To my surprise, yoga has entered my 67-year-old life. I am in Mysore, home of the guru of Astanga yoga, Patthabi Jois (PJ). My stepdaughter is here to study with him. My wife and I are trying an end-of-life experiment of settling in a different country for three months each year. India-lovers had told us Mysore would be one of the more suitable cities in India.
In ten years PJ will probably be dead. He is 87 now, but his brand of Astanga yoga is hot and yogis come from all over the world for his last blessings. When we arrived after Christmas the rumour was that only 50 students would be accepted. In January 100 were taken in, which is to say everyone with $500.
Those flaky seekers after truth with their long hair and ethnic clothes were a familiar sight to me. I'd seen the same people at Harvard where I'd spent 1969-70, the year of campus riots against Nixon's bombing of Cambodia. I'd found them again ten years later when I visited my brother in the Rajneesh ashrams in Pune and the US. I'd seen them in anti-poll tax demos in London at the end of Mrs Thatcher's reign of terror. Young, alternative and certain about only one thing: that the ways of the west were bankrupt and that the truth was to be found elsewhere, in socialism or the east, anywhere but in capitalism and the west.
Wrong, all wrong. Since that first glimpse, I have talked to quite a few of PJ's yogis and cannot remember meeting a group of people that I liked as much. They are seekers, yes, but more centred, grounded and stable than the others I have known. Chip, for example, is a body-mystic who runs a sailing school on the Potomac and is one of the most self-contained and silent men I have met. He frowns, nods thoughtfully and says, "sweet" at moments when an earlier generation would have said, "cool." Serious, dedicated, some of them beautiful, they were very different from my stereotyped expectations for one obvious reason: the way of yoga is hard and the way of Astanga yoga is particularly hard. Not for them the easy certainties of the campus radicals, or the ganja-wreathed trail of the hippies.
Here, the yogis' day is built around the Astanga practice, a sequence of positions timed and held together by deep breathing. I went one morning and watched the experts finishing the 4.30am session and the next lot starting at 5.30am. The concentration and physical control were like nothing I've seen outside the Chinese State Circus. The setting is tacky, the room small and windowless. It is crowded with just 12 people in it and concentration seems impossible. "You are focusing so hard you don't notice," they explain.
The yogis are not saints. Some are extremely serious but others are determined to shine, to outdo the others and attract the smiles of PJ. Many are working austerely down the yoga path; many more are in it for instrumental reasons, for fitness or for a career. "Yoga is a religious practice," Gustav, a handsome Dutchman, told me, "but it has become a health fad, the latest way to get into shape for the stressed-out executive." He runs a yogashala in Amsterdam at the serious end of the spectrum.
That PJ makes quite so much money is a source of controversy. It offends the Brahmins of the town who say that the role of a guru, in Indian tradition, does not include making money out of his disciples. PJ's apologists disagree. They say he has devoted his life to the study of yoga and is only now getting a fee commensurate with his precious knowledge. The paradox remains. It is as though a saint, having found the sure route to salvation, made the secret available first to his richest admirers, a hypocrisy not unknown in Christianity.
I would never have taken yoga seriously if I had not seen the extraordinary effect it had on a friend during a period of great stress in his life. He had done yoga for years, at an Iyengar studio in London. For some months I watched as he descended into numb despair only to be jerked back twice a week, when he would return from yoga class physically changed and bright-eyed. Up until then I had regarded yoga as a form of religious weirdness. But whatever was going on, it obviously went further than ritualised contortions.
What is going on I can only guess at. Rigorous control of body movements, breathing, gaze and thought creates a form of meditation which (together with the release of endorphins) produces a state of well-being-perhaps even a state of higher being. Whatever it is, people make big sacrifices to get it.
And did I begin to get it? I am over-weight, stiff, elderly and not an obvious candidate for transcendental anything. At the start of my stay, I went to one of the shalas in Mysore, run by an old student of PJ's but although I sweated a lot, I got nowhere. Then I found Sabel, a tall, elegant French-Senegalese who teaches yoga in south London. She takes me through the primary series every morning and tells me encouragingly that I am changing. I shall never be able to do the lotus position or jump up from the facing-down dog position, bringing my legs through my arms, let alone move from there to wrap my legs behind my neck, but I do not aim so high. Old people totter and fall over because they lose the ability to recover from the many little trips and imbalances that younger people adjust to without thinking. To be able to recover balance flexibly will be enough for me. "Ah, balance," Sabel said when I told her this. "That is the whole point."
