Hereford Yoga Centre

I HATED PE at school. I really loathed it. It was a routine humiliation of nylon knickers and enforced communal showers, of feeling clumsy and inadequate next to the ‘PE girls’, who were usually also the ‘popular girls’; powerful, enviable, desirable. PE, for me, meant shivering on a vast field, waiting for the inevitable hockey stick in the shins or ball in the face. I was usually picked for teams second to last. It was an all-round painful experience and every chance I could, I would bunk off.

Fast-forward 30 years and here I am, delivering a ‘yoga for periods’ lecture-demo at an education conference at the University of Worcester. After the introductions, I realise that the audience is entirely made up of ‘PE girls’, now PE professionals. Granted, there are some guys present, but all of these people are just so into sport! I have nothing against sport. After an unfortunate start I have come to really appreciate its importance and its beauty. But it has nothing to do with my experience- so how did I get here? It’s so ironic that I nearly burst out laughing, then glance around awkwardly, waiting for that ball to the face. And collect myself. These people are amazingly committed. They care deeply about their tribes (their sports, and their teams, their schools), and also about education, about helping young people stay active and healthy, and about closing the gender gap. This is where our interests intersect.

Since the inception of Hereford Yoga CIC (Community Interest Company) in 2014, I have worked closely with local statutory and voluntary services whose interest is in increasing activity, especially in girls, who are over 50% more likely to become inactive than boys of the same age. Girls, only 2% of who describe themselves as ‘strong’ as opposed to 49% of boys. This has usually meant collaborating with PE departments.

I practise yoga as an art and a philosophy, so bringing yoga to schools via PE departments has always felt like a strange fit. It’s just been the ‘way in’ due to the widely accepted misconception of yoga as a purely physical activity. And yet, how wonderful that these sporty teachers are identifying the needs of those, like me all those decades ago, for whom traditional PE activities just aren’t resonating. Who care about girls’ experience of the menstrual cycle enough to take a day out of their busy schedules to learn some approaches to opening the conversations and expanding the offers at their schools.

Iyengar yoga, thanks to the lifetime’s work of Geeta S Iyengar and her colleagues, has a wealth of knowledge to offer around staying active throughout the whole menstrual cycle. The idea that a meaningful asana (postural) practice can be adapted to work with (not against), not just menstruation, but all phases of the menstrual cycle and indeed all phases of a woman’s life, was radical when Ms. Iyengar started her research into it. Postural yoga was having its hey-day in the 1970s and 80s, spreading worldwide via students of the guru Krishnamacharya, with each of these (almost exclusively male) students developing his own style and methodology. The physicality was strong and dynamic, evolving as it did out of the Mysore tradition that was designed for active boys and young men. BKS Iyengar’s dedication to making the practice of yoga accessible to all bodies no doubt inspired his daughter Geeta’s mission of bringing the female experience to the forefront of contemporary yoga practices.

2 out of 3 girls are still opting out of PE during their period. But the Iyengars’ method does not stipulate that a girl or woman should stop practising when she is menstruating. On the contrary, the poses and sequences are adapted according to the individual’s needs, with special care taken for rest and release in the abdomen, lower back and head, and towards promoting hormonal balance. Props are used to engender a feeling of being supported. As someone who has suffered chronic menstrual problems, I advocate this as one of the greatest gifts arising from the phenomenon that is transnational postural yoga. I believe that girls should be taught these techniques in schools. It will help them to feel listened to and cared for; to feel equipped and capable; to acknowledge and respect the inherent strength of their own womanhood, rather than perceiving it as a weakness.

We learn through the body and the senses; imagine the impact throughout the rest of the education system, and on the rest of their lives, if in PE lessons kids were routinely given opportunities to improve posture, increase confidence and develop an understanding of body-mind integration. I learned last week that, unlike my experience in the 1990s, this is what many departments are beginning to implement. So I thank the organisers for the invites to the Worcester and Hereford conferences. I salute the teachers who are serious about shifting the culture of PE from primarily or exclusively sports education to a meaningfully inclusive and holistic physical education. And I know that yoga has an important part to play in enabling that evolution.

Images: Gabriella http://capturedbygabi.com/

https://strideactive.org/

https://www.activehw.co.uk/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geeta_Iyengar

I was hoping to be among many thousands of people marching in London this weekend to demand truth and immediate collective action in response to the climate crisis. I can’t go, in the end, but I wish all who can very well. Perhaps naively, I wish them success.  I live in hope, because it’s not possible to live without it. I have teenaged children one of whom particularly, after a few years of engagement with climate action, has become utterly disengaged and fatalistic about the future of humanity. I don’t blame them. Sometimes, even allowing for adolescent hormones, it seems like the only logical and realistic response as we slide over the precipice and into the catastrophe. And yet, somehow, hope persists. Without hope, action will disintegrate, and vice versa.

I find hope in my practice of yoga. I’m aware of what a cliché that is, and yet it doesn’t make it any less true. I have noticed how publications of environmental organisations now regularly recommend yoga- both as a way of managing anxiety (which is an altogether natural response to the reality of the situation) and of connecting with nature. They are onto something. Yogic practices were originally developed by people and through cultures that were deeply integrated with the natural world. These practices offer a framework for an exploration of our place, not only on this earth but as part of the entire universal complex. Some texts describe the body as a microcosmic reflection of the universe. The experience of ‘prkrti’, ‘nature’, the yogis discovered, is at the very core of being human. We are it, it is us. Logically then, any violation of the natural world is also a self-violation.

This is my very simple experience- that a daily practice of yoga connects me to nature. It reminds me of my humble existence as an organism within an ecosystem upon which I am completely reliant for survival. Every organism is a collection of living cells in symbiotic relationship. By studying this interdependence within the field of our own body-mind-breath, it’s possible to cultivate valuable knowledge and intuition about how we, as a species, exist in relationship to each other, to other species and to our environments. It’s about balance, and it’s about alignment.

Think of vrksasana (tree pose); this is an iconic symbol of balance. It is also a lens through which to dive deeply into an exploration of balance as a practice in general. Balance of the weight of one’s body on one leg requires a careful distribution of resources, of energy versus time, of breath and nutrition and effort and will and poise and concentration. Try it. If one side over-does, draining resources, then the pose will soon be over. For sustainability on any scale we require an informed, practised, I’d venture an embodied, understanding of balance.

Jenny-May adjusting Utthita Trikonasana

It’s the same with alignment. Iyengar yoga is particularly associated, within the field of modern postural yoga, with an almost fanatical preoccupation with alignment. The alignment of the back body in Utthita Trikonasana (triangle pose) is a good illustration of this, where one may spend years working on getting the back of the left heal, the tailbone and the back of the head to line up on one plane. Why bother, when the world is burning? It’s a good question. For me, it’s partly because by studying alignment in the particular we are cultivating it as a practice in general. If, for example, policies were developed with alignment at their core there would be an end to the use of fossil fuels and a transition to green tech ensuring the protection of livelihoods, landscapes and biomes.

I was interested to read in a recent open letter from concerned scientists and engineers demanding a pause to the precipitate and dangerous development of AI, a call for measures to ensure that this technology is ‘more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy, and loyal’. Alignment matters. We can take our understanding, our embodiment of it, from Utthita Trikonasana, to our personal choices, to the demands we make of our governments and institutions.

For me, practising and teaching yoga is a way of maintaining hope and stability in these very distressing and uncertain times. It is a small act of resistance to the status quo of measuring everything by economic profit.It is a tiny contribution towards greater balance and alignment of people and planet. It is a daily reminder to tread lightly.

‘It’s in childhood that most people have their first spiritual experience; that of an innate and natural link to the sacred. The joy, the clarity of mind and the curiosity that we’ve known can become the starting point of a marvellous rediscovery. If our relationship with our parents is imbued with love and respect, it will serve as a model and a foundation, and all of our other relationships will also be founded on trust and respect.’- Jack Cornfield

I love this quote from Jack Cornfield. Those who haven’t had the benefits of a stable start in life of the kind he describes may have different experiences from those who have; but the ‘innate and natural link to the sacred’ is available to everybody. The cultivation of this link develops a particular quality of self-respect which can be used as a foundation for healthy relationships. 

A few weeks ago I came across some striking research about the effect of shared spirituality on children’s mental health. By spirituality I mean a conscious and deliberate examination of one’s inner life and the cultivation of its connection to and place within universal patterns. It is well documented that maternal mental ill-health puts children at 50% higher risk of depression in their own lives. HOWEVER this robust, peer-reviewed study led by Lisa Miller shows that if a child shares a spiritual life with their primary care-giver, they are 80% LESS likely to develop depression, whether they were high- or low-risk to start with*. This means that parents, whether they suffer with their own mental health or not, are providing a proven antidote to depression in their children just by sharing their experience of a spiritual sensibility. And this can be done in so many ways! Maybe there is a faith tradition that the family belongs to, or perhaps not. It doesn’t matter; this has been factored into the research and has no bearing at all on the outcomes. What does matter is a sense for the child of their inner self being held, loved, and existing as part of a larger community and universal pattern. This can be experienced by, for example, connecting with nature, by appreciating beauty, by talking about priorities and what we base our choices on, by practices that develop empathy, joy and compassion.  

As adults we have to accept that we cannot provide a life for our children that is free from pain. What we can do is provide a framework that helps them to build resilience, to be as well prepared as possible for the difficulties they are bound to face. This research has given me heart. It is easy to become disillusioned when faced with suffering, especially of the young, especially of the young people that we love and care for intimately. And there is so much of it about, this suffering, and it’s so unfair. But we have a choice to educate children and young people, at home and, importantly, in schools, about the importance of exercising what starts in infancy as Cornfield’s ‘innate and natural link to the sacred’; the ’being’ part of human. If we can show them lots of ways that this can be done, and if we can continue to learn from them how to stay in touch with our own initial innocent wonder in life, that seems like a good start.

*Miller, Lisa: ‘The Awakened Brain: The Psychology of Spirituality’, Penguin 2022

Our Beginners Class in action

Nadia Gilani’s opinion piece on yoga is an important contribution to this January’s ‘get-well’ fetish.

As the NHS crumbles and health inequalities widen, universal access to high-quality yoga services should become a priority for all local authorities interested in creating high-functioning integrated care systems. Because firstly, regular yoga practice is known to work as a path to sustainable integrated health.

Secondly, it’s relatively cheap for the public purse. It’s taught in groups (in which good teachers differentiate for individuals’ needs) so for the return in health and wellbeing, spend-per-person is peanuts compared to costs associated with long-term health issues that yoga is proven to both treat and prevent. It also provides experiences of belonging and connection that reduce loneliness and isolation, identified as a major stress-factor on primary care.

Gilani’s article is a call-to-action for all yoga teachers to make community outreach a priority. I agree, but would go further; everybody should have access to the benefits of studio learning. In Hereford, we are conducting a pilot in partnership with 3 NHS surgeries, providing free yoga on prescription. It’s been the surest way to both diversify our yoga community and to dismantle social and financial barriers to practice.

As a long-term practitioner I’m not at all surprised by the transformative benefits reported by patients. Patients themselves, and their health practitioners, are surprised. They are also impressed and enthusiastic, telling us there is a big need and please can we do more? Our answer is, we know, and we hope so.

It should be remembered that physiotherapy was long regarded by the establishment as a fringe ‘alternative health’ practice. Now, quite rightly and thanks to targeted research, there is a physiotherapist attached to every surgery and hospital in the country. I’m not suggesting that yoga replace physio- it meets a different need- and the yoga industry is currently too unregulated for blanket integration into the NHS; as Gilani suggests there’s work to do, to differentiate between practices that offer a truly self-educative experience and those that sell unsubstantiated images and concepts for financial profit. But as we’re developing, as a species, our understanding of health as balance between body, mind and connected consciousness, yoga is poised, ready to deliver its very tangible benefits to masses of people regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, income or ability.

“We live in the most part in closed rooms. These form the environment from which our culture grows. Our culture is to a certain extent a product of our architecture. If we want our culture to rise to a higher level, we are obliged, for better or worse, to change our architecture. And this only becomes possible if we take away the closed character from the rooms in which we live.”

– Paul Scheerbourt, 1914

 

EXPLORATION OF SPACE

Yoga is an exploration of space; the spaces we live in; the body-mind-environment spaces. Have you noticed, there are lots of closed rooms…

Did you ever have one of those dreams where you discover a new room in the house that you’ve lived in for years? You thought you knew the place inside out, but here it is right in front of you, a door, and inside the door a completely new space. What’s in there?

With a sustained practice of yoga, we sometimes get those moments in waking life- when a particular experience, perhaps an adjustment in an asana (posture), makes you go ‘Aha! This space was always here, but I never knew!’. In fact, the exploration of consciousness through diligent training of body-mind processes can open out an infinite number of new ‘rooms’ for us to experience. Yet we tend to exist on a day to day level in a small, cramped abode, without questioning the limitations this puts on our potential for growth.

There are certain aspects of our body-mind architecture that we have no choice about. But we usually have more agency than we believe possible. Let’s take a simple example. As we age, the thoracic dorsal vertebrae, especially T6-9, begin a process of protruding outwards, or cyphosis. This can occur very slowly over many years, or in some cases more rapidly. In any case, as the spine ages that’s what happens. It is also exacerbated by how we live, for example working on screens, driving, caring….everything that gives us the ‘hunch’ of the middle-upper back.

THE THORACIC DORSAL

The thoracic dorsal spine is proximal to the back of the chest. So when the spine in this region withdraws, it’s like closing a room in your house; shutting it off with a door that will eventually become so rusty and fixed that no amount of pushing and pulling will open it again. The implications of closing the back door to your chest are potentially serious. It’s where your heart and lungs live. In yogic terms the chest space also houses the seat of the spiritual heart or intuitive intelligence, which brings light and vitality and uplifts our everyday experiences. It’s the place in which we feel love most acutely and tangibly. I’d say it’s worth keeping it open for business.

SOMETHING TO TRY…

If we make a repeated small daily effort to move the thoracic dorsal in, to maintain its function as a support and gateway to everything in front of it, then we can reduce the pace at which the door becomes rusted shut; possibly even avoid that happening all together. This can be done through various asana, with or without props (see the pictures for some ideas).

Urdvha Baddhanguliyasana

Paschima Baddhanguliyasana (without belt, fingers interlocked)

Gohmukasana (arms)

Purvottasana (using the chair)

Supta Urdvha Hastasana (with brick in the back)

Try one or two of these poses every day for two weeks and see if you feel a difference. As Paul Scheerbourt suggests, change your architecture. Change your culture. Do this with the intention of acknowledging and cultivating the intimacy between the back and the chest. Allow them to collaborate. This will frame how we experience and inhabit the space between them. That space where love happens.

Aah, savasana. That lovely bit at the end. Or, that bit when I’m supposed to completely relax but my mind is running in circles. How is it for you? Sometimes we experience a flip between these feelings around savasana on a daily basis. Nevertheless, I cannot advocate strongly enough for savasana as a daily practice. I entreat you not to dismiss or neglect it and not to underestimate its transformational powers over a lifetime.

1. ‘Classical’- flat on the back with a blanket supporting the back of the head and neck

It’s important to finish each and every practice of yogasana and pranayama with savasana for a number of reasons:

7 Good Reasons to practise Savasana

1. It marks the end of the practice, giving a sense of completion and contentment.
2. It allows the benefits of the practice, both physical and psychological, to embed and consolidate.
3. Even a short savasana is like plugging a device in to re-charge. It’s immensely restorative.
4. It is soothing for the nervous system, so reduces symptoms of stress and anxiety.
5. It allows the senses to completely rest from their habitual activity, reducing their attachment to external objects.
6. It is a bridge between the ‘outer’ aspects of the yoga practice and the ‘inner’ aspects; it allows us to dive deeply inside that inner experience in a safe and secure way.
7. It is one of the best preparations for a good death.

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Have you ever been there when someone is dying? If you have (and depending on the nature of the death) you may have noticed the phenomenal quality of love when death is close. When loved ones assemble in witness of a life’s twilight hours, love takes form and becomes, for some time at least, a palpable, almost personified presence. ‘Love was always love’, writes Gabriel Garcia Marquèz in his celebrated novel Love in the Time of Cholera, ‘any time, any place, but it was more solid the closer it came to death’.

As a world-wide community we find ourselves in a state of virtual vigil at the deathbed of many, many people, both known and unknown to us. The inability to assemble makes sorrow more acute and more lonely.  In grief and in love we are turned inside-out, our fleshy vulnerability exposed, raw, howling for human contact. If we are lucky and mindful, even as the scar tissues begin to form, we can retain the direct empathy that accompanies such open-heartedness.

As we stand witness at the demise of much that we have known and accepted and expected, a sharpened awareness of the trembling fragility of our societal structures underpins our everyday actions. Our cultural and political architecture, our hypocrisies, our complicities, our inequalities and everything we take for granted, is laid bare. What and who we love and value, and how, has become poignant and tangible on a global scale.

Space and time have changed their meaning. They are stretching and bending, contracting, expanding and aligning in unusual ways; some pleasurably, some dragging along a heavy pack of frustration and longing. We are removed from one another physically, spatially, over an unknown period of time, and it hurts in very many ways.  Yet as a species we are displaying more presence of awareness perhaps than ever before. Social isolation and distancing, as a great act of solidarity and self-discipline, has demonstrated increased, and increasing, awareness in human thought, speech and action. We are experiencing an unprecedented shift in consciousness; from individual to collective, from isolated to interconnected.

The many physical, emotional and economic hardships that this virus and the subsequent prolonged lockdown are causing are lamentable, and for many are utterly tragic. But a stripping back of everything but essential human activity has left a space. An external space that nature is recovering and inhabiting with abundance and abandon.  Cleaner air and oceans; a proliferation of flora and fauna of all kinds, in environments more conducive to their success; this is surely something to safeguard, to cultivate, to insist upon maintaining?

Our contemporary shared experience of opening spaces developing hand in hand with enhanced awareness and healthy habitation is entirely consistent with yogic processes. Indeed, the process of stripping life back to its essential elements feels profoundly familiar to anyone engaged in a daily spiritual practice. Through a disciplined practice of āsana (posture) and prānayāma (control of breath/life force), we are not creating new spaces, but rather discovering and cultivating what was always there; tapping into something that usually we are too busy, too occupied with external affairs, to notice.

Movement into and within and out of a series of archetypal postures, or breaths, invites us to inhabit an exponential internal spaciousness (ākāśa). In that space resides freedom of choice (svātantrya). So how do we choose to respond to our conditions? What do we maintain and cultivate, and what we discard and move on from? Through this conscious sorting process emerges an enhanced experience of embodied awareness. ‘We are love’s body’, writes Nan Shepherd, ‘or we are undone’.

From the more spacious viewpoint in which we are now collectively situated, the component parts of our human society can be seen for what they are. Rampant consumption, ecological destruction and the kind of gross economic expansion that benefits the richest few have, for the moment, reduced or ceased.  Currently the poorest and most vulnerable are suffering the most. We have proven that complete systemic change is possible, feasible, practical. And now we can make it just, if we find that something worth insisting upon.

A friend wrote to me recently ‘may you journey out and journey in…may everything rise’. Her words led me back to some of twelfth century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart: ‘What a man takes in by contemplation, that he pours out in love’.  Let’s decide now then, from inside looking out and in the painful, shameful exposure of our defective structures, what to cultivate and what to discard.  Let’s allow our grief-ripped hearts to continue pulsing openly, in a unified rhythm. Let’s balance our actions with proper contemplation, with compassion, and be ready to implement the kind of transformation we want to see, inside and out. This is our opportunity, individually and collectively. Let’s take it.

My young daughter loves to be naked. Her innocence is beautifully unspoiled. Her enthusiasm for music, nature,
friends, the moon, often results in her shedding all of her clothes, running and dancing in the utter delight of being alive in her body. She loves the feeling of being herself, in herself. It is a lot of fun. We often say the party hasn’t started until our girl’s got naked.

However your own childhood ecstasies manifested, fast-forward a few decades. How often have you heard yourself, or a female friend or relative say ‘I hate my hair/thighs/hips/feet/whatever’? My guess is too often. A friend recently told me ‘You’ve never met someone who hates their bum as much as me’. I have no way of knowing if what she says is true; hatred, like love, is subjective and unquantifiable. True or not, it represents an attitude I come across far too commonly to comfortably ignore.

In my role as a teacher of yoga, I meet women almost every day. Women of all ages. Women from a wide range of backgrounds and occupations. Women who find themselves in a yoga class for a huge variety of reasons. Women, too many of whom experience some level of fear of, loathing for or dissociation from their own bodies, or parts thereof. This applies to men too of course, who are certainly not excluded from this conversation, but I am particularly interested in why this body-horror manifests more frequently and more overtly in women and how yoga can map a path to acceptance and emancipation.

It would be completely incorrect to suggest that women spend their lives obsessing over how they look. Most don’t; we have more important things to get on with. But few would dispute that as women we are expected (by society, by patriarchy, by hierarchy), to aspire to look a certain way; and if we don’t conform to current trends then to wish to be different. There is a normalised, deeply embedded cultural expectation that we should spend quite a lot of time thinking about how we appear. Looking good (and wanting to) is great, it’s healthy, when it’s a natural expression of an inner state of sthira (stability) and sukha (comfort). It means that the outward appearance of the body need not present a distraction from more meaningful aspects of our lives. But women’s bodies are still being systematically commoditised, colonised and mined for profit.  As women, as people, we deserve better. Our daughters deserve better.

Feeling bad about oneself is not erroneous or weak, and to imply that it were would be irresponsible. The quest for eternal positivity is a myth (younger sister of Naomi Wolf’s ‘Beauty Myth’ of, yes, thirty years ago) which, just like standardised concepts beauty, is pedalled very effectively by the corporate machine. It keeps us buying stuff, oils the cogs of consumer-capitalism and has seeped into almost every aspect of our daily lives. Of course we will have days when we feel dissatisfied, grumpy, at odds with the world and ourselves. Of course this will be reflected in the way we view ourselves and our perception of how others view us. This is not failure; it is indicative of the fluctuations of daily life. But an occasional ‘off day’ which we know will pass is not the same as chronic hatred of or dissociation from a particular body part or the body in general. This latter is not failure either. It may have occurred for any number of good reasons, including trauma and pain. But in the context of yoga it is a state which can and should be recognised, addressed and reformed in the quest, not for an ideal of physical beauty or eternal positivity, but for peace of mind. The postural aspect of yoga (asana) is practised first in order that the body ceases to pose an obstacle to meditative states, and eventually to enable those states; the healing process is a prelude to the deeper spiritual endeavour that is yoga.

I do not ask explicitly about my students’ relationships with their bodies. I am not a counsellor or a psychologist. But I do listen to them, look at them and touch them.  By working collaboratively to observe responses in practice (verbal, physical, physiological, emotional), my students and I are able to deduce, never infallibly but I hope with a fair degree of accuracy, where there is a disconnect, for whatever reason, between their consciousness and the lived experience of inhabiting their human body. We all have them, these bodies and their hidden truths. Gems sometimes so buried, so forgotten, that we do not know they are there. We also have all we need in our yoga excavation pack: a shovel, a lens and a spotlight. To dig them out, bring them into focus and then switch on the light and let them shine.

Bare in the glare of our own consciousness can feel like a vulnerable place to be. We will be breaking long, long habits of ignoring the things we are now bringing to light. We may have become partially disembodied at a certain point in time for our own safety, for survival even. But when practised with due awareness and discipline, yoga offers a tried, tested and progressive means for making a safe and thorough exploratory excavation of the body-mind complex; a process that transforms pain into power, surviving into living.  What do we have to lose? Only the silt of embarrassment, shame and guilt associated, for whatever reason, with the parts of ourselves that over the years we have felt the need to dissociate from. What do we have to gain? Jewels of acceptance, renewal, celebration; and the chance to exist as a fully integrated human being. Yes, yoga can be an act of radical feminism. Let’s get naked and enjoy the party.