Ritam Wellness Forum

Inaugural Session: 3-6 Sept 2026

A new dialogue between two sciences of the mind

The Ritam Wellness Forum is a public dialogue and learning initiative presented by VedantaNZ under its broader theme of Human Flourishing. The Forum brings together leading psychiatrists, researchers, educators, contemplative teachers, and members of the wider public to explore, with both intellectual rigour and contemplative depth, the conditions in which human beings live well, recover from suffering, and flourish.

Swami Tadananda, Minister and Spiritual Head of the Ramakrishna Vedanta Centre, Auckland is the Convenor of the Forum.

Looking Ahead

The September 2026 series marks the beginning of what is intended as a sustained public and contemplative dialogue. We plan to organise two series annually - around March and September.

Swami Sarvapriyananda will be back with us for the Sept 2027 series which will span across New Zealand. The Ritam Wellness Forum will continue to bring distinguished voices from medicine, psychology, neuroscience, education, and the contemplative traditions into conversation on the great questions of human flourishing — not only mental health and resilience, but also compassion, education, ageing, grief, and meaning. Each public event will be open to all digitally available so that the Forum's conversations may travel beyond the rooms in which they take place. Registered members of VedantaNZ will have priority access.

Why this Forum, why now

Mental health has emerged as one of the defining concerns of our time. Across the world, individuals, families, communities, and governments are searching for better ways to understand the mind, support those who are suffering, and cultivate the inner resources that allow human beings to meet life's difficulties without breaking.

Two great bodies of knowledge offer themselves to this work. The modern medical and psychological sciences have transformed our understanding of the brain, mental illness, and the conditions that support recovery and resilience and continue to do so, at remarkable speed. The world's contemplative traditions, for their part, have spent millennia investigating the nature of the mind, the sources of human suffering, and the cultivation of inner steadiness, compassion, and clarity.

For much of recent history, these two enquiries have unfolded in separate domains — the clinic and the laboratory on one side, the contemplative seat and the spiritual community on the other. The Ritam Wellness Forum is founded on the conviction that they have much to say to one another, and that human beings everywhere stand to benefit when they are brought into genuine, respectful dialogue.

What the Forum aims to do

The Forum has been established to:

Convene serious public dialogue between the medical and contemplative sciences, in which neither tradition is reduced to a supplement of the other, and both are heard in their full depth.
Translate wisdom into practice — moving beyond theoretical conversation to identify concrete tools, practices, and frameworks that clinicians, educators, mental health workers, and ordinary people can use in their lives and work.
Build a community of enquiry through ongoing learning programmes, retreats, and small-group conversations open to the wider community.
Contribute to the global conversation on mental wellbeing: Bringing this dialogue into the cultural and clinical discourse on mental health, in Aotearoa New Zealand and around the world. Mental health is a challenge of our age that knows no borders; and Vedanta, by its very nature, addresses the universal human being. The Forum is rooted in New Zealand but speaks to all who share these concerns, wherever they live.

Each Forum event is designed to be substantive without being narrowly technical, and accessible without being shallow - a place where serious science and serious wisdom can meet on equal terms.

The inaugural series — September 2026

The Ritam Wellness Forum will be formally inaugurated in September 2026, during the visit to New Zealand of Swami Sarvapriyananda, Minister and Spiritual Leader of the Vedanta Society of New York and one of the most respected contemporary teachers of Vedanta. The inaugural series comprises four events across four days — two public panel discussions, one evening satsang, and a closing spiritual retreat — moving outward from public dialogue with the medical sciences, inward to traditional teaching and practice, and finally into sustained contemplative immersion.

Thursday 3 September · Hamilton (Waikato Indian Association) Panel Discussion: Harmonising Medical and Spiritual Sciences for Promoting Mental Health With Swami Sarvapriyananda, Dr. Shailesh Kumar, and Dr. Ashim Kumar Majumdar.

Friday 4 September · Auckland (Freeman's Bay Community Centre) Satsang: Three Intelligences — Artificial, Human, and Spiritual - An evening of teaching and interaction with Swami Sarvapriyananda for devotees and seekers, in person and online.

Saturday 5 September · University of Auckland (Room Eng 439) Panel Discussion: "Medical and Spiritual Sciences on Managing the Mind and Enhancing Resilience" with Swami Sarvapriyananda, Dr. Tony Fernando, and Dr. Deepak Garg.

Sunday 6 September · Vedanta Retreat Centre Spiritual Retreat: The Mind and Its Training - A day of contemplative practice and study, drawing together the themes of the week.

Together, the four events trace a complete arc from public conversation with the medical sciences, through devotional teaching, to direct contemplative practice.

Join and avail Membership benefits and Priority Registrations

Alongside its public events, the Forum sustains a standing programme of Ritam Yarning Circles — facilitated small-group conversations, modelled on the Indigenous practice of yarning, in which participants come together to share, listen, and learn from one another in an atmosphere of openness and respect. Seven circles meet regularly, each tuned to the specific concerns of a particular community: VedantaNZ Members, Health Professionals, Youth, Teachers, Parents, Workplace participants, and the wider Community. These circles are where the Forum's larger conversation becomes personal and continuous — a place for the questions raised in public dialogue to be lived with, returned to, and explored over time.

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Membership Offer
108 days to the event
Panel Discussion: Harmonising Medical and Spiritual Sciences for Promoting Mental Health
Thu, 03 Sept
Waikato Indian Association
What can modern psychiatry and contemplative traditions teach us about understanding the mind and promoting mental health? Join our panel discussion with Swami Sarvapriyananda, Dr. Shailesh Kumar and Dr. Ashim Kumar Majumdar for a genuine dialogue between the sciences of the mind.
Register
Membership Offer
109 days to the event
A Satsang with Swami Sarvapriyananda on: Three Intelligences: Artificial, Human, and Spiritual
Fri, 04 Sept
Freeman's Bay Community Centre
This event is for spiritual seekers in general. Limited seats. Join us in-person or via Zoom for an evening of spiritual inspiration and interaction with Swami Sarvapriyananda. Dinner included.
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Membership Offer
110 days to the event
Panel Discussion: Medical and Spiritual Sciences on Managing the Mind and Enhancing Resilience.
Sat, 05 Sept
Room Eng 439, Auckland University
What do modern psychiatry and contemplative traditions tell us about mental resilience and its development? Join our panel discussion with Swami Sarvapriyananda, Dr. Tony Fernando and Dr. Deepak Garg for an honest dialogue between the sciences of the mind.
Register
Membership Offer
111 days to the event
Spiritual Retreat: The Mind and its Training
Sun, 06 Sept
Vedanta Retreat Centre
We really live in our mind-space. Our everyday successes and failures, joys and sorrows, peace and turmoil etc depend on it. We are either masters or slaves of the mind. So what is the mind? Join this retreat if you are wish to learn how to ride the mind-horse rather than let it take you for a ride!
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Meet the Panel Discussion Members

We have brought together a team of four eminent psychiatrists with vast clinical, academic, and research experience from Australia and New Zealand. Together with Swami Sarvapriyananda, they will explore how the rigour of modern psychiatry and the depth of the contemplative traditions can be brought into genuine dialogue — for the promotion of mental health and the building of mental resilience in our communities.

Swami Sarvapriyananda

Minister and Spiritual Leader, Vedanta Society of New York

Swami Sarvapriyananda is one of the foremost contemporary teachers of Vedanta and a globally respected voice on the philosophy of consciousness and the practice of contemplative wisdom. Since January 2017, he has served as Minister and spiritual leader of the Vedanta Society of New York — the first Vedanta Society in the West, founded by Swami Vivekananda in 1894. Before that, after a degree in business management from the Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar, he joined the Ramakrishna Math in 1994 and received sannyasa in 2004. Within the Ramakrishna Order he has held a range of educational and monastic leadership roles, including Principal of Ramakrishna Mission Shikshanamandira (a teachers' training college affiliated with Belur Math), Vice-Principal of Deoghar Vidyapith, and acharya at the monastic probationers' training centre at Belur Math. In 2019–20 he was a Nagral Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, and Fortune India has described him as "one of the best known lecturers of the Vedanta in the world today".

Much of Swami Sarvapriyananda's international reputation rests on his ability to bring the rigorous insights of the Upanishads and Advaita Vedanta into dialogue with modern science, psychology, and philosophy of mind. He has engaged in public dialogues with eminent contemporary thinkers including the philosopher David Chalmers, the neuroscientist and author Sam Harris, and the non-dual teacher Rupert Spira, and has spoken at TEDx, Google, the United Nations Headquarters in New York, the 2018 World Parliament of Religions in Toronto, and Harvard University, among other forums. His talks regularly address themes directly relevant to these panels such as the nature of mind and Self, the science and practice of concentration, mental resilience, the relationship between contemplative discipline and wellbeing, and the contribution of Vedanta to contemporary questions about consciousness. Together with his co-panellists, he brings the wisdom of an ancient enquiry into the mind into conversation with the modern medical sciences of mental health, offering a uniquely integrated lens on how human beings can both flourish and endure the inevitable difficulties of life.

Swami Tadananda

Minister and Spiritual Head, Ramakrishna Vedanta Centre, Auckland

Swami Tadananda is the Minister and Spiritual Head of the Ramakrishna Vedanta Centre, Auckland, the New Zealand branch of the worldwide Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission founded in 1897 by Swami Vivekananda. With a background in Electrical Engineering (1986), he joined the Ramakrishna Order in 1992 and received his monastic vows (sannyāsa) in 2001 from Swami Ranganathananda, then President of the Order. He has served in various capacities at major institutions of the Mission in India — including Ramakrishna Mission Vidyapith, Deoghar; Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Kolkata; and Ramakrishna Math, Hyderabad — and was subsequently posted to the Vedanta Centre of Sydney in 2006 and to Ramakrishna Mission, Fiji from 2008 to 2020. As Secretary General and President of the Mission in Fiji, he led its educational, medical, and humanitarian work, and in 2014 received the Government of India's Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Award — presented by the President of India — on behalf of the Mission for its contributions to community service and the promotion of human values in Fiji. He assumed charge of the Auckland centre in April 2021, on its official affiliation to the Ramakrishna Math, Belur.

Swami Tadananda has been deeply concerned about the rising mental wellbeing challenges of our time — particularly among children and young people — and has worked to develop spiritually-grounded wellbeing programmes drawn from the practices and insights of the Vedantic and meditative traditions. During the COVID-19 pandemic he reached audiences across New Zealand and beyond through a YouTube series on Guided Meditation and Mind Management Techniques, and his ongoing podcast "Ritam — Being in Balance" continues this work, exploring practical paths to inner steadiness and wellbeing through the lens of Vedanta. Building on programmes successfully delivered in Fiji and Australia, he has identified mental wellbeing as the primary focus of the Auckland centre's service to Aotearoa New Zealand, and in 2024 led the establishment of a 125-acre Vedanta Wellbeing Retreat from which these programmes will be delivered. He is the founding Convenor of the Ritam Wellness Forum, VedantaNZ's public dialogue series under its theme of Human Flourishing, through which he is bringing the wisdom of Vedanta into structured, respectful conversation with the modern medical and psychological sciences.

He will moderate both panel discussions in this inaugural series.

Dr. Ashim Kumar Majumdar OAM

MBBS, DPM, MRCPsych (UK), FRANZCP

Consultant Psychiatrist · Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry, University of Queensland · Visiting Senior Psychiatrist, Greenslopes Private Hospital and Pine Rivers Private Hospital, Brisbane, Australia

Dr. Ashim Majumdar is a consultant psychiatrist with more than four decades of clinical experience across India, the United Kingdom, and Australia. After completing his MBBS and a Diploma in Psychological Medicine at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bangalore, he undertook registrar training at Guy's Hospital, London, and senior registrar training at Mapperly Hospital, Nottingham, obtaining his MRCPsych in 1976. He was admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists in 1983 and has been in private psychiatric practice in Queensland since 1984. He is currently a visiting senior psychiatrist at Greenslopes Private Hospital and Pine Rivers Private Hospital, and a Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry at the University of Queensland, where he teaches medical students and registrars and remains active in research and publication. His clinical interests span general adult psychiatry, post-traumatic stress disorder, drug dependence, medico-legal psychiatry, and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.

In 2015, Dr. Majumdar was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for service to the Indian community of Queensland. Alongside his clinical work, he has been a long-standing contributor to community wellbeing and cross-cultural understanding in Queensland — a vocation that has given him a uniquely broad vantage point on how cultural, social, and contemplative dimensions of life shape mental health. His training and practice across three continents, paired with his enduring engagement with both Eastern and Western traditions of understanding the mind, position him distinctively to explore how medical and spiritual sciences can together inform mental health and mental resilience.

Dr. Tony Fernando

MD, PhD

Consultant Psychiatrist and Sleep Specialist, Practice 92, Auckland · Senior Lecturer in Psychological Medicine, University of Auckland

Dr. Tony Fernando is a consultant psychiatrist and sleep specialist whose work has been at the leading edge of integrating clinical medicine with the contemplative sciences for over two decades. He obtained his medical degree from the University of the Philippines and completed his psychiatry and sleep training at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a Senior Lecturer in Psychological Medicine at the University of Auckland, where he is a multi-award-winning teacher, and now practises privately at Practice 92 in central Auckland. In 2012 he received an award from the President of the Philippines for his contributions to sleep medicine and medical education, and in 2015 he was honoured with the Chair's Award by the New Zealand Medical Association — the highest recognition given by the association to a doctor in New Zealand — for his work on physician well-being. In 2021 he completed a PhD at the University of Auckland in the field of compassion in medicine.

Dr. Fernando's clinical and academic work is uniquely informed by his sustained personal engagement with the contemplative traditions. He received temporary ordination as a Buddhist monk in Myanmar in 2017 and has, in his own words, been integrating the teachings of the Buddha into his practice as a doctor for the past 20 years. He is the author of Life Hacks from the Buddha: How to be calm and content in a chaotic world which distils ancient wisdom into practical techniques for managing stress, cultivating compassion, and finding contentment. He has helped organise New Zealand's first Compassion in Healthcare Conference and currently teaches mindfulness and emotional balance to inmates at Mt Eden Corrections Facility in Auckland. With clinical expertise spanning sleep medicine, mindfulness, and the psychology of compassion, and lived experience of both medical and monastic traditions, Dr. Fernando is uniquely placed to speak to the practical how of building mental health and mental resilience by drawing together the best of modern medicine and ancient contemplative practice.

Dr. Shailesh Kumar

MBBS, DPM, MRCPsych, MPhil (London), Dip CBT, FRANZCP, MD

Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist · Honorary Clinical Associate Professor, Waikato Clinical School, University of Auckland

Dr. Shailesh Kumar is a Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist with three decades of clinical, academic, and leadership experience across India, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. After graduating from Calcutta Medical College in 1990 and completing a Diploma in Psychological Medicine from the University of Ranchi in 1993, he undertook his psychiatric training in London at the St George's rotation and the Maudsley Hospital, gaining Membership of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Master of Philosophy from the University of London, and a Diploma in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy from St George's Hospital and Medical School. He migrated to New Zealand in 1997 and served as Clinical Director of Mental Health Services in Rotorua until 2006, with additional roles as Director of Clinical Training, Director of Postgraduate Education in Psychiatry, Intern Supervisor, and Director of Area Mental Health Services. In 2006 he moved to Waikato District Health Board as Forensic Consultant Psychiatrist, and he holds an honorary appointment at the University of Auckland and the Waikato Clinical School as an Honorary Clinical Associate Professor.

Dr. Kumar is a highly published academic clinician, with 36 publications and over 1,365 citations to his name across forensic psychiatry, risk assessment, cultural psychiatry, and the wellbeing of medical professionals. His research has examined burnout and job satisfaction among psychiatrists, the recruitment and retention of mental health practitioners, structured clinical guidelines for risk assessment and management, and the use of social networks to understand mental health service utilisation among Māori communities. He has also developed evidence-based digital tools, including a self-help website (CALM) aimed at improving the mental health of medical students and lectured nationally at forums such as the GP CME conference on suicide and violence risk assessment. His sustained focus on the wellbeing of those who care for others, alongside his deep clinical expertise in the management of complex and risk-laden presentations, brings to this panel a distinctive perspective on how medical and spiritual sciences can together inform both the promotion of mental health and the cultivation of mental resilience in patients, in clinicians, and in the wider community.

Dr. Deepak Garg

MBBS, MD (Psychiatry), MRCPsych (UK), CCT, FRANZCP

Consultant Psychiatrist · Clinical Lead, Innovative Mood Disorder Service, Gold Coast University Hospital · Honorary Senior Lecturer, Griffith University Medical School.

Dr. Deepak Garg is a consultant psychiatrist with 25 years of clinical experience across India, the United Kingdom, and Australia. After psychiatry training in India, he worked for a decade in the UK, including four years as a consultant in the National Health Service (NHS), with sub-specialty experience in perinatal psychiatry, consultation-liaison psychiatry, and chronic fatigue syndrome, before relocating to Australia in 2015. He is a committee member of the Section of ECT and Neurostimulation of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists and a member of the International Clinical TMS Society. He has been actively involved in national and international research and publications on neurostimulation and mood disorders.

Dr. Garg has particular clinical expertise in the assessment and management of complex and treatment-resistant mood disorders, anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, perinatal mental health, age-related mental health conditions, and work- and combat-related psychological injuries. His practice combines advanced, evidence-based interventions, including repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) and transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS), with a strong grounding in both neuroscience and the humanities, considering not only symptoms but the emotional, interpersonal, and psychological factors that shape a person's wellbeing. Committed to full recovery and a holistic approach to psychiatry, he brings to this panel a clinician's perspective on the frontiers of modern mental health care alongside an openness to the deeper questions about mind and human flourishing that the discussion will explore.”