Yoga on the upper terrace
6.30 am, sixty to seventy-five minutes, hatha, taught by Priya Bisht who trained in Rishikesh and teaches at the Berinag school. Three mornings a week, more if enough people want it.
Slow living
Nobody here
is qualified
to heal you.
There is no spa, no therapist, no consultation and no treatment menu. What there is: cold air, uphill walking, food grown eleven metres away, and a structural hole in every afternoon. For a surprising number of people that turns out to be the whole thing.
What is actually offered
Six things, all included
Not treatments. Practices, run by people who do them anyway.
Forest bathing, three hours
Shinrin-yoku in the loosest sense: walking very slowly in oak forest and stopping a lot. Deepak leads it, badly, on purpose. No talking after the first ten minutes.
Guided meditation in the grove
At dusk, in the temple grove that has not been cut for two centuries. Twenty-five minutes. Anyone can join and nobody will look at you.
The cold water
The waterfall in April is about eight degrees. There is no ceremony around this and no breathing protocol. You go in, you shout, you come out changed for an hour.
Silent mornings
By arrangement: nobody speaks to you before eleven, including at breakfast. Three guests a year ask for this and all three have written to say it worked.
The empty afternoon
Two to five, every day, deliberately unscheduled. This is the actual intervention and it is free.
Forest bathing
Three hours,
two kilometres
That is the whole method: cover as little ground as possible in as much time as possible. We stop for ten minutes at a time and nobody explains why. There is good evidence that time in forest lowers cortisol and blood pressure, and there is a great deal of nonsense written around that evidence. We do the thing and leave the claims alone.
Slow living
Six conditions, not six activities
None of these are things you do. They are things that are true of the place, and they do most of the work.
Dawn at fiveThe light wakes you. No alarm has been set here in ten years
Unreachable, dailyTwo to three hours with no signal, without anyone confiscating anything
Food you watched growEleven metres from soil to pot. The plate is not a concept
Cold that means somethingFifteen degrees between noon and midnight, all year
One tableEating alone is possible and nobody does it after day two
Dark by sevenEverything closes. There is nowhere to go and nothing to miss
Dawn at fiveThe light wakes you. No alarm has been set here in ten years
Unreachable, dailyTwo to three hours with no signal, without anyone confiscating anything
Food you watched growEleven metres from soil to pot. The plate is not a concept
Cold that means somethingFifteen degrees between noon and midnight, all year
One tableEating alone is possible and nobody does it after day two
Dark by sevenEverything closes. There is nowhere to go and nothing to miss
A stillness day
What it looks like if you take the quiet option
This is the shape of the Stillness package, though nobody is held to it and about half of guests abandon it by day three in favour of walking a great deal.
05:45
Awake
Because of the light, not an alarm. Tea outside your door on a steel tray.
06:30
Yoga on the terrace
Sixty to seventy-five minutes with Priya, facing north. Three mornings a week in season.
08:30
Breakfast, in silence if you asked
Roti, ghee, pickle, tea. Nobody will speak to you before eleven if that is what you requested.
10:00
Forest bathing
Three hours, two kilometres, and a great deal of standing still in oak.
13:30
Lunch, then nothing
The empty afternoon. Hammock, book, terrace, or lying down. Two to five, unscheduled, every day.
17:30
Meditation in the grove
Twenty-five minutes at dusk under two-hundred-year-old oak. Optional and unannounced.
19:00
Dinner, one table
The only fixed point of the day. Even the silent guests come to this, and usually start talking at it.
The kitchen
Lighter, when you ask for it
Kumaoni food is already close to what most people mean by clean eating — millets, pulses, seasonal greens, fermented pickle, very little sugar, no processed anything. For guests on the Stillness package Kamla shifts it further: less oil, no fried gutke, more curd, an early dinner at half past six, and no tea after four so that you actually sleep.
- Mandua and jhangora — naturally gluten-free whole grains
- Gahat dal, traditionally given in Kumaon for kidney stones
- Jaggery rather than sugar in everything sweet
- No caffeine after four, by default, on request
- Early dinner at 6.30 rather than 7, which changes sleep more than anything else
Quietly
What people said afterwards
★★★★★
I did not sleep through a single night for the first two, and then I slept eleven hours and woke up frightened by how rested I felt.Ananya Krishnan · Bengaluru · 6 nights
★★★★★
Three silent mornings. By the third one I had stopped composing sentences in my head, which is a thing I did not know I was doing constantly.Anne Lindqvist · Stockholm · 30 nights
★★★★★
I came expecting a retreat and got a farmhouse. It was better. Nobody once asked me how I was feeling.Meera Bhattacharya · Kolkata · 5 nights
★★★★★
The empty afternoon nearly broke me on day one. By day four I was defending it to another guest who wanted an itinerary.Sudha Menon · Chennai · 7 nights
★★★★★
Left my phone in the room on the second day, not deliberately, and did not notice until dinner. That has not happened since about 2011.Vikram Iyer · Bengaluru · 41 nights
★★★★
Forest bathing sounded like something I would find embarrassing. Three hours later I understood it was just walking slowly, and I have kept doing it at home.Priya Nair · Kochi · 4 nights
Questions
About the quiet things
No. Nothing on this page is compulsory and nobody keeps a register. About half of guests do the yoga once and then decide they would rather sleep, which is also a wellness outcome.
Yes. Priya teaches a gentle hatha sequence and modifies for anybody who needs it. If you have a back or knee injury, tell her before rather than during.
Yes, and it will be respected without comment or explanation to other guests. Ask on the first evening and specify when it starts and ends.
No. There is a good Ayurvedic practitioner in Pithoragarh, fifty-five kilometres away, and we will give you the number. We do not offer anything ourselves and would not want to.
Possibly, and please tell us in advance so that we can be useful rather than clumsy. But we are a family with a spare room, not clinicians. If you need professional support, arrange it before you come — the signal on the walks is genuinely absent.
We will keep it in the kitchen drawer if you ask, and we have done it eight times. Six of those guests asked for it back within a day. The two who did not still write to us.
The afternoon with nothing in it
It is free, it happens every day, and it is the part that actually works. Three nights is enough to feel it; six is enough to stop resisting it.