This is an experience...
This is not a retreat. Not a wellness program. Not another thing designed to get you to perform more efficiently.
This is an experiential trip carefully crafted to allow you to experience something beyond the ordinary. In one of the most interesting cities on earth. With people who have experienced and understand what you've been carrying.
Calcutta will surprise you.
Most people who haven't been here picture poverty and chaos. That's there. But it's a small fraction of the story.
This is the city that produced every Nobel Laureate India has ever had. This is the former capital of the British Raj. A place where Rabindranath Tagore wrote, where Amartya Sen taught, where Saint Mother Teresa spent most of her life — not because she had to but because she found something here she couldn't find anywhere else.
During the Raj, this was the capital of the entire Indian subcontinent. The architecture still carries that — grand colonial buildings sitting alongside centuries-old temples and some of the most chaotic street markets you've ever seen. The Victoria Memorial sits in the middle of the city like an architectural argument that somehow got built. The Howrah Bridge is one of the busiest bridges on earth and walking up to it on foot at dusk is one of those experiences that just lands.
College Street is the largest second-hand book market in the world. One of the world's largest flower markets is still in motion when the rest of the city is winding down. The Ganges at dusk does something to time — makes it feel less urgent, more yours.
And the food. Calcutta is the birthplace of Indo-Chinese cuisine — a collision of Bengali and Chinese cooking that happened in the city's Chinatown and spread everywhere. The restaurants we take you to are the kind of places locals have been going to for thirty years and will go to for thirty more. There is Indian food and then, there's food in India. The food alone justifies the trip.
Calcutta has a way of getting under your skin. She doesn't apologize for herself. She is heat and humidity and color and noise and the kind of beauty that doesn't ask permission. She is also considered one of India's safest cities.
The women here carry themselves with a grace that will stop you mid-street. They will smile directly. The baby they are carrying may even be offered to you to hold. This is India. You are instant family.
The food is unapologetic. The flowers are excessive. The chaos has a rhythm and you eventually stop fighting it and start moving with it.
She's not a tourist trap or a circus act. She's quintessentially old, wise and weathered. Calcutta is alive in a way only ancient cities are.
And there is a difference.
Visitors who expected to be overwhelmed find themselves not wanting to leave. It is not comfortable in the resort sense. But it is deeply inclusive, stubbornly alive. And alive, it turns out, is exactly what most of us are missing.
A day looks something like this.
We wake up in a comfortable hotel room here. Most days we start at 6:30 am — the city is just waking up. Depending on the day, breakfast is on the go or a buffet.
The ride to the centers takes you through streets that are already moving. Vendors setting up shop. Tea being prepared. Calcutta doesn't ease into the day — it starts. Some days we start at Mother Teresa's or New Light. Other days we start at Joypur Ashram or another center we are working with.
Schoolchildren. Motorbikes. A city that has been doing this for centuries and has no intention of stopping.
The city matters. But the organizations matter more. The Human Kind Project exists in Calcutta because of places like Mother Teresa's Home and New Light. These are the environments where people most often experience the shifts they came looking for.
We have a guide that leads each cohort. It may be Jenna herself or someone else she has appointed. Someone greets us. We are shown where to go and what's needed — and then our day unfolds.
There is no formal orientation. No icebreakers. We sit with someone. We help with something simple. You notice that the person in front of you is looking at you the way patients used to look at you — before the system got between you and them.
Those looks. We remember those looks.
The morning moves slowly. Not because nothing is happening — because everything is happening at a human pace. By the time we leave, three or four hours have passed and it feels like both five minutes and an entire day.
The ride back is usually quiet. Some of us have stories. Some of us are still digesting a story.
Some of us prefer lunch back at the hotel. Others decide to discover the Calcutta lunch scene. Your guide will offer suggestions.
The early afternoon is yours. Maybe you go back to the hotel and sleep — actually sleep, the kind that doesn't happen at home. Maybe you have a workout. The neighborhoods around the hotels are all safe and navigable. Maybe you sit somewhere with a coffee and visit with a cohort member.
Early evening we head back in to the city. This time to discover her. Interesting excursions have been planned not from the tourist perspective but from the point of stretching our perspectives.
We have dinner together. By day three we are not strangers. These are people who were in the same room as you this morning and don't need anything explained. The conversation goes places that conversations at home don't go — not because anyone is trying, but because something was felt and needed sharing.
After dinner the city opens up her nightlife. Some nights you follow it. Some nights you don't. Both are fine.
Many of us go to sleep earlier than we expected to. We wake up more curious than ever and want to go back.
That's a day.
Mornings are for something you haven't felt in a while.
Most mornings we depart by 6:30am. Some mornings we spend a few hours at Mother Teresa's Home for the Destitute and Dying; other days with New Light — an organization that serves children born into Calcutta's red light district. Each day is different as the exposure to these worlds is both emotionally and physically intense.
We are not there as medical professionals.
There is no chart. No protocol. No family member watching you for signs of hope — or waiting for you to make a mistake.
We show up. We may sit with someone. We may hold a hand. We help where help is needed. We witness where help isn't needed — we witness reality.
The women, men, and children in these rooms have almost nothing. And yet there is a dignity that will stop you cold. A lightness you weren't expecting. A smile that asks for nothing and gives everything.
This is the type of contact we used to have—long ago. We've been missing it for years. It's not exhausting. It fills you back up.
Something happens in those mornings. We have never been able to put words or promises to it. You'll know it within your first hour.
Afternoons are yours. Completely.
After the morning, the pace stops as we head back to the hotel. Some of us lunch there. Others go hunt for something more local.
Most afternoons will allow you to rest. Take a walk. Work out. Uber over to a variety of cafés and watch Calcutta move past the window.
Afternoons have no agenda. No one asking anything of you. No schedule to keep. We've learned not to fill these 2 to 3 hours. What happened in the morning needs space to land. The emptiness is part of it.
Early Evenings open into the city.
Daily outings are planned. We try to leave our hotel at 4:00pm. There are several types of outings each dependent on what Calcutta is experiencing during your cohort.
Major festivals dictate October and November cohorts. Christmas celebrations are active through December. January through March reset to slow, intentional times.
Heritage walks through neighborhoods where every wall carries weight. Evenings along the Ganges where time stops feeling urgent. Temples where the air itself shifts. The organized chaos of the flower markets still moving as the day ends. Everything is organized to give you a flavor of what is present.
Our dinners together are at places that will stay with you.
The range is intentional. You are not seeing one version of Calcutta. You are moving through its many moods — the way you move through your own.
After dinner the nights are alive — Park Street lit up, social, loud in the best way. However, most of us head back to the hotel for a slow and quiet unwind. Your nights are what feels right.
On the members of your cohort.
Many applicants are nurses. And there are also physicians, business owners, or company executives.
You will not have to explain yourself here.
That is rarer than it sounds. Most of us spend our lives slightly translating — editing what we say for people who don't quite understand what our jobs actually take. In this group you don't have to do that.
What happens in that dynamic — five people for 9 days, mornings that crack something open — is difficult to describe without sounding like a brochure. So we won't try.
By Thursday you will have had conversations you haven't had with anyone in years. Maybe ever.
Five people. Every cohort. No exceptions.
Not ten. Not twenty. Five.
Because this only works when the group is small enough to be real. When there's nowhere to hide and no reason to. When the people around you start to feel less like strangers and more like the only people in the world who understand exactly what your day was like.
Everything is taken care of. Your own hotel room. Your transportation. Breakfast and dinner every day. Every evening, every morning, every detail — coordinated, managed, thought through.
You bring yourself — as you are. We handle everything else.
On coming home.
This is the part nobody talks about in the marketing.
You will get on the plane home and feel something unfamiliar. Not the post-vacation dread — the thing where you're already back in it mentally before the wheels touch down. Something quieter than that.
A kind of steadiness.
The floor will still be there. The patients, the administration, the same systems and the same pressures. None of that will have changed.
But something in how you meet it will be different. Not dramatically — not in a way you can point to and explain in a staff meeting. Just a small but real shift in the distance between you and the weight of it all.
People describe it differently. In early tests, some say they remember why they started. Some say they feel like they can breathe again. Some say they don't have the words for it but they can't wait to book again.
That last one tells you everything.
An Important Distinction:
A vacation is about you, a tour is about the destination, a cohort is about what happens between people when they show up for something that matters.
Why this works.
You leave your environment. You stop carrying clinical responsibility. You reconnect with direct human contact. You process the experiences with peers who understand your burnout. You return with a different perspective from what was experienced. A shift in perspective does more heavy lifting than any vacation ever did.
What this is not.
Forced reflection. Group therapy. Worksheets. Wellness mantras. Anyone telling you how to feel or what this means.
If you're looking for another round of drinks and another excursion, this will disappoint you.
What this is.
A carefully crafted opportunity to witness different worlds. Worlds that only exist in the most interesting city you've never been to.
The worlds of Mother Teresa and New Light embrace us at whatever crossroad we may find ourselves.
And from that embrace, something quiet comes back with you. That experience is different for all of us.
Some morning will be beautiful.
Some mornings will break your heart.
Usually both.
It is definitely something that doesn't disappear when you return to the floor on Monday.
The Human Kind Project will linger.
The Cohorts & Pricing
October
Transition. Energy. Awakening.
November
Clarity. Celebration. Movement.
December
Stillness. Depth. Ease.
January
Felt. Contrast. Perspective.
February
Lightness. Openness. Renewal.
March
Heat. Energy. Endurance.