Monk Prema (Premahansa)

Monk Prema, who goes by Premahansa, teaches Bhakti Yoga in Austin. His main offering, Intro to Bhakti Yoga, combines guided meditation with kirtan music, and the whole thing is built around one idea: weave devotion into what you already do every day.

Prema found Bhakti Yoga during graduate school. He doesn't talk much about what he was studying or what was going on at the time, but he's clear that the practice brought him healing, spiritual and emotional and physical. After finishing his studies, he went deeper. That's the short version of how a grad student became a monk.

His teaching style is devotional, which in practice means less about perfecting poses and more about building mental habits. Prema treats Bhakti Yoga as a system for training your attention toward God throughout ordinary daily activities. You're not adding a separate spiritual practice on top of your life. You're reworking the things you already do, your morning routine, your commute, your meals, so they become points of connection. He talks about building pathways in the mind and then strengthening them over time, the way a trail gets clearer the more you walk it.

The practical result, according to Prema, is that these pathways become grounding and coping mechanisms. He's specific about this: it compounds daily. He describes the outcome as a sense of peace and well-being that grows from the inside. People who stick with the practice report feeling more settled, less reactive. The effects build rather than plateau.

Prema's classes include kirtan, which is call-and-response chanting set to music. If you've never done it, kirtan can feel strange for about five minutes and then surprisingly natural. It's one of the oldest forms of communal meditation, and Prema uses it as a core part of his sound-healing work. The combination of guided meditation and live kirtan gives his sessions a different texture than a typical yoga class or a silent meditation sit.

The thing about Prema is that he's earnest. He talks about Bhakti Yoga exceeding all his expectations, and he means it without irony. He wants to make the practice easy to understand and easy to fold into daily life. No elaborate philosophy prerequisites, no pressure to adopt a full monastic lifestyle. Just a method, taught by someone who has used it long enough to trust it. You can find him on Instagram at premahansa.