I hosted a week long creativity workshop in the mountains for 15 artists. Here's how it went.

Nestled amidst the thick forest of pine trees studded with few native oaks and rhododendrons, is a sanctuary of dreamers, artists and misfits. Dharmalaya Institute, nearly two decades old is an institute of natural building and permaculture, a place adored by everyone who has had the privilege of setting foot here. When I first came to Bir, I heard of this mystical place and hurriedly looked at its programs and workshops to figure out a way for myself to spend time here.

Life happened and even though I got the chance to visit Dharmalaya many times in the past 2 years, I never got the chance to participate in any workshop. As destiny would have it, I was offered to facilitate a week long writing workshop at Dharmalaya by my kind friends and co-travellers who work there and even before they had finished their sentence, came a resounding YES from me!

I reached the beautiful earthy campus a day prior to the start of the workshop. I wanted to feel arrived and grounded before I gathered the energy to welcome participants the next day. 15 artists were travelling from all over India taking out a week from their life to experience Dharmalaya and reimagine their creativity in my presence. Of course I was feeling like the biggest imposter out there!

What did I have to teach these amazing folks that they didn’t already know?

As an educator, the joy of designing learning experiences is always very exciting. To be able to do it for a subject I absolutely love and enjoy, creativity, was an expansive creative task for me as well.

I spent days and nights without any tech, just my white board and my notebook to scribble ideas on. I was very sure to not use AI for the workshop. To champion human creativity, I had to channel all of my limited wisdom even with its shortcomings and mistakes - the very essence of human creativity!

Having witnessed the work of phenomenal facilitators and educators in the past decade, I had a vault of rituals, processes and systems to steal from and steal I did.
Welcome poem from one particular organisation, the art of including games from one particular educator.

“If you steal from one, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research.” — Wilson Mizner

After months of planning, weeks of designing it was finally time to enter the stage and facilitate the workshop. My obsession to perfect the plan for the week and to meticulously plan for each session melted away as soon as I met the artists. I had spoken to all of them on a video call before as part of the application process. To see them actually come all the way for the workshop just melted the part of me that wanted to over plan and over commit to the workshop. My vision for a creative, safe container still remained but that too became a creative project for me - one in which I could make mistakes and it would be alright.

The youngest participant was 18, a man just out of school brimming with curiosity, the oldest a fierce woman in her mid 40s whose wealth of experiences and travel stories had me hooked! A human rights worker who has seen half the world, a man who is a photographer by day, fitness professional by night. A corporate lawyer on a break who always had a smile on her face, a comms professional whose curiosity and wonder for other participants along with the intent to deeply immerse, an art teacher from Bombay, a yoga teacher from the neighbouring mountains of Himachal and many more creative souls. Every person had a beautiful relationship with creativity and the desire to reimagine it!

The institute was now ablaze with curiosity, play, activity and music of conversations. It was interesting how I was constantly playing the role of a facilitator and a participant both.

Throughout the next few days, we gradually formed a deeper bond. Sharing food and laughter, playfully fighting to volunteer for a certain task, entertaining the whole group upon coming late to the full team circles and lending our ears to each other for vulnerable conversations.

As the community strengthened, the creativity got the chance to flow without obstacles. As the creativity found it’s path to flow for each one of us, we felt closer to the community, to ourselves and to one another. It was a cyclical process that got started as soon as we started with the workshop.

Dharmalaya’s deep embedded values of compassion, non violence, sustainability, silence and meditation formed the foundation and bedrock of our creative workshop upon which my sessions served as platter of experiences where people could be vulnerable, playful and creative!

Zines, Blackout Poetry, Community Art, Meditation, Listening, Writing, Morning Pages, lot of games - the idea was to together experience art in different shapes and forms and to publish at least something every session. Be it a writing piece, a poem, a zine, an art or even just a journal in the diary. The practice of publishing enough times and sharing the experience in public solidifies the internal belief that we’re creating and we’re creators - a feeling I have come to realise that has to be re-created every now and then.

Additionally, the Dharmalaya Institute with it’s amazing team of bhaiyas, didis and volunteers helped us engage in farm work, mud building and cooking local cuisine, activities that further helped us to approach creativity more hands on!

The goal of the workshop was to be in the flow of creativity and in that flow, to make wonderful art - whatever wonderful means for the artist, whatever art means to them.

It’s just been a day and I am still far from making complete sense of what happened over the past week. But all I can say is that in a remote village in Himachal Pradesh, perched on top of a hill nestled by pine trees and a few native oaks and rhododendrons, 15 people came together to reimagine their relationship with creativity. As a creative soul, it gives me immense hope.