The practice

This newsletter was once about yoga, and a little bit about mental health. These days it’s about books and art and the question of contentment, and not very much at all about yoga. In its earliest iteration, I used the newsletter to advertise the two weekly zoom classes I taught in 2020, when I’d first qualified as a teacher and yoga had quite dramatically transformed how I felt about my body and myself.

I first started practicing yoga at university, where a local photographer and yoga teacher had put on a series of £2 classes during exam season. My legs shook in warrior 2 and my sleep vastly improved. Then, in 2015, when I was first living in London and was struggling to cope with the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, I started practicing in my bedroom on YouTube, using Yoga with Adrienne. There was a twenty minute class for depression, which I practiced most nights. A particular phrase Adrienne used to cue a forward fold and the feeling of a heavy head — “busy mind, strong mind” — reframed entirely how I felt about my depression. I was deeply ashamed about the fact that I was depressed. I thought of my depression as a weakness that meant I was less able than other people to cope with the ordinary realities of adult life. “Busy mind, strong mind”, though, was not defect, just difference — a way of approaching reality that involved maybe too much thinking.

From Adrienne, I graduated to 6.45am classes at Highbury Fitness First with my housemate, Mattie. We had an excellent instructor who taught us the fundamentals, and lifting up into crow pose for the first time I felt something I had not felt in a long while — that I could trust my body, that my body was strong, as well as my mind. I could focus my attention! I could move my mind! I could float! The closing pose of the class was always the most challenging — savasana, in which students lie flat on their back with their eyes closed, is a pose of surrender and vulnerability. But I stayed, though often I lay on my side instead, and I kept on going back. Crow pose became easier, and I gave myself a carpet burn and broke my mirror flipping over into it in an overshot forearm stand. Eventually, savasana became easier too.

Yoga had changed my life once, a quiet constant in the midst of a crisis that helped me to re-inhabit a body from which I had felt exiled. Yoga moved me from self-punishment to somewhere closer to compassion, but as I became more passionate about it, and as yoga grew in popularity, my practice became more intense. I caused myself a chronic hamstring injury overstretching them, and I went to classes where teachers encouraged everybody to push to the limits of their flexibility. I displaced my still very much extant depression by obsessing over flipping myself upside-down and tying myself in knots. A practice that had once transformed my self-perception was somehow becoming punitive. Then, almost by accident, I walked into a class that taught the opposite — that yoga was about maintenance and not improvement, about doing less and not more. We more or less rolled around on the floor for an hour and fifteen minutes, and at the end of class, my heart unclenched.

Again, the yoga practice changed my life. I learnt about the philosophy from which yoga developed in India’s Vedic Period, and its sustained interrogation of a fundamental question — how are we to bear the condition of temporality? Time passes, therefore decay, therefore pain and grief and all its ancillary suffering. The answers, and the metaphysical systems, belief systems and practices that have emerged out of this question and within the traditions of Indian philosophy and religion are, from the little I know, rich and layered and often contradictory. Their complexity has evolved on emergence into late modernity, and in collision with capitalism, which has a very different answer to yoga to the fundamental question of how we bear the passing of time: we measure it and optimise it, we pack it out with productivity, potential and investment all of which looks, always, forward to an imagined future, to paradise in this life, not the next. Yoga has been adopted and adapted and appropriated, and the kinds of immortality (yogic philosophy has always been very much interested in immortality) promised by the dominant forms of yoga practice you’ll encounter on social media and in the marketplace are essentially to do with preserving the appearance of youth and elasticity and an extremely narrow ideal of beauty.

It is, in a word, annoying. Teaching yoga, I have become cautious not to overstate its potential. People come to practices like yoga sometimes because they need to stretch, but very often because they are looking for something. Answers, maybe, about how to cope with sadness or agitation or their feelings about their bodies. Any practice or system and especially any teacher that promises all such answers is, in my opinion, to be regarded with suspicion, particularly if those practices stipulate a particular body-type which is athletic and very able, and access to a huge amount of disposable income (it will come as a surprise to nobody that yoga classes now rarely cost £2).

And yet I cannot deny that the yoga practice has transformed how I feel about my body, myself and my relationship to the world on more occasions than I care to count. It is a privilege to share these practices with the handful of students I teach on a regular basis. Because I am a writer, I spend a lot of my time thinking about language and how it shapes our innermost thoughts and feelings: “The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives,” says Audre Lorde. Yoga classes are a receptive and open place in which to transform not just self-perception but also your sense of your own power in the world, through the alchemy of movement and language and imagination.

So, my feelings are mixed. But, on the advice of my very excellent yoga teacher, I’ve come to embrace the position that ambivalence is a good thing because it keeps you in the question. There’s a fast-growing body of research into the physiological and psychological benefits of yoga and meditation practice, and all of this is potentially hugely beneficial to people who struggle with depression and chronic illness. But in my experience it’s the philosophical framework, to which yoga gives sustained access, rather than a particular physical practice (release your trauma by stretching your hips), that has helped really more than anything else with my depression. And the fascinating thing about yoga is that it is via the physical practice that you access the philosophy: you have to experience the body as limited and temporal in order to consider what lies beyond that temporality. Mostly, again under the guidance of my own yoga teacher, my practice involves rolling around on the floor on a tennis ball and doing a handful of stretches. Whenever I’m lucky enough to encounter a group of students receptive to that kind of class, that’s also what I teach.

This newsletter was going about putting two tennis balls in a sock and rolling around with them either side of your mid-spine to release your quadratus lumborum, which gets very tight from a lot of sitting, but here we are. I do recommend that you try the tennis balls.

With love, Rosie xxx