Before I started to do yoga, I tried to imagine what it would be like. I thought it would be a bunch of people in a church hall, mostly sitting or lying down. I thought it would feature gentle stretching techniques, that there would be some element of meditation, that an hour spent doing this would drag on and on, that I’d feel tired afterwards.
I started reading about yoga. I got a book. I read two pages. From what I gleaned, the book seemed to be about impatience, but I was too impatient to read it. Yoga, I thought, would be a corrective for the things that we, in the West, get so wrong. It would be about the journey, rather than the destination. Does that sound trite? Yes it does. Yoga, I realised, would be a big risk. Talking about it, I would sound trite. Still, I would learn something about my own impatience.
So I went to the church hall. The bunch of people arrived. Average age: 30. That’s purely a guess. The lesson was not an hour; it was an hour and a half. We started doing our stretches. Physically, it was really, really good. It’s about pushing your body, but not wrecking it, as you might in the gym. I looked at the clock, like you do in a maths lesson. Weirdly, the clock seemed to be whizzing along. The 90 minutes felt like about forty - the pace of good TV. Except that afterwards, I didn’t feel seedy and tired. It was 9.30 in the evening, and I felt less tired than I had all day.