An Indian ‘sadhu’ monk has been holding his arm in an upward position continuously for more than a decade in honor of his god.

Mahant Radheypuri Juna Akhara, an Indian sadhu – a religious or holy person who has renounced their worldly life – from Allahabad has been keeping his right arm raised high above his head for more than 10 years in honor of a Hindu deity. He was recently featured in a viral Twitter video, telling the interviewer that he wanted to do something for his god, so that it notices him. So he raised his right arm up and never put it down again. Today, it’s sort of stuck in that position, and he claims he doesn’t even feel it anymore.

Photo: Twitter video caption

If Mahant’s sacrifice looks familiar, that’s probably because he was not the first to ever do it. Over a decade ago, we wrote about another sadhu, Amar Bharati, who at the time had been holding his right arm up for 38 years, becoming a symbol for Shiva worshipers all over India. He has now been keeping his arm raised for over half a century.

Bharati’s feat makes that of Mahant Radheypuri Juna Akhara seem easy by comparison, but it turns out that the first couple of years are the most difficult. After that, the muscles in the arm become so atrophied that the whole appendage becomes numb and stuck in that abnormal position. Juna Akhara even pinches himself in the video to demonstrate that he doesn’t feel anything anymore.

Asked how long he planned to keep his arm raised like that, Mahant, who even sleeps with his right arm in the unusual position, said that he hadn’t even thought about it. He prefers to live in the present, but he expects to keep it raised for the rest of his life.

It’s unclear how long the sadhu has been keeping his arm up like this, he just says “over 10 years” in the video, but there are photos of him on the internet from 2018 with captions that claim he had been doing it for over a decade then. So it’s been at least 14 years…