When I was a young girl, I had a brown paper grocery bag filled with assorted plastic toy horses. They came in different sizes, shapes, and colors, and I carried them with me everywhere. Sometimes I acted out horse stories, but mostly I just liked looking at them. They seemed so beautiful and strong, and someday, I thought, I would like to have a horse of my own.
As I grew up, I outgrew my “horse phase” and lost track of that grocery bag, but somewhere beneath the surface, I kept thinking about horses and their mysterious grace and power.
In my early twenties, I discovered yoga. My employer brought a yoga teacher to our workplace once a week to lead classes in a conference room, and I quickly fell in love with the way yoga made me feel. It gave me the sensation of shaking off stagnation and truly feeling my blood and breath move through my body. I continued practicing for years, deepening both my practice and my awareness.
Fast forward to my early forties, and life was kicking me in the teeth. My marriage was falling apart. My stress levels—from work and life—were through the roof. My yoga practice, along with every other form of exercise, had fallen away. I felt sadness around every corner and an absence of joy. Around that time, I remember flipping through a women’s fitness magazine and finding an article about vacations for adventurous solo women travelers. It featured something called “Cowgirl Yoga,” where a group of like-minded women could practice yoga and ride horses together. The article felt as though it had been written just for me. How could there be a vacation where I could renew my yoga practice and rekindle my childhood love of horses?
I went on that retreat in 2013, and it changed the trajectory of my life. I still remember the quiet rhythm of hooves beneath me, the laughter of the women around me, and the beauty of Montana surrounding us. The experience was so magical and meaningful that I found every possible way to attend ten more retreats with Big Sky Yoga Retreats, from Montana to California and from Costa Rica to Argentina—twice.
After returning from Argentina in 2025, I came home with a fire in my belly to keep deepening my connection to horses, so I started taking riding lessons. I also signed up for the Cowgirl Yoga retreat in Sweden in 2026. I knew the Sweden trip would include riding Icelandic horses, which I knew nothing about, so I found a nearby barn with Icelandics and began taking lessons there. What started as an effort to become a slightly better rider before the Sweden retreat turned into a full-blown love affair with Icelandic horses. At that point, I knew I needed horses in my life full time. Shortly before the Sweden trip, I purchased my own Icelandic horse.
With my own horse waiting for me back home, the Sweden retreat couldn’t have come at a better time. It delivered the magic I had come to expect from Big Sky Yoga Retreats while giving me the chance to accelerate my riding skills for the partnership I was just beginning with my own horse.
It may sound dramatic, but that first Cowgirl Yoga retreat helped carry me through one of the darkest periods of my life. I now see all eleven Big Sky Yoga retreats as gifts I gave myself—each one a small return to breath, courage, joy, and the steady wisdom of horses. They did more than help me heal; they led me back to the girl with the brown paper bag of toy horses, and to the dream that had been waiting patiently for me all along: a horse of my own.
