My Naked Hippie Crunchy Granola Weekend

Yes, there was nudity, and yes, there was granola. Well, ya gotta eat something for breakfast, right? ;-)

My wife & I went to a Passion Training retreat at Harbin Hot Springs, at the north end of the Napa Valley. The schedule for the weekend had things like yoga, breathing, and water breathing. Hey, I can do those. This should be a nice relaxing weekend. Plus, the Hot Springs pools are clothing optional, meaning that most people are naked when soaking. Now, that's just gotta be a good combination for a relaxing weekend.

We drove up on Friday and stopped for a few tastings at St. Supery and Beringer wineries. We arrived at Harbin in the late afternoon, but our first scheduled event was dinner at 7pm. So, we took some time to walk to the pools and try soaking. The main pools are a quiet zone. They don't allow talking in the area and the extremely hot 114F soak pool is silence only. That's really tough when you're trying to get into water of that temperature without screaming.

Even though it was Friday, there were many more people at Harbin than we've seen at other Naturist resorts that we've visited in the past. In combination with the quiet zone, we decided that this wasn't the best place for us, so we went back to the conference center where we would be staying for the weekend. We had about 1/2 acre of buildings and grounds for our group. That included bathrooms, a kitchen where our meals were prepared, about 1000 sqft sleeping area, two outdoor 98F pools and a large 1000sqft+ indoor area for our main conference facility.

All of our food for the weekend was vegan because that was the preference of the organizer. For Sunday lunch we had some awesome baked yams. Towards the end of the weekend he told us about a previous conference he'd hosted where people asked about meat in their meals. He brought two live chickens to the kitchen and told those wanting meat that they were welcome to prepare it themselves. As for the rest of them, they prepared their lovely vegetables.

After dinner we began the training. LiOr introduced himself and the aims and goals of the training. Basically, we were going to learn how to focus our lives and passions. Yeah, pretty vague, but there was more to it when he described it. We started with some breathing techniques in the conference center, then moved that practice out to the pool. There were eight of us, plus LiOr, and we were all able to fit nicely into one of the small pools. Of course, it was dark by this time, but everyone stripped down and used the warm outdoor shower to rinse ourselves before using the 98F pool. Ah! The water was devine. ;-)

So, the idea with the breathing was to put floats under your knees and lay back in the water while your partner supports your head so that your head stays above water. This gives you close contact with your partner ( there were 3 couples and a pair of very good friends, who weren't lovers ). This gave you an opportunity to develop a deeper level of trust in your partner, while developing the breathing skills that would be built upon throughout the weekend.

This exercise ended close to 11:30pm and hugs all around before heading to bed. So, getting hugs from my wife was fine, but even though we were in the pool, it was still a bit weird to be hugging 7 other naked strangers. However, this certainly was an ice breaker, even though there wasn't much chance of any ice in water that warm. ;-)

Of course there was really no reason to put any clothes back on. Why would I? Everyone had already seen me naked, what's left?