Back after a break

The week before last I was really, really tired. Work was furiously busy, everyone at home was worn out, there seemed an endless amount of things to do...I just couldn’t face either getting up early to do yoga at home or going out in the evening to a class, so I didn’t. I got forty five minutes in at home over the weekend, but then went away with the extended family for six days. It was a good break, but there was neither the time nor the privacy to do a practice so I missed another week.  

After driving for six hundred and fifty miles yesterday, I didn’t really fancy it this morning either. However, I was sufficiently confident that I would enjoy it that I got up at 5.45am and rolled out the mat.

I’m glad I did. I soaked it up like a sponge. I was completely absorbed and the time flew by - the twenty minutes was up before I felt I’d even started. It’s good to be back.

My Favourite Asanas #2 – Eagle or Garudasana

Along with tree pose, I think of this as being one of the poses people think of when they think of people doing yoga. Despite its cartoon-y nature, it’s quite tricky and, ultimately, pretty rewarding.

Unlike tree pose, there isn’t anything obviously eagle-y about it at first glance, but it is there.

Trying to find a focal point past the entwined forearms and hands, I am unable to maintain the usual combined binocular picture of the world I’m used to. Instead, I get two images, one from each eye, like most creatures do (can you think of another creature with both eyes on the front of the head rather than the sides?). My eyes flicker from side to side getting used to this new perspective.

In this crouched but taught position, knees bent, elbows pushing up, I am really aware of the musculature around my shoulders and upper arm – there is a coiled sense of strength which I can release if I dip my shoulders, arch my neck back and spread my arms out and behind me, fingertips lifting up and back. Flying.

I don’t know if this variant even has a name, but it feels great.

Patanjali's Yoga Sutras for Beginners #2 - The Vrittis

In my first post on Patanjali I talked about the way the mind "whirrs away... generating...froth." Patanjali classifies these movements of the mind into five separate and distinct types which he calls vrittis.

The first vritti or mental activity he identifies is True Knowledge. This is stuff we know and can rely on - things we see for ourselves, work out for ourselves or are told by a reliable source.

The second vritti is False Knowledge, things we believe but which do not have a reliable basis in reality. This could be the obviously (to us) false knowledge that the sun revolves around the earth, or the mistaken "knowledge" that someone we know definitely doesn't like us, when in fact they do; it's a spectrum.

Third up is Imagination or Prediction. This is where we use what we think we know (which may be true or false) to guess or fantasise about what might happen in the future. This is a sort of mirror image of the fifth vritti - memory. Memory is the playing back in our minds events which we have experienced in the past and we assume, because we were there when it happened, that our recollection is accurate. Hmm.

A curious thing about memory is that we are just as deeply if not more deeply attached to bad memories as we are to good. We are also probably more likely to embellish the bad than we are the good; we often remember things as worse than they actually were but less often as better. We do the same when it comes to imagination - we are strangely prone to imagining worst case scenarios and tormenting ourselves with the image of a disaster yet to come.

The fourth vritti, which I skipped over, is sleep. He calls it "unbeing" and leaves it there. Although we spend a third of our lives doing it, sleep is a closed book even to Patanjali.

Music is yoga for the ears

Patanjali's Yoga Sutras for Beginners #1

If you want to understand a bit more about yoga than the poses, there really is no better place to start than reading Patanjali. My kids prefer to watch films when they know what's going to happen (weird I know) because they say it allows them to enjoy it more.  I think the same holds true when it comes to this text.

The first thing you will need to get your head around is the distinction between the mind and the self. In modern western thought, the two are so interchangable as to be almost indivisible. Blame the enlightenment and the age of reason (yes you, M. Descartes, with your cogito ergo sum).

To understand the entire premise of Patanjali you need to think of the mind as one thing and the self as another. The self is called all sorts of things depending on the translation - self Self, I, atman, conciousness - but it's all the same. The self exists in a sense behind the mind and is often obscured by the mind, which masquerades as the true self and hogs all of concious thought.

A useful analogy is Blakes assertion that he sees through the eye, not with it. The mind isn't the self, it's just a big processor that whirrs away thinking of reasons and explanations for everything, rationalising our experience rather than just perceiving it. If you can stop the mind generating all that froth for a minute, then you have a chance to be able to see things not as you think they are, but as they really are.

Yogamatters

I like this shop enough to write this entirely unsolicited testimonial. I like it partly because the name can be taken in three ways. Firstly, Yoga matters as in, yoga is important. Secondly, yoga matters as in, the matters concerning yoga. And thirdly (and I really hope they did this on purpose) you could, at a stretch, describe someone who either makes or spends a lot of time on a yoga mat as a yoga matter. Like a coffee drinker, or a bird watcher. Lovely word play. I could enjoy that all day.

The other reason I like it is that it sells good products quite cheaply; sadly not something that can be said of every yoga retailer. I'm not going to link to it. It's easy to find.

I especially like my eye pillow. It cost less than £5 and is great. It’s plain and comfortable and just the right weight. The cover is removable which is handy if you want to scent the pillow, like I did. I removed the cover before adding five drops of lavender oil to the pillow, so the oil didn't stain the cover.

Unless you want to perform a chemical eye peel, I suggest you use no more than two drops.

Shhh...

If I had to sum up what yoga does for me in one word, the word would be quiet. When I’m doing yoga in the sense of practicing asanas, life, or at least my perception of and engagement with life, slows down until there is just me, the movement and the breath. 

It’s hard to explain to someone who isn’t dad to two kids under ten how busy and noisy life is generally, and even harder to explain to someone who doesn’t practice yoga how quiet life can be at its most quiet. This is a real, deep quiet – a quiet without any self-questioning or raking over the past. The cycle of examination, critique and planning which is so valuable in my professional life but so relentless in my personal life just stops. There is now worry or judgement. There is no future planning, no looking forward to what might go wrong, no working through all the possible outcomes. The past and future stop tapping on the window for a few moments and the present is everything.

To crave silence in the middle of a hectic family life might seem an utterly selfish and even misanthropic, but I don’t buy that. On the contrary, a period of silence means that I can hear more clearly afterwards – literally and metaphorically. A lot of the noise in family life isn’t physical, although there is a lot of that. And that physical noise – the noise that most needs to be listened to, understood, attended to, absorbed – is in competition with the internal noise created by work stress, financial planning, managing a busy diary…

Yoga means that I can listen with less (I won’t say without any) distraction to my family and give them more of my attention.  I recognise intrusive thoughts as they pop up and just nudge them aside for the time being. I am more attuned to the emotional currents in the house. I am more aware of my own emotional state and consequently more able to control it.

In short, I can hear more clearly. Who wouldn’t want that?

An easy start

It was an unsettled night in the house last night, so I am up slightly earlier than usual, having given up trying to catch a last few minutes of sleep. No wildlife to deal with today, so I get out the mat and get straight on with it. I use the Downdog app for my daily practice, and I love it. It varies the content of my regular twenty minutes enough so that I am familiar with the poses but not bored by the repetition. It goes well today, the breath linking the asana smoothly and elegantly. My mind stays with the practice effortlessly and in no time at all I’m in savasana, heavy and relaxed. I’m so relaxed that when the cat launches itself at my foot and gets both teeth and claws in, I take it in good spirit and shoo him away. I am Yogaman and nothing scrambles my eggs. At least not yet, today.

My Favourite Asanas #1 – Half Pigeon or Ardha Kapotasana

Generally speaking, I like asanas that I feel I can do quite well and dislike those I’m rubbish at. This one is an exception. From the first time I tried it, I’ve been attracted to the feeling of danger as I put a stretch on my glute that threatens to do something dreadful, something catastrophic that I might never recover from. It’s a big old muscle and it protests loudly but, however much it feels like it might, it doesn’t rip and pop my hip socket out like a jointed chicken. Then, ever-so-gradually, I start to let go, lean forward and settle towards the floor. The sense of danger transmutes to a duller aching that starts to feel intensely satisfying as I take the tension out of my shoulders and soften everything, until the belly is connected to the shin, the cheek to the mat, the arms to the floor…

I sit a lot at work, so there is generally a fair bit of tension in my hips. This was the pose in which I first noticed that holding tension in a muscle to protect it actually makes things worse. It takes a leap of faith to relax fully and let the muscle really stretch out. The mixture of a great, deep stretch with a little bit more surrender every time completely hits the spot for me. This one’s on my Desert Island Practice for sure. 

The desert island I have in mind for my Desert Island Practice

This morning

I come downstairs in the dark at five to six. The cat is desperate to be fed so I do that, otherwise there'll be no peace for anyone. I notice as I do that there is a big old spider sat on the wall above his bowl - one of those massive autumn ones that I don't like. On the way to get a glass to deal with him, my bare toe sends a headless mouse corpse skittering across the kitchen floor.

But I am Yogaman and nothing ruffles my calm. I escort the spider outside, dispose of mousey, roll out the mat and off we go.

Why I do Yoga

I like a hobby but, because I’m pretty competitive and obsessive by nature, any hobby soon turns into an arms race of research, acquisition, goal setting, training planning, disappointment and eventually a sense of disillusionment with the thing I’ve been putting all those hours and all that effort into. Honestly, I could list them. Yoga is different.

When I started yoga it was on a whim. I used to describe it as an exercise class rather than a yoga class, because I was a bit squeamish about all the spiritual connotations of yoga. I approached it as a sport. At first I wanted to know how I was getting on, so I spent a lot of time looking around the class at other people and trying to “do” the poses as well as they were. I got cross with myself when I couldn’t, and felt self-conscious and uneasy. I tried to get into asanas that I wasn’t capable of and hurt myself.

Meanwhile, I was reading. I like to read around a subject. For me, it’s part of the enjoyment of a new hobby. When I started reading about yoga, initially in Patanjali and the Bhagavad Gita, it turned out that the spiritual, or at least philosophical, side seemed more relevant than I had ever expected it to. I started to learn all sorts of things about myself. Like how I construct a story about what I can and can’t do. About how I make assumptions about other people and about myself that are unfounded. About how I worry about things I can’t control and criticise myself for things that aren’t my fault.

So I stopped worrying about how sweaty I was, how short my hamstrings were (and still are), how I was a million miles away from the effortless serenity of the other people in the class, and as soon as I stopped judging myself I started to really, really enjoy it. 

It turns out that I do yoga for the same reasons that I have done lots and lots of other things throughout my life – playing with Lego for hours as a child, reading, running, cycling, listening to music, taking things apart and fixing them – only now I understand why I’m doing it. It’s all been a quest to find a quiet little spot where the internal dialogue stops and I can fully relax, just bobbing along in the flow of a totally absorbing action.

So at last, after only forty four years, I’m learning to let go. I’m learning self-compassion. I think it makes me easier to be around – a better dad and a better husband*. It certainly makes me happier.

*I’d have to check that.

Reasons for men to do yoga

Reasons for men not to do yoga:

It’s girly

You are certainly likely to be in a largely female environment. So what? It takes a while to get used to the world of the yoga class, but it’s one of the few activities that makes a point of being non-judgemental. Honestly, people will just let you be. Compared to five-a-side it’s a doddle.

I’m not bendy enough

Almost certainly true. You're not bendy enough to do everything the teacher does, but who cares? You’ll get bendier. Have a go and stop when it feels right to stop.

I’m too old and out of shape

See above.

It’ll be embarrassing

Only if you let it. Try not to fart. If someone else does, don’t laugh.

Everyone else there will be young, good-looking, and expert

They might be to you, but they won’t think they are. Let them worry about them.

They’ll think I’m weird

They won’t notice you or care. Sorry.

I haven’t got the right clothes

That’s easy – they don’t really make ‘em. At least not for people like me. Get over it. Just try to wear a t-shirt long enough so that when you raise both arms above your head you don’t expose a pale three inches of hairy belly fat. Not because no one else wants to see it, but because you’ll be preoccupied trying to hide it and it'll stop you from relaxing.

On the other hand, reasons for men to do yoga:

After the first class, you’ll notice you’re seeing the world from a subtlety different perspective because you are walking with a straight back. I reckon it added at least 20mm to the distance between my eyes and the group.

It feels great.

It is great.