Om Shanti Shanti Shanti

The Yoga Point

Each time I practice, there's a set-piece that occurs and it gets more noticeable if I haven't practiced for a while. It goes like this: first up is Suryanamaskara A, the shorter sun salutation. I find this all well and good, fairly straight-forward now I've been practicing the full Primary Series to the accompaniment of David Swenson's (utterly humbling) DVD - boy, how good is he!

By the time I reach the fifth repetition, I'm a little exercised but a long way from tired, unlike when I first began when I'd need to take Child's Pose between every vinyasa. Then I move into the longer Suryanamaskara B whose movements for some reason I enjoy less. By the time I reach about the 3rd repetition, I reach what I'm beginning to call "The Yoga Point".

Let me explain. Since I left school I've been shy of exercise and sport. I don't really know why, because I actually enjoy physical exercise. Maybe it's just that I never found the right form, or maybe it's just that I always felt there was something else (so much!) to do, like read a book, talk to a friend, learn something that might help me be better at work, whatever. It built up over the years into a kind of dread of doing exercise, which I still can't rationalise. Maybe I need my misery and see sport as something that would end it? I really don't know.

But even now that I've discovered Ashtanga Yoga and absolutely love it, I find it difficult to get to the front of my mat. David Swenson in fact says, simply but sagely, that the most difficult thing is getting to the front of the mat. Maybe I just fear I'm so unfit (despite evidence to the contrary) that it'll be beyond me, and so avoidance is the best thing. Don't ask me, I never asked to be here in this body and even as its owner, I am none the wiser.

During the first few Suryanamaskara A's this feeling stays with me. When I reach the fifth repetition, I admit to myself that I'm actually slightly enjoying it - but am not looking forward to Suryanamaskara B, because I have a poor sense of balance and wobble as I bend my knees and look up. There's a conflict inside me, you're unfit, you're going to sweat like an animal, you'll never be fit, just give up and go back to your book or computer - versus a growing feeling that I'm enjoying it.

At what I can only think to call "The Yoga Point", suddenly it all changes, the challenge is great, I feel connected from fingertip through to toe and this incredible mental clarity emerges, as if all the worries and shackles of my life no longer matter, as if something has thrown off my mental chains. This happens with such predictability that I'm surprised that right before my practice I'm still stuck in my state of dread. It's as if within me there two people - the avoider and doubter, versus the spiritually-ravenous seeker, and yoga is the thing that connects one to the other.

What's intriguing though is that this doesn't feel like an endorphin rush. I've been in a few endorphin-laden situations in my life and suspect I know enough to distinguish between a chemically-induced high and the burning-off of my mental fog. The distinction is that there's no euphoria here, there's no tingling sensation - just a gorgeous sense of deep and controlled calm. I feel clean and pure inside, particularly (for some reason) in my mouth and all around my nasal cavity. I understand anecdotally that I'm not alone in feeling this, but what I do wonder is how many other people experience such a dramatic "switch" from a state of fairly deep and stodgy lethargy into a sense of mental clarity, and so soon into a practice.

Any ideas?

From Beery to Yogi

Four weeks ago, I was a balding, overweight thirty-something. This was not what I planned, but what I feared.

Although not unwell, I was desperately unhappy with my state of health. Something has been tugging at my mind for years, about how if I didn't get in shape, I wouldn't live a long, happy life.

My life since leaving school, though, has witnessed countless false starts to health. At school, I'd been initially sporty, trying rugby and rowing, but quickly suffered from various health irritations, such as tinosinovitis, Osgood-Schlatter's Disease, all related to too much exertion on a frame that was growing too fast, or just simply forms of exercise to which I was unsuited. So my closing years at school saw me doing no real exercise, which at the time I was quite pleased about. My grandpa had always told me, half seriously, that he never exercised because "exercise numbs the mind." I was never sure what to make of this, but I felt content that my medically-condoned inactivity was not at odds with his comment, jestful or not.

Actually, that's not quite true. When I was 17, I came across a strange Indonesian martial art called Kateda (check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kateda for a good overview). It involved little in the way of impact, so I signed up and found that enjoyed it. In particular, I enjoyed its focus on breathing control and dynamic postures. Thing is, it imploded in a mysterious tale of intrigue, complete with rumours of cultishness and financial weirdness. And anyway, there were no classes where I then went to university, so I gave it up. No rowing or rugby at university for me, of course, so I spent four blissful years doing nothing at all in the way of exercise. But within the bliss, there was guilt.

So then, I started working. I got myself a graduate job with one of the big companies in London and got stuck into the the hard-working, hard drinking culture. The guilt sat there, behind the haze of alcohol and long hours, calling my name, and pointing to the other graduates who managed to work, drink and exercise. If they could manage it, so went my reasoning, and if I'm as good as they are, then surely I can exercise too. Quit whining, I told myself, and do something about it. So, inevitably, I joined a gym.

I went twice in a year. It was horrendous. Everyone screwing up their faces, looking like they were forcing themselves to "get through" their workouts, rather than savouring and enjoying them. And there was lots of eyeballing of each others' routines and the amount of weight you loaded up and general gym poseurishness. It felt mechanical, rudimentary and most of all enormously unnatural. Who knows why we're really here, but I don't need persuading that whoever or whatever created us didn't intend us to work out in gyms.

Fast-forward a decade from graduation, blow a tornado through several other jobs with fast-lane companies, and stop somewhere in the mid-2000's, and I find that I'm a (slightly) balding, definitely overweight 30-something. Not monstrously out of shape, but a decade of work in London has nonetheless chewed me up and spat me out, wealthier but unhealthier than I imagined.

Now cue the career sabbatical and figure, what gives? When I return to what I used to do, do I inevitably head back to a life of unfitness, digestive issues and spiritual malaise, or do I head back to the gym and get through the pain barrier of actually going in the hope that I'll find a routine that I enjoy and stick to? Nah, that doesn't work. The gym effort failed because it's not "me", so there must be something else.

You know, sometimes things happen for a reason. We go to school, nose-up on some stuff in books, maybe go to university, nose-up on some more stuff, and then head to work, head full of Newtonian cause-and-effect, and ideas about how, after the Enlightenment, we've figured most of the hard stuff out and that there's really not much to life than, well, birth, school, work and death.

It's easy to have this idea that life is some kind of conveyor belt, where we steadily move from infancy, through childhood, to kidulthood, adulthood, then seniority and finally dotage, and that somehow along the way we'll pick up this thing they call "wisdom". But that's not really my experience. Perhaps it's because I'm only child of a single parent and I've always had to figure things out for myself, but I never bought into that script. It just didn't seem to fit and, well, it didn't answer the nagging question about why some people figure it out better than others. Even conventionally super-smart people make a mess of their own lives sometimes, and some people who don't do so well academically "get ahead" in a way that their more academic peers never manage.

I've concluded, so far, that success and happiness are actually most of all to do with how well you listen to what life is trying to tell you. Robert Kiyosaki explains this idea in his excellent book "Rich Dad, Poor Dad". At one point Rich Dad gets philosophical and says that when things don't work out the way you want, it's basically life shoving you around and saying "hey, listen". At this point, many people don't listen but instead get angry - with themselves, or worse, with someone else who they end up blaming for their misfortune. In my opinion, understanding the correlation between blaming others and the persistence of one's problems is one of the key lessons in life.

This is relevant to the story I'm about to relate. There I was in a fashionable bar in London, last summer I think, drinking a beer I didn't particularly like when I got a tap on my shoulder. I turned round and was met by a girl saying "you don't know who I am, do you?"

Well, actually, I knew instantly who she was, an old friend from university that I hadn't seen in too many years, and said as much. As we filled in the missing years, I learned that she had jacked in her career and now ran a holistic healthcare company, which focuses on yoga as a means to helping people to a new way of caring for themselves. I was impressed at her decisiveness and, in fact, at the concept itself.

A light went on several months later and I realised that my poor shape was not, in fact, a result of the work I did or anything else. It was, in fact, because I had never found something I was happy to pursue and it was always easier going out for a beer with my friends than it was to force myself to go the swanky, expensive gym that I was still a member of and yet had not been to for 18 months. I understood that my issue with health had always been blaming the hours I worked or my general fatigue as the reason I didn't make it to the gym. This was the "low state" of blaming and anyway, exercise numbs the mind. Re-meeting my friend showed me that this was all wrong, and inspired me to find out more.

Talk about "guilt money" and a good business model, though. The various gyms I had failed to attend had been freely given many thousands of pounds over the years, and I continued to pay the monthly subscription because it was too painful to admit that I would never go. I preferred to pay my sub and labour on under the illusion that one day I would find a formula for making myself go. They got the money, I never went. I never even caused their gym any wear-and-tear; they just got "free money" in return for providing me just with an opporunity to work out that I never took. Perhaps it was seeing other naked men that was so off-putting. Being of the straight persuasion, and for some reason never having liked communal changing rooms, I find the sight of naked or mostly-naked men parading around in changing rooms really quite unpleasant. If nature is so kind as to give us men the pleasure of female companionship, why look at men?

So anyway, my friend gently (and cleverly) kept in touch, finally suggesting that I join her on one of her yoga-and-chilling extravaganzas. Funny, because I'd been pretending all along that I might buy a place on one of them as a present for my mum, when really I was interested for myself. She's a clever girl and sussed me right out, I guess. Since I packed things in back in my old hard-nosed career, I've tried to be a lot more open-minded about what I will and won't do. Remeeting my friend was life "shoving me around", I realised - right here, right now. So three weeks ago my new self startled my old self by checking in at Gatwick for a flight to a place I'd never been before.

And that was it - two weeks of twice-daily yoga, meditation, organic food and daily treatments from a cleverly-designed "menu", all in 30+ degree heat and 70+ percent humidity. And I hadn't been to the gym in nearly two years. Wouldn't it be agony? Would I get hurt? What I come back home looking like Gandhi??

And yet, from the first yoga session, I was hooked. Completely, utterly, hopelessly hooked. It felt like "coming home" and where in the gym there was boredom and drudgery, here there was fascination, beauty and a feeling of "connection" with the mists of time. Oh, and a lot of sweat, but that wasn't too bad. It was a bit like Kateda too, that weird martial art I did as a teenager.

Three weeks on, I've just returned from a yoga class and the buzz is as clear and strong as out on the yoga retreat. I'm still very much a newbie but happy with the progress I've made, being comfortable with the bulk of Astanga's Primary Series. But hey I'm under no illusions that I'll be David Swenson in a month. There's a life-time, perhaps, of learning ahead that I'm looking forward to. But I'll use other entires to explore precisely what it is that has hooked me so much.

Yoga is not limited to physical practice. If you study it in depth, you'll study a moral code too. Yoga's "Eight Limbs" teach that we should be generous and considerate and that we should not hoard wealth. To that extent, I decided to share my experiences with this blog.

I started this blog not as an exercise in parading myself in public however, but in the hope that my words might resonate with others out there, grappling with the same predicament of over-work, over-beer and under-something. (Did I mention feeling like an alien when hearing people talk about celebrities and Big Brother?) As the blog develops, I'll try to convey something of what yoga means to me and the effects I get from it, not just in the class but elsewhere in the day. But since this blog is not about me and my life and not an attempt to become a celebrity blogger, I'll keep focus away from irrelevant personal details as much as poissible. Let me know if I stray.

And please, be under no illusions that I've turned into a crystal-wearning New Ager, not that I have anything against such people. Quite the reverse, I actually feel more "me", better able to cope with everything that I was already doing before and not at all ready to sell all my possessions and move to India. I'm going to carry on running my company, dealing with all the same issues as before, but with a deep sense of emotional balance and calm that I don't recall feeling before.

In short, my brief but intense experiences over the last few weeks have made me believe not that I found yoga, but that yoga found me - me as I am. It just made me better at being me. I hope this blog might inspire you to have a look into yoga and that it might do the same for you.