# Mind Flowers Shamanic Arts Retreat
### Seven days in the Thar Desert with Saira and Kelian Kamil.
*Presented by CBDstore.in*
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## The Invitation
There is a kind of knowing that does not arrive through reading.
It comes through the hands while they are working. Through the throat while it is singing. Through the feet on cooling sand after the sun has gone. Through a cup of something bitter and warm, shared in a circle of people who were strangers on Monday.
For seven days at the edge of the dunes near Jaisalmer, we set up tents and remember how this is done.
This is not a retreat where you are handed a technique and sent home with a certificate. It is a workshop of the sacred arts — plant medicine, song, dance, paint, fire, archetype, ceremony, divination — held slowly, in good company, with the desert doing much of the teaching.
You arrive as a guest. You leave holding your own ceremony.
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## Your Guides
Two lineages hold this week. One comes from the mountains and the forest of South America. One comes from the old north of Europe. They meet in a desert that belongs to neither, which is the point.
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### Saira
**Born in Cusco. Carrier of Andean and Amazonian lineages. Ashtanga teacher. Dancer.**
Saira's path runs through the Inka and Q'ero traditions of the high Andes and the Amazonian ceremonial knowledge of lineages including the Shipibo and Huni Kuin. She works with energetic and spiritual cleansing, purification of space, Haywarikuy — the sacred offering to Pachamama — and Karpay, the transmissions and initiations passed hand to hand in the mountains above Cusco. Cacao ceremony, sweat lodge and floral blessing baths sit alongside these.
Every ceremony she holds is carried on medicine music and **ikaros** — the healing songs of the Amazon, sung not as performance but as the working itself.
**As a yogini,** she was drawn to practice early and found Ashtanga in 2014. She trained directly in the lineage of Sharath Jois and has held a dedicated daily practice ever since. She treats yoga as a vehicle for self-discovery, purification, discipline and devotion — breath, movement, gaze, and the long patience of sustained practice. Teaching is her first love.
**As a dancer,** her training spans contemporary, ballet, capoeira, Eastern fusion, salsa, dancehall, and the folkloric and Inka dances of Peru — including three consecutive years as an official dancer in Cusco's Inti Raymi, the festival of the sun. She then came to India to study music and dance, and became a **Kalbelia** dancer.
Which is one reason this retreat is held here, and not anywhere else.
A thousand years ago the ancestors of the Roma left Rajasthan and carried their dance west across the world. Saira learned that dance in the land it came from, and carries beside it the ceremonial traditions of a continent that dance never reached. Her own **Sacred Fusion Dance** methodology grew from exactly this meeting.
Her motto is *Love in Everything.*
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### Kelian Kamil
**Founder of Mara, the Guild for Ancient Wisdom. Working in the Northern European pagan tradition. Author and archetypal practitioner.**
Kelian's work is with archetypes and with the universal principles beneath them — the hidden structures that organise a life whether or not the person living it can see them. His concern is not belief. It is architecture: what we are made of, what moves us, and what happens when a person stops being moved and starts deciding.
He is direct about what he thinks magic is. Not illusion, not spectacle — the result of intuition, discipline, and the willingness to turn something invisible into an action you actually take. He works with the cosmic archetypes and the entities and realms described in his books, and he teaches the handling of them as a craft with standards, not as a mood.
**His written work:**
*The Golden Book* — offered freely, and the shortest route into his thinking. It asks the oldest questions plainly: who are we, where do we come from, what are we built of. It sets out the trinity of human existence and gives working tools for dissolving long-held problems and for the specific shift from turning something over in the mind to doing something about it. It also stands as the opening chapter of his larger work.
*The Greatest Game of Life* — his main work, on the unfolding of real magic in the world. Deep material on the cosmic archetypes and the entities of the universe, on practising in real time, and on creating deliberate ripples in the cosmic field.
*The Archetype Card Deck* — the practical extension of the book. A working toolkit that makes the archetypes tangible enough to handle with precision.
Every guest receives the deck, and it is in your hands from Day One.
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## The Seven Days
### Day One — The Root
**Plant Medicine & Ancestral Apothecary**
We begin where every tradition begins: with the plants that were here before us.
Two apothecaries meet on this day. Saira opens the Andean and Amazonian materia medica — the plants of the mountain and the forest, how they are addressed, how they are prepared, what is asked of them and what is offered in return. Alongside it, the Ayurvedic and folk pharmacy of this land: the bitters and tonics, the smoke herbs and sleep herbs, the ones that open and the ones that hold.
*Evening: Cacao Ceremony.* The heart is opened first. Everything after this is easier.
### Day Two — The Voice
**Shamanic Chanting & Medicine Music**
Every medicine tradition sings. The ikaro, the bhajan, the qawwali, the wordless hum a mother makes over a sick child — all the same technology.
Saira teaches the ikaros as she received them: breath, drone, rhythm, and the simple instruments that need no training. You do not need to be able to sing. You need only to be willing to make sound in front of other people, which is a different and braver thing.
*Evening: Singing Circle.* Voices under an open sky, with nothing between them and the stars.
### Day Three — The Body
**Kalbelia, Sacred Fusion & the Art of Props**
The dance comes home.
Kalbelia — the serpent dance of the Thar, black skirts turning against sand — taught by a woman who learned it here and carries the Andes in her spine. Alongside it, Saira's Sacred Fusion methodology, and the props that make the body braver: skirts, veils, fans, finger cymbals, flow.
Taught with joy, not correction. The body remembers faster than the mind.
*Evening: Desert Dance.* Local musicians, a fire, and no one watching from the edge.
### Day Four — The Hand
**Painting, Symbol & Sacred Adornment**
Vision made visible.
We paint — on cloth, on skin, on paper. Shipibo pattern and Andean geometry from Saira; from Kelian, the older discipline of the mark that carries meaning, and how a symbol is constructed to hold something rather than merely to depict it. A drawn form is a decision with edges. Today we learn to draw carefully.
Alongside it, we make. Beads, wire, thread, stone, seed — talismans and amulets, made properly, made slowly. And the working tools tomorrow will need: the rattle, the fan, the cloth, the vessel, the bundle.
*Evening: Ceremony of Adornment.* Each piece is blessed and given — to yourself, or to another. Nothing leaves this circle unconsecrated.
### Day Five — The Fire
**Haywarikuy & the Sweat Lodge**
The deepest day of the week, and the one everything else has been preparing you for.
We begin in the morning by building — the **Haywarikuy**, the sacred offering laid for Pachamama, assembled piece by piece with intention; and the lodge itself, raised by the whole circle with our own hands. This is not a structure you are invited into. It is one you help make.
At midday the fire is lit and the stones are set in it. The offering is given to that same fire — the grandfathers take the heat and carry it inward.
At dusk we enter.
Saira holds the lodge in the traditional way, in rounds, with song. And she teaches it: the role of the fire keeper, the role of the door keeper, how the rounds are called, how a lodge is opened and how it is closed. By the end of the night you will have sat inside one and you will know how one is held.
Nobody is asked to stay longer than they can. The door opens between every round and it opens on request at any time, and choosing to step out is a complete and respected part of the practice, not a failure of it.
*This is the one day of the week on which no Vijaya preparations are dispensed.* Heat, ceremony and cannabis are a poor combination, and we hold this night clear.
### Day Six — The Eye
**Archetypes, Divination & the Unseen**
Kelian's day.
The archetypes are not personality types and they are not decoration. They are the recurring forms that show up in every mythology because they are describing something real about how a life is structured. Today we work them directly, with the deck in hand — learning to identify which is moving in a situation, what it wants, and what it costs to work with it rather than be worked by it.
Beside it, Saira brings tarot and the angel oracle, and the reading of what is present rather than what is coming. Two divinatory grammars, one afternoon.
Reading is an act of service, not prediction. You will read for someone. Someone will read for you. Both are the lesson.
*Evening: Circle of the Word.* Speaking what was seen — the longest and often the most important night of the week.
### Day Seven — The Offering
**Creating Your Own Ceremony**
The whole week has been building toward this.
Each guest designs and holds a ceremony of their own — small or large, for one person or for all of us — with both facilitators guiding and the group standing behind them. Saira for the form, the song and the handling of the space. Kelian for the intent: what this is actually for, what it is asking, and whether it has been built to hold weight.
The week's principle, stated once and then demonstrated: the invisible becomes real only at the moment it becomes an action.
You came to receive. You leave able to give.
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## The Daily Rhythm
Held every day, without exception, as the spine of the week:
**Morning Ashtanga** — at first light, on the sand, before the heat. Led by Saira in the Jois lineage, adapted for every body in the circle. Beginners are genuinely welcome.
**The Herb Table** — open all day. Teas, tonics and infusions, explained and freely shared.
**The Word Circle** — conversational, unhurried, held before sleep. No teaching, no fixing. Only what needs saying and the people willing to hear it.
**1:1 Sessions** — a private hour with Kelian is available to every guest during the week, for those at a genuine turning point who are ready to act on what they find. These are booked on arrival.
Meals are simple, vegetarian, cooked over fire, eaten together.
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## The Plant Allies
Woven through the week — always offered, never required, always explained before it is given.
**Ceremonial cacao**, held in the Andean manner.
**Gentle botanicals of heart and dream** — blue lotus, damiana, passionflower, mugwort, mullein, fennel. Traditional relaxant and dreaming herbs, taken as teas and smoking blends. These are subtle plants. They soften, they deepen sleep, they open the chest. They are not hallucinogens and this is not a psychedelic retreat.
**Adaptogenic mushrooms** — reishi, cordyceps, lion's mane and their kin, for stamina, clarity and rest. Non-psychoactive.
**Ayurvedic Vijaya preparations** from the CBDstore.in apothecary, for guests for whom they are clinically appropriate. Every guest completes a confidential health intake and consultation with our in-house Ayurvedic physician before arrival; any Vijaya preparation is dispensed individually, under prescription, at a dose set for you. Guests may decline entirely, and many do. These preparations remain in India at the close of the retreat, and none are dispensed on the day of the lodge.
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## Before You Come
We ask every guest to complete a confidential health intake. This is care, not paperwork — the lodge in particular asks something real of the body, and we would rather know.
Please tell us if you are pregnant or nursing, if you live with a heart condition or high or low blood pressure, if you have a history of seizures, if you are taking prescription medication of any kind, or if you have a respiratory condition.
None of these necessarily excludes you from anything. Several of the plants are contraindicated in pregnancy, and the lodge is held differently — or held alongside, rather than within — for some guests. We will simply shape the week around you.
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## The Land
**Desert camp, Jaisalmer, Rajasthan.**
Traditional tents at the edge of the Thar. Golden sandstone behind us, three hundred kilometres of dune ahead. The silence out here is not empty — it is the loudest thing most guests have ever heard.
Days are warm and open. Nights are cold and enormous. The stars are not a metaphor.
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## Dates & Offering
**7th to 14th of every month**, September 2026 through April 2027.
Arrive the 7th. Depart the morning of the 14th. Seven full days, seven nights.
**€1,500 per guest** — inclusive of accommodation, all meals, all teaching from both facilitators, your Archetype Card Deck, all materials, a private 1:1 session, the pre-arrival consultation, and all plant offerings.
Groups are kept small deliberately. A circle stops being a circle past a certain number — and a lodge holds only so many bodies.
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## Who This Is For
Artists and non-artists. People with a practice and people looking for one. Those who have sat in many circles and those who have never sat in a single one.
You do not need experience. You do not need to be flexible, musical, artistic or spiritually advanced. You need seven days and an open hand.
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## To Join Us
Write to us. Tell us a little about why the desert is calling.
**Mind Flowers Shamanic Arts Retreat**
*with Saira and Kelian Kamil · presented by CBDstore.in*
*Love in Everything.*
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*The desert has been holding ceremonies since long before any of us arrived. We are only setting up tents.*
