On being no good at Yoga

I have known for a long time that I should get serious about yoga. Apart from the obvious health benefits (both physical and spiritual) there's the aesthetic appeal of composing one’s body into all sorts of interesting, attractive and impressive postures. And if that isn’t enough, there is the tantalising prospect— for those willing to undertake a rigorous regime of self-discipline — of attaining an elevated state of consciousness and even bursting through to full-blown spiritual enlightenment.

What’s not to like about it ?

The trouble is, I'm hopeless at yoga. I can't touch my toes; I can't even sit on a flat floor with my legs outstretched without toppling backwards. At the last yoga class I attended — and I have attended many over the years — I considered asking if I might do my exercises in a little curtained-off area, visible only to the teacher and thereby sparing my fellow participants the half-glimpsed sight of my lumbering efforts.

Of course, given even a modicum of serious application, all this would undoubtedly improve. At the yoga class the teacher advises starting every day with 10 or 15 minutes practice but on the first morning there is invariably something more important that needs doing; on the second I forget completely; on the third, I do 3 minutes and realise that it is nowhere near enough and then it’s too late. Best try again next week. This goes on for a week or two, after which I decide that I won’t go back to the class until I have cracked the problem of daily practice. After that it all goes rapidly downhill until the whole cycle starts again.

I believe it boils down to a problem with self-discipline (towards which I have a stubborn and perverse resistance). If only it were possible to practice yoga in a similar way to those Michel Thomas language courses. There, the advice is that you should not try to remember any of the words you are learning and on no account should you revisit lessons or attempt to revise. Now that's the kind of discipline that appeals to me. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t seem to work when it comes to yoga.

And so —  though the day I have to ask someone to tie my shoelaces is still a little way off — I have come to accept that suppleness is a quality I am destined never to enjoy.

But then recently something interesting happened. As if reluctant to give up on the yoga business completely, I found myself wondering precisely why it is I am so bad at it. So for example, if I lie on my back with my arms out to the sides and let my knees fall to the right, I get a sense of tautness in my left upper arm. It’s a similar case with the other bits. It led me to develop a mental picture of my body as a complicated system of interlinked strings (frayed) and pulleys (seized-up) in which every part is linked in some strange and intriguing way to all the others.

These days, I find myself unable to resist spending a few minutes every morning on the mat, exploring the minute details of my incompetence.