A purchase includes a double room (shared with one other) in the Govardhana Retreat Center. Message personally if you want a private room (for extra cost).

The weater this time of the year is starting to cool, but is practically perfect. Cooler mornings and evening, and pretty hot days. The deeper one stays into Kartika month, the colder it gets.

Any clothing you don’t mind getting very dusty! For women, in consideration of the social culture which is quite conservative, clothing like tee-shirts and yogi-pants, if not a full-on saree, is recommended. Be intuitive!

The taxi from Delhi to Govardhana Retreat Center is not included in the original cost. We can help arrange for one if so desired.

You can pay electronically for the retreat, either upfront or in installments. More information can be found on the Registration page.

After a ticket is purchase, half is immediately deposited for securing the space at the retreat center, the budget for ahimsa products, and the budget for the videographer and photographer. This cannot be returned for any reason whatsoever.
The other half of the ticket can only be retrieved within one month after purchase and only if purchase is made before four months to the pilgrimage. If purchase is made within four months to the pilgrimage, it cannot be returned whatsoever. This is due to logistics becoming increasingly complicated the closer we are to the event.
Therefore, in full consideration and prayer of what the event is and what it is meant for make the investment.
If there are any other questions, mail odysseyofobeisances@gmail.com.

A retreat usually involves a comprehensively curated experience; with minimum to no unknown factors; is meant to be fun and largely comfortable; and a relatively new invention of the first world mimicking it’s historical antecedent, the pilgrimage.
A pilgrimage—which has been going on for millenniums, seen in all indigenous cultures East and West, and adopted by the affluent and the destitute alike—involves a letting go (if only temporarily) of the familiar, known, predictable, and comfortable world and entering (usually through walking historically) the unknown and allowing it to illumine an inner question of meaning.
It is the questions of meaning that happen internally that are illumined by the quest (pilgrimage/odyssey) that happens externally. Just as the eye has the potential to see, but sees only with the help of the sun outside of itself, the “inquisitive-eye” has the potential to truth-see, but truth-sees only with the help of the sun of the quest outside of itself.
A pilgrimage means encounter with the unfamiliar, uncomfortable, even dangerous (especially historically when one walks through forest and mountains, etc.); and most importantly it means encounter with oneself as uncontrolled circumstances starts to reveal one to one’s self.
The Odyssey of Obeisances is a somewhat in between point of pilgrimage and retreat, with a leaning toward pilgrimage. Many items are curated, but the intensity of the physical aspect combine with the unpredictable terrain give a potent assimilation of what a pilgrimage would feel like and certainly allows for a pilgrimage encounter.

Circumambulating is a somatic enactment of the metaphysical idea that the Center of one’s existence, around which one is meant to orbit, is something transpersonal, ie more than any individual self. For the secular psyche that center may be family, nation, political cause, etc. For the religious psyche, it is Divinity, the Universe, God and Goddess, Being Itself. It is the absence of the acknowledgement of a common unifying center that leads to the clash of the separate-ness-ego. It is the acknowledgment in mind and in body (circumambulating) that makes harmony out of the separate-ness-ego.

Prostrations takes the acknowledgement of circumambulating and adds to it the somatic expression of surrender to that Transpersonal Center.
Initiation into knowledge begins and proceeds on the heart’s posture of surrender to mystery, the unknown, the guru, Grace, and God. The repeated enactment of this posture through prostrations is tantamount to challenging ever present resistance with ever present practical openness which says “I’m ready to receive, learn, blossom, bear fruit, become!”

Everything in life moves in circles (cycles) from the beginningless cycle of creation—sustenance—dissolution—re-creation to the seasons of nature, to the psychological patterns of individuals and collectives.
Premodern cultures recognizing this crafted rituals, ie rites of passage, that mimic this archetypal circle of life starting with separation from the known—initiation by the unknown—and return to the known with redeeming medicine, magic, knowledge, love, ie a return as an expanded being.
Just as in baseball, the idea is to starts at home base and returns to home base with a point added, so also the point of circumambulating is to start at home and return to him with “the point” and an expanded being, awareness, love, etc.