Wellmania

by Brigid Delaney

  Adam looks around the circle. ‘Meditation – how are people enjoying it?’

  His question gets an enthusiastic response – from some.

  ‘My alarm is set for 4.45am each morning,’ says one woman in shiny leggings with a pineapple print. She has boot camp at the beach, then a long commute, and now meditation – which she does after boot camp but before work. Unlike me, she does not try to meditate on public transport.

  But although many of my classmates are getting up early to meditate, they aren’t finding it easy. No one is having difficulty fitting in six seventy-five-minute yoga classes a week, yet when it comes to meditating for fifteen minutes a day, suddenly we ‘don’t have enough time’. Maybe it’s because the results aren’t physical – it’s not something we or anyone else can see.

  For Type A personalities – or, really, anyone who has an over-stimulated 21st-century mind – meditation can be frustrating. After all, it looks like a bad use of time. You’re not doing anything; you’re just sitting there. You’re not even meant to think things through – like what you’re going to cook for dinner.

  ‘My mind won’t stop talking,’ says one Englishwoman. There are nods of agreement around the circle.

  ‘The chatter is just as important as stillness,’ says Adam. ‘If you don’t have the chatter, you won’t be able to recognise the stillness. The calm between the storms of thought.’ He tells us about monks who meditate for hours, only to achieve one pure second of silence. The thing is just to accept where you are. ‘Chatter happens; right now I’m turbulent. You undulate back and forth. But once you hit that part of meditation where there’s stillness, there’s nothing like it in the world.’

  There are more questions.

  ‘Is being asleep meditating?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you meditate when you are drunk?’

  ‘Sometimes you’ve got to tick that box.’

  ‘What about exercising before you meditate?’

  ‘If you can burn off the top layers of energy before you meditate, that can be good.’

  Everyone is focused on the asanas – that is, the physical aspect of becoming a yogi. We are coming into the studio six days a week and powering through the toughest classes, even people who are sick with winter colds. The home practice is harder. Even the Type A personalities seem resistant to the idea of practising outside the studio. I’m the same. At home I’ve flung a towel on the ground and done two or three downward dogs, then called it a day.

  As with Dr Liu and the fasting clinic, we seem to need a taskmaster, a public space, an appointment. At home, alone, with no supervising parent, we become lazy and apathetic. We lie around, distracted by our devices.

  At this point in the modern yogi journey, Adam asks us to be aware of leaking energy, or ‘prana’. ‘We have to stop the leaking of prana. Our exercise this week – forgive somebody.’

  People groan at this.

  ‘One of my pet peeves is when yoga teachers say, “Let it go.” It’s not just “let it go” – it’s a gradual discharge, like taking an electric charge away from it all.’ He pauses. A hush has settled. There’s a new atmosphere in the room – thick and heavy. We’re all thinking about who to forgive, I’m sure of it. People are involuntarily wincing or have a sad, faraway, wistful look in their eyes. Forgiveness is a bitch, but I believe deep down that it will set you free.

  ‘Can you forgive yourself?’ asks Adam. ‘That’s the most difficult.’

  By week three I’ve found my rhythm with the program and am meditating and going to yoga every day. The studio staff know me now and greet me by name. I have my usual spot down the back in the right-hand corner near the door, and make a thorough job at the end of each class of wiping down my sweat-stained mat – the clean-up and packing away now as much a part of the daily ritual as the rounds of sun salutations. The anxiety is still there, but I move around it. There’s a mid-morning vinyasa class with a teacher whose name is Karma, a whole class on shoulders that leaves me aching for days, a class on twisting our ‘side waists’ after which I feel pleasantly wrung out, cold meditating mornings, being on the phone many times a day to my mortgage broker, who keeps on requesting tax returns and letters from my employer and bank statements, afternoons at the beach when it’s too chilly to swim but I sit on the sand with a coffee, texting the dude from the party – back and forth, back and forth – and scrolling through the news. A terror attack at the Orlando Pulse nightclub (forty-nine killed, fifty-three wounded), an ISIS supporter driving a 19-tonne truck through the Bastille Day crowds at Nice, killing eighty-six. Days later, ISIS attackers strike in France again, murdering a Catholic priest in his church. The Turkey coup attempt, 300 dead, 2100 injured. Erdoğan loyalists arrest more than 6000 people, dismiss another 36,000 from their jobs, and torture and rape hundreds more. In Japan a man with a pathological hatred of disabled people breaks into a care home and stabs nineteen people to death. At home, the Australian election campaign is limping to a close, with disillusioned voters having to choose the least-worst candidate.

  Even though we’re only halfway through it, there’s a fear that 2016 is turning into the worst year ever. I wonder how closely my rising anxiety is connected to the increasingly feral news cycle, and if my many, many, many times a day checking and refreshing of news websites and Twitter is bad for my mental health.

  Although I can’t look away from the news (particularly the increasingly bizarre American election campaign), I’m beginning to make positive changes to my life away from the yoga studio. At the start of week three of the program we are asked to focus our energies on ‘getting real’ and ‘focusing on our dreams’.

  The Modern Yoga booklet asks us, ‘In which areas of your life are you making excuses? Where are you hiding? Is there an aspect of your life where you are ready to come clean?’ By uncovering the hidden, more shameful places we become a more authentic version of ourselves. The idea of this week is to step back and compassionately, yet with detachment, observe yourself.

  I’m a first-person journalist, I’ve kept a diary for twenty years, I’ve been on dozens of retreats – I am no stranger to self-observation. Yet still, like most people, I can be dishonest with myself. Being honest can be painful, and it may lead to an acknowledgement that things need to change. And change is hard. Yoga and meditation can assist in this process, we are told. Part of the yoga practice each day is becoming comfortable with uncomfortable feelings, and sitting there without distraction as they wash over you. These feelings could be the uncomfortable physical sensations of getting into or holding a pose, or uncomfortable emotions that might surface during meditation. This week we are taught that eventually these feelings will pass, as long as we – paradoxically – stay with them.

  It is tempting to short-circuit the uncomfortable feelings – by checking your phone, for example – but this is a form of cheating. Are you making excuses? Where are you hiding? This week we are told we need to feel all the feels and not run away.

  I’m starting to notice changes that aren’t explicitly a part of the Modern Yogi Program, but they flow from it. For example, if I’m doing yoga six times a week, and working really hard, I’m less inclined to eat junk food. My body craves real food and lots of nutrients. For lunch I swap sausage rolls for salads, and I go to a cold-pressed juice place most days and buy a ten-dollar green juice as a treat after class. Wellness – well, this particular brand of wellness – is proving expensive.

  There are also some physical changes as a result of a sudden increase in exercise. Yes, I’m actually becoming leaner! Others notice too and the compliments roll in (but my joy at the compliments shows how much work I have to do on letting go of attachments and ego). My friends and colleagues comment that my hair is shinier, my eyes are brighter, my skin is clearer, my clothes are looser. I’m on the way to becoming more like the yogi women in the Bondi organic shop – healthful and glowing, whacking people in the arm with my yoga mat as I turn around to inspect a peach.

/>   And most gratifying of all for this eternal yoga beginner: in only a few weeks, my physical progress in class is off the charts. I notice certain postures are becoming easier. My hips are opening and I can get my knees down further to the floor when we’re cross-legged. I’m becoming stronger and more flexible. My legs and arms are getting leaner, my back is starting to feel properly trunk-like and my previously weak core muscles are switching on. My balance is improving, as is my focus, concentration and stamina. The classes go for sixty or seventy-five minutes and I’ve gone from wishing it could all be over in fifteen minutes to feeling that I could easily do ninety minutes. Two hours even! I marvel at how adaptable the body is. Some days are harder than others, of course, but some classes I just sail through.

  Yet curiously I’m also feeling blanker during yoga, like the classes themselves are a meditation where I don’t have to think. I switch off. And the sweetest of all? Those shavasanas at the end, where it’s almost as if a chemical calm is flooding across me, cutting through the anxiety momentarily like a detergent through grease. I’m not sure if the sudden anxiety I’ve been feeling is connected to my dramatic uptake in yoga and meditation or is purely a coincidence. All I know is since starting the Modern Yogi Project I’m having trouble regulating. My energy levels are surging and most nights I can only get around four hours’ sleep. Maybe all the exercise is short-circuiting my system or messing with my hormones?

  *

  A raft of first-person essays about yoga found on the internet share a familiar narrative: that of yoga saving their life, giving them peace, health, wellbeing, purpose and the gift of spirituality in this secular world. They entered the studio at rock bottom – they were fat, they were broke, they had been dumped – and after hopelessly struggling down the back of the class, a transformation was made.

  In October 2016, I came across an article on xoJane.com that caught my eye. Headlined: ‘I Thought Yoga, Meditation and Instagram Could Save Me from PTSD After I Was Raped’, the piece was written by Sydney woman Phoebe Loomes. It provided a counterintuitive narrative about yoga, one you don’t often hear. She had spent the day ticking all the wellness boxes: up since 6am, a dawn swim, asanas on the wooden deck of the place she was staying at on New York’s Rockaway Peninsula. She recalls giving very yogic advice to someone that day: ‘You can overcome anything. Everything you need is inside you.’

  That night Phoebe was drugged and raped by a bar manager. Initially, after the attack, she returned to her routine of daily yoga: ‘I was angry about what had happened to me, but I was determined to continue on my path to enlightenment … So I committed to stop myself from thinking about it. I repeated my mantra – let go – whenever I caught myself thinking about what had happened to me.’

  I contact Phoebe and arrange to meet her for lunch in Sydney to hear more about what role yoga played in both helping and harming her.

  She tells me why she got into yoga in the first place. ‘Aged twenty-three I went through a really bad break-up. I used alcohol and drugs to cope and it wasn’t working for me. I wanted to start exercising. I was much heavier, so when I started doing yoga I lost a lot of weight really quickly – 16 kilograms over the course of about eighteen months.’

  It wasn’t purely from exercise, Phoebe says. The place where she was doing yoga encouraged veganism, so she adopted that as well. She didn’t find the change in diet hard because, just as I have found, ‘when you are exercising and feeling healthier and seeing results it becomes easier to restrict your diet’:

  Looking back, I had major issues with eating and control. I couldn’t control much else in my life. I lost my social life with that break-up, and being able to spend my evenings at a yoga studio was liberating because I didn’t have to think about what else to do. I found this new community. I was a bit nuts and looking back I was a bit orthorexic but it wasn’t just food – it was spirituality as well. I found a lot of answers. It wasn’t a bad thing.

  Then, America, and that night. Phoebe was back on the mat three days after she was raped. For a few days she felt traumatised, but then worked herself up to get over it. ‘This is the magic of yoga,’ she told herself, ‘anything can happen to me and I will be okay. I have the whole toolkit, I can cope.’

  The impact of the rape didn’t start to hit until five months later, when Phoebe was back in Australia and attending a yoga retreat.

  ‘Everyone I did yoga with had trauma and anxiety and I was listening to their stories and I was thinking, “You don’t know what trauma is – you haven’t been through anything I’ve been through.”’ She felt angry at all of them for taking up her time. Losing your compassion for other people is a common PTSD symptom. ‘That’s the first time I realised I wasn’t coping,’ she admits. But Phoebe still refused to properly acknowledge it.

  After the retreat her life started to fall apart. ‘I started fucking everything up. I lost a lot of friendships because of my anger and inability to be compassionate to anyone. That was hard because such a big part of my yoga practice is to be compassionate, kind and softly spoken and I couldn’t do it.’

  In the end, a non-yogi friend who’d always been sceptical of her endless positivity called her out on it. ‘I was at a friend’s birthday at a pub and staring into the middle distance and she was like, “What is wrong with you?”’

  Phoebe told her she had been feeling suicidal and wasn’t coping.

  ‘It was just very hard for me to accept that I’d been victimised – I had this whole narrative in my life, on Instagram, of being a yogi, and I just didn’t want to let it go. It was an identity – and an ego thing.’ Phoebe moved in with her friend and started doing intensive psychotherapy for PTSD. That was around two years ago. She still does yoga but recognises its limitations.

  ‘People need that spiritual instruction in their lives. I needed that in my life. I was so lost and I’m so glad that I found the answer – and something divine.’ But she acknowledges that expecting yoga to solve all her problems is wrong-headed. ‘If I was a Christian and I was raped, I wouldn’t look to the church. The problem wasn’t yoga – it had solved all the other problems like a bad break-up, but what I went through was so much more serious, and yoga alone can’t help PTSD.’

  *

  All the studies point to yoga as being an excellent tool to help reduce garden-variety anxiety. The Harvard Mental Health newsletter quotes a small German study published in 2005, in which twenty-four women who described themselves as ‘emotionally distressed’ took two ninety-minute yoga classes a week for three months. Women in a control group maintained their normal activities and were asked not to begin an exercise or stress-reduction program during the study period. Though not formally diagnosed with depression, all participants had experienced emotional distress for at least half of the previous ninety days. At the end of three months, women in the yoga group reported improvements in perceived stress, depression, anxiety, energy, fatigue and wellbeing. Depression scores improved by 50 per cent, anxiety scores by 30 per cent, and overall wellbeing scores by 65 per cent. Initial complaints of headaches, back pain and poor sleep quality also resolved much more often in the yoga group than in the control group, according to the study.

  If it weren’t for the anxiety, and if I had time and money, this routine of yoga and meditation every day would be the path to vigour, vitality and wellness that I’m seeking. When I did yoga only a couple of times a week, it wouldn’t take long – a day, maybe – before I felt ‘locked up’, fatigued and stiff. In that state it felt as if things weren’t flowing – blood, oxygen, my body, my life. Inside and out, I became … stuck. The Chinese call this chi, but whatever it is, if I didn’t exercise every day, I would feel stagnant. Doing yoga every day, I feel the opposite of stagnant – I’m vital. Maybe too vital! And with all this surplus energy I’m going out all the time.

  Week three of Modern Yogi Project and there is the Frida Kahlo exhibition opening night at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, with free champagne and mini burrito
s and women walking around the gallery in long skirts and their hair piled high on their heads, and later dinner with the Mexican ambassador and a coterie of Kahlo scholars – trays of tequila and bottles of wine, and later, outside, sheets of rain, the streets a hazard, Toto’s ‘Africa’ playing really loud in the Uber on the way to another party in Glebe where everyone is talking about Nauru and the upcoming boring election, the Uber driver saying that he can no longer afford to live in this city but he doesn’t know where else to go, and all the while I’m clutching the Namaste Dudes timetable and rearranging my class schedule in my mind (well, I’m obviously not going to make the 8am class if it’s now 3am …).

  Then, midweek in the city, at a methamphetamine forum, drinking too much red wine and eating all the cheese and wondering why anybody would take such a fucked-up drug, without acknowledging my own excessive inclinations. A Guardian party in Surry Hills farewelling a colleague moving to India, buying rounds of bottles of wine, trading cigarettes in the courtyard, smoking with our jackets done up high against the cold, and the block of anxiety melting with the addition of each unit of alcohol. All the while my body aches in the best possible way from all the daily movement and stretching, and the bag with the always slightly damp yoga clothes comes with me everywhere. It feels like I’m carrying a bag of wet soil.

  The week rolls on. More fun! More parties! More yoga! Blurry Uber rides home, not enough to eat, trouble sleeping, the 4am Valium to bring it all down so I don’t have to see the sun come up again. More yoga. More meditation. In some classes I’m dripping so much sweat that I can’t see out my eyes. Sweat pours out of my head and covers my hair, which becomes dirty and matted. At home I’m endlessly washing yoga clothes, scribbling in my journal and listening to a lot of Father John Misty and Courtney Barnett, hearing in the lyrics mainly gentle and weary disgust with the world and our objects of idolatry.