Spiraling into control

About three years ago when I was mostly confined to bed, recovering from a hip replacement operation, I was talking on the phone to my yoga teacher, Emma Lloyd, about our mutual obsession with spirals. As you do.

I’d started collecting pictures of them on Pinterest as I became increasingly fascinated by their frequency in nature, in the structures of everything from shells to whirlpools, from Messier 51a to fingerprints and ammonites. They are everywhere, they really are.

Emma was already on to it, she was recounting mathematical ratios and patterns which escape me now, but then having general anaesthetic and morphine working their way out of your system will do that to your memory. (That heady cocktail is also responsible for convincing me that watching Top of the Pops circa 1972 audiences dancing to T-rex was just about the most movingly beautiful thing I’d ever watched on an iPad, but I digress…).

Given this mutual appreciation for spirals, it was a delight to experience how Emma had been working with them, from those days to these, weaving their power into a sublimely creative workshop for the British Wheel of Yoga’s north west regional AGM this year.

Tantalisingly entitled Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Emma took us through a day of vinyasa flow, pranayama and a yoga nidra that drew on her influences, which include both Iyengar and the Satyananda yoga systems. While both methods are steeped in the therapeutic capacity of yoga, Satyananda particularly has a strong emphasis on moving away from the linear. Emma was all for unleashing the circle, as she put it ‘setting it free to power upwards in a spiralling motion, away from all notions of the vicious circle’.

How does this work in Practice? Why flex the spine in Marjaryasana (Cat), when you can work your shoulders and swirl your hips as you breathe through the asana. Yes, we are now moving out of the norm, into a fluid, snaking flow of an asana, known as Sexy Cat (Sanskrit for ‘sexy’ anyone?). Our big cat emerged in Parivritti Vyagrasana (Twisting Tiger), transitioning to Pyramid, for strength and stretch in motion. Why be content with the static strength of Utkatasana (Chair) when you can find your arms out at the side and flowing with your breath in the manner of dragon wings? Now try with one leg extended!

Aside from being terrific fun – and I am all for that – there is method and wisdom underpinning this fantastical, creative journey. This extraordinary flow sequence had multiple benefits:

• those niggling pockets of held tension with which we are annoyingly intimate were released as familiar movement patterns in asana were challenged
• working deep into the fascia, irritating, hard to reach areas of tension were magically massaged and soothed
• the extraordinary flow seemed to take us in a reverse slow-motion at times, keeping us focused on the movement and balance, leaving no room for ‘I can’t do’ thinking.

Our pranayama and yoga nidra sessions both referenced spirals: weaving the breath up and down, wrapping around the spine through the yogic breath and nadi shodhana, journeying through the stars in a deep, healing relaxation.

Spiralling and fluidity in yoga make a lot of sense to me. Hopefully, it does to you.

I have this theory that our life events track in spirals, certainly not circles or straight lines. For example, have you noticed that the people we know or the situations we face, seem to pop up again? Sometimes the same but different, sometimes exactly the same? For example, I’m now good friends with a group of people from my secondary school class who I knew on a superficial level at school, but didn’t really know, in a ‘this is really troubling me’ kind of way I do now. Do we plant seeds as we’re younger, to reap the crops when we’re older?

With hindsight we can see how we could have learned together, or learned a lesson for later, but the turn of the dice took us in another direction the first time around. And so these people or situations come around again.

Now, I have no scientific basis for this theory (which, of course, makes me like it just that little bit more), just my own experience and those observed from friends, colleagues and clients. So, if you have anything to add to the spiral theory, or something you think discounts it, I’d be very interested in hearing from you.

If you go down to the woods today…

The Germans have a special word for the joy of spending time within them.

The Japanese have been running a dedicated public health programme around them since 1982.

And research investigating their benefits has discovered a wealth of measurable, positive gains from striding about them.

Call it ‘waldeinsamkeit’, call it ‘shin-rin yoko’, whatever you label it, there are very strong arguments for being out amongst them.

And yet, there are those for whom these delightful natural temples of health and life somehow manage to strike fear into the heart. For trees en masse – woods and forests to be precise – can leave grown adults quaking in their walking boots.

A friend of mine physically shuddered when I enthused about my regular traipses through woods and uttered ‘oh no’ at the thought of doing it herself, as if it were the equivalent of putting her hand into a liquidiser and turning it on.

I get almost giddy with the anticipation of the coming treat as I walk towards the edge of my local woodlands. The layers of colour and texture, the shafts of dusty sunlight, the glistening dewiness… for me it is all adventure and fun. What you see shifts with the seasons, the weather, even the time of day. Which birds will I see and hear? How many rabbits will I spot bobbing into the undergrowth? It’s a treasured opportunity to suspend the demands of the day and focus on just being. But for my friend it’s a horror film set waiting to burst into Living Dead life.

To some extent, I can see why woods instil nervousness. About a third of what you can see is hidden from view because, well, there are trees in the way. The word ‘panic’ comes from the god, Pan, to whom all woodland noises were once attributed. Those woodland noises being mostly blackbirds crashing about in the undergrowth, or those scampering rabbits.

Imagination is a wonderful thing, but those myths and fairy stories are just that and we all know fiction and reality are two different things. Don’t we? Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White… they all feature woods and forests and, of course, hundreds of years ago served to warn children about the perils of wandering off into the woods alone. Today our chances of being eaten by wolves are pretty slim.

That feeling we get in our stomach when we enter the woods is primal. It’s our senses switching on to alert, because so much is hidden from view. You can identify that feeling as ‘fear’ if you want, or you can choose to see it as ‘excitement’. They feel exactly the same in the body. It’s your choice as to how you’ll interpret them mentally.

For me, it’s definitely ‘excitement’. I can’t think of anywhere better for a mindfulness walk, as the visual cornucopia of colour and texture unfurls you stop thinking about the 101 things that must be done and start being present in its delightful setting for ‘nowness’.

The Germans certainly get it and most of those stranger-danger fairy tales are theirs. Waldeinsamkeit, which roughly translates as ‘the feeling of being alone in the woods’, in a contemplative, relaxed kind of way, not a ‘The Hills have Eyes/Friday the 13th/The Evil Dead’ kind of way. The artist Ludwig Richter’s painting gives you the gist of it. See, all chilled serenity. No ‘where’s the demon gone now?’ flapping.

In Japan, forest batheing, shin-rin yoko, has been popular for decades. Research projects have discovered there is good reason for attributing health benefits to the practice, including blood pressure and cortisol levels dropping after walks in woods and staying lower for some time. As well as improving our stress responses, their natural killer cells (the ones killing off infections and cells going rogue and potentially cancerous) are higher. This is because trees breathe out phytoncide, an antimicrobial compound that protects trees from germs and insects. When we breathe walk about trees and breathe in phytoncide it boosts our immune system.

Apparently the tech company bright young things of San Francisco see the sense in getting into the woods when they can, even if its only for a lunch time walk, so perhaps it will catch on in Britain.

I’d be interest in hearing about attitudes to forests and woods in other cultures, though. Where else is walking in the woods a health past time to relish?