A residential retreat of reflective and embodied practices exploring what it means to feel at home in ourselves, our identities, our roots, and the stories that continue to shape us.
Overview
Program Type: Residential Retreat
Topic: Exploring belonging within and around us
Dates: 3rd-8th May, 2026
Language: English
Facilitators: Manisha Narula (along with Guest Facilitators) & Dharmalaya team
“I have arrived, I am home” means: I don’t want to run anymore. I’ve been running all my life, and I’ve arrived nowhere. Now I want to stop. My destination is the here and now, the only time and place where true life is possible.”
-Thich Nhat Hanh
Key features of the program
Exploring Belonging
We all want to belong, yet belonging is rarely simple. Our identities are shaped by the environments, people, cultures, and traditions we grow up with, and they keep evolving as we move, explore, and change. The desire to belong often appears when we least expect it, touching both old wounds and new possibilities.
This retreat invites you to explore belonging, identity, roots and the idea of home. Whether you’ve lived across cities or countries, wondered what home truly means to you, or felt unanchored in life’s constant movement, this space is for you. You may identify as nomadic, as an immigrant or expat, as part of the diaspora, as a traveller, or simply as a wandering soul. Whatever your story, the longing for belonging connects us across our differences.
Retreat Journey
We will begin with an online session before the retreat to prepare the ground together. This gathering will help you reflect on your intentions, gently open the themes we will explore, and arrive with clarity and readiness.
We will then spend six days together in person, moving through a carefully held arc of practices and conversations. Through embodied work, reflection, dialogue, creativity, and shared experience, we will explore what belonging means in our bodies, our stories, and our relationships. This will also include time spent connecting with members of the local Dharmalaya community, listening to their lived perspectives on home, belonging, and their relationship with the land.
After the retreat, we will gather once more online to integrate the experience. This closing session will offer space to reflect on what has shifted, how the insights are landing in your everyday life, and how to continue cultivating a sense of home within yourself and your communities.
This retreat explores belonging not only as a cultural or geographic experience, but as an internal state we can cultivate within ourselves, regardless of where we come from or where we are in life.
Program approach
Each day will weave together a variety of practices, including:
somatic and embodied practices
story circles and dialogue
guided journaling and reflection
workshops and visualization
nature-based practices
creative expression
The rhythm of the day is designed to balance depth with rest, community with solitude, and inner reflection with shared dialogue.
We will hold space to gently explore our own lived experiences of belonging, displacement, identity, and home. Through intentional sharing in community, we will practice listening deeply, witnessing one another without fixing or advising, and honoring the many truths that can exist in the same room.
This retreat is not only about personal reflection. It is about learning how to be with our stories and each other’s stories with care and courage. We will create a container where vulnerability is met with respect, and where each person’s journey is valid and welcome.
Alongside inner exploration, we will also ask how belonging can be reimagined in the world around us. What would it mean to build families, communities, and spaces where more people feel at home? How does our internal work ripple outward?
Creative Integration
Throughout the retreat, you will work on a personal creative project, whether a poem, painting, song, movement piece, or another form that calls to you. This project will be an invitation to move from inner reflection to outer expression, giving shape and voice to your own evolving understanding of home.
By the end, you will not only have reflected on belonging. You will have embodied it, expressed it, and shared it. You will leave seeing your story through a different lens, with tools to connect the threads of your journey and a community that resonates.
Overview of the main themes and activities we'll explore
Over 6 days, we’ll take a reflective and embodied journey into what it means to feel at home - in ourselves, our identities, our roots, and our evolving stories. Together, we’ll explore:
Creating an inner sense of grounding and presence
The journey of integrating personal transitions
Reconnecting with our core essence
Layers of fixed and fluid identities
Homes we inherit and homes we choose
How we see ourselves and how others see us
Connection to land and roots
The role of grief, longing, and joy
Unpacking our conditioning
Decolonizing the idea of belonging
Who is this programme for?
This retreat is open to anyone who feels they are in motion, externally, internally, or both.
It may be for you if -
You feel lost in parts of your identity, or are curious about who you are becoming.
You struggle to feel a sense of belonging at home, within your family, in your culture, or in certain spaces.
Your idea of home, roots, or belonging keeps shifting as your life changes.
You are in a season of transition between places, roles, relationships, or versions of yourself.
You have experienced the cycle of being lost and found, and sense that the rediscovery is ongoing.
You are beginning to realize you may not even know what belonging truly feels like, but you want to explore it gently and honestly.
This space is for those who are curious about their inner landscape. For those navigating movement, migration, growth, or change. For those who want to feel more at home not just in a place, but within themselves.
What kind of experience to expect?
Full-time immersive experience: This retreat invites you to step away from everyday busyness and into a slower, deeper rhythm of living and creating. It is called immersive because the intention is to be fully present with the journey. While there will be time for rest, journaling, and personal reflection, there will not be space for activities unrelated to the programme. During your time here, we invite your full attention and participation from beginning to end, allowing the experience to unfold with depth and continuity.
Restful and structured rhythm: Each day will follow a gentle structure, with sessions in the morning and afternoon. Evenings will remain mostly spacious for rest, reflection, or quiet wandering, with occasional light gatherings such as a conversation circle, creative sharing, or grounding practice. The rhythm is designed to balance depth with integration, community with solitude, and structure with ease.
Supportive community of co-travellers: We’ll hold space for each other through sharing circles and reflective spaces without pressure, only invitation.
Natural simplicity: We’ll be surrounded by quiet forests, birdsong, and earth. The accommodations are shared and are rustic, natural earthen buildings in a beautiful forest setting.
Yogic lifestyle: We’ll follow rhythms inspired by yogic living with mindful mornings, nourishing food, and integration of rest. Clean and simple ashram-style lifestyle in which everyone contributes to the running of the place, including cleaning, washing dishes, etc. No smoking or intoxicants.
Healthy Vegan food: Natural and mostly organic, purely vegetarian meals (100% plant-based, vegan). No junk food or packaged snacks, etc.
Digital detox: We invite you to take a pause from phones and screens so you can be fully present with yourself and this moment. To support the immersive nature of this retreat, we will minimize the use of mobile phones and internet during sessions. This helps create a shared space of attention, allowing us to be more present with one another and with our own inner experience. For some, this may require a period of adjustment. We gently invite you to notice what arises when you step away from constant connectivity and turn toward yourself, the community around you, and the abundance of nature that holds us during these days.
Campus life and the experience of living in community
Many past participants share that one of the most meaningful aspects of a residential retreat is the experience of living, learning, and growing in community. There is something powerful about sharing space with others who are also exploring similar questions about identity, belonging, and home.
We intentionally cultivate a culture of kindness, cooperation, and mutual respect. Rather than competition or comparison, we invite collaboration, care, and curiosity. Living alongside others in this kind of environment can be deeply nourishing and, at times, gently challenging in ways that support growth.
Learning to be a healthy part of a healthy community is a core aspect of this retreat. Belonging is not only something we reflect on individually. It is something we practice together. Through shared dialogue, self-reflection, journaling, and intentional conversations, we will explore how we relate to ourselves and to one another.
This kind of inner and relational work asks for openness and willingness. If you feel called to grow not only personally but also in how you show up in community, this retreat may resonate deeply with you.
Dates and times
Start and end dates
The programme will begin at 10am on Day 1. All participants can arrive between 9am - 10am on Day 1 (we will provide detailed timing, instructions, and travel tips after confirming your registration). On the arrival morning, you’ll be settling in and getting oriented, with introductions and an overview of life at Dharmalaya Institute in general as well as an overview of the programme.
The programme will conclude on Friday afternoon. Participants who are leaving after the programme can plan to depart by 4:00pm. You can also choose to leave Saturday morning if you’d like an additional evening to integrate at Dharmalaya. If you are interested in staying longer and volunteering at Dharmalaya post-retreat, feel free to get in touch to chat more!
Daily schedule: What will the flow of the days be like?
Although the day-to-day schedule will vary a bit, the schedule for a typical day during this programme would more or less as follows:
6:00 Wake
6:30 Morning practice: Optional meditation, Yoga, or silent morning walks.
8:00 BREAKFAST
9:30 Morning session
12:30 LUNCH
14:00 Afternoon session
18:30 DINNER
19:30 Evening session: Often a conversation circle or grounding activity
20:30 Time for journaling, reading and personal practices
Each day will weave together somatic practices, story circles, guided journaling, workshops, visualisation, silent reflection, nature-based practices, and creative expression. The rhythm of the day is designed to balance depth with rest, community with solitude, and inner reflection with shared dialogue.
Programme fee
Dharmalaya Institute is a not-for-profit charitable and educational organisation, and as such seeks to make its programmes accessible everyone. Recognizing that our participants come from diverse backgrounds, we are providing a sliding scale with three tiers, to make it possible for each participant to give according to their means.
Total fees for this 6-day retreat (inclusive of shared accommodation, three healthy meals daily, and tea), at each of the three tiers are as follows:
Standard rate
(For most participants)
Rs 18,000 total
For transparency: This standard rate is essentially a break-even rate, just enough to cover the Institute’s total average monthly costs in providing this service-learning opportunity.
Subsidized rate
(For low-income participants who can’t afford the standard rate)
Rs 12,200 total
For transparency: This subsidized rate is approximately 33% below our break-even rate, which means it is not enough to cover the Institute’s costs in providing the programme, though that shortfall might be covered by participants who choose to pay the ‘Supporter rate’ to the right.
Supporter rate
(For those who can afford to support the subsidized rate)
Rs 23,800 total
For transparency: This supporter rate is approximately 33% above the break-even rate, and 100% of that surplus will be used to support lower-income applicants to participate at the subsidized rate. We thank you sincerely for your generosity in choosing this rate if you can.
We do not want cost to be a barrier to anyone’s participation, so if you have exceptional financial hardship and cannot afford even the lowest subsidized rate, you can contact us to let us know your situation and your needs and we’ll be happy to discuss options for scholarships (subject to limited availability).
A very limited number of private rooms are available at extra cost. Please contact us for details.
In addition to the base fee, there will be an opportunity to offer dana (an optional, voluntary offering of support), as per tradition, to Dharmalaya Institute.
RECOMMENDED EXTENSION: STAY ON AFTER THE PROGRAM ENDS TO DEEPEN YOUR LEARNING
For those who wish to gain additional experience, there may be an opportunity to stay on after the programme ends (subject to available space and acceptance of application), with a discounted rate for long-term volunteers.
About your facilitator: Manisha Narula
Manisha designs and facilitates reflective, community-centred experiences that deepen self-awareness, connection, and grounding. For over a decade, she has been building intentional communities across the non-profit sector, alternative education, and wellbeing spaces. Her approach blends somatic practices, guided reflection, and community-based tools to create environments where people can explore emotional and social wellbeing and imagine new ways of belonging. She currently runs The Soulful Return, where she offers inner guidance to help people return to themselves, to each other, and to the land.
Manisha is a third culture kid who grew up across countries, spent over fifteen years in Canada, lived nomadically around the world, and eventually felt a deep pull to reconnect with her roots. Living between many worlds has shaped how she understands belonging, not simply as a physical place, but as an inner state we can cultivate within ourselves and in relationship with others. Her lived experience of movement, transition, and return informs the care and intentionality she brings to this retreat.
Alongside Manisha, a few skilled guest facilitators will join us, each bringing different practices and perspectives to help us explore and experiment with the concept of belonging.
Application process
The application process is designed to help identify applicants who are best matched with the programme.
A Note for Applicants
Before completing this form, we invite you to spend some time exploring the Dharmalaya website and reading the program details thoroughly. Dharmalaya is a living learning community, and understanding our values, culture, and guidelines is important before applying.
STEP 1 — APPLY: Submit the application form below and wait for our reply. We may email you to ask follow-up questions if necessary.
STEP 2 — ACCEPTANCE: If you are accepted for the retreat, then at that time we will send you an acceptance letter by email, which will include more detailed information about the programme and how to prepare.
STEP 3 — DEPOSIT: You will then have one week from the date of acceptance to make your nonrefundable payment to hold your place in the programme. Once we have received your payment, your registration for the programme will be complete.
If you have any questions after reading all the material here on our website, feel free to contact us and we’ll be happy to address your questions.
We look forward to connecting with you!