Posts Tagged Yoga
Calling up the Dead
Posted by mirandainnes in Writing on April 4, 2012
‘It’s too hot to go.’
‘Have you seen a manila envelope? Hell’s bells! There’s something I want to show you.’
‘That one?’ Fastening an earring, she indicated with her elbow the small package lying on his bedside table. ‘The food will be awful. She’s the most wearisome, opinionated woman. She has nothing interesting to say, and she says it ad nauseam. Her friends are terminally stuffy. Remind me, why are we going?’
He pranced up behind her and sought her eyes in the dressing-table mirror. She was busy outlining her full lips with a brush loaded with waxy blood-red lipstick, and he knew better than to interrupt. She blotted her lips carefully, patted her black hair — glossy as molten tar and swept up Betty Grable style — and gathered lipstick, powder and a silver flacon of Mitsouko into an ostrich skin clutch bag. She rose, unfurling from her seat to stand eye to eye with her husband.
‘I don’t know how you do that. Three children, and you still rise like Venus from the waves.’
‘What?’
‘What what?’
‘You wanted to show me something.’
‘I’ll show you some other time. Beatrice may be dull, but she’s had a consignment of Plymouth gin. And Teddy may yet get us out of here.’
They stepped out into the searing dust, the ragged palm trees, the beggars, the smell of donkey shit, the sound of jingling caleches and men shouting hysterically in Arabic that engulfed them beyond the gates of their small ugly house in wartime Cairo.
Boy — who had a name, Mohammed — had polished the chandelier in Beatrice’s courtyard house, had watered the bougainvillea and strewn the garnet rose petals in the murmuring fountain. He stood, undecided, fingering the buttons on his white jacket, dreading another staccato barrage from his employer.
‘Boy? Boy! Come here. Flowers — flowers for the table. The roses. Where have you put them?’
Mutely he indicated the red confetti dancing on the troubled meniscus.
The blonde dumpling was for a moment paralysed. Sweat pearled her upper lip.
‘Are you mad? Oh my God. Why do you always….I told you to put the roses in water.’
She turned, muttering sticky imprecations, and entered the dining room whose double doors were open to the courtyard and whose ceiling fans rotated lazily. A long table was laid for twenty, crowded with calendared napery, prismatic cut glass, gold-rimmed porcelain and buffed cutlery. It was punctuated at precise intervals by Georgian silver candelabra. It did not need flowers.
‘Boy? Boy! Come here. Fetch candles, from the ice-box’. To herself she murmured, ‘don’t think they’ll melt now. Thank God, it’ll cool down soon.’
At this point Teddy joined her, tall and spruce in immaculate ivory linen.
‘Ice!’ he called after Boy. ‘Well, Bea. Time to see if we’ve been sold a pup.’ He opened the clear glass bottle and was reassured by the sharp cathedral smell of juniper that wafted nostrilwards. ‘Smells like the real thing. Lemon!’ he flung after Mohammed as he shook the bottle of Angostura bitters.
‘Ice as per instructions? Boiled water? Good. Don’t want the High Commissioner to come down with dysentery.’
He rarely looked at his wife these days, finding her a disappointment now that her belly quaked and her dimple was lost in fat. There was no shortage of available women in Cairo, but Beatrice ran the house and looked after his interests. He was sorry for her. They’d never managed a baby. Pity. It would have absorbed her fussing, kept her busy.
Instead he looked at the billowing sails of the Mayflower on the familiar gin label. ‘Tonic, Bea? I’m having a pink gin, there’s some Noilly Prat if you’d prefer…. This glass has got a fingerprint on it.’
Following this discovery Beatrice made a minute inspection of the crystal tumblers, handing Mohammed another that did not pass muster. ‘Look!’ She brandished them under his nose, ‘not good enough.’
‘Who did you invite to replace George Cousins?’
‘It was very last minute. I invited that writer, Lawrence Durrell.’
‘Well! I just hope he behaves. I thought he’d gone to Alexandria.’
‘Someone saw him at the club. He goes back and forth.’
‘You’d better be careful, Bea. They say that since his wife left he’s slept with so many women he can’t remember them. A genuine Don Juan. Apparently women can’t resist him. I’ll be keeping my eye on you.’
‘That’s very crude, Teddy. I don’t believe it anyway. I don’t understand why anyone would fall for him. He’s not exactly Errol Flynn. I hope none of the women tonight…. I don’t think so….we know them all. Well, except Paul Innes’s wife, Eileen? It is Eileen isn’t it? I’ve only met her twice — at bridge and at the Williams’s. She seemed a bit racy. Scarlet lipstick…..No, no…. out of the question, they’ve got three children. And Paul is such a good-looking man. She’s very tall. Durrell’s tiny, shorter than me, and well, that pug nose. Not good on a man. No, I don’t think so.’
She noticed that Teddy was still holding an empty glass.
‘Boy? Boy! Where is that creature? Spends his life in a dream.’ Beatrice marched towards the kitchen.
Teddy, with a narrow catlike smile on his face, moved Durrell’s place card to seat him next to Paul Innes’s wife. ‘Randy, meet Racy.’
‘Well, that went well, I thought. They liked the vol-au-vents.’
‘Paul is quite a raconteur. I’d heard the story about the Chinese cook and the whisky bottle before though.’
‘I thought it rather coarse. I have to say, I really don’t like his wife much. I don’t know why Durrell engineered himself a place beside her — I put her next to that military chap, Ashbury. As it happened, she hardly spoke to Durrell. I almost felt sorry for him. Silly chump.’
‘Didn’t seem to worry him — he was his usual ebullient self after a drink or two. He got her to dance with him. They made a pretty ridiculous couple….She’s a good-looking woman.’
He had been disappointed by the failure of his scheme to reveal an illicit passion. He was embarrassed in fact, to find himself rather taken with her, surprised to have been piqued by a sharp little pinprick of jealousy, as he watched them in the courtyard, dancing close. Twice. Sinatra, ‘All or nothing at all’, and Lena Horne. Nothing remarkable there — everyone was dancing, it was the standard finale to a dinner party. Teddy himself was still in a cloud of Mitsouko after they’d danced to ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ under the stars.
Bea shattered his pleasant reverie. ‘Mother would say she’s got ideas above her station — she comes across as so superior, but what is she? What has she done?’
‘I think she’s a bit of a scholar. Someone said she got a double first at Cambridge.’
‘Well, I certainly don’t believe that. And what about him? He’s nothing special. He’s just a glorified salesman, when you come down to it.’
‘Bea, my angel. If I didn’t know you better, I might think you were jaundiced. Paul kept the Shanghai side of Shell in operation, almost singlehandedly. A bit more than a salesman. They both speak Mandarin. There have been hints that he was placed there by the government. MI6. There’s a rumour that she’s in it too. Did you notice, she didn’t drink a drop?’
‘What? Are you saying that they’re spies? Oh, come on! I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, Teddy, but they need their heads examined.’
‘Who’d have thought she came from Argentina?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. For God’s sake, how much did you drink? She’s from Bedford. Or Banbury. One or the other.’
‘Bea — when we played ‘Down Argentina Way’, she burst into tears. She grew up on an estancia, near Cordoba. Both her brothers are fighter pilots — she doesn’t know where they are, whether they’re still alive, even. She was genuinely upset — you must have noticed. Don’t give me that look. You don’t know her — you said it yourself. You’re being very unfair.’
‘Well, you two certainly got chummy. I’m off to bed. Boy? Boy! Get him to clear up, will you? I’m asleep on my feet.’
Teddy poured himself another whisky, turned off the lights, and put Lena Horne’s smoky version of ‘Stormy Weather’ on the record player again, low. Resting his heels on the table, by the muted lightning of sputtering candles, he smoked a cigar.
‘Never again. Never have so many dull people been marooned around a table to eat such indifferent food. Don’t blame me if you get dysentery — I saw you wading through those vol-au-vents as if Escoffier made them. What was in them? It looked like vomit. I couldn’t touch them.’
‘You’re a hard woman. By Jingo, I felt proud to be among staunch compatriots: it sounds like our boys are really getting somewhere. Look, this war’ll be over by Christmas and we can go home.’
‘Home? Where is home? I certainly don’t want to go back to Blighty. You go, I’d rather go back to China….England isn’t home. Durrell calls it Pudding Island. Not affectionately.’
‘So you did talk to him? From where I sat, you didn’t seem to have much to say to him.’
‘No. Nor he to me. ‘
Paul was on the balcony outside their bedroom, smoking a cigar. Somewhere in the maze of streets behind the house a woman was ululating — a marriage. Eileen unpinned her hair in front of her mirror. Slender, languorous body hinted at by a nightdress of oyster silk satin — one of the few things she’d managed to bring from China — she was a voluptuary’s dream. He stubbed out the cigar and ran his hands over her shoulders, with a louche grin.
She removed them.
‘Oh, no. Much too hot. Pass me the Pond’s, will you?’
Paul was nettled.
Smoothing cold cream onto her high cheekbones, she continued: ‘For a writer Durrell was curiously inarticulate, well, until the drink got to him. Then he was moderately entertaining. Not my cup of tea.’
‘You danced with him.’
‘You danced with Therese, Beatrice and that giraffe-like secretary from the embassy.’ She paused. ‘What are these? “Apology Card”?’
‘Have a look.’
She tipped a wad of small cards from the manila envelope. She read:
Mr………..
regrets exceedingly
his deplorable conduct while a
guest at your
Party
and humbly craves your pardon
for the breach of etiquette checked in the
adjoining column.
‘Oh, really, Paul. What nonsense is this?’
‘Turn it over. I thought I’d send Teddy and Bea one. As a thank you. It’ll make them laugh.’
‘“Spanking female guests. Picking nose at table. Indiscriminate goosing.” Do you really think they’ll find this funny? “Failure to button pants. Failure to unbutton pants.” Oh dear.’
She removed the cold cream with cotton wool. ‘“Locating female’s complex” and “Looking for hidden mole” are amusing.’
She pushed them aside wearily. ‘You’re still a child, aren’t you?’
This hurt more than her rejection of him, and he turned away from her in bed.
And she, who had a secret penchant for short, funny, unmanageable men, and could still feel Durrell’s hand, surprisingly clearly, surprisingly strongly, imprinted on the small of her back, turned away from her husband.
Eileen’s friend, Dilys Arbuthnot, invited her for a birthday drink among the palm trees and jasmine of Shepheard’s Terrace. ‘Eileen, I’m taking you out for a proper bash. Cocktails, like it or not. We’re going to gossip, we’re going to ogle chaps in uniform, and you’re going to get squiffy. You’re only 36 once.’ And so, Paul having previously committed himself to a bridge evening at the club, and the children happy to be in the care of bosomy Khadija who made them sugar and cocoa sandwiches, Eileen went on her own.
Her birthday gift from Paul had been an opulent emerald silk shawl. She knew that such expenditure betokened guilt, but defiantly wore the beautiful thing to signal forgiveness of his venial peccadilloes. Whatever they were. It rippled in the evening breeze as the gharry trotted to Shepheard’s, where she found Dilys toying with a plate of olives, an empty glass at her elbow.
‘Hello Dilys. I’m not late, am I?’
‘No. I was ravaged by thirst. They’re terribly habit forming. Gin fizz. That was my second.’
Eileen raised her eyebrows.
‘I did have some water first, but it didn’t do the job. I needed a proper drink.’
Half-way through her fifth, when her top button had undone itself to expose a heaving, sweating cleavage, and her coppery hair was stuck to her forehead, it transpired that the occasion for this drink was not in fact Eileen’s birthday, but the defection of Reggie who had recently announced that their marriage was at an end.
‘No reason. He said that one more evening with me, and he’d….’ Eileen never discovered what Reggie would do, as Dilys slithered from sight beneath the table, landing with a soft flump.
‘Waiter!’ Eileen stood and waved to attract the attention of one of the boys, whose fez bobbed weaving among the chairs and tables. ‘Oh Madame. Madame is on the ground!’ Someone joined them from another table and between them they retrieved Dilys. The waiter ran to fetch coffee.
‘I know you. You’re the diva from Argentina.’
Eileen looked up, startled. ‘Oh, Mr. Durrell, thank God! I’m so glad to see a friendly face. We were celebrating my birthday, and I think Dilys had…’
‘Five drinks to your one. I know. I was sitting just there.’
‘I don’t know how I’ll get her home. She lives in a flat over by the Services Club. It’s not far, but I don’t think she can walk. I certainly can’t carry her.’
‘I’ll give you a hand. Let me just get my stuff.’ He paid the bill with an involuntary groan, and between them they frog-marched Dilys to a gharry. She lived on the third floor. Getting her there took some doing, but eventually she was in her own bed.
‘Whew! That was warming.’ Eileen passed a hand over her damp forehead. ‘Thank you so much. I’ll stay here with her.’
‘Absolutely not. She doesn’t need you. She’ll just sleep it out. I’ve got a much better idea.’
It was not yet ten when they climbed over the fence of the Services Club. There was some kind of party taking place within. There had been rumours that day of some significant allied putsch, and they could hear Vera Lynn predicting an outbreak of bluebirds over the south coast.
‘My husband was born in Dover,’ whispered Eileen.
‘Shh.’ The garden was absolutely still, not a whisper among the palm leaves that made a mysterious Rousseau backdrop, lit by a cold half-moon reflecting placidly in the pool. She sat on the edge, her feet in the water, and Durrell lay back next to her looking up at the sky.
‘You’ve just had a birthday, so what are you? Taurus. Mmm. Don’t know what Taurus looks like. Bullish I suppose. There’s me. Look, over to the right. There — Pisces. That zig-zag.’ He took her hand and guided her fingers towards the cluster of bright stars.
With a little shock of excitement, she retrieved her hand. Leaving her shoes at the pool’s edge, she slipped into the inky shadows of the garden. A moment later her ghost-white body emerged.
‘Oh, God, that’s wonderful,’ Eileen whispered from the cool dark water.
They swam lazily, and then lay naked on the radiant warmth of the stone terrace. The seductive musk of frangipani floated on the warm air.
‘What’s in the notebook, the book you had at Shepheard’s?’
‘Notes for a book I’m writing about Corfu.’
‘Called?’
‘Prospero’s Cell.’
‘Not Caliban’s?’
He turned over and ran his fingers along her upper arm, causing an outbreak of gooseflesh.
‘Not Caliban’s.’
This exchange drifted ineluctably into what Eileen referred to, decades later, as a ‘skirmish in a taxi.’
Pisces had almost slipped from the sky when Durrell asked ‘Another swim?’
‘Larry!’ she hissed, ‘Spawn of the devil. I’m in such trouble already. I must go home right now.’
‘Please don’t go yet. Have a last dip with me. You know you want to. Come on. Carpe diem — we may all be dead tomorrow.’
‘Five minutes. That’s it. Oh! This water’s like silk.’
‘You know, I almost wish you didn’t have to leave. I like your company. In Alexandria I’m awash with languorous, musky women craving my body, but I rarely come across an odalisque with intellect.’
‘You didn’t come across me.’
‘Don’t be smutty. You’re much too grand. It doesn’t suit you.’
They stood, very close, in the water.
‘What is this gorgeous amulet?’
‘Gorgeous amulet? Oh, that. It’s a key-ring. Thoth. The Egyptian god of writing. Writing and wisdom. Here, have it. So you remember me when we’re apart.’
He fastened it round her neck, taking his time. She held his face and kissed him, then climbed out of the pool and dabbed herself dry with Durrell’s trousers.
‘Larry, we’ll never do this again. If we meet again, it’ll be as acquaintances, not lovers. You’ve got your life. I’ve got mine — three children and a loyal husband.’ Her voice was firm, decisive.
‘I’ve got a daughter, a little girl too….. somewhere or other….. Penny.’ Very quiet, very sad.
Eileen allowed a glimmer of doubt to dilute her resolve: ‘If we’d met 20 years ago, it would be different.’
‘Yes. For a start I’d be twelve.’ He snorted. ‘I mean I like older women, but…. Oh, hell. You’re being serious, aren’t you?’
Eileen was looking for her shawl.
‘Yes. And I must go. Now. It’s way past midnight.’
‘How will I manage? I need you now. I didn’t know until tonight. Can we write?’
‘No. And no, we can’t be friends. I’m not going to join the sorry ranks of your rumoured liaisons.’
He was quiet for a couple of minutes.
‘OK. So be it. Let me take you home.’
Unknown to them, this very minor skirmish happened to take place on what was subsequently known as D-Day, June the 6th, 1944. It has been estimated that 4,414 allied soldiers were killed during that operation, which decisively changed the course of history.
Exactly 40 weeks later during a relentless, gritty khamsin, Eileen gave birth to another Piscean, a girl whose snub nose was generally considered to be a legacy from her aunt, Daphne. Eileen christened me Miranda.
Eileen’s brothers were both killed shortly afterwards, within days of each other, in the final throes of the war. Their mother Evelyn left Bedford to join her other daughters, Daphne and Clare, back in Argentina. Eileen brought all her four children to the UK in the polar winter of 1947, when Larry and Eve happened to be there. The following year, Eileen took my brother and me to visit Evelyn, coinciding with Larry and Eve’s time at the British Council in Cordoba, a four hour drive away.
When Eileen, Paul and I returned permanently to Pudding Island, the year of the new queen’s coronation, there was no one and nothing there to welcome us. Eileen was not happy in commuter-belt Essex, and an inexplicable rancour had infected her marriage.
With my three siblings away in boarding school, I was a dreamy, withdrawn creature. Eileen had no truck with just wanting her children to be happy. She wanted intellectual superstars, or boys. She was convinced that I was stupid, and could not look at me but with exasperation. I was not a boy.
My parents and I cohabited each in solitary confinement, sharing nothing but the space we lived in. I had not one memorable conversation with either of my parents. I was fond of Paul who provided the warmth my mother lacked. But we didn’t have a single interest or opinion in common. We had no family life — no trips, no holidays, no talk, no jokes, no card games. We were strangers to each other. This is not a misery memoir. One’s family constitutes reality, from which anything else is a deviation, an oddity. The result of coming, as it seemed, from a different planet, is that I live in my head — a convenient locus for a writer. And negative criticism acts like capsaicin, a bracing condiment that unleashes a scribble of endorphins.
When I was 15, Eileen gave me ‘Mountolive’ to read, an event I still remember, as being a unique sign of interest in my cultural development. With embarrassment I confess that I found it boring. It could not compete with the urgent trivia of adolescence: Brook Benton, Buddy Holly, meringue net petticoats and ballet shoes a la Bardot, stalking boys and the hula hoop — although I did read Freud, and filled notebooks with knotted prose.
There were no more references to Durrell until Eileen was widowed twenty years later. After a year of fierce alcoholic mourning, she started reminiscing about that skirmish, implying that Paul might not have been my father, a notion I dismissed at the time as the wishful thinking of a woman who invented what life failed to supply.
Durrell died in 1990, Eileen in 1997, and I forsook journalism in Pudding Island to live in the hills of Andalucia: writing, drinking, practising yoga and Buddhism.
Thoth, battered and oxidised by age, retrieved from the junk in my mother’s red leather jewel-box, sits before me now.
Google is a boon for writers — beyond being a source of information it supplies a tsunami of diversion for those bleak droughts when nothing flows. One such afternoon, when my husband was swaying on perilous scaffolding, painting the high ceiling of the yoga room, I turned to Images to see what Lawrence Durrell looked like.
I called Dan from his painting to have a look.
‘Christ!’ he said, ‘It’s as plain as the nose on your face.’ We were faced with not just me, but my son Leo as well. A possibility, now, that we could wear our noses with pride.
A circuitous path, unexpected connections and coincidences, and I met Durrell’s surviving legitimate daughter. Just four years older than me, Penny was lost in the cloudy purlieus of Alzheimer’s disease. She embarked on sentences that dissolved as she spoke and left her stranded in a strange place. The only identifiable shape that loomed from the mist was suspicion.
It was a meeting of exquisite poignancy: thick grey rain slicking down the drenched Herefordshire grass, a sudden power cut, Dan and me trying to make sense of Penny’s shreds of memory in the softly seeping darkness of a November afternoon, by the light of dying candles wedged into a clotted iron candle-stick wrought by Durrell himself.
Grudging, Penny consented to show me her photos. As she opened the lid of the cardboard crate, I felt a terrific jolt of affinity for Durrell — writer, drinker, yoga student, Buddhist. There he was, at a Buddhist fair somewhere in France, and again, in a fearless Urdhva Padmasana, an inverted lotus pose, in a garden.
She snapped the lid shut. ‘That’s enough of that.’ she said with startling clarity.
Penny’s husband was convinced of my case, constantly remarking that I was a virtual clone of Margo, Durrell’s sister who had lately died. That I even had the same mannerisms. He repeatedly referred to Durrell as ‘your father’ and Margo as ‘your aunt’.
But he refused to put Penny through the ordeal of giving a dna sample. Shortly afterwards she was dead.
I shall never know.
Carpe Diem.
Riad Maizie — the Cast
Posted by mirandainnes in Marrakech on January 24, 2011
Dan and I bought Riad Maizie, in the very oldest part of the Medina of Marrakech just 100 yards away from the original mosque, ten years ago. We knew that it was here that we could devote ourselves to gambling and gladly read johanngut.wordpress.com. We fell in love with it immediately, and then proceeded to slither headlong into one drama after another, until two years ago, when we realised that it had to be run Mafia-style, within the family. The story of our bumpy ride can be read in my book, ‘Cinnamon City’. Riad Maizie is now a family business — you can see the serious info on riadmaizie.eu — but I thought I’d introduce you to the people who give it warmth and character.
Maizie.
Maizie was a mere dot when we bought the pretty, abandoned courtyard house in October 2001. We named it after her to celebrate its completion and her arrival on the planet. Her first visit was somewhat marred by the fact that she had chicken pox, and spent the time exploring the accoustics. Despite everyone tiptoeing, she would wake at the twitter of a solitary bird, creak of a single hinge, a perambulating lizard’s quiet cough, and she would scream and scream. She has greatly improved since then.
Dan
Dan loves Marrakech — the Kingdom of Boys. It takes me forever to get to Djemaa el Fna these days because every other bloke wants to know how he is, where he is and when he’s coming back to Marrakech. The answer is that he spent a year managing the riad, quite brilliantly, and now lurks here in Italy in his frowsty lair doing his Oscar cartoon, and nothing short of an earthquake will budge him.
Leo
Leo and Saki are Maizie and Chilali’s parents. Leo is a Website Meister, and really got us going when he did such a brilliant job on riadmaizie.eu — of course he always complains that it needs updating. He website is called zimzamzimmy.com for reasons best known to himself.
Spigs
When Dan came back to Italy, Spigs took over. He combines eccentric, efficient and convivial management with learning Arabic, provocative painting, superlative cooking (he worked as a chef for a couple of years in Spain) and SKATEBOARD FANATICISM.
He has a masterplan to set up a skateboard park for the bored youf of Marrakech — who otherwise turn to less salubrious pastimes — and to somehow to provide them with affordable skateboards. It’s a great idea — his name is Will, and I can’t help but think, where there’s a Will, there’s a way.
Amal and her Family
Amal holds the place together. With a sweet, secretive smile, she makes Riad Maizie into a home. She has a major repertoire of fab Moroccan cuisine, for which she shops fresh every day — even down to the spices with which she makes her own distinctive ras el hanout.
The trio work peacefully together and for them the riad represents stability, cash, and amusement. They observe us, our friends and the guests with discreet interest, and earn accolades for their quiet attention to comfort and pleasure, without a trace of judgement for riotous or eccentric behaviour . Nezha buffs the brass basins until they shine like gold, she and Amal cook together, and Hicham is guard, handyman, organiser and generally Mr. Fixit.
Our Mates, Yussef and Jamal
Jamal used to play and sell musical instruments, but decided it was irreligious and now sells teapots.
Miranda
So, there you have it — you now know everyone. Next I’m going to introduce you to the riad, the city and the shopping. Baci, M
From Creaky to Bendy double-quick
Posted by mirandainnes in Yoga on December 27, 2010
I sincerely believe that yoga is the secret of eternal youth, or maybe of prolonging a frisky, jaunty, devil-may-care middle age.
Look up any ailment — from the myriad stress-related stuff to arthritis and osteoporosis — on the internet and you’ll find yoga mentioned somewhere as being a useful antidote or preventive.
On which topic, check with your doctor if you have specific aches or pains, high blood pressure, injuries, back, arm, neck or knee trouble, contrary hamstrings, osteoporosis, heart problems, hernia, swollen joints or eye problems such as detached retina or glaucoma.
Doing the poses, you should never feel sharp pain — but a kind of dull ache, meaning that you are working your body, awakening unused muscles and joints, is a good thing. Yoga teachers always say ‘listen to your body’, and while I’m not sure what that means, I think it is possible to be a sympathetic friend to your body, firm but fair, treating it kindly and sensibly, much as you might your grandchildren. Expect great things, applaud generously, don’t push or bully. And — where appropriate — boost your immune system by giving yourself a hug, or stroking recalcitrant bits fondly, as you might a wayward puppy.
Yoga is absolutely a non-competitive pastime. You will be able to do what is now impossible very quickly, with gentle and regular practice.
It is brilliant to be racing up the down escalator.
Regular. You have to keep at it. It will soon stop being a chore, and become the best bit of the day – gradually you’ll notice that your hips don’t judder like they used to, that you can reach your feet, that your shoulders don’t ache, that you are conscious of your posture. With a bit of luck you’ll find calming, even soothing perspective in the practice.
Every single body is built differently, and while your partner may do a superlative dog, your taste may be more in thegeneral area of spitting cobra. Some people have natural balance, some have unexpected strength. Little skinny people tend to be good at tying their feet behind their heads. The thing is, it is only your, one and only, fabulous body that matters. And according to surgeons – who comment favourably on the tidy interior of a yoga practitioner’s body – regular yoga takes care of it.
Homework
Four rounds of Sun Salutation every day. Four left and four right. Morning, or mid-afternoon if mornings are impossibly creaky.
This version is aimed at Chakra One, Muladhara, which looks after fundamental security, stability, grounding, and is situated as you would expect in the perineum. It concerns your right to be here and to have what you need, and is the vital foundation upon which everything else rests.
Don’t give yourself grief if you can’t face doing it every day.
Sun Salutation stretches and strengthens every major muscle group and exercises the respiratory system. It is a reminder to be grateful for the external source of light and life, and stokes the creative fire that radiates from within each of us. Start by doing it slowly and consciously. If you like to buzz, get faster, warm up, get your heart trotting (leave racing for boys).
Sun Salutation 1
Start with hands to heart
1. Reach hands to the sky, arms parallel, palms facing
2. Jack-knife from your hips with heavy head, hands somewhere near your feet, bending your knees if necessary, in forward bend
3. Hands to floor, right leg back and straight, left bent at right angle in a lunge. Look up
4. Left foot joins right foot in plank position — FANTASTIC for your stomach muscles
5. Bottom up in the air in inverted V in downward facing dog
6. Bottom back to rest on feet, arms extended forward in extended child’s pose
7. Tuck toes, raise bottom in another downward dog
8. Right leg forward and knee at a right angle, left leg back and straight in lunge. Look up
9. Bring both feet to front of mat, head down, heavy, hands near feet in forward bend. Bend your knees if it hurts
10. Slowly raise arms to sky as before
11. Hands to heart. Catch breath. Repeat on the other side.
Well done. Just three more rounds to go…….
Six Slinky Sirens do the Downward Dog
Posted by mirandainnes in Yoga on December 21, 2010
Riad Maizie — see raidmaizie.eu
YOGA
From 2nd to 9th November 2010
Reprise from 14th to 21st February 2011
Mornings began with a cup of tea and an hour of yoga on the roof in the sun with the glittering snowspangled peaks of the Atlas, clear and sharp in the winter light on one side, the Ben Saleh mosque on the other, and a loud altercation of birdsong bursting from the bougainvillea on all sides.
We worked our way through the seven chakras one day at a time, starting with the Muladhara and ascending to the Sahasrara chakra. I was amazed by how good we all were, especially Beth and Anthea who had maybe been to one yoga class twenty years before. Sheila did a perfectly balanced crow, and they all managed the beautiful King Dancer, no problem.
There was a bit of groaning particularly with the locust and the eagle, but sunwarmed savasana with cute lavender eye bags and a spot of hypnotic guided relaxation soothed indignant and unaccustomed joints and muscles.
This healthy exertion was followed by breakfast — local vanilla yoghurt, little pastry things made by Amal, scrambled eggs, Berber bread, fig and apricot preserve, coffee, tea, avocado and pomegranate milkshakes. It just about replaced the calories lost by two rounds of surya namaskar.
Then there was usually a discussion — which sounded a little as though a fox had got into the henhouse — about how to spend the day.
The favourites were:
1) shopping for devore velvet caftans near the Badi Palace
2) driving to the mountains, lunch by a river in a fairytale deserted adobe village
3) shopping for candy-coloured carpets in the magic souk
4) braving the mysteries of a typical Moroccan hammam
5) shopping for love potions and ambergris in the spice market
6) taking a horsedrawn caleche to visit Yves St. Laurent’s Jardin Majorelle
7) shopping for embroidered boots in Gueliz, the French quarter

9) shopping for scarves and rainbow bright leather bags in Souk Semarine
10) taking a guided tour of historic sites with nice, clever Youssef culminating with a visit to the Berber pharmacy (Herboriste du Paradis), a flurry of spice buying, and a shoulder massage with argan oil and arnica that transported us to pink fluffydom.
We did it all. We also dined under the stars at La Terrasse des Epices, less glamorously at Aisha’s Number 1 stall in Djemaa el Fna, and at the Marakchi overlooking the square where a couple of trainee belly dancers made us quite disgruntled by demonstrating what seriously bendy, youthful people can do without the benefit of yoga. We ate cheap and cheerful up on the rooftop at Chegrouni, and had a couple of feasts made by Amal and Nezza in the candlelit dining room at Riad Maizie.
The hammam Mille et une Nuits was a revelation. We went for the full €40 job with vigorous clay cleansing, abundant black soap and sloshing, and a full hour of heavenly argan oil and neroli massage. I’m very shy of removing my overcoat let alone everything down to my knickers, and had never previously had the courage to venture into the steamy dark interior of a hammam (men am, women pm). I was so grateful therefore for my brazen mates, with whom being pummelled and soaped, sandpapered and sluiced by female Sumo wrestlers was not only bearable, but hilariously fabulous. An absolute Marakchi essential, best with a couple of friends. We followed it with watching the bustle of magic and mundane below us in Radha Lakdima, while we downed cornes de gazelles and coffee on the roof of the café des epices under a Pucci sunset.
Buddhists and Chinese food
Posted by mirandainnes in Italy on August 25, 2009
About a Little Gingko Tree in the Rain
We’ve just had seven mixed Buddhists to stay with us for 10 days. They would rise at 6.30 am, drive across the estate to Casa Garuda for lectures and meditation, return after lunch for a siesta, then go back to Casa Garuda for more enlightenment. They would finally return to us at about 10.30, Prosecco merry, and we played mah jongg with Andrea’s adorable Chinese girlfriend Zhong Yu Shan, whose name means ‘Little Gingko Tree in the Rain’. Her mother changed her name two years ago when she was 17, fearing that she lacked sufficient wood and water for good feng shui with whatever she was called before. Andrea — who could well be a model for a Caravaggio angel — teaches Italian near an enormous glittering New York-like city built on a river, called Cheng Du in Sichuan. Read the rest of this entry »