Svadhisthana in Buenos Aires

Dancer's pose in the Recoleta Cemetery

Last tango class with my instructor

In the fall, I was lucky enough to participate in a my first yoga retreat. And I chose a yoga tango retreat in Buenos Aires with Ashley Turner. In one word, it was fantástico! It was two weeks (I stayed on an extra week after the retreat ended) filled with yoga, dancing, speaking Spanish, and drinking wine. By Ashley's own words, it was an unusual retreat due to the fact that we stayed at a hotel in the heart of the city and balanced our yoga practice with drinking wine, eating meat, and being out-and-about in the hustle and bustle of BA. We started our days with a morning rooftop practice, not too early mind you. Argentineans have a very different perspective of what a late night entails. Our afternoons were filled with some individual site seeing, tango classes, and a dinner or tango dancing outing. Pretty great, right?

I was definitely looking forward to classes with the great yogini, Ashley. I was also looking forward to the tango immersion. I'd had a couple of lessons in Spanish classes in high school, so I knew the basic step and already loved it. However, that proved to not even be the tip of the iceberg. My biggest problem in the tango classes, which Andrés continued to harp on me about, was letting go of control. In tango, the male partner is supposed to lead and the woman is supposed to follow. I thought it would be easy-peasy; he has to do all the work. Not. At. All.

As the week proceeded, we discovered how hard it is to give up control to the guy. We also discovered how much this relates to the experience on the mat. As the female in tango, if you fight where your partner is trying to take you, it turns into a mess on the dance floor. I usually stepped on his foot. On the mat, if you fight against your breath, the asana poses, your body's limitations, and your body's sensations, you're not in the present moment. We need to allow the breath to lead us, to feel rather than think. This was the theme of our retreat: allowing ourselves to stop overthinking and rely more on our senses, to find the strength to surrender to the experience of the present moment. And to indulge.