Why should you go to a Yoga Retreat?
Holidays are the most precious days in most persons’ year. Why should you go to a Yoga Retreat, what are the reasons and benefits that resonate in you long-time after your return home?
Every participant has his or her own motivations for joining a yoga retreat, and often he or she will repeat the experience. There are 5 reasons which are common to most, in our view.
Table of Contents
Your stay is organised – nothing to worry about
Accommodation and healthy food, often vegetarian, and activities are arranged in a nice setting, you just lay back in between two yoga sessions.
Discovering yoga – or a yoga style
A retreat is not necessarily for experienced yogis. It can address (and often does) to beginners and is a perfect opportunity to learn something new, to check out if you like the practice. For experienced yogis it allows discovering other branches of the big yoga family, or practices which they don’t have back home. Also, the duration of the yoga retreat allows creativity with places and time slots, like sunrise yoga on the beach or midnight meditation.
Combine holiday with activity
Daily stretching, twisting, bending and inversions are a great gift for your body! (careful, it might get used to it!) Not to get overdone with yoga practice all day long (twice a day might be enough) a retreat is usually combined with other activities: it can be workshops about yogic way of life, symbols and philosophy, but it also can be activities like horse riding, hiking, surfing, cooking, Ayurveda, pool/beach and so on.
Get to know like-minded people
Everyone arrives with his or her own baggage of expectations, worries and stress. After a few common sessions of postures and meditation, the energies are levelled and very soon the group finds its harmony. You will make new friends, opening you to new horizons.
Takes you out of your comfort zone
Might you go with a friend or alone, you never know in advance what the environment and people will be about, there’s always a bit of unknown joining a retreat – and that’s where the magic happens. Just open your mind and your soul will be rewarded!
… and last but not least
You head to a sunny place, and you come back home with sunshine in your heart. Yoga is more than reaching your toes, the breathing exercises take you deeper than to your lungs and tummy, closing your eyes opens the view on a new landscape. As one of the participants to Yoga & Relax in Chiang Mai said: let go and feel reconnected to oneself.
After a Yoga Retreat you always have some take away that will resonate in you long-time after your journey. You are free to pick the piece you want to take with you.
