If there were a clock hanging on the wall in our white, skillfully designed room at Cocoon, which, of course, there isn’t - it would only show three times. The clock would read 7:30, 13:00 and 17:00. The hand would cross those hours leisurely, lazily to announce to the few people and many animals in the vicinity the start of yoga at 7:30 (followed by breakfast), lunch at 13:00, and yoga at 17:00 (followed by dinner). On this farm in Portugal I enter, for the first time, into a world in which the itinerary is reliably engorged with necessary bouts of empty time. Blank space in a life that until this week has been crowded to the absolute brim with an engagement, a new job and the faithful commitments that are summer in the city. But not here at Cocoon.

Cocoon is located in Alentejo, an area of Portugal south of Lisbon and north of Algarve with all of the quiet beauty of a region sandwiched in the midst of a crowded city destination and a busy beach one. On our bus ride from Lisbon the view is mostly farmland, cow pastures, perpetually blue sky and views of the ocean over tall cliffs. As peaceful a place for a yoga holiday as one could conjure up in their imagination while sitting longingly at their desk at work.

The group, eighteen of us in total, is majority British so mercifully Brexit and Boris Johnson get more airtime at meals than the impending US election. Europeans, though, are never ones to shy away from political talk after a few minutes of niceties so while I am certainly not off the hook, I am grateful for the accented distraction from the news cycle in New York. Kimberly and I are the only Americans and the only millennials of the group. We are a mixed crew, ages 14 to 72, of people with separate lives who came together to enjoy the benefits of a week stretching and eating farm-fresh food in the sun. To all of the others, I have come very far and I much appreciate the anonymity-in-a-crowd feeling I’ve grown comfortable with in the depths of Manhattan.

My favorite summer hat which now lives on a bus somewhere between Lagos and Lisbon

While Cocoon appears to be everything a twenty-something woman from New York could dream of, with its white walled cabins, orange roofs, unlimited plants hanging from every available space, peacocks roaming the grounds, teepee tent, hammocks and macramé chairs in cute corners - I soon find the location to be lacking. Superficially, yes, it is complete with all of the “cool” elements required for a great photo and envy-inducing social media. But: this is a weeklong yoga retreat. We are a group of people who practice awareness and are highly alert to energy.

So when we realize that, although plonked right in the middle of Portugal, all of the employees and owners of Cocoon are American (the only Portuguese employed that we see is the cleaning woman), bells start to ring. When the staff recommends a restaurant for our only dinner out in a local town, it is a touristy one. When they highly suggest we visit a swimming hole nearby, it is not nearly as phenomenal as the beaches we found on our own. On the final evening when the staff shares that we should pay the balance of our bills in cash and not by credit card, as they can avoid taxes with cash, we note the lack of contribution to the very place in which Cocoon is situated.

Max the tiny dog taking a nap in the sun

Thankfully I have a full week after the yoga retreat to travel the country; if this one week were my only experience in Portugal I would have felt cheated of the rich culture. It is a learning opportunity when looking for future yoga retreats, to search for destinations more deeply ingrained in their localities. Integration and understanding are critical and fulfilling parts of international travel and without any connection to the people and place one is visiting - you could be anywhere.

Luckily, the yoga itself is expertly administered and the Portuguese sun casts such a glow on Alentejo that it is simply impossible not to enjoy ones self, starting bright and early each day…

7:30… 13:00…

We find ourselves on our mats, half-awake, half remembering to grab our props, blocks and blankets haphazardly strewn across my personal space and the person’s next to me. We place the blankets over ourselves and I sense the logical transition from bed to mat and into the day. Jess, our effervescent instructor, eases us into stretching, breathing exercises and ultimately a dynamic flow with a British accent so clear when appropriate and perfectly soft when need be. We twist and sun salute until limbs feel connected to body once again in the early morning fog.

I place myself next to my friend Kimberly and in the front of the yoga class; better to see and hear this way. This location has incidentally provided me with my favorite moment in the morning practice. When the sun fights through the early fog to reach visibility, it beams so strongly through the open window at the front of the studio and for several brief seconds, my face is completely obscured in the rays of the new morning sun. I cannot see as I am blinded by the strength of the light. So I close my eyes. In closing them, I deepen into the practice - I feel my body move and the morning layers shed as I build heat and light along with the day.

I find myself surprised over the course of the week that Jess is able to so easily transition our practice into different shapes and form such distinct flows every morning. As a yoga student in New York, a place that I have found has the highest of expectations of yoga instructors (you’ll never find a teacher reading their flow from a notebook, for example), I am constantly impressed by Jess and - equally - inspired, as I continue to consider a path that leads in the direction of yoga teacher training. I appreciate, for instance, when in the midst of a particularly challenging practice (day 4, everyone is at a bit of a saturation point), Jess acknowledges that yoga should be 51% surrender and 49% effort. Always slightly more surrender than effort, slightly more yin than yang. A healthy reminder of the balance in everyday life that leads to peacefulness.

If we don’t fall asleep in shavasana (not a given but Jess always provides a kind reminder during meditation that we should try our best not to), we eat. The Brits, I learn, have quite a glamorous way of describing food that they really like. “It’s gorgeous, just gorgeous!” And this breakfast is. Plums, figs and berries fresh from the gardens. Egg tarts and scrambles straight from the very chickens we heard squawking through our practice and tried to tune out. Apparently the coffee isn’t very good, according to the retreaters from Italy and Spain, but I love a weak coffee and it’s perfect to drink along with the onset of a new day.

It is a special feeling, sitting outdoors (we always eat outdoors) and recognizing that the length of breakfastime is completely up to ones own whim. Some days we have long conversations about the past lives of middle aged fellow yogis or future lives of the Gen Z ones. Other mornings I learn the stark and surprising differences between the governments of Germany and Austria (not to mention Liechtenstein) from the resident political science student of the group. Topics that, without a place to be, are endlessly discussable. The rest of the day is ahead of us with no one to dictate a fixed plan, no productivity to be measured on, just blue sky and a farm in front of us.

After breakfast, we are free to do exactly as we please. Certain mornings we hop in the stick-shift car that our German fellow yogi maneuvers through the fields and out to the ocean. Fifteen minutes and we’re in Almograve, the first Portuguese beach I lay eyes on with its cliffs and in-ocean rock formations proudly immovable. Defying American public beach standards, this paradise is free to enter with clean restrooms and a fish and cocktail bar engulfed in lilting Portuguese love songs played over the stereo for a post-swim snack.

One day we wade out into the lush, sandy coastline of Almograve at low tide, through the tall rock formations, calmly chatting and peering into the distance, when a man not ten feet away plucks an octopus straight out of the ocean. Its many tentacles struggle in his hands, occupying both of them as he tosses the creature lightly back and forth from left to right hand as we watch. A few nearby girls scream and shuffle away. Eventually the octopus goes limp; based on the comfort level the man has with handling this creature we deduce that he must be cooking it up for dinner with his family.

At times in the mornings we stay around the farm and I rotate from the lounge chair by the lake, to the hammock under the tree, to the chair by the house that gets the best wind and the most sun. I read The Sun Also Rises for probably the fourth time and it feels tangentially appropriate being that I am in southern Europe and it’s summer.

On the hammock in the shade I write in my notebook about the experience of being on a farm for a week, the luxury of traveling without packing my bag and moving every other day, the sense of staying put in a foreign place for just a bit longer than I’m used to. I write about the hilariously disparate personalities of those in our group who I am coming to know and appreciate, and I write about how funny it is to see how Germans and Brits interact on a nude beach. I write about how glad I am to have a great friend to do this retreat with and a great partner at home who understands my desire to travel more than most people would ever consider and I record how lucky I feel to have been in Europe for a disjointed but entire month this summer. Creativity comes and I take it and run with it but also I stay put in my hammock and stop reading or writing every few minutes to look up through the trees to the clear sky and daydream.

As you can imagine, there is no lunch bell at Cocoon. There’s no noise really at all save for the crow of chickens, birdsong and the sound of one of the employees singing while she cooks up lunch. Still though, at 13:00 everyone gathers casually around the long outdoor farm table we share thrice a day because in all of that lounging we’ve worked up an appetite. Imagine lunch very similar to breakfast in its leisure and imagine the time after lunch very similar to the time before in its relaxation.

One afternoon, we head to the local beach Praia do Malhão for surf lessons. There is an undeniable and universal connection between surfing and yoga; I have seen it true from Nicaragua to California. It could be the relaxed attitude evocative of both activities or the agility required by each. Our instructors look to be straight from Laguna Beach, if only with a Portuguese twang. The first thing they tell us is that surfing is all just energy - the flow of energy from the waves to our boards and our bodies. Considering we’ve been hearing about flow and energy all week, these guys are speaking our language. Our group laughs with recognition when we are led through stretches to “warm up” that resemble a deconstructed warrior one and side angle pose. “We’re on a yoga retreat!” one of our members explains, as if to accredit us with know-how that will somehow help us when we get into the water.

Just before lugging our boards into the waves, our instructor draws a graph in the sand with his fingers. He walks us through the inevitable relationship between ability and energy, sharing with us that at the beginning we will have a high amount of energy but little to no ability. Slowly we will learn the key aspects of timing waves, paddling and standing up on the board so our ability will rise as our energy tapers off. There is a critical time period, he shares, in the middle of the lesson where our ability and energy levels will meet to produce optimal results and we should remember this, to pace ourselves throughout. I enjoy this as a metaphor for our week of yoga in general - slowly we learn the intricacies of yoga in this context and by the time we leave our bodies and minds may be tired but also content if we can pace ourselves.

One afternoon on the lake at Cocoon, a few of the teenage members of the group play around with a stand up paddle-board; they had done their first downward dog just days earlier but today they find themselves on a board in the water attempting balancing poses as one of the older, more yoga-advanced guys shouts over to them, “focus your drishti on the tip of your nose!” in a melodic British accent. This same advanced yogi later holds my legs up as I attempt a handstand in the middle of the room during an inversion workshop and tells me repeatedly that I can do it. Without a competitive air, something so tangible in New York yoga classes, my guard lowers on the farm and the experience of the week of yoga feels like something more, something shared.

…17:00…

I have my reservations around the evening yoga sessions. Of course, I love the idea of doing yoga twice a day, every day for a week, to get a feel for a consistent practice and strengthen my knowledge. The evening yoga, restorative and yoga nidra, is the very, very slow kind. Not historically my New York City, hip hop yoga, quirky downtown flow cup of tea. To be fair, the quieting of the mind is a challenging task in New York studios in which separating oneself from the city means trying as hard as possible to ignore the ambulance siren coming down Broadway as you meditate.

My ego assumes that I will be “good” at this slow yoga, that is until the first afternoon when Kimberly mentions casually that in her experience is it hard to do as each pose is held for several minutes - an eternity in a world in which I have always flowed and changed poses with each inward or outward breath. And so I engage in the slow yoga and surely enough I find that I have to avoid going too deep into the poses - usually I would rely on my flexibility to deepen into it - and, instead, go halfway as far as I think I can in order to be able to keep hold of it. At one point my head is touching my right knee and my left leg is bent and my arms are overhead and instead of quieting my mind in meditation, as I am supposed to, I am writing the opening paragraph of this article in my head which is quite far from the goal of a clear, empty mind.

Certain evenings we have the opportunity to practice outdoors in the beautiful forest shala which requires a short trek with props in hand. At these times I sneak a peak during yoga nidra up from my mat to the sky as it changes color and peaks through the branches and leaves above me. It is here, on the wooden planks that have seen yogis come and go with retreats week after week, that I first accomplish a forearm stand without the support of the wall - a pose I have been working on for at least six months. I am brought back to the memory of two years ago before in Nicaragua, on a similar outdoor yoga platform, and first holding a headstand without the wall - a moment in which I felt like so much work and diligence had paid off.

The last night on retreat we have a fancier version of our typical dinner prepared by the Cocoon team and we all dress up for the goodbye. Someone wears heels but most of us just change out of our uniform of leggings or a bathing suit into a semi-clean dress and brush our hair. Mid-dinner, so naturally, our group begins speaking, one by one, around the table, each member taking the chance to announce what they learned this week. When that finishes, it turns into another round-robin of people toasting one another, forming personalized sentences to cheers the unrealized strangers that they have come to know. I can’t recall another time in my adult life so genuine as these moments with a table full of random friends.

When it comes to be my time, I make a toast to everyone at the table - telling the group that if they ever find themselves in the US (to which I laugh remembering our outspoken German friend muttering “don’t wish that on us!”), that people are as welcoming to them as they were here to me. It feels just cheesy enough - and sincerely candid enough - for a yoga retreat farewell.

Next stop: Lagos in Algarve!

On Retreat: A Week of Yoga on a Portuguese Farm

7:30… 13:00…

…17:00…