Feature: Community yoga is just a part of a journey round the country

When I started writing my book exploring Britain through its communities of yoga practitioners, I never imagined it would take me to such profound stories – or such deep squats. Travelling round 21 different yoga classes I had the chance to get to know my country from new angles; to visit not only cities I was familiar with, like Edinburgh, but places like West Kilbride where I’d never been before, and so many communities where I met inspirational teachers using yoga to rebuild lives rocked by disease and trauma.

Elizabeth Gowing: Unlikely Positions in Unlikely Places

My first stop in Scotland was a Sunday morning in Edinburgh. The reason I had come here was for the weekly Lululemon store freebie yoga class. Lululemon sells yoga clothes with strange names (is “Align Pant” a series of imperatives or legwear?) and high prices (“Sweaty Endeavor Tight pants” at £88, “Enlighten Tight pants” at £108, “Savasana Socks” at £42).

I reached the shop at 9:30am, before it had opened, and was the first in the queue. Next came Agnes, her daughter and husband, who told me they all do the class every week – “It’s free – in George Street! Nothing’s free in George Street!”

By 9:45am there were more than 30 people behind us, sipping at their reusable water bottles. Some were in fancy leggings – the ones with the diagonal strips of mesh wrapping round the legs – but others told me they could never afford to shop at Lululemon and didn’t have the budget to do yoga at studios either, but that the free classes gave the chance to practise at least once a week in a group.

So not only Lululemon’s price tags but also their hearts were of gold?

After the class I spoke to Jack, the teacher, about her motivation for running the classes at Lululemon.

“Yes, it’s commercial,” she said, “but doing these sessions is a great way to raise awareness about the community yoga my studio does,” she said. “It’s one of the things I love about the yoga community in Edinburgh – it’s so non-competitive and supportive.”

Because when Jack isn’t on George Street she also teaches at Edinburgh Community Yoga, a not-for-profit organisation that offers yoga that is free at the point of service for women affected by trauma, military veterans, and those with mental health issues. They also run a range of wellbeing programmes for NHS staff. Jack said, “It’s deeply rewarding work teaching yoga where it can have such a transformative effect on their lives.” She talked about a course she ran through ECY for surgeons, paramedics, nurses and porters at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.

“The reality of the pressure of the work that these amazing humans do was brought in to sharp relief one day, when we had to cancel one of the sessions as ALL the staff were required at once. Three people had come in concurrently that required resuscitation. Three lives were literally in the hands of these dedicated humans.

“To be able to teach them the skills to deal with stress, and bring ease in the face of what they have to deal with every day felt small, but also so valuable.”

My exultation in finally mastering the Crow seemed rather trivial in comparison, and my next stop in Scotland just reinforced how seriously therapeutic yoga can be. I’d heard about yoga classes for people living with Parkinson’s disease and I got in touch with the inspirational Angela McHardy from West Kilbride. After she was told she had Parkinson’s the limitations that came with her diagnosis were not something she was willing to “just accept”, she said.

“What I was being offered was such a deficit model,” she says, and I heard a former head of education speaking. “I wanted something that was beyond the meds approach.”

She could be forgiven for turning to meds, as well as a duvet and her chosen comfort food, because the year she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s was also the year she lost her father (who had the same disease) and the year her husband left her. But instead, Angela turned to yoga. Now a qualified instructor, she spends 90 minutes a day practising and says: “When I get on my yoga mat, I feel like the Parkinson’s just melts away.”

Angela is on a mission. She’s contributed the pay-out she got for her ill health so that she can host classes at her own venue, designed by an architect she knows from when he was a local pupil. She’s named it in honour of her late father’s birthplace, Stonehaven, using the Sanskrit word for “stone”. And when Upala-haven isn’t hosting classes it’s a drop-in centre for people living with Parkinson’s to learn about available resources.

She invited me to attend one of her classes. I knew nothing about West Kilbride except for remembering its accolade as once (2004) having the highest number of recorded UFO sightings in the UK. But I discovered that more recently the town has reinvented itself with a focus on a different kind of craft. Angela’s classes are held in the award-winning Barony Centre which I read is part of West Kilbride’s self-styling as a Craft Town, for which it won the Enterprising Britain competition in 2006. I could see Angela and her attitude fitting in fine.

Not everyone at the class was living with Parkinson’s, but I had the chance later to talk to some of those who were. Janice, 52, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s 11 years ago, said of these Sunday night yoga sessions simply: “It’s what’s kept me going; it’s what’s kept me upright.”

Not that any of us found it easy to stay upright. The yoga class seemed to make no concessions. I felt the familiar tug at muscles as we moved through Sun Salutations, and when Angela invited us to hold ourselves horizontal in Plank I felt a judder and a shudder working through my body and wondered whether she was aware exactly what kind of a leveler she had asked of us all.

We moved into Triangle and I struggled, as always, with keeping my body in a single plane. I later discovered it was the perfect West Kilbride yoga asana since this town where I was currently folding myself over my extended front leg was the birthplace of 18th-century mathematician Robert Simson for whom the Simson Line is named – yes, that’s the line “containing the feet P1, P2, and P3 of the perpendiculars from an arbitrary point P on the circumcircle of a triangle”.

As the class came to an end the participants talked about the power of having an instructor fighting the same battles as you were.

“You don’t feel awkward if you’re having a bad day,” Janice said.

Angela heard her and joked back: “And when the teacher falls over it’s alright.”

Another woman replied straight away: “We’ll try and catch you.”

It was not just the instinctive offer of support that struck me; it was the plural form she used: “We.”

This was the exact opposite of the guru tradition; this was what it looks like when a teacher owns and celebrates her frailty, and this was the community that builds as a result. As with the supportive group Jack was creating in Edinburgh, I felt that here in West Kilbride I’d gained a significant understanding not just of yoga for people with Parkinson’s, but of yoga for anyone.