conscious intimacy – unblocking the heart | india
Chapter Note:
In December 2025, we gathered in Goa for a three-day immersive retreat exploring exploring emotional openness, intimacy, grief, relational healing, and heart-centered embodiment through expressive arts therapies, somatic work, and conscious relational practices.
Facilitated by Neha Bhat, co-produced by Disha Duggal, SR-trained expressive arts therapist and Creative Strategist, Gorika Singla, this retreat brought together deep-thinking individuals seeking to reconnect with their emotional truth, vulnerability, softness, and authentic connection in a carefully held, nature-filled trauma-aware environment.
At the center of this retreat was the exploration of the heart centre: not as an abstract spiritual idea, but as a lived emotional and nervous-system experience.
Participants explored:
- emotional inhibition and guardedness
- heartbreak, grief, and relational closure
- fear of intimacy and vulnerability
- attachment wounds and protective defenses
- trust, receptivity, and emotional openness
- self-worth, compassion, and connection
- embodied experiences of love, longing, and belonging
Throughout the retreat, participants explored the many ways the heart protects itself: through withdrawal, hyper-independence, emotional numbing, overgiving, people-pleasing, avoidance, and fear of being fully seen. Conscious Intimacy: Unblocking the Heart emerged from a growing need for healing spaces in India that honor both emotional depth and psychological safety.
We remain deeply grateful to every participant, facilitator, and support member who co-created this experience. This retreat was an invitation toward softness, truth, courage, and relational healing.
And the work continues.