Modern Life: What is yoga therapy?
Yoga therapy is gaining interest from the NHS. And the Prince of Wales’s charity has started to fund yoga classes for young offenders to prevent them reoffending.
That doesn’t make hardcore practitioners any less annoying (all that smug wandering around with rolled-up mats and bottles of expensive water) but it does serve as encouragement for those with residual ailments, both mental and physical. It follows a growing, positive trend away from guzzling pills.
A parliamentary committee is looking at integrating yoga into hospitals and care homes, though it might be a stretch (pun intended) to imagine that huge amounts of new money will be given over to yoga therapy.
Even so, it’s on a roll – and not before time, given that it originated in India some 5,000 years ago. Yoga is now as mainstream as swimming.
The Duchess of Sussex is a firm believer (the Duchess of Cornwall, too) and apparently insists that Harry works regularly on his ‘downward dog’ pose, to iron out kinks in his body and increase blood flow to his brain.
According to the International Journal of Yoga Therapy, whose mission is to ‘establish Yoga [note the capital Y] as a recognised and respected therapy’, it helps with everything from arthritis to dementia.
The Prince’s Charitable Foundation is
‘I recoiled a little when she mentioned Vedic chanting’
supporting the Prison Phoenix Trust. In February, Prince Charles said yoga had ‘proven beneficial effects on both body and mind’ that could save ‘precious and expensive’ NHS resources.
I’m yet to be sent to prison but am all for spiritual welfare. On a more shallow level, I am constantly reminded about what the late editor of The Oldie, Alexander Chancellor, said about putting on one’s socks. His challenge was to avoid sitting down while performing this rudimentary task – something he achieved, albeit with a few splutters and curses, until he was into his seventies.
It was with that in mind that I knocked on the door of Miranda Taylor, a fortysomething mother of two teenagers, who offers one-to-one yoga therapy from her Chiswick, west London, home. She teaches classical yoga based on the tradition of Krishnamacharya. I always thought that anyone could set up as a yoga teacher, but Taylor told me the training lasts several years and includes studying philosophical texts, ayurveda and what she calls ‘mantra’ (Vedic chanting in Sanskrit).
I recoiled a little when she mentioned chanting – but generally I found the 75-minute session a treat, albeit an expensive one at £80 a pop.
At one point, she simply got me to stretch out and close my eyes and before you could say, ‘Listen to your breath,’ I was listening to the fairies. ‘So sorry,’ I said, embarrassed, when I came round. ‘Not at all – that was superb,’ she said. What I found interesting was how, towards the end of the session, I was able to reach further towards the floor than I had at the start. This made me feel good. Yoga, unlike cricket, is something you can become better at as you get older.
And, in a self-indulgent sort of way, I found talking about some of my worries remarkably easy, in between various stretches. Rather easier, in fact, than sitting with a packet of Kleenex in a chair in front of a therapist, something I have tried at various turbulent times, with mixed results.