How come there's always bad news? Some of us are just coming to the end of our first term of evening classes, and feeling rather virtuous that we have only missed one class in the past three months - a miracle - and the next thing you know is that there are reports coming in that - I can hardly write this - yoga is bad for you, says Ann Marie Hourihane.
Now this is a modern blasphemy. Saying that yoga is bad for you is kind of like saying that fish oils are bad for you or that fatty bacon should be consumed three times a day. It's like saying that unprotected sex is life enhancing or that chips are good for the heart. But there it was in the Guardian,so it must be true.
There is a yoga grapevine, and we do know about the Bikram class where the dressing rooms are so filthy that devotees are reluctant to change their clothes there, let alone take a shower. Bikram is the type of yoga during which, according to ancient Indian tradition, the central heating is turned up so high that you start to sweat profusely, and end up both dizzy and drenched. We all know that Sting's wife, Trudy Styler, snapped her sternum during a yoga session - very bad news for that particular teacher. We all know about idiots (me) who went to yoga classes so strenuous that they had to spend the entire session in corpse position, a classic pose which is referred to by the uninitiated as lying down.
But bad for you? Our yoga class takes place in the evening and is conducted by candlelight. It is so dark that you can hardly see the money as you take it out of your purse to pay. It is full of young women - quite a few teenagers recently - and, increasingly, men. Ashtanga yoga has taken on a more masculine aspect in this country since Roy Keane was discovered to have been practising it in his final years at Manchester United.
Our yoga class isn't exactly conventional. It takes place to a roaring soundtrack with a bass line that makes you understand how Trudy Styler's sternum came to grief. At one point we were doing stomach crunches, or at least the others were, to songs recorded by Donna Summer during the more aerobic phase of her career. Our teacher has to shout to tell us to listen our breath.
Even in the posher yoga classes - always recognisable by the combined presence of a fitted carpet and total silence - injuries occur. There are women who have broken their toes trying to swing into the cross-legged position from Down Dog ( it would take a while to explain, not least in the A&E ). And there is always a contempt for foolish western inventions, like antibiotics. But one look at the cars in the car park shows that not everyone has succeeded in rejecting materialism just yet.
Everyone drives to yoga, it's just a rule of the game. As a matter of fact, driving home may be the most dangerous part of yoga, because you are stoned out of your mind on endorphins.
Of course no one ever talks about Indian materialism, which brought yoga to the west a century ago and earned itself a jolly good living. Yoga teachers still retain a quasi-religious attitude that wouldn't get them very far if they were to train as, to give just two examples, physiotherapists or nurses. In America, according to Time magazine, yoga injuries are keeping the paramedics busy. Yet you still hear comments like this, from a managing director of a chain of yoga centres in London: "You have to learn to recognise pain that isn't good and stop if you need to." Pain that isn't good? What exactly is pain that is good, is what we want to know. It is popular yoga wisdom that old injuries resurface after a couple of weeks of practice, and teachers tell you that they should be worked through. Physiotherapists will tell you something very different.
Yoga has become a victim of its own success. It has swept this country like an epidemic and even medical authorities recommend it for a variety of chronic conditions - from depression to back problems to high blood pressure. They must be thinking of Hatha yoga, the old fashioned, slow sort. But given their undiscriminating enthusiasm, combined with pictures of Madonna's pectoral muscles, it is no wonder yoga classes take place in every town in this country, with no inspections or teacher supervision that I have ever witnessed. Remember, you don't have to do everything that teacher says.
Yoga is a system of exercises for people who hate every other system of exercises. That means that, most of the time, people who attend yoga classes are not very fit. Perhaps teachers could bear that in mind. Having said that, on the whole we love our teachers. Looking at the teenagers sitting outside at the end of yoga class, enjoying a quick fag whilst waiting to be picked up by their mums, you can't help thinking that some things are even worse for you than yoga.