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?

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.