20 hours ago.
Updated 7 hours ago
If yoga is the answer what, then, is the question?
When a friend and colleague suggested recently that I sign up for a yoga retreat, the first thing I asked her was “why would I do that?”
At first she told me that, as a doctor, I should practise what I preach. “You’re always advising your patients to find time for themselves,” she told me.
Then the truth came out. She tried to tell me delicately of her concern that I could become a physical and emotional wreck.
Like many people, I have a lot of stress to deal with in life. As a specialist doctor, it’s common for me to work in the operating theatre or on the birth suite right through the night.
I also work as an executive in a large health company, undertake research at a university, and sit on various high-pressure committees and charities. I find it very difficult to relax and tend to bottle up stress, hoping it will just go away.
Not dealing well with pressures like this can be a recipe for burnout – and even physical and mental health problems – if stress isn’t handled well. Which, in my case, it often isn’t.
That’s where the yoga comes in. My friend had just completed a week-long retreat at the Byron Yoga Centre and was convinced it would be the perfect salve for my stress-induced wounds.
There’s plenty of scientific evidence that yoga can be good for you. Large studies have shown that practising yoga is an effective treatment for depression, for example, with the added benefit that it has fewer side effects than drug treatment.
Research has also confirmed the effectiveness in many medical conditions, ranging from mental and physical conditions in pregnancy, to helping people with sleep problems, and it even helps to relieve the symptoms of menopause.
A yoga retreat was not something I had ever considered. Despite yoga classes being ubiquitous and many people I know being yoga devotees, I had never set foot in a yoga lesson or studio.
One of the reasons I have ended up with so much pressure in life is that I find it very difficult to say no. No surprise, then, that I agreed to take my friend’s advice and sign up for the yoga retreat on the spot.
When I began telling people that I was soon to join the ranks of the enlightened and spend a long weekend on the yoga mat, the almost universal reaction was mirth. People who knew me well laughed heartily at the prospect of me striking yoga poses.
I shared their scepticism. I am totally inflexible, and the last time I chilled out was in 1997.
Was it a folly for me to launch into an immersive yoga retreat, especially in the peak wellness town of Byron Bay?
My flight from Sydney landed in the warm embrace of Ballina on a Friday morning and the change of scenery felt instantly invigorating. The Uber driver helpfully had Zara Larsson’s Lush Life playing loudly as we cruised past the glorious green landscape.
Erupting from the St Helena tunnel into the outskirts of Byron almost felt like a rebirth of sorts, and I could instantly feel a sense of calm begin to wash over my racing mind.
There is no mistaking the Byron vibe. We passed a young man carrying a double-ended fire stick and I could imagine its flames twirling wildly on the beach after sunset. It was a sure sign I had entered a higher spiritual plane.
The Byron Yoga Centre is about half a kilometre from the main centre of Byron Bay, an oasis of calm surrounded by verdant vegetation. It is dotted with glorious yoga-themed murals and statues.
During the retreat, yoga classes begin at dawn and run in 90-minute sessions through the day, winding up long after dark. The yoga is interspersed with coaching in meditation and mindfulness, deep tissue massages, sauna and swimming.
All of the meals are strictly vegan, and no alcohol is allowed. Participants are strongly encouraged to do a digital detox at the same time. Everything is set up to encourage an atmosphere of calm reflection. Perfect for an older stressed executive like me.
Taking time away from work for a yoga retreat takes considerable effort, and I wanted to know whether the experience would have the desired effect.
As a scientist I wasn’t prepared to judge the benefits of the retreat on gut feelings alone, so I underwent quite rigorous testing in the week before I set off to Byron.
My blood pressure was slightly elevated at 132/92 (I don’t take any hypertension medication) and my level of cortisol – the primary stress hormone – was 253 nanomoles per litre (above 535 is abnormally high).
To check my levels of stress and anxiety objectively I undertook formal psychological testing, including the Perceived Stress Questionnaire and the Smith Relaxation States Inventory 3 (SRSI3), which measures the individual’s levels of stress.
Across the board my stress levels were high. Although I was expecting the results to confirm this, it was a wake-up call to put a number to them. Most importantly, though, it would allow me to repeat the tests after the retreat and measure any changes with precision.
The first thing that struck me on arrival was that I was the only male participant in the centre. Of 15 yoga participants – excluding the staff – the other 14 were all women. I was the odd man out.
My yoga instructor for the first day, Ross, was a kind and gentle soul who took a deep interest in all his students. I discussed my concerns about the gender imbalance with him and he reassured me that men were very welcome and that my experience was a statistical oddity.
Indeed, Ross is so keen to teach yoga to men that he runs regular men-only retreats to embrace men’s health issues. I took some comfort from this and tried not to feel too much like an outlier.
Each day began with an hour-long sunrise yoga session before breakfast. All of the classes were held in the spacious and cool Garden Shala, where we could spread our mats and props out and stretch out but not invade anyone else’s space.
Never having set foot on a yoga mat, my first session was daunting to say the least. As well as being inflexible, I am not known for having great balance. Tripping over is a forte of mine. All of the other class members were seasoned practitioners, which added to the pressure I felt.
Ross put everyone through their paces, expertly balancing the abilities and experience of the women in the class with my physical incompetence.
The fact that I could barely manage even the most basic poses – or that if I did manage to drag my limbs into the correct alignment, it required industrial-strength propping to keep them in place – didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest.
It didn’t seem to bother any of my classmates either, something I hadn’t been expecting. Where I come from, laggards and stumblebums sometimes invoke the ire of other team members. Not so in a yoga class. I never felt judged or even pitied – not by anyone else, anyway, only by me.
Dining is communal at the Byron Yoga Centre and vegan eating invites languid, long conversations. I was fascinated to hear the yoga origin stories of my fellow retreaters.
Some came to yoga following personal crises, others in search of a higher state of wellbeing. There was a range of occupations, from soldier to family doctor. The GP explained to me that she recommended yoga to her patients for its health benefits.
Every single person I spoke to – and I had the privilege of speaking at length to almost all of them – told me that yoga was an integral part of their lives. For some it seemed almost to be the foundation of their lives.
The centre was started by John Ogilvie decades ago and found its present location in 2013. Surrounded by exquisite forest, it resembles a small village set around an open green space with a salt and mineral swimming pool. The accommodation is comfortable and calming.
Ogilvie had been an overworked electrical contractor in Melbourne until the early 80s, when he began to seek a higher purpose and deeper contentment beyond the building industry.
Yoga was then a hobby, but in the decades since he started, it has consumed almost every aspect of his life. His yoga centre has become the physical embodiment of his passion for the philosophy and healing powers of the art.
The retreat gave me a lifestyle shock. Rather than gulping down several strong coffees as soon as possible in the morning – and not much else – breakfast was based around ochre-coloured kitchari. That took some getting used to.
The centre’s communal facilities extend to unisex showers and compost toilets. I had not experienced a compost toilet since I was a child staying with my grandparents in Brisbane in the 60s. Throwing a cup of sawdust into the loo, instead of flushing it, brought back happy childhood memories.
On the second day of the retreat our instructor was Aurora, a yoga devotee and teacher with decades of experience. During our guided mindfulness session she told me about a retreat she had attended in India that involved 12 solid days of sitting cross-legged for hours at a time, concentrating on the skill of breathing through alternating nostrils. That is what you call devotion.
Aurora, like Ross, was an extraordinarily patient and kind teacher, not only of the poses of yoga but the philosophy that underpins it. We had deep discussions about the eight “limbs” of yoga, of which putting one’s body in a “downward facing dog” was but one limb.
Over dinner, Aurora also shared her other abiding interest – Byron’s crazy real estate market.
Taking several yoga classes each day – especially when I had absolutely no idea what I was doing most of the time – was exhausting and I had the best sleeps that I could remember. That experience alone was enough to commend the retreat.
On the final day, Ross returned as our instructor. When we began our final dawn class that morning I’m sure I saw a look come over his face that spoke to a deeper truth. I think he had noticed that I was even worse at performing the poses than when I started.
Ogilvie first came to Byron Bay to teach yoga in a more innocent age – certainly before all of the celebrities arrived in town – and his philosophy had been to share with others the deep sense of wellbeing and purpose that yoga had given him.
In that, he has been an amazing success. Each of the retreat participants I spoke with had found their time at the centre to be grounding, calming and an overwhelmingly positive experience. The range of people who were there with me was incredible. Participants had come not only from Melbourne and Sydney, but from the US, Japan and beyond.
What of my experience, though? For someone who has never held a yoga pose and who is in, shall we say, an older age group, what was the outcome of long days of yoga, meditation, vegan eating and using a composting toilet?
I won’t pretend that I enjoyed the yoga component of the retreat. I found it uncomfortable, frustrating and confusing – and even outright painful at times. I finished an entire packet of Nurofen over the course of the retreat.
The mindfulness and meditation sessions – including the Yin and Nidra yoga classes – definitely were soothing. Strolling around the grounds and chatting with my fellow participants was relaxing.
The experience of the yoga itself was oddly mesmerising. Seeing my instructor and the others in my class effortlessly move through their sun salutation, watching them bend their bodies into the baby cobra and downward facing dog poses, was really something to behold.
I am certain that I did not manage to correctly attain any of the poses – except perhaps for Savasana, the “corpse” pose – during the retreat. In the end, though, the only person it seemed to bother was me. My instructors and classmates didn’t seem to mind that I was less co-ordinated than a newborn foal for most of the time. That is a very comforting outcome.
The question for me, now, is whether the retreat has had a positive effect on my mind and body.
If you’re wondering whether I intend to continue with yoga as a practice, sadly the answer for me is no. I found it too unpleasant. When I mentioned to Ogilvie that I was just too stiff and inflexible for yoga, he calmly told me that was like saying I was “too dirty to have a shower”. He’s probably right.
If, however, you want to know whether my yoga retreat was a stress buster – it absolutely was. The wonderful setting, the calmness and lovely people left me with a deep sense of wellbeing. That alone made it well worth the trip.
When I checked my test results taken mid-week after the retreat – and compared to those from the week before – the picture was clear. Apart from the level of my stress hormone cortisol, my blood pressure and stress levels were better. The objective results seemed to confirm my gut feeling. The retreat had been beneficial, at least in the short term.
In our final discussion before I left the centre, Ogilvie explained that the yoga people experience in a typical gym class is like the tip of an iceberg. Underneath there are glorious patterns of sunlight, sculpted shapes in the ice, beautiful patterns in the currents, and schools of glorious fish swimming by. The true beauty of yoga does indeed lie beneath the surface.
Namaste.
Professor Steve Robson is one of Australia’s most highly qualified surgical specialists, researchers and teachers. He is professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at the Australian National University and former president of the Australian Medical Association. He is a board member of the National Health and Medical Research Council.
This column is published for information purposes only. It is not intended to be used as medical advice and should not be relied on as a substitute for independent professional advice about your personal health or a medical condition from your doctor or other qualified health professional.
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