Dear Yogis,

I have to laugh when I think how people may excuse themselves from yoga because they can’t touch their toes. No one offers the excuse that they can’t walk around in crab as they used to in the primary school playground. That’s the better goal.

Over the years I have taken classes with teachers who have promised me that I can get high. They themselves seem very happy and, possibly, high. They promise euphoria, higher states of consciousness and transformation. Some talk about the drugs they used to take before discovering yoga.

Amazing positivity comes over me on one day of the year! (10th October). Isn’t it funny! One day is not so different to the day before or the day after but when a birthday comes along it’s absorbingly lovely. The day produces a shot of positivity that feels so powerful, it seems to illuminate a higher self and a better state. This state of self-generated specialness seems to bypass the thinking mind.

Dear Yogis,

A yogi mentioned Seasonal Affective Disorder this week. SAD starts to appear in journals and columns about now, along with advice to take vitamins and exercise. The darker days can affect non-depressive people like depression. It’s not hard to understand. You know what it feels to look up at a galaxy of stars (not in this country!) and feel the wonderment and positivity and amazing emotions when the glorious view enters under your skin and into your grey cells and gives you joy… Well, clouds can also get under the skin and into the grey cells and do what clouds do - dull the light.

I often think about adjustments these days. I miss some of them and I wonder if the fashion for assisting yoga students is passed. Then I think of some of the memorable ways teachers have adjusted me: David Swenson and Stewart Gilchrist have drawn screams and giggles from me! I think of Nancy Gilgoff who wasn’t happy with my restrictions in a seated forward fold and asked if I have trauma in my lower back – a childhood accident, perhaps. Yogis believe that the body is made up of physical imprints of experiences and traumas whether we remember/recognise them or not.

Dear Yogis.

I got an email this week that pleased my heart. The yogi said: ‘Maybe a class focusing on core strength and the good old six-pack might be popular... with all the lock down working from home – static sitting at my desk – strengthening the stomach muscles feels like a good move’. I couldn’t agree more. Let’s do it! I have exactly the thing for you.

Isn’t it funny that yoga teachers (like me) repeat ad nauseam that yoga is about meditation... yet classes are all about the postures! We site the Bhagavad Gita as the foundation stone of practice which describes yoga’s goal as to connect with the supreme. Even Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, also a bible for yogis, has no idea how hard Rotated Side Angle Posture is or what to do with an Uddiyana Bandha! So how did yoga move from wanting us to merge our conscious with the divine to our present-day pretzel practice?

I have to say, I absolutely love teaching online. There’s some really great yoga practice happening in the Zoom boxes on my conferencing screen! Is it my imagination or is your yoga improving in the more relaxed, home environment?

My wonderful book by James Nestor, Breath, has this bombshell line: 'The lungs are a weight-regulating system of the body'! How? Nestor says that exhalation has weight! He says: ‘for every ten pounds of fat lost in our bodies, eight and a half pounds of it comes out through the lungs; most of it is carbon dioxide mixed with a bit of water vapour’.

Back to my book about breathing by James Nestor, I'm afraid! I'm unpacking more and more fascinating stories about the power of the inhalation and exhalation. Nestor talks of a character who 'expanded lungs and extended life spans', Carl Stough. He was a pulmonaut, a 'choir conductor and medial anomaly'. He trained opera singers, athletes and emphysema patients.