Five or ten days of sitting and walking in a tea bungalow at 1,980 metres, three hours from Coimbatore. Thirty-two places. No fee.
Next: ten days, 9 to 19 October 2026 · 14 of 32 places open
The retreat is a former tea estate bungalow on the Kodanad road, on a ridge above Kotagiri. There is a meditation hall, two dormitory wings, a dining room and a two-kilometre walking path through the estate. Most mornings the plains are under cloud and the hills stand above it.
Fly or take the train to Coimbatore. A shared taxi leaves Coimbatore Junction at 11:00 on arrival day and reaches the bungalow by 14:30; ₹650 a seat, booked on the application form. If you drive, the last four kilometres are unpaved and you will want a car with some clearance.
The shared taxi stops at the gate on the Kodanad road and everything after that is estate track through old tea. You climb 218 metres in 2.4 kilometres. The hall is the last thing on the ridge, and the only building you can see the plains from.
The gate
1,762 m
Where the taxi leaves the Kodanad road. The last 2.4 km are estate track.
The culvert
1,811 m
A stream crosses here. Loud through October, dry by January.
The office
1,848 m
Phones, books and notebooks go into a labelled box on this table.
The bungalow and the two wings
1,907 m
Dining room, verandah, eighteen single rooms and seven twins. Blankets, no heaters.
The meditation hall
1,980 m
Cut into the ridge, facing east. Thirty-two mats, six chairs.
The taxi takes eleven minutes over it. Most people walk down it once, on the last morning, with the box from the office under one arm.
Every day of a retreat is this day, drawn below to scale: nine and a half hours of sitting, one and a half hours of walking, and one hour with a voice in it.
5:00–21:30
A teacher is in the hall for every group sitting and meets each person once, for ten minutes, halfway through the retreat. There is no lineage to join and nothing to sign up to afterwards.
Meenakshi Raman
Leads the ten-day retreats. Has sat here since the trust opened in 2014.
Meenakshi grew up in Coimbatore and spent eleven years practising in monasteries in Thailand and Sri Lanka before coming back to the hills. She teaches in English and Tamil, and says very little.
Arun Sivaraj
Leads the Tamil-language retreats. A schoolteacher in Ooty for twenty-two years.
Arun came to Stillwater as a participant in 2015 and has returned every year since. He runs the December retreat in Tamil, and the evening talks are the same plain lessons he gave in his classroom.
Kavitha Balan
Leads the five-day retreats. Trained with Meenakshi from 2017.
Kavitha was a physiotherapist in Chennai. She takes the five-day retreats, which are the ones most people come to first, and looks after the walking practice and anyone whose knees complain.
Nine nights without a word.
The silence starts when the first evening talk ends and holds until breakfast on the tenth morning. Not at meals, not on the path, not in the rooms. You can always write a note to the office, and there is a bell by the hall door for anything that will not wait.
Last season, from the audited accounts
There is no fee. A retreat costs the trust about ₹1,900 per person per day: food, the taxi from the road, the staff, the roof. At the end you are asked to give what you can, anywhere on this scale. Most people give around ₹1,500 a day.
Nobody is turned away for money, and nobody is asked why they gave what they gave.
8 retreats between August and February. 2 are full.
Arrive by 16:00 on the first day, a Friday for October. Leave after breakfast on the last. August and September filled in June; if the one you want is full, write anyway and we will hold you for the next. Month calendars
Ten days is long. Five is a start. Both begin with a bell at five.