When I was a kid, I had a reputation among extended family for being "fey" — an old-fashioned term which can mean having supernatural powers but can also mean "vague as ferk", not so much gifted with clairvoyance as away with the fairies, one of those dreamy kids that are never paying attention.
I didn’t grow up to be a dreamy adult. If anything, I'm a brutal realist and rather inflexible with it, although I’ve been doing a lot of yoga lately so I can be more elastic when lunging for wine.
The Yorkshireman, while not serene, is deeply woo woo, all reiki and sound healing with some grated apricot kernel on top, which seems all the more ridiculous when you know he is also an ice hockey player and loves nothing better than giving ’em the lumber, and slashing, cross checking, submarining and squishing a chirpy player up against the glass without so much as an om shanti om.
Deciding to try as many different kinds of yoga as possible in a fortnight, I first did chanty yoga and, although I was initially afraid to be heard "oooming", really loved it: there was something about the monastic rhythm of the sounds the class made together, the cycling mantras and focused breathing that hypnotised me into a peaceful mental cul-de-sac, away from the current state of the world where everything seems insane all of the time and a lot of people seem to not notice or care.
I did hansa rest, where they swaddle your body in a blanket, tuck a bolster under your knees and cover your eyes with a headwrap, gently pushing down on your shoulders and feet to centre you, leaving you cocooned, shielded, a feeling so powerfully reassuring after a day on the hamster wheel that I floated off somewhere else in my mind — others just went gently to sleep, the red brick studio walls absorbing a few soft snores.
I started to think of yoga as a kind of weight loss — a way to release the heavy mental load we all carry around; worries about the health of your parents, financial stressors, work commitments, wondering if your children are too ADHD to get a job.
I did bendy yoga with a class of fiercely fit women — basically just planking and complicated (for me) instructions: "Bringing your right knee under your left arm, raise your entire body up on your fingertips ..."
My stomach hurt for three days afterwards. I wasn’t sure I had stomach muscles, but it turns out there’s a sixpack buried under the doona. Spirituality is the same, maybe. Always there, somewhere, under a front of world-weary cynicism and the fear of being vulnerable.
Last weekend was the winter solstice, which coincided with international yoga day and Matariki. I considered going to the solstice rave but just don’t have the patience for people being off their heads and talking bollocks in a paddock anymore.
Instead, I convinced the Yorkshireman to come to yoga with me and perved at him a little out of the corner of my eye in a purely holistic way.
Exiting the class all floaty, feeling reset and unburdened, I finally understood what they mean by the phrase "leave everything on the mat" — the idea that you use the practice to release stress and emotional baggage and find contentment with where you are, who you are and what is. I’d achieved the serenity I’d been seeking ... only to pick up my phone and discover Trump had violated international law and plunged humanity into crisis.
Typical. You finally get Zen and some bastard ruins it for you.
