The Independent Field Trip: A Yoga Retreat

It was ten weeks into our yoga class, and now Rose and I were finally going to a REAL yoga setting.  The place is called the Shoshoni Yoga Retreat in Rollinsville, CO. Some guest can stay for overnight retreats, but our class was just going for the day retreat trip. Rose and I planned to carpool together in her Subaru, which was much better for the mountains than my little Camry. Rose picked me up at 7am on a sunny Saturday morning with the donuts, and I brought the coffee.  We were like cops! After a drive that was about an hour long though the winding mountain roads, we finally made it up there before 9am to meet up with our instructor and classmates. There were also about roughly forty other people on the retreat.

Of course the scenery was beautiful, and the weather, for early April, wasn’t too bad. What was cool about Shoshoni though was that it was as if India has just transported into the Rockies. Just like how one might see in India. There were the temples, but there were no pink blossom trees, with the exception of a little blossom tree plant inside one of the temples. On the site, they had gardens, chicken coops, and even a ceramic studio, as well as the yoga studio. The morning started off with a tour of some of the temples and the garden, and then we went to the yoga studio.  In the studio, we had a two hour class on wood floors, unlike the carpet floor we have in our classroom, and we were taught by one of the instructors there. Instead, our instructor was in the class with us. But she couldn’t do many of the poses because she was still recovering from her car accident before the semester.

The retreat ended with having a completely vegetarian lunch.  The food was great, but what was the most interesting to me, were the handmade bowels we ate a part of the meal in. Getting a close look at them I could see they were made on a ceramic wheel, and glazed only on the inside. They clay used might have been organic material too. When I finally ate out of the bowel and stopped analyzing it, Rose and I were told that we could leave if we wanted to. And that was our day at Shoshoni.