Retreat Center in the Mountains of North Carolina
The retreat center set in the majestic Blue Ridge Mountains offers a peace-filled getaway for you or your group. Imagine sitting on top of a mountain and watching the sun rise over expanses of mountain ranges; or sipping tea to the soothing tunes of Philip's flute; or sunrise yoga; an Ayurvedic spa treatment; or a walk the forest in the quiet shade. The retreat center offers multiple possibilities and retreat spaces for groups, individuals or families. It is an ideal event space to support community-building and transformative experiences in the heart of the mountains, nurtured by attentive hosts and comfortable retreat lodging and facilities.
The retreat center is just three miles from the Blue Ridge Parkway. America's favorite Scenic Highway, and a short distance from Blowing Rock and Boone, North Carolina. The area is host to a number of attractions, most of them natural and others cultural. Hiking trails, waterfalls, streams and ski slopes abound. Cultural highlights include Southern Appalachian music and the acclaimed Performing Arts Series that passes through Appalachian State University, one of the key universities in the field of sustainable development. A lively spiritual heritage is also in the making with nearby Asheville's vibrant yoga scene, the Mother Meera Foundation's new home down the mountain, an active community of meditators and the Art of Living retreat center.
What to Expect from the Retreat Center?
We encourage you to lay aside expectations and to settle for unlimited possibilities. The retreat center is not a hotel – while we offer comfortable retreat accommodations with a range of options and terrific event venues with wonderful views, we are more intent on providing an experience than a night’s stay. So if you are looking for more – a place where miracles can happen, where lives can change, where people can emerge refreshed and ready to live more fully, please come visit.
A Home in the Mountains
We are a home and a community for yoga and meditation enthusiasts, those with an interest in the inner arts, from all over the world. We embrace diversity and have made it our mission for over thirty years, before even founding the center, to bring people together. Community exists in the feelings we nurture towards each other and the spaces and environment we create to evolve those feelings.
Meeting Rooms at the Retreat Center
The retreat center spans 381 acres of lush, forested mountains. The main meditation center stands on the mountaintop near the dining hall and other residential facilities. The halls’ focus architecturally is to uplift the spirit. The main meditation hall holds up to 3,700 people, while seven other halls each support retreat groups, weddings, anniversaries, family reunions, corporate retreats, church groups and student retreats ranging from 15 to 200 people.
The main dining hall measures 41,000 sq. ft and is built to offer superb views of the mountains and sunrise. Seventeen residential buildings house retreat participants and retreat center staff in a variety of accommodation styles that range from apartments to hotel suites. Uniting all these retreat spaces, meeting rooms and residential quarters is the mountain, the view, the silence and the common aspirations that bind this place together.
Who we Are
Stewards of the Center – the Retreat Center is managed and run by a staff of committed volunteers and individuals who want to share an experience of the vastness and beauty of life. Extra help comes in through donation of time and labor throughout the year by outside volunteers and supporters. We are committed to building a better society, motivated by founder Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s vision of a stress-free, violence-free society.
Our staff, many of whom participate here as a labor of love, come from five countries; have educational credentials ranging from Ph.Ds to high school diplomas; speak seven different languages; and are united by an attitude of service and a spirit of celebration and silence. Teaching specialties include silent retreats, yoga retreats, meditation retreats, vegetarian cooking, Ayurveda and the Art of Living core curriculum. The retreat center also shares land with a host of creatures, great and small.
