Gareth Lavan: My new, horrible addiction.

Gareth tells us how he really feels about yoga.


Earlier this term, I decided to branch out and explore the array of putatively rich cultural experiences that St Andrews has to offer. My girlfriend, who has has often bemoaned that my pass-times should involve more than cynicism and scowling, suggested that we might have a pop at yoga.

I now love yoga.

I was skeptical at first, and second, and third. But at the risk of being subject to another diatribe about my disagreeable demeanor, and the dilapidated state of my health, (I define ‘wasted breath’ as being breath that is not drawn from a cigarette), I grudgingly relented. So for one night, I suspended my aversion to, well, people, and donned my sportiest looking Sunderland AFC shorts from 1998 (thanks, Dad), and a Ralph Lauren Polo shirt purchased in Thailand for about three pence.

The sniggering started early, as I tiptoed tentatively into the hall where all the yoga people do their yoga thing. I paid, (this is a purely cash up front business, much like organised crime), took my mat, and readied myself for this stretchy yoga thing.

After only the first of the forty renditions of downward facing dog, my thighs, biceps and pretty much everything else in my body that laughably masquerades as a ‘muscle’ had turned against me. Fortunately, I happen to be thin and long. Unfortunately, I happen to be alarmingly brittle. Me doing yoga is like trying to wrap a Twiglet into the shape of a Pretzel.

Everyone else, however, seemed to be having a grand old stretchy time. This seemed odd to me. I mean, you and me, we don’t like doing the stretchy thing. It’s awful. The yoga people, however, they like doing the stretchy thing. In fact, they do the stretchy thing and then afterwards they say, “Look how good we all are – at doing the stretchy thing”.

Our supreme spiritual Leader, our yoga instructor, has a penchant for pseudo-cerebral bile, such as, “and in this pose, we are both rediscovering and redefining, our relationship with the breath”. She was bang on. I did certainly rediscover my relationship with my breath, namely that my breath feels far more comfortable when I’m not doing fucking yoga.

The point I’m driving at, albeit tangentially, is that yoga seems to be anathema to me; I don’t like exercise, intellectual obfuscation, or being sniggered at, but herein lies the proverbial rub. After the pain and immiseration of my muscles, I got a funny little high from the whole endeavour. A Yoga-High. My heart, usually a pestilential, disagreeable place, remained as such, but now had a special little alcove reserved for enjoying yoga. My enjoyment seems unfathomable; what could it be?

My theory is as follows: the sheer relief one accrues from bringing to an end a torment- ridden experience actually precipitates in one a greater high than one would have actually garnered had one not gone through said horrible ordeal. So, paradoxically, the thing that makes me want to go back to yoga is the fact that after I do the stretchy thing, I’ll be finished doing the stretchy thing. Perhaps all of this makes little sense. Maybe I just enjoy spending an hour alone with my girlfriend, just the two of us? However, to that I, like I once felt about yoga, remain deeply skeptical.