Finding Stillness in Motion: Lessons from Shoshoni

The first time I attended Shoshoni Yoga Retreat & Ashram was in 2018, during my 200-hour yoga teacher training with Cambio in Colorado Springs. They brought students up for a weekend as part of the program and I was amazed. Yoga, meditation, chanting, mountains… everything I was slowly falling more and more in love with.

I returned in 2019 for my 300-hour training, and that same spark lit up again. I knew I wanted to spend more time at Shoshoni, something about it just gave me this feeling, but I didn’t know what that meant. Another retreat? A longer stay? Then the pandemic hit, and life carried on: a 9–5 job, routine, comfort.

A few years later, over coffee with a friend who spent time at Shoshoni, I learned about their work-study program. She mentioned she wished she’d done one before having kids. It planted a seed. At that point, I was fresh out of a breakup with the man I thought I’d spend forever with, grieving the life I thought I wanted, and craving change. So, spending a month at Shoshoni sounded perfect. And it was… but not in the way I expected.

The work-study days were long: 6 a.m. meditations, housekeeping and dishes, wood chopping, more meditation, more work. It wasn’t the peaceful, recentering experience I had imagined. When you’re meditating that much, things come up. The energy at Shoshoni acts like an amplifier, it pulls buried emotions to the surface. What I thought would be a calm reset turned into deep emotional work.

To understand the lesson, let’s rewind a bit.

During that old relationship, I had settled into what society said “should” make me happy — stable job, nice home, reliable partner. But I wasn’t happy. I wanted to leave my corporate job and pursue my side gigs full time, move somewhere new, but my partner didn’t support it. When the relationship ended, I was ready to burn it all down (figuratively 😅).

So I did: quit my job, sold most of my belongings, left my condo, and planned a nomadic lifestyle from there on out — traveling to Thailand, Alaska, Hawaii, teaching yoga in Costa Rica, van life, ski instructing, attending Shoshoni & more. I wasn’t running from life; I was running from the mundane.

But somewhere along that journey, I fell in love again. Yes, with a man, but also with a small town in Costa Rica. I didn’t think I’d want to “settle” again, but Costa Rica wasn’t settling — it was soul-aligned. Still, part of me resisted. My nervous system equated any sense of rootedness with getting stuck again. So instead of grounding, I kept chasing more movement, more novelty, under the illusion of freedom.

That’s where Shoshoni came in. In the stillness of meditation, I realized something big: my nomadic lifestyle had quietly become another form of running. While I told myself I was avoiding the mundane, I was actually avoiding stillness. I wasn’t escaping a place — I was escaping the possibility of being content.

This clarity hit me like a wave. I saw how my subconscious was protecting me from past pain — afraid that if I settled again, it would all fall apart like before. But that awareness changed everything.

Now, I’m choosing differently. I’m grounding into life, community, and love in Costa Rica — trusting the pull in my heart instead of resisting it. I truly can’t wait to return. This trip back to the US this time around was a closing of a chapter, that was very necessary in the end to allow me to dive deeper.

Meditation gave me that insight. It helped me see that freedom doesn’t always mean movement. Sometimes, the real freedom is allowing yourself to stay. ❤️

Thanks for reading.

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