In the years before and after her own initiation, she began falling into bhava — states devotees described as spontaneous absorption, sometimes rigid and motionless for hours, sometimes convulsive. She had never studied scripture or practiced formal meditation. Villagers who witnessed it were unsettled, then drawn in.

Alone at midnight on the full moon of August 3, 1922, twenty-six-year-old Nirmala performed a complete initiation ritual on herself, taking in turn the roles of guru, initiate, and the deity invoked — a ceremony normally requiring a teacher, which she had never had.

After she moved to Dhaka, a devotee named Jyotish Chandra Roy, known as Bhaiji, gave her the title by which she became known worldwide: Anandamayi Ma, Mother Saturated with Joy. Ashrams bearing that name eventually opened across India and in Bangladesh.

She died at Kishenpur, near Dehradun, on 27 August 1982, at eighty-six. She had welcomed Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Buddhists alike at her ashrams, and had refused to found a fixed doctrine, saying only that she pointed toward what was already there.