Wellmania

by Brigid Delaney

  By Sunday at 5pm I cannot get out of bed. I’m too tired to move. The rain lashes the windows. The sea is a grey line with white caps in the distance – forming and dissolving, dissolving and forming. The federal election was the day before, and I’d visited all four corners of the city writing about the mood of the people before going to Malcolm Turnbull’s terrible victory party at the Sofitel. There was the weird corporate art in the lobby, the three layers of security checks, the bitter champagne and greasy canapés, big televisions covering the count but nobody watching. It gets past midnight. Malcolm takes ages to claim victory – if indeed victory can be claimed – and when he does he’s angry and gives a bad speech. The press are all sloppy drunk and getting bored. I get drunk as well, and spend half the night in an upstairs suite with a colleague, talking about the meaning of life and drinking room-service red wine. The rest of the time I’m riding the elevators in between floors, skulking about and staking out secret Tory parties. Girls with taffeta gowns, super-straightened hair and private-school accents are weeping under lobby palms. The boys look sweaty and shop-soiled, anxious and angry – all at once. Somehow, somewhere in the night I lose my credit card. I get home at 2am and wake at 5am to file my story. I consult the timetable, and circle a yin class. No matter what else is happening, I cannot miss yoga. I need to practise six times a week or … or … or … I can’t tick my name off on the Namaste Dudes board, I can’t morph into this thing I’m destined to be: a modern yogi. A modern yogi with a demanding social life.

  Yin is the only option when you’re struggling to get out of bed. You can turn up on little or no energy and it will be okay. That night the Irish instructor talks about sides – sides of the body, sides of life. You can’t just work on one side – the juicy, loose, flexible side. Does this mean we shouldn’t always play to our strengths, but explore our weaknesses with equal vigour? I wonder if it has something to do with the teachings on Monday night, and the self-reflection: ‘Are you making excuses? Where are you hiding?’ The instructor tells us that in the practice you have to spend time on both sides, that they’ll both feel different and be different. Left and right, yin and yang, good and evil, activity and rest. We need to be equally aware of each half and not favour one over the other.

  This kind of yoga talk is full of parables and hidden meaning and as you’re lying there, open to receiving, you bring to it whatever is going on in your life. It makes me think about my two duelling sides – wellness and hedonism. The more yoga I did, the stronger the hedonic urge. The more meditation I did, the more medication I was taking to help me sleep. It doesn’t make sense – unless these are two parts that cannot coexist or unite. My wild side is giving me guilt, which maybe is the most modern trait of all when it comes to being a modern yogi – we’ll rise at dawn and drink the organic green juice, but then stay out too late at night drinking cocktails. I’m not the only one. At the studios around Bondi, particularly on a Sunday night, I hear people talking about their weekends – all the coke they had, the nights of two hours’ sleep. The yoga class is a corrector to the cocaine. It is the Bondi wellness paradox and I see it over and over again. It’s former Olympic swimmer Geoff Huegill announcing that, after serving a six-month good behaviour bond for cocaine possession, he and his publicist wife are starting a health and wellness business.

  It’s getting hauled out of your house by police during a massive Bondi drug bust while looking pristine in your activewear.

  And it’s Lisa Stockbridge, an eastern-suburbs blogger and convicted cocaine trafficker, complaining at a hearing about the conditions in prison. According to the Daily Telegraph, ‘the self-styled lifestyle blogger also said prison food made her hair fall out, gave her migraines and mood swings, all brought on by her many dietary intolerances’.

  ‘I have issues with sugar, wheat, dairy, yeast, anything that is processed,’ Stockbridge told the Tele.

  Bondi sells Australia wellness, with products such as organic soaps apparently borrowing some of the suburb’s magic. It also sells Sydney its nightlife. We laugh, but the Bondi paradox is not necessarily hypocritical. Other societies managed to integrate both discipline and excess without seeming schizophrenic or contradictory. Look at the Greeks. Letting loose before knuckling back down has been a way of life since the days of the Greek god Dionysus. There are the Easter celebrations after Lent, there’s Carnival and Mardi Gras.

  In her 2006 book Dancing in the Streets, the writer Barbara Ehrenreich uses the term ‘collective joy’ to describe group events that involve theatrics, music, dancing and a sense of loss of self. She argues that for at least 10,000 years humans have made space in their lives – at arranged times – for festivals. In Australian Indigenous culture, you see it in rock art – it’s there in the ceremonies. For other countries, it’s the town square and the maypole, or going into the desert and taking ayahuasca and forgetting your cares for a few days. It’s Burning Man and Glastonbury.

  ‘To join in dances, to laugh with the flute, and to bring an end to cares, whenever the delight of the grape comes at the feasts of the gods’ – this is the bacchanalian way, Euripides wrote. In losing control, followers lost their self-consciousness and cares in brief, intense frenzies before returning to their highly ordered lives.

  These community-based festivals continued right through the Middle Ages and beyond, and invigorated and strengthened communities. Ehrenreich charts how the practice went out of fashion by the 17th century, as puritanism and capitalism smothered our habits of collective joy. Worship became less loud and Pentecostal, and more stifled and silent.

  We need to lose the self from time to time – otherwise we’d be driven mad. Once we would try to lose ourselves in love, war, religion or drugs but now we attempt to lose ourselves in the struggle for body, mind and spiritual perfection. We desire to be clean, lean and serene. What is this struggle but trying to overcome death and disease? What is wellness but the futile struggle against inevitable loss?

  *

  While each morning I am waking at 4am, unable to sleep, I am also checking in with a therapist. She wants to keep an eye on me, worried that while I am becoming a full-on yogi I am also becoming a train wreck. There is the string of crazy nights, a spontaneous decision to buy an 1860s cottage thousands of kilometres from my current home – in a town where I know no one – a lost wallet and cards, the confusion about the dude who keeps texting but is proving elusive in real life, tearing through the Valiums at night, the crying jags, the parties, the cigarettes and the anxiety.

  She tells me, ‘Meditation and exercise can bring feelings to the fore. The things you need to feel well – meditation, good diet, yoga – are bringing things up, like a sore, coming to the surface.’ It’s like the detox all over again. I am having a mental healing crisis.

  ‘You should observe the extremes,’ she says. ‘How do they live side by side? One – wellness – doesn’t necessarily cancel the other – hedonism – out.’

  ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,’ I mutter as I take notes in her consulting room, the yoga bag there at my feet, where it always is.

  It’s now a month into the Modern Yogi Project, and I’ve banned myself from going out so much. It’s raining outside and all week the news has been of the ascendancy of Trump, unarmed black men being shot in America, police being shot by protesters, and a week or more of uncertainty over the election result at home. One Nation leader Pauline Hanson is returned to the Senate on a wave of right-wing nationalist sentiment.

  The American yoga instructor leading tonight’s class has an accent like Lena Dunham’s. The lights are down and the heaters are blasting. I’ve strained my lower back in one of the poses; I can feel a weak pulsation and am lying on the ground, trying to breathe into the pain, to feel it properly so that I can also feel it pass. The instructor walks around us, talking. ‘I’ve been feeling really down lately,’ she says. ‘It’s mid-winter, it’s cold. I’m thinking about all the shitty things that are happening in the world and I’ve decided th
ere’s not enough love.’ She reaches down to correct someone’s posture. ‘People are so sterile. They’re afraid to touch each other on the bus. We’re all made of the same thing. We’re all just cells dancing. Love each other. Be warm. Be kind. If someone is unkind it’s because bad things are going on with them. So love them. Show them kindness.’

  And even though I am not in a hip-opening pose, and I do not like to touch people on the bus, lying on the studio floor, I find myself crying.

  Strong practices are getting easier every time I get on the mat now. I meditate daily, craving it – the mental space, the quiet twenty minutes (we’ve moved up five minutes from fifteen), the way towards the end everything just empties out and time loses all its tension.

  My diet is changing without much input from anyone. There’s no program being shoved down my throat, no dietary plan, yet without it feeling like a hardship – without the need for ceremony, ritual, one last binge, the anticipation of future regret – I am letting my old favourite foods go and gravitating towards healthy options. If only I had known it could be so easy.

  Things I clung to in the past, my ‘favourite’ things – dirty burgers, chips, chocolate, pasta, three lattes a day – I just don’t feel like any more. One morning I learn the hard way about not eating a massive, cooked breakfast fifteen minutes before class. In the room heated to 30 degrees I can feel the food move up (all that avocado, all that toast and coffee) and the sweat pouring off me is not the cleansing kind but feels toxic, meaty and dense. The worst poses are the inversions and crunches. I spend most of the class lying down, struggling not to throw up.

  There is a nutrition aspect to the Modern Yogi Project – a juice cleanse halfway through, which I don’t do. They don’t really push it. In the Monday night meeting Adam says he has met yogis who are frequently on juice cleanses, and if you’re not careful with the intention behind your cleanse, it can be just another form of eating disorder. I’ve been down that road before and I’m done with detoxes.

  *

  By week five my body is showing signs of wear and tear from all the exercise. Some ancient exhaustion reappears. My left hip aches. I see a physio and he presses his body weight right onto me. I sweat with pain. I have an injury on the left side that he believes is caused by turning off my glutes and overusing my front hip muscles. It’s a yoga injury – repetitive rather than sudden, probably from too many warrior poses. When I walk, I feel like an invisible hand is pulling my left leg out of my hip joint (Oh, what a feeling! What a terrible, weird feeling!) but also I’m quite pleased. This means I’ve joined some elite world – an athlete’s world, where people have sporting injuries.

  I tell people even when they don’t ask: ‘You may have noticed I’m walking a bit funny … well, would you believe I’m doing so much yoga that I have an injury? Not serious, but still … I guess that’s what happens when you exercise – you know, vinyasa, every day.’

  I’m not the only one. A week later I’m getting a pedicure at a nail bar in Bondi (one of the problems with yoga is you spend a lot of time staring at your feet) and another customer recognises me. We chat through the partition of the waxing room. She was also doing the Modern Yogi Project but had to drop out because she hurt her hip.

  In the Monday meeting a woman approaches me. I was sharing news of my special yoga injury with the group (‘When I walk I hear click click’). She is practising every day – ‘I’m practically an addict!’ – and her hips are gone, both of them. She can’t run without feeling like her legs are about to fall off. Some of the women in the course say that if something gets between them and their daily practice they become agitated and unsettled. Injuries don’t stop them.

  I wonder if it’s possible to become addicted to yoga. Surely when different parts of your body ‘go’, practising through the pain is the equivalent of trying to shoot up into a collapsed vein.

  The New York Times published a story in 2012 on yoga injuries, interviewing Glenn Black, a yoga teacher of nearly four decades. Black has come to believe that ‘the vast majority of people’ should give up yoga completely. ‘It’s simply too likely to cause harm,’ he says.

  People injure themselves because they have ‘underlying physical weaknesses or problems that make serious injury all but inevitable’. Instead of doing yoga they should be doing exercises designed specifically for them, to strengthen weak parts of the body:

  Yoga is for people in good physical condition. Or it can be used therapeutically. It’s controversial to say, but it really shouldn’t be used for a general class … To come to New York and do a class with people who have many problems and say, ‘O.K., we’re going to do this sequence of poses today’ – it just doesn’t work.

  For a start, he says, most people who are doing one or two classes a week do not have bodies adapted to the poses invented by Indians who squat or sit cross-legged a lot. Instead we are more likely to spend at least eight hours a day sitting behind a desk or in front of a computer. When we then go to a crowded class with people of differing abilities and attempt to twist or land into a position our bodies are not used to, we are vulnerable to injury.

  Black says he has seen some ‘pretty gruesome hips’. One of the biggest teachers in America had no movement in her hip joints: ‘The sockets had become so degenerated that she had to have hip replacements,’ he tells the Times. Other teachers had such bad backs, they had to teach lying down.

  Other injuries detailed in the article include strokes, whiplash-style injuries from moving the head and neck too quickly, cervical-disc injuries, muscle strain, rotar-cuff tears and, in Bikram, injuries related to over-stretching in the heat, including muscle, cartilage and ligament damage.

  *

  The sky is the colour of soot – the branches bare and tapping on the window. The lorikeets are still there, bright against the grey. They scream for a bit then fly away. I am waking around 4am most days; I lie there then meditate. At 5am the traffic starts up again – the swoosh of cars, the faraway headlights, the 389 bus turning carefully on the wet road.

  My life revolves around my yoga schedule. If I don’t practise every day, I feel weird – anguished, even. I get sick with a cold but try to practise anyway, taking some super-strong drugs a friend brought back from the US. They are quite speedy and I don’t sleep properly for three nights, but that’s okay – as long as I have enough energy to go to yoga.

  I get another massage and the pain is almost more than I can bear. The masseur is walking on my back, his hands, rough and strong, are digging into my groin, stretching out my thighs. My body tenses, drenched in sweat. I long for something to bite down on.

  On a trip to Canberra I fret – what if I can’t find a good yoga studio? In Manuka, I find a studio but it’s slow and boring – all middle-aged public servants, by the looks of it – and they don’t play the right music. I miss Namaste Dudes and the cool kids there – their beauty and their tight bodies, their fierce dedication and their expensive activewear, the way they greet each other with over-the-top hugs and the way they just seem to live it. I’m not one of them but they give me a living, breathing ideal to aspire to. Some of them have their own Instagram pages, and the Likes gather around their feet like small offerings to a Hindu deity.

  But in darker moments I question these wellness idols and ideals that so many of us have chosen to worship. Aren’t the modern yogis just flaunting a fairly unrealistic, ath-lean body shape? After all, who has time to go to a ninety-minute yoga class every day? Aren’t they just setting the rest of us mortals up for disappointment? Are we just wasting our time and a fair amount of money chasing this elusive thing called wellness? Are we looking in the right places? More importantly – will wellness make us happy?

  Even now that I’m doing yoga every day, and regular meditation, I’m finding that it’s not making me happier, even if it is making me fitter. There’s a definite endorphin high after each class, and the yin classes are calming. But I still feel generally unsettled and anxious – and not
grounded at all.

  In week six, walking along Campbell Parade on a sunny winter’s day after class, I feel tremulous, on the edge of tears, shimmering with barely suppressed feeling. It’s 23 degrees in July and everything is too bright and hot. The air is dry and unmoving. The beginner surfers are trying to ride waves that don’t have the energy to form. It’s a Tuesday and most people are at work. What am I doing with my life? Why am I even here, with only yoga to fill my days? The house purchase is becoming something of a mirage. My mortgage broker can’t find a bank that will lend me money. My financial past – earning $100,000 one year and $20,000 the next – confuses them. Outside all is flat and still and hot and golden. I am coming down from my wellness high – from every high. The cottage in the country wasn’t the only mirage … The dude has stopped texting me back. I saw him on Facebook with some other girl, and it felt like being punched. I closed the computer, went into my room and retrieved an old, stale cigarette, which I smoked by the window and cried. I put all that energy into him, only to be ghosted. Romantic rejection doesn’t get any easier to bear, even when experienced in the middle of a wellness kick, even when you’re looking good.

  Walking up the rise from Campbell Parade, I order the nineteen-dollar organic mushroom dish (the ‘woodland bowl’) from Bondi’s uber-cool Porch and Parlour and a ten-dollar green juice. I can Instagram my meal, my juice, and the beach in one #cleaneating #bondi frame. I’m starting to get yoga muscles yet am the saddest-looking wellness person in the wellness cafe.

  I’ve seen other people like me in cafes from time to time, radiating something – something raw and sad and powerful. They sit on a stool at the window or at the edge of the communal table, and the force field, the power of their sadness, creates its own climatic system. I’ve seen the wellness boys and girls when they thought no one was looking – in the cafe, by the locker, after class, their eyes briefly meeting my eyes in the change room at the studio – and there is sadness there too.