More from a pretzel-in-training

“Think of something happy,” seems like a fairly harmless thing to say.

That is because your mind is not a mousetrap for misery like mine.

Ask me to think a happy thought and I got nothing. Ask me to think of something painful and there’s a stampede.

In last week’s column I said all I wanted was a physical relationship with yoga. I wasn’t signing up for the kind where emotions, spirituality and the like come up. And I didn’t sign up. All that was suggested was that I think of something pleasant.

Is it yoga or is something deeply wrong with me?

My yoga-instructor friend is giving up hours of her life that might be better spent playing with her beautiful little Papillon.

We start the session with breathing exercises and focusing on good thoughts. The result is me holding my breath and my mind going blank.

And here’s the other funny thing I’ve noticed about the yoga. Yoga has so much to do with breathing. Controlled breathing. Counting breaths. It’s completely breathing-obsessed. And I say it’s funny because when I’m doing it, breathing is often the last thing on my mind. Often the thing I entirely forget to do.

It can’t be possible to remember to breathe while moving your left leg to the left, your right arm to the left and your left arm over a toaster. I used to think I was out of my element if you left me in alone in a room full of frogs. Not so. Please, may I have the frogs?

Yoga cannot be the hill on which I will die. By now I’ve described so many hills on which I refuse to die, you might, like me, come to the awful conclusion I’ll meet my end on some horrible flat, viewless terrain.

Going back to nice thoughts for a bit, last week I thought I was writing about the beginning of my mild yoga journey. I’d do some stretching and some twisting. Most of all, I’d be overcoming a lifelong fear.

This is where “A is for ‘ambivalence’ and A is for ‘Anu’” is always true. I see now what I was really doing was trying to get out of my head. I don’t know if this is true for all people or true all of the time, but the focus and attention to yourself does nothing to help me flee my thinking about me.

I say I only want the physical exercise and I ask it to take me away from the thinky-thinky part of me, yet something in me resists: why? It’s not rocket surgery.

I ask this of everything. I always want to be distracted but I can’t let go of over-analysing. I ask the same of Scrabble. And Pictionary. And cricket and Netflix.

Some people need to get to know the withinside of them and that’s important. You do that if you need to. If your life is made up of things that don’t allow you to make time for introspection and the inner self, do something that lets you meet that self.

But some people are so inside we need to find our way out, in the manner of voles trying to burrow up into the light. I don’t know much about voles, but I bet they like basking in a bit of sunshine.

So I find myself taking one deep breath after another and, because it is being guided by a woman I have essentially always known, I feel safe. I feel she’ll look at me and know if I’m scared or going into a dark place and will pull me back.

We breathe. I sit on a mat with apparently enough serenity that I am joined by a cat. I’m so still Friend has to ask me to ask the cat to move so we can move on.

I’m going somewhere with this. But where?

I still have moments of panic when the stillness starts to draw me into fear. Fear of failure when I can’t be as supple or gravity-defying as Friend. Dread when I feel it’s yet another thing I’ve started that I can’t see through. But I so want to.

At all sorts of risks (death by vertigo, sprains from hubris, reader-boredom) I’m aiming for one more try next week to make sense of all this.

One last thing: There’s a smell. Ack-ack-blick. ‘Tis I. Is this a thing? I’ve done weird things in my life, but none of them made me smell like this. Why?

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