PROGRAM PARTICIPANT AGREEMENT
Consisting of:
- Terms and Conditions
- Privacy Policy
- Health Privacy Policy
TERMS AND CONDITIONS
I understand that there is a cancellation fee specific to each program. If you need to cancel and get a refund, contact your local program coordinator printed on your online program registration receipt.
• For all cancellations, there will be a processing fee on all VVM program fee refunds.
• No program credits will be issued.
• If a participant decides to leave the program (except in case of emergencies), no refunds or credits will be given for program fees and expenses.
Cancellation Policy: on Programs where Sri Sri is not physically present (local/regional Programs):
Cancellation Policy: on Programs with Sri Sri present (national Programs):
Note: all credit cards charges will read Ved Vignan Mahavidyapeeth.
The techniques and processes taught on all VVM Programs- Courses and Events- (including but not exclusive to Art of Silence, Art of Silence Intensive, Blessings, Guru Puja and DSN Programs) are powerful and effective when learned under the personal guidance of a trained teacher in the environment of these Programs. These techniques and processes are offered to program participants for their own personal development and only under the strict personal supervision and guidance of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar or his trained teachers while on these VVM Programs. The techniques and processes taught on VVM Programs are confidential and are to be used by program participants only for their own personal development.
By signing this Agreement below it is hereby agreed by the program participant and Ved Vignan Mahavidyapeeth that these techniques and processes are private in nature and will not be practiced or taught outside of the environment of these Programs without the written permission of Ved Vignan Mahavidyapeeth.
It is also agreed that if the Program Participant is given a process or technique for home use, that it will be kept private and not be passed on to anyone, either written or verbally, without the written permission of Ved Vignan Mahavidyapeeth.
By signing below, the Program Participant also agrees to abstain from taking notes or making recordings of any processes or talks while on these Programs.
The undersigned hereby gives permission for any necessary medical care to be given to myself in case of accident or illness. I agree to take full responsibility for the costs of any treatment provided.
I hereby give the irrevocable and unrestricted rights to use my performance and participation (in whole or in part), image, name, voice, and likeness for all non-commercial written, audio and/or visual presentations. I understand and acknowledge that the written, audio and/or video presentations may be used in print, broadcast and online promotions for the purposes of advancing the Art of Living Foundation around the world.
For Programs hosted at the Art of Living Retreat Center in Boone NC
For programs hosted at the Art of Living Retreat Center, the undersigned agrees and does hereby release from all liability and hold harmless the Business (Art of Living Retreat Center, Blue Ridge Preservation, Inc. VVM & its sister organizations) and any of its employees, officers, directors, volunteers etc. representing or related to the Business. Parent or Guardian of a minor child does hereby accept full responsibility for said minor while on Premises (136 Virgil Day Road, Boone, NC 28607). Execution of the Liability Release Agreement by a Parent or Guardian does hereby cover any minor child. Participant releases the Business from all liability and holds harmless the Business for the minor child.
This liability release is for any and all liability for personal injuries including death and property losses or damage, including of personal property, in connection with any activity or accommodation of the above mentioned Business.
The undersigned does hereby further agree to abide by all the rules and regulations that are presented by the Business. Applicable Law: The above contract shall be governed by the laws of the State of North Carolina in Watauga County and any applicable Federal Law.
For Ayurveda Programs
I acknowledge that all components of this program are exclusively wellness-based approach from the traditional knowledge of Ayurveda to empower an individual for a healthy life. I acknowledge that no member of the Sri Sri Ayurveda staff and contractors will diagnose any disease or disorder, nor prescribe any medical substance or treatment. I have been advised that this consultation is not a substitute for consulting my physician for medical care.
I further understand that the massages and other techniques, treatments or recommendations, which may be offered during this Program are not intended to treat, cure or diagnose any disease or disorder but are used exclusively for a wellness based approach for a healthy lifestyle.
I acknowledge that I do not have any physical conditions or physical limitations which would prevent me from participating in the Program or would limit in any way my participation in any aspects of the Program.
I do hereby release, indemnify, save and hold harmless the Organization, its parent, Sri Sri Ayurveda products and supplements, Shankara, Inc., Physicians and Ayurvedic Doctors (Vaidyas), and their directors, officers, employees, staff, agents, volunteers, consultants and contractors from and against any and all claims, liabilities, damages, or losses, including any costs and attorney’s fees, arising from any activity, treatment or therapy provided.
Further, as a material part of the considerations for allowing me to participate in the Program, I hereby assume all risks of injury to my person or damage to my property arising from my participation in the Program with the exception of willful or intentional misconduct on the part of the parties hereto. It is my intention that this be a complete and unconditional release of all liability to the greatest extent allowed by law.
In addition to the above, for Detox Panchkarma Retreat
I acknowledge and represent that I have sought the advice of my family doctor and any specialists with whom I have consulted regarding my participation in the Program, that I have shared with such physician(s) the attached Memorandum which outlines the scope of the Program, and I have been advised that I do not have any physical conditions or physical limitations which would prevent me from participating in the Program or would limit in any way my participation in any aspects of the Program.
I hereby acknowledge that I have read and fully understand the attached Memorandum which outlines the scope of the Program for which I have registered.
I do hereby release, indemnify, save and hold harmless the Organization, its parent, Sri Sri Ayurveda products and supplements, Shankara, Inc., Physicians and Ayurvedic Doctors (Vaidyas), and their directors, officers, employees, staff, agents, volunteers, consultants and contractors from and against any and all claims, liabilities, damages, or losses, including any costs and attorney’s fees, arising from any activity, treatment or therapy provided for the undersigned at Blue Heaven Spa and Art of Living Retreat Center.
This Waiver, Release and Consent Form shall be governed by the laws of the State of North Carolina.
• For all cancellations, there will be a processing fee on VVM program fee refunds ($40 processing fee, $100 processing fee on programs with Sri Sri present).
• No program credits will be issued.
• If a participant decides to leave the program (except in case of emergencies), no refunds or credits will be given for program fees and expenses.
PRIVACY POLICY
This agreement is entered into by and between Ved Vignan Mahavidyapeeth on behalf of itself and its affiliates and licensors (“Organization”), and you as user of this website and potential participant in one or more programs of learning administered by the Organization (the “program” or “programs”).
The Organization respects the privacy rights of visitors to our website and is committed to protecting those rights. To support this commitment, we have adopted this Privacy Policy that governs how we collect, use, disclose, update and protect the information you provide online to the Organization.Please read this Privacy Policy carefully before you use the Organization website. This Privacy Policy does not apply to information collected by the Organization other than through its website.
Visitors to the Organization website from outside of the United States of America are advised that the Organization’s Privacy Policy is intended to meet the laws and requirements of the United States of America, which may not necessarily be the same as the laws and regulations of your home country. Any information that you provide to the Organization online will be handled in accordance with the laws and regulations of the United States of America.
Contents
This Privacy Policy will inform you as to:
• Which websites are covered by the Privacy Policy
• What types of information (if any) may be collected from you and by what means
• How such information may be used and shared
• The consequences (if any) if you choose not to provide personal information
• The measures that the Organization takes to maintain data security, quality and integrity
• How you can confirm and, if necessary, change the personal information that the Organization maintains
• Where and how to ask questions or file complaints
Websites covered by the Privacy Policy
Please note that this Privacy Policy applies only to this website and other websites maintained by the Organization. This Privacy Policy does not apply to websites maintained by other companies or organizations to which we may link.
When you click on a link displayed on our website, you may be leaving the Organization’s website and entering another website for which this Privacy Policy does not apply. You may not be specifically informed of this fact, although in most instances a new browser window will be opened when a hyperlink is redirecting you to a website which we do not operate or control. This may not always be the case, however. Therefore, before providing any personal information which may be requested from you, you should first verify the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) or the hypertext transfer protocol (http) address displayed by your web browser to confirm whether or not you are still accessing a website operated by the Organization. If not, this Privacy Policy will not apply to your visit.
You should carefully review the privacy statements or policies of any other website that you visit or wish to send email to because those privacy statements or policies will apply to your visit and email sent to that site and may be very different from the Organization’s Privacy Policy.
Our website is not intended for children under 18 years of age. No one under age 18 may provide any personal information on our websites, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under age 18. If you are under age 18, do not use or provide any information on this website, make any purchases through this website, use any interactive or public comment features of this website, or provide any information about yourself to us. If we learn that we have collected or received personal information from a child under age 18 without verification of parental consent, we will delete that information. If you believe that we might have any information from or about a child under age 18, please contact us at [email protected].
Collection of Personal Information and Its Use and Purpose
Data Storage and Transfer
Your personal data will be securely stored by and accessible to us, including our affiliated organizations and our technology outsourcing partners, on servers which may be located in countries with different data protection regulations than apply in your home country, for the purpose of providing information technology services on our behalf for the administration of the programs and offerings described on our website. The data on the servers may also be accessed by us or our technology development outsourcing partners from outside your home country for system development and support purposes.
Electronic Marketing
By accepting our privacy policy, you agree that your personal data may also be made available to our carefully selected partner organizations located within and outside your country of residence for the purpose of offering you information regarding products and services related to our programs and offerings, and that we may also directly inform you of such products and services when they become available in your country or anywhere else in the world.
If you decide you do not wish to be informed of related products or services in the future, you will be given the opportunity to be removed from our database in our communications, and may request to unsubscribe at any time by contacting us at [email protected].
Demographic and Aggregate Information
In order to provide you with the best possible experience on our website, the Organization may also collect demographic and aggregate information from online visitors who access its websites. “Demographic information” is anonymous information such as age, gender and geographic location. “Aggregate information” is data about a group or category of services or users from which individual identities have been removed. Demographic and aggregate information is not considered personal information, as it does not permit the identification of an individual.
User Comments and Email
Our websites will sometimes invite users to provide us with their comments on our services or on certain programs. Users who wish to provide us with their comments will sometimes have the option of also providing us with their name and email address. We do not require users to provide us with such information, however. Comments provided to the Organization by users may be posted on our websites. Alongside such comments, we may also post the user’s first name and last initial as well as the city and province that this user has indicated he or she is from. However, we will take measures to prevent such postings from containing any personal information.
If an online form or an email submitted by a user contains personal information, we will only use such personal information to the extent necessary to respond to any comment or question from such user. We will limit access to such personal information and will keep such personal information in a secure system. Although most online forms and email messages submitted by users are deleted after we respond, in certain cases hard copies or data extracts may be kept on file. Any such copy or any such information, to the extent it is personal, will also be stored in a secure location.
Disclosure of Your Personal Information
We may disclose demographic and aggregate information about our users and information that does not identify any individual.
We may disclose personal information that we collect or you provide as described in this Privacy Policy:
• To our subsidiaries and/or affiliates.
• To contractors, service providers and other third parties we use to support our business and who are also bound by contractual obligations to keep personal information confidential and use it only in accordance with applicable data protection laws for the purposes for which it is authorized under this Privacy Policy.
• We contractually require these third parties to keep personal information confidential and use it only for the purposes for which it is authorized under this Privacy Policy.
• To fulfill the purpose for which you provide it.
• For any other purpose disclosed by us when you provide the information.
We may also disclose your personal information:
• To comply with any court order, law or legal process, including to respond to any government or regulatory request.
• To enforce or apply our Terms of Use and other agreements, including for billing and collection purposes.
• If we believe disclosure is necessary or appropriate to protect the rights, property or safety of the Organization, our customers, or others. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organizations for the purposes of fraud protection and credit risk reduction.
Accessing and Correcting Your Personal Information
You may send us an email at [email protected] to request access to, correct or delete any personal information that you have provided to us. We cannot delete your personal information except by also deleting your user account. We may not accommodate a request to change information if we believe the change would violate any law or legal requirement or cause the information to be incorrect.
Safeguards to Protect Your Personal Information
The Organization maintains reasonable safeguards in an effort to ensure the security, integrity and privacy of the personal information we collect. We also have implemented reasonable security measures in an effort to protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of the information under our control. Personal information collected by the Organization is stored in secure operating environments that are not available to the public (e.g., locked rooms), and access to that information is limited to employees who need the information to provide you with our products or services.
Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we do our best to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee the security of your personal information transmitted to our website. Any transmission of personal information is at your own risk. We are not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on the website.
Cookies, Web Beacons and Log Files
Some of our sites use cookies. Cookies are small text files placed on your hard drive when you visit a website. These files identify your computer and record your preferences and other data about your visit so that when you return to the site, the site knows who you are and can personalize your visit. The cookies used on our websites are not linked to any personal information about you.
We use cookies to collect information so that we can determine how to improve our websites by seeing which areas, features and products are most popular, to personalize the website and make recommendations based on products you have examined while visiting our website and to improve the website experience. As noted, the information collected by the cookies we use is not personal information, as it is not identifiable to you specifically. As technology advances and cookies provide more functionality, we expect to utilize them in different ways. If so, we will update this Privacy Policy to identify such new uses of cookies.
Most browsers are automatically set to accept cookies. You can disable cookies or set your browser to alert you when cookies are being sent. However, some areas of our website may not function properly if you do so. There are many sources for additional information about Internet cookies, and we encourage anyone concerned about the use of cookies to do more research on the topic so you can make an informed decision about accepting them from any site.
The Organization also uses “web beacons” (also known as “web bugs,” “action tags,” “pixel trackers,” or “clear GIFs”), which are small, graphic images on a web page, web-based document or in an email message that are designed to allow us or a third party to collect certain information and monitor user activity on our sites. Web beacons are invisible to the user because they are typically very small (only 1-by-1 pixels) and have the same color as the background of the web page, document or email message. We may use web beacons to collect non-personal information such as the IP address of the computer that the web beacon is sent to, the URL of the page the web beacon comes from, and the time it was activated (such as when you view the web page, advertisement or email that contains the web beacon). Web beacons can be linked to personal information, but we do not use web beacons that link to personal information. We may permit third parties to place web beacons on our sites, but these web beacons are not linked to personal information either.
The Organization maintains log files, which contain Internet Protocol (“IP”) addresses. An IP address is a numeric address that is assigned to your computer by your Internet Service Provider. We do not link IP addresses to personal information. In general, we only use log files to monitor traffic on our websites and to troubleshoot technical problems. In the event of abuse, however, we may block certain IP addresses.
Changes to this Privacy Policy
We reserve the right to make changes to this Privacy Policy. If we make such changes, we will post the changes and change the date at the top of the policy. Please check back from time to time to ensure that you are aware of any changes to this Privacy Policy.
Where and how to ask questions or file complaints
By providing personal information on this website you consent to the collection, use and disclosure of such information by the Organization in such manner as set out in this Privacy Policy, including but not limited to the sharing of such information with third parties in accordance with the terms described above.
If you have any questions, complaints, or comments regarding this Privacy Policy, please send an email to the following address: [email protected].
HEALTH PRIVACY POLICY
This notice describes how health-related information that you provide to us will be used. Please review it carefully.
The Organization (as defined above) understands that your health-related information is personal and confidential. This is a notice of our privacy policy with regard to any health-related information that you provide to us (the “Policy”). This Policy will be followed by all Organization teachers, employees, staff, volunteers, agents and service providers. Please note that while you may deal with the local entity providing programs in your country, the Organization is the data controller in respect of your information and the local entity is acting as a service provider/agent on behalf of the Organization.
Our pledge to you
We will maintain the confidentiality of your health-related information as follows:
• We will take such measures as may be required under the applicable law to maintain the security of your health-related data
• Except as expressly set out in this Policy, we will not disclose your health-related information to any third party except with your prior written authorization, as required by law or in case of a medical emergency, as described below.
How we may use health-related information about you
For medical reasons, it is recommended that individuals with certain health conditions not participate in certain programs. Information collected via the Organization health information questionnaire assists the Organization in determining your suitability for particular programs. This information may also be used in case of a medical emergency, in which case we may disclose medical information about you to medical personnel directly involved with your care. From time to time the Organization may disclose your medical information to agents and service providers acting on its behalf. Such agents and service providers may be located in your own country or overseas. The Organization has appropriate contractual arrangements in place with such agents and service providers to ensure that your medical information remains adequately protected in accordance with applicable laws. The Organization’s agents and service providers will only use your medical information for the purposes set out in this Policy.
Your responsibility
The Organization is committed to teaching simple and effective techniques for reducing stress, resolving conflict and improving health. However, we are not medical professionals or specialists. Therefore, the health-related information we collect from you is supplementary to determining how our programs can be most beneficial for you. If you have any health questions and/or pre-existing health conditions, please consult your physician prior to participating in any of our programs. You are entitled to receive a copy of any health-related information that the Organization holds about you and to have any inaccurate information amended or erased.
