THE STORY OF SOCAL WELLNESS RETREATS: FOLLOWING THE PATH OF JOY

When I got called into HR on a Thursday at my “dream job” I was pretty sure I was about to get fired. I remember it unfolding like I was watching a movie, physically I was there but as my boss explained the case he had been building against me for months a numbness came over me. For a moment I began to plead my case and as the words tried to come out something inside me said “don’t even bother.”

I walked out of the office and down to the street, called my dad and told him what had happened. He asked me how I was doing and I said something along the lines of, “I’m good, I think, I’m excited, I can go to yoga tonight and I can sleep in tomorrow.”

Not really what you’d expect when you just lost your “dream job.”

On paper everything looked pretty good. I was covering the NFL, interviewing top players and coaches, watching football all day in midtown manhattan and wearing jeans and a hoodie to work. I lived in Hoboken, New Jersey, a vibrant and fun place for a 28-year-old single guy. 

But something was off. Way off. I had loved sports as a kid and had spent countless hours watching and researching leagues, players and top headlines. Over time, that joy that I had once had began to fade. 

I had taken that dream job after a series of misfires at previous jobs. My first job out of college worked me to the bone and I didn’t make the cut when the company went public and cut my team in half. My second stop was at a television network working on a really cutting edge sports show that filmed a pilot episode that never saw the light of day after the CEO stepped down and the new CEO decided sports had no place at that network. I was repurposed onto the web team and was doing monkey work, watching the news all day and putting segments of it onto the website. I hated the work, the culture and having to watch the news ALL day long. 

So when a flashy producer from an up and coming network reached out to me about joining their NFL team, I got really excited. He promised a fun and dynamic culture that was changing the way sports reporting was done. It was a small network, so I would have to take a $20,000 pay cut but the upside (I thought) is that I would love going to work. 

Unfortunately that was the last I would see from that guy as he passed me along to my new boss and basically said, “good luck.” Having no say in my hiring and seeing my resume filled with network names much bigger than any he had worked at, my new boss immediately positioned me as an outcast. I spent the next year desperately trying to win approval by coming in early, staying late and trying to fit in wherever I could. Every day felt like being picked last in gym class, having no date to prom, forgetting your homework and sitting alone at lunch all rolled into one. 

I was waking up each day and without thinking I woul yell “FUCK” at the top of my lungs. I was living to get to Friday, trying to cram an entire life in on Saturday and on Sunday facing the existential dread of another work week at a job I hated. I couldn’t fathom trying to find another job at this point. Every stop I had made had proven to be high effort, little reward. I had been a writer, editor, producer, director, photographer, reporter, videographer, pretty much everything you could do in journalism and here I was almost 30 with no job and little joy. 

So the first thing I did (after yoga and sleeping for what felt like a week) was I asked myself the question, “well what DOES bring you joy.” It was an exercise I called peeling back the onion. I had always loved sports, hockey was my favorite and I knew I loved it. But hockey needed other guys, a rink, a puck and I didn’t really see any clear path of making that a “career.”

It was my mom who first suggested I try a yoga class in my mid twenties and since I was stressed to the nines and in need of something to balance lifting weights and running, I decided to give it a shot. By some miracle, the dungeon of a gym I went to in Hoboken happened to have yoga classes with a tattooed rock and roller named Jeff, a hardcore yogi who also loved to blast Led Zeppelin. He was exactly who I needed to get through the door. 

He was edgy but definitely spiritual, he would start each class with chants I didn’t understand and quote from the Bhagavad Gita and other spiritual texts, but he was also fiery. He would rant about politicians and injustice in the world and would encourage us to seek things that brought us true joy like strumming a guitar, going for a bike ride or the love of a pet. 

Besides hockey, I knew yoga was the other thing that brought me joy. 

There was something deeper in play with yoga. It wasn’t just exercise, there was a component to it that felt special, sacred and transformative. There weren't winners and losers like so many things in my life, it wasn’t some battle against other players/employees/people trying to catch the subway in front of me. It was an inner journey, it asked questions about how you felt, how you wanted to feel and what your purpose was. It challenged you to be calm in the face of difficulty and to work to cultivate an unbreakable inner peace. 

I opted to jump into an intense yoga teacher training in New York City with a very no-nonsense teacher named Jhon Tamayo. JhonT (John Tee) as we called him had left home in Columbia at 13 and joined the army which eventually brought him to the United States. He went on to open his own studio near Union Square and created his own custom yoga mat. 

When I walked into the first day of training the space was beautiful and intimidating. Black and white pictures of JhonT in perfect expressions of each pose lined the walls of the studio space. I was behind the other students who had all already completed their 200 hour training and were now working on their 300 hour program, but JhonT agreed to let me join and so there I was in a room full of people who could stick their feet behind their heads and stand on their heads. 

JhonT knew I needed to be pushed, so when he was handing out Karma yoga assignments, I was tasked with arriving each day at 6am to sweep and mop the studio floor. I was now having to get up earlier than when I worked in breaking news.

The funny thing was, I wasn’t waking up yelling “FUCK” anymore, I was waking up excited, optimistic and filled with joy. The training was hard, morning and evening yoga classes that were two hours long with four hours of theory, anatomy and philosophy in between. We had to eat only vegan food at the studio and refrain from caffeine.

Despite being 200 hours behind the other students in the training, it was clear I was very good at teaching. One day, one of the regular teachers couldn’t make their evening class at the studio and JhonT asked me, “do you want to teach it?” I was excited like Christmas. I carefully selected my playlist, thought about what I would say and rehearsed my sequence in my head over and over again. After class, I told the two students in the room that it was my first class and they were shocked I hadn’t been teaching for years. I had finally found something that brought me joy and was really, really good at. 

After leaving teacher training I ran around trying to teach wherever I could. I taught at crossfit gyms, parks, apartment buildings, studios and I would teach private lessons for what half most people would charge. Pretty soon I was teaching a LOT, like 20+ classes a week a lot. Teaching started to feel repetitive and laborious. I knew I needed to take a break and find my joy again. 

I had never taken a vacation as an adult, I had gone from college straight to work and had not come up for air since. I decided to take a trip to Costa Rica because it seemed like the opposite of winter in New York City. I started mentioning the trip to my yoga classes and my friends and curiosity turned into inquiry as people wanted to know if they could join me. All of a sudden I was booking accommodations for 14 people and creating an itinerary that included daily yoga, surfing, cooking classes, hikes and evening meditation. 

My joy had manifested into something truly special, I was running my first retreat.

That trip was certainly not without its challenges. We arrived to filthy rooms, wildlife jumping on our roofs at night, daily sunburns and a bout of dysentery that nearly put me in the hospital. Despite all of that, it was amazing. These people that I knew from various walks of life had quickly become bonded and were opening up to each other and I was opening up as well. I wasn’t on guard like I had been at other jobs I had, I was allowed to just be myself, in fact being myself was what got us all to this magical paradise. 

It felt special, sacred and transformative, just like the first time I walked into a yoga class. We laughed, we cried, we almost went to the hospital (just me), it was life-changing. 

When I got back to the cold of New York I knew I wanted to immediately begin working on my next tropical adventure. Within the span of one week I kept seeing “Bali.” FIrst it was a patch on someone's backpack on the subway, then a show on National Geographic, then after a yoga class, a student mentioned it unsolicited in a conversation AND recommended the place I should go. I didn’t even know where Bali was on a map but I knew I was headed there. 

With a better understanding of how to actually run a retreat, I began planning and again another 14 people said yes, this time we were flying literally around the world with me. My classes had evolved to a truly immersive experience of mind, body and spirit. I had gained an understanding of how to create a space for people to be themselves and to transform. We immersed into the local culture, participated in a holiday parade like we were locals, we went scuba diving, and visited with local shamans at temples for prayer ceremonies. This experience was truly unlike anything any of us had ever done. The joy I felt somewhere so far from home with these people was something I will never forget.

I went back for two more trips to Bali before deciding I didn’t want to live in New York anymore. Once again, on paper everything looked good. I was teaching a full schedule of classes and private clients, I was teaching in the Hamptons where celebrities like JLo and the Olsen twins would come to my class regularly and my international travels were being funded by my retreat offerings. But the deeper I had gone into my own self-study, the harder it became to turn down the volume to my soul's desires. 

When I was a kid, at around five years old I walked up to my mom and said “I need to get to California, all of my friends live there.” I went on to name who my friends were and describe the landscape of Southern California (mind you this was pre-internet). I had always had a sense that California was for me and despite now having a pretty full life in New York, I pulled up my stakes and headed west. I did zero market research, set up zero teaching gigs and literally did not know any of the neighborhoods. I was simply following my joy. 

I found community challenging in San Diego as everyone is much more spread out then I was used to living in Hoboken. This also made teaching more difficult as Yoga didn’t pay as much in San Diego and the travel alone made the cost equation nearly impossible to justify. At times I questioned if I had made the right decision. Then one day a talk with my new  landlord led to me teaching private lessons for he and his wife. Aside from cutting my rent in half, this would lead me to the first property I would host retreats at in San Diego. 

My landlord had neighbors who owned an old ranch way up in the mountains east of San Diego. The conditions were rough at best. The roof leaked, mice would routinely scurry through the house and a storage building that would eventually become the yoga studio took 10 people 13 hours to clear and clean. It was far from luxurious, but it showed up at just the right time to show me a path to running affordable local retreats in San Diego. I put a TON of effort into those early retreats. Often I was charging very little and doing all the work myself. I would make beds, clean, cook, teach and sleep on couches to maximize our capacity. It was hard, and, I loved it. 

It brought me so much joy that people would fly from around the world and make their way to this dilapidated ranch to practice yoga and meditation with me. I wasn’t getting monetarily rich but I didn’t care, I was running my own business and my life was rich with purpose and joy.

At times I’ve gotten off track. I’ve gotten excited at the prospect of hosting at flashier properties and plunked down big amounts of money for flashy people that promised to help grow my business, neither grew my business or brought me more joy. These days, I still sometimes sleep on the couch but I’ve returned to my roots of wanting to be of service to others, wanting to make the world a better place and following my joy. That same feeling that I had the first time I taught yoga comes back every time people show up on the first day of a retreat, I get Christmas once a month. 

Yoga, meditation, breathwork, spirituality, religion, entrepreneurship, there’s a common thread I see running through them all. Checking in with how something or someone makes you feel will always be your best compass, and, it’s ultimately up to you to find joy. How many of us feel “stuck” where we are but have been running the same programs and practiced the same way of being for so long it feels almost impossible to change?

Every day we have the opportunity to choose joy. We also have challenges, oh so many challenges. One of the things I ask myself is, if I had all the money in the world, would I still live my life the same way? The answer is yes. I would run retreats, I would teach yoga and I would live near the beach. 

I feel grateful I got fired from that dream job, who knows where I would be now if I didn’t have the opportunity to step back and reset. It was literally my first retreat. My advice, don’t wait for the outside world to grant you permission to feel the way you want to feel. Wake up and fiercely pursue joy every single day, the rest will take care of itself.