The Itinerary
Your
Journey
Day 01 · July 17
Surrender · Awakening your senses
The Georgian Military Highway does not ease you into the mountains. It pulls you in — through curves that hug ancient rock faces, past villages where time moves differently, toward peaks that have been watching over this land since before anyone thought to name them.
Your first stop is Ananuri. Most people drive past it. You won't. This 17th-century stone citadel sits at the edge of the Zhinvali Reservoir like it has been waiting — fortress walls rising from deep-blue water, towers catching the morning light at angles that don't feel entirely real. A motorboat whisks you across the reservoir in seven minutes, giving you views of the fortress that no road can offer.
You stand on ancient stone and feel, for the first time all weekend, that the city you left this morning belongs to a different world entirely. Then the real adventure begins.
A 4x4 Jeep takes you off-road — thirty minutes climbing through spruce and beech forest, the city already forgotten, the air already different. Thinner. Crisper. Alive in a way that makes you breathe more deeply without being asked. You emerge at 1,100 meters above sea level at a paragliding launch point where the valley opens below you like a secret the mountains have been keeping.
Here is where something interesting happens. Standing at the edge, harness on, the instructor beside you, you will notice your mind doing what it always does — calculating, assessing, preparing a rational argument for why this might not be entirely necessary.
And then you step off the edge anyway. And the calculation stops. For fifteen minutes you are suspended over the turquoise curve of the Zhinvali Reservoir, held by nothing but air and a little fabric and the simple fact of having chosen to let go.
The silence up there is complete. The view is the kind that rearranges something inside you. It is not an accident that this is how we begin.
The whole weekend is an invitation to step off edges — not physical ones, but the edges of your familiar self. The paragliding is the first practice. The simplest one. The body learns something up there that the mind will spend the next two days catching up to: that letting go is not the same as falling. That surrender, done consciously, is one of the most powerful things a person can do.
We descend to Gudauri as the afternoon light turns golden. Check in. Settle. The mountains are right outside your window. Dinner is the first gathering of the circle — the beginning of something none of you can quite name yet. The weekend has already begun.
Day 02 · July 18
The Unlearning · Reconnecting With Your Body
You wake up in the mountains with no alarm. Breakfast is already waiting — warm, unhurried, eaten in silence or easy conversation, whichever your body wants.
The morning begins gently. Not with a lecture. Not with a schedule projected on a screen. Sarani opens the space with a practice so simple it almost surprises you — just breathing. Deliberately. Fully. The kind of breath you have not taken since you were a child, before you learned to hold yourself small and tight and efficient. Something starts to shift.
The morning moves through a sequence of somatic practices — movement that is not choreographed, not a workout, not something to do correctly. You are asked only to feel. To follow sensation rather than instruction. Some people cry. Some laugh. Some simply stand very still and realize they have not been inside their own body in years.
By mid-morning you will have done something that sounds almost embarrassingly simple: made eye contact. Held it. Not the polished, professional gaze of a person who has learned to appear confident — but real contact. The kind where you see someone and let yourself be seen. For most participants this is the most disorienting and most beautiful moment of the retreat.
Lunch is Georgian — abundant, slow, alive with colour. The table conversation has a different quality now. People are softer. Something has already been released.
The afternoon deepens the morning's work. Breathwork that moves energy through the body in ways that cannot be explained but can absolutely be felt. Guided partner practices — always clothed, always consensual, always held within Sarani's masterful facilitation — that begin to dismantle the social choreography we perform in lieu of actual connection.
You will notice things about yourself. How quickly you smile to ease someone else's discomfort. How you apologize for taking up space. How strange and unfamiliar it is to simply receive attention without immediately deflecting it.
By evening, as the Caucasus peaks turn amber in the last light, you will feel something you may struggle to name immediately. Lighter. Like something you have been carrying for years has been quietly, carefully, set down.
Day 03 · July 19
The Integration · Embodying Presence & Celebration
The last morning has a different quality. The group that arrived two days ago as a collection of accomplished strangers has become something else — a circle. You notice it at breakfast. The way people move through the space. The quality of silence between words. Something has settled.
The morning session is the most powerful of the weekend. This is where Shiva meets Shakti — not as a concept, but as a lived experience. Sarani guides the group through practices that bring masculine and feminine energies into conscious contact.
This is the heart of Tantra: not merging, not dissolving, but the electric aliveness that happens when two fully present people actually meet. The stillness of the Mountain holding space for the flow of the Muse. The charged, creative tension between depth and movement, between receiving and offering.
You will experience what genuine presence feels like in your body. Not presence as a performance — the attentive nod, the held eye contact, the carefully calibrated warmth — but the real thing. The kind that requires nothing of you except to be exactly where you are.
Many participants describe this session as the moment the whole weekend clicks into place. The breathwork, the movement, the eye contact, the conversations — all of it was building toward this. A felt understanding, not an intellectual one. The difference between reading about swimming and finally being in the water.
After lunch, the circle closes. This is not a rushed goodbye. Sarani facilitates a closing ceremony that honors what each person brought, what was released, and what is being carried home. You will have the chance to speak — or simply to sit in the warmth of being witnessed.
You will leave with something specific: not just a feeling, but a practice. A set of anchors — breath, body, presence — that you can return to when the city speeds back up and the wall begins to rebuild itself. Tools for staying open. For choosing depth over performance, even when performance would be easier.
The transfer back to Tbilisi departs in the late afternoon. The drive takes two hours. Most people are quiet. Not the disconnected quiet of people scrolling through their phones — the full, settled quiet of people who have just been somewhere real. You arrive home the same person. Just more of yourself.
