Wellmania

by Brigid Delaney

  *

  Despite being not very good at yoga, over the years I have felt that it’s been beneficial, for the reasons Adam touched on – you are moving parts of your body that were previously stagnant, and stimulating blood flow. Yoga has helped me sleep better, and seems to balance out my equilibrium. I like that it forces me to concentrate for an hour or more, and then at the end, gives me the space to let go.

  I need the discipline. I am always overthinking things, hyper-stimulated yet unable to focus. I have poor attention to detail and am prone to alternate bursts of laziness and anxiety. Tests on the internet indicate I have adult ADHD but I’ve never sought treatment. What if they gave me Ritalin, like a child who can’t focus in maths? And anyway, haven’t I always been chaotic and disorganised, ever since I was a child? Hasn’t my energy always been – as one Covent Garden tarot-card reader put it tactfully – ‘scattered’?

  There have been years when I couldn’t seem to hold anything down. Jobs came and went. Men came in and out of my life. Crushes flush with potential were regularly crushed. I was occasionally loaded with cash after selling a few articles – mostly celebrity interviews or long think pieces about youth – but mostly I was poor and living beyond my means. I had thirty-five superannuation accounts, each with about ten dollars in them, the principal dwindling each year due to administration fees. Throughout my thirties I lived like an aristocrat fleeing various corrupt regimes and angry creditors, moving from one borrowed manse to the next. First I’ll take Manhattan … There were thirty or more houses: Barcelona, London, Berlin, New York, Sydney, Melbourne. I was travelling all the time, but it was haphazard, without a plan. I was a restless romantic, somewhat despairing, but mostly celebrating my ability to be on the move.

  I spent ten years – more – flying by the seat of my pants, exhilarated, but also exhausted. My friends could be charmed by my charm, and they liked the crazy stories, but wasn’t the hot mess stuff starting to wear a bit thin? I mean, really, how many times could one person lose their wallet? Or leave their laptop sitting on the table in a cafe? Or lock their keys in the house where they’d also left their phone and wallet? Or lose their credit card at a music festival?

  It’s like I need something, some sort of practice, some sort of rigorous regime, to hold me down and make me, in yoga parlance, more grounded. And if it makes me thinner as well – well, that’s a total bonus.

  The Modern Yogi Program, with its daily classes, meditation and journalling, is fairly time intensive, like a part-time job. It means going out less or going out at times that work around the yoga schedule. ‘Let’s meet at 8.20am for breakfast – I’ll have finished my essentials class by then,’ I tell my friends. Or: ‘I can meet at 7.45pm for dinner, somewhere close to the studio.’ The yoga timetable becomes the organising principle of my life over the next six weeks. I refresh it constantly on my phone, and carry a hard copy wherever I go. No matter what, I have to go to six classes a week.

  Adam says that unless we’re feeling unwell or injured, we should try to make the majority of classes vinyasa – the energetic, dynamic power classes where you sweat a lot. The hard yakka. It is also the kind that will give you more of that lean yogi’s physique. Yin is a once-a-week treat, a Sunday night wind-down.

  By day three I have to force myself to go to vinyasa, even though I don’t feel fit, flexible or coordinated enough. I can’t cheat and just do six weeks of yin. We have to account for our attendance on a whiteboard at Namaste Dudes. A row of blanks beside my name is both the motivator and the reproach.

  Vinyasa is tough. It’s a flowing, dynamic form of yoga that links movement to breath. The poses require a mixture of strength, flexibility, agility (to get down low, then bounce up high), concentration, balance, a strong core and cardio capacity. The benefits of vinyasa include increased flexibility, mental focus, cardiovascular conditioning and muscle development. It also burns more calories than the other, slower forms of yoga such as hatha or yin.

  I pick a vinyasa class that I hope will be sparsely attended. It’s the middle of the day at the Bondi Junction studio. I stay down the back, feeling irritable and tired. My fellow yogis – as usual – look like part-time models and are unsmiling and focused, wrapped in their personal insulation of wellness. I tune in to my body and notice all that I cannot do. My left side is incredibly locked up and stiff. In a cross-legged position the knee of my left side floats up in the air, resisting any downward movement, as if it is being held aloft by a floatation device. Bounce, bounce, bounce. What goes up will not come down. My hips lock up at a certain point, like a rusted compass. I cannot move anything down further. After sixteen years, even after sixteen years, I am about as flexible as a wooden board. It’s hard not to feel envy as I watch the woman in front of me transition gracefully, without breaking a sweat, from a standing forward bend to crow pose – a balancing pose where all your body weight is essentially on your wrists and forearms. I leave the class sweaty, spent and still irritated, thinking maybe bodies are a certain way, anatomy fixed, bones fused at certain angles, and all the yoga in the world won’t change a thing.

  Week one of Modern Yogi passes in a blur of yogi-related activity, each day dictated by the studio timetable, each morning vaguely stressful as I try to squeeze in fifteen minutes of meditation. But after a week, I do begin to notice some physical changes. It’s the coldest day of the year, all of six degrees when I wake up. My flat is unheated. But when I get out of bed, I’m bending down and picking things up off the floor with an ease I’ve not felt before. I’ve unstiffened, like someone’s coated my insides with oil. While I’m not completely lubricated of joint, the difference is noticeable after six days and five classes. Maybe the trick is to slam a heap of classes in a row rather than do years of low-level yoga, attending once or twice a week.

  The meditation is also becoming a habit. Adam’s passion for it is infectious, and it’s nice to do if you are not in a hurry to be anywhere. Sitting up in bed during the bright, short dawns I close my eyes and fifteen minutes later, when I open them, it’s morning. I go to the kitchen and put the coffee on.

  But if I don’t do it first thing in the morning, things unravel. The meditation practice becomes ragged, stressful and uneven. One day, having slept in, I try to meditate on the train. There are people talking on their mobile phones, announcements, and the self-conscious feeling of doing something private in a public space. Will my meditation end up on Snapchat? I look very holy, like I’m about to receive my First Communion. My hands folded in my lap, eyes closed, lips soft in an almost smile. But I’m conscious too of missing my stop and ending up in Jannali so I keep opening my eyes every time the train pulls to a stop: Edgecliff, Kings Cross, Martin Place, Town Hall. On the train, the practice becomes a micro-meditation, infused with stress.

  By the seventh day I return to yin, my limbs feeling light and loose. The yin class is familiar now, like a cave or cupboard where everything is folded in and slowed down. There’s the sense of the Sabbath about it – this is the day to rest, to put the phone away, to have a meal with family and friends and end it all with a slow, lovely yoga class.

  On Friday in that first week, in a move that shocks just about everyone, the citizens of the UK elect to leave the European Union. The teacher, an Irishman, references Brexit in his ‘nugget of truth’ sermon about forty-five minutes into the class. We are in pigeon pose, bowing to an unknown deity. I am not crying. ‘You might not like change. You may resist change,’ he tells us, walking around the heated room. ‘You may not agree with it. You may think the change is a bad thing. A very bad thing. But change has happened. It’s happened and you can’t do anything about it. To resist it is pointless.’ His voice is heavy, sorrowful, and he sighs. ‘It is what it is.’

  As in life.

  More than any other activity or form of exercise, yoga has the power to be transformative. You could call the cycling scene or the running scene a way of life because people do it obsessively – it’s where their friendshi
ps, recreation and identity can be found. But yoga incorporates a spiritual dimension that other exercise routines don’t have. As Adam said, ‘We are using the asana as a way to move towards unwavering contentment, bliss and peace.’

  Those, my friend, are big promises.

  Sometimes I need convincing about the spiritual stuff. Some teachers impart wisdom and after their classes I feel like I’ve learnt something important. But other teachers – mainly in the gym chains – fumble with the spiritual aspect of yoga. They don’t really know the philosophy from which yoga is derived, or just don’t have the language for it. Or maybe they lack the depth. They are doing classes at the gym, subbing for someone when they should be teaching Pump, Zumba or water aerobics. (It reminds me of something the late journalist A.A. Gill wrote of India: ‘Plenty of Westerners come to pick through its jumble for something off the peg that fits; they do yoga as exercise, which is a bit like walking the stations of the cross as aerobics.’)

  After one particularly aerobic vinyasa practice, a teacher with a platinum bob and hot-pink leotard got us to do a visualisation: ‘Okay, you’re in a lake – I mean, by a lake, you’re by a lake and you are in a beautiful house. It’s a multi-million-dollar house – lots of glass and the sun is streaming in. Feel that sun on your face. Now you’re in a car – a Ferrari. It’s going really fast and you’ve got the top down and the music blasting!’

  Some things they say are outright lies, ridiculous concepts that seemed to clutch from the air various New Age-y, spiritual things and then try to glue them together with random bits of pseudo-physiology, things that make no anatomical sense. Like: a seated twist pose rinses out your kidneys. Or: this pose massages your liver. Does it? Does it really? Prove it. The best teachers aren’t always the most flexible ones – they are the ones who’ve been soldered through some sort of fire, and have come out the other side with hard, sweet wisdom that demands to be shared.

  Adam is a great teacher. He doesn’t lay the nuggets of truth on too thick, but when he does impart something it seems to come from an authentic place. One day after class we have lunch at a vegan place in Bondi and he tells me how he came to be a yoga teacher.

  It all started in September 2001, when Adam was a teenager and fresh out of music school, where he had studied classical guitar. He got a job working for an insurance agency in downtown New York. The job, his first in the city, wasn’t too onerous. It mostly involved entering insurance policies into a computer. The commute, however, was more problematic. Getting the subway in from Queens each day, he had to walk past Ground Zero to get to work. There were loudspeaker announcements being made about explosions going off, there were flyers with missing people dotting the landscape and dust everywhere.

  Then, about eight months into the job at the insurance agency, something strange happened. On his way down to the ground floor, Adam freaked out in the elevator.

  ‘The elevator doors opened to the lobby and I took a step out and got the worst vertigo – and I was against the wall,’ he recalls. ‘A good friend got me on the train to Queens and I got home okay. But the dizziness kept coming back, worse and worse. At first I thought it was something I was eating, dehydration, sinus, or something like that.’ Symptoms started piling up: ‘Numbness in my legs, headaches, trouble sleeping. I started thinking it was something serious.’

  Adam went to a GP and a neurologist and they did the whole gamut of tests – spinal tap, X-rays, MRI, scans. They found nothing. Finally a doctor said, ‘Your body is healthy but your spirit isn’t.’ He was ultimately diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Doctors in New York were seeing waves of similar symptoms following the events of September 11.

  Adam was put on antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication for six months and told to come back at the completion of the course. The meds worked, and while he was happy to be symptom-free, ‘the next part of the journey was healing myself without pharmaceuticals’, he says, as they had a dulling effect.

  Then he found meditation. But it didn’t come easily. ‘I was so guarded from panic attacks and anxiety that the process of meditation couldn’t really find a seat – I couldn’t really let go enough. I felt so unsafe in every aspect of my life that when I sat down in stillness, all I ever felt was terror.

  ‘I went to an asana teacher and she said, “You’ve got to get into the physical practice of yoga first.”’

  He did and ‘it was a really deep physical practice, really heart-based’:

  It was in this that I felt the hard shells, the outer layer, start to melt. The physicality of the practice quietened the inner dialogue – but for me it was moving into meditation after asana. I remember the effects of the meditation clearly. It was a ninety-minute yoga class then thirty minutes’ meditation afterwards – and the feeling was you’re safe. The feeling – I hadn’t felt it for so long – it was beyond words.

  *

  It’s the start of week two when a bad bout of anxiety hits me: a week of short days, dark skies, rain showers thrown across the sky like a veil, my body aching from all the exercise. Before our regular Monday evening Modern Yogi meeting (which is like a mixture of a sharing circle and a university tutorial), I’m in a coffee shop drinking chai, when suddenly I’m gripped by what can only be described as deep dread. Something bad is about to happen, I can feel it. Someone I love is about to die, I can feel it. This isn’t paranoia, this is intuition. This intuition feels almost grossly physical – it’s all sensation.

  I sit in the cafe as if waiting for the anxiety to assume physical form and pull up the chair beside me, have a talk, tell me some really scary things. ‘Are you ready?’ the dread feeling seems to ask. ‘Because you need to be ready. The thing you fear the most is coming.’

  The chai getting cold, I sit there for as long as I can, waiting for the stranger to turn up and take his seat. I breathe like we learnt in meditation class until my heart rate slows down. No one takes the seat. I walk to the studio just in time for the discussion group – we are talking about what we are resisting in life that is blocking us from joy.

  The theme of the week is ‘Choose’. Our booklet says, ‘At any time, regardless of the circumstances, you can make the choice to be joyful, so start right now.’

  The anxiety and dread are now nestled like a new organ in some cavity in my body. Don’t think you can stay, I think but do not say.

  *

  After class in week two, I count the nights I’ve been away this year: more than 100 and it’s only the start of June. I need to slow down. But, oh, the places I’ve been and the things I’ve seen! I’ve swum with manta rays at midnight in a warm sea off Hawaii, ballooned over the Great Sandy Desert at dawn, ridden a Harley around the base of Uluru as the desert sun came up, climbed the rim of Kings Canyon, which looked to my eyes like the crater of a red moon. I’ve swum in a wild billabong on an Indigenous cattle station in the west of Cape York, I’ve seen flocks of rare birds scatter across skies so large that the human field of vision is inadequate for the task, drunk a strange mushroom drink with strangers in a jungle in Thailand and danced in the twilight to Sting! I’ve wandered the streets of Georgetown in Penang, looking for a mystical cafe where you take a selfie and they put it on your coffee foam.

  I’ve put in a bid on a house I’ve only seen once for five minutes in a town I was passing through, maybe ending decades of renting and the prolonged adolescence of share houses. The house is old, like 1860s old, with warped glass windows, sloped ceilings, rough unpolished floorboards and vines that run across the verandah. At dusk kangaroos graze out the front, and the only sounds around for miles are the birds, the frogs in the creek and the passing train. I spend hours staring at the pictures on realestate.com.au, willing it to be mine, despite all the obstacles and impracticalities (it’s in the country, I don’t drive, etc. etc.). I cannot get it out of my head.

  Desire is everywhere that winter, bursting from me like a geyser. I’ve fallen in love after a brief meeting with a guy at a party. My phone is r
unning hot with his text messages and I’m texting back until the pads of my fingers hurt. I’m using all the emojis. My phone is constantly threatening to run out of charge. I can see when he’s typing on his phone to mine, the dots appearing like bubbles of someone underwater using up all their air.

  The whole thing is exhilarating and exhausting but takes place in some virtual space where we are meeting but not meeting. In the nuggets-of-truth sermons at the end of class, a common theme is to embrace uncertainty. We don’t know what the future holds, what the outcome will be. But, man, it is hard.

  *

  I go out after a strong yoga class on Tuesday night, where in the shavasana I’m actually panting and my ponytail is damp with sweat. It’s a restaurant opening in Paddington. I meet my friend Tim there and tell him I’m so anxious I can’t sleep, that I feel speedy and scared – and that the yoga and meditation, while good, is not making the anxiety go away. ‘But at least I have some Valiums from … before. Also, I’ve put in an offer for a house – somewhere or other!’

  He suggests I have a week not drinking, eating lots of fruit and vegetables and getting more sleep. ‘But keep up the yoga and meditation.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ I say. We’re on the second level of the restaurant, the uneven terraces and hushed backstreets of Paddington spread like a patchwork quilt before us. All is quiet out there. Who says money never sleeps?

  Someone comes around with a tray of cocktails – Bellinis, by the look of them. The liquid around the massive ice cubes is an amber light. That first sip is miraculous. The anxiety just dissolves like aspirin in a glass of water. And so I take my medicine.

  *

  The next day we sit in that circle in the yoga studio, the fruit in the middle (I have figured out by now that it’s for eating – it’s not an offering). It’s winter. People are in yoga gear with shawls and ponchos around their shoulders.