ANTARA NETWORK

Why Antara Network and Why This Retreat?

Antara Network’s first retreat will take place in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, an area that has been impacted by hurricanes this past year. As we gather together to share our collective wisdom and honor Earth, we will be supported by these Grandmother mountains as well as one of the oldest rivers in the world, the New River.

The intention of this gathering is to plant some of the first seeds of the Antara Network. During Covid, Aarti Tejuja and Sojourner Zenobia dreamed of Antara, which means the space of the in-between in sanskrit. They wanted to use their embodied facilitation skills to help people tend to the wounds that were manifesting in the moment. Initially Antara started as a business that held “in-between” spaces for whatever was coming up in the culture. This began as “in between” spaces to process feelings in general, then it became spaces that were needed because of covid. Then, when the murder of George Floyd happened, spaces for grief tending were needed.

It wasn’t long before Aarti and Sojourner began to see that Antara had become bigger than them. Antara the business began to fall away when Aarti moved out of Chicago and into the mountains of Boone, NC. Soon after, Antara showed itself again, this time as a collaboration of various thoughts and feelings about embodied space holding, facilitation, earth and the elements, and ancestors in general. Conversations between Aarti, Holly Gayley, Jimena Vergara, Matt Lentz and Kylene Williams began to happen.

It was soon apparent that the Antara Network was ready to birthed, but that it belongs to no one individual. Because Antara can only be birthed thourgh a collective, we opted to start with a gathering of people who we personally know to be at the intersections of “space holding” , “justice” , “land tending” and “deep spirituality.” As with any birthing process, we don’t know what is going to come out. And although Antara has a history, she is ready to be birthed in the form of a larger, but still manageable network.