Yoga of Self-Development

Our guided yoga retreats, self-guided retreats, intensive courses and selfless service stays support healing, personal growth and self-development. Spiritually we offer a focus on Light and the Divine Feminine, much-needed in our world today. Please note that we are only open to guests who have made an advance reservation.
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  • Baby Girl and the Heartstone

    Before you begin reading, will you pause to look around? Let your head and neck turn from side to side, and notice where you are – the colors, the shapes, the shadows. Give your body time to find and feel what’s around you, underneath you, at your back. A deep breath. And another. How are you? And how do you know you are ready to read? There’s no rush. We Exist Beyond Fix It Culture “Sometimes being broken is the way to open these doors of this heart…Yes… Falling apart is a part of the process…” These are the words I sang to myself underneath the hot, relentless sun in my oversized shade hat. It was over one hundred degrees. Breath was the air current for my self-expression. The lyrics were becoming less of an intellectualized idea and more of an unprecedented reality. For a long time, I resisted falling apart. I held myself together, held myself back. Held myself in. Can you imagine the effort? Perhaps you know it yourself… I didn’t let myself break, at least not on the outside – until I did, and the whole house of smoke and stone I had been living in crumbled. It nearly cost me my life. Until then, I lived by the subliminal (and not so subliminal) messages from modernity, doing my best to fit in and to get it right at whatever the cost. Modernity says, be normal, okay, show this, not that…and most of all, feel better and be successful! Whether in my family system, school, overculture, the hospital, or rehab, there was always something to strive for — a system of organization on how to “feel better” as if feeling better could be reduced to a generalized and universal prescription: Be happy. Eat local. Make good money. Be physically strong, and able. Seek the cure. Relieve suffering. Reduce pain. Go after what you are worth. Be different but not too different. Stand out but still fit in. I’ve been interrogating these edges, asking questions. Who defines better? Is it true? A small voice inside knocks and I choose to not ignore it: What harm is caused by having a fixed definition of ‘normal’? Who does that make visible? Invisible? How does that lend itself towards a hierarchy where better can exist? What violence does that engender? What does that do to contentment? Am I broken when not better? What if the ‘normal’ system is actually what’s broken? You are welcome to answer these questions or add your own. Listen to your body answer, too. For my graduate studies, I am focused on unfolding the healing industrial complex – a trillion dollar industry built upon the unrealistic and unreal universality of normal where anything outside of that standard needs to be bettered. It shows up as “alternative” medicine and “diversity” inclusion. In a conversation between Resmaa Manakem, author of My Grandmother’s Hands, and Gabor Mate, author of The Myth of Normal, they remember to ask the questions often unasked – diverse from what? Alternative to what? The culture we live in affects all of us; it is like the air we breathe. We aren’t free until we are all free, and right now, we are not free. It seems we need another approach to healing that doesn’t perpetuate the problem. That is why, in my studies and life work, I am dedicated to other ways of knowing and being through dreamwork, the body, and the creative art process. These ways have been engaged with for time beyond time and are available to us each – we all dream, have bodies, and can engage with creativity. A blessing: they bridge the gap between the individual’s story and our shared human condition. They get underneath appearances and the cognitive mind. They are wide enough to hold paradox. They remind and encourage us to be timeless and interconnected. No one can take them away. For the Love of Life and Death In 2008, I was hospitalized for an intentional overdose. I lived in an inpatient treatment facility where I felt invisible. I became a statistic that had a treatment plan, which I had very little say in defining. Hardly was I asked questions; I was more so given orders and told what I could and couldn’t do. Now I offer practices to which people come to relieve their pain. I can’t give them false hope or tell them lies to keep them in my classes. I ask them questions: what if you could feel better not by attempting to change yourself but by accepting yourself? And what if you changed through that acceptance? As I teach I wonder how my students, and people in general, define better. Who gave them that definition? Where might they be without it? And, most of all, I empathize. I aim to hold the complexity and paradox. I know what it is like to want to feel different. I also know that by practicing being with the direct experience of present-moment sensations in my body – be they what they are – I have grown leaps and bounds. Through not trying to change myself, I have changed. I’ll say this: change didn’t happen through pushing myself or my inner world away – although that was needed when it was needed. It was little moments – simple/complex moments felt for the multiplicity they contain. It was with the help of my dreams and art-making that held with me, lovingly and creatively, what was hard to hold. It was through relationships of all kinds. It was by noticing involuntary sighing, the precious exhale. It was with awareness and rerouting attention. It was through recognizing more than one thing is happening at once, all the time, and choosing what energy stream I follow. And it is still happening; it doesn’t end. It was tough, and in some ways, only gets more difficult. The catch: my capacity to be with difficulty has increased tremendously. Difficulty has revealed itself to