This essay follows a yoga retreat in Costa Rica through journal entries organized around five lessons and a photographic archive of landscapes, movement, rituals, materials, and moments of attention. The journal and archive are a visual inquiry into storytelling and memory as I look back at the adventures that I had on my trip and the lessons learned along the way.
The written journal moves chronologically through the retreat, while the photo journal gathers fragments that can be viewed in sequence or rearranged. After the trip, I worked with collage to crop, repeat, layer, and recompose the photographs. I think about these experiments alongside the work of Surrealists, whose use of collage opens familiar imagery to unexpected associations. I experimented with how chance and play could introduce new relationships, while slowing down gave me time to notice what those relationships might mean.
The collages are a way to revisit my journey and lessons and see things in different ways through cropping, repetition, and shifting visual form. Storytelling becomes a form of research through making.
How can chance and collage help me re-see a photographic archive and tell stories beyond the sequence of the trip?
The written journal follows sequence because each lesson gathers meaning through a particular day, place, encounter, and repetition. The photo journal records the trip as fragments that can be revisited, compared, and recombined. The collages move between these forms. They hold the experience as it unfolds while also allowing the story to change through later acts of seeing and re-seeing.
Although journaling is not a new practice for me, working with photographic fragments through collage as a form of visual inquiry and storytelling is relatively new. I’m interested in exploring how personal archives can tell stories through collage, and what changes when those fragments are brought into new relationships. Bringing words from my journal and daily lessons into the collages could be another way to explore these connections.
Day 1: Arriving in Costa Rica
Tuesday, November 1
We flew into San José early that morning, exhausted but energized by the movement of the airport and the anticipation of being somewhere new. Mario, our shuttle driver and guide, met us with fresh coconut water. We packed our luggage into the van and began the drive toward the coast.
Along the way, we stopped for snacks and lunch near the Crocodile Bridge, where enormous crocodiles rested below us along the riverbank.
We reached Vida Asana late in the afternoon. The retreat grounds felt immediately different from the pace of travel with open-air buildings, pathways surrounded by tropical plants, coffee brewing, and monkeys moving across the rooftops.
I was tired, and not only from traveling. I was worried about my son, grieving my dog, and feeling guilty about being away from my students and responsibilities at ECU. I had imagined that arriving in Costa Rica would make those feelings disappear. It did not.
The first lesson was not about escaping what I carried with me. Saying yes to myself meant acknowledging that I needed rest, even while guilt and grief were still present. The day forced me to slow down. It felt uncomfortable, but I was there.
Lesson 1: Say yes to you
Day 2: Manuel Antonio, El Avión, and a first practice
Wednesday, November 2
We spent the day exploring Parque Nacional Manuel Antonio. The trail opened onto beaches framed by dense vegetation. The forest was beautiful and curious and kept revealing itself in small details. We spied a sloth high in the trees as well as many monkeys, frogs, birds, and other wildlife creatures. The shifting light, distant sounds, and views of the water were breathtaking. The wildlife was alive with fun.
Later, we stopped at El Avión, a restaurant built around a Fairchild C-123 aircraft, and watched the coastline from above before returning to Vida Asana for our first yoga class.
During yoga practice, I kept returning to a question: How can I be stronger? My first response was to think about weakness in my body and I wondered, how could I fix this weakness or what could I do better to become stronger? But noticing was not the same as judging.
Strength does not require the elimination of weakness. It can look like effort, contribution, and the willingness to act while uncertainty is still present. The lesson was less about becoming stronger than recognizing the strength that was already there. Could some of what I saw as weakness like needing help, slowing down, or taking a break actually be a form of strength?
We are stronger than we think. Strength can be resilience and perseverance, but sometimes it means allowing ourselves to recover and rest.
Lesson 2: Note it, do not judge it, or try to change it.
Day 3: Morning practice, bicycles, the beach, and meals at Vida
Thursday, November 3
The day began with yoga, followed by a bicycle ride to the local beach. The black sand, heat, water, shared meals, and easy movement between activities gave the day a quieter rhythm. Nothing dramatic happened. That was part of its value.
Letting go sounds simple until we try to name what we are holding. That is often the harder work. When every hour is occupied, there is little space to notice what is causing anxiety, sadness, or tension.
I began to understand reflection as a practice rather than an occasional response to a crisis. Slowing down creates the conditions for naming what is happening. Naming makes it possible to decide what deserves attention, what can change, and what can be released. We cannot resolve what we refuse to acknowledge.
Lesson 3: Let go of what does not serve you
Day 4: More practice and recovery
Friday, November 4
By Friday, yoga had become part of the rhythm of the retreat rather than an isolated class. We practiced twice with Polly and again with Julia. Between sessions, there were massages, small rituals, conversation, and time to be still.
The repetition made something clear: yoga is a practice, not a performance. Each return to the mat begins from a different body, mood, and amount of energy. Progress is not always visible, and it rarely moves in a straight line.
Patience asks us to stay with a process long enough for it to teach us something. It also asks us to stop measuring every experience against an imagined finished state. This felt relevant beyond yoga. Creative work, teaching, research, and healing all depend on the willingness to return, adjust, and begin again.
I started drafting a manifesto of sorts called “Design as Process, Design as Patience” that called on designers to not rush through the process toward a preconceived idea of what’s to come. “Resist the temptation to allow expectation to dictate outcomes as it may stifle your ability to explore and discover.” These words can be seen in the hero image of my teaching page.
As I thought about yoga as a practice rather than a performance, I began to see connections to how I practice and teach design. Can I give more attention to the trying, questioning, and revising, rather than looking so quickly for a finished outcome? These ideas stay with me today.
Lesson 4: Patience is the highest virtue
Day 5: Morning practice and the Jungle Excursion
Saturday, November 5
Today’s practice was about radical acceptance.
Radical acceptance does not mean resignation. It means meeting the present moment honestly, without waiting for it to become something else before we can inhabit it. I could miss my family, grieve, feel guilty, and still receive what the trip offered. Those experiences did not cancel one another.
After our morning practice, we traveled to Rainmaker Conservation Park. The trail moved through dense rainforest, across suspension bridges, and toward waterfalls and swimming holes. The landscape required attention like where to place a foot, when to pause, when to look up, and when to trust the bridge beneath us.
Yoga is a practice because we are always in transition. We change, lose our balance, find it again, and continue. The excursion gave that lesson a physical form, reminding me that acceptance can include responding to what is difficult, one step at a time.
Costa Rica did not resolve everything I carried with me. It gave me time to see those things more clearly. Sometimes that is not a dramatic transformation, but a pause long enough to notice where we are and choose how we want to continue.
I returned home thinking differently about practice. A practice is not a perfected method. It is a structure for paying attention. In daily life, it can create space to recognize what we need, name what is difficult, and respond with more intention. In design, research, and teaching, it can help us remain open to uncertainty, listen more carefully, and value the process of becoming alongside the outcome.
Lesson 5: Practice radical acceptance
Re-seeing the archive
After writing through the five lessons, I returned to the photographs as material for making. These are fast digital collages created to explore what happens when images from different moments are cropped, layered, and placed beside one another.
In these quick studies, a horizon repeats, a path meets a waterfall, and a photographed sign begins to work as part of the composition. I’m interested in how these shifts can change the stories I see in a personal archive. The collages are still in progress, and I want to try bringing fragments of the journal and its lessons into them next.
Re-seeing in motion
Three looping studies extend the collages through time. To make these, I added a simple motion rule to each fragment of the composition to invite attention to duration, rearrangement, and movement and to allow relationships within each composition to change as we watch.
From retreat to practice
The manifesto that emerged from the retreat is another kind of translation: experience became reflection, reflection became language, and language became something I could carry into teaching and making. The collages translate the photographic archive and memory into visual form. The process of slowing down was a method for noticing more carefully, relinquishing control, and making room for relationships and new ideas about the experience more visible.
What began as travel documentation has become an experiment in collage. I want to keep exploring how rearranging a visual archive might change the stories I tell and the sense I make of an experience.
However, I’m not ready to draw conclusions just yet. 😉