Sometimes I dream of a perfect yoga
practice space. Pristine natural surroundings, melodic bird song, magical cloud
formations in a dramatic sky. An even floor surface and no other human being in
sight.
Reality, as many practising yogis will
agree, is often quite different. We push aside the papers, the text books, the
kid’s toys. We move the furniture to create a space just long enough for a yoga
mat and the width of our outstretched arms. Far from soft ambient background
music and wafting incense, I have often found myself breathing my way into
poses to the sound of sports on TV and the smell of steak frying. The fact is,
although some of us have spells in peaceful solitude, most of us live with
other people. Normal people.
Yet even in these seemingly bizarre and
un-yogic situations, I find it is still possible to focus my mind and enter a
deep, sacred space. To become lost, as one of my students very aptly put it, “down
the rabbit hole of yoga”.
A look into the archives of my past yoga
practice spaces reveals an eclectic snapshot selection. In the early days it
was my bedroom in various shared student houses where I sought sanctuary. I
discovered that in order to centre myself and become absorbed in the stories
that unfolded from my body, all I needed was a closed door. I would retreat
from the piles of washing up, blaring music and essay deadlines and enter the
blissful arena of breath.
I remember the view over our overgrown back
garden in Relf Rd, Peckham, where I first moved through daily sun salutes. And
the small snippet of sea I could glimpse from my beautiful upstairs lair in
that old Victorian student house in Brighton.
There have also been many times when I took
my yoga practice on tour, to far and wondrous locations. The conifer-lined
shores of Swedish lakes, a bird hide at Shimuwini in the Kruger National
Park, an ancient yew tree forest in
Southern England, a roof top in Ecuador and a cliff top in India stand out in
my memory. Yoga during a day of silence on a journey to sacred Scottish sites,
was like something from a lucid dream. Experiencing stillness was easier in
these places, but it happened too when I was wrapped in layers next to a gas
heater on a concrete floor, or in parallel practice with a fellow teacher, in a
gusty windblown campsite. I recently even managed to disappear into yoga inside
a tent at a very loud psychedelic trance party. .jpg)
Even when surrounded by people whose main
interest was partying, sport or capitalism, I have grasped brief moments of silence.
The sanctuary of my practice is a place I can always return to. Like a mudra,
the hand position that seals a state of mind into our bodies so we can access
it repeatedly, just reporting to my mat and feeling the force of gravity,
transports me to that harmonious state again and again.
At times solitude is elusive. Once while
working in Chintsa in the Eastern Cape, a young Xhosa girl who I was sharing
accommodation with stared at me intently as I moved from pose to pose. In India
a fellow yogini and I began our practice in a quiet place outdoors and
attracted an audience of fascinated children.
There have been few times in my life where
I have had the luxury of an undisturbed, comfortable and scenic yoga practice. The
sun has plagued me, mosquitoes have feasted on me or I have struggled to find
alignment on uneven ground. Nature is bumpy. A dry river bed in the arid Karoo
seemed ideal until I realised my presence was attracting swarms of savagely
hungry ticks, enticed by the possibility of their first meal in weeks.
.JPG)
But
I think I attained the ultimate practice space for a while in my days in
Tsitsikamma National Park. I had a warm, carpeted little house on a hill overlooking
mountains and ocean. I lived alone and could peacefully rise at dawn and watch the
sun pop up, while standing in tree pose with arms upstretched to welcome the
new day. It was a precious time in my life when I was single, a little lonely,
but a blissfully fulfilled yogi. Old friends dubbed it my “celibate phase”. I
was on a three-year forest retreat. I meditated on the edges of waterfalls, was
visited by gentle bushbuck and curious otters and swooped over by majestic
birds of prey. On cold mornings I would cross the Storms River suspension
bridge and hike the steep, bracing climb to the viewpoint: a wooden deck
overlooking the ribbon of rocky coast, with its dancing waves and sometimes,
breaching whales. Warm and invigorated, I would practice warrior poses on my
platform in the sky. All of that was in
contrast to my previous life in London where the soundtrack to my yoga practice
was the endless thrum of traffic and the rants of drunkards on their way home
from the pub. I felt I was in heaven.
Tsitsikamma National Park, South Africa 2008
Now, even with the contentment of love and
family, I sometimes long to return to the purity of that time, the oneness with
nature that was my forest yogini era. Yet it is forever encapsulated in my soul
and stored in my cells. So even when practising yoga in a cramped corner with
the view of a blank wall, I can revisit all those scenes where in the past I
unrolled my mat.
Was I more enlightened in my forest yogini
days? Compared to the present when I sandwich my yoga between breastfeeds and
nappy changes. This is not the first time I have found myself on a mat
exhausted, drained or distracted and it surely won’t be the last. Nothing is
constant, except that zone I enter in myself. It’s that still place where, when
the moment is right, I can let go, ignore external background noise and detach
from internal mental noise. Where I can return to the rhythm of my breath, that
eternal yoga sanctuary. No matter if I am on a beach in Thailand or dusty
township in Africa, it will always be there, in me.
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