Generally speaking, I think most people go to a yoga class in order to feel better. Just a small, quiet moment of the sort that doesn’t come from a bottle – and not necessarily accompanied by several lectures on Vedantic philosophy accompanied by a dose of teetotalitarian teetotalism as of immediate effect.
It can feel, quite frankly, utterly overwhelming if you’re just attempting to calm a frazzled nervous system with something less likely to destroy your liver or cognitive faculties over the long term. And these days, if you’re not careful, helping folk take a bit of a rest in Savasana (corpse pose) might get you put onto some sort of radicals’ watch list.
And most definitely if your sartorial choices lean towards the beautifully swishy and ethereal, as this recent article by the BBC seems to suggest.
Back in May 2005, while between jobs, I undertook the Sivananda Teacher Training Course (TTC) in rural Dorset. This involved just over 200 hours over 30 days of intensive yoga, vegetarian food, classes in Vedantic philosophy and a spiritually transformative bout of food poisoning. I didn’t even know if I really wanted to be a yoga teacher. But since graduation from university, life had become an uncomfortable hop from one job to the next, that first break into a paid, professional publishing job still an elusive dream. It had me contemplating my own existence – the Who, What, When, Where, and Whys of it all.
It sounded so good on the website: a month of yoga, meditation, chanting and vegetarian food. A person would surely emerge mentally uplifted, emotionally balanced and spiritually sound, armed with a qualification to invoke the same state of elevation in others by means of a few bends, inhalations and exhalations.
Wouldn’t they?
Each day of that month was very like the day before, and the day after much the same: 5:00am start, followed by two hours of group meditation and then two hours of yogic asanas (postures). 10:00am meant breakfast, which was never enough to fill you up. 11:00am, an hour’s lecture, followed by another hour of meditation, and then two more hours of asanas and an hour on yoga theory. Then you had an hour to yourself, which – if you had the energy – you could spend walking around the grounds. 6:00pm, time for supper, a perfectly balanced Ayurvedic meal from the Groundhog Day menu: reheated undercooked rice, beans and salad that was never quite enough. Then 7:00pm to 8:00pm, a lecture on yoga philosophy, a seamless prelude to sleep. Fall into bed at 9:00pm each night, slightly hungry and totally exhausted. Get up at 5:00am and do it all over again, rinse and repeat for another thirty days. By then, your body is cannibalising itself to stay alive. We were all given the same clothes to wear: a regulation yellow yoga school T-shirt and a pair of baggy, bright white yoga trousers.
The asana classes were taken by Swami Kalisthaninidando (not his real name – or his real swami name, either), who’d bark out instructions to his faithful in his heavy German accent: “Trikonasana!” “Dhanurasana!” “Savasana!” (triangle, bow, and corpse poses, to you and I). Like Catholic holy men who insist on using Latin as their universal language, the swamis used Sanskrit terms as the lingua franca of yoga. Others might argue that it’s a series of grunts, groans and sighs.
As yoga teachers in training, the ability to baffle and alienate any future students we might have one day was paramount, obviously.
Over dinner one day (another plate of reheated Groundhog Day rice), he told us how his grandparents had been indoctrinated by the Nazis in the 1930s; our earlier smirking now feeling rather... sour. Perhaps his choice to lead the life of an abstemious swami was his way of dealing with intergenerational trauma. Although he called it his ‘karma’.
Yes, that reheated rice was certainly memorable for a few of us that month, the chosen ones, who spent several days no further than a metre away from a shower or toilet.
“Detoxification,” the swamis called it, smiling serenely, hands in prayer.
Me, back then I called it food poisoning: your prayers won’t save you, but Pepto-Bismol might. But modern medications were frowned upon by the swamis:
“You must let your body deal with it naturally.”
Nearly two hundred years of modern medicine and research – apparently all for nothing. Those white yoga trousers? A complete liability.
Very, very fortunately, no ambulances had to be called, and the detox-afflicted all made it to the end of the month. The paperwork I'd signed never said it was going to be easy, nor promised that anyone with basic food health and safety skills would be doing the catering for that matter.
And me? Still alive. Still practising yoga, although I’ve not taught a class since 2008. I still do yoga and meditation because you really don’t want to see what happens if I don’t (it tends to end up in a position called ‘The Downward Spiral’).
And I still can’t wear yellow.
On reflection, some 18 years later, what I could have done was to use the one day off granted to the lightheaded each week more wisely. I could have gone into the local town (Wimborne Minster) and bought non-perishable food and canned supplies, the kind of long-life thing that doesn’t need to go in the fridge. Condensed milk; Complan; energy bars even. Yep. Before the time had come to reconnect the car* battery, get the engine going again (it had been sat there for an entire month, the poor little thing), and drive like a bat out of hell to a glass of wine and a plate of fish and chips 4 hours' drive away.
* It was my first car: a beaten-up 1991 Nissan Micra that I’d bought with the remains of my student loan. That thing had a driver's door held together with gaffer tape and putty but it got a person from A to B.
ALL WORDS COPYRIGHT | © Anya Hastwell | Sunday 10th September 2023