The Poetry of Movement

-Ashley Allard

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In the very small, very Christian, very white suburb, yoga was thrown into the same category as chiropracting and devil worship. Seminars would be held at the local high school with the topic of abolishing all three. My yoga teacher, a short yet very scary woman, knew fully well that her neighbours called her a witch or Satanist behind her back, and would fearlessly attend these seminars, sitting in the back, empty chairs surrounding her.

I should have been able to recognise the claustrophobic cultish Christianity that held our town hostage earlier. I only became cognisant of it when the town I had called home, and others only knew for its traffic department, was put on the map after the arrest of an actual sadistic cult, which had nothing to do with yoga but everything to do with Christianity.

My foreign parents, thankfully, did not subscribe to these beliefs. I was christened, mainly to appease my father’s religious trauma, and, after befriending a bunch of Evangelicals, even went to a Christian camp at the Durban seaside, where I had to leaf through pages of my brand new bible while the sun rose. But, my mother read me Harry Potter before bed while the other kids were taught about the evils of fictional magic. She also immediately signed me up for yoga classes as soon as I expressed an interest.

I was the youngest in the class; the closest pupil to me in age was in her late thirties. Every Tuesday evening, I would listen to the crackle of arthritic spines, doctor recommendations and what type of wood they would like their coffin to be made out of.

But, I was fifteen and grumpy, and would soon enter a love-hate relationship with my yoga practice. I came to approach the class as more of a chore, using the end-of-class meditation to think about boys and would have my period at least twice a month to get out of the difficult upside-down poses.

Yet it still stirred something within me and I began to look more into Buddhist philosophies and even travelled to Nepal, flowing through vinyasas on rooftop overlooking the lush mountains that grew into the Himalayas.

However, when I moved away from my very small, very Christian, very white town to another very small, very Christian, very white town in another province, my relationship with yoga trickled into barely anything, my mat collecting dust in the corner of my student apartment. When I went home, I would still go outside and do a few surya namaskars before breakfast.

The final break happened after my twenty-first birthday. After rolling my mat out in the small corner of my mother’s bedroom, the thought of having to spend twenty or more minutes deeply focussed on my own interiority would launch me into a panic attack. So, I stopped.

But, like water, I was eventually brought back to the beginning. As if my breath and blood were begging me to return, I fell back into yoga as easily as a spoon in honey. It was smooth and sore and wonderful. Now, my day orbits around my practice.

I have always had an affinity for language. While yoga is a practice focussed on breath-work and stretching and mindfulness, a very interior activity, it is at its core poetry. It is a solo dance, weaving from one pose to the other, entering a meditative state, fostering a connection with the self similar to the one achieved in poetry.

Even the language that describes the flow between poses — ripple, melt, flow — all are reminiscent of poetry powerful enough to make the world bleed milk and honey. The names of the poses themselves (more beautiful in Sanskrit, it must be said) are elegiac and mellifluous: fallen star (Patita Tarasana), half-moon (Adhra Chandrasana), lotus (Padmasana). The poetry pilgrim within me, I believe, is the reason why I was destined to return to my practice. I was merely resting. And although I still fall face first whenever I attempt crow (kakasana) and haven’t even tried a headstand in five years, I am finally ready to acknowledge that yoga has taken up residence in my heart, and will remain there.