Privacy Policy

This website is run by the Greater Portland Kriya Center, a volunteer-run Kriya Yoga meditation center in Portland, Oregon. The center is not a registered company or nonprofit corporation — it is a group of practitioners who meet to meditate and who maintain this site between them.

Everything described below is handled by those volunteers, and every request about it reaches them at portland-or@kriya.org. That address is the center’s mailbox; messages sent through this site land there and are read by the people who run the center.

There are two forms on this site and they are the only places it asks you for anything. There is no account to create, no newsletter, and nothing is inferred about you from how you use the site.

• The contact form asks for your name, your email address and your message.
• The guest book asks for your name, your email address, a phone number if you want to give one, your message, and a tick confirming that the center may store the message and write back to you.
• That is the whole list. No other field is sent, and nothing is collected from you anywhere else on the site.

A submission is saved to a database and then emailed. Both happen immediately; nothing is queued for later processing and nothing is passed to a third party for enrichment or scoring.

The database is a MongoDB database that is shared with a small number of other websites built by the same volunteer developer. Each record is tagged with the name of the site it came from, so entries from this site stay separate from the others — but the database is not exclusive to this center, and saying so is more honest than implying it is.

The emails go to two places: a notification to the center’s mailbox, portland-or@kriya.org, so a volunteer sees that you wrote; and a confirmation copy to the address you gave, so you have a record of what you sent. Both are sent through Google’s mail servers, and once delivered they sit in those mailboxes under Google’s own terms like any other email.

The notification carries your email address as its reply-to, which is the whole of what that address is used for: it lets a volunteer answer you by pressing reply. It is not added to any list and is not used to write to you about anything else.

Your message is read by the center’s volunteers so that someone can answer it. It is not shared with anyone else, not sold, not used for advertising, and not added to any mailing list.

Nothing you write in the guest book appears on this website. There is no public list of entries and no page that displays them — the guest book is a way of writing to the center, not a wall. The guest book page says the same thing in three places, and this is the fourth.

When you submit a form, the server reads the IP address the request arrives from and counts how many submissions have come from it recently. That count is held in the memory of the server for ten minutes and then discarded.

It is not written to the database, not attached to your message, and not used for anything but stopping a bot from submitting a form hundreds of times. Saying "we do not collect your IP address" would be false, so this page says what actually happens instead.

Both forms also carry a hidden field that a person never sees and never fills in. A submission that fills it is treated as automated: it is discarded on arrival, and is neither stored nor emailed.

The site is hosted on Vercel. Like every web host, Vercel keeps its own request logs — the kind of record that includes an IP address, the page requested and the browser used. Those logs belong to Vercel and are held under its policies on its own schedule. The center does not read them or use them for anything.

This list is short and specific on purpose. Each line was checked against the code on 23 August 2026, and if any of it ever stops being true, this page changes in the same commit that makes it untrue.

• It sets no cookies, and stores nothing in your browser.
• It runs no analytics, no tag manager and no session recording. There is no measurement code of any kind on any page.
• It carries no advertising and no tracking pixels.
• It embeds no third-party widgets, maps, videos, comment systems or chat.
• Its fonts are served from this site rather than fetched from Google Fonts, so visiting a page sends your IP address to nobody but the host.
• It does not sell, rent or share what you send with anyone.
• It does not build a profile of you, and it has no way to recognise you between visits.

There is no fixed retention period, and nothing deletes old records automatically. A contact message or a guest book entry stays in the database, and in the center’s mailbox, until a person removes it — which means that in practice it is kept indefinitely.

That is a description of the present arrangement rather than a policy the center has committed to. It is stated plainly because the alternative — printing a retention period that nothing enforces — would be a promise this site cannot keep. If the center sets a period later, this section will say what it is.

Write to portland-or@kriya.org and ask. You can ask what the center holds about you, ask for a correction, or ask for it to be deleted; the guest book page already promises this and the promise is the same one here. Writing from the address you used on the form makes it quicker to find, but is not a requirement.

A deletion removes the record from the database and the emails from the center’s mailbox. What the center cannot reach is a provider’s own infrastructure — Vercel’s request logs and Google’s mail backups expire on their schedules, not on the center’s.

The forms are not aimed at children. The minimum age for Kriya Yoga initiation in this lineage is 13, and public talks have no age limit at all, so a young person may well have reason to write to the center. If you are under 13, please ask a parent or guardian to write for you. If the center finds that a message came from a child under 13, it deletes it.

This site links out to kriya.org and to the center’s Facebook page. Following one of those links takes you somewhere the center does not run, and what happens to your data there is governed by that site’s own policy, not this one.

This page is updated when what the site does changes, not on a schedule, and the date below is the day its wording last changed. It is meant to describe the code exactly. If you find a line here that does not match what the site does, tell the center and it will be corrected.