Rishikesh, India

1 - 9 March 2025

The Retreat

Our retreat takes place in an energetically charged ashram of a meditation master. With a big white marble meditation and yoga hall, well-equipped ensuite rooms with king sized beds, simple white linen and a sattvic vegan kitchen. 

You will have an opportunity to experience the best of spiritual India as well as cleanse at the deepest levels of your being. You will come away from this retreat with clarity of mind and a way to move forward in your new life. Your old life of deadlines, pressures and expectations will still be there, but you will be different and you will navigate it very differently with greater awareness and consciousness. You will understand your patterned behaviour and make choices that are more beneficial for you and your loved ones. When you allow the dust of everyday life to settle, a sea of possibilities emerges that you never knew existed before. When you start living these possibilities, you transform into a person that you never knew you had within you. And one day, without even realising it, you are transformed into a new Self. 

Freshness, silence, and tranquility:  Often a retreat into a new environment can open up unexpected doors. We take you on a journey of another kind for nine days on a unique transformational process. When life comes at you a thousand miles an hour, your deepest calling and truest self often get knocked unconscious by storms of distraction, anxiety, and heaviness. It can feel as if somewhere along the way, you lost connection to yourself, your direction, and your ability to see things clearly.

The truth is; you never really “lose connection”. The clarity you seek simply gets muffled under layers of toxic inner dialog, self-limiting stories, and conditioned mindsets. This retreat is the perfect way to slash through the inner and outer clutter weighing you down in a fun, grounded, uplifting, and safe environment. The experience of being in India while connecting with others who also care about becoming their best selves is a deeply fulfilling experience.

You will learn practical ways to help strengthen the connection to your own internal guidance system while discovering life-enhancing tools to help move you toward the vibrant, abundant, and purposeful life that feels most aligned with your soul. 

This is a holistic experience for women:  cleansing of body and mind through detoxification and a juice fast, insights into the Ayurvedic lifestyle and nutrition, cleansing yogic techniques, and to take the experience further, we will gently guide you towards accessing the deeper levels of transformation.

Transformation is a life-long process, a journey from head to heart to being; from physical body to emotional body to spiritual well-being. We will teach you the art of letting go, releasing feelings, taking off the mask, and getting rid of the tensions that you have accumulated in various roles you have been playing in life. Because connecting with your emotions is really at the core of well-being.

Location

Rishikesh, situated on the banks of the Ganges river in the foothills of the Himalaya, is the place of ancient spiritual practices.  It is a place that holds the vibration of thousands of years of yoga, meditation and Ayurveda and as such is the perfect environment for deep transformational work.   

The retreat home is an ashram walking distance from the crystal clear turquoise waters of the Ganges river.  Your home for 9 days is just a stone's throw from numerous temples and nature walks in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains.  Because you are deep in process, you will have your own private ensuite room. Ashram life is a simple life. A life of devotion, and in this case, we are devoting our full time, energy and attention to our own being. Traditionally, ashrams are about spiritual work - karma yoga - what we do on the inside, we mirror in our environment. While we cleanse bodies, our hearts and minds in order to reach our soul, we also maintain our environment. We clean our own rooms, the meditation hall and clean and tidy up after ourselves. 

Karma Yoga – the path of action without attachment

Karma yoga is the path of action. It is the intention we weave into our actions, which perpetuate more actions and the ongoing state of our minds (also known as karma)

The Cleanse

The retreat starts out with a beautiful healthy vegan meal on the first day. Then for the following 5 days we juice fast with freshly squeezed local fruits and vegetables. Each day, we make fresh almond milk for traditional Ayurvedic Golden milk and / or cacao drink and a vegan broth in the evenings. For the remainder of the retreat, we reintroduce food in a healthy and balanced way for your body to reap the best benefits of the fast. The retreat ends after breakfast on the 9th day.  

Cleansing has long been practiced by so many yogis and meditators who have fasted as a tool to access their deeper selves, to cleanse the body and purify the mind.  The result is that we develop a deeper connection with our inner life and begin looking at our lives and where we are with a fresh and clear vision.  With this clarity it becomes easier to guide and direct our lives into the lives of our own choosing. 

This retreat promises transformation.  You will not only cleanse your physical body, but your emotional body and mind also.  You will have an opportunity to experience the best of spiritual India as well as cleanse at the deeper level of your being.  You will come away from this retreat with clarity of mind and know how to move forward in your life. All you have to do is answer the call. The call to India. The call to your own inner life. 

Yoga

While yoga is a useful tool for exercising and stretching our physical body as well as nourishing and tonifying our organs and assisting with the detoxification process, our yoga practice is as much for the mind as it is for the body. It helps to calm and balance our mind utilising the breath as our primary focus. You do not need to have practiced yoga before, our classical Indian yoga is suitable for beginners as well as intermediate practitioners.  

Meditation

Yoga Nidra

We use a method of guided meditation called Yoga Nidra, or yogic sleep as it is commonly known. Yoga Nidra is an immensely powerful meditation technique, and one of the easiest yoga practices to develop and maintain making it suitable for beginners but it is also highly beneficial for regular meditators. The practitioner rests comfortably in savasana (lying down on their back), and is systematically taken through the layers of self, leaving us with a sense of wholeness. During the practice of Yoga Nidra, we are able to develop communication with our body and mind and become more integrated. Some of the many benefits include stress and anxiety reduction, the promotion of emotional wellness, the development of self awareness and greater consciousness, increase in concentration span, improved sleep and with regular practice can lower blood pressure along with a healthy lifestyle. 

Dynamic Meditation

This meditation is full of energy and vibrance.  It allows us to bring to the surface old patterns of behaviour that drive us to behave unconsciously and that keep us trapped in our own mind.  It allows us to shake off unwanted habitual behaviour and to see ourselves clearly with honesty in order to make lasting changes in our lives that move us forward.  

Emotional Release

Our bodies hold memories of all our experiences including all kinds of traumas. So we may be aware of certain events in our lives and we may have dealt with them at the emotional and psychological levels, but we haven’t necessarily dealt with them at the physical level. We will learn how to release these emotions that are stuck in our bodies which ultimately and powerfully hold us back from truly changing the way we see, think and feel about ourselves. When we release these old emotions, we develop new neural pathways that lead us to deeply care about and love ourselves which brings about a fresh energy to live our lives the way we want. 

This is a deep cleansing transformational retreat which promises not only to cleanse your physical body, but your emotional body and mind also.  

Processes

All the processes are designed to support your transformation in this magnificent environment. Run by Cape Town Retreats founder Annie Wyatt who has run over 70 detoxification and transformational retreats personally and Veechi Shahi of Namaste Retreats India who has been working with transformational processes for the last 30 years in order to tune into who we really are. You will be held and cared for by Annie and Veechi for the duration of the retreat. 

Spiritual India

Rishikesh is one of the ancient places in India where you will still encounter real yogis. These are people who have dedicated their lives to the practice of yoga which can but does not always include asanas or physical postures as they are practiced in the west. Many of these people practice devotional yoga, raja yoga, karma yoga etc.  Many of these people still live in the foothills of the great Himalayas which surround the town and who still come down from the mountains for meetings with other devotees or to get supplies. 

You will also encounter the ancient rituals of aarti which include mantra chanting, music, singing, lighting candles and offerings of incense. These practices have been practiced for thousands of years and continue to be practiced in the same way with the same heart. 

The place itself is filled with spiritual energy and you are likely to have a deep experience on our retreat. Spirituality is different for everyone, so it is best to come with an open mind and heart and the heart of a child who is experiencing the world for the first time.

The Retreat includes

• Airport transfers to/from Dehradun (Jolly Grant) Airport Rishikesh

• Accommodation in private ashram rooms with ensuite bathrooms

• Nutrient dense freshly squeezed juices

• Daily meditation

• Daily yoga

• Puja (yogic ritual)

• Transformational workshops

• Herbal teas

• 5 Days juice fasting

• 3 Days healthy vegan meals

• Vitamin rich veggie broth

• Freshly pressed almond milk

• Nature walks

• Emotional release

• Solitude

• Sharing with like minded people

• Excursions to local sites and temples

What's not included

• Flights

• Visa

Packages

Private ensuite room R22500 ZAR (all inclusive including airport pick up and drop off)

Payment plan R7500 x 3 months starting December 2024

Early Bird Price R19500 if paid in full by 31 December 2024)

(prices are quoted in ZAR)

Flights

When booking your flights the best route is to fly into Delhi and then get a 45 minute connecting flight to Dehradun (45 minutes from Rishikesh).  Emirates has affordable flights to Delhi and Indigo or Vistara has a decent connecting flight. 

eVisa

You can get your tourist visa for India online.  It's a very quick process, follow the link below.  We recommend you start the process from about a month before you travel.   Follow the link below for your eVisa.  

https://indianvisaonline.gov.in/evisa/tvoa.html

Letter from our March 2024 participant

It was a long time that I manifested my trip to India. I felt that you supported me so gently in my path to get there, and made me realise that it will happen when the time is right, and it was! Thank you so much for that.

I had no specific expectations, but I did hope, that it would be as meaningful as I had heard. And both India and the retreat with you (Annie) and Veechi, as our guides, far exceeded anything I could have hoped for. The group of women too were incredible and the strange connection between us all was so interesting. It was really a moment in time, one that I value very much.

I loved the flow of the retreat - it matched India! The chaos within a structure, but with flexibility and movement, that allowed for both important inner work and freedom too. The journeys you and Veechi guided us on were incredible - sometimes difficult, sometimes met with some resistance, but each one was valuable in some way. What a learning it was. Someone asked me if it was transformational… and I think that there were pockets of space where I had deep and meaningful transformative experiences.

I am so sad in some way that I have now done this retreat and that I can’t go back and experience it all over again from the beginning, new. But I hope that there will be a way for me to return, to India, to Rishikesh and to the Ashram.

Thanks for your guidance and gentleness. I feel like you have become one of my teachers, and I hope that there are more opportunities for me to connect with and learn from you in the future.

India was calling me, and it has crept into my heart - the place, the pulse and the people. And the food!!!

- March 2024 participant