A 4.4.1: Profound realisations in downward-facing dog pose

Yoga has become a staple of my life. Three times a week, my gym runs hatha yoga classes with one particular teacher.

I have a love-hate relationship with yoga. Eleven years ago, I tried it for the first time with one of those terrifying teachers who appears to have gone to the American Army Drill Instructors’ Academy for Yoga. My body, which at the time was delicate and very inflexible (not to mention incredibly underweight) due to anorexia and simply did not move into the postures we were meant to achieve.

I ran – unsurprisingly – and vowed never to go back. “I have a body about as flexible as your average ironing board,” I was wont to say.

About three or four months ago that changed. I decided, albeit with reservations, to try out the yoga classes being run at my gym. Nervous, standing there in t-shirt and Adidas running pants, barefoot in a class full of other very chilled-out looking people, we were introduced to Yoga For People Who Can’t Wrap Their Ankles Around Their Ears.

My teacher was small and petite, with gorgeous dyed-red hair cut very short. She rolled out her mat before us and told us all to lie down. And then we began. This was a new kind of yoga, one that didn’t require attempts to twist and contort our bodies into a rictus of agony. Neither did she stalk around the room like some Napoleonic gym instructor, wrenching our limbs into outrageous places that they just did not go. It was calm, it was gentle.

It was all about the breath, and really finding our way back into our bodies. It was what yoga should really be about. This was how I realised that all the emotional pain and struggle I’d experienced for the last twenty-five years had created my incredible inflexibility, turning my body into something that makes concrete look bendy.

It was also how I learned that in order to release a great deal of all that stuff, I needed to do this kind of physical work. Yoga is recommended for people using Holosync, and I can fully see why.

Last week, I’d had a moment of release, when the tension around my hips suddenly gave way and I was able to go more fully into forward fold poses. Every day, when I come out of yoga, I feel so blissfully melted that the world could end and I wouldn’t mind. It’s how I’ve realised that I have a much better relationship to my body as a whole. The endless internal criticism of it has ceased.

Today was different. The start of the day was bad. A tense meditation, with a great deal of painful material right on the surface. It was getting to be One of Those Days. It was almost lunchtime, and I was becoming convinced that I couldn’t go to the gym feeling so badly. I was worried that I’d stand in the middle of class and just cry.

With some trepidation, I went. I was very reluctant, feeling fragile and sensitive. Thankfully, Body Pump – the class before yoga – was the launch of the new release 71, with the two instructors all done up as school delinquents so the whole class was fun and very entertaining. I felt more relaxed at the end and settled in to yoga.

The emotions flooded up almost immediately. We did swallow dives and breathing, several sun salutations, and then moved into a side pose that required a lot of focus. Suddenly, I was sitting on my mat on the brink of tears. Something had gone ‘pop’ in my chest.

An emotional pop, which I guess we could call the opening up of what has always been a very closed down heart chakra. Fabeku has described it as being an empty, bare room. I am hidden through a door in the back room. Suddenly, all the energy that had been building up through the morning was flooding out of me, and it felt as though my chest was on fire.

I sat there on my mat, too shaky to move into the pose. The instructor came straight over. “Go into child’s pose,” she said.

It was perfect. There was no fuss, no “what’s wrong?” or a need to tell a story. She knew exactly what to do. The joy of that class is that if you have to do something like that, you’re in a space safe enough. I went straight into child’s pose and stayed there until the last section of the class. There were more poses designed to open up the chest area, but now that felt easier, more relaxed.

All the pain that had been building through the day was suddenly gone. On the way home, I had just reached my door when I thought, “Wow, I really do hold on to a lot of stuff.”

It was as though it melted off my shoulders. For a long time, I sat in my apartment in silence, feeling quietly amazed. It was like a great release. This is why controlled, physical work is so essential to this kind of healing practice.