I discovered yoga at a sad time in my life and it helped me.
The classes offered me a space where I could be calm and find peace. Yoga was
the perfect balance to running and my aching muscles thanked me for it. There
were mental and spiritual benefits too. I have tried meditating and found it
difficult to stop the brain chatter. But, after an hour and a half of yoga, my
mind became a more placid creature. I looked forward to the breathing exercises
at the end of the class that help to bring your awareness into the body and
prepare you for the meditation, or Vipassana. I felt a wonderful stillness and
enjoyed the respite from thinking and worrying. There were pauses in-between my
thoughts. I learned that, with practice, these gaps should increase in length
until you can maintain a state of ‘no mind’ for long periods.
My computer is being ironic. I just used the thesaurus to
find a synonym for ‘meditation’ and the first choice it gave was ‘thought’.
Yoga can be an expensive habit. People have been evicted
from their apartments because they blew all the rent money on ‘just one more
vinyasa flow’. They roam around in threadbare leggings with a wild-eyed stare,
clutching their yoga mat and a packet of incense sticks. They cause disruption
and distress by throwing their mat down whenever the urge takes them, in Tesco or the middle of a busy street. Adults gawp and children cry. I was
lucky; my sister used to work at a yoga centre so classes were cheap. The
centre was a nice place but her
experiences of working there were not always of blissful serenity. I imagined
everyone in a yoga centre would spend their time floating around and beaming
at each other. But like in any service industry you have to deal with
challenging people who don’t leave their stresses at the door. It’s strange to
see an irate person in a place designed to encourage self-observation but then it is probably the ones wound tightest who need yoga’s benefits the
most.
Then my sister stopped working at the yoga centre and the
cheap classes came to an end. I was keen to keep up the practice without
spending all my spare cash and ending up downward-dogging in tube stations.
Enter the internet. It’s a free teacher and great for someone who enjoys yoga but is not good enough to self-practice. I
am currently obsessed with a 40-minute ‘energising vinyasa flow’ which is
rewarding without being too difficult. I haven’t mastered the shoulder stand
yet though, and almost destroyed my printer when I toppled over into a stack
of computer equipment.
Thanks to yoga, I
have had success with self-initiated Trauma Release. After a Youtube yoga
session I noticed a trembling in my legs and tried to encourage it. Sure
enough, with deep breathing and patience, the powerful shaking came in waves
through my legs as I lay on my back. It spread up through my body, radiating an
almost sexual feeling from my core. It travelled down my arms, into my hands and up into my jaw, which
locked into a manic gurn.
What a sight I
must have been, lying flat on my back, sweating with my legs shaking wildly. I
imagined my flatmate walking in on me at that moment. He would hardly have been
more surprised if my head then span around 360 degrees and I started vomiting green slime.
