About The Hard & The Soft Yoga Retreats & Adventures
The Hard & The Soft Yoga Yoga Retreats and Adventures was founded in 1975 in Winter Park,Colorado, and is one of the most prestigious and comprehensive yoga schools in the United States. Directed by Beryl Bender, internationally renowned yoga teacher and author, the school has been offering both weeklong and weekend retreats in classical yoga and meditation, as well as 200 and 500 hour teacher training certification courses for almost 50 years.
The Hard & The Soft 200 and 500 hour Yoga & Meditation Teacher Training programs – both in person and online – were ongoing from 1980 through 2022. Over that time, the courses evolved into one of the top teacher training programs in the country. Hundreds of our graduates can be found all over the world, literally, serving their communities and teaching in universities, yoga centers, corporations, rehab facilities, prisons, churches, senior centers, schools, and hospitals. Currently, our school’s attention is focused exclusively on national and international yoga retreats and immersion weeks and weekends in meditation and practice, and we are not currently running teacher training programs.
The school derived it’s name from the Zen proverb which says “Only when you can be extremely pliable and soft can you be extremely hard and strong,” and was founded by Beryl in 1975 in Winter Park, Colorado. All are welcome.
About our Director: Beryl Bender
Beryl is a renowned teacher, not only for her knowledge of classical yoga and her studies of the Yoga Sutra, but for her abilities to brilliantly and intuitively access a student’s weaknesses and misalignments, both physically and psychologically, and prescribe specific yoga practices for healing and growth. Her down to earth, accessible style of teaching has made her a beloved and highly sought after teacher.
She pioneered the introduction of yoga into the athletic community in 1980, when she became the Wellness Director of the New York Road Runners Club. She continued in that position until 2002, teaching yoga classes in New York City to over 100,000 students in that 22 year period of time.
Beryl coined the term “power yoga” and her Power Yoga classes in New York (and workshops all over the country) were the first and original “power” yoga program. Based on the astanga sequences (Beryl’s personal practice since l979), Beryl adapted the power practice for athletes of all sports, ages, and abilities, which is one of the reasons the program rocketed to success.
Her first book, Power Yoga, was published in 1995 and sold nearly 300,000 copies. She has since then written 3 more books, Beyond Power Yoga (the philosophy of the 8 limbed yoga path), Boomer Yoga (practice for aging athletes), and Yoga for Warriors (written for veterans and men and women in active duty military)