Total Pageviews

Monday, October 9, 2017

Thoughts on the Wild Women Yoga Retreat at Wolf Ridge

I struggle with balancing my external life with my internal life. I love planning events, activities, and get-togethers. I’m well known for intense itineraries that start at sunrise and go well past sunset. I love laughing, storytelling, dancing, adventuring, camping, traveling, and living life in big, bold, colorful strokes.

This often results in months of consecutive weekends full of activities. It also means sacrificing a rich internal life to meet the obligations of my external life. It means I go to happy hour or drive to the cities instead of spending time reading or hiking with Drew. It means I trade off an orderly closet for a chaotic space with suitcases never fully empty between weekend excursions. It means that I don’t prioritize my own fitness and wellness. Inevitably, it leaves me exhausted, drained, and deflated.

This is a cycle I’ve self-perpetuated since I can remember. I’ve always been a busy body.

Once, an acquaintance gave me what she thought was a compliment by saying, “Amanda, you are always flying around like a big ball of mess but somehow still get everything done.”

I was really hurt by that comment. After all, no one really wants to be perceived as a “big ball of mess.” The truth is, that description can be pretty accurate.

I do fly around a million miles an hour.

I do overextend myself.

I do believe in being generous of spirit, but at what cost?

At the last retreat, we were… busy. I logged around 30K steps per day, practiced yoga several hours per day, rose to see the sunrise, and hauled paddleboards 4+ miles. On Saturday, I was walking back from Raven Lake with Bryana and said, “I don’t think I can do this. I’m too tired.” Months of running around all hit me at once.

By Saturday night, I reached a level of exhaustion that I haven’t felt for a long time. The same level of exhaustion I’ve felt after coming home from a funeral, after completing a long race, or after a 10+ mile hike. In the depths of exhaustion, I see things with new perspective.

On Sunday, I drove home from the retreat totally exhausted but also fulfilled and satisfied, I had an overwhelming sense of calm and clarity.

I hardly spoke for a nearly a full 24 hours. I simply allowed myself to rest and reflect silently. In that silence, I realized the toll my extroversion can take on both me and on my introverted husband. I made a commitment to work on my personal wellness this fall. That has meant learning to say no, setting boundaries for myself, asking others for help, letting go of control and allowing others to assume responsibility, setting aside time to do nothing, stopping myself from planning things when an idea strikes, getting back into the habit of running, drinking more water, consuming less alcohol, and spending more time in silence.

The retreat at Wolf Ridge genuinely surprised me. I did not expect to feel so exhausted and simultaneously fulfilled. I did not expect to walk away with such clarity. I did not expect to have to face my own shortcomings and insecurities so squarely in the face.  It was humbling and grounding.

I’m entering this fall retreat with a few months of practice under my belt, but I still have a long way to go to achieve the balance I need between an external and internal life. Heck, I’m still super busy with all the plans I made BEFORE the last retreat. It’ll take me through the end of October to get back to a calendar that is beautifully blank.


I am so excited to find out what this next retreat holds for me. Yoga, when practiced several hours a day, offers healing through intensity. We stretch our limits, find vulnerability in our discomfort, and achieve new depths in the process.


Drew's 2016 Holiday Letter

This year Amanda and I took our relationship to a whole new level. We’ve already been best friends, spouses, and business partners, to which some people say, “wow, don’t you ever get sick of each other?” To which we say, “why do you think we have a TV in the basement?” But still, being the perfect couple, just wasn’t enough, so Amanda decided she had better add becoming my teacher to the list. This came about one evening when Amanda asked me if I was aware that she was putting on an 11-week bi-weekly journaling workshop and that I was signed up for it and that the first class was tomorrow and that if I missed it I might as well just start packing my bags. Needless to say, I did not know any of the above and was slightly taken aback by the sheer audacity of her just assuming that I had time to attend a journaling class for 11-weeks when she knew perfectly well that I was very busy re-watching all of the Star Wars movies to prepare for the new one coming out this holiday season. However, I was also keenly aware of the look in her beautiful, deadly-blue eyes, so instead I said “What time, dear?” I know what many of you are thinking, that is, that having your wife as the teacher would be awesome and that it basically guarantees that you will be the teacher’s pet and ace the class. Well, let me be the one to tell you that anybody that thinks that is an idiot.

My attendance in the class, has proven, without any doubt, that being married to the teacher in any of Amanda’s classes does not buy you brownie points. Actually, it makes things twice as hard. Of course, it also didn’t help that I was the only male in the class and that many of the writing exercises involved writing about feelings. Amanda clapped and praised the other students as they recited heartfelt poems dealing with serious issues such as divorce, depression, eating habits, parenting, love lost, and love gained. Amanda frowned and shook her head when I recited my epic space saga full of flesh-eating aliens, mutant assassins, laser-eyed-lizards, battle-axes, piles of corpses, and zombie bears. In fact, Amanda was so appalled by my inability to write thoughtful, emotionally charged literature that she decided that she would take on the additional role of becoming my X-mas card editor. This is the main reason why you are receiving this letter after Christmas.  This is (I’m not lying) the fourth version of the X-mas letter. The first was too vulgar, the second too childish, and the third too politically insensitive. I was becoming so disheartened from my apparent inability to write an acceptable X-mas letter that I was forced to take desperate measures in order to actually get something in the mail. Long story short, I waited until Amanda was put under general anesthesiology for her ankle surgery to write the letter. Then, when she was all doped up on morphine and other powerful narcotics, I told her the X-mas letter was all done and ready to send, to which she responded “why does it taste like purple in here”, which I took as, “it’s perfect, let’s send it to all of our loved ones”. In other words, what you now hold in your hand is the unedited, uncensored version of the 2016 X-mas letter.      

Besides spending most of the year in journaling class, we did manage to do some other stuff this year. We spent a week in the Bahamas snorkeling with the Thoe family. It was a wonderful trip. We are continually amazed by the culinary evolution happening in the Caribbean. It was the gastronomical adventure of a lifetime as we joined the native Bahamians at little Ma and Pa places like Dominoes Pizza and Burger King. Can you believe they have a conch burger? It’s number 6 on the drive-thru menu.

We also took a trip to see glaciers in Glacier National Park. Seeing glaciers in Glacier National Park is more challenging than one might think. This is mainly due to the fact that there are none, unless of course you consider a dirty pile of snow, much like something you would find after you plow your driveway, a glacier. Not satisfied, we travelled north to Canada to see the glaciers in Kootenay, Banff, and Jasper National Parks. These glaciers, although much more glacier-esque, were receding at a pace that made them nearly invisible to the naked eye. All in all, it was a great trip and we both returned home more depressed than ever.

Other than that, we didn’t do too much this year. By we, I mean me. Amanda did lot’s of stuff. Here’s a list of some of the stuff Amanda did:
        Became a board member on the St. Luke’s Hospital Board of Directors.
        Taught an 11-week journaling class that was a smashing success.
        Put on a number of fundraising events to raise money for local charities and other good causes.
        Joined Mentor Duluth to be a role model for young children in need of such things.
        Was on the news and in the newspapers for all her good deeds and special talents; virtually a local  celebrity if you ask me.
        Continues to teach yoga and win awards at her smarty-pants job at Maurices HQ.

Here’s a list of everything Drew did:
        Fell over and broke his face.

Which reminds me. If you ever want to get lots of nice letters, tasty treats, and cool stuff in the mail, all you have to do is seriously injure yourself. I was unaware of this until now, but I feel like I might be on to something. If I can just seriously hurt myself three, or maybe four times a year, I wouldn’t ever have to buy groceries again and people would always be saying nice things to me like: “Wow, your face looks even better than it did before.” (On second thought, maybe that isn’t so nice. What did I look like when I had teeth and a solid facial skeletal structure?) On a serious note, we can’t thank everyone enough for the support we received during my little mishap. I did write lovely thank you letters to everyone, to show the true depths of my appreciation, but I lost them somewhere in Glacier National Park. I’m not lying, I really did. If you don’t believe me, just look next to the glacier, if you can still find one.

Season’s greetings and Happy New Year to all. 

With love,
Drew and Amanda Imes