Wellmania

by Brigid Delaney

  In an advanced yoga class in Fremantle, the instructor told me not to come back until I learnt the basics. ‘But I’ve been going to yoga for six years!’ I told him.

  On retreat in Sri Lanka, the instructor, a man of enormous strength, grunted, strained then dropped me onto the ground when he was demonstrating a pose where he had to lift me into a backbend. People watching winced; it was like seeing an Olympian attempt a deadlift and give himself a collapsed disc with the effort. In Bali I injured myself during yoga – not from the practice itself but from not looking where I was going and walking into an offering. Knocking over a candle and a bowl of oil, I skidded across the floor on the oil slick as rows of yogis looked on, trying not to laugh.

  But I kept going back because I knew it was good for me. Even if I didn’t seem to be progressing – not even an inch further in my standing bow-pulling pose – when I stopped doing it (and I stopped and started plenty of times), I got as bent-over and stiff as an elderly woman. It was like a little taste of the arthritis I was sure was to come.

  So I kept going back and I kept sitting on the mat in the back row, gritting my teeth until it was over and I could get my reward – shavasana, known as the corpse pose, when the body feels as if it is sinking into the floor (through the wood, through the concrete, into the soil), when there are waves of energy that dance across my body, like light moving across water, when a deep feeling of peace and a quiet, stillness in the mind descends and the words of Tibetan lama Nyoshul Khenpo Rinpoche spring to mind:

  Rest in natural great peace

  This exhausted mind,

  Beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thoughts

  Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves

  In the infinite ocean of Samsara.

  That was me – beaten helpless by neurotic thoughts. Wasn’t that all of us?

  It is 2016 and yoga is my only form of exercise. I’ve got into a comfortable groove, doing just enough to stop my body from ossifying but not enough to effect any meaningful physical change. My practice is stagnant at around two classes a week, and I despair that I will never, even after fifteen years, go beyond the beginner classes.

  Meanwhile all around me, they are multiplying – ‘they’ being the bourgeois boho yogis popping up like gremlins all over my neighbourhood. They are so much better at yoga than me and I wonder what they have that I don’t.

  For a start, they look different. Most people I see walking around Bondi have stopped wearing proper clothes. Unless you are around the bus stops in time for the morning commute, people dress almost solely in exercise gear – yoga pants, singlet top and hoodie, thongs in the summer, trainers in winter. The look is casual and sporty – but also relaxed and, I don’t know … wealthy. As if they are too rich to care about getting properly dressed.

  And they must be rich. They’re not chained to the man, waiting for the bus at 8am, having to wear some scratchy, uncomfortable suit to work. Instead, these are people who have enough time to do lots of exercise classes and enough money to buy the stretchy pants that often cost upwards of $110. They loiter in the aisles of the organic fruit and vegetable shop, their yoga mats hitting me in the face when they turn around. They zip around the narrow streets by the beach on mopeds or bicycles and, after class, gather around the large communal tables of cafes, sipping ten-dollar juice in mason jars or almond milk chai. And they are lean. Not just skinny, but finely muscled. It’s a fit-looking leanness.

  I see them – bright and early down at the beach with their dogs and surfboards and boyfriends and babies, or meditating on the concrete bit at South Bondi at dawn, or at Icebergs on a Sunday afternoon drinking chilled white wine and eating oysters – and think to myself, I’ll have what she’s having.

  This manifestation of wellness encompasses not just good health and vitality but also spirituality and wisdom. It looks casual and effortless. This is the Good Life incarnate. But how to get there? Where to start?

  Then, after yoga class one day, I see a flyer in my studio for a six-week program called the Modern Yogi Project. It promises exactly what I have been longing for! It is the transformation from normal, unenlightened schmuck to glowing, well, bendy, wise yogi.

  I sign up immediately, pay a couple of hundred dollars and buy a hefty textbook. For the next six weeks I will be practising yoga six times a week, meditating daily, doing a mini-detox, attending Monday-night classes, journalling and undertaking a batch of ‘self-inquiry’ questions. I will shake up, examine, replenish and re-energise my mind, body and spirit, and then emerge, butterfly-like, a ‘modern yogi’. I will also emerge lean. That is the hope, but I wouldn’t be so superficial as to mention it out loud. It is a deeper transformation that is dangled before us.

  *

  So day one, Monday night, and we are all sitting in a circle, on bolsters, covered in blankets, holding copies of Modern Yoga – the prescribed textbook allocated by the yoga school, Namaste Dudes. There are thirty-two other people in the room – all but two are women. They look glowing, healthy and fit already. They do not need to be here, surely. Everyone is in activewear, with many wearing the expensive multicoloured yoga pants only sold in sizes ten and down. In the middle of the circle is a bowl of fruit, which could be either healthy snacks or some sort of offering. ‘Did you bring an offering?’ I ask the girl beside me.

  Adam Whiting, our facilitator, asks us why we are here. ‘Two words, you’ve got two words,’ he says. Adam wears his longish hair in a man bun, is American and is also, as many yoga instructors are, gorgeous. Already he’s told us that he doesn’t keep his electronic devices in his bedroom and that for the first two hours of his waking day, from 6am to 8am, he doesn’t look at social media. He meditates every day, and at 3.33pm, no matter where he is, he stops what he is doing and gives thanks. He says a little prayer of gratitude and invites others who are with him to do the same.

  I have so many questions for him already. What does he use for an alarm? Or does he just wake up naturally? How does he resist the temptation to check his emails once he is in the same room as his devices? What does he do for those two hours without his devices? Why 3.33? I raise my hand and ask him a couple of questions (FYI, he has an alarm clock – the old-fashioned, battery-operated kind) but we have to keep moving because all thirty-three of us have to give our names and then answer the maybe unintentionally really existential question of ‘Why are you here?’

  Why am I here?

  WHY AM I HERE?!

  The answers tumble out like truncated Zen koans, like unanswered prayers, like fragments of bathroom mirror affirmations, as we go around the circle.

  Settling.

  Connection.

  Believe.

  Freedom.

  Letting go.

  Surrender.

  Love myself.

  Some of these are answers I wouldn’t expect this group of very good-looking and fit people to give (many of the people taking the challenge are already practising yoga three to four times a week). They are words that hint at a dark sort of hinterland, a well of pain, a private struggle.

  Self-love. Self-acceptance. On it goes. There is a quiver in some voices.

  Yoga, out of all forms of exercise, promises the most in terms of healing: both inside and out. People go to yoga with broken bodies and broken hearts and give themselves up to the practice and its healing potential in the way that they don’t in, say, Zumba or CrossFit or F45.

  My two words are ‘turn up’. Adam laughs, but it isn’t really a joke – I am here to turn up. For a start, anyway, what I want from the project is to attend the project. I want to – need to – turn up. I am forever paying for courses but dropping out when my interest wanes. These programs promise on some level to change my life, or start me on a new path, and I would – like tonight – commence them full of energy and commitment but then flag around the start of the second week, before going back to my unhealthy, bad old ways.

  This time, though, this time will be different.


  *

  Yoga originated in India in the seventh century BCE. It encompasses physical and mental exercises, breathing techniques and meditation. In the Bhagavad-gita, a 700-verse Hindu scripture in Sanskrit, Krishna defines three branches of yoga: karma yoga (the yoga of action), bhakti yoga (the yoga of devotion) and jnana yoga (the yoga of knowledge). Most in the West are aware only of the first of these, also called hatha yoga. According to writer Suketu Mehta in the New York Times, our definition of yoga as a purely physical form is erroneous and limiting: ‘Volunteering at a soup kitchen is yoga; raising your voice in praise in a gospel choir is yoga; trying to understand how the galaxies shift and why the poor lack shoes is also yoga.’

  Modern yoga, as practised in the West today, is predominantly a physical practice, comprising a series of shapes, poses and breathing exercises. But Western yoga has evolved into a philosophical system that makes suggestions for ways of living and provides a framework for personal growth, reacting to the world and taking responsibility. Due to these doctrinal elements, for many it is less an exercise class and more like religion.

  In many ways, yoga is the perfect pastime for our age – the meditative elements give us the opportunity to find peace and stillness in this increasingly hectic and crowded information age, the instructional bits (which I refer to as ‘nuggets of truth’) give moral lessons in the absence of traditional religion, while the stretchy, bendy, sweaty physical stuff is a great way of countering eight, nine, ten hours a day spent hunched over a computer.

  I like yoga teacher and blogger J. Brown’s fairly straightforward assessment of why we should do yoga:

  The ultimate goal of yoga is to be well and appreciate life. The breathing and moving exercises we do are nothing more than a way of easing discomfort and encouraging conducive perspective. In turn, practice also tends to facilitate intimacy, strengthen relationships and make life more enjoyable. This practical application of yoga has always existed and ought not be obscured by zealots or profiteers.

  Of which – like in every area of the wellness industry – there are many. But more on that later.

  *

  On that first, cold Monday night, Adam moves about the semi-darkened room, talking about the next six weeks. It won’t be all smooth sailing, he says. Around week three or four ‘it’s going to be, “Holy shit, I’m tired and I can’t focus on meditation,” and all these things are going to be coming up and there’s going to be a sense of failure. Throw that away right now! We are using the asana to move towards unwavering contentment, bliss and peace.’

  The asana he is referring to is the physical aspect of the practice – the poses, such as downward-facing dog.

  ‘We self-understand through yoga. The tools yoga will teach us can create an enlightened life, and an enlightened life means a fulfilled life – to touch into unwavering contentment. It’s crazy to think that’s possible, to have this unwavering contentment deep inside throughout the unending turbulence of life. We’re going to talk about how to access this.’

  The access is mainly through yoga and meditation, though Adam stresses that the meditation is the main game, and he’d prefer us to miss a yoga session than stop meditating daily. Meditation, he says, ‘is like taking a bullet train to bliss’. Through meditation you can connect with the ‘animating force that moves all of us and connects all of us on earth. If you follow your heart and the laws of the Dharma, that (collective) energy is there to do your bidding. When that happens, the path is laid out and the universe unfolds.’

  Adam mentions the poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson and his belief that ‘the world makes way for the man who knows where he is going’.

  ‘Sounds amazing, like “yeah, I want that”. But what it means is that you have to have a meditation practice, preferably before the sun rises. Wake up at 6am and don’t touch any electronic devices until 8am.’

  I contemplate buying a digital alarm clock. The first thing I do when I wake up, before my eyes have even properly opened, is check Instagram, then Twitter, then Facebook, then emails. Repeat. The social media cycle of my day is an unhealthy feedback loop of consuming, commenting, then posting content back into the vast, relentless digital matrix. The cycle starts early and finishes late. I usually do one or two Instagram and Facebook posts a day, but on Twitter I am nuts. Since 2009 I have tweeted 45,000 times in a sort of digital and public extension of my internal monologues and half-formed thoughts. I wish I could banish the phone from my bedroom, like Adam has. Right now the little screen is my good morning and my goodnight. I sleep with it beside me. Checking it is an addiction – but, of course, I’m not the only one.

  *

  On day two, I start with a yin class. I like yin. It’s soft and slow and when it’s over, I have usually dropped into a lovely soporific state. Poses are held for forty-five seconds to two minutes, or longer if you’re advanced. Heavy-limbed deep sleep and sweet dreams follow. The class involves no sudden moves, no exertion; instead you drape yourself over cushions, folded-up blankets and bolsters like you are an injured ballerina fallen to the floor. The stretch – which the instructor keeps referring to as working the fascia (the connective tissue) – can feel deep and juicy.

  I had forgotten how soothing yin could be. An acoustic piano plays from the instructor’s iPod while I get into pigeon pose (my head and neck bent over the long bolster, my left knee tucked under me and my right leg stretched out behind me) and I think, Ah, yes. I can do this – just lie here, only somewhat uncomfortably, for two minutes on each side, breathing into my slightly rank bolster in the darkened room while the same two chords of a piano circle overhead like some sort of aural string of prayer beads. I am not sweating; I’m not even moving – yet in this almost stationary practice there is still some work happening. My breath is becoming laboured and my glute muscles are starting to ache. This pose is a hip opener. Many teachers, over many years, have said the hips are where you store your emotions and sometimes, in this pose, it’s normal to cry. Not just cry but sob. They call it a ‘release’.

  The room is dark. I listen out for soft sobbing but hear none. I used to not believe the teachers. What do you mean our hips store emotion? It sounds dumb, like saying our right leg is the place memories are stored. It’s true that the body is a storage facility, but for material things: our fat, blood, bones, organs, cells. Even if you accept the premise that our bodies store emotion (according to author Louise Hay and scientist Bruce Lipton, physical symptoms are evidence of what is going on in your unconscious mind), why the hips?

  Wellness website Naturally Savvy calls the hips ‘the body’s junk drawer’. They are the body’s stabilisers, ‘but they also serve as storage units that house sad memories, financial fears, relationship woes and family issues. By taking the time each and every day to focus ample attention on the hips, you’ll release anxiety, fear, depression and sadness.’

  Okay … but what is it about leaning deeply over your calf for two minutes in a room full of strangers that causes these old, stored emotions to be released? It seems witchy, superstitious, pseudo-science.

  Yet sometimes, after a very bad week, I’ve bent my body over my calf – just like everyone else in the class – and felt a spontaneous welling, something not coming from my hips but from my belly, and just started sobbing, naturally, as if a valve has been opened. One pant leg is sopping wet, getting covered in snot and tears. You’re down there, your face mashed against your leggings, back and belly quaking, and you can feel the sadness move through you, less like a dance or an exorcism and more like the back-and-forth pull of a king tide breaking on a retaining wall. You hope the aural piano loop or the Bon Iver or Damien Rice song they always play is loud enough to mask the sounds. You hope everyone else in the room is also sobbing so that it drowns out your own noises. In the dark, across those long minutes, where parts of you are simultaneously stretched and compressed, something is being released.

  I ask Adam Whiting about the connection between emotion and the physiolo
gy of poses such as pigeon. Why do people get teary during this pose?

  ‘I did a little bit of research about why that is, past the surface level of releasing muscle of the hips, which allows for a better locomotion,’ he says.

  Adam thinks we can look at the phenomenon in a few different ways. From the perspective of the chakra system, ‘if there is a blockage of the root chakra, prana or energy can be released into the body when we stimulate the area with movement, intention, stretch or awareness.’ This can result in a release of emotion or sensation. But there is also the physiological release:

  If you look at the musculature of the iliopsoas (which gets worked during hip openers), it’s amazing how dynamic it is. It’s been called the muscle of the soul. The lower portion comes into contact with the femur, which has to do with movement; the mid portion runs behind all the reproductive and digestive organs; the upper portion attaches into the vertebrae and is deeply connected to the diaphragm. This muscle comes into play in locomotion, digestion, reproduction, protection, breathing and the autonomous nervous system.

  It’s one of those muscles that can be consciously connected to the nervous system but can also bypass the conscious thoughts of the brain and move more towards the reptile brain. So to be able to manipulate this muscle in a yoga pose is really important.