Say Ommm

Yoga week retreat was a fun relaxing way to spend some extra time we had on our hands. Every morning we would get up at, the not fun hour of, seven o’clock to get ready for yoga at eight. Yoga was generally ninety minutes long and in the morning was almost always vinyasa flow. Breakfast was after yoga and was almost worth the wait, with chocolatey croissants decorated with powdered sugar. At breakfast there was also yogurt and some pretty good juice also some, possibly fake, ham. All the food was supposedly vegetarian but the ham tasted like regular ham. Maybe the Sicilians don’t consider breakfast ham meat! Dinner was definitely vegetarian with nothing like meat or that could be mistaken for meat. First was bread and soup, then a buffet and then dessert! The desserts were different every night, with some really good ones and some ok ones. My favorite dessert was a chocolaty ice cream concoction that we had on the second to last night.

Vinyasa and Yin yoga were the two main practice types but we also did some special types. The Vinyasa yoga was all about breathing requiring mostly the blocks for props. The Yin yoga was slower with sometimes up to six minutes spent in each move, in hopes of relaxing more. On the last day we got an extra prop: the tennis ball. The ball was used for throwing to others while in strange positions like crab walking. The ball was also used on a different day, to give ourselves a massage.

Several times during our stay we went to the beach. Unlike some of the other beaches we’ve been to this one had sandy shores. On our first beach walk, when we had just come out of a very windy above ground sand tunnel, we spotted the body of a dead fish, on closer inspection we found that it was probably a flying fish! Daddy kite surfed for the first time in approximately five years since they had it available for rent. I only went to the beach there a few times and never went in the water but from what I gathered it was a nice beach.

There were many animals with us, some even participated in the yoga. The Queen cat was one of these animals, though I can’t remember her name. On the first morning of our stay while in yoga she slid through the doorway. I was close to the door and she came over and sniffed at everyone. Then she came over and lay down on Jack’s blanket, which was in a sunbeam. After she rested for a moment she went to survey the rest of the yoga participants. When she came back to our side of the room everyone was in boat pose, on our backs with our knees curled in and hand by our sides. She lazily came over to me and decided I was a pillow, so what are pillows there for if not to be slept on? I laughed so hard that she jumped off and went to the pile of real pillows, where she sulked till breakfast.

Jacob was my mom’s favorite cat, he was a big, fluffy, black, pompom that only liked her because she was preparing lunch that involved salami. We had guessed the cats and dogs were vegetarian too, but at least in that cats opinion we were sorely mistaken. He got the salami, and he tried to get more, and he got more. There were also dogs in the establishment, one was small and friendly, one was medium sized and rarely seen by us, and the last was called Coco who was big and barked at everything that moved and some things that didn’t.

None of us had ever been to a yoga retreat before and it was an interesting experience, now that we have rested we are ready to get back on the road. My guess on when each of us will come back to this or another yoga retreat would be Mom and Dad tied for first to repeat the experience, me maybe coming along again some day, and Jack fighting hard never to do in again. I think he might have secretly liked it though.