Yoga Retreats (5 things you need to know!)

Transcript

- So you're thinking about
possibly going on a yoga retreat, maybe you have some stress,
maybe you want a vacation, maybe you love yoga. There are so many amazing
reasons to go on a yoga retreat and today we're gonna
talk about the top five. Welcome to Fightmaster Yoga, the place to deepen your
practice and change your world. Today's topic: the top five
reasons to go on a yoga retreat. Today I'm here with my
friend Courtney Parkyn. - Hi. - And Courtney and I have
been teaching together for 10 years-ish and we've done several
yoga retreats together. Courtney has been teaching a long time, she's a wonderful teacher,
I love working with her. And so I thought she
would be a great person to talk about the top five
reasons to go on a yoga retreat. So Courtney. - Yes. - I'm turning it over to you. - Oh. - What would you say, in your opinion, on a scale of one to five,
the fifth most important, let's go from five to one. - Okay, I would say the fifth
most important is the food. - Yes.
- Yes. - The food.
- You have to have good food and there's usually good
food at yoga retreats. I'm a foodie, I love to
eat, I mean who doesn't? But for me even beyond the food is the fact that you
don't have to do dishes. - [Lesley] Yes. - You don't have to cook for yourself. - [Lesley] You don't even
have to think about it. - Yes. - You don't have to think about
what am I gonna eat today? What am I or what, go shopping, you don't have to do any of that. And I also love food and I can tell you that if a yoga retreat
doesn't have good food, I won't be doing that yoga retreat. Do you feel like that too?
- For sure, yes. - Yes.
- Absolutely. - So the food is important, another really neat thing
about the food experience at a yoga retreat is
you really get a chance to connect with people at the retreat. - You do because you're
sharing meals together and it's a lot of bonding time. - It is. And you also get to, as a student, I know people have told
me this as a student, they're like really excited
just to be able to sit next to their teachers
and maybe ask questions that they might not
feel comfortable asking, like you know at a yoga class, so. - Yes. - It's kind of a neat bonding
experience, the whole thing. - It's very neat.
- Yes. - I know for me when I go on
retreats or go to trainings and I have access to the
teacher a little bit better, I've found that it is
nice to get to know them and see them as a person
because teachers are people too and get to know a little
bit more about them beyond just you know learning
yoga from this person. - Yes.
- It's really nice. - Now Courtney what if somebody watching has dietary restrictions
or certain types of food that they do or don't eat? - Right, so my experience
is that most retreat centers and most yoga retreats can
deal with dietary restrictions. For my retreats usually
it's a vegetarian cuisine but I've also had people
that were paleo come and they were able to eat okay. I've had people that did the keto diet and they were able to eat. So I've found that pretty much
anybody with dietary stuff can figure out their
food on a yoga retreat. - Okay.
- What do you think? - I agree. One of the places where I've
done a couple of retreats was raw vegan cuisine and
it was done very, very well. In fact one of my friends
came from Buffalo, New York, that's where I grew up and she's like, you know, where we were from, I mean it's meat and
potatoes every day growing up and you know still kind
of like that mindset and she and her husband like
they're all about the meat and potatoes and when they
found out it was raw vegan, they were terrified.
- Yes. - But when it's done
really well like it was, they were amazed, they were really amazed about how delicious it was and
how good they felt all week eating the food.
- That's true. - So the fourth most
important thing, Courtney, what do you think that would be? What's your opinion? - I think just getting out
of your normal daily life where we're kind of on autopilot, driving here, driving there, and you know seeing the
same people every day, it's taking yourself out of that and breaking out of your routine. - It's really important to do, we definitely can get into patterns and patterns and patterns and to be able to do something
completely out of the norm actually increases endorphins
in your body, I believe, but it makes you feel
more excited about life and sometimes you can get stuck in a rut. So doing something that's
completely different is really, really good for your mind plus you're doing the yoga, it's good for your mind and your body, it's great for your soul
and just to give you a new kind of new lease on life so you can just have a new experience to chalk up in your life. - Yeah, I agree. I feel like we kind of
step out of our normal life and we're able to drop into
ourselves a lot deeper. And spending two, three,
four, five plus days on a retreat with yourself
and practicing yoga every day and being around like-minded people, a lot of things that you
didn't necessarily know were going on can kind of
bubble up in a good way. You can, yeah, become more
connected with yourself. - Yes, okay, so number three. - [Man] Emma, what's number three? - What's the third thing, Emma? So the third most important
thing we were talking about it, Courtney and I, sharing space. So a lot of my students,
Courtney, they practice online and so they're not even really used to practicing with other yogis and did you know we found
a statistic recently that 55% of people who practice yoga have never even been to a studio? - Wow, that's amazing.
- Mind-blowing, so. - Yeah.
- But sharing the space, what about sharing the
space do you think is good? - I think that yeah on
retreat this group of people comes together and you know we
share space in circle format, we share space in yoga practice and meditation and relaxation and it just adds such
a deeper element to it, sharing the energy of others. I practice at home a lot, actually, I've watched some of
your videos, I love them. But I do a lot of home
practice and I love it, I love to be by myself and in my element but when I step outside of that and I get to practice
in a room full of people especially on a retreat where you're getting to know
these people really well, it just adds such a nice deep
element to the practices. - What do you think, Courtney, about someone who's
considering going on a retreat but they're not going with a friend, like they're like the
brave but scared kind. - The brave but scared. - Yeah, what do you think about that? - I think it's awesome. I have a lot of students that, you know, they want single rooms,
they want their own space and they're nervous to share bedroom space and bathroom space with other people and for me, my experience is
that the single rooms go fast and then the people that wanna still come, they have to room up with somebody. And I have heard from, I'm thinking of a few students
in particular right now, that what initially was, they were very hesitant
about sharing a room with another person, those
people became best friends. They still stay in contact, they get together when
they're in town together, and it really has formulated really strong friendships with people. - I've seen the same thing happen and I'm thinking of a couple people too, Molly and Alicia, I think
when they were together and they didn't know each other at all at the beginning of the
retreat and they shared a room, by the end, they were like besties. So, so cute and so fun to see. - It is fun to see, yeah. - So the number two thing. - [Both] Number two. - Laughter.
- Laughter. - Talk about laughter,
'cause we get silly. - So when you're on retreat
and you know day one everyone's kind of hesitant and not knowing everybody very well and then after a day or two, everyone starts to loosen up a little bit and the laughter starts
to get really loud, like Lesley mentioned meal times, bonding time, lots of laughter then. On one retreat in particular,
Lesley and I led in Sedona, one night we had the
group do vision boards and after the vision boards
we had a dance party. - [Lesley] Yeah, we just put the music on. - [Courtney] We just put the music on and I can't even remember
what music we were playing. - [Lesley] I remember happy. - Happy, yeah. And there was a lot of
getting down happening and... - And let me just say,
I'm not a good dancer. It always surprises people
but no, I'm not a good dancer. - [Courtney] I think you're a good dancer. - Really? - Yeah.
- I don't know. I always feel really uncomfortable dancing but when I do it, I
just like you know what? It's just fun and nobody's
like staring at me, believe it or not, right? No one's staring at anybody, we're just like doing our own thing and it just feels really good to just completely let
go and have some fun. Do you remember when you were a kid and you just have fun?
- Yeah. - We do that kind of
stuff on the retreats. We try to, I mean we don't
even try to build it in, it most of the time just
like organically happens but I've had the biggest
belly laughs on yoga retreats than I've had like anywhere else and it's you know completely
sober, all that kind of stuff. So it's a really great way and you know, laughing is a wonderful
release for your body and your nervous system. - It is.
- Who knew? - And it works the abdominal
muscles really well. - Just tighten those up,
get really strong abs. - I'm doing it right now. (both laughing) - And the number one reason to come on a yoga retreat is drum roll. (both imitating drum roll) What is it, Courtney?
- Connecting with others. - Connecting with others. When we are home during
our practice by ourselves, there's something really nice about that but when we get to connect IRL in person with other people and sharing space, it's a wonderful thing
and I just want to mention that in this day and age,
I'm gonna sound like an old, when I was a girl, we used to go out and we played with our friends, no. But in this day and age, you can really get stuck
behind your smartphone, your computer, you don't really
need to leave your house, you can have food delivered, you can have pretty much
anything delivered to your house, you don't really have to leave. But it's important to
connect with other people, share space, like physical space like I am telling you,
yesterday I was telling a friend that Courtney was coming
over to our house today and I was telling about oh,
and we're gonna do video and I was so excited and my friend said, "You know anytime you
talk about doing anything "with Courtney you just light right up." But it is very important to
be with other human beings, we need each other.
- We do. - We need to even have
touch with each other and not in a weird way but
like at a yoga retreat, you know like we might sit
in circle and hold hands, or you might have a hands on
adjustment from your teacher as long as you're okay with that. But just having not just the, you know, the physical space
together but actual touch and we end up hugging a lot. I mean if you're a hugger, we're not gonna force anyone to hug, but we end up hugging a lot, so. - We do, yeah, the connection
is really important. I love what you said and
even just understanding knowing that people are
there to support you and opening up about
what's going on with you even if it's just a
little bit of opening up, just allowing yourself to be vulnerable and then seeing that when
you open up a little bit, there's a whole group of
people there to hold your hand. - Yeah and when you do, yeah, when you allow yourself to
get a little bit vulnerable and then people aren't like oh my gosh, you know, everybody is very supportive, it really helps like your confidence. - Yes.
- And to be who you are, to be authentic because the
more you can like peel away and take away that armor
and be your authentic self, the better you're gonna feel anyway and doing that in a safe space of like a yoga retreat is amazing. Speaking of yoga retreats.
- Yes. - [Lesley] I'm doing some
coming up this summer. - I would like to go.
- I wish you could, I wish you could, we're
going to be in Provence, although that one is sold out but we do still have space in Denmark and you can go to
fightmasteryoga.com to check that out and I'm doing a two-day
workshop in Amsterdam. So Denmark's like the beginning of July and then Amsterdam's around the middle. And now changing the subject very quickly, do you wanna know if yoga
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