Shilpi Pratap – Co-Founder, Saarthi Retreats

Shilpi Pratap is an educator, artist, and experience-based practitioner devoted to conscious living and gentle transformation. She brings a spirit of creativity, empathy, and presence into the spaces she holds—believing that learning and healing unfold most naturally through awareness and connection.

Her creative journey began with her first art exhibition at the India Habitat Centre at the age of 17. Over the years, her work has found its way to audiences across India, the US, and the UK, including a recent showing at the Indian High Commission in London. Shilpi is also the author of Zero to Z: From Nothing to Everything, a book of concrete poetry that invites reflection and self-discovery through words and form.

For more than 15 years, Shilpi has worked with children and adults through Studio START, her art lab in Delhi, where art becomes a way of knowing oneself. She also teaches at Mirambika, a free-progress school rooted in Integral Education, and has designed and conducted several teacher training programs and workshops for educators and her Conscious Classroom Retreats.

Trained in Kathak for over a decade under a disciple of Pt. Birju Maharaj ji, and deeply connected to the piano as a form of soulful expression, Shilpi sees the arts as languages of the soul—mediums that open us to beauty, rhythm, and presence.

A certified practitioner of Awareness Through the Body (ATB) up to Level 5 from Auroville, Shilpi has been facilitating self-awareness retreats for the past several years. At Saarthi Retreats, she co-creates experiences for parents, children, women, corporates, and educators—spaces to pause, reflect, and reconnect with one’s deeper being. Her work weaves together art, movement, silence, and dialogue to foster clarity, balance, and authenticity.

With roots in literature and a lifelong love for creativity and learning, Shilpi approaches each retreat as a shared journey of discovery. Guided by humility and the aspiration to live more consciously, she hopes to help others listen inwardly, express freely, and walk gently toward a more present and purposeful life.