Author: Shane Watson
Publication: www.thisislondon.com
Date:
URL: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/dynamic/lifestyle/londonlife/top_review.html?in_review_id=360010&in_review_text_id=304854
If you ring round the pillars of
London's yoga community this is how it goes. One of them is incommunicado
in Ibiza, another is on her way to a Sanskrit class, several are not so
enthusiastic about talking to a journalist (for fear of being misinterpreted),
a few of them ask me if I'm all right, panting and firing questions on
the end of the line while they radiate inner calm. These are the gurus
of the new thems. Now that we can all have takeaway sushi and white teeth,
and pashminas are a piddling £49.99, nature has had to find a way
of differentiating the haves from the have-nots, the shiny half from the
other half and the answer, it turns out, is yoga.
Yoga has become the lifestyle essential
of the modern successful person; that's successful as in healthy, relaxed,
emotionally stable, not successful as in loadsa-money, pumped up and living
like Elvis. Everybody's doing it.
Every gym now has yoga classes,
yoga teachers are gaining guru status, and those rolled-up blue mats tucked
under armpits have become the badge of a new enlightened elite. The people
who have discovered yoga in the past 18 months, who are responsible for
turning a minority practice into a mainstream trend, are the equivalent
of Eighties yuppies - only now they buy organic food, their houses are
sparsely furnished with rare woods and leather, and they are conscious
of their "all round" wellbeing.
This is the modern way: a subtle
blend of New Age thinking, Seventies hippie culture and Eastern mysticism
with a dash of urban survival instinct and body image awareness. The new
yoga generation believes there is something Neanderthal about pounding
the treadmill when you could be engaging mind and body.
The journalist AA Gill, who up until
now has avoided all forms of organised exercise, caught the yoga bug on
a recent trip to Bali: "I plan to do it privately at home because before
yoga finds your well of serenity, it finds your canister of gas, and I
couldn't do it in a room of Fulham girls. I have no intention of doing
that sweaty Ashtanga. I really like the breathing and the fact that it
is entirely non-competitive." A good one-to-one practice session will cost
him in the region of £60 an hour, and a class is never less than
an hour and a half. "In the past 18 months it has gone berserk," says Faustomaria,
owner of the Innergy Centre on Kensal Road, W10. "People ring all the time
asking 'Do you do Madonna-style yoga?' This yoga explosion has physical
origins and that is why Ashtanga [the strenuous physical version Madonna
practises] is the most popular form. But the more evolved people see the
potential in yoga ... for the mind, for the feelings." As Sarah Wilson,
MD of The Life Centre, W8, puts it, "about 50 per cent are doing it as
a work-out but people who start to keep fit often go on to explore the
spiritual benefits."
Yoga is empowering," says Faustomaria.
"It's not about being a failed film director who drops out to practise,
it's about being a great film director who practises to be a better director
... more centred. It is the next step in our evolution."
Cat de Rham who teaches five Iyengar-based
classes a week in Chelsea and is married to Jonathan Dwek, founder of Planet
Organic and Sundance, is one of those for whom what was an alternative
lifestyle has become regular business. "People take up yoga thinking of
it as a work-out and find something else is being answered." It's this
"something else", this "why do I feel so great" that has filtered down
via celebrities such as Madonna (she has said yoga changed her life) and
word of mouth. Plus, of course, yoga tones and firms the body to the point
where you can be 42, give birth and be rocking on stage a few months later
with a pair of low-cut jeans and a stomach like Britney's.
Claudia Nella who teaches private
clients Dynamic yoga (a version of Ashtanga) has noticed a dramatic change
in perception in the past year: "Before it was considered a bit 'culty'
and no one imagined it was a good option for a work out. Now everyone wants
to do yoga." And now the choice is virtually unlimited: you can feel the
burn in 100F heat (Bikram yoga); go the Madonna, Sting, Tim Jefferies route
(Ashtanga); try a deeper, slower workout (Iyengar, as practised by Lili
Dent-Brocklehurst), take up the more spiritual Sivananda, or Hatha yoga,
which Faustomaria describes as the "colourless yoga" (Joseph Fiennes is
a regular at his class), to name a few. The theory is that you need different
types of yoga at different times of your life, but it's also true that
there is rivalry between yoga style factions (which boils down to Ashtanga
being looked on as the fast fix).
"Ashtanga," says Jonathan Sattin,
managing director of the triyoga centre in Primrose Hill, "is an example
of how yoga has changed. Previously, people were put off by the brown rice
and Woodstock image. We live in the 21st century and our aim is to provide
a yoga environment for now, where you start to de-stress the moment you
walk through the door." And it seems to work for the likes of Sadie Frost,
Jude Law and Joseph Fiennes. For Cat de Rham, the absence of competition
is also crucial: "In the West our lives are super-competitive, so it's
important to have a place where you can get away from that, where you stop
being hard on yourself, and that's part of what yoga is about."
The real, deep benefits of yoga,
as most experts will tell you, will not be felt for several months (though
the toning effect can be seen much more quickly). Leela Miller, who takes
classes at The Tabernacle, W11, and has taught Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow
privately, says: "Even if some people do treat yoga like Hindu aerobics
they will still get the benefit. When I started it took me a year to be
convinced by it. But yoga changes your life and it happens by itself. For
example it's hard to do your practice on a hangover so if you love yoga,
eventually you will choose the yoga over the hangover. And it does unlock
emotions."
This idea of yoga as therapy, like
a cross between seeing a physiotherapist and a counsellor, is what is really
fuelling the yoga craze. "If you go to a beginner's class and look around,"
says de Rham, "everyone has a rounded back or hunched shoulders and all
these things have built up, not just from bad physical habits but from
emotional experiences. When you start to open up physically all these kinks
begin to erase themselves, so yoga is a form of self-therapy." And it is
this "connection" between teachers and pupils that results in some teachers
having an almost cult following, Faustomaria and Leela (ex-husband and
wife) being among the most revered. Yoga teachers are not afraid to get
intimate with their pupils both in terms of being hands-on and commenting
about their mental states.
"Sometimes you can see if someone
is stubborn or angry or shut-down emotionally," says Leela "and you can
work on that."
Other yoga gurus include John Scott
(Sting's teacher) and Hamish at the Royal Homeopathic Hospital, whose 6am
Ashtanga practice has been attended by Madonna.
"There is that risk of yoga being
perceived as another trend," says Jonathan Sattin, "but then this is a
5,000-year-old practice. And once you start doing yoga, you find you don't
want to stop.
"It's a real feelgood, it's not
a temporary high, it's a lasting feelgood. This one isn't going to go away."
