It was about three quarters of the way through my first yoga class that I realised I was going to die. We were in the shoulder stand position and, as a woman with somewhat more than a handful in the chest department, I feared I was on my way to becoming a victim of auto-erotic asphyxiation. After wiggling my way back to a safer savasana pose (lying on your back, not doing much) I accepted two things. First, I was really, really bad at yoga. Secondly, I was completely hooked.
Yoga is having something of a moment. Helped along by the Instagram generation posting filtered shots of their handstand attempts, the West has revised its opinion of yoga. No longer is it the preserve of vegetarians farting happily in the local village hall, the wider benefits of yoga are now being recognised and brought into our daily lives.
The earliest yoga traditions can be traced back around 5,000 years. More than just a physical practice, yoga was about uniting body and mind in a search for spiritual enlightenment. In the 20th century we started to understand it as a physical practice, as a way of toning and shaping our bodies. But if you’re looking for a reason to roll out a yoga mat this International Yoga Day, then by far the best one is the sense of calm your mind will find with it.
As I continued to go to my yoga classes, I noticed a few things happening. For a start, I didn’t really seem to get any better at it. As someone who grew up with the motto, if you can’t win - don’t play, the regular humiliation of literally falling flat on my face once a week should have put me off yoga early on. And yet I stand before you as one of those smug, preachy yoga types who can’t get enough of telling you how it’s transformed their life. It’s dangerous like that.
I also noticed how my reactions to everyday situations started to change, it made me calmer. I’d love to tell you that I no longer roll my eyes at emails, lose my temper at bad drivers or turn into a mad women when people refuse to move down the tube carriage, but it is just yoga, not a miracle. However, studies show that yoga can be so good for controlling moods and calming your responses that new research shows it could be a possible treatment for PTSD. Yoga’s focus on breath gets to the core of how we manage stress.
The recent focus on mindfulness and meditation has highlighted some of the benefits of slowing down our busy lives. However, my experience of it is that there’s nothing more stressful than sitting quietly and trying to tell your mind that in order to destress it needs to not think about the things that are making it stressed. I have the ability to do this for about five minutes before my fight or flight instincts take over and I run for the nearest donut. Yoga, on the other hand, requires a different type of concentration. As with meditation, you focus on your breathing but you put that breath to work. Try standing in Warrior III without a calm and measured breath and you’ll end up wobbling around like a jelly. And the more you think about how much you’re wobbling, the more likely it is you’ll end up on the ground.
Yoga taught me how to get out of my head, to calm my body down and focus on what was working right at that moment, rather than what wasn’t. It taught me how to break the cycle of feeling a bit wobbly, followed by completely collapsing. Instead you learn to get comfortable with discomfort.
It also taught me to be brave. Despite being the worst in my class, and having spent thirty odd years swearing that the most activity I wanted on a holiday was a swim-up bar, I took myself on my own to Vale de Moses, a beautiful yoga retreat in the Portugese mountains. I also stood on a TEDx stage and talked about snorting my way through a shoulder stand. I took more risks in my daily life too, after all if you’re prepared to nearly suffocate yourself each week in a yoga class then everything else becomes a little less scary.
This, for me, is why you should get behind International Yoga Day. Yes, it seems like the commercialisation of a spiritual practice but if it encourages just one person to go a little beyond their comfort zone then it’s a good thing. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go Instagram my handstand.
