Maitri field guide
What a Maitri women's circle is actually like
What is a women's circle here?
It is a session where the six women in a batch sit together, usually around a small kitchen table or on the terrace, and talk. Gunjan holds the session. There is no curriculum and no round-the-room obligation, and what is said in the circle is treated as confidential. Circles happen across all four days rather than as a single set-piece evening.
When does the group start to form?
Earlier than most people expect. The drive from Delhi takes about seven hours and the six women share it, so the group has usually found itself well before the car reaches Pangot. Nobody walks into a room where friendships have already been established. Every batch mixes women arriving alone with women who came through a past guest.
What is expected of you in the circle?
Nothing you do not offer. No one is required to speak, to disclose anything, to cry, or to arrive at a realisation by Day 3. Sessions are shaped by who is in the circle that week rather than run to a fixed plan. Practices outside the circle work the same way: yoga, breathwork, sound healing, forest bathing, and art therapy can each be modified, skipped, or replaced with rest.
Is there a schedule?
Not in the sense of a timetable. Writing about the women who come, Gunjan has put it plainly: "There are six women and no schedule. There is nothing to complete and no one keeping score." Meals arrive without anyone having planned, shopped for, or risen to serve them. Days have shape, but the shape is not a set of appointments to keep.
Day 1: the drive, the first circle, the intention
The retreat starts when the chauffeur meets the group in Delhi, not when the car arrives. Seven hours through the plains and into the hills, with no route to plan and no bags to manage. At the house: forest-harvested Kumaoni tea, room keys, and nothing on the agenda. The first circle is an unhurried introduction rather than an icebreaker or a schedule briefing. Then a slow-cooked Kumaoni dinner eaten without agenda. Before sleep there is a short intention-setting ritual, which is not a goal or a plan but naming the one thing a guest came to put down.
Day 2: the body
Most women wake before any alarm. The morning is somatic yoga and breathwork facilitated by Gunjan, aimed at what the mind has been storing in the shoulders, the jaw, and the chest. Breakfast is on the terrace while the mist clears off the valley. Late morning is a private guided slow trek into Pangot's guest-only birding trails, walked at conversation pace rather than as a hike. The afternoon is deliberately unstructured, usually spent in the vista bay alcove with a book or with nothing. The evening is a sound bath, held on Day 2 because by then the body is quiet enough to receive it. Dinner runs long, with the kind of conversation that happens when nobody is performing.
Day 3: the circle finds its rhythm
Morning practice goes deeper, since the nervous system has had two nights of mountain quiet. Kahwa, the Kumaoni spiced tea, follows. The main practice of the day is Shinrin Yoku, a slow deliberate walk to a hidden stream in the forest, which is immersion rather than exercise or sightseeing. Lunch is eaten together, and by this point the table feels different than it did on Day 1. The afternoon is art therapy in natural light: canvas, colour, no skill required and no outcome expected. Evening is the ceremonial centre of the retreat, a seven-course slow-cooked Kumaoni feast built on the season's harvest, followed by the fire circle, with no agenda.
Day 4: the closing and the letter
An early unhurried breakfast, with the morning kept clear for exactly that. Then the closing circle, where each woman names what she found and what she is choosing to carry back. It is a completion rather than a debrief. Each guest then writes a letter to the woman she will be in thirty days, when the city has crept back in. It is sealed at the house and posted to her a month later. The Maitri Peace Kit goes home with her, and the Innova makes the seven-hour drive back, which leaves enough time for everything to settle before anyone has to explain it.
Where do guests stay?
The Slow House is a boutique mountain home in Pangot. Rooms are ensuite and open toward the forest. Accommodation in the ₹29,999 price is twin-sharing, and a private suite upgrade can be arranged on request at extra cost.
How quiet does it get?
After about ten at night the valley goes quiet, and that quiet is kept on purpose. The Slow House sits inside a protected bird sanctuary, so the silence belongs to the forest and its wildlife before it belongs to any guest.
What the house does, and does not do
Very little is done to the women who come. Gunjan has been direct about this in her letters: "We do almost nothing. We keep the fire going. We set down the kheer. We stay out of the way." Nobody is diagnosed, fixed, or worked on. There is no engineered breakthrough and no guarantee of transformation. The claim is smaller and more honest: four days in which the woman who usually holds everything together is not the one holding it.
Do six strangers really open up?
Often, and faster than people expect. Gunjan's account of watching it across batch after batch: "how quickly six women who have never met will hold one another's truths more carefully than the people who have known them for years. Perhaps because there is nothing yet to protect." Nobody in the circle needs a guest to keep being who she has always been for them. That is easier with strangers than with family.
What happens after the four days?
The six women from a batch stay connected through a private group. Thirty days after the retreat ends, the letter each guest wrote to herself on Day 4 arrives at her home address by post.
What it is not
It is not therapy, and it is not a substitute for professional mental health care. It is not a yoga intensive, a silent retreat, or a workshop with outcomes. There is no mixed-gender participation, no alcohol, no non-vegetarian food, and no children. Women who want a large programme with a full timetable will find this the wrong shape.
Reading further in her own words
Gunjan writes about the house and the women who come to it in The Unrush Collective. The letters are the fullest account of what these four days are, written without anything being for sale.