I teamed up with my yogi teammates at Three Jewels—an NYC, and now, virtual studio—to share ways to recreate a yoga retreat experience in your own home. Sure, your home won’t be able to exactly mimic the experience of the beachside yoga escape you might envision when you think “yoga retreat,” but you’ll still be able to reap some of the benefits from your little corner of the world. These suggestions below are framed around what to do leading up to and during a one-day retreat, but feel free to repeat and repurpose as you’d like. Maybe you’d like to devote three days to an at-home retreat, or maybe you’ll even feel inspired to incorporate one element into your daily routine. Setting intentions is an important part of any retreat. Why are you going into this? What do you hope to achieve? Then, meditate on that intention before you get started. You’ll want to do this about four, equally spaced, times throughout the course of the day. From there, allow yourself to ease back into everyday life slowly. Can you give yourself a couple of hours in the evening to reacclimate? Or the morning of the next day? Be sure to celebrate what you’ve accomplished. Maybe cook a beautiful meal, listen to your favorite music, or take a luxurious bath. Finally, take time to acknowledge how you feel different from when you started. This is a rare opportunity to check in with yourself, to leverage the alone time and strengthen your relationship with your own mind. This “retreat” might be difficult—it might be hard to wind down, to separate yourself from the anxieties of the outside world—but that’s OK. Just because a retreat is challenging does not mean that it is not successful; in fact, oftentimes, it’s quite the opposite. Let yourself feel how you feel, and treat every thought like something to be investigated. If you enter with curiosity and kindness for yourself, you can only have a rewarding experience.
