This summer I was too busy balancing work with leisure activities to have time for blogging. Instead I enjoyed yoga, sailing, kayaking, tandem biking, some great books and movies — and socializing with people I care about.
Perhaps it’s a characteristic of Boomer women — we’d rather interact with friends and family in the real world than spend all our time online. (I’ve heard this from many of my Boomer friends.)
This summer it was certainly true for me: when not working, I spent lots of time with old friends, new friends, and family. In Washington State, New England and Provence.
Not to mention the Toronto area, where new friends and current clients are located.
Just imagine: yoga in a gorgeous medieval hilltop village in southern France…
Yoga in Provence
I was lucky enough to experience my first-ever yoga retreat — in Provence, of all places — with some girlfriends from Apple. (We worked together at Apple 20 years ago, on the early Mac marketing team.) Five hours a day of yoga, for one week… I didn’t know what I was in for.
We were joined by their friends from a Bay Area yoga studio, their favorite Anusara yoga teacher, and some adventurous Europeans who found the web site promoting Jane’s yoga retreat in Provence.
Here we are, former Apple marketers, posed beneath a stone entrance to the medieval hilltop village of Vaison-La-Romaine in southern France. (Let’s not talk about the challenge of driving a cantankerous French SUV up the narrow hilltop streets or through portals originally designed for pedestrians, horses and small carts…)
My friend Jane organized the yoga retreat and our wonderful lodgings and group meals. (She’s also a gourmet cook and francophile, so she researched all the best places to eat, with something to please every budget.) Jane was the brave person who wrestled our SUV through this portal — without scraping any walls in the process.
Our yoga studio was a mile away, down the hill and along a river — quite a trek in the summer heat and intense sunshine of June in Provence. We made that trek twice a day, for a week.
It was June, so the lavender fields were in bloom. And it was incredibly hot the whole time we were there, with temperatures well into the 90s. The downside to staying in these charming, picturesque stone villages is that they don’t cool down at night…
Anusara Yoga — A Treat for Boomers
The particular style of yoga that was taught at our retreat was Anusara yoga. Anusara balances core values from the yoga spiritual traditions (such as openness and the light within) with a real focus on alignment principles.
It celebrates the heart, and welcomes people of all abilities. Even beginners like me. (Someday my asanas will be as graceful and powerful as the woman in this photo.)
One reason why Anusara is great for Boomer bodies is that its focus on alignment is potentially less dangerous than yoga variants that emphasize the flow between the poses. As our instructor pointed out, most of the injuries occur during transitions into and out of poses…
Now that I’m back in Seattle, I’ve signed up for some local Anusara classes, in hopes of finding and nurturing that balance within.