In Search of the Ultra Spiritual Yoga Retreat with JP Sears
October 6, 2016
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Finding a good yoga retreat that you can actually benefit from is getting harder than ever. With the vast offering out there it’s getting too complicated to differentiate between the retreats that are meant to help you to truly become more spiritual and the ones that are just a tricky scam. But fret not! Thankfully, at BookYogaRetreats.com we’ve looked for advice from the most qualified person on this planet to help us clear the obstacles on our way to find the best spiritual yoga retreat.
He is JP Sears, an outstanding yogi, emotional healing coach, international teacher and author of the book How to Be Ultra Spiritual: 12 1/2 Steps to Spiritual Superiority. In other words, he’s an enlightened soul so brilliant he only needs his initials to introduce himself (like OJ Simpson or JK Rowling but much more spiritual –and definitely better).
Admittedly, JP has never been on a yoga retreat, but it doesn’t mean his knowledge is limited by any means. In fact, he has a very good reason for not having gone to one: “I would say that I’m spiritual enough that yoga retreats are forces of nature that want to come to me rather than me going to them” he explains. Fortunately, he still gave his guidance for us who haven’t reached that level of spirituality and need to physically go on a retreat to feel its benefits.
Find the best instructor
Image source: JP Sears Facebook Page
So, what should we pay attention to when booking a retreat? JP has one simple rule: “I would definitely want to look at the instructor who’s leading it and completely judge the book by the cover. I would definitely recommend not reading anything about the description, but just looking at the people who are leading it and ask yourself, are they incredibly beautiful?... I think it was Gandhi who highly advocated judging a book by its cover –yeah it was definitely, maybe Gandhi”.
Choose an exclusive destination
Image source: JP Sears Facebook Page
And once you find that amazingly good looking yoga teacher to train with, you might be wondering which destination is more suited to reach the spiritual level that we want. And if you’re thinking India is always a safe option, we’re sorry but you probably want to reconsider this place, they’re too authentic for how yoga has evolved according to JP Sears “Those are the yoga retreats that I’m not interested in going because they’re too close to the roots of yoga. I think how yoga has improved to make it flow better on Instagram is something India is way behind in the time and I don’t want to be a part of their way of doing yoga. I mean, they don’t even have a word in their language for Instagram” he points out.
Therefore, if not a yoga retreat in India, then where? “Undoubtedly South America, for sure, because yoga originated in the far East, so it makes sense that South America would be the most important place to go on a yoga retreat. Specifically, Costa Rica; it is a very spiritual-sounding name to tell my friends where I’m going” suggests JP.
Now that you’re starting to follow the logic behind this wise man, there is good chance that, based on his criteria, you’re already looking for yoga retreats in California. Please hold your horses for a second, that’s not a good option either “Because statistically speaking almost everyone in the world lives in California, so it’s not very exclusive. A part of the yoga retreat success model that I advocate needs to have an element of exclusivity into it. The population of Costa Rica for example is much smaller than the probably trillions of people that live in California at this point. So, if you want to spiritually be set apart from your yoga friends, you can’t just stay where they already are and where they’ve already been. You have to go somewhere different” says JP Sears.
Execute your yoga
Image source: JP Sears Facebook Page
Once you book your yoga retreat you have to make sure you take advantage of it by adopting a proper ultra spiritual attitude. And no, it has nothing to do with deepening your practice, indeed JP doesn’t even like to use that term: “I don’t think a yoga practice has anything to do with getting good at yoga. In fact, I think the very term practice implies that you’re not very good at yoga; it means that you’re having to practice because you’re pretty poor at it. So, I’m all about doing execution of yoga. I don’t need to practice and I don’t advocate other people practice yoga. You ideally should be so good at it that you simply execute”.
The perfect retreat organized by JP Sears
Image source: JP Sears Facebook Page
Even though JP Sears might be the greatest yogi on earth, sadly, he is not interested in organizing a yoga retreat. Sharing his high energies with low vibrational people is not something that really attracts him. However, he could imagine how it would be if he were to organize one. Teachers who are interested, read carefully because this is the best guide to organize a yoga retreat you’ll ever find:
- Instructors
“I wouldn’t teach yoga. I think that the fundamental core of the yoga teachings is to teach you that you have nothing to learn. That’s exactly what yoga is trying to teach, so I think I would be doing good service to the yoga community by refusing to teach them yoga. But I would still have the best looking instructors and they may or may not know how to do yoga. But quite honestly it doesn’t matter because they would be dressed in yoga clothing”.
- Food
“I think aggressively vegan food served by aggressive vegans at the yoga retreat center would be incredibly important”.
Image source: JP Sears Facebook Page
- Clothing
“What kind of clothing should you wear is one question, the other question is how much do you just not wear doing yoga. But if you’re going to wear clothes, what’s most important in order to allow you to achieve incredible flexibility is wearing the tightest clothing possible that restricts your movement. Specifically yoga pants that allow your blood to circulate at the absolute medically safe minimum. I like to use a practice of –OK, if I wear a large size of pants, then I highly advocate subtracting two sizes from that in order to get the appropriate size of yoga pants. So if I were a size large in normal fitting clothes, then I should definitely wear a size small of yoga pants”.
- Communication
“Talking is really low vibrational. My preference is telepathic communication and even that can be a little low vibe. Sometimes astro-projecting to a place where you’re not in order to meet someone else is a little bit of a higher vibe communication. In other words, leaving the place where you’re at, so you can go somewhere else to communicate in a different plane, is not only the most practical way to do it, but it’s the most spiritual way to do it”.
- Extra activities
“There would be a lot of dolphins involved; dolphins swimming in the ocean. Yeah, I’d definitely make sure they have them on staff. I think monkeys on trees would be a very valuable part of it too”.
- Price
“Charging a handsome price of 25,000 US dollar would be important so that people would feel that they’re getting a lot of value for their retreat experience”.
What to do once you come back home
Image source: JP Sears Facebook Page
As good as it is to have a pleasant time during a yoga vacation, there is nothing more important than the way you behave once you go back home. And JP Sears has the perfect recipe to keep the ultra spiritual feeling long after the retreat is over: “It’s very important when a person is returning home that they stop by a store or café while they’re wearing their yoga outfit, so that more people have the pleasure of seeing them wearing the tight restrictive clothing that is very inappropriate for the new environment that they’re in. Also, it will only make your friends jealous and you more spiritual than them if you redundantly talk about it to your friends and rub in their face that you went and they did not” he advises.
There you have it. Thanks to JP now you count with all the tools to find the most ultra spiritual yoga retreat. And don’t forget that you can also count on BookYogaRetreats.com to help you compare among the most comprehensive compilation of yoga holidays on the web. In fact, when we asked JP Sears if he had visited our site, he said: “I haven’t visited it and I love it; I absolutely love it”. That’s how cool we are, he can just feel it.
Be sure to check out the full interview with JP Sears. And if you want to get to know our guru a bit more, read our ultra serious interview with him.
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