Checking in with River Guide Jules: Yoga in Costa Rica

I still feel like I am in the nascent stages of my yoga practice (and perhaps will be for a long time), but I have known from early on that the pull towards my yoga mat began at the river. This is a story that I've told many times now, but bringing it out in this venue seems incredibly appropriate.

I love the river because of the presence and connection it brings into my life. Rapids are
fun, complex, intricate opportunities to learn something about your self and what it means to be truly alive. During the Summer of 2011 I discovered this. The following Winter, I (unconsciously, at the time) longed for some forum to explore this feeling of connectedness and aliveness off the river. Enter: Hatha Yoga. Here is where I found a way to continue the journey into the self during the months when most rivers are frozen or too far away.

After a couple of years of dedicated practice, the pull to delve more deeply into the yoga tradition was overwhelming. I'll shorten the story (you can read the long version on my personal blog, River Yogi) to save time, but in short I decided that I wanted to do a 200-hr Teacher Training and I wanted to go on an adventure to do it. It was also important to find something during the off-season from Wildwater, since guiding and kayaking are such important parts of my life. I left a mind-blowing season with the WW crew for the Nosara Yoga Institute, an amazing center on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica.

Nosara is a small town, especially in early November. The rainy season, which is the off-season for tourism, ends near the middle to end of the month, meaning the town was mostly locals during the month that I spent there. As time wore on, more and more foreign faces began to pop up, but for the first two weeks at least, my sub-par spanish had to get me through a lot of the time. The institute is about half a mile removed from town, set on an incredibly landscaped hill top filled with jungle vines, guanacaste trees and howler monkeys. It truly feels like a sanctuary, another winding path or and iron Sri Yantra at every turn.

For one month, the 48 yoga teachers in training and I rose at 5 am to make the hike up to the institute for morning practice. I think we were up earlier than the monkeys. Arriving on the mat in the morning was often the easiest part of the day, it was what you found there that could be truly intense. Each day was packed with 8 hours of class, with multiple long breaks for beach time and siestas. Incidentally, however, when you're living just up the path from a beautiful beach that is also a Leatherback Sea Turtle sanctuary with 80 degree ocean waves, you don't feel the need to "siesta" very often. Breaks were usually spent swimming, trying to re-up calories with Tico food (rice, beans, plantains, avocados), or maybe napping on the beach if you were absolutely exhausted.

And absolute exhaustion is exactly where we found ourselves during the final weeks of training. Diving into yoga philosophy and posture technique for 8 hours a day is unmeasurably rewarding, but it can be quite draining both physically and mentally. While I was there, I never wanted the experience to end. But when I got home, I slept for about a week. Something so life changing can require a "reset" period.

Getting back to the States and normal life was  a strange adjustment, but yoga teacher training and Costa Rica ignited the flame of desire to share Yoga and live Yoga in all dimensions of my life. It set me on a clear path. To return to what I wrote earlier, the river showed me the very beginnings of that path. Moving forward, it is my hope to share the benefits and the inquiry of yoga with the river community. Presence and peace is there to be found, both on the mat and on the water.

Hope to see you all on the water this Summer with Wildwater!

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