The contemporary world of yoga can be split into three sections: a spiritual practice, harking back thousands of years – an ancient Hindi tradition as a path to enlightenment; a physical exercise, celebrated for its ability to strengthen the body and relax the mind; and now the commercial aspect. It’s become a billion-dollar industry of retreats, designer tights and Instagram-perfect, #fitspo-promoting, celebrity yogis. Once the butt of hippie-related jokes (as in the damning lyric of Jimmy Buffett’s If You Like Pina Coladas: ‘If you’re not into yoga, if you have half a brain’), yoga is now big business.
Combining all three aspects of modern-day yoga is the Wanderlust festival, brought to Australasia by American Jacque Halstead and her Kiwi husband Jonnie. The first full New Zealand event was held last year, with almost 5000 yoga fans flocking to Lake Taupo for four days of music, yoga, meditation, lectures and mindfulness.
The Halsteads, who have three young children and split their time between Seattle and Auckland, timed their entrance into the yoga world perfectly.
Taking the plunge
“For a while, we both thought, ‘I don’t think a yoga festival would work,” Halstead says. “But once we’d done some research on yoga in New Zealand and Australia, we saw it was the fastest-growing sports industry.”
Halstead had moved from the US to New Zealand after being bitten by the travel bug “right around Lord of the Rings time”, so she made Wellington her home base for a few years, taking yoga classes and working in hospitality in between overseas trips. It was while working at popular Wellington restaurant The Matterhorn that she met Jonnie, who was co-owning a nightclub and producing music festivals. They fell in love, she got pregnant, and they both wanted to do something of meaning with their lives after their first child was born.
“It’s a catalyst for change, having a child,” Halstead says.
“I started to reflect on the legacy we’re leaving. I was looking to open a yoga studio and Jonnie was looking to produce a green festival, so it kind of happened serendipitously that someone recommended we check out Wanderlust.”
The couple had originally aimed to produce just one Wanderlust festival in New Zealand, but have now produced several festivals across Australia and New Zealand. The original Wanderlust started back in 2009 in Squaw Valley in the US, when three university friends wanted to create a good-time event that was also ‘personally transformative’.
There are a lot of people signing up to be transformed – with numbers hitting 20,000 for some of the bigger festivals in the US
“It’s different from your normal, hedonistic festival,” says Halstead, noting the average attendee as a 34-year-old, female, well-educated ‘conscious consumer’. “It’s people of your own age, all laughing and crying together. It’s also a credible music festival – you can have a boogie and have a glass of wine.”
The tagline for the festival is ‘Find your true north’, a call, as Halstead puts it, to ‘bring more mindfulness to the urban and mainstream audience’. What was once fringe is now embedded into our culture. The Eastern practice has become an antidote to Western schedules – teaching us mindfulness, lowering blood pressure and quieting our buzzing brains. Halstead wryly acknowledges that in the madness that comes with organising the festival, it can be a little hard to practise what you preach, but being able to create something that brings so much joy helps, she says.
Antidote to stress
While competitive regimes like boot camps put the fear of God into your fitness routine, yoga seeks to create a calm, safe space from stress. So it’s little wonder that until recently it has attracted a mostly female crowd.
“It’s not about how fast and how hard you can go,” Halstead says. “It’s how calm you can be, how long can you hold it. The female nature fits it well – men can find it more frustrating.”
The spiritual aspect is also interesting. We’re more secular than ever, yet many of us are picking a physical practice that ends with hands in prayer. Is yoga filling a void in our soul, as well as our body?
“There are a lot of parallels between yoga and most religions,” Halstead agrees. “It’s about spirituality and whatever form you find it.”
Even in restrained, ‘let’s not draw attention to ourselves’ New Zealand, the wild emotional abandonment one expects from Americans slowly occurs at Wanderlust.
“The first day is funny; it’s a little subdued,” Halstead says. “By Saturday, you’re hugging everyone that you see.”
