.

For the days and times of all live sessions, the calendar lives at yogavedainstitute.com/event-calendar. It is always current. For the full map of courses and faculty across every trimester, see the academic calendar.

Twice a month: Sanskrit. Not grammar for its own sake — the language as a living key. Every term in Āyurveda carries more meaning than translation can hold. When you learn the word, you learn the concept beneath it. Students who resist this at the beginning are often the ones who, by their second year, speak of it as the thing that changed everything.

Once a month: clinical immersion. This is where the medicine stops being something you study and becomes something you do. Bring your observations. Bring your questions. Bring the cases forming in your life and the lives of those around you. A practitioner is present here. So is the whole community.

Twenty-four modules. Four years — or more, if that is what your life asks of you.

This curriculum is not a corridor. It is a garden. You do not move through it in a line. You move through it as the season calls you, as a teacher's words open a door you did not see before, as a case in your own life makes a module suddenly urgent. Some students begin with herbalism. Others with subtle body anatomy. Others follow the live class schedule and let the teachers lead. All of these are right. There is no prescribed order. There are only requirements — and the freedom to meet them in whatever sequence is true to your path.

Around ten hours a week, across three trimesters a year, a student can complete this program in four years. Other students take longer. Six years. Eight. They attend every live class they can reach. They return to the same module three times, in three different seasons of their life, and find it has become a different teaching each time. This is not falling behind. This is Āyurveda working as it was designed to work — as a lifelong companion, not a qualification to obtain.

The twenty-four modules are listed below. Read them not as a syllabus but as a horizon. Everything you see there, you will come to know. The sequence will reveal itself.

Every first Monday, someone new arrives.

They have come from everywhere. A midwife in rural Kenya who has waited three years for a program she could afford. A yoga teacher in Portugal who has been circling this medicine for a decade. A retired pharmacist in South Korea who wants to understand what Western medicine left out. A mother in Colombia studying after her children sleep. A nurse in Ohio, working night shifts, studying in the quiet hours before dawn. They arrive on the same morning, into the same room, carrying different languages, different bodies of knowledge, different reasons — and something in common that they will only be able to name later, after they have been in the same classes for a while and recognised it in each other.

This community is the education as much as the curriculum is. A question asked by someone in Accra will be the exact question that unlocks something for someone in Nashville, and something else again for someone in Amsterdam. A case shared in the clinical immersion class from a small town in India will carry a teaching that no module contains. This is how Āyurveda has always been transmitted — not only through texts and teachers, but through practitioners thinking alongside each other.

When you graduate, the community does not end. Alumni return. They mentor. They attend sessions. They carry the school forward by the quality of their practice. The person you study with today may be the person you call in ten years when you encounter something that stops you. Build those relationships. They are part of what you are here to receive.

The Charaka Saṃhitā teaches that the physician who withholds medicine from a patient who cannot pay has not understood medicine. This school was built from that teaching.

One school. One simple membership. That single step opens everything: the complete curriculum, the live classes, the community, student support. You study for yourself, your family, your future. Pause or leave anytime, and return whenever you are ready. No timeline. No stress. Full pricing lives on our Tuition page.

Most students who find their way here are lifelong learners — drawn to professional-level education, not to a license to practice. For those who do wish to pursue formal certification, we offer our own AHC and AP tracks — the AP track earning both credentials at once. See the Certification page for what each involves.

If tuition is a genuine barrier, write to us. We do have some financial assistance available for students who need it, and we're glad to talk through what might be possible.

Start the conversation at learn.instituteofayurvedicmedicine.com/apply-now.

Join the school. The curriculum opens immediately. There is nothing to wait for.

On the first Monday of the following month, you attend orientation. You meet your cohort. A faculty member speaks. Something in the room shifts. This is where the four years — or however many years your life gives to this study — begin.

Twice a week through each trimester, you attend a live class. Twice a month, Sanskrit. Once a month, clinical immersion. In summer, rest. In the space between semesters, integration. The knowledge you receive in a classroom will find its way into your kitchen, your daily walk, the way you hear a friend describe their insomnia. This is how Āyurveda enters a life. Not through the mind alone. Through practice.

There will come a time — perhaps in the first trimester, perhaps in the third year — when the study feels impossible. When the curriculum feels too vast, when life presses against the hours you have set aside, when you wonder whether this was the right decision. In that moment: do not leave. The medicine goes deepest precisely there. The students who stay through that moment are the ones who, at graduation, speak of it as the turning point.

Complete the curriculum. Carry this knowledge for the rest of your life. Into your practice. Into your home. Into the bodies of the people who trust you with their wellbeing.

Āyurveda asks only one thing of its students. Show up. Everything else follows.