HSCI 2025–2026

The Hindu Spiritual Care Institute (HSCI) has arrived!! Eight arduous years of a volunteer team's research, development and outreach has culminated in HSCI being one of the "go to" institutions for Hindu chaplaincy and spiritual care.

The Counseling in the Hindu Tradition (CHT) course was launched in October 2018, with a class of twenty one persons who were entrenched in community service. Years of quiet, steady work of many volunteer hands—building the curriculum, widening community outreach, growing relationships deepened one conversation at a time went into the growth. Today, that work is converging towards a firm, shared direction. That direction is simple to state and radical in practice—honoring Hindu tradition as it has been lived, while actively shaping how it will be carried forward.

The year 2025-2026 has been a milestone year in multiple ways. Academically, three initiatives have come to fruition. First, the GTU-HSCI affiliation now offers 12 credits to CHT graduates enrolling in the new GTU offering—a 36 unit MA in interfaith chaplaincy. Second, HSCI has been approved as a APC/BCCI validator for Hindu credentials for Chaplaincy Board and job applicants in the US. What this means for Hindu chaplains—no more convoluted methods of getting Hindu credentials validated for future Hindu chaplains in the US. The third initiative has been the MOU with CPEI, an accreditation body for the CPE course. HSCI has begun the necessary efforts to offer Hindu-centric CPE courses starting in 2027.

We are excited to announce the addition of a new course, the Hindu Purohit Counselor (HPC) program in collaboration with the South Africa Hindu Maha Sabha (SAHMS) starting in 2026-2027. SAHMS, is a highly regarded organization in South Africa, standardizing the role of a Hindu priest. The boost to the curriculum and the pedagogy starting with the 2024-2025 initiative to substantially increase roleplay and live discussion sessions in the CHT course was strengthened in the 2025-2026 cohort. Priests who complete the HPC course will be well-equipped to serve the different needs of contemporary blended Hindu communities with empathy and presence. Parallely, HSCI's initiatives extend to offering volunteering opportunities to the graduates, collaborating with local senior centers to offer support and with Vishwa Hindu Parishad America to offer Hindu inmates at local jails compassionate non-judgemental presence. More opportunities are cropping up—keep up with us at our website!!

The above ventures are central to our initiative to bring an ancient text, the Bhagavad Gītā directly into the community—as a living resource available to families, seekers, and chaplains alike. This distribution effort is more than a project; it's a statement of intent. It says that the wisdom at the center of Hindu spiritual life belongs in people's hands, in their homes, and in the moments that matter most—grief, uncertainty, celebration, and everyday life.

How we practice Hindu spiritual care is non-judgemental compassionate presence: niśkāma karma, which is the underlying message throughout the Bhagavad Gītā. The Gītā emphasizes the dropping of the ego during the performance of an action. Even as you give it your best. Chaplaincy trains its counselors to "Leave everything that is you (your ego)" at the door when you enter a careseeker's sacred space, making room in your heart for the careseeker.

Moodle is HSCI's learning management tool; AI is used extensively within HSCI for research, collating gems in the Shruti/Smritis, documentation and presentation refinement; but for writing reflections on concepts and situations, which is stressed throughout the course, an AI polish of an assignment submission is discouraged, as counterproductive to your goal to awaken reflective skills.

HSCI is emerging as a viable pathway to learn to serve, and we invite the community to walk this next stretch with us—as students, as supporters, and as recipients of a tradition that has always been meant to be universal.

Stay tuned as HSCI's convergent initiatives offer new opportunities for service and personal growth.

Usha Narasimhan
Registrar, HSCI