Other people’s sweat flicks around the room in drips and spurts. The guy on the mat in front of me leans down to do eagle pose and drips his foot-sweat into my face; my next-door neighbour’s ponytail flicks a stream of sweat onto my mat, like a horse after a race.
The instructors are miked and stand up the front. This could be a military drill. ‘Legs should be like concrete, steel … one piece, unbroken.’ Many of the postures rely on constrictions, where you ‘choke your throat’, then release, gasping for air in the heat.
Afterwards in the change rooms hardly anyone speaks and no one makes eye contact – like a bad one-night stand where you finish up quickly and bolt for the door. But after that first class, something incredible happens to me. Euphoria. And it’s not just the usual endorphin rush, but something akin to a drug high. Everything is as it should be. Everything is beautiful. My mind is calm and my body feels twisted, rinsed and lengthened from the inside out.
I start going two, three, five times a week – as often as I can, just so I can experience that thing on the mat: being drenched in sweat, being born again – the thing that cults or religion or exercise promise and this so viscerally delivers. Each time feels like the first time.
Sometimes in class people cry, or are sick. They try to leave, or they stand up and look disorientated before flopping onto their backs in a recovery posture.
By the end of the first, intensive month, I’m losing weight and feeling strong and everything – particularly my limbs – feels and looks elongated.
I also feel like the yoga is tuning me in to a higher frequency. I start receiving quasi-spiritual, career-orientated messages when I come out of tough poses. It’s like Bikram himself is speaking to me in his gruff, mean way about what I should do with my life. In one class I receive what can only be described as a flood of insight while doing a super-intense backbend. While coming out of the camel pose a very authoritative voice from within commands that I must return to the law and retrain to be a barrister. It is very specific. In the week after the class I buy the textbooks, sign up for the exam to do the Readers’ Course, find a barrister to read with and an office to squat in, and start preparing for the exam. In other words, I up-end my life because of an insight I had in a yoga class. I study civil procedure, evidence law and criminal law for six months before a senior barrister takes me out to lunch to interrogate me on how much I really want to be a barrister. ‘What made you decide to change careers?’ he asks. I do not tell him it was Bikram.
In the end neither the study nor the Bikram stick. After six months I move house, and with the studio an extra two tram rides away, I stop going. Then I move to New York and throw in the study. Nothing I read seems to be retained in my brain.
After I leave Bikram, I remember only the annoying things: my yoga clothes wet and heavy in the bottom of a sports bag, the way they smelt, even after I’d washed them. The way I smelt, even after a shower. The way the studio smelt, and the way its sodden carpet (floorboards were too risky – you could have an accident slipping on the sweat) would always smell of vomit, no matter how much they’d been cleaned. All this gives me reason not to take up Bikram again.
I don’t miss it.
But my body never forgets it. Doing something every day – even for just one month – imprints on my muscles and their memory. Even now, hearing someone say the words ‘standing bow pulling pose’ makes my body instinctively want to bend deeply at the hips. I can do things, move in a certain way, bend and stretch in a way – right back my knees, head to heels – that looks almost like an angel has come into my body and gently removed my ribs. All because of Bikram.
*
Yoga – the activity that is the pathway for many people into the wellness industrial complex – has entered the mainstream in the last decade. Just walk through any city or suburban main street and look up. There’s sure to be a yoga studio up a narrow flight of stairs. Sometimes it’s Bikram, sometimes a generic hot yoga, or hip-hop yoga or hatha. An Ibis market research report from 2015 on the industry in Australia noted the sharp growth of yoga in the last decade. It has now become Australia’s fastest-growing sports, its popularity doubling in the past eight years.
Where I live, in Bondi, there are now a dozen studios, but I remember when there used to be just one – Dharma Shala in North Bondi. The scent of incense and the ocean hung heavy, along with the sweaty, rubbery odour of old yoga mats. Ragged Tibetan prayer flags flapped out the front. Mist drifted in the air and on cold, still nights you could hear the waves crashing against the cliffs at Ben Buckler Point. Young people weren’t represented so much – there were more older men in the class: rich hippies with bad backs who’d spent formative years in India or Bali. They were men of inscrutable spirituality who didn’t come in pony-tailed packs but alone – snakes shedding their skin weekly, doing the moves with a sort of vacillating coiled, uncoiled, coiled intensity, like they’d been doing it forever, like they’d been doing it all their past lives. The practice felt like something deeply private that you just happened to do in public. And this public space was muted: the blinds were drawn, the lights dim, the sounds of the waves high and close, and the room had a hushed, cathedral-like atmosphere of people praying alone. I always felt stretched out and revived after a class. Good was being done, somehow, somewhere in my body. And so I kept going.
Later a really cool organic cafe opened next door, and a different, younger crowd started attending classes – one more conspicuously healthy, cliquey, better dressed and voluble. This was the emergence of a new tribe – a curious blend of hippy and yuppy, a sort of wellness version of the bourgeois bohemians. They saw yoga not just as an exercise class but as a lifestyle. They talked about yoga retreats in Costa Rica over chai tea and green juice, their yoga mats lined, bright and upright, like umbrellas against the door.
This was before the Instagrammers and the #cleaneaters, but this group was a bridge between back then and now, a sort of bellwether for wellness – a wellwether, if you like – that became a model for not just how we should look, and what we should wear, but the rest of it: what we should do and how we should be.
Now the tribe has grown further and the aesthetic that used to belong to just one corner of North Bondi and the wellness capitals of LA, New York, Costa Rica, Ubud and San Francisco has spread out to the suburbs, towns and regions.
It’s activewear as a default uniform, tattoos in Sanskrit or inked lines from Rumi or Beckett (‘Fail again, fail better’), cold-pressed juice bars, salad outlets, breakfast bowls and activated almonds. It’s mindfulness apps, #cleaneating, yoga retreats, yoga teacher training, the fusion between yoga and surfing culture, the Buddha statue in the garden of the glass-and-steel beach house, the $120 yoga mats, the resale market on second-hand Lululemon leggings, the alkalised water, the coconut water, the coconut.
Roy Morgan Research from 2016 said one in ten Australians aged fourteen and over now do yoga, up from one in twenty in 2008 when aerobics ruled.
Today, more than twice as many people do yoga than aerobics. Yoga is also more popular than table tennis, ten-pin bowling, darts, dancing, soccer, cricket, tennis and golf. The proportion of women doing yoga has almost doubled over the period, from 8 per cent to 15 per cent.
The trend is global. According to a Yoga Journal report, 20.4 million people practise yoga in the US, up from 15.8 million in 2008. The yoga market is now worth $30 billion in the US and $80 billion globally.
In 2015 yoga was a $1 billion industry in Australia, employing around 12,000 people in 3000 studios. Many studios now resemble upmarket day spas and cost upwards of thirty dollars for a drop-in class. Recently I went to a studio in Sydney’s Surry Hills and it was like going to a Gold Class cinema, a masseur and an exercise class all at the same time. Enormous screens ran along the wall, showing stunning scenes shot from helicopters or drones – deer running in the wild, a waterfall cascading into a canyon, a flock of birds fanning out in the sky at dusk – while a guy, not the instructor but he
r helper, would walk behind us, rubbing our backs and, in shavasana, giving amazing head massages.
Another studio just around the corner was fitted with expensive speakers that vibrated and sent waves of sound through the floor. There was no music, just this vibration that was meant to interact with your breathing and what the teacher termed ‘internal currents’. Liberally using the forty-five-dollar bottles of Aesop products under the massive showerhead before drying off with an enormous fluffy towel (it was toasty too, like it had just been taken out of the dryer) and repairing to the tastefully furnished lounge to sip tea or coconut water from the terracotta mini-mug (seventy dollars each), I reflected that yoga – once the practice of some of the poorest people on earth – has moved a long way from its origins.
My first yoga class was in 1999 in a country town – one of those taciturn, cold and tough little settlements that faced the Southern Ocean. Roaring winds rolled in from the Antarctic. It had once been a whaling town, but now operated as a deep-sea port with an aluminium smelter. The town – working class, downbeat, rugged and rough – emitted a sort of spooky vibe. Disquiet, an undercurrent of something, was palpable to an outsider like me, alive to nuance and atmosphere in the way only a stranger can be. I had moved to the town for a job, had few friends and no driver’s licence. My work was difficult – I was a graduate lawyer, too young and probably too green to do the cases I was given, at once shockingly overworked and underprepared. You should have seen me in court: best debater’s voice, ill-fitting suit, my legs – docked unsteadily in too-high heels – trembling until I found my rhythm.
There were long nights working after the office had closed: dictating letters, memos, advices, reading stuff, researching stuff, signing stuff. If it was warm, if it was summer, if we felt like it, a few of us would meet in a car park in the last gasps of twilight and drink or pass around joints. In our cheap suits with our bad haircuts, we’d sit in the gathering gloom murmuring about our files and our cases, complain about our clients and their unpaid fees, but fret about them too. What would become of the shoplifter with the heroin problem? Or the beaten wife too scared to get an intervention order? Or the child in the vicious custody battle? Sometimes we’d go to the local tavern, the Truncheon. It was the sort of place you’d read about in the local paper: a stabbing; intoxicated and unreliable witnesses; dark corners used for drug deals; the service of minors (the large sixteen-year-olds on the football team buying cheap trays of shots).
When I first moved there, I lived in a caravan in a park behind psychiatric services (thin plastic mattress, ill-fitting sheets, the claustrophobic feeling, particularly in summer when the caravan would heat up like a tin can, the scary noises late at night, and the way I would literally wake in fright, and in the morning, the strangeness of putting on a suit, stockings and heels after showering in the communal concrete block). Later I moved to a small house with a garden a short walk from the office. Those Thursday nights doing shots at the Truncheon sometimes ended with my being ill in the caravan park toilets or, once I got a house, in the back garden under a bright spill of stars.
But I was twenty-three and always felt okay the next day. Well, I thought I was okay. But these things can burrow in like termites in wood, insides rotting, and you only see the damage years later when the structure falls apart.
That year, the year I first discovered yoga, I was so lost. I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going. I felt constantly incompetent, out of my depth, socially outside of things, trapped in the town, anxious about the future. (Was this it, was this what I had been studying so long for?) That year I put on 15 kilograms, probably from the stress, the drinking, the sedentary work, the despair I saw and felt: the in-and-out of the same cast of characters from court and jail, the unpaid fines, the active warrants, the antipathy of the police, the cynicism of the lawyers, the desolate town and the way the bitter winds would blow down the main street in winter and shut you in for months on end.
In that remote coastal town at the start of the new century, there was no wellness scene; there was no Lululemon, or cold-pressed green juices or $150 yoga mats. The town didn’t even have a bookshop. But it did have yoga. The people in that first yoga class I attended seemed down on their luck – ageing hippies with large, soft bodies who moved slowly through the poses and breathed noisily, like Frank Booth from Blue Velvet, sucking hard from an oxygen canister. But my fellow country yogis were, in their way, ahead of the zeitgeist. They practised yoga, meditated, grew their own vegetables and pickled them, saw naturopaths, believed in organic – all the things the Bondi crew commodified and paid big bucks for twenty years later, calling it ‘wellness’. Nothing is ever new.
In yoga class, everyone wore woollen tracksuits or their gardening clothes. Some of them even wore jumpers. At the end of the class, we covered ourselves in hospital-grade blankets, pulled from a tall cupboard before meditation. The blankets smelt stale and when you unfolded them a cloud of dust would rise, yet being under them was oddly comforting. Nothing about the class was a fashion statement.
The teacher – I still remember him so clearly – had a completely different body shape from all the sporty guys in town. More wiry pipe-cleaner than brick shithouse, he was lean with a straight spine and a small pot belly, like a newly pregnant teen. When he did side angle pose I could see his ribs through his T-shirt. I went with my housemate and we giggled on the way home. What was that thing he kept saying about ‘Ted’s arse Ana’? What was with that? Who was Ted? What was his arse like? We didn’t know then about Sanskrit, that he was saying ‘Tadasana’ (mountain pose) or what any of the poses meant – just that every now and then he’d say ‘Ted’s Arse Ana’ and the class would stand to weary, still attention and settle their laboured breath while we giggled and smirked.
When I was in the studio, the world outside – which seemed stressful, harsh, threatening and hard – would soften and sink. The moon shone in through the high windows; there were candles but no music, just the steady pull and swoosh of the container ships leaving the port and their low, long horns blasting out in a nautical minor key.
Yoga meant moving in a different way from what I was used to. It wasn’t the fast, tight spring of running, or the jarring stop/starts of netball, the hard floors, taller girls looming over you with their right arm outstretched in your face like followers at a fascist rally, the taped nails and shrill whistles, the spotlights and cold nights.
This was gentle and strong, challenging and yielding all at once – just you and your body, no balls or whistles. I was moving things I hadn’t thought about moving before – the inside of my upper arms and my side waist and the inner thigh and the shoulder muscles. After that first yoga class (or lesson, really; it was my first of thousands of lessons), I experienced a feeling I’d never really known before. It was a deep, sleepy and peaceful yet alert feeling, like I’d woken up in another, less fractious kingdom. People talk about an amplified version of this when they take opioids. The Berlin Wall you didn’t even know you had within you falls. (The divided self heals, and only when that happens do you even know it was divided.) Boundaries collapse. Aches and irritations disappear. My whole body coursed with a new and different energy; an inner tension was relieved and I felt attached or at least connected to my physical self in a way that I never had before. That first night I slept so soundly and deeply, it was like every other night of my life had been serving me an inferior product – a sleep without peace.
The spiritual stuff and the Sanskrit would come later, with other teachers. This first time was all about the body.
*
Since my early twenties I’ve been going to yoga – sometimes a lot, sometimes a little. But I’ve always been going to yoga. I usually carried a tote bag around with me containing soft, loose clothing, in case I passed by a nice-looking yoga studio on the way home from work, and decided to drop in for a drop-in class.
I went to yoga in New York, in London, in Berlin, in Bali, in Texas. I went on yoga retrea
ts to Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Healesville, the Blue Mountains, Hawaii and Thailand. I went to yoga in country towns and in Midtown Manhattan. I did yoga outside and inside, in jungles, deserts, gyms, office conference rooms, bedrooms, basements, bars, church halls and in RSL clubs, on beaches, on the grass, on concrete, floorboards and sand.
I did yoga even when I didn’t speak or understand the language spoken by the instructor, when I was sick, and when I was hungover. I did it when I was happy and sad. Fat and thin. Fit and out of shape. Broke and rich. Searching and satisfied.
I wasn’t aligned to any particular school. I did Bikram, hot yoga, hatha yoga, kundalini, vinyasa flow, sound yoga, urban yoga, hip-hop yoga, aerial yoga and heavy metal yoga. I had Hindu, Muslim, atheist, African-American, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Australian, American, Indian, Indonesian and Polish teachers. They were young, old, somewhere in between – hundreds of yoga teachers. I did it all. I did it everywhere. All the time. With everyone.
What results did I get after all those hours of yoga? Well, very little, actually. Apart from my intensive time doing Bikram, it never made me particularly lean – although I always felt more supple after. I just never really got good at it. All those hours did not result in any kind of improvement. I’ve learnt the hard way that I’ll never advance to advanced – I’ll always be checking the timetable for the yin class, the beginners, the basics, the essentials. It turns out that doing something for 10,000 hours doesn’t necessarily make you good at it; it just means you have spent a lot of time on it. For me, yoga was a Sisyphean experience in which I was always struggling to climb the foothills but never really making it to the middle reaches of the range. I was frequently bored, and often frustrated. My body, particularly my arms, hips, shoulders and back (everything above my knees, essentially), lacked the basic flexibility to get into a lot of the poses. I can – still! – barely sit cross-legged. I can’t put my hand on the ground in triangle pose. I can’t do shoulder stand or headstand (but I can do ‘legs up the wall’.) I’m always having to stop and rest, always having to break for water, always making bargains with myself. If I go into child’s pose now then I’ll give it a proper blast of energy at the end. Or: Maybe if I just do a half push-up instead of a full one, no one will notice that I’m not keeping up with the class, or the only one without a tattoo, or the only one wearing cheap sweatpants and a generic T-shirt (my favourite was the baggy green T-shirt I wore after working for a Labor MP in 2010, which reads MICHAEL DALEY – LOCAL AND ACTIVE).
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