From Jester To King XXXI

He can’t remember how it started. Perhaps a herbal tea something innocent without stigma something he gave minimal thought to. Then in 2006: yoga. Just for his back for his persistent lower back pain, just a few poses or postures in the comfort of his own home, no one would know. Nothing to do with feeling completely lost and lonely, with his zero self worth or his inescapable inclination to put himself down at every available opportunity in public. Nothing to do with trying to find a solution to his woes. The yoga worked fine. He told himself he wouldn’t get hooked wouldn’t put all his energy into it like he tended to do with everything he started on, focussing on it to the exclusion of every thing else until he was utterly blinkered.

Then he found Astanga, still yoga yes, but Astanga is eight-limbed and really not just yoga. Not the yoga everyone else practised, with a cat or dog on a Wednesday lunchtime. Astanga was sex. Astanga was Madonna, and 95 sweat-dripping minutes of morning exhaustion. Astanga was watching the weight drop off in tens of kilos. It was beholding the grunts of teeth-clenching girls in the Primrose Hill branch of Triyoga. He couldn’t help himself, what with the vigour of the new pastime as well. His back improved, his physique changed, he felt just a tiny bit cooler. Astanga was working.

But then Astanga needed a complement. He happened upon a newspaper advert for a course at SOAS. A few evenings a week, it was an introduction to Indian mythology. Why not? It would jive well with the yoga, give him even more gravitas, more credibility. The fact that two Planet Organics were within scooting distance never crossed his mind. He bravely endured the tedious lectures and received his award putting all his energy all his 6’ 5’’ focus into the task in hand. No big deal, you say. Yes big deal. He now had a confirmed interest in the East. In his mind, he knew about things, about the real meaning of yoga, about Shiva and Shakti, about the unifying eternal consciousness and was beyond going back, beyond returning to the old innocent mind-set.

But it wore off eventually. It stayed but it ceased to have such a powerful effect on him and he soon needed the next thing.

And then around this time someone must have asked him if he liked honesty. Simple question. They said there was a group on Thursday for honest people for them to talk honestly about whatever and whoever they wanted, without complaint or focusing too much on the past all in a pleasant suburban domicile setting. Why not again. He sat in their circle whilst people said things about each other they’d never dare say in any other context, all unfacilitated and fresh, all positively encouraged. His bullshit smattering of Eastern mysticism was also a hit, he could allude to it and it went down well, or it was sometimes even viciously scolded and he was told to talk about himself rather than just concepts. In any case there seemed to be an emphasis on talking about it or not, the cushions were the special lower back meditation ones they now sold at all good yoga outlets, the ones with the twirly design and they meditated for a few minutes before they kicked off and then they served licorice tea mid-session in small clear glass mugs with little ears for holding them and you never felt for one moment that you weren’t at the forefront. The group was like the final seal or rubber stamp and he soon became a stalwart.

Yoga was a daily thing by now excepting moon days and rest days (Saturdays) and he’d progressed quickly to the gruelling intermediate series of postures which tended to engender a whole lot more grunting than the primary series did. Now he thought: why not go the whole hog and not only do it but teach it, I’m bloody good at it, I like it, and people will pay me and I won’t have to do boring IT anymore. So cue another course somewhere, perhaps a couple, he gets his certificate and starts teaching, meaning he could spend even more time hanging out after self-practice at the organic café opposite the Shala every morning, the Shala being the preferred name of the more professional more hardcore Astangi yoga centre he now chose to practise in. Tolle by now was a staple; he was so often in the moment and being in and of the moment and not thinking of anything else but the moment, or just watching his thoughts as an impartial observer, accepting them, letting them wash over him, knowing that emotions are visitors, he was so all there, that nothing could touch him. But even Tolle was a bit basic and he branched out into other non-dualist philosophies and soon he had a whole book collection to go with the not insubstantial set he’d shelled out for for SOAS, he had Krishnamurti J and UG, some Thich Nhat Hhan or however you write it, Byron Katie, all the usual suspects, plus he even bought a book on the Enneagram and personality types. The divide was unbroachable. Everyone else was thick and unlike George Harrison, and he was for all practical purposes enlightened.

But it so happened one day, who knows how, that he invited a real emotion into his stomach and that emotion seemed to tell him he really wasn’t that ok or happy and perhaps he had to heed this emotion and not just blank it out and it was telling him he wasn’t really where he hoped or thought he’d quite like to be. All this time ensuring to bask in the Tolle to make sure he never left the moment for one little instant. It wasn’t as sudden as a clean break, it was something he struggled with in his psyche going back and forth, grappling with it, vacillating but eventually he realised he had to change. He stopped going to the group, realising that whatever they said to him was actually just mean. If something had needed fixing it wasn’t fixed, he still felt lonely and silly and insecure and stupid and depressed and shy and wrong and cast out and different, but what to do, what was the panacea, so he started getting more into the movement side of yoga, you know the anatomical side and what each muscle group is doing, he thought that if the trauma was really in his body then he needed to get more to grips with it than Astanga was allowing, and he read books, and then he looked at the Feldenkrais method which he’d done as a kid to get him to stand up straight until he found a bit of a geezer called Gary who ran his own outfit called Movement Geeks which seemed to break down every last movement to its tiniest component and thinking he (our protagonist) was tall and funny, thinking yoga was a bit funny, Gary asked him to demonstrate and soon he was helping him out and he sort of became his business partner until he (our protagonist) decided this wasn’t the thing either and he apologised to Gary but said he wouldn’t be able to continue and just left all of a sudden and went back to the yoga. It was a low point but one he’d soon get over and at least he had some decent posts out of it.

It was now about 2018. Having been notified that someone in his extended friend community was going along to an event that Wednesday via a Facebook notification, he had a look and decided to go along. It was a one-off in Hackney about something to do with frog poison something about cleaning out your system not just physically, but emotionally mentally and psychically and well it seemed just interesting. Just to insert at this juncture that he was fully vegan and had been for years, fully organic, fully sugar-free almond Alpro, weaned off milk as we used to know it, not to mention all the grains the quinoa and millet and the kale and the barley and the shakes and the supplements. He went along and found a curious pleasure in hurling your guts out in Homerton to be met afterwards by this light-headed and warm feeling, to feel new and the facilitator said he looked new and was bound to do that’s what the frog was for and the other three poison drinkers also felt new and said so, if a little bit groggy. His language changed, his identity also, and here was something the yoga people didn’t necessarily know about. Not quite time for the first post on Facebook yet! But this bull’s horns were very much for the grasping. More sessions followed, more puking and the logical extension of the process was to travel to the homeland itself, Brazil, to stay with the indigenous Huni Kuin in their own villages with more frog poison than you could shake a stick at, Kambo it was called, Kambo for breakfast lunch and dinner, but not only that Ayahuasca, it could certainly warrant a few photos and his cheery angst-free countenance after the ceremonies hugging a few of the tribe in their traditional costumes, surely that would get a few likes and possibly even hearts.

Yoga and licorice tea far from his mind. When in his beloved Brazil he thought he might never come back and his new found appreciation of trees led him to spend even more time on Hampstead Heath when he eventually had to, even though he lived more than an inconvenience away in Muswell Hill. Could it be said he was now fixed? Definitely. Could it be said his perennial need to be fix was fixed? Definitely not. Every so often he’d share the content of the astrology page he followed and add his own summation at the top. Wise prescient words that shall fix you. He would for the moment carry on going back to Brazil, he was there, for sure he was where he needed to be, he’d gone on in leaps and bounds, but there was always work that needed to be done and at his age he still had the energy, and boy was he determined to work, to fix, and he had every chance.