Inside a 5-day self-mastery retreat at India’s Pyramid Valley

In the autumn of our lives, we imagined that participating in a spiritual retreat would impart some divine nourishment to two agnostic hedonists like us. We are international nomads who have been travelling for the better part of our lives. For a change of pace, we felt that contemplating our navels inside what is said to be India’s largest pyramid, built solely for meditation, would give us some insights into the hereafter.

So, we headed to the 40-acre Pyramid Valley International near Bengaluru, south India, to attend A Quantum Leap, Decoding Ancient Scrolls for Modern Souls. The five-day self-mastery retreat was orchestrated by Shreans Daga, wellness teacher, breathwork and transformation coach. Shreans, 51, was the pivotal figure of the retreat which unfolded in the giant Maitreya Buddha Pyramid, soaring to 30 metres and brimming, we were told, with sacred energy. A large Buddha near the entrance to the pyramid seemed to exude beneficent calming vibrations and an invitation to surrender oneself to the universe and its mysterious workings.  

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Shreans is the founder of the Shreans Daga Foundation, which aims to bring science and spirituality together to empower people. He is also the chairman of Pyramid Valley International which holds meditation and wellness retreats and weekend retreats for leisure and learning.

Clad in a T-shirt and jeans, Shreans held his audience in thrall as he stood on the stage while two large screens at his side flashed his image and the proceedings as they unfolded, along with clips of the spell-bound audience. Another screen in the centre lit up with visuals that illustrated his discourses with diagrams and short pithy films that drove his perceptive points home. We hummed, we chanted and listened to discourses that nudged us into a rarefied other-worldly bubble and also plunged into the rabbit-hole of our inner selves that we had never explored before.

The retreat was a distillation of all that Shreans has learnt from global spiritual masters whom he has met, a potpourri of ancient wisdom, new-age meditations in the pyramid and in the alluring outdoors of Pyramid Valley. His knowledge of spirituality, quantum physics, epigenetics, neuroscience, breathwork, etc., is impressive and he shared it with his audience with the generosity of a genuine seeker, someone who defines himself as “a work in progress”.

The Maitreya Buddha Pyramid, as tall as a ten-storey building, seemed to resonate with the healing positive vibrations of the thousands who have meditated there in the past, overlaid with the soul-searching audience (drawn from all over India and a wide mix of ages) who turned inwards in unison.  The meditations unravelled against a sound track of soothing or pounding music that rose in waves to the top of the pyramid and were threaded with Shreans’s hypnotic voice; exhorting his audience to let go of past traumas and an unrelenting cycle of stress borne of an unpredictable environment.

The retreat turned out to be a tune-up of sorts for us, and helped to release past hurts that tend to run like a slide show in one’s head and ingrained patterns of negative thought. When we re-emerged into the real world, we felt grounded and calm as though the sun had emerged from behind a bank of clouds!

The tempo of the retreat varied… the heat was turned up during The Transcendental Breathwork Ceremony when the lights dimmed, soothing music was followed by tempestuous notes overlaid with Shreans’ exhortation to breathe in and out and to release negative thoughts and emotions that ravage the mind and body. Many reported to have felt an amped up prana or life force course through their bodies.

Another meditation happened in the great outdoors on a hillock in the lush Pyramid Valley International campus with the forested environs, coconut groves, water bodies and meandering pathways spread below like a green quilt. The air was filled with bird song and the deeply rural aroma of rain-washed grass that mingled with the fugitive fragrance of cow dung from the cow shed. We sat cross-legged in a gazebo while others, who wished to commune with nature and their inner selves under an over-arching blue sky, lay down on mattresses spread around the gazebo.

At the retreat we learnt that meditation and the search for the divine can take different forms. With ear phones or blue tooth devices plugged into ears, participants gathered initially at the picturesque leafy-green amphitheatre for a walking meditation. As we walked down designated pathways, Shreans’ recorded voice guided us into a trance-like state. Later, a Sufi whirling workshop conducted by the statuesque danseuse Zia Nath in inky-blue robes seemed to generate a vortex of powerful energy that resembled a tornado spiralling upward.

For many participants, it was their second and third retreat while one die-hard follower told us that it was her eighth retreat. Three came up on the stage to testify that they were cancer survivors who had been snatched from the jaws of certain death by healing themselves. They worked on themselves each day and recovery and growth came along the way — unheralded and without fanfare. They began to live instead of merely survive; they internalised a vital truth — what you think and feel shapes your reality and they felt awash in a sea of gratitude.

Shreans says that the very purpose of being spiritual is to have fun, and become loving and creative. “There are no quick fixes nor does one have to become an ascetic,” he cautions. “I’m not a guru. I have a family, a business; I go on holidays, have fun … one must be in the world and of the world and strike a delicate balance… between reality and an inner stillness.” The ideal is to achieve a state of homeostasis which enables the body to maintain a stable internal environment and handle overwhelming situations in the outside world.

We emerged from the retreat like swimmers who had swum against the tide for too long… And our spiritual odyssey turned out to be our lifeboat, the start to a lifelong search for the inner silence of our souls.

wknd@khaleejtimes.com