About YatraNestRetreats
Built for people who are
ready to travel inward
YatraNestRetreats is India's platform for mindful retreat discovery — curated, honest, and built around a simple belief: the right retreat at the right moment can change the direction of a life.
Our Mission
Make the interior journey as accessible as any other kind of travel
Millions of people in India are burnt out, overstimulated, and quietly searching for something they can't quite name. They know a holiday isn't the answer. A few have found their way to a retreat that genuinely changed them. But the path to finding the right experience is fragmented, opaque, and full of noise.
YatraNestRetreats exists to close that gap. We personally visit and vet every retreat partner. We translate the landscape into plain language. We match people to experiences that fit where they actually are — not where they think they should be.
6+
Destinations curated
20+
Vetted retreat partners
500+
Retreatgoers served
4.8
Average experience rating
Our Story
It started with a wrong booking
In early 2023, our founder Arjun booked what he hoped would be a transformative silent retreat in Rishikesh. What he found on arrival was a tourist-facing "meditation experience" — beautiful photos, scripted instruction, and thirty strangers on phones at dinner. He left after two days.
The retreat he eventually found — after six weeks of research, twelve wrong leads, and one conversation with an old teacher in Mysore — was everything the first one wasn't. Genuine, demanding, and quietly profound. It changed his relationship with his own mind. He came back wondering why finding it had been so hard.
He brought in Kavya, who had spent a decade evaluating retreat programmes as an Ayurvedic practitioner, and Rohan, whose journalism had taken him to ashrams, monasteries, and forest camps across India. Together they built the curation framework, vetted the first twenty partners, and launched YatraNestRetreats in 2024.
"The retreat market in India is full of good intentions and mixed execution. Our job is to find the ones where the execution matches the intention — and to build the infrastructure that makes them discoverable."
— Arjun Mehta, Co-founder
What we stand for
Our core values
Nature
We believe the natural world is not a backdrop for healing — it is the healer. Every retreat we curate honours this truth by embedding its programme deeply in its landscape, whether forest, mountain, or shore.
Mindfulness
Not as a trend, but as a technology. Centuries of contemplative wisdom have produced extraordinarily effective practices for working with the mind. We take that lineage seriously and look for retreats that do the same.
Connection
The epidemic of our time is disconnection — from ourselves, from community, from the natural world. Every YatraNestRetreats retreat creates conditions for genuine reconnection, not performance of it.
Transformation
We use this word carefully. A real retreat doesn't just relax you — it shifts something. We vet organisers not just for safety and comfort but for their track record of creating experiences that actually change people.
The people
Our team
Arjun Mehta
Co-founder & CEO
Former product lead who took a 3-month sabbatical across retreat centres in India and never quite returned to the life he left. Built YatraNestRetreats to solve the problem he couldn't find a solution to: trustworthy curation.
Kavya Iyer
Co-founder & Head of Curation
Ayurvedic practitioner and yoga teacher with 12 years of experience across India's retreat landscape. Every retreat listed on YatraNestRetreats has passed through her personal evaluation framework.
Rohan Das
Head of Community
Vipassana practitioner and former journalist whose writing on mindful travel has appeared in major Indian publications. Leads our content, partner relationships, and the community programme.
We're a small, focused team — and we're hiring. Get in touch if you believe in what we're building.
Ready to begin?
Find your retreat
Browse our curated collection of mindful retreats across India — or let us build a personalised recommendation for you.