My spine was crushed like a concertina, but yoga set me upright
After years of avoiding the ‘mindful mafia’, Anna Maxted is now a downward dog convert
I’ve resisted the cult of yoga for all of my adult life. But people are curiously invested in getting you to try it. On the few occasions I’ve relented I’ve loathed it. The class where the instructor told me, marvelling, “You’re so inflexible.” The unfriendliness of the yogis, nasty despite their namastes. I always felt clumsy and out of place.
But, in March last year, when lockdown began, my usual cardio and resistance training was not working for me. I mostly run on the gym treadmill, which saves my weak lower back.
Running on pavement crunched my spine like a concertina. And running in the fresh air while knowing everybody hates you for breathing was neither restorative nor relaxing.
At home, even half an hour of PE with Joe Wicks was beyond me. Every lunge, press-up or squat, rather than strengthening my core, intensified the backache. Obstinately, I persevered until the pain woke me up at night. Then I quit all exercise, while doubling my sugar intake. My GP prescribed painkillers and suggested physiotherapy.
Meanwhile, every one of my friends was getting super fit. I felt like an inert lump, surrounded by athletes. On a walk, I bumped into one such super-fit friend on his bike. Just before lockdown, his wife had persuaded him to join a hot yoga studio. In confinement, he’d been doing the Zoom version. He’d been a reluctant convert. But abruptly, his back pain had disappeared.
Soon afterwards, I was asked to trial a weekend online yoga “retreat” for work. Even being paid to do yoga, I felt reluctant. But I swiftly realised that yoga via Zoom is thrillingly different from yoga in real life. All the lithe Lululemoned mean girls were just another brick in the wall (or box on the screen.) No one could see or sneer at my downward dog, no one cared if my cobra was more of a caterpillar.
I always knew yoga was tough. It was partly why I was reluctant to engage. I feared I’d be terrible at it. I couldn’t make the shapes.
The dynamic flow session left my body buzzing with appalled shock at what had been asked of it. But the barrage of dogs and planks and sun salutations briskly corrected my defeatist hunch. I felt open and upright. As for the slow, restorative yin yoga – for the first time in lockdown, my whirring mind slowed and I felt as light and floaty as dandelion fluff. The pulsing inflammation in my lumbar subsided within a day, replaced by a gentle ache of awakening corset muscles.
The speed at which yoga has reduced my back pain continues to astonish me.
Running and strength training have given me the capabilities of a reasonably fast wind-up toy, but left me as stiff as old chewing gum. I’m genuinely hopeful that yoga will enable me to develop a normal range of movement. After 10 days of practice, my husband remarked on the improvement in my posture. And I see emerging definition in my arms.
“Our gym should be putting out online yoga classes,” I told him. “They are,” he said. Wallowing for weeks in my pit of gloom, I hadn’t checked. Theirs are on Instagram – even better than
Zoom as no one can see me except for my cat, who taunts me by performing luxurious silken stretches on my new pink yoga mat to show the amateur how it’s done.
Another advantage of Instagram yoga is that you can save the recording – so should I decide to do a class, I can start it that same minute.
There’s no time to book it, dread it, cancel it, or miserably sidle into the studio and invoke the rage of the mindful meditation mafia because I’ve put my mat in their spot.
Shamelessly, I’ve become a yoga bore. “It’s such hard work! But I feel so peaceful afterwards!” My yogi associates are quietly smug as I preach to the choir. My running and weightlifting friends consider it treason, which is entirely just. I protested too much. I was proud of not doing yoga – I preferred my status as an unexceptional runner who could do the odd press-up.
Now I realise how much of the basic foundation work I was neglecting – the stretching, twisting, lengthening, toughening – all of it so critical to holistic health.
I realise that if I ever want to run a 5K again without my vertebrae crumbling like a stomped- on Crunchie bar, yoga is key.
So, for my 51st birthday, I requested a new yoga mat, and yoga gear. I’ve signed up for Zoom yoga classes live from Sri Lanka. I’ve found some free yoga sessions on the Lululemon website (yes) and some are even doable. Others are Cirque du Soleil level stuff (no, I cannot slowly lift myself into a crouching handstand and hover upside down in the air). A friend in LA suggested I join her Zoom yoga class – why not? There’s so much choice.
I am grateful ( if not #blessed). Yoga hasn’t just given me stillness, it is enabling me to progress. It has freed me from my dispiriting and agonising back pain, it has rebooted my mental and physical health, and it has allowed me to feel that I am accomplishing something. It has been a gift.