The Journey to India Retreat 2022
My Background
Yoga transformed me. I was led to yoga 24 years ago. My older sister, was 16 and was happy to drive us just about anywhere, her new drivers license would take her. So sister outings to the gym became a regualr. It was in a rowdy gym in Orange County, California were we both gre up under a hug hedge of boganvilla and sunny skies. The gym was loud but once inside the doors for yoga the whole scene changed. The music slowed us down and after an hour asana practice I noticed my mental states had also shifted to states that I hardly knew I could even possesed. Especially at the end of class as we laid in shivasana or meditated, I was able to access states of consciousness that felt both so foriegn and like returning home. From the beginning, yoga changed me in all possible ways - mind, body and spirit. At the time I was in competitive soccer playing for a club team as well as my High Schools team, my muscles and gravitational pull to contact sports started shifting to lean long muscles and contact with self rather than other. As an awkward teenager, I learned about my potential as a human “being”. I realized for the first time ever in my life until that moment that I wasn’t just the physical body, there was something else inside me. Eventually “gym yoga” turned into “real yoga” as I frequented a respected yoga studio called Yoga Place near my home, I realized that yoga wasn’t just movement - it was prayer, intention, a mental exercise with a rich history steeped in connecting to the divine, enlightenment and becoming aware of our spiritual health. Yoga opened me. I found a new knowing and started to trust in my body’s ability to transform - on one level my muscles started to shift, new ways of focusing developed using my breath, and maybe most importantly, I learned how to surrender to the beauty within me and in all of our lives. Yoga helped me to see things differently, both on the mat and how I approached a challanging pose or meditation as well as in the modern real daily life that I was leading as a teen. I started to view the world with a different lenses, seeing everything as a new opportunity, a pose to adjust to, a psych to atune to. I started to react to life in ways unlike a had in the past. In my twenties and through my college years I took many yoga teacher trainings, started teaching yoga. I’m forever grateful to yoga for providing me with an avenue to discovering and finding my true self. Throught the innate teachings of yoga I became unafraid to express myself authentically, and allowed myself to be felt, in touch with joy that is life. My journey led me from teenage curiosity to multiple yoga teacher trainings, in-depth workshops and then retreats. It also led me to a new friends who practiced yoga and eventually to the man I married, a long time yogi himself. We recognized each other right away. Together, we opened a yoga studio in San Luis Obispo, California and have had the privilage to lead many many yoga classes, interacted with thousands of yoga practitioners, led yoga teacher trainings, and have yoga wellness hosted retreats in many special locatiopns. For the last 8 years, I’ve had the opportunity to travel overseas to India to co host a yoga and wellness retreat in South and North India to experience firsthand yoga’s birthplace and wonder. It is so clear to me how yoga gives back, and I love being a part of that reciprocity circle, being able to offer the upcoming yoga classes for the Journey to India Retreat with James Bailey, whom I’ve know for years as a family friend and also as my Ayurveda teacher. I’d love to invite you to this adventure! Details below!!
The Journey
Like many others who after practicing yoga, Ayurveda, and meditation for decades, feel a call back to the “homeland”, I too desired to visit the great mama India - to have an opportunity to pay respects and deep gratitude to the land and people that have touched my life. It became important for me to personally experience India in my heart - feel it in my bones, see it with my own eyes, hear it’s sounds with my own ears. If you’re at that point too, come join in the journey! One doesn’t have to dig very deep into any travel guide to India without feeling a little (or a lot of) anxiety about traveling there, especialy solo. I have seen others who got the call to India’s sweet draw to experience its culture so rooted in spirit, but too scared to go. One of the biggest gifts in attending The Journey to India Retreat is James’s vast knowledge and experience guiding students to the very best places to travel and learn from, making our time there so much more pleasurable, without concerning ourselves with the nitty-gritty of foreign travel in an often crazy, beautiful and chaotic country. Deep bow to you James and after now 6 times being the cohost of this retreat I am also so excited to welcome and support your adventures ease and magic!
When you go as a group, you have the opportunity to experience India’s rich history and so much of what it has to offer Westerners – a chance to slow down and venture into the vast Indian tapestry of life as an intentional group and family. Since time immemorial, the human brain has benefited from this type of community to navigate transformation with. As we move through this country together, it helps us feel supported, safe, and understood to have the experience that we are ready to have. Coupled with amazing new friends, exotic experiences, therapeutic body treatments, spectacular yoga (if I might say myself), and James’s incredible wealth of knowledge, the overall effect is pure rejuvenation. Just what we all need, right?
I hope you will join us for what will be a trip of a lifetime in 2022!
Lovely videos, all the details HERE, at Sevanti Adventures The Journey To India Retreat
-Tawny
