Sacred India Pilgrimage
An Intentional Journey to the Heart of Devotion
September 29th - October 13th, 2024
with Alexandra Moga & Ira Ruiz
GOA • JAIPUR • VRINDAVAN • RISHIKESH
Kirtan • Temple Visits • Daily Yoga • Pranayama • Marma Acupressure Therapy • Prema Breathwork
Welcome to India! Alexandra and Ira have been through her mystical nooks and crannies a total of 8 times combined and are over the moon to share some of her most precious treasures with you!
The mood of our journey is that of a pilgrimage. We are moving into the heart space with the intention of honoring the culture and traditions of India and its devotional and spiritual lineages. Both Alexandra and Ira have studied and practiced Bhakti Yoga for over 13 years. The prayer in our hearts is to share what we have learned and been given from our teachers, and the personal ways these teachings have impacted us, while offering you a chance to consider how these new perspectives might impact your life and relationships. The core principle is relationship: the exchange of love, listening and holding one another in consideration of our temporary and true identities, the sharing of song and joy, the invitation of God and Goddess into the container of humanness and practical daily life.
If you are reading this, we are hopeful that our intentions resonate with you and that you say yes to this life-changing journey. May it nourish the deepest and truest parts of you!
OFFERINGS
Yoga Classes (Kundalini, Yin, Vinyasa)
Kundalini yoga is a powerful yogic technology which brings deep focus and clarity to the mind, uplifts the spirit, balances and aligns the chakras, cleanses the organs, and regulates the nervous and glandular systems. Comprised of breath work, dynamic movement, mantra, and meditation, the practice restores deep calm and reinvigorates your entire being for your full-spectrum health and wellness. When practiced regularly, you will gain the strength, courage, and self-knowledge to break through subconscious blocks and act from your higher self, in harmony with intuition, universal wisdom, and compassion.
Yin yoga will be offered as a chance to slow down, receive gentleness as we move through many new and potentially overwhelming things, and open into the spaciousness of breathing ease into the body. It is a practice with longer holds, deeper stretching, and slower pacing.
Vinyasa yoga is a dynamic movement-based practice that is effective at awakening and conditioning the body and calming and focusing the mind while inviting balance to the nervous system.
Pranayama and Meditation
Offered as a compliment to our morning practices and as a part of the essential journey through the limbs of yoga.
Bhakti Stories and Practices
From the stories in the Mahabharata to the beautiful wisdom in the Srimad Bhagavatam and Bhagavad Gita, the spiritual literature of India is timeless, potent, and filled with relevant wisdom to apply to our lives. The daily practices and prayers the Bhakti tradition offers is another layer in supporting a relationship with divinity and with the tenderness of your own heart. These two elements are present in the culture of India, and as doorways into greater understanding of its universality.
Kirtan (call and response chanting)
The simplest way to activate the joy body and evoke connection and devotion shared in community.
Sacred Breathwork
Breathwork is an active meditation technique that uses the breath to purge the body and nervous system of emotional debris. It is part catharsis, part socially-sanctioned adult temper tantrum, and part consciousness altering. The experience moves stagnant emotional energy and facilitates release of strong emotions like anger and sadness.
It can help you to find a home in your body and your heart and help you learn to trust yourself. It leaves you feeling softer, open and less burdened.
We tune into the power that is already alive in our sacred bodies and allow it to grow, finding grace and ground in returning home with every breath, and sending our prayers out into the field with every exhale.
Marma Acupressure Bodywork
Marma Therapy is a dynamic and powerful Vedic method of bodywork stemming from India’s ancient healing science - Ayurveda.
Its focus is the manipulation of subtle energy in the body through the ‘portals’ of acupressure points for the purpose of supporting the natural healing processes that your body already carries. A variety of techniques are used to awaken prana — our body’s vital energy — and invite life back into areas where stagnation or imbalance may be present.
Marma Therapy allows the clearing of any blockages restoring communication of these channels, and as a result, the receiver experiences a sense of ease, vitality, increased focus, clarity, and strong immunity.
Temple Visits, Sacred Sangha (association with dedicated holy persons)
The gift of India’s culture lives in the communities and practitioners serving in holy places as potent vortexes for spiritual advancement. These physical places are brought alive through ritual, gathering, and celebration. A flavor of devoted living like nothing else on earth! (Alexandra’s experience in certain temples is “like being welcomed into God’s living room after dinner”).
DAILY SCHEDULE
Each day is a new adventure. The beauty of India, in our experience, is the powerful current of energy that is constantly flowing, and slightly differently paced than the USA or Europe. Cities can be quite frenetic with a greater concentration of people, animals, cars, bicycles, tuk tuks, and motorbikes. Traffic flows according to alternate, intuitive laws. The country and oceanside are rustic, gorgeous, primitive with random bursts of activity. Mid-day siesta times are common. Early morning (4am) bustle is also common... You can find yourself driving down the highway at 3am and there will be people awake and active all around.
That said – our first few days are tailored to bring you back down to earth after lengthy travels, to acclimate you to this new time and space in which you’ve landed. The ocean and sun are the most magnificent tools to reset the electro (mind) - magnetic (body) field and nervous system, and so our focus will be on body-mind care. Sunning, bathing, eating grounding foods, meditating with the sunrise and sunset, practicing yoga to open and unwind the body, petting cows on the beach, learning one another, setting intention together. Simple. Easy. Sweet.
Then we take off into a little more activity. Exploring a historic center of handicrafts, Bhakti yoga (devotion), and royal culture and architecture. Our days in Jaipur will offer outings into these places of deep history, yoga to bring us back to center, some early mornings in temple meditations, song and dance. Preparing us for…
Further deepening devotion and prayer. The heart of our journey. Vrindavan is a place where people come to retire in the rapture and intensity of Big Love. 24/7. The 108+ temples in this small city are all focused on celebrating Krishna and Radha. The divine couple. And all their various manifestations. There is a considerable amount of variation on the theme. Each one more beautiful than the last. There are wonderful shops in a bustling market center. Mementos of a journey you won’t soon forget. Tokens of ritual to keep you connected. Incredible forest groves of quiet sunlight filtering against soft and grace-infused sand. A long walk around a sacred hill. This is where we sing and pray together. This is where you bring your heart’s deepest truth to offer up. This is the place that changed our lives. And likely, yours too. We will practice yoga off the mat. Like you maybe never have. It is glorious. Sometimes intense. Some very empowered teachers will guide us here. We are in good hands.
Finally, to cap it all off, a ride into the Himalayas. Along the Ganges. To the mountains where yogis took shelter, cut the fat, got clear with themselves and the big questions. This is where we will wash any heaviness off. This is where you may want to offer a token of the past, or of a dream. A rushing, otherworldly wishing well of a river will greet us daily. On her banks we will share stories, prepare to return home — in all the ways that rings true for you.
A rough schedule
(note that travel days and excursion days may be different)
6am - Sunrise meditation, prayers, puja, journaling
7am - Movement & Pranayama (Kundalini yoga, Vinyasa, Yin, hiking/walking)
8am - Breakfast
10am - Day’s outing
1pm - Lunch
3pm - Afternoon workshop, outing, or relaxation
6pm - Dinner
7:30pm - Evening gathering, storytelling, kirtan, quiet time
YOUR RETREAT GUIDES
ALEXANDRA
Alexandra Moga is an artist at heart, dedicated to the path of devotion through writing (poetry, song), taking care, and yoga, all of which she can remember moving her from her earliest memories. During summer breaks in Romania she would meditate alongside her aunt who taught her practices in forgiveness, focused breathing, and energetic visualization. In her teens, she attended culinary arts high school and took her first yoga asana class. Both provided stability and vital expression, finding yoga to perfectly suit her passion for movement and dedication to spirituality. After four years of studying art history in Paris, she returned to New York where she immersed herself in the yogic path with over 1,000 hours of training in the various limbs of yogic teachings (Ashtanga, Kundalini, Restorative, Bhakti, Breathwork, Ayurveda) and teaching since 2010.
Travels throughout Africa, southeast Asia, Europe and India has made Alexandra a student of the thread that ties together spiritual paths and cultural expressions through the arts; namely food, song, poetry and dance. She is a student of her heart, senses, intuition, listening, and the lessons that come from difficulties. Ever open to the gurus, stars, spirits, and Source to deliver wisdom to and through her, she has learned that the dark nights and wrong turns are often incredible gifts to catapult her into fuller self-realization and massive creative expansion. She is deeply grateful for her many, many teachers: friends, family, devotees of the divine, nature and the dream realm.
IRAIMER
Founder and Director at the Sacred Movement Academy, Iraimer (Ira) is a 500 E-RYT dance-movement artist, certified trauma-informed holistic coach, and a certified facilitator of integrative somatic trauma therapy using the modalities of Yoga, Ayurveda and Transformational Sacred Breathwork based in New York.
As a Latina woman of color raised in marginalized and oppressed communities, her greatest mission is to create safe and inclusive wellness spaces that offer equitable opportunities to explore holistic and self-integrative tools for all bodies to approach their healing process in a supportive, loving and welcoming environment.
Rooted in Vedic sciences, she uses modern psychology and somatics as a means to empower others through the process of broadening their current state of awareness, reconnecting to the infinite source of wisdom and love within, so that all can succeed in the journey of life by cultivating a sacred relationship with the inner-outer environment, and from there with the Divine Source.
She aims to guide individuals through sacred journeys that ignite their curiosity to rediscover themselves, and offers practices to both balance and integrate the body-mind with the soul’s purpose (dharma), and from here, move through the body of the world embodied.
FINANCIAL EXCHANGE
Total investment: $3,600
Price includes:
All meals
All workshops
Accommodations
Excursions
Bus & Train travel
Not included in pricing:
Any off-schedule food/drinks/meals
Airfare to India
One domestic flight from Goa to Jaipur (estimated cost is $80)
PAYMENTS & DEPOSIT
Payments can be made via 3 or 5-month payment plan or in full.
$500 non refundable deposit.
Refund policy:
Up to 60 days out: all monies refunded excluding deposit
Up to 30 days out: 50% refund of payment excluding deposit
Up to 2 weeks out: payments are non-refundable but 75% transferable to a future event with either Alexandra or Ira.
PREPARING FOR THE JOURNEY
If this is your first time coming to the sacred land of India, we encourage you to to read The Journey Home by Radhanath Swami before the trip. If you’ve already read that one, please read his second book, The Journey Within. These books will really lay a good foundation for a lot of the experiences that we’ll be having in India. The Hidden Glory of India by Steven Rosen is also an amazing book that will demystify a lot of the culture.
We will gather over zoom on a bi-monthly basis in the months leading up to our trip for meditations, sharing of readings, and questions and answers with Alexandra and Ira.
TRAVEL
If you are not coming from New York, please book your flight to Goa (GOI) to arrive as close to arrival time below (flight 1), and departing from Dehradun (DED) as close to departure time below (flight 3).
Make sure your flight 2 is the exact same as the one below.
Flight to India: *Arrive on Sept 29th in Goa (GOI)
Suggested Flight: JFK > GOI ( 1 stop)
Air India Flight: AI 102
Depart Sat, Sept 28th: 12:30PM ET
Arrive Sun, Sept 29th: 8:05PM
Internal Flight: (Book exact flight)
Indigo Flight# 6E 5162 book.goindigo.in
Depart October 3rd 3:25PM GOI | Goa
Arrive October 3rd, 9:25PM JAI | Jaipur
If above flight is sold out & unavailable we are getting pilgrims to book this as a secondary booked on same airline at the same website listed above:
Indigo 6E 5074 : Depart October 3rd, 4:30pm (BOM) ::: Arrive October 3rd, 9:40pm ( DED)
Departures: *Depart on October 13th (*LATE* night).
REGISTRATION
Ready for the trip of a lifetime? To secure your spot, fill out the form below and send your $500 deposit to Alexandra via Venmo (@alexandra-moga). Alexandra and/or Ira will reach out to make sure you have all the info you need!