In May 2002, Yorit arrived in Auroville together with her husband Aviram and their daughter Osher, in search of a different way of living. The first night the three of them slept in an old bullock cart with a roof made from coconut leaves. Yorit remembers that she was unable to go to sleep, as she felt a magic entering her life. The land which the bullock cart was standing on would become the place of her Sadhana. \u2018Sadhana\u2019 is Sanskrit and means \u2018a spiritual discipline for self-realization.\u2019 The family decided to grow a forest, this would become their spiritual practice. The first year was fascinating and challenging. Soon after starting they realized that their project was not only about planting trees but about conserving water. The lands they chose for their project was composed of red laterite earth and clay, which formed canyons in the heavy monsoon rains. How to control the flow of water and conserve the rainwater was the main question Yorit and her family faced. The land they were attempting to change was in the same condition as the land the pioneers of Auroville settled 50 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sadhana Forest was slowly transformed, by building eight dams and several kilometres of dykes (or bunds), which collected water. Yorit and her family managed to create a system of trenches and dams that stored over 50,000 cubic meters of rainwater. During the first five years, the water table rose 6 meters, from an average depth of 8 meters to only 1.8 meters in 2008. The people living in the local villages got interested by the project once they saw their wells filing up with water again, providing them with water throughout the year, for the first time in 20 years. Sadhana Forest remains extremely water conscious in every possible way. The kitchen is equipped with a hand pump, not a tap, in order to create awareness about water conservation. Their hand wash station is a simple cup with a hole at the bottom; if one wants to use more water one needs to refill the cup again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n