the wow factor

Last evening I was confused, excited to start yoga again but having one of my bad days. In the end, will power won and so off we drove through the darkening day, taking the mucky route because we were late. Emerging from deep countryside we headed off into town and five minutes later we entered the attractive old building. A lovely woman with curly golden hair laughed and said, “Come join in!”

Enchanted, we settled in to her class with thirteen others. It all began and ended well, but in between we rushed to the command of her soft voice lost in the music playing on her iPad. Poor as the teaching was, for she was absorbed in doing the postures along side us, I felt elevated. The usual headaches, dizziness, feeling of illness, had diminished. Now that is something.

The next morning, that is today, my morning feverishness was bearable. Gobsmacked, I decided Yoga is going to be part of my future. Knowing we’d prefer less hectic lessons, over breakfast we scanned yoga teachers in our area, having last week had another wrong lesson. Last Friday we’d driven to another town, lured by an inspiring phone conversation and enjoyed the friendly women we went to a cafe with after the lesson. The lesson had not been as inspiring as the women. It was the postures cut up in sections, sliced up again and rehashed to form exercises which would please anyone not used to the thrill of real yoga.

And so this morning, whilst chewing our ‘French Toast’ we found somebody who teaches classical yoga. I rang, left a message and minutes later a woman on a sunny beach in a distant land echoed my thoughts: “Yoga is meditation, done properly, slowly, the classical postures stretch the body, forcing blood through your organs, regenerating you.”

When I first learnt the postures in 1972, there weren’t any commercial systems, only hatha yoga and this woman almost my own age, adheres to them, so next week when she’s back from her warm beach we’ll rediscover yoga as I was taught it in India.

Try it. I mean real yoga, not stuff on steriods, nor stuff concocted to please health-and-safety regulations, but the classical postures which have been practiced for 5,000 years. They will wow you.