The other weekend, my friends Amanda, Sara and I went on a yoga retreat hosted by Dina Ivas at Heathen Hill Yoga in Franklin, New York. Admittedly, I haven’t been the greatest at abandoning my unhealthy and lazy habits in exchange for a life of good ones. If I decide to start eating better or to do a cleanse, the effort usually lasts for one meal. But I figured if I was in a place where you were forced to do healthy things for a couple of days, maybe that would be enough to want to do it all the time. So I was really looking forward to this retreat that was supposed to surround us with nature, cut us off from WiFi, eat like healthy kings, and do enough yoga that my body was craving it by the end of the weekend.
Heathen Hill Yoga has two accommodation options: you could opt to stay in B&B-like rooms or glamp it out in tents. Encouraged by our outdoorsy dispositions that once existed when we were younger (and pre-NYC), we chose tents and hoped for the best. The tents were huge, each with a few small camping tables and chairs, and there were also air mattresses to support our sleeping bags. There was even an outhouse that was sort of nice (way nicer than your average Porta Potty, but at the end of the day it was still an outhouse). When we weren’t doing yoga, we were free to roam around the property, swim in the lake, and take advantage of the hot tub with our BYOB supplies. The fresh air (and being followed by chickens) was equally refreshing as all of the yoga we were able to do. But the home cooked meals might have been the best. We all served ourselves and enjoyed original recipes from the owners of Heathen Hill. The food was fresh (and grown right on the property) and downright memorable – I still regret not purchasing their cookbook before heading home to the city.