My nose was about six inches from the floor hands spread eagled under my shoulder, bum perched in ridiculous fashion up towards the sky and who knows where my feet were? I was quietly hopeful they were behind me and on the mat somewhere, progress of a sort! My two hands should have been flat to the floor with fingers wide spread, but you see my wrist was too weak so I had to close up my fist on my right and balance on my knuckle, when I think back on it the yoga teacher was more than restrained. I was in that pose what I know now, is called Down Dog a sort of comfortable pose that I sometime these days, retreat into from more testing poses. But back then I can assure you it felt like a particularly peculiar type of persecution.
So why did I stay on the mat that very first day? There I was, in a yoga class of thirty five people hidden away in the back blocks so that no one could see me. All around me were folk of different shape, age and ability some, for whom like me it was patently the first time they had ever stepped onto a mat, others were svelte young things who looked like they had been born doing yoga.The yoga teacher herself was an older model of the above mentioned young ones, an amazing shapely bendy woman in her late 60's early 70's and truly a great advertisement for what she was teaching . As we stretched, huffed and puffed through that first routine and I began to feel my muscles stretching, the blood course through my veins, the very gradual awakening of different parts of my body, It felt like little bits of me seemed to have been asleep for a very,very long time.
My mind drifts back to my childhood (Obviously I hadn't learnt anything about mindfulness yet or staying present!) I was sent to a private school away from my beloved national school at eight years of age . It was an all boys school and it was the the first year girls were allowed to attend. There were about ten girls and what felt like a million boys, probably in reality about two hundred. Part of our curriculum was a curious subject called PT. I had no idea what PT was but duly obeyed orders to put on my runners and assemble at the quad. We lined up in rank formation and this Physical Training (PT) instructor from the army, came to put us through our paces. It was a version of yoga though I didn't know that either, but I remember feeling a curios sensation at that early age that I had done this type of thing before, a sort of body memory. I revelled in it, the freedom yet discipline of the movements allowed me a kind of real self expression that was a bit different from going to art class or pounding out scales on the piano.
Back on the mat, the movements of my body and the discipline of the poses have once again awoken not only that childhood memory but also the strong feeling that I have done this before, that first morning it was almost instinctive, that I knew what to do before I did it. It made me smile and wonder at the world. It felt like I had come home.
So why did I stay on the mat that very first day? There I was, in a yoga class of thirty five people hidden away in the back blocks so that no one could see me. All around me were folk of different shape, age and ability some, for whom like me it was patently the first time they had ever stepped onto a mat, others were svelte young things who looked like they had been born doing yoga.The yoga teacher herself was an older model of the above mentioned young ones, an amazing shapely bendy woman in her late 60's early 70's and truly a great advertisement for what she was teaching . As we stretched, huffed and puffed through that first routine and I began to feel my muscles stretching, the blood course through my veins, the very gradual awakening of different parts of my body, It felt like little bits of me seemed to have been asleep for a very,very long time.
My mind drifts back to my childhood (Obviously I hadn't learnt anything about mindfulness yet or staying present!) I was sent to a private school away from my beloved national school at eight years of age . It was an all boys school and it was the the first year girls were allowed to attend. There were about ten girls and what felt like a million boys, probably in reality about two hundred. Part of our curriculum was a curious subject called PT. I had no idea what PT was but duly obeyed orders to put on my runners and assemble at the quad. We lined up in rank formation and this Physical Training (PT) instructor from the army, came to put us through our paces. It was a version of yoga though I didn't know that either, but I remember feeling a curios sensation at that early age that I had done this type of thing before, a sort of body memory. I revelled in it, the freedom yet discipline of the movements allowed me a kind of real self expression that was a bit different from going to art class or pounding out scales on the piano.
Back on the mat, the movements of my body and the discipline of the poses have once again awoken not only that childhood memory but also the strong feeling that I have done this before, that first morning it was almost instinctive, that I knew what to do before I did it. It made me smile and wonder at the world. It felt like I had come home.
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