I felt a pair of feet step on my hands. Not next to. I looked up. The teacher looked down on me like I was shit. She stood on my hands till I managed to get my legs through to Dandasana without lifting my hands from the mat.

It got worse. Or better, depending on your tolerance for pain and public embarrassment. Adjustments came thick and fast, and none of them were gentle. Hands shoved my hips into place, feet kicked my hands about, my spine was pushed down, and at one point, the instructor barked out something unintelligible and physically twisted me like a corkscrew in to a “proper” knees to ears Karnapidasana. I think I saw God, and my own perineum.

And yet, in the middle of this utter chaos, something clicked. Beneath the questionable hands-on techniques and slightly sadistic energy, there was something oddly profound. I wasn’t coasting. I wasn’t hiding in…

And yet, there it is. That familiar tension in the chest. That buzzing undercurrent in the back of my skull. That restlessness, like I need to do something, fix something, prepare for something. It’s only human, I know that. We’re wired for it. Brains are prediction machines, always scanning the horizon for threats. Worry was probably a brilliant survival tool once upon a time. But now?  We live in a world of vast comfort, a world of shallow worries and hollow threats. There are no tigers in the bushes, there are no enemies at the gate. The sad fact is that the enemy at the gats is often ourselves, stood like John Cusack outside our windows, holding placards depicting the most bizarre and obscure outcomes and fates that will most probably never come to pass.

I know, from introspection and great therapy that my problem is that worry feels like control. Like if I’m anxious enough, I’ll somehow prevent the bad thing from happening. But that’s not control. That’s just self-harm…

When I was first introduced to Om, (hereafter referred to as just ॐ) it was in a book written by a man, I say a man as I can't remember his name, as it was a long time ago on a niche public audiobook forum.

It was introduced to me as one of the many names of god. The one true Word and the true name of God in Hinduism, and one of the 99 known names for God to the Muslims. 

ADHD side tangent: Back then, I learned that there are apparently 100 names for God. Humans only know 99, and nomads say the last name of God is known only to the camels, which is why they look so smug.

This was the universal Word, both the name of everything and…

As it turns out, that was the last day I had social media apps on my phone and, honestly, it’s has been revolutionary. After writing the post, I made the hard decision to abandon my photo memories that were locked behind the Facebook account wall and just step away. I concluded that this must be the main way they lock people in who desperately want to leave, this is why every day it shows you your memories first, you’ve got to remember, Social media and media companies done do anything for you, so if they’re doing it, it’s for a reason, and I think that reason is…

I personally think it’s impossible for normal run of the mill western people to aspire to living an egoless life.

In my family we try live a life of achievable goals. Come new year we have a drink and see in the new year, then we’ll each set an “achievable goal”. This can be a family walk on New Year’s Day (depending on how much we have had to drink) or maybe saying this year I really want to go to a zoo or get a new fencing jacket. We really try to remember and push each other to do these things, until everyone’s complete.

There is power in seeing something full circle and achieving goals, much like anything you practice, achieving gets easier with time and practising achieving goals by bringing the goalposts closer, is a wonderful way to start the year on the right path as opposed to starting the year with inevitable failure. In this same light…

Does this mean that doing yoga in the West is Cultural appropriation? Absolutely not. Sure, my personal experience of yoga has been quite varied, from the commercial to the disjointed and fringe. But the yoga community that I’m involved with are beautiful; practised by people who understand that it is borrowed, people who understand that we’re lucky to have it in our lives, regardless of whether it’s our own personal roots.

Commercial classes too, the people that attend them are doing nothing inherently wrong, sure they’re being sold to by a large corporation that is selling a surface exercise variant of Indian culture, but in the current state of the world, we’re all being sold something from somewhere and none of it is really ok.

“There is no ethical consumption under late-stage capitalism” hits home here, everything is not great in the world when it comes to money and products. This quote is something I think about a lot, its not attributed to someone, its just a fact, a statement that…

The only negative that ill meditate on is that I took the class today without consulting SJ. Honestly, it just never crossed my mind that I should, again, this comes down to responsibility and something I’m working on. On a technical note, the class was free, and the people were my own, the building was my own, the insurance was my own. This was on me, but it's my job to learn to be accountable to people other than myself. No matter how far I go in this yoga journey, either personal or professionally, SJ will always be the person who taught me Yoga, someone who helped me learn the technical side of something I had already fostered a great love for and someone I look up to professionally. In the same way, I will never forget Mr Gardener, who taught me to read and who read Harry Potter to our class in primary school. I'll never forget…

On another side note before we do a little reflection, these old women were amazing, I did some partnered exercise with a wonderful lady who was stood on one leg, eyes close,d following my movements with hers, she was 84 years old… 84! What a vision of health, beauty and serenity to aspire towards for future years. She also left me with a soundbite that will stick with me. I asked her how long she had been doing Tai Chi, and she said this:

“Me and my friend have been coming to Tai Chi for over 20 years, teachers come and go, but we are always here”

It was a lovely reminder that teaching a practice is not about the teacher, or your business or how you teach, it’s not even about any particular student, it’s just a superb and transient journey where everything changes all the time, some things are more constant than others, but nothing is forever.

Anyway, tangent aside, how did Tai Chi compare to Yoga on a historical level, how do the practices compare or where do we draw comparisons?…

There are two things at play here: a personal mistake on my part, and I think a little misleading use of the evidence on the part of the information as it is known. I think my mistake is this: when people say Yoga goes back up to 5000 years, I assume they mean Yoga as a practice, the mindfulness, the meditation, and then much later (much later) the movement. I assumed, possibly incorrectly, that the history of yoga referred to yoga in spirituality, not just a Sanskrit word used long before the first solid evidence of yoga as a practice. I think the misleading part is this; When yoga practitioners or teachers state that yoga goes back 5000 years, and even when its explicitly stated that’s “it’s not as we know it now with poses, it was about meditation and enlightenment” they’re still talking about the Upanishads, we know them to be 800BC, that’s 2,825 years ago. This links to the important part for me - I have been told and it seems to be common knowledge that Yoga predates Buddhism and Hinduism, but Vedic religion is thought to be the founding religion of Hinduism, part of the proto-Hindu chain that lead to Hinduism and it is in these texts that we’re scrambling to find the word yoga being used for more than hitching horses and combining ideas…

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Let’s draw a line under the positives and focus on the reason I underwent a reincarnation at 30. My 10 year career as a plumber and gas fitter had reached its grand, shitty, crescendo. I ended up taking a job at a secondary school, not any old school, but the very school that I went to in my teens. I know this sounds dramatic, but it was a nightmare. People literally have nightmares about being back at school, that old teacher who hated them looking down their nose at your failures, well, that was me, I was stood at the end of that teacher’s nose, holding a mop bucket.

In the process of getting on with ‘working a job I hated to pay the bills’ I fell; I fell really fucking hard. They say that depression manifests differently for everyone, for me…