Wellmania

by Brigid Delaney

  I’ve seen the same people on Instagram, hashtagged to the hilt with styled bed hair – and I’ve thought, How is it possible to be that full of shit? Doesn’t it defeat the purpose of all this work? For fuck’s sake, just be real.

  Meanwhile, the year marches on, and the world outside this beachside bubble is getting madder and meaner. Loads of good celebrities have died way before their time, and there is a sense of standing on the plates of history as they are shifting. The US presidential campaign is in full swing and Republican candidate Donald J. Trump is promising to deport Muslims from the US. He calls Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals and threatens to build a great big border wall. His rallies are electrifying, terrifying, unpredictable and violent. People not prone to hyperbole compare Trump with Hitler. In the UK, the public is fed lies and misinformation by politicians who lack all conviction, and are asked to vote on exiting the EU, the thing set up not just to facilitate movement of people and trade, but also to ensure events like World War I and II wouldn’t happen again. Nationalism and xenophobia are on the rise in the West. The war in Syria has caused a refugee crisis of massive proportions. By mid-year more than 3000 Syrian refugees have drowned in treacherous journeys across the Mediterranean Sea. It had been the longest, hottest summer on record. It is now winter, as if autumn had forgotten to arrive. The online world where I spend much of my time is becoming an increasingly brutal space – particularly if you’re a woman. I have stopped reading the comments published under my columns for the Guardian. The bad ones make me heartsick and I want to keep writing with the exhilaration and freedom that hooked me into the game in the first place.

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  The market is without morality. Careless market forces will gobble up and transform anything where there might be a profit. For all its hippy, non-materialist vibes, yoga is no exception. An individual yoga studio and its teachers are often only trying to do their best to create a community out of dust – and while it might be a ‘caring’ community, it is still hooked onto a capitalist system that is making a tonne of money from the wellness industrial complex. People are packed into classes, which are north of twenty dollars a pop; yoga teacher training costs thousands (courses start at around $3000 and can go up to $10,000) and retreats are pricey.

  It’s not just the studios. Take a look at the market for yoga mats, for instance: according to market research company Technavio, the North American yoga and exercise mat business is expected to climb from a current US$11 billion to US$14.03 billion in 2020 (this is just for the mat). Sales of athleisure clothing, including yoga pants, generated US$35 billion in 2015 – an all-time high – making up 17 per cent of the entire American clothing market, according to market research firm NPD Group. The trend is also booming in Australia; research conducted by Victoria University for the Australian Sporting Goods Association predicted that sales of activewear in Australia are expected to continue to grow by more than 20 per cent by 2020.

  Yoga pants by Lorna Jane cost $110, and Lululemon’s pants are a cult obsession among ‘a certain set of gym-minded women and busy moms across the country’, according to GQ magazine. Lululemon yoga gear is collectable: certain lines of sweatpants or shorts are highly prized, like jewellery or designer dresses.

  You can also buy Lululemon prayer beads for $108.

  The company has come under fire for prescribing a rigid aesthetic for the people who work for them (young yoga hotties) as well as their customers (their clothes do not come in larger sizes). Critics say it defines ‘wellness’ within a particular aesthetic paradigm.

  In an article for Jezebel, a former (anonymous) Lululemon employee says: ‘They co-opt something from yoga and warp it until it loses its true meaning … They mean to be relevant, and instead they manipulate good ideas until they become totally corrupt.’

  Churches used to be important. It’s hard to understate just how central they were a mere generation ago, particularly if, like my people, you lived in a country town. They were where you made friends, socialised, met your partner, networked for jobs and got assistance when times were tough. If you were poor you could get food, clothes and money; young couples went there for marriage counselling; refugees came for English language lessons. You were born into a church, educated by it and you were buried in it. You kept the cycle going by bringing your children into the church through the sacrament of baptism, and the habit of weekly mass.

  Christianity’s decline is so sharp as to have fallen off a cliff – in Australia anyway. But just because religion has almost disappeared, it doesn’t mean we don’t need it. Regardless of whether or not you believe there is a God, organised religion can provide a sense of meaning, ritual and community. We’ve picked up some threads from old religions but the fabric is now pretty threadbare. So we go off searching. We might try a few different sorts of yoga at a few different studios and see which one suits us, where there might be a good community (it’s no coincidence that yoga studios explicitly talk about community when advertising classes). We go to India and find gurus to study under. Like modern monks – but with wi-fi and wheelie suitcases – we go on retreat where we meditate, eat simply, go to bed early and reflect on where we are and where we have to go. Yoga is part of this ‘religion-lite’ offering.

  It’s not all bad. The nuggets of truth in many of the Namaste Dudes yoga classes were vital in steering me through this troubling winter. They provided a counterbalance to the grim politics of the year, the disappointments in love, the stress of trying to buy a house – as well as being a way of imparting wisdom, information and a value system that resembled an old-timey church sermon.

  We’ve thrown out most of the old-timey church stuff – yet in its place is a yearning for something bigger and more powerful than ourselves. In the last few years, the public appetite for guidance from the amorphous beast known as the wellness industry has become almost like a mania. I don’t think it’s too big a call to say that for many young people (mostly young women) yoga and meditation have replaced church as their main form of spiritual sustenance.

  For the children of secular baby boomers, born into nothing – no religious tradition, no rituals, no catechism, no theology, no sacred texts – yoga fills a gap. You pay your twenty dollars and you submit to a form of spiritual teaching. What else have we got? Our society is so impoverished that all it can dish up to satisfy our hunger is entertainment and distraction. We gorge ourselves on it. It’s not so much satisfying as numbing – and profoundly fucking sad. It’s no surprise that a yoga class is the best the mainstream can offer on the spiritual front.

  The yogic way of life (physical practice, meditation, self-knowledge, a philosophy, spiritual practice) is definitely not a cult, and definitely not a religion, yet, like fasting, it can have the rigour and the discipline of religious devotion. Yogis in training have to submit to this way of life. To get there fully you have to change not just your body and what you put in it, but also your habits, how you structure each day, your social life, your mentality, thought patterns, your inner life, your intellect, your spiritual beliefs, your friends, your worldview. In other words, you have to change your world.

  Instagram has thrown up a whole generation of patron saints who demonstrate how it is done. You follow them. ‘Fall in love with taking care of yourself. Mind. Body. Spirit,’ they write over a picture of themselves doing crow pose on the sand at sunrise, as the sky flames and water laps. You don’t desire the person in the photo. That’s not the aim any more. The desire, more carnivorous and impossible, is to be them.

  The result of all this work on yourself is a feeling that might be described as vitality or some sense of optimum health, fitness, calmness and strength. Your body is humming along tickety-boo, but so are your spirit and your mind. After all, yoga in Sanskrit means ‘to yoke; join together, pull along’.

  But does yoga yoke us together in a broader, collective sense? American writer Judith Warner notes a disturbing social trend. Just as the women of the mid-1970s took flight into
consciousness-raising groups, the work force, divorce and casual sex, their daughters are also taking flight, but that flight is inwards. ‘They’re fleeing to yoga,’ she writes in the New York Times, ‘imitating flight in the downward-gazing contortion called the crow position. They’re striving, through exquisite new adventures in internal fine-tuning, to feel more deeply, live more meaningfully, better inhabit each and every moment of each and every day.’

  Warner glumly concludes, ‘There’s no sense that personal liberation is to be found by taking a more active role in the public world.’ In fact, ‘such interiority seems to be a way to manage an unbearable sort of existential anxiety: a way to narrow the scope of life’s challenges and demands … to the more manageable range of the in-and-out of your own breath’.

  As a result of this dereliction of public duty, the world then turns a certain way, and not another. What was the election of Donald J. Trump except a manifestation of this abdication of a sort of collective ideal?

  In the wellness industry we can self-actualise: follow our bliss and find individual contentment, be the best version of ourselves we can be. The collective has collapsed in favour of the individual. We can’t do anything about inequality or the ruined environment or the heating planet – but we can get really, really good at these poses and master all the potential shapes that our body can make. Before Trump we had long stopped marching, and taking our issues to the streets; instead we took them to our mats.

  Carl Cederström and André Spicer, authors of The Wellness Syndrome, argue that obsessive ritualisation of self-care comes at the expense of collective engagement, collapsing every social problem into a personal quest for the good life. Writing in the Baffler, British commentator Laurie Penny agrees:

  The slow collapse of the social contract is the backdrop for a modern mania for clean eating, healthy living, personal productivity, and ‘radical self-love’ – the insistence that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we can achieve a meaningful existence by maintaining a positive outlook, following our bliss, and doing a few hamstring stretches as the planet burns.

  In yoga, when we talk about structural problems it is our bodies that we are referring to – the way having short arms might make triangle pose difficult, for example. As for the other structural problems – the patriarchy, income and housing inequality, Indigenous recognition and a profit motive that is destroying the environment – we prefer to look away.

  Social change and self-care do not have to be mutually exclusive but I wonder if a greater engagement with the collective could come at a studio level. A good yoga instructor won’t necessarily be a political teacher, but the values of love, compassion, kindness, inclusivity and respect that yoga instructors talk about – these are becoming political values in the age of Donald Trump.

  Yoga means ‘to yoke’. We need to yoke these values found in the studio to politics and public conversation. That’s where we start.

  But what about the practice itself? Will doing yoga change your life? Or at least give you a lean body? Well, yes. It can.

  It’s easy when most of our work is so sedentary to become disassociated from our bodies. It’s easy to let the disassociation become the dominant way of being. It’s there in how we unwind after work – television, boxset binges, large glasses of wine, a beer or tumbler of Scotch, a joint before bed, a trashy novel, hours spent scrolling Facebook or Twitter, getting lost down the internet click hole, all the entertainment, all the numbing, all the distractions. These distractions are the way we push away darkness, sadness, doubt, a nagging sense of meaninglessness or pain. But they also mean that we are not really in our bodies much of the time. I mean, our bodies are there, stretched out on the couch, the heat of the MacBook warming our lap – but it’s all happening in our heads. Everything else is numbed.

  An hour of yoga a day brings you back to your body. Not only that, you tune in and become aware of what seems like another body in your own body. This other body is complex and subtle: one side moves more easily than the other; some days it’s all-powerful, other days there’s no juice in the tank; some days are full of energy, other times you just want to stretch out and rest. In yoga, where awareness is drawn everywhere – even to the breath – this disassociation falls away. At least, that’s what it’s like for me. And yoga and meditation have been effective in fighting this disassociation. In short, they make me feel more alive, even if feeling more alive means feeling more pain, sadness, loss and anxiety – and, yes, also during the six weeks, joy. And that’s a good thing.

  Adam Whiting says there are two ways to look at modern yoga practice:

  One, the entry point, the surface level – people moving their bodies and stretching for an hour a day. Just this physical output of energy is benefiting them on a physical level. Their hips are getting more open, they’re no longer experiencing back pain, they are feeling healthier, and this helps with wellness.

  Then there is a subtle energy in the postures. A skilled teacher can create a specific sequence combining the postures with specific breath techniques that can create a profound change on an energetic level. Beyond the surface of a stronger, more open, more supple body is an ocean of energetic channels. Sure, some of it has these mystical, magical undertones, but these techniques are not mysticism or witchcraft – it’s science.

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  Friday is the last official night of the project and we do a really tough groove class with Adam and all these loquacious models who have not been part of the Modern Yogi Project – or maybe they once were, but have now graduated to full, proper yogis. They greet each other with kisses at the start of the class and keep high-fiving each other and doing handstands. At the end of the ninety minutes, Adam gets out his guitar and sings Whitney Houston’s ‘I Want to Dance with Somebody’ as we are lying there drenched in our own sweat. It’s a cappella, full of yearning, and unexpectedly moving and beautiful.

  Then, when the song is over, we all sit in a semicircle and do three long omms in rounds. They seem to run over each other and through me and last for a long time, mingling with a kind of afterglow of the classical guitar chords, like a bath of sound, and I think that this is the right note to end on – literally.

  But after class there is a graduation party of sorts and the yogi girls sit around eating nori rolls and talking about bad Tinder dates. I don’t stay long; instead I get an Uber to a dinner party in Bronte and I notice one of the guests – a director – has brought his own food, wrapped in foil. I pour some champagne and wonder if he’s gluten-free and maybe brought his own meal – which would be sad, but very much of the times, so I don’t say anything.

  Later I am relieved to find it is not gluten-free, it’s actually a large hash cake and we all eat it before dinner and everything is hilarious and there is good linen and shiny tableware and steaming bowls of curry and crisp wine and I can’t stop laughing and then I think, The modern yogi course wasn’t supposed to end like this. But of course it was always going to end like this. This is my path – what C.S. Lewis calls a ‘secret road’ that we are all on, but each road is different. I like to think that I’m walking in the middle of the road, between the wellness lane and the hedonism lane, trying not to get run over by cars. Maybe I am meant to pick a side. But right now, I can’t – and that’s okay.

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  In January of 2016 a Los Angeles jury ordered my old mate Bikram Choudhury to pay $6.4 million in punitive damages to his former legal adviser, Minakshi Jafa-Bodden. Jafa-Bodden had initially sued (and won over $900,000) for sexual harassment, gender discrimination and wrongful termination.

  Bikram claimed during the trial that he had run out of money – although on further questioning he admitted to owning a fleet of more than forty luxury cars. He said he had donated all the vehicles to the government to found the ‘Bikram auto engineering school for children’. According to Jezebel, a spokesperson for the government said, essentially, ‘Lol no.’ If I could talk to Bikram now I would say two things to him. One: y
ou were right – if you do yoga every day you will get lean and look good. And two: you are a total dick.

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  Winter has turned into spring – and I don’t do yoga at the moment. The anxiety has gone too, thank God. It left as mysteriously as it arrived. One day I just noticed I felt ‘normal’. The sick feeling in the pit of my stomach was gone. I never get to the bottom of why it appeared in the first place when I was so intensely engaged in a practice that was meant to chill me out. The New-Age, witchy part of me thinks – and I have no evidence for this – that when we radically try to shake something up (suddenly start doing lots of exercise, or lots of meditation, or eating differently) our more subtle energy system can be thrown. It can put up a firewall in protest at all the change, like a low hum of anxiety, or it can become fatigued. The body and all its workings seem at times more mysterious to me than distant galaxies and other planets.

  What else? After months of paperwork, and negotiating with banks, I bought that little cottage in the country in a place without yoga studios or juice bars. Now, at night, all I can hear are the frogs in the creek and, in the morning, the magpies. I go to the gym five days a week and do weights, supervised by a really muscly guy called Lionel who doesn’t say much but sometimes surprises me with passionate outbursts when I am doing split squats: ‘Strong Brigid! Strong Brigid!’ he’ll say, which makes me look up, then wobble and lose my balance. Rihanna blasts from the speakers and I lie facedown on some machine and do single leg curls, and all I think about is the count of reps. I’m bored. Of course I’m bored – but after the tumult of winter, that’s fine. It all works if you do it often enough, all the yoga and the running and the weights. After all, it’s just moving your body, and that is what we are meant to do.