Joe Bennett: Where do I start with yoga?

As I disposed myself into the downward dog, I was glancing about to compare myself with others. Photo / 123rf

"And please, whatever you do, don't, under any circumstances, say ..."

"Yoga," she said.

She was a physiotherapist currently engaged in trying to restore my left rotator cuff. Quite what I've done to it neither she nor I know, but it has lost the will to rotate. She has been going at it once a week with heat, unguents and remarkably penetrative fingers, all of which has the effect of making it better, but between appointments I find ways of making it worse again. It's a war between her skill and my clumsiness, with the shoulder as the field of battle.

But the shoulder is not my sole unsatisfactoriness. These days I find I am forever straining muscles. The cause is vanity. In the belief that I still am what I once was, I try to lift this, shift that, and deal to the other, just as I used to. But when I used to lift, shift and deal, it was with muscles that were long and rubbery. Now they are short and stiff. One hint of lifting, shifting or dealing and they are only too pleased to go ping and withdraw to feel sorry for themselves and reach for the consolatory drinks cabinet.

So, "Do you know," I asked the physiotherapist, "any way that I might restore to the muscles of my arms and legs a degree of length and rubberiness, though please, whatever you do, don't, under any circumstances, say ..."

"Yoga," she said.

Oh God. Where do I start with yoga? Well let's start with the classes. I do not want to attend classes. In anything. Baking, ceramics and windsurfing are all splendid pursuits, but I would not go to classes to learn any of them.
Once I'd left school I felt I'd left the classroom and I bridle at going back to it. It's an absurd attitude, of course - like everyone else I am up to my eyeballs in ignorance - but it has something to do with the wish for autonomy.

That said, I did attend a yoga class some years ago but I lasted just two weeks, for a number of reasons..

The main one was me. Know thyself, said the ancients, and I've followed their advice. I have a degree in me. No one is better qualified in the subject. And I behaved in the yoga class exactly as I knew I would.

I am aware of course that yoga is all about the self, the inner being and similar guff, that it is not a sport and above all, it is not competitive. But try telling that to this psyche.

As I disposed myself into the downward dog, I was glancing about to compare myself with others, and of course because I was a beginner my downward dog was disastrous, and of course because I am an ageing bloke I was comically inflexible, and of course all that was a blow to the ego, so of course I gave up.

But there was also, and more subtly, the yogaishness of yoga, the airy side, the unprovable bit, the sitting wincingly cross-legged, putting the hands together, saying om, focusing on the nothing of the third eye and radiating benevolence and all that.

That sort of thing is all very well in India where it evolved over a couple of thousand years, and where it fits nicely with the local approach to life, but when it goes walkabout and fetches up in urban Western capitalist society, all that talk of chatkas and tantra and I don't know what else rings as hollow as a rotten log.

It feels like mystical dress-up, playing at spirituality, and if there is one word I would like struck from the lexicon until someone gives me a plausible definition of what it actually means, it is spirituality.
As far as I am concerned, yoga is stretching, no more no less. It is a means of improving flexibility, of getting some long and rubbery back. The rest is fiddle-de-dee.

All of which I didn't say in so many words to Ms Physiotherapist, but I think she may have got wind of it from the sudden tension beneath her fingers.

"Alternatively," she said, "you could just do stretches at home. There's some good stuff on YouTube."

"Thank you," I said. "I will. Ow."

"Sorry," she said.