Yin Yoga

I’m tired. It’s only Monday night. Actually, spring is here now so it’s more like Monday evening. I take my place at the back and look around. I haven’t done this before, but I know the room. Am I nervous? Not really. I’ve been told to expect slowness and relaxation. Or have I? I imagine that’s what I’ve been told. Suddenly I don’t know what I’ve imagined, what I’ve been told, or what to expect. The Voice reassures me there is no balancing involved. Phew. I’m shit at balancing these days. I’m in my 40s now.

I know the room for two reasons. Number one: I work in the room downstairs. A beautifully decorated cosy room with a large Victorian window and kind lighting. I only work in here for an hour or two each week, but that’s enough to make a place familiar. This is a building where I know the key code, I know where the cups are.

There is no balancing involved and it’s all horizontal. The actual words from The Voice are it’s all down on your mat. Jesus, this sounds easy. Maybe too easy; I wonder if I’ve made a mistake; I’m trying to lose weight. That’s reason number two. I come to this room on a Monday evening anyway, but usually earlier, for Vinyasa Yoga.

Vinyasa means flow, and flow means both non-stop and fucking gruelling. in Flow Yoga I get really hot and it feels like exercise. The class is billed as ‘Suitable for beginners’. Yeah.

After lockdown I spent eighteen months delivering pizzas. In other words, for eighteen months after lockdown I ate pizzas. You get a free one with every shift. I did five shifts each week. Let’s do some basic maths. That’s a quarter of a million pizzas. Fuckles. In your forties pizzas become a tummy. I’ve never had one of those before and I’m not keen.

It’s all down on your mat. What does that even mean? There is a man here named Simon. I say hello and he says Yin Yoga is ‘awkward sleeping‘. I’ve definitely made a mistake. Yes I’m tired but sleep is the last thing I need. All those pizzas left me with anaemia and I slept for most of 2023. Twelve hours, fourteen some nights, did not equate to weight loss. I’ve never known – never needed to know – how to lose weight. Pfff. Even with my small knowledge, I suspect that awkward sleeping is not the solution.

The mats fill up as folk come in, and we prepare to begin. The Voice lights some incense. We will start with our Shavasana. Good grief, this isn’t even awkward sleeping – it’s just normal sleeping. It’s how we end a Vinyasa class. Shavasana, I have learnt, is the resting pose. Flat on your back with feet at the corners of the mat, arms by your sides. Eyes closed. Cover yourself with a blanket if you want to. I cover myself with a blanket and sigh inwardly.

Last time I Shavasana-ed, I started dreaming. I drove along Dover’s London Road looking for ‘chick-lit’ writer Marian Keyes. It was summer, but night time. Hot. Windows down. I think I was returning something to Keyes. Maybe her keys. I haven’t thought about Marian Keyes for approximately twenty years. It was a heck of a surprise to return to Earth and find myself bleary eyed in this familiar place, flat on the floor above my counselling room. I wiped my eyes with a tissue from my pocket. The tissue smelt like a yoga mat.

I dream so easily. Recently a man carried some eggs up a hill for me, and I was gleefully grateful, feeling as though I was a slim seven years old. Also recently I queued at a golf course with Ronnie O’Sullivan, and we spoke to a man who had three eyes – two normal ones plus a smaller one in the middle above his nose. He wore wireframed glasses with a third central lens. I think he’d heard about me – the man who won a day out at the golf course with Ronnie O’Sullivan.

Thanks to my new alarm clock we never got to the bit where we actually played golf.

We stay on our backs, snoozing, for five minutes. I do relax but I do not dream. I’m waiting for the sleeping to become more awkward.
Now, keeping our eyes closed, let’s raise our knees and place our feet flat on the floor. I do this. And, lifting our hips, we can place a block under the small of our back before straightening our legs again as they were before.
Fuck. Yeah that does feel quite awkward actually.

I am a bridge. A breathing bridge. In ten short hours the Baltimore Bridge will be hit and collapse. I do not know this yet. My stomach rumbles. I do not feel as though I’m losing any weight.

I had some spiritual massages a few years ago, where I was told that my rumbling stomach signified the movement of energy. I was releasing something. It’s a good sign. I thought it was all bollocks at the time but I have to admit, sometimes this happens with my clients. We shift some emotional stuff by talking something over, and a burp comes. A letting go occurs. I’m an intrigued bridge. We stay like this for another five minutes. The block under my back is pinching my skin a little. I try to ignore it.

I have been lied to. It is not all down on the mat. Blocks removed, we move into our Tabletop Position. That’s all fours in layman’s terms. Shoulders above the hands; hips above the knees. I feel clever here because we do this in Vinyasa Yoga so I already know what to do. Hands spread, index fingers pointing to the top of the mat. A slight bend in the elbows. Let the muscles do the lifting. We can flex the spine a little, wiggle the hips. It feels mildly pornographic. I shouldn’t be thinking that. I wipe my thoughts clean.

Something happens next. It is called The Swan.

Bringing the right knee behind the right hand, shuffle the right foot forwards until it rests behind the left hand.
‘Rests‘.
OK yeah, this is quite awkward.
And we’re going to move into our Sleeping Swan.
Woah.

I know from experience that anything ‘sleeping‘ means resting your head on the floor in front of you. Fuck that. I know from experience that I do not bend that far. I know I can’t outright refuse so I play along and vow to give it my best shot. I’m grateful for my decision to hide close to the corner at the back of the room.

In addition to our blocks we each have a bolster, a kind of giant draught excluder, about ten inches thick. A cylindric pillow with the heft of a futon mattress. I am not alone in utilising this. I fold forward to the best of my ability into a reluctant Snoozing Swan, silently cursing the pain in my right hip and inner thigh. Fuck right off. Five minutes of this?! You cannot be serious. Breathe. My arms doing most of the heavy work, resentfully I breathe. My head rests on my hands, stacked one on top of the other, the bolster underneath. I know I’m not doing it properly but it’s all I’ve got.

With each round of breath, just see if you can fold a little further into your Swan. Really feel that stretch through your hip.

I’m almost in tears. I have never felt a stretch like it. It is…
It is…
Christ. I have met my nemesis. I call it resistance.
The Voice is saying things like a little more and deeper. I am 100% certain that more is an impossibility.

But.

Somehow I know I’m capable of more. It’s just… Terrifying. I am a frightened child, holding two beliefs in equal measure: I can bend a little further. I cannot bend any further. For my own safety, I need to hold on.

But.

What exactly am I holding on to? Whatever it is, I feel like I’ve met it before, but its identity has only ever eluded me. Come on, what is this thing that I’m suddenly so scared of? Never walking again? That’s rather extreme. Mind you, I have never walked again before. I slipped two discs in my lower back at the end of 2019 and I never walked again then. Until I did, of course, but still. At the time I never walked again. I think it was five weeks before I walked again. I wonder if I’m never going to walk again after tonight or if this, this folding even deeper, is what I really need.

A revelation to all my exes: I am learning to swim. Four months ago I discovered I can float. Before this, I’d never fully trusted the water. Countless numbers of people, over countless numbers of years, in countless numbers of pools, have assured me that everyone can float, but I knew all along that I was not everyone and that I cannot float. But then in December 2023 I floated and within moments, like a newly hatched sea creature, I tried kicking my legs like a frog and arcing my arms like fins through the water and lo and behold, I swam. Imagine that: I am not made of bricks. I am mobile in the water. I can even put my face in and I do not drown. It’s a miracle; in no time at all Breaststroke has become one of my favourite words, largely because it has stst in the middle. Suddenly I’m the sort of person who watches swimming tutorials on YouTube. I didn’t see that coming.

I also didn’t see myself folding even further forward into my Swan, but I fucking do exactly that. I remove my hands and rest my head on the futon thing. I am five years old. Younger still. Deeper. The question returns. What am I holding on to?

I’m holding onto fear.

Some honesty. I’m learning to swim and the biggest hurdle involves working out how to get the main holes in my head high enough out of the water for long enough to take a breath. The truth is I can swim as far as one lungful of air will allow. The truth is, I still don’t fully trust the water. I’m convinced the whole breathing part of swimming is as impossible as the Sleeping Swan. Breathe. No matter what I try, I only seem able to manage the tiniest most desperate gasps of exhausting air. I’d rather float face down interminably. Deeper. Something in me draws a connection between my Swan and my swim. One relies on the other. We’re halfway through. Jesus Christ. I don’t know why but the word Surrender flashes through my mind. I’m sure I heard this word in those massages. My stomach rumbles. From this I gain a little courage.

In for a penny, in for a pound.
I realise I can’t drown here.
Away with the draught excluder.
I fold a little more.
Letting go, one fraction of a millimetre at a time.

I am often convinced that my counsellor, Dominic, knows me better than I know myself. For a long time he told me I’d experienced something, something, as an infant. Possibly before I was born. This, he said, was the root of it all. The mother of my resistance. The father of my fear.
I asked my Mum if she could think of anything. We drew a blank. Dominic was wrong. I knew it.
Then, some months later, an email arrived. Mum said she’d remembered something that might be important. As the summer of 1979 faded into autumn she was heavily pregnant, awaiting my arrival with motherly anticipation. She and my Dad were driving home to our village in a slow queue of traffic. A car up ahead turned right at the same moment as a motorcyclist overtook the queue. The bike hit the car and the rider flew off his seat, landing somewhere on the grass verge. Mum, bless her heart, carried me in utero into the scene, offering first aid. It was futile; the motorcyclist was dead.
I told Dominic this and he said, ‘that’ll do it.’
I wonder where my then two year-old brother was when this happened.

My forehead touches the floor.
I think I am going to cry.
My body completely tenses up and fully relaxes at the same time.

The theory says that Mum’s distress served us both a spike of cortisol, adrenalin, and norepinephrine. The effect of this cocktail of stress hormones was that together we shared an increase in blood pressure, heart rate, glucose. I will have sensed a change in temperature, one way or the other. A disorienting dose of vital signs. I guess I learnt then that the world I was preparing to enter is not to be fully trusted. The lesson: Be slightly tense. i.e. do not, under any circumstances, let go.
I expect my parents will read this and I don’t want either of them to feel bad about any of this in any way, shape, or form. I love my Mum all the more for trying to help that poor chap.

It’s weird, I consider myself to be a relaxed person. This is the common review I get from others too. Certainly when I’m working, I can flow easily and hold complex ideas in space while contrasting them with reality, searching out and dislodging the stuff that my clients are holding onto. This requires a degree of relaxation, and trust. Sometimes my clients cry. Sometimes their stomachs rumble. I say things like let’s breathe and let’s pause and it’s perfectly safe. Forty-four years of history tells us I am not exactly great at saying these things to myself. Thank God for The Voice. Her name is Alexandra. She has rapidly gained a great deal of my respect.

Now let’s bring ourselves back up to our Tabletop and shake those hips (porn) before we move into our left-handed Swan. Fuck off Alexandra, you have got to be joking.

I don’t remember the rest of the class. To an outsider I am awkwardly asleep, while inwardly I transcend my physical existence. My mind is a maze of neural pathways firing at light-speed in ways they have never fired before. I adopt the left-handed Swan. My head hits the floor with a wallop. I think, for a short time at least, I may have achieved full enlightenment. I wonder if I can swim and breathe simultaneously now. I haven’t tried it again yet.

Time is sketchy but I know two things: one, there is a second Shavasana at the end of the session, and two, I am spent. Once again I do not dream. As time is called, we wiggle our fingers, wiggle our toes, reawakening our bodies. I haven’t opened my eyes for an hour and when I do, I’m still in the same room, which is something of a surprise.
Simon asks how it went for me.
I can barely speak.
Eventually I say fuck.
I shift onto Bambi legs and discover to my amazement that I can indeed still walk. I don’t know what I was worried about.
And guess what?
Immediately I want to do it all again.
I hear myself telling Alexandra I will do alternate weeks.
Vinyasa one week
for weight loss
and Yin the next
for surrendering.