Yoga Retreats with JESSICA LUSE

Jess offers a warm presence and infectious enthusiasm that makes people feel right at home. She fell in love with the practice of yoga over a decade ago and loves nothing more than to share this love with anyone curious enough to try it.

She’s spent 3 years living and working within creative communities abroad where she had the opportunity to live in alignment with nature’s rhythms and found her own creative potential awakening. She began to sing, dance and create via different modalities and quickly realized that creativity, similarly to yoga, is just another way to find presence, as well as a way to let go and make peace with the inevitable messy bits of life.

She’s gathered over 900 hours of formal yoga education in India, Australia, Cambodia and the United States. She received her first yoga teacher training at the heart of where yoga began, Rishikesh, India, with no intention of ever teaching, but rather wanting to deepen her own personal practice. Her time in India took her life for a spin in a new direction and she hasn’t stopped learning or teaching since. She believes the practice is helpful in developing awareness, as well as challenging ourselves to grow stronger and more flexible, both on and off the mat.

Jess has a passion for movement, especially in the form of free dance and slow flow yoga with lots of time for intuitive movement. Her love of dance started right here at Anamaya nearly a decade ago and has sent her dancing around the globe ever since.

She has led over 50 week long retreats, designed and facilitated countless workshops and taught thousands of public classes. Although she loves workshops and public classes, her favorite thing to do is to lead retreats. Retreats provide us an opportunity to nourish our spirits, refresh our hearts and come out feeling alive and present. Retreats offer a necessary break from the hecticness of life, and give space for new ideas and inspiration to arise. She loves watching strangers become family, and the vulnerability that comes with opening up and simply sharing an experience that’s been designed with so much intention and love. She has seen time and time again how coming together with intention can help to shine a brighter light onto our everyday lives, long after the retreat ends.

She believes that the body is always on our side, doing what it can to keep us functioning optimally and well. These subtle practices teach us to tune in and listen, so we can hear when our body is reaching out for care via illness, pain and those little “hunches” we may feel in our belly or our heart. She’s learned from personal experience, as well as by working with her students, that those little whispers don’t go away when we choose not to listen, they only get louder until we do. Her classes are a mix of slow flow vinyasa, hatha, restorative and yoga nidra. These practices all help to slow down to truly listen within.

In addition to the practices of yoga, Jess enjoys cooking simple and nourishing meals and tapping into her creative side in any way that feels right in the moment: dancing, singing, painting, and writing. She’s a people person, a dog lover and loves nothing more than soaking up the sun.

Her moto: Come as you are, always.