You might think yoga is a bit too mainstream for this book, and you might be right; it has certainly been moving in that direction over the last twenty-plus years. But I wasn’t interested in the type of yoga done during lunch breaks in City gyms, the eye-wateringly expensive Lululemon apparel or the young platinum-haired yoga bunnies greeting each other with namaste hands. I wanted the hardcore stuff. I wanted the chanting, the spiritual growth, the vegan diet, the meditating.
An ancient Indian practice dating back to at least 2000 BC, of course this wasn’t something I could expect to conquer in a lifetime, let alone during a wet weekend in Cornwall, but I at least wanted to go deeper down the rabbit hole. Were the Vinyasa flow classes I had been attending at the Fitness First gym under London Bridge just a commercialised misappropriation of the ancient spiritual practice, or were they genuinely helping me on my way to enlightenment? I vowed to improve my understanding and learn more about what it would take to become a bona fide (but, this time, clothed) yogi.
I was able to use the hilarity of our last downward-facing dog experience as bait to drag Tori along for a long weekend of yoga camp. We hit the road for the six-hour drive to an eco-community farm in the south west, passing the time by singing along to the Mary Poppins soundtrack in full throttle while the hammering rain did all it could to dampen our spirits.
When the GPS finally announces that we have reached our destination, we look around the waterlogged field in mild despair. As soon as our tent is erected, like, the very minute our now sopping-wet bedding is inside, the skies clear and we are able to trudge through the sticky mud to explore the site. Strewn with brightly painted signs that point out the compost toilets, solar showers and wood-burning sauna, something tugs in my chest as I am flooded with memories of Findhorn.
In the middle, next to a small earth mound with the word LOVE constructed from stones etched on its side, a bonfire flickers, hissing and spitting the rainwater from its heart. Soaking up the warmth of the fire, a lady in blue with wild wavy hair and a man with a ponytail and weathered olive skin sit at its edge, playing instruments and singing songs about Shiva. Above the bonfire is a bright yellow camper van, converted into a café and draped in colourful bunting.
We venture over to shelter from the returning rain and are immediately handed two steaming bowls of soup, lovingly prepared from ingredients grown on-site. Both emitting the same ‘ahhh’ sound from the old Bisto adverts, we sink into plastic chairs and bask in the sound of the drumming rain on the plastic awning, making a silent agreement that we are going to really, really like it here.
*
After a damp, sleepless night in our recklessly selected Tesco Value tent (not very ‘eco’ of us, I know), I manage to drag myself out of bed for the 7 a.m. meditation. The group gather in silence in a round hut overlooking the farm, wrapped in blankets in the early morning mist. We focus on our breathing for an hour, our ears full of birdsong, our noses full of incense.
When the gong sounds to mark the end of our meditation, I remain in the tent for some Bhakti (devotional) yoga, chanting and singing along to repeated verses of praise for the Hindu gods Shiva and Ganesh. A wooden flute and a shruti box, played by Buddenath and Gayatri, the fire duo from yesterday evening, accompany the chanting. When the music comes to an end, I sit with the musicians in the hut, the sun warming our bare toes as we pass around a flask of ginger tea.
Born Damon, Buddenath was given his spiritual name by a Hindu guru he lived with in the foothills of the Himalayas. He spent many years working happily as a primary-school teacher, but the more he opened up spiritually, the more difficult it became for him to stay in a mainstream job.
‘I loved making music with the kids, and allowing them to be creative,’ he tells me, ‘but I have long hair, and I don’t like to wear shoes. I just didn’t really fit in, and they got fed up with me. I miss it, though. I loved teaching.’
The conversation turns to my indecisive nature, and how this has influenced my decision to write this book; trying to work out who I am and how I want to live by experiencing as much as possible of what life has to offer. I linger on the fox-hunting chapter, trying to articulate how torn I felt about taking part.
‘What do you think is worse, eating meat or fox hunting?’ Buddenath asks. He doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘Eating meat is worse,’ he declares. ‘The fox is wild and grows up in its natural habitat. It is free. And to be hunted is a natural way for it to die. Animals in the meat industry are born slaves. They are imprisoned for as long as they exist and are not allowed to live their own lives. Then they die young in an unnatural, sterile environment where they are part of a mechanised process. They are never treated as individuals.’
Before giving me time to pick up on this outburst, he wanders off barefooted across the sharp stones as I frantically scribble his words in my notebook.
I turn my attention to my other companion.
‘I am truly wonderful at manifesting, at asking the universe for something,’ Gayatri tells me as we sit outside the camper van for breakfast together. ‘You just have to have complete faith, and it will come. For example, I want a harmonium at the moment, so I have asked the universe for one.’
‘Can’t you just go and buy one?’
She looks at me as if I have just said something utterly stupid. ‘No, I don’t have the money.’
‘Of course.’ I recoil at my ignorance.
After the second flask of ginger tea, which Gayatri waves her hand over and mumbles something before we are allowed to drink, I wander over to the Apple Barn at the other side of camp for my first physical yoga class of the weekend: Ashtanga. Our teacher, John, has been practising for twenty-eight years. With a long, twisted beard and sharp Dionysian eyes, his magnetism silences the room as he walks purposefully into the class. John is undoubtedly a real, bona fide yogi.
Without a word of introduction, he leaps into an extended sun salutation, floating from one position to another like a ballet dancer.
‘Some of you may just want to learn to do a handstand,’ he says, perfectly balancing his entire body weight on one hand, like the clown’s daughter at the circus, but with a fluidity that makes him seem superhuman, ‘but yoga isn’t just exercise. First and foremost, it is a spiritual practice. Get this right, and the body will follow.’
He motions for us to begin our own salutations and we settle ourselves into a downward-facing dog.
‘Step or float your feet to the front of the mat.’
There is a mass ‘thud’ as we all follow the instructions, followed swiftly by a flamboyant fart that reverberates from the front of the class. My head shoots up, alert as a meerkat, as I let out an involuntary, ‘Pah!’ No one joins in the laughter, and I spend the next five minutes wishing Tori wasn’t having a lie-in.
‘When you are doing yoga you are drawing the energy up from the ground, through your body,’ he says. ‘You have to help the energy flow through your chakras and release any blockages.’
Next we are guided through a series of balancing poses, including headstands, handstands and windmills. I manage a few, but cannot hold them for long and repeatedly end up in a tangled heap on the ground.
Perfectly toned with long blonde hair and flawless bronzed skin, the girl in front of me is able to do everything.
‘Hi, can I sit next to you?’ I approach her after the class as she warms herself next to the wood burner.
‘Sure. I’m Helen,’ she says.
Helen is a children’s yoga teacher, and one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. I can’t help but hate her a little bit.
‘The kids love yoga,’ she says. ‘They change so much as they learn, becoming much more focused and relaxed. It teaches the kids to be more aware of their minds and bodies and to think independently. They spend more and more time hunched over computers these days, so their bodies don’t develop properly, and they carry tension from a very young age.’ She smiles with her whole body. I think she might be an angel, or at least a very, very pretty yogi.
Helen used to be a professional swimmer, finding yoga as a means to loosen her tightened muscles.
‘Do you hang out with other yogis?’
‘Oh yeah,’ she says. ‘We are all on the same spiritual path, and it’s comforting to share in that. We all understand why we make the sacrifices we do in life.’
There is a pause while she thinks and makes the long ‘hhhmmm’ noise I have become accustomed to hearing in these New Age circles.
‘I broke up with my boyfriend last year,’ she continues. ‘We were together for a long time, and although he was tolerant of my practice, he never really got it. He didn’t really know why I did it. There were other reasons, of course, but the more yoga became part of my life, the further apart we drifted.’
Leaning towards the fire to soak up its warmth, I look at her perfectly toned body with envy, curious about what I would have to give up in order to look like her. ‘Have you had to make a lot of sacrifices to get to your level of… (*don’t say hotness, don’t say hotness*) … hotness?’
Dammit.
She laughs. ‘Well, I don’t drink any more,’ she says, her cheeks now a dark shade of pink. ‘And I get up at five a.m. every day to fit in my two-hour practice before work. I switched to a vegan diet too; I want to put the best things I can into my body.’
I take solace in the fact that she probably wouldn’t be much fun at the office Christmas party.
But there is a bigger question here, isn’t there? Why am I so obsessed with the way Helen’s body looks? Is this what yoga is really about? As John had told us at the beginning of class, yoga is supposed to be concerned with self-realisation – spiritual, emotional and mental – and a physical body in optimum health is not the end itself, but simply a vehicle for meditation. Even though I know this is true, it’s hard for me to disentangle the physical aspects of yoga from the spiritual roots of the practice. It’s as if my mind has been hijacked by the body-beautiful industry to assume that, if you are thin, muscular and bendy, you must have got all of that spiritual stuff right as well. Of course, this isn’t necessarily true, and in fact it can be the opposite if you allow your fixation with the physical body to get in the way of your spiritual practice. The tightrope between mental and physical health is a difficult one to balance on.
After a vegan lunch of lentil bake and salad – which was all you could ask for in a meal, so long as flavour, texture and general enjoyment were not part of your criteria – Tori joins me for the first class of the afternoon, Rolfing – a combination of movement education and tissue manipulation. Although not an actual yoga practice, Rolfing is a complementary exercise that sits somewhere under the New Age umbrella of alternative therapy and can often be found in similar circles.
‘Why do we practise yoga?’ our teacher, Andrea, asks us.
‘To get me out the house on a Tuesday night,’ a chap from the back of the class quips.
‘It gives us a reason to be attentive to our minds and bodies,’ I say, feeling smug.
‘For strength and flexibility,’ another chap to my right says.
‘You are all right,’ she says, which annoys me because I was feeling competitive. ‘It is good for all of us in different ways. The body wants to be healthy all the time, but it isn’t always. Why is that?’ She throws the question out to us.
The ‘it gets me out the house’ chap shouts from the back again, ‘Because we drive ourselves mad in our head and we fill our bodies full of shit.’
‘That’s true,’ Andrea says. ‘Now, I presume none of you eat meat’ – Tori and I trade looks, feeling both irritated and guilty – ‘but the white film you see over the top of meat is what’s called connective tissue. We have it too, and when our connective tissue isn’t used, it stiffens and sticks together; that’s why you often hear those clicking and fizzing noises when you stretch. It’s the sound of the fibres in our connective tissue ripping apart.’
We are then instructed to study each other’s walks. Tori and I discover that ours are completely different: mine more forward-leaning and determined, rolling from heel to toe; and Tori’s more backward-leaning, toes pointed and legs out in front like a dressage pony. We are asked to reflect on how our walk compares to our personality, and it is obvious to me that I lean into life, consuming it like Pac-Man consumes yellow dots; driving forward and never waiting for life to come to me. Tori is more relaxed and at ease with herself and is much better than me at living in the moment.
‘Your walk is who you are,’ Andrea tells us. ‘I’m not telling you to change it, just to observe it and use it to help you understand how movement and intention are linked.’
After the class we take a solar-powered shower, using organic products so as ‘not to harm the wildlife in the grey-water pond’. Tori had left her towel at the other side of the room, so she got out of the shower and walked across the room stark naked in front of one of our fellow, male, yogi wannabees. I was so impressed. There is no way she would have done this before our naturist experience. Later that evening I get the urge to prove my own liberation by plunging into the ice-cold water bath next to the sauna in only my pants.
Sleepy and warm, we leave the sauna for the evening’s entertainment in the Apple Barn. An open log fire roars in the corner, and the floor is a sea of yoga mats, cushions and sleeping bags. It sounds as if someone is playing the drums on the plastic roof as the rain continues to hammer down. We are here for a ‘sound bath’: an hour of listening to didgeridoos, singing bowls, vocalisations, drumming, chimes and rainmakers. The musicians walk around the room, playing their instruments over our heads as we lie on the floor with our eyes shut. At the end of the session, we all ‘Om’ together. A Sanskrit word (Aum) that translates as ‘source’, the Om chant is often used to mark the beginning and end of a yoga practice, the vibrations rising from the bottom to the top through your chakras, to create a state of calm and wellbeing that prepares you for meditation.
The Om continues, vibrating through the group as we experiment with our tone to create a rich harmony.
This is more like it. I go to bed feeling peaceful, warm and relaxed.
On our final afternoon, I hug Tori a reluctant goodbye as she makes an early escape back to London and scramble up the meandering path that leads to the meditation hut for the class I have been looking forward to all weekend, ‘Tantra with Fiona’. Although not strictly a branch of yoga, what Western culture has come to know as ‘tantra’ – a form of self-realisation through weaving together and expanding our internal energies – does use various yogic and meditative practices along its path. As with most of Eastern spirituality, it has been appropriated and often misinterpreted by the West, moving from a principle of what was essentially self-negation (enlightenment) to the material promise of ‘spiritual orgasms’ and ‘deeply connected’ tantric sex. And so what in reality is a complex and at times conflicting collection of spiritual texts that span the Hindu and Buddhist traditions has been reduced in Western culture to a practice that is easier to digest, and, no doubt, easier to sell. Tantra embraces opposites, asserting that there is nothing that is not Divine, bringing into this Divine sphere everything that the Judeo-Christian tradition would classify as impure, ecstatic and decadent. So perhaps it’s not surprising that the West has embraced this particular aspect of tantric tradition, the belief that has converted sex, in all of its salacious glory, from sinful to spiritual.
‘Don’t worry,’ Fiona opens with, ‘I am not going to couple you off and tell you to get down to business.’ The hut fizzes with relieved giggles.
Fiona has a master’s in sexology, the scientific study of human sexuality. Also a trained massage therapist, she has a shock of short, bleached-blonde hair and a strong Aussie accent.
‘I go into schools and talk to kids about sex,’ she tells us, ‘but I am only allowed to teach them what not to do. Sex education in this country is just about warning kids about the dangers of STIs. It’s such a shame. They don’t get to hear about the positive things. There is still this big taboo around sex.’
She stands up. ‘OK, on your feet, you lot. It’s time to wake up our bodies.’ Fiona looks all of us in the eyes, scanning the room before settling her gaze on Gayatri. ‘Aha,’ she says, ‘you look like the right person to lead this.’
She couldn’t have been more right. Gayatri leaps into action, shaking her whole body and making a loud shivering noise – ‘brrrrrr’ – we all copy. She jumps up and down and makes a guttural growling noise that crescendoes into a shrill scream. We look around at each other and attempt to copy, all with slightly less enthusiasm.
‘Come on, guys!’ she yells, leaping up and making tribal noises as she gyrates her body. ‘Let’s be animals!’ She drops to all fours and stalks around the hut, roaring, hissing and pretending to scratch at my heels as she passes me. Oh God. ‘Just let yourself go,’ I tell myself, as I collapse to the floor and do my best impression of a tiger. A few others join us as we turn into snakes and drag ourselves across the floor on our bellies, battling with crippling discomfort and trying desperately hard to pretend that this is all completely normal.
After five minutes the torture ends. We go back to our places and are directed to squat down, rotate our hips back and forth in a huge circle, and make caveman grunting noises – ‘Ugh, ugh,’ we all say, humping the air with eyes jammed shut. What we are doing here is connecting our masculine base energies with our higher feminine energies to resolve the conflict of our dualistic nature. Of course we are.
Finally, we are taught the Ashwini Mudra technique, or ‘horse gesture’. We kneel down, fill our lungs, and are told to tense and release our anal sphincter muscles rhythmically. We repeat the process for ten minutes, adding in other breathing techniques and visualisations to draw the energy from our root chakra to our crown.
I leave the hut feeling a little violated, and not much wiser about what tantra actually is. What I have learned is that there isn’t a lot I won’t just go along with to fit in. I hope I never find my way into a human-sacrificing circle.
The weekend is closed with a kirtan. Don’t be fooled, though; interesting as it may sound, kirtan turns out to be another chanting session with the same line of a song being repeated over and over again by Gayatri and Buddenath.
I had promised one of the ladies in the group a lift home earlier that afternoon, not realising that she wanted to stay for the entire kirtan, so I am forced to wait until the end before I can make my exit. After three hours of chanting, I can’t take any more.
‘We really have to get going,’ I say, noticeably irritated. ‘My drive home is over four hours, and it’s already nine p.m.’
‘You could start lugging my stuff up to the car?’ she suggests.
I am not up for this at all. The car is parked at the top of a long muddy hill, and I feel the least she could do, having already delayed me so much, is to help me to carry her stuff up to the car.
‘If I do that, I’m not coming back for more stuff,’ I say. ‘I’ll just have to meet you up there.’
She finally finishes chanting with the group and starts to load me up like a packhorse: two rucksacks on my back, two bags in my hands and her tent across my elbows. She looks down at the one remaining item, her camping backpack.
‘The universe is telling me not to put that on my back,’ she says. ‘I put too much of myself into the chanting; I don’t have any energy left.’
She looks at me. My mouth is open and I don’t know what to say. I am loaded up to breaking point with all her stuff, and she is too lazy to carry her own fucking backpack.
‘Can you help, Peter?’ She turns to Peter, who must be in his seventies.
‘Unfortunately, I have a bit of a bad back,’ he says in a really cute old-man way.
‘Oh, it’s fine once you get it on,’ she says, lifting it onto his back without giving him a chance to protest. With that she disappears to the toilet, carrying absolutely nothing, leaving Peter and me to slog up the hill to the car.
‘The universe is telling me not to give you a bloody lift,’ I scream after her.
Well, I don’t, actually. I’m British, remember? Instead, I punish her by being a tiny bit off with her during the two-hour drive to Bideford.