Please note: This is the updated retreat curriculum and description as of June 1, 2024. At the Himalayan Writing Retreat website, you will find lots of information about the Retreat Center, FAQ on India travel, and the application/registration link for the Goddesses of India Creative Retreat. However, please note that the retreat curriculum and description posted there may be the earlier version until the HWR website is updated shortly. This is the correct curriculum description for the Goddesses of India Creative Retreat. ! (Feel free to contact Annie with any questions). Thanks!
Goddesses of India Creative Retreat in the Himalayas
Fall 2025 – Retreat Schedule.
We begin our outer and inner pilgrimage in the city of Delhi where we visit a renowned temple dedicated to the Goddess Kali, Kali Bari. Tracing our route through other Goddess temples, we commune in a powerful secluded Goddess shrine in the foothills of the Himalayas. Finally we head up to the Himalayan Writing Retreat, the home of inspiration, insight, and good food.
All stays and transfers are pre-arranged. The serenity of the rural Himalayas is a stark contrast to the touristy India of the first two days. In the mountains, we continue to discover a sliver of India every day, but at a relaxed, unhurried pace. Up here, you write in the halo of Himalayan peaks – five thousand feet taller than Mt. McKinley. If you have questions about India, click here to read our India travel FAQs.
This retreat is open to all women and gender-nonconforming creators and seekers who are ready to explore a Goddess-centered creative process.
Program
Amid India’s rich Goddess traditions, our retreat’s workshops and creative time are designed to open will, mind, body, heart, and spirit to deeper understandings of the Divine Feminine. Each day we will absorb a new aspect of Goddess-centered experience through readings in key texts of Goddess literature and thealogy; discussion; and Annie’s Five Directions series of journaling/writing techniques. As we share our ongoing works, ideas, and perspectives across our various media for feedback and revision, we enhance everyone’s experience of the holistic and multifaceted nature of Goddess-centered creativity. Creating, revising, and learning individually or together, we will connect more fully to the Goddesses in mythic, human, or natural form—including in the breathtaking world of the Himalayas around us.
The daily program is outlined below. We plan on having lecture/discussion/workshop meetings each day. In addition, each participant will receive a one-hour private consultation with Annie.
Day 1, October 9, Thursday
Welcome! Arrive at Delhi Airport any time after 12 noon on the 9th of October. A team member from the Himalayan Writing Retreat (we’ll share details before your arrival) will meet you at the airport and bring you straight to your hotel. Your stay is arranged at the Tree of Life BnB, amongst Delhi’s top rated. In addition to being highly rated, the hotel is also close to many amenities.
No class on this day.
Today, we’ll get settled and have an opportunity to get to know one another better. Our dinner will be at the iconic Bukhara restaurant, famous outside India as well as within.
Note: Many international flights land in Delhi at unearthly hours. If your flight gets in before noon on the 9th of October, we will still meet you at the airport and take you to your hotel. We’ve also negotiated a great room rate at which you can stay for an extra night. Please confirm your travel itinerary to us at the earliest opportunity so that we can book accordingly.
Day 2, October 10, Friday
We start the day early, visit the Kali Bari Temple and then drive to Haridwar in private Taxis. “Jet Lag is for Amateurs” says Dick Clark but it is real, and this four hour drive from our hotel will allow you to rest or sleep off some of your jet-lag. We will visit some Goddess temples that afternoon and get back in time for a short session on the relationship between Goddess spirituality and creative inspiration. Lunch will be at one of the best restaurants in Haridwar. We will have dinner and stay the night at our Haridwar hotel.
Topic of the Day: Goddess Cycles, Goddess Power (no workshop)
The liminal state of travel (and even jet-lag!) is perfect for observation—you’re extra-sensitive, raw, and open to experiencing your new surroundings in a more passive and receptive way. Today, we’ll take advantage of any discombobulation to practice openness to rhythm and sensory detail and to channel the cyclical Goddess energies around us.
Over breakfast, you’ll receive brief instruction on our tasks for the day, designed to ground and center your unique personal experience of the Goddess temples we will visit. After we return, we will reconvene over dinner to discuss each of our unfolding creative Goddess trajectories and to share tools for building on those experiences in the days to come.
Carol Christ said: “The simplest and most basic meaning of the symbol of Goddess is the acknowledgment of the legitimacy of female power as a beneficient and independent power.” This is an insight to contemplate for human beings in general, but especially for creative women seekers. As we visit the temples, consider: What is your past experience of Divine Feminine energy, and what has the Goddess meant to you so far? Has she shown up in forms where you might not have recognized Her at first? Now that you are here, how do you respond to the experience of encountering Goddess power? Do you notice any changes in your senses of hearing, touch, smell, taste, and sight, your thoughts or emotions, your awareness of yourself? How might you accept Goddess inspiration to grow in your voice, spirituality, and creative practice?
Day 3, Oct 11, Saturday
Into the Mountains!
We head out early and board the train to head towards the Himalayas. We board the Kathgodam Shatabdi Express train and travel First Class to Kathgodam. On the journey we’ll continue honing our awareness of the Goddess gifts of cycles, rhythms, and embodiment. If you are called to create during this transitional time, consider tapping into the tradition of sacred address to invite a conversation between yourself and the Goddess energy you are coming to know. This conversation may take lyric, dramatic, or narrative form, or that of a journal entry, drawing, or song among other possibilities. Whatever its form, it may shape a space of awareness and invitation for your experience of the Goddess to unfold, opening you to inspiration that may arrive during our visit to Sitla Devi Temple and during the days to come.
The town of Kathgodam is where the mountains start. We transfer to taxis for the last three hours of our travel, stopping for our pilgrimage into the ancient seclusion of the temple to Sitla Devi, ancient mother Goddess and a form of the goddess Durga. As you ring the temple bell three times to announce your presence to this primal Goddess, how does this sacred site meet and affect your will, mind, body, heart, spirit? What of yourself are you drawn to share with the Goddess? What creative gifts are you prepared to accept? How does your awareness of time and space inform this moment?
Saying farewell to Sitla Devi, we stop for lunch at the iHeart café owned and run by a couple from Bozeman, Montana (really!) who specialize in awesome coffee. We arrive at The Himalayan Writing Retreat (THWR) in Satkhol Village – our home for the next seven days.
The Himalayan Writing Retreat is built to provide inspiration and to offer a sense of serenity. This niche property has six double-occupancy guest rooms and a full staff to cater to your needs with love and the highest standards of hygiene. The food is tasty, fresh and includes a lot of local cuisine.
We reach the Retreat around 4 PM and have a short session in the evening where we discuss our plan for the next few days.
Session 1: Channeling the Embodied Goddess: Grounding Ourselves in Sacred Space
To create sacred space is in itself a gift of the Goddess. Practicing our Goddess-given intuition, we will participate in a short intention-setting exercise and lay the groundwork for the days to come, planning our use of space from a ceremonial perspective and bringing in the tools of cleansing, balancing, and circle-casting. We will also consider our own angle of approach, noticing the Goddess’s power to shape our experience of new places, people, and situations with gratitude, playfulness, and courage as we acclimate to a new continent, country, climate, and culture. In a spirit of divine feminine collaboration, we will combine all our talents to weave the ideal space in which our creative retreat will flourish for the good of all.
We will close this session with a homage to some of the beautiful yet broken traditions of women’s stories and poems to the Goddess, with brief excerpts from a range of cultures, from Indian to Native American to Sumerian. We will consider the ways in which stories of Goddesses, including those of India, have been twisted to enforce reigning political and gender hierarchies—and how to meet and shapeshift these challenges in our own lives and work.
Day 4, Oct 12, Sunday
Early Morning: Yoga session (evening yoga session also available on demand)
Morning: workshop sessions and craft class at the Himalayan Writing Retreat.
Afternoon: an optional trip to the local school (www.chiragschool.org ) and a social enterprise (http://b2r.in/ ). For those interested we can walk back – it is a 2 mile walk through the forest.
Evening: Open Mic after sundown.
Session 2: Goddess Language of Will; Passion
Sparking our creative retreat period, we welcome the Goddess within ourselves, each other, and nature by sharing sound-exercises to recognize each person’s unique creative core. Then we entrain the rhythm of Will and Fire into our lives in a journaling session channeling the fire-rhythm through the urgency of our Goddess-given creative will and desire. Inviting our rooted creative energies to dance with the Goddess’s fertile powers, we can re-sacralize passion out of its patriarchal limbo and claim back its power for our central creative purposes.
Readings, TBA, are planned to include excerpts from the Sanskrit Kalika Puran and Riane Eisler’s Sacred Pleasure, along with women’s erotic literature including Jane Hirshfield’s translations of haiku in The Ink Dark Moon and excerpts from Diane Wolkstein’s translation of The Descent of Inanna.
Day 5, Oct 13, Monday
Early Morning: Yoga session (evening yoga session also available on demand)
Morning: optional hike & write. After breakfast we head out for a short hike to a nearby temple on the hilltop. Along the way we stop and write sitting on a ridge in the pine forest.
Late morning/lunch: Workshop and craft class at the Himalayan Writing Retreat.
Afternoon – open time at the Himalayan Writing Retreat, or explore the forest reserve.
Evening: Bollywood movie night. It’s kitschy, yes. But it is part of the India experience. So we watch a Bollywood movie with English subtitles. And Popcorn.
Session 3: Goddess Language of Mind; Image
Moving into the clear energy of air, we invite the rhythm of Mind into our lives and work as we embody the Goddess power of wisdom and manifestation through altar-building out of a place of lovingly objective attention to our surroundings. Brief journaling will focus on concision and the use of parallelism and contrast to clarify thought and intention: the spider Creatrix not only spinning the universe-thread out of Her belly, but also weaving it into the web that channels and amplifies creative interconnection. Continuing the spirit of setting intention, we will also use some of this session for each person to pull back and share our visions for the final form of the works-in-progress under creation so far during our retreat.
Readings, TBA, are planned to include excerpts from the story of Sarasvati in the Sanskrit Rig Veda, Patricia Monaghan’s Red-Haired Girl From the Bog, and For colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange.
Day 6, Oct 14, Tuesday
Early Morning: Yoga session (evening yoga session also available on demand)
Morning: optional walk through a local village and visit to women crafters and cheesemakers.
Late afternoon: generative class on writing and reflection.
Session 4: Goddess Language of the Body; Shape
We will learn how to embody the double, falling rhythm —the rhythm of Body and Earth— in our lives and work. At the same time, we will invite in the Goddess powers of grounding and strength through a revision process centered on the fertile pattern aesthetics that tend to characterize matriarchal, Goddess-focused writing, music, dance, and visual culture: repetition, harmony, symmetry. Participants will be encouraged to bring a revision which we will further invite into a more committed relationship to the transformative constraints of pattern manifested in visual correspondences, lyric necessity, narrative plot, or other means.
Readings, TBA, are planned to include excerpts Ancient MIrrors of Womanhood by Merlin Stone, the story of Parvati from Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhavam, the stories of Asase Yaa and Persephone,”Great Goddess” by Janine Canan, and “Why Women Need the Goddess” by Carol Christ.
Day 7, Oct 15, Wednesday
Early Morning: Yoga session (evening yoga session also available on demand)
Morning: workshop session and craft class at the Himalayan Writing Retreat.
Midday and afternoon: we head over to the Kasar Devi temple in Almora (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasar_Devi ). It will be a 4 hour round trip so the visit will take up most of the day. We will do session 5 on our return.
Session 5: Goddess Language of the Heart; Rhythm
In his session we will flow with the triple, falling rhythm —the rhythm of Heart and Water— in our journaling and creative practice, then applying it with a healing focus on the key Goddess powers of compassion and forgiveness with an optional chance to share in the discussion circle. As we transform these experiences through circle sounding exercises, uniting our pulse and breath with those of the soul-sisters around us, we flow our lives with the seasons and cycles of time and mortality. We will close by sharing passages from our journals or creative works three times, inviting ourselves to respond and transform them together out of that seamless state of connection.
Readings, TBA, are planned to include excerpts from Wild Women: Seekers, Protagonists, and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry edited by Arundhathi Subramaniam, and She Rises LIke the Sun edited by Janine Canan.
Day 8, Oct 16, Thursday
Early Morning: Yoga session (evening yoga session also available on demand)
Morning: free writing time at the Himalayan Writing Retreat, or explore on your own.
Afternoon: Workshop session and craft class at the Himalayan Writing Retreat.
Goddess Language of the Spirit;
As we enjoy the delicious depths of our final rhythm and only double rhythm — the rocking rhythms of Spirit and Matrix– we will invite the Goddess gifts of ritual and intuition into our life and work. What has been our implied or explicit working definition of ritual so far and what, if any, creativity rituals do we like to use? How effective are they? Are there other ways to evoke the power of ritual that we may not have yet considered? How might our ritual practice change in light of our experiences during this week’s retreat?
Readings, TBA, are planned to include excerpts from The Goddess Companion by Patricia Monaghan, Women’s Rituals by Barbara Walker, and For colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange.
Day 9, Oct 17, Friday
Early Morning: Yoga session (evening yoga session also available on demand)
Morning: workshop session and craft class at the Himalayan Writing Retreat.
Afternoon: Optional hike to visit the ancient Kapileshwar temple (said to be over 1000 years old).
Session 7: Re-Visioning Goddess
Our final session will guide you through a series of journal prompts, designed to draw forth your deepest intentions for integrating the experience of the retreat into your creative work and any other facets of your life where it may feel called. Then each participant will offer the group a presentation consisting of the following: 1. a presentation of a refined, revised creative work or other offering produced during the week 2. discussion of how a particular excerpt or passage from our week’s readings has influenced your offering 3. revisiting and update on your intentions for the retreat, how they evolved, and the trajectory you envision growing for you from this experience going forward.
Readings: participants will share their own work along with readings from the retreat that have influenced themt.
Day 10, Oct 18, Saturday
Early Morning: Yoga session
Morning: We pack up and head back to Delhi by taxi and train, stopping for a boat ride to honor the breasts of the Goddess presiding over the joyful sight of the ancient Naina Devi temple at Nanital, especially sacred as the spot where the left eye of the Goddess Sati is said to have fallen and become the bright lake facing the sky. Our stay in Delhi is again at the tree of life / Colonels Retreat.
Day 11, Oct 19, Sunday
Morning: After breakfast we check out from the hotel and head out for a guided tour of the old city. We start with the spice market – where all your senses will be on overdrive. A short rickshaw ride takes us through more of old Delhi where we visit a Jain temple, a mosque end our tour with a visit to the Gurudwara Sis Ganj Sahib, a Sikh temple. The tour is a deep dive into Indian culture and values. This tour, again, is conducted by the highest rated operators in India.
After lunch at the excellent café Lota, we can head out for some shopping at one of the best boutiques selling block-printed cotton clothing, Anokhi (one of Annie’s favorite shops in India) or you can wait at the hotel for your flight (for waiting here and keeping a room, extra charges may apply). Airport drops are arranged for everyone based on your flight schedule. Those wishing to stay longer can do so at a pre-negotiated rate.
Looking forward to seeing you soon in the Himalayas!
