Reforestation Volunteer Program in Southern India

This is one of the few places that focuses on living a more sustainable life. In the process they are also reviving the biodiversity around the place. The food is completely vegan and is prepared entirely by the volunteers themselves. The volunteers here do a variety of chores everyday making the community an almost independent community. They also practice other values like unschooling that makes you time here an entirely different experience. Overall, they practice a very healthy lifestyle that might be hard at first but worth the experience!

For people who need a retreat from their daily lives, volunteering at Sadhana can provide to be a great experience. The place gives a sense of living with the nature, so do not expect too many modern facilities and be prepared for the hot and humid weather. A lot of selfess physical labour goes behind its community's functioning, called Sevas, which you will get to be a part of. You will also get to meet and socialise with people from all around the globe and experience being part of the Sadhana community.

We came here as a group of 11, with my college friends. Definitely an experience. We had a lot of fun cooking and playing in the mud pool in the Sadhana forest. There are tonnes of birds for budding bird watchers and insects for biologists.
We were pleasantly surprised with the aesthetic huts and the bamboo architecture. It gives a lot of space for beautiful pictures and videos.....good ig content too. There are couple of dogs and many cats which make wonderful companions throughout the stay here. Overall a memorable experience.

Although I wasn't mentally prepared to begin with, given the kind of alternative living this involves, once you do get used to it, it's really completely fine. There is a built-in community here, with many people to guide you through the volunteering process.

The place is quite pretty, too - being a proper forest with a lot of different species of birds and a mud pool to cool off in after seva.

Eventually, you do begin to realise how a lot of different everdyday things can not only be recycled, but upcycled. It is a self-sustaining place where all waste goes back in through a different process that makes it useful somewhere else, at least as much as is possible, which I find interesting.

Working at Sadhna forest
Pros
Give you a chance to quit cigarette
Great experience to live in a community and forget your past traumas
Meet various people around the globe and and interact with them
Get a sense of living a minimalistic life style
Spend time away from your routine and spend it in the nature
Highly sustainable living and zero waste

CONS
More than 5 hours of hard labour
Harsh and humid climate and away from the main city of Pondicherry.
Don't expect any luxuries as there are no fans and lights .Which gets makes sleeping at night very frustrating due to extreme humid and hot climate.

Sadhana Forest as an organisation is a great place to learn the value of self service or seva, sustainability goals, veganism as a lifestyle as well as community living. The organisation emphasises on their core values as well as creates pathways to put it in to effect in reality. It's an ambassador of an alternate way of living that protects nature.

Although the heat can get to you as there are no fans because of lack of any sort of machinery, the values learnt are worth the sweat. One has enough opportunity and space to engage with different forms of physical labour and reflect on the morale behind. Overall, a 10/10 experience. There's a 24/7 operating banana counter as well!

So I visited Sadhana Forest because I was a little confused about my life and I wanted some time alone to think about all the issues happening in my life. I needed to find an answer to them and I always wanted to have a more minimalistic life that is connected to nature but I never had the chance previously.

When I learnt about Sadhana Forest, the life I imagined and never experienced, I finally got the chance to try it. I packed my bags and came to Chennai from Udaipur, Rajasthan.

So if you ask me now, if I achieved what I wanted in Sadhana then the answer is YES! Outside of seva, I get my own free time to be explore my interests. I also got the first-hand experience in helping take care of the forest and animals, like the cows and dogs here. The food they serve here is pure vegan and it is very healthy and I feel that my health has improved.

The experience I had here made me realise how we can still be kinder to every living creature and how I can coexist. It was an amazing exposure for my 6 years young daughter to get to live in and being cared by mother nature and it's elements and she learnt how to care for it in return. We have a LOT of take aways definitely to implement in our daily lives. It just lit my conscious a bit more and I feel a lot of blanks got filled up. Being an unschooling family, a community like this, I had always been looking for. I am glad my daughter found a home in nature with a wonderful caring and conscious living community. So grateful to have got a chance to be the part and contribute something through seva to remain the part of this place forever. A warm stay with a lot of memories for life. Coming back soon..😇