Do you remember the scenes in Marathon Man where Laurence Olivier keeps asking Dustin Hoffman, “Is it safe?” I ask myself that. Is it safe to return to yoga?
I am inspired by the country’s First Yogi. But I struggle to walk on cobblestones, I can’t walk backwards carrying a stick, I can’t lie on a rock with my arms stretched out, and if I have to walk around in circles I would probably collapse. These things are so tough.
But everybody around me is a yoga freak, walking about briskly carrying yoga mats, casually dropping into asanas in the middle of a conversation, and so pumped up with energy and good feeling that it is annoying. I neither do asanas nor do I feel pumped up with extra energy – I have just enough to see me through the day before I strike my favourite pose, lying supine on the bed after dinner.
And yet, I was a yoga man once. Thrice a week at a particularly ungodly hour, the tutor would get me to hold my nostrils in turn, and my knees and my neck, and do the kind of things that under different circumstances might have got me arrested. If you can keep your head when all about you are getting their ankles around theirs, as Kipling nearly said.
But that was not what turned me off. It was the mat.
You laid it out ensuring that the lady next to you wouldn’t get her nose thumped by a random elbow, or the guy on the other side didn’t literally breathe down your neck. And you hoped everybody else did that too. But no. There was always someone who was ignorant of mat-ethics, and invaded your space. The last thing you want to confront when half asleep is a loud burp directed at you, or worse. I love the feeling of wind blowing through my hair. But not on a yoga mat.
Also, I struggled to find my chakra and didn’t know where to look for my kundalini; my yoga bone was not flexible, and my zen muscles rarely moved. It was all very confusing. Perhaps, I was mixing things up. Perhaps, yoga was yoga, and zen was zen, and never the twain should be allowed to meet.
After a few attempts, during which I created my own poses not seen in any book (eg. foot in mouth, ear to the ground, nose in other people’s business), I resigned from yoga. And now, I want to return. The rest of the family are yoga buffs, speaking in a body language I cannot understand, and I want to know if it is safe for me to return.
Has the burper retired? Has the woman understood the concept of straight lines and personal space? Above all, have I made my peace with body parts that went on strike every time I tried to follow instructions?
As the man said, you can’t buy happiness, but you can buy yoga. And that’s the same thing.
Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu
