J & S fishing
palms
balcony
yoga mats on platformjpg
Back in late February, during the last terrible snow storm, I ran off to Costa Rica with Stephanie (my cohort in yoga teaching) and 7 yoga students to luxuriate and practice yoga in the tropics. It seems like a while ago now though I still have the tan-lines to prove it.It's easy to forget what was so worthwhile about being away. Especially in New York, where the vibe is "life is less-than incredible elsewhere." But a retreat deep in the Costa Rican lushness is pretty incredible.
This year, I wrote some impressions to help me remember the sweetness of going on retreat. Below is part one and later this week, part two. Here goes...Most mornings, around 6am when we stumble from our cabins into the lodge, we can see the scarlet macaws dancing and squawking in the almond tree 100 meters down at the beach. We listen to a flock of toucans call. Just waking up, I have a sense of the jungle as a great big force with dizzying power, constantly growing, changing, demanding, expressing itself and requiring our full presence. Pay attention! It seems to say. On moonlit nights the banana palms leaves and dewy paths are bright and silvery--and seem to quiver with life. It feels magical.
In the lodge, we lean over the balcony, or sit on the polished floor as we sip steaming tea and coffee, nibble a piece of ripe banana, pineapple or papaya, trying to wake up. From the nearby kitchen, comes the low sound of a radio and rhythmic chopping of the cook prepping the day’s food. A shy woman with her glistening hair pulled neatly back, in tidy cut offs and a grey T-shirt finishes mopping the almond-wood floors. Yoga is at 630 down at the yoga deck near the beach. At 625 we gather our rolled up sticky mats and walk down through the reedy marsh over a wooden planked walkway (turtles, tadpoles, and toads underneath) over the lagoon with small red-winged black birds swooping by. The sky is flawless. Everything is damp--from the planks on the yoga deck, damp from heavy afternoon rains, to the straps and blocks, kept in big plastic tubs, to the thriving jungle.
Here in the south west of Costa Rica on the Pacific near Panama the humidity feels like it's about 7000%. Our clothes are never dry nor our hair. Long hair is always wet. Fine hair curls. Paper musts. Passports peel open like blooming laminated flowers. At night, the sheets begin damp and only get steamier with body heat, tossing under the draped canopy of mosquito netting. But this is good news in class. For yoga this means that we don’t need to do many sun salutations to warm up. We can begin with a quarter the number of lunges and warrior ones and twos before our bodies build the necessary heat to move on to variations. Within a few minutes, the night’s stiffness--from active sleep, from yesterday’s hike to the waterfall or kayak trip to the snorkeling spot down the gulf--soon begins to shift and change, and even in these cool morning hours people sweat.
Costa Rica Bliss, Part 2 coming on Wednesday... stay tuned...