Parents take adult children to yoga retreats as pressure grows

Parents are increasingly inviting their adult children to yoga retreats in search of a calmer everyday life, DR reports.

Gitte Trier and her 28-year-old daughter, Caroline Møllskov Trier, went on a three-day retreat last year at Anahata Yoga Retreat Center, a yoga centre on Møn. They plan to return in January.

Caroline says she had already experienced some anxiety before the retreat, and that major changes in her life can bring those feelings back. This year, she has moved house, got a dog and changed work location. Her mother also had breast cancer over the summer.

“I need to do something actively to get out of it. Yoga and meditation help me a lot, and it means a great deal to have someone guide me through the process,” Caroline says. She was so taken with yoga that she trained as a yoga instructor in 2018.

Kåre Netterstrøm, co-founder and head of the retreat centre, says more young adults are coming with their parents, often because life feels too demanding. Some attendees are on sick leave, he says, and many are in their 20s, new to the workforce and also dealing with young children and the demands of everyday life.

Parents often pay for the retreats, Netterstrøm says, because young adults on student grants or raising a new family may not have enough money. He is working with the Danish church on lower-cost retreats for young people, where they will put away their phones, sing, cook and practise yoga.

Yoga teacher and mindfulness instructor Sisse Siegumfeldt has also seen more mothers bring their adult daughters to retreats. She says younger women have become more common over the past five years, with some groups now made up of as many as one-third young women. Study and the high expectations they set for themselves can feel overwhelming, she says.