Around the age of thirteen, Sadhguru came across Raghavendra Swami, a yogi popularly known as Malladihalli Swami. He caught Sadhguru's attention because he was faster and more agile than Sadhguru was, despite being over eighty years old!

Sadhguru: When I was very young, he used to come to my grandfather’s place. I was just twelve or thirteen years old and he was about eighty-one. At the time, I was made in such a way that I could climb anything. In the house where my grandfather lived in the village, there were wells in the backyard which were just six or seven feet in diameter and about 120 to 130 feet deep.The water would be sixty feet below the surface. One of the sports among us boys was to jump into this well and climb back up. If you made one mistake, you would hit the rock walls and that would be the end of you. None of the kids could climb as fast as me but then one day, this eighty-one-year-old man came and did it faster than me. When I wanted to know how, he said “Come and do yoga with me.” That is what set me off initially to go to him and learn some simple yogic practices.