My FavoRite R's of Yoga Retreats

There are countless benefits to taking a yoga vacation with an experienced teacher you know and love to a place that is heaven on earth.  Here are my five favorites:

Remember

We each carry around several identities.  We wear them in layers around our True Self. They are the labels of our life, like mother, director, husband, employee, caretaker, and leader.  Each label carries with it its own responsibilities and obligations.  When you go on a retreat...they all go away.  You get to be the person you were before you got married, before you had kids, before your time became swallowed up with adulthood.  You get to remember who YOU are, with no strings attached. 

Replenish

There are “vacations”  there are “trips,”and there are “oblications.” They are all different degrees of fun, and they get you out of normal day-to-day activity.  But afterward, you often need to recover! Rest after a vacation?  Not with a yoga retreat.  When you retreat to another place, get your fill of yoga, nutrition, meditation, adventure, and rest, you come back rejuvenated.  Just imagine that feeling.  New energy for when you return to the day-to-day, which lays the groundwork for greater contentment, peace, and harmony in regular post-retreat life.  If you’re like me, the dividends pay off all year long. 

Regroup

Ever feel a bit energetically scattered by life?  Go here, show up there, call in here, shop over there, plan this, follow up on that… Now that we’re getting to the other side of this pandemic, I’m remembering how spread out I had become.  This is just life!  Which is why retreats are so important.  You get to regroup. Pull together those disparate parts of yourself to one unified place and time.  You might even realize a new way of being.  You could discover that there is a way to feel in life that you much prefer, and you find that feeling on a yoga retreat.  Then you bring it home.

Refill

Everything we do, even if it is something we love, takes something from us.  Every encounter with another has the potential to deplete us a little bit.  Decisions draw down our reserves.  Challenges zap us and leave us needing some energetic deposits.  Yoga retreats, on the other hand, refill us.  With minimal outside influence, communication, or energy suckers, you have the chance to refill your energetic cups and get your prana strong and flowing well throughout your whole system.  Picture popeye post-spinach, but without the need to punch!

Reveal

Sometimes life gets us into a bit of a rut.  The feeling of “meh” can make us forget our joyous center and divine identity.  We can become like a mirror that is covered in a layer of grime.  We’ve been shiny before, but feeling a bit dim now.  Yoga retreats give you the concentrated time to do the yoga practices that reveal your shiny, happy self.  They are a chance to polish away the grime that piled on all year, and get yourself all glowed up. And the glow?  It lasts a long time :)

So what are you waiting for?  Take a moment, right now, and put down a deposit on the yoga retreat of your dreams.  The rest will take care of itself.  Do this one thing for yourself, right now, and you’ll start to glow right away just seeing yourself basking in the waters of Lake Atitlan, refilling every cup.

Much love,

Jess