We Took a Group of Strangers to the Himalayas. Here’s What Happened

Why we chose the Himalayas for Rooted

Some places just ask you to slow down. Dunagiri, tucked into the hills of Uttarakhand, is one of them. Thin mountain air, terraced fields, a quiet that Mumbai or Bangalore simply doesn’t have room for. That’s the backdrop for Rooted, our retreat.

It wasn’t a random pick. Time spent in natural settings has a well documented effect on stress and mood, something researchers keep circling back to when they study why people feel different after time away from routine. Put yoga and mountains together, and you get more than the sum of either.

Day one: awkward silences and shared chai

Nobody arrives at a retreat feeling instantly at home. The first evening at Rooted usually looks like small talk over chai, a few nervous laughs, everyone quietly wondering if they’ve made the right decision. That’s normal, and it’s part of the design, not a flaw in it.

Group settings can accelerate the benefits of a practice that’s often done alone. Research on residential retreats has found that the shared, immersive environment itself contributes meaningfully to the psychological gains participants report afterwards, beyond what the individual practices alone would produce.

By the second chai of the evening, most of that initial awkwardness has already started to soften.

The practice: yoga with nowhere else to be

Mornings at Rooted start early, with slow, breath-led movement before the sun is fully up. There’s no rushing to beat traffic, no phone buzzing mid-Warrior II. Just the mat, the mountain air, and Anjali’s voice guiding the room.

That absence of distraction matters more than it sounds. Stress management is one of the more consistently supported benefits of a sustained yoga practice, and research summarised by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health) points to real, if still developing, evidence for yoga’s role in easing stress-related symptoms when practised regularly. A retreat setting simply gives that regular practice room to breathe.

Evenings are slower still: restorative postures, long holds, breathing exercises, and often very little talking at all.

The shift that happens around day three or four

Almost every retreat group has a version of this moment. Around the middle of the week, conversations get less performative. People start asking each other real questions. Someone mentions why they actually came.

It tracks with what longer-form yoga and meditation retreat research tends to find, too, that psychological gains from immersive practice often continue to build several days in rather than peaking on the first day, with benefits that can persist for weeks after the retreat ends.

“I’ve watched this happen on almost every retreat I’ve led. Somewhere around day three, people stop performing calm and actually start feeling it. That’s usually when the real work begins, not the poses, the shift underneath them.”
Anjali Pandey, Founder & Lead Instructor, Yogaendless

Coming home: what actually stays with you

The honest answer is: not the poses, mostly. Most people who join Rooted don’t come home able to do a perfect headstand (though some do get closer). What tends to stick is smaller and quieter, a breathing pattern for hard days, a slower morning routine, a handful of people they still message months later.

Yoga isn’t a cure for stress or a guaranteed fix for whatever brought someone to the mat, and we’re always careful not to promise that. Current research on yoga’s effectiveness is still developing and varies by condition. But many people do find that a week of consistent, supported practice gives them tools they keep reaching for long after they’ve left the mountains behind.