I suppose at the outset that the kind of experience one gets at a yoga retreat has a lot to do with the sort of retreat it is. That is to say, I imagine that the vibe at Land of Medicine Buddha in Soquel is different than the vibe at Wanderlust out at Lake Tahoe. The former was a small group for a yoga and meditation weekend at a Tibetan Buddhist center; the latter looks like it is a large scale-yoga-cum-burning man-cum-live music fest. I hope it turns out that I can attend both, but at bottom I'd just point out that there are yoga retreats, and there are yoga retreats, and I don't pretend that any observations I have from last weekend hold across the board.
In the time leading up to going to Soquel, I wasn't sure what to expect, never having gone to such an event before. I think I'm far enough along in practice to feel like I'm good for more after an hour or hour and a half class, but in signing up for a whole weekend, was I facing going at it for something like 6 hours straight? I was excited to go, but I can't deny I was a little bit apprehensive about it, too!
That being said, the first thing I have to comment on is to applaud Julianne's teaching style. She's just friggin' amazing. She's a very gentle teacher, but don't let that gentleness fool you. It might not seem that she's encouraging you to push much, and for the whole weekend there wasn't any moment that I was sweating bullets or aggressively challenging my "edge," and there weren't any 6-hour sessions. But I knew on Monday morning when I woke up that I'd have to bail on my regular Monday evening class because it felt like every muscle in my body was wrung out.
So if there weren't any 6-hour sessions, then how did it go? The pace was pretty mellow, and part of what added to that mellowness was Julianne's insistence that all of the program was optional: that we should listen to our bodies and our minds and be present for what we were ready to do, and take time off when that was right, too. So, for instance, although there was by all accounts a fantastic little music event Saturday evening under the stars in the meadow, my body was definitely telling me to sleep, so off to bed I went at 7:30 and I slept for nearly 11 hours straight, not even noticing when the 2 girls I was sharing a room with returned during the night. How awesome is that?
Another thing that I think was spectacular was the pacing and organization. On organization, for instance, the last afternoon's yoga session was spent doing partner work. Not PARTNER-partner, but work with a partner to help get into a stretch better than one can on one's own. I think, theoretically speaking, it would have been conceivable to do partner work the first evening there. But doing it last instead, after we had all had a weekend to get to know each other and feel more comfortable around each other contributed to making the whole environment more friendly and relaxing, and that made it possible to get more of a benefit from that sort of practice. As another for instance, one of the things I was really looking forward to doing was yoga outdoors. And, again theoretically, it's conceivable that we could have all schlepped out to the meadow Friday afternoon for a go at it. But we had a Friday evening yoga session first, then another one on Saturday morning before going out to the meadow Saturday afternoon, and I think that was a really good thing. It gave us a chance to get the psychological muck of our workaday lives out and start embracing the calm of the surrounding environment. Gave us a couple sessions of revisiting the motions in the controlled environment of the Pine Room's studio. That was all key to practicing outdoors, because I sure learned that all the pretty pictures aside, doing yoga outside is more challenging than it looks. We were in a grassy meadow, but the ground was still uneven and it took extra focus to do even fairly uncomplicated things. So if we had gone outdoors straight out, I don't think I'd have gotten as much benefit from it.
The pacing was also fantastic. Sure, over the course of the weekend we did a fair bit of yoga, but it was broken up into sessions in the mornings, afternoons and evenings and interspersed with different sorts of quiet or meditative time. Maybe it would be a sitting meditation in the Pine Room. Or maybe it would be a silent walking meditation out in the woods. Or a moment of lying down under the trees and just taking in all the surrounding beauty. I have read that traditionally speaking, the yoga that we all associate with in what one does when one goes to class is actually intended as a technique for preparing the body for meditation. But we don't often meditate in class, or if we do, it's not for very long. Here I got to experience, for the first time really, just how profoundly present one can feel in taking a meditation after yoga - of really and truly feeling the past and future fall away and being settled and content here and now. That was crazy awesome.
And speaking of the present beauty, there was certainly the beauty of being out in the redwoods. But being at the Center there was incredibly amazing. There was no cell phone reception there. No phones in the rooms. No TVs. No computers. No traffic. Outside the studio, on the site, everyone - the Buddhist monks and nuns, the other visitors or employees - were soft-spoken and friendly. In the evenings, you could hear chanting emanating from the temple. You could hear the birds sing. I swear you could hear the dust fall. Sometimes you'd hear chimes ringing out there, somewhere. It was so calm and peaceful there.
And friendly and supportive. The food that was served was just the bomb; I swear I ate three servings at every meal. Even the bread! (I'm not a big bread eater, generally speaking.) The staff were all so kind. In the cafeteria area you could get tea or coffee or water or fruit any time you wanted, and it wasn't uncommon to fall into conversation with someone else there, and have little get-togethers on the couches. I really liked, too, how there was a designated "quiet" table - it has a sign on it that said it was a space for people who didn't want to talk and for others to respect their desire for silence.
Actually, I >really< dug that because there was at least one time for certain I considered sitting there, not because I didn't dig anyone's company, as though that were an undesirable thing. It was more like I felt a lot of processing going on - not like I was consciously focussing on it, but I could kind of feel it ka-chunking along in the background and I just sorta wanted to be quiet and be present to that happening without getting distracted.
BUT everyone was so friendly and nice, and I really enjoyed talking with them! Here I'll speak particularly about the group I did the retreat with. It was really a terrific bunch of people. As I heard one person put it, there weren't any yoga-snobs there. Everybody was warm and welcoming and supportive and accepting, and that made the space we created all the more one where you could just >be<, without excuses, or explanations, or worries. There was such great power in that!
One of the more fabulous experiences of that was Saturday evening when Julianne was teaching us a technique for getting into the "wheel" pose - a backbend, on other words. Remember doing them when you were like 8 years old? Tried one lately?
There were some folks who had trouble with it and maybe some who thought they just couldn't do it at all. And in teaching a variation on the pose, I suspect that the original intent was to have just a few people try it out, to sort of demo the technique. I was one of the first 2 or 3 who tried it, and I'll probably going to sound all "woo-woo" (as Julianne would put it) to describe how it felt, but I'll go there anyway.
Mind, now, in the process of doing warm-ups for my martial arts class we always take a couple of wheels (if one can), so I'm not a stranger to going up on my hands and feet. But when I went into wheel there, in that place, in the space of a fraction of a second it felt like I had firecrackers going off all along my spine and then felt something like a crazy burst of energy busting out of my chest up to the sky. To make what might sound corny, cornier still, if I had to visualize the feeling, I think of "the weapon" kicking in at the end of the movie "The Fifth Element." So call me what you will, there's no denying it was one of the most powerful or profound sensations of energy I've ever felt, so there you have it.
After I was done, I turned to the friend who had come to the retreat with me and said "you have GOT to try this!" and where before, she told me later, she had been all "uh-uh, no way, not happening for me," she braved up and decided to give it a try, and successfully did a wheel, too. And by this point, if what had been intended was to do a few demos, it morphed into EVERYONE taking a turn while everyone else applauded and cheered and it was just a really beautiful thing, and that couldn't have happened without everyone in the group being as kind and supportive as they were.
So that's a few snippets of what it's like to go on a yoga retreat. If you like the practice, and have the time and curiosity, I definitely recommend taking the opportunity if it comes your way!
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