Tell me if you can think of anything more unpleasant than holding your weight on your wrists while your head lolls upside down and your bum points skyward, your VPL clearly on display, your baggy t shirt gaping open to reveal your greying bra?
Downward dog fucking sucks. And yoga classes are like, an hour and a half. An hour and a crumbs in the bed half. Your only out is to either fake or actually have a heart attack.
To the uninitiated, yoga might seem like an easy fitness option. Especially for those with a bit of extra meat on the bone who don’t fancy puffing, red faced and sweaty through a bouncy kind of class full of much smaller people in lycra. Yoga is stretching, isn’t it?
Er, sort of, I guess. I mean it is stretching, true, but until your body is quivering, and not in a good way. Also there’s farting. Actual farting.
By the time you’re crunching your torso into a shoulder stand, all you can think about it backing your car out and keeping your foot hard on the accelerator until you’ve put quite some distance between you and that godawful mat. I used to pray the fire alarm would go off, or a small chunk of plane would plop through the ceiling and land on the teacher.
At home it’s no better.
You want to be like one of those serene looking yogis you see in photos, meditating under a palm tree or holding some elaborate hands-free pose in front of a snow capped peak. Naturally, then, you tuck your mat under your arm and head out to the patio, clearing a space between the garden chairs.
Only, the wind picks up and the front half of your mat keeps blowing over. Leaves start flying everywhere. Worse still, every time you roll over your toes into upward dog, your unprotected toes take a battering on the concrete paving. So you head inside to find a spongy section of carpet, but of course the only space available is a sliver in the hallway. Every time someone wants to go to the loo, or pop upstairs to fetch their slippers, you have to put your warrior pose on ice and step to the side.
It’s not quite the tranquil, hooley of zen you were hoping for.
Of course you constantly lose count too – was that number four or number five of sun salutation A? And how does the transition routine from standing to floor go again? An hour goes past and you’re still in tree pose, you haven’t even got to the seated crap yet, you’re bored witless, wondering if you’re going to be done in time to see in the new year.
It’s not just you who despises yoga. I did it twice a week for three years, and loathed it with every dying ember of my fire breath. When you’re unfit and a good chunk of the poses are so far out of the realms of your inflexible reach, you’re hardly going to whoop and cheer when it’s time to pull on your stretchy trousers and start chanting.
However, everything changed for me when I stopped being such a duh-brain and realised… you don’t have to do long hour and half sessions. Ten minutes is adequate. You don’t have to be barefoot and have your toes smudged into the paving every time you roll over them – you can wear trainers. You don’t have to do five sun salutations and then another four of the other variation. You can do two. Or one.
Your routine doesn’t need to be challenging, it can be all spine twists and the stretchy stuff that feels like a massage for your insides. You can cherry-pick the poses you love and ditch the ones you don’t. And with that, I stopped hating the experience. I stopped hating yoga. Now I am better at yoga than I was before I didn’t do any yoga and I feel that my mind is stronger, which is the real purpose of doing it.
Bottom line: practise it in a way that lets you do it everyday and you’ll do it everyday. Do it everyday and you’ll see improvement every day. See improvement every day and the last thing you’ll hate, is yoga.
Peace, bitches xx