Little Paths of Light

Truly, is there anything more nauseating than some blow-hard giving you a moment-by-moment account of their latest ‘spiritual opening’?

Well, brace yourself. There’s one a-coming.

Earlier in the week, I was doing a short online yoga practice, a string of mainly standing poses, the like of which I’ve been doing off and on for the last few months of lockdown.

About 4 years ago, and after 20 years of practice and 10 years of teaching, I gave up on yoga. And I gave up for the simple reason that it no longer did anything for me. I found the poses boring, the teachers whose classes I attended boring, I found the yogic soundbites glib and flaky, the yoga community infantile and frenzied with the need for accomplishments and insights. I found the whole scene tired and repetitive. I think it’s fair to say that I was feeling generally cross and bitter, but more about the origins of those feelings another time.

At the start of lockdown and really for the want of anything better to do, exercise-wise, and with a touch of RSI niggling in my wrist, I came back to online yoga classes.

My expectation of these classes was close to zero and, for the most part, they didn’t disappoint. Nevertheless, I pressed on. I’d been rising at 5am, and half an hour of midday yoga wound me down into a nice little siesta before I took over looking after my children at 1pm. I wouldn’t have been able to see out the day without it.

So, earlier this week, I was going through the motions of a 30 minute standing series. I was a little more focused than usual, and less preoccupied with the number of yoga poses I’d have to knock out before I could LIE DOWN ALREADY! for my siesta.

I came to probably my favourite standing pose in the world, Parsvakonasana or side-angle stretch. It suddenly felt mad and delicious to have the soles of my feet pressing down on the ground. Luxurious, even. From my feet, this near-liquid pleasure began to stream up my each leg towards my pelvis in what felt little rivers of delight. I felt giddy with the joy of it.

As I kept moving from pose to pose, the energy continued to stream upwards from my feet. It felt as though a channel that had been blocked for decades had been flushed with pure water, flushing up and out years of accumulated crap. It was an overwhelming feeling and I was soon crying with surprise and the relief of release.

As any yoga teacher worth their salt knows, there is in yoga a notion of the energy body. This energy body is made up of thousands of little streams, called nadis which circulate energy, called prana in yoga (not to be confused with the terrifying south American fish) around the body.

Apparently, there are 72,000 nadis in the human body (yes, I know) and they loosely correspond to the meridian system used in acupuncture and which provides the bedrock for Chinese medicine systems. The nearest most of us get to experiencing prana is through our breathing, as prana is said to be carried on the breath (very poetic, no?).

When you experience a traumatic emotional of physical event, it is said that the movement of prana can seize up and cease to flow unimpeded through particular energy channels, giving rise to physical, emotional and mental ill-health. And the genius of yoga as I understand it (and sometimes experience it, as Nick once did), is that the poses, coupled with the breath were designed to reintroduce the movement of energy back into these blocked avenues, to flush out the crud and restore balance to the system.

And, of course, I want this to be true. I have a desperate need to believe there is some intelligence, order and design in our inner and outer worlds. Because if there isn’t, if everything is random, then there’s no obvious reason or cause for this emotional pain I’m experiencing and, by extension, no obvious road out.

And that’s scary.