After many months of traveling and hiking mountains, we felt that it was time to take a little rest. We decided a yoga retreat in San Marcos would be just the thing we needed.

At 2pm on June 8th, an employee from the retreat came down to San Marcos to walk us up to the grounds.

I was rocking the double backpack (front and back), and the route was steep and filled with stairs. Huffing and puffing, we finally reached the check-in desk. We walked up with a woman from South Africa named Melody. We went with her as she was shown her room. This was the view from her cabana.

We were quite pleased, especially once Ricardo (the wonderful manager at the Yoga Forest) informed us that our view was even better. He wasn’t wrong.

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We shared our room with Jon from Spain–great guy. Our four-day retreat comprised of the following:

• 6:30am – Meditation
• 7:00am – Yoga
• 8:30am – Breakfast
• 10:30am – Yoga
• 12:30pm – Lunch
• 4:00pm – Gentle Yoga (my favorite activity)
• 6:30pm – Dinner

It was a great schedule. One day we had a Kirtan ceremony instead of the afternoon yoga. About 50 of us sat on cushions in one of the yoga studios, drank tea, and enthusiastically sang songs in English, Spanish, Sanskrit, and Portuguese. It was fantastic.

There was quite limited electricity in the forest. No wifi. No lights in the rooms. In fact, we didn’t even have four walls on the bathrooms.

There were two main yoga studios tucked away in the forest. The Shiva studio was my personal favorite.

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The early mornings and the lack of electricity led to absurdly early bedtimes. I was in bed before 9pm most nights (old man Huseby over here). However, the benefit of the early bedtime was that I woke up naturally before the 5:30am sunrise. Definitely worth it.

Everyone in the forest was incredible. There was just so much love and positive energy on a level that I had not experienced beforehand. It just makes you want to be a better person. It was sad to say goodbye to all of our new friends, even though we were only there for a short time. I’ll definitely be back.