The Salt Lab

🎉 UPDATE: 🎉 A number of you asked about the possibility of a late winter/early spring retreat for The Salt Lab. Well OKAY! ❤️

Some things opened up, and we are now considering adding in a week for you guys, but wanted to check first on what dates might work best!

A) Feb 8-15th
B ) Feb 22nd-29th
C) Feb 29th - Mar 7th
D) Mar 7th-14th

Comment below and lemme know which work/don’t work for you!

And don’t worry about the cost. If you want to come, lemme know and we’ll find a way to make it work. ☺️ We’re much more interested in just getting a group of us all together down there to enjoy and experience this! ❤️ Daily super fun surfing, yoga, meditation, amazing food, secluded beach, a shiatsu workshop, a homemade cacao workshop, baby tuuuurtles... 😍

Let us know if you’re in!

Pause and check in. What is your mind *actually* craving (or avoiding!) when you open up that window?

But are you surprised? 😉

Still: more of this, please! ❤️

School Replaced Detention With Meditation And It Created Incredible Results By Mayukh Saha / Truth Theory We have all been through those terrible detentions back in school. But it’s really debatable whether detention actually results in …

No keys required. 😎

Stop. ⛔️ Check in with yourself right now: Are you swimming upstream? Or going with the flow? I had to do this mental sweep today, and had an unexpected response.

It started when my friend complimented me on the somewhat unconventional life I've been building for myself, and the way I've been busy deconstructing my previous life and set of beliefs. "You're an interesting character – don't change. The world needs 'interesting,'" he told me.

I thanked him, and said, much to my surprise, "You know, it's as much a case of swimming upstream, as it is going with the flow. We live in a strange world where going with the flow *is* swimming upstream."

Funny, isn't it? 🤨

I think that's why sometimes we struggle so much with letting go and allowing. We're constantly told to plan, fix, strive, strategize, optimize, push, and create. Be a busy worker bee, or fall behind and lose everything!

But what if we dared to just...sit? When if in moments of uncertainty and confusion, we fought against convention urging us to take action, and instead waited and saw what organically emerged when things grew very still and quiet? How rebellious!

Birth happens organically. When it begins, we must push, yes, but until that moment, it's just a whole lot of waiting for the water to break, and for the moment to emerge.

Allow for the pregnancy. Wait and watch what happens. Otherwise you may miss the feel of a tiny kick, the swirl of something moving in your belly, reminding you of the life that is growing.

The headline reads like an Onion article, but nope, it’s true! 😂

“The results? Even just eight weeks of meditation changed people's brains for the better.” 🙌🙌🙌

What’s the longest number of consecutive days you’ve gone in your practice?

Neuroscience shows that 50-year-olds can have the brains of 25-year-olds if they sit quietly and do nothing for 15 minutes a day You can see significant positive changes in just 15 minutes a day.

Really loving this breakdown of the different ways our brain gets stuck in stress loops. Which is your dominant go-to? 🧐

We all have coping mechanisms we developed early on, long before we even realized what we were doing, but the question that you can now stop and ask yourself is: are these coping mechanisms still serving you?

Maybe you needed them as a child when you had more trauma and fewer tools to help manage that, but what about now? Are you still experiencing that same trauma? What other, more productive tools are available to you? 🤔

If you’re ready to put these coping mechanisms down, mindfulness and meditation helps us break all eight of these loops. Ready to start?

🚨Reminder that we’re having a flash sale right now! Book with a friend and you both get 50% off our all-inclusive retreat in paradise! 🚨

Image credit: Thrive Global

Getting through the rest of this week like... 🧘‍♀️

A really wonderful and fascinating exploration of self.

The deeper down the rabbit hole you go, the more you realize that a central truth of existence is that there *is* no self. It’s a funhouse illusion. Period. I would say “end of story,” but the thrill is that that’s really only where the story begins. ✨🧶✨

Dreaming of our next adventure... How ‘bout you? ✨

One of things I love about the ocean is how endless its lessons are — truly a wealth of knowledge as deep as the ocean itself. The primal push and pull of energy as it moves, its emotionally stirring imagery, the beautiful life metaphors that seem to spring from the sea spray itself...it never stops teaching me. If never stops serving as a glassy mirror, its wasters reflecting back my own life’s journey, from its rocky storms, to its playful rolling waves always pushing me right where I need to be.
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I’m always so surprised that there aren’t more religions entirely devoted to it. Certainly one of the most humbling forces I’ve ever known. 🌊

"Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time? That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.”
― Hermann Hesse

It’s not too late, ironing board! Get back out there and charge it! 🤙 🏄‍♂️

"The ocean never lets you down. It might surprise you, or frighten you, or challenge you, but it's always there for you. There's nothing more powerful. It's stronger than wind, than fire. You can get to know it, but you can never 100 % predict it. Some days the swell will come up faster than you could ever imagine, and you'll have to battle your way outside. You'll take waves over the head over and over again, barely able to catch your breath. You'll be scared and tired, but you can't give up. If you give up in the ocean, you'll never walk out of it. So you keep paddling, keep thinking, keep moving. You find your inner reserves. And when you make it up to the lineup, you've never been so grateful. You have accepted what the ocean has offered you, and you've proven yourself in the process. It's a metaphor for life. What you believe you can do, you can."
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—From the book “Surf Girl Roxy”

This is what mindfulness in action looks like. 💪

Because a lab can’t run on its own, right?
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Ryan, head teacher at The Salt Lab, has been practicing Zen meditation since 1968. He is an ordained Soto Zen Buddhist priest in the lineage of Kobun Chino-roshi and was the Director of Chino-roshi’s temple, Jikoji, for 12 years. He trained with Zen shiatsu master Ryuho Yamada-roshi in the 70’s and again in the 90’s, and is a former teacher at the Institute for Conscious Bodywork, as well the former president of the Center for Sacred Studies. He is also ordained as a ceremonial leader in Native American traditions (Arapaho and Cheyenne), and has participated in or led retreats, ceremonies, and sesshins in Europe, India, and North America for the last 40 years. Ryan has been integrating earth-based forms of worship and prayer with Zen meditation since 1970, and caught the early wave of California surfing when it first hit the mainland US in the 1960s.

YES. 🙌🙌🙌

Because a lab can’t run on its own, right?
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Alida, The Salt Lab’s founder, spent her childhood in the halls of California’s Jikoji Zen Center helping run retreats with her dad, but it wasn’t until she was sixteen that she personally connected with and began exploring Buddhism, eastern philosophies, and indigenous earth-based practices more intimately. Rather than lean on these teachings to guide her life choices, however, she went the conventional route, got a neurobiology degree, and cycled through several careers chasing after “success.” Eighteen years later, she’d realize how out of alignment she’d become, have a profound “wtf” moment, leave her corporate job as a media VP in NYC, and spend a month surfing in Central America to reflect and reset. (You know – that ol’ story.)

Her soul-searching trip to the sea was surprising to none. A near-mermaid since birth, Alida always felt a deep connection with the ocean, and when she picked up surfing later in life, she instantly saw the interplay between the sport and her mindfulness practice. The more she stayed rooted in mindfulness and Buddhist philosophy while out in the water, the better her surf. The more she attached to her ego and let her stress and anxiety get the best of her, her surfing immediately suffered.

Surfing provided the perfect laboratory to experiment with and gain instant feedback on her mindfulness practice, which proved instrumental to her personal growth and introspection during her life transition. She only wished others could experience this new way of engaging with mindfulness. And thus, The Salt Lab was born.

We, uh, have no idea what you’re talking about... 🙈

Each of us is similar to that wave; each of us has a face that can be distinguished from other faces but also, fundamentally, belongs to a whole. Among other things, the koans in this book teach us that we are at once the wave and the ocean, an ‘I’ in possession of a name and face that are specific and unique on one hand but also a manifestation of everything. And there is no contradiction or discontinuity between these two perspectives–both of which are replies to the question ‘Who am I?’–just as there is no contradiction between referring to the water that swells in the ocean as both wave and ocean. An individual is at once his particular self and the entirety of existence. Our ordinary manner of speaking, and even our use of the words ‘I’ and ‘world’ as mutually exclusive, tends to obscure this truth.
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–Yoel Hoffman in “The Sound of One Hand Clapping”

Hi! 👋 We’re a fun, week-long laboratory where you can experiment with mindfulness through meditation, surf, yoga, and more. It’s mindfulness for real life usefulness, but, you know...in a relaxing, tropical sanctuary. ⠀⠀

We’re as serious as we are silly, and as spiritual as we are scientific. We’re as creative as we are logical. We laugh while we cry, we cry while we laugh, and we’ll never turn down an extra serving of dessert. ⠀⠀

We’re The Salt Lab. Come on in.