This past weekend, Whistler was taken over by tight bodied people donning spandex from head to toe, totting around their yoga mats. This surely meant that Wanderlust was here.
Wanderlust is a 4 day lifestyle festival, a celebration of yoga, music and nature. Created to share values of mindfulness, spirituality, and environmentalism. Wanderlust brings some of the world's leading yoga teachers to places of astonishing beauty: Colorado, Vermont, California, Oahu, Chile, Tremblant and Whistler. Festival goers are provided with yoga classes, guided meditation, speakeasy lectures as well as outdoor activities such a SUP, biking, hiking or rock climbing, followed by an array of music by night. It's the largest and fastest growing celebration of it's kind.
To many outsiders, yoga carries certain stereotypes, that you're a vegetarian, you live a spiritually rich life, you are health conscious, positive. As much as I'd like to think I live life with a healthy, loving conscious, I generally don't. I am a far cry from your stereotypical yogi. I'm more of a pessimist than an optimist, cynical at the best of times. I indulge in more booze than I should, and if you put a bacon wrapped anything in front of me, I'm instantly in heaven, and... I love yoga. With regular practice, I have strength, flexibility, balance and range of motion that I feel helps me to avoid injury from the other high impact sports I love to do. It's known to reduce stress and anxiety, which like most, I suffer from often. Being in the service and tourism industry, like the majority of Whistler locals, I find I use 'yogic' breathing daily at the work place to help cope with the general public. Seriously, I honestly recommend it to anyone.
We have a growing number of yoga enthusiasts within the Sea to Sky corridor and are truly blessed with some unbelievably talented and well educated teachers. So it's no wonder that for the 2nd year in a row, Wanderlust has decided to make this one of their stomping grounds. I was a bit skeptical before I attended. I don't love how commercialized yoga has become. How it's now a multi-billion dollar industry, that sometimes it seems the sacredness of yoga gets lost in the desire to make a profit. But like everything, people are going to catch on, people are going to follow and inevitably it's going to grow.
Whistler hosts festivals of all sorts, Cornucopia, World Ski and Snowboard Festival, Crankworx and now Wanderlust, and I think it's a perfect fit. Yes, the festival goers are more likely to order a tea than say a Manhattan, but I would much rather deal with herbal tea drinkers than the black out drunk types that other festivals can string along. In a town full of active, healthy, kale smoothie lovers, I think it makes sense.
