I’m writing from the Pacific Northwest in my mother’s garden, truly a garden of the heart. When she moved into this house around six years ago, the backyard and front walkways were basically dry grass. With her skill, devotion, and consistent attention, gradually the bit of land in her care has become a lush oasis filled with native regional plants. Seemingly, an entire colony of honey bees is buzzing at the thresholds of many tiny orange flowers growing all over the bush to my right. I have crammed my mouth full of succulent raspberries flourishing because of the attention of large, fuzzy black bees that visit in a continuous flow to the small white blossoms, eventually turning them into the crushed velvet of mouth-watering red fruit that stains my fingertips upon contact.
Indeed, the Tucson Yoga4All sangha was like a hive of bees that visited the blooms of our hearts for our 2025 Summer Solstice retreat, turning our spirits into bright fruit. Clustering together on our mats, shifting in small ways to chase the shade or sun, we as a collective hummed and thrummed and vibrated in our unique dance beneath the inviting presence of the Angel of Shavano, whose flanks tremble with fluttering maracas of birch leaves and whose river banks flow with a throaty roar of ice melt.
From June 23-27, eleven yogis (and an unborn child) gathered to cultivate the secret gardens of our hearts. Cars and vans and SUVs packed with camping gear, coolers, water jugs, cooking ware, stoves, propane, food aplenty, yoga mats, and more, once again unloaded in the parking lot of the group site. Beloved Camp Ranger Elise was back to clean the site for us and deepen a connection begun in previous years, with her feisty beagle, Peanut, on patrol. Everyone in our group miraculously arrived by Sunday night, so we were able to officially start a little earlier than usual.
I opened our first integration on Sunday evening with an invitation to create a wild altar by gathering logs and branches, stones, flowers, pine cones, and more. Then we discussed our ancestral and personal connections to altar-making before transitioning to a circle around a campfire, where we wrote responses in our journals to a variety of prompts designed to help us set intentions in alignment with Gopal’s retreat theme. Several folks bravely broke the ice and shared aloud, and we closed out the night with the first of many Ramadasa prayers led by Barb and sent out to beloveds connected to the sangha who need extra support.
On Monday morning, Ajeet Bachan graced us with the first of his two heart-centered yoga classes before Barb took over in the late morning with her characteristic grounded flow through well-chosen kriyas. Then, after the first of many delicious lunches prepared by many thoughtful hands, Amelia sparked our creative flames with her Sparklecards integration. By the end of the retreat, most of us were addicted to this channeling practice of snipping photos from magazines and gluing inspired images, words, and strips of super special sparkle paper to notecards and designed to be given away as free-flowing currency to someone in need of a magic lift. As dinner was prepared by dedicated hands, Amelia also pulled out the felt and sparkle paints and invited everyone to start making colorful prayer flags to help us remember this retreat. By nightfall, we once more settled in around a fire, and I taught a council practice of reflective listening skills whereby instead of commentaries on each others’ intentions, we offered back direct quotes and summaries of what each person said, and in so doing, generate a clear, neutral mirror to reflect each others’ hopes, fears, and longings.
Tuesday brought a double-header of Sant Saroop Barb’s divine early morning yoga that had us calling salutations to the four directions with empowered new forms of Ramadasa, and then co-led an integration with Taylor that started us off with some uniquely visual kriyas. The rain clouds on this day chased us under the pavilion during Barb’s opening invitation to “Fart Lick” some collaborative yoga. The rain dramatically switched to hot sun, sending us under the trees to finish out the session with an integration practice whereby I invited yogis to lie down and “dream” into their own personal vision of their inner secret gardens, where they could meet a dream being who had a message to deliver. The afternoon highlight (and likely the heart of the retreat) was Gopal’s phenomenal creative movement integration workshop that had us whirlwinding through a series of interconnected activities, including writing a personal myth, writhing our limbs, faces, and voices through a series of “plastiques” meant to resist our inherited family and ancestral burden bodies of shame, fear, and smallness, before ending up galavanting first through the field on our own personal missions to play with our new plastiques and then gathering together in a mirroring circle that had us “buckling up” and “cuntivating” our holy wholeness in a roaring, laughing, gyrating transformation of raucous catharsis. Luckily, after another delicious, homecooked vegetarian dinner and an evening of making prayer flags, Amelia’s Inspired Dying meditation settled us into blissfully supine positions around the fire in our sleeping bags as her calm and reassuring voice led us into a death state and then reawakening, followed by a reflective conversation on a meaningful life and death, and how the two are inextricably connected.
Wednesday morning’s early yoga session with Ajeet Bachan was particularly transcendent, as he invited us into a state of divinity as pure as his white garments reflecting the early morning sun. His capacity for conveying his open heart led us into the sacred temple of his practice, and we were all deepened. SS Barb of the earthworms’ late morning yoga session culminated in taking a walk with a cup of tea on the Colorado Trail. A line of dreamy yogis balanced our mugs of slow-sipped yogi tea with an invitation to “stop the war” with each heartfelt embrace of the holy everywhere we encountered, with each thoughtful step. I then led the afternoon integration with a Proto-Celtic language mini-course and history of my practices with ancestral lineage healing work on my mother’s mothers and father’s mothers’ lines, which segued into yogis making their own Proto-Celtic chants in conversation with wild beings on a wander. In the shade of the altar, which had been growing each day with new additions, we returned from our wanders to share the fruits of our creative imaginations and collaborations with our ancestors and wild encounters. In a circle, we sang our song-chants and told our stories, and we reflected on how the process opened us to deeper layers of creative expression and vulnerability. The evening culminated in the first of two rockin’ dance parties around the fire, the setlist curated by Amelia that had everyone asking, What is the name of that one singer who raps about being a goddess? Generally, a lot of tushes were shaken by all. We wrapped our fire circle as always with another beautiful invocation of divine collective healing with Ramadasa, our voices lifted on wings through the darkness like night birds.
Thursday shook things up with a field trip out of the campsite after Barb’s grounding early morning yoga. Warmed and wellspringed by her strong flow of kriyas and chants, the wild idea snuck into me that taking a collective dip in the river with a band of topless women would help me confront my ancestral shame body that Gopal had us questioning the day before. Before I could stop to overanalyze, I heard my voice making the audacious offer, and within minutes, I had a whole troupe of wild women willing to accompany me down to the water. After packing up the breakfast dishes, some made plans to go into Salida for shopping, another went hiking around Shavano, and still others left for adventures further afield. Two groups went out to hike to alpine heights and see the wildflowers and snow, and we all met up again after different hiking distances to soak our tired yogi bones in the mineral waters of hot springs. Dinner was the most delicious with a homemade curry korma dish, and the pavilion tables were full of people making last-minute sparkle cards and prayer flags that Amelia continuously added to a rope hung along the side of the pavilion. That evening, a second dance party, a reflective circle, and our last and maybe best Ramadasa finished out our last night, and we hugged our early goodbyes to a yogi who had to leave first thing in the morning to beat the traffic and get home to her ailing mother.
On Friday, Gopal’s only but deeply meaningful yoga class of the retreat had tears of reflective joy flowing by the end, and then it was off to the races with packing up camp on the final morning. At long last, we managed to gather everyone back from the busy work of loading vehicles and figuring out which coolers went in which car, and we closed out our time with a song chant chosen by Ajeet Bachan and a blessing offered first by Taylor and then added on to by each person who wanted to speak their gratitudes. Then, we ritually dismantled the altar to return each piece of nature that had become infused with our love back into the wild world from which it came, meeting beauty with beauty through our intentions to give thanks to all that had been given to us by this beloved place throughout the week. Sparklecards strewn in a milky way amidst the altar rooms were gathered up into a bundle to be shared with the wider community back home in Tucson. The prayer flags that flapped on their rope over the altar were lovingly taken down and folded, saved as treasures to help us remember the laughs and inspirations of this year, amidst the future Solstices to come.
Shavano’s peak stood silent and radiant through our flurry of farewells, but for those few moments before we scattered, we all nestled together in the inner room of the altar on her lush body as if within one shared heart. The sun on her crown and face landed equally on each yogi’s crown and face, which glowed also from within through our heightened feelings of connectedness, gratitude, and deepened friendship.
The sweetly gathered hive had to fly on. The time had come for buzzing talk in the parking lot to disperse, wheels of laden vehicles to churn away like pollen-heavy legs, and hands waving fiercely as wings through the car windows to disappear in the wake of gravel-crunch. A brief post-partum silence settled. Then, the gentle wind once more shimmied a prayer of aspen leaves, and the whole of Shavano’s vastness offered one weighty, untranslatable farewell: ande-oksto. Fed by such open-hearted wonder, until next year.
By Taylor Johnson
