If you were to call me today and tell me to fill a suitcase and grab my passport, I’d do it. I wouldn’t even ask where we were going. Crazy, right? Traveling has the grace of placing you smack dab into the present moment in every moment. The environment is new, the people unfamiliar, and often even the language is incomprehensible. You instantly shift your focus to the here and now, and a sense of awe and wonder fills the space in your brain that was formally occupied by mundane details and worries. For a yogi, traveling instantly provides the present moment, one pointed awareness that we constantly seek on our mats and cushions.
Then, as with everything else, eventually things start to feel familiar and comfortable in each new place. The old habits and mind stuff start to creep back in. When you are removed from your day-to-day life though, you are able to view this stuff through a new lens. Traveling allows for your perspective to change. You shift your understanding of your tendencies (and often your normal tools for coping with them are absent), so you begin to observe the heart of the matter, that your habits and tendencies are yours alone, and you find the strength and the willingness to let go of what no longer serves you. Then when you return home, the hope is that you retain some of the freedom that you found in your exploration of the world.
In my modest amount of travels, I’ve had many versions of this experience. A few I’ve even laughingly named…the Mexican Margherita Awakening, the Costa Rican Bullet Ant Awareness, the Guatemalan Lake of the Mind. But nowhere that I’ve been in the world so far
magnified this experience and propelled me to a deeper relationship with the Self than the Sacred Valley in Peru. There is something about this very spiritual place that feels almost enchanted. Maybe it’s the thinner air that allows us to break through so much of our thick headedness, or maybe it’s the unfathomable feats of architecture and construction that took place in a culture entirely dedicated to honoring the spirit of the place. The people today are still intimately connected to their past and their culture in a way that is so hard for most of us to understand. When they speak of the accomplishments and trials of the Incan people almost a millienia ago, they speak with ownership. There is not a separation between the “they” of the past and the “we” of the present. When describing the achievements of a past civilization, a local Peruvian is very likely to explain what “we did” and why.
The result of this deep and personal connection is a feeling of reverence toward everything, and this feeling is contagious. As a visitor, you begin to move through your days with this same awareness, that everything is sacred and it is a blessing to be a part of it even for just a moment. The ideas of gratitude and grace come to the forefront of our experience, and we can begin to understand that we carry these gifts of awareness in us always. The hope of our retreat is that we offer support in the unfolding of this process and the tools to carry them home with you into your life.