Yoga has returned to the limelight, coinciding nicely with modern man’s feelings of spiritual emptiness and physical exhaustion, arriving just in time to rescue us from darkness

Yoga has returned to the limelight, coinciding nicely with modern man’s feelings of spiritual emptiness and physical exhaustion, arriving just in time to rescue us from darkness in our higher chakras and rigidity in our lower backs. The image of lumpy leotards and boiled cabbage community centre classes is gone, replaced by a lean new version. Yoga has been re-packaged as a mental and physical survival kit for the millennium.

Yoga retreats have sprung up all over the world, from the Bahamas to the Outer Hebrides. Each one has something a bit different on offer, ranging from severe asceticism, with a lot of macrobiotic bowel-cleansing thrown in, to bendy lolling about under coconut palms, with as many banana daiquiris as take your fancy. The retreat at Nayyar Dam in the Cardamom Hills of Kerala, South India, is mid-range asceticism, with a bit of boarding school time-tabling thrown in. Windfire Yoga on Ibiza is mid-to high-range asceticism in pursuit of body and mind beautiful, with a lot of brown rice and lightly steamed vegetables thrown in. Kerala is recuperative; Ibiza, more physical.

The Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centre at Nayyar Dam spreads itself out through a garden beside a lake where crocodiles apparently bask. Swimming in the lake at midday is completely safe-crocodile siesta time. I was upside down gazing into the fleshy, sensual flowers of a ginger plant, yearning for inner peace, strangely conscious of lions roaring in the middle-distance and wondering exactly how I might be able to get my t-shirt back up over my bra. Inverted decolletage is not quite de rigeur in a Sivananda ashram; head-to-toe floaty is more the thing.

It was the end of the monsoon season and the ashram garden was steaming and throbbing in full glory. I was on a yoga vacation, which is perhaps a bit of a misnomer for the two weeks of recuperation that I spent by the lake where the fireflies are so bright and big that you mistake them for shooting stars. Who takes a vacation to get up at 5.30 in the morning? Dawn meditation is followed by a quick cup of chai, almost guaranteed to have you running for the bushes during the two hours of yoga asanas (postures) that follow.

Then it is brunch, seated in lines on rush mats in a great prayer hall. You’re not supposed to talk but people do. Sometimes you sit next to someone who just wants to eat in silence and it made me realise how much we miss about food because of all the talking, drinking and social paraphernalia that usually goes with it. The cooking at the ashram is ayurvedic, the ancient South Indian practice of alternative medicine, and perhaps the oldest method of diet and lifestyle still in common practice. According to ayurveda, chat disturbs the digestion. I was delighted to let mine work in peace: coconut curries with warm puffed poori (chapatis fried until they swell like doughnuts), fluffy idli (cardamom steamed cakes of sticky rice), soft, rich dosas (thin pancakes made from rice and lentil flour), papaya and plantain salad, multi-flavoured dhals, sambar soups thickened with tamarind, and different chutneys every day; sweet, sharp and astringent tastes all balanced to soothe the belly and the soul.

From the rush mat straight to work with two hours of what is called karma yoga, work dedicated to the glory of the god of your choice with no object of personal gain. Sloshing large amounts of industrial (though organic) antiseptic around squat loos seemed suitably lowly, if not wholly divine. There follows an afternoon lecture, often led by the head swami, a fantastic ball of Italian banter in orange robes, a long way from home. He may have been in Kerala for decades but his lectures are still heavily punctuated with references to cappuccinos and the gelati of his beloved Roma.

After the lecture, there is a small amount of time to roam, write, read (the advice is nothing too racy), or just sleep before two more hours of asanas, supper and the evening meditation. The days are full and long but the pace is gentle, each asana followed by a short lie down, each meal eaten slowly, every sunset over the lake seeming hopelessly romantic. Even the lions in the nearby jungle reservation roar with consummate lethargy.

In marked contrast comes the Ashtanga school of yoga practised at Can Am in Ibiza. Two important points: firstly, Ashtanga yoga is not about navel-gazing. It is, to quote Godfrey Devereux, the founder of Windfire Yoga, ‘a method of self-knowledge, self-acceptance and self-empowerment based on self-determination and self-responsibility’. It also happens to be the powerful physical method that gave Madonna her full body-sculpture look and put Geri Halliwell back into a tiny black bikini; Ashtanga yogis have fantastic bodies. Second important point: forget what you think you know about Ibiza – the MTV saturation, the shots of superstar DJs flying in to ignite altered states of consciousness in clubs with dangerous decibel levels. Can Am is a traditional farmhouse built in the middle of a national park in the north of the island, miles from the strobes and the drugs.

The place is beautiful, set at the end of a donkey track, half an hour’s walk through fields and villages to the wild cliffs and beaches of the north. It is not an hotel, nor an ashram, nor a retreat. As Devereux likes to clarify, ‘we are a training centre dedicated to a way of life based on simplicity…free from the conventional clutter of gadgets that isolate us from the healing matrix of nature’ – so, no electricity and absolutely no mobile phone reception. It also involves sleeping out under canvas or tepees during the summer months and in shared rooms in the farmhouse in the autumn and winter.

You get about six hours of yoga a day. It’s hard graft – honing, cleansing and penetrating exploration of most of the physical boundaries that you never had any intention of going near. And just to make sure that the body is totally detoxified, there is brown rice, local grains and vegetables to throw the bowels into overdrive. I had moments of catharsis when I wanted to run screaming among the sabina trees, bury myself in the great banks of Ibithencan rosemary, and never do the ‘downward dog’ position again in my life. However, I came home with thighs like whipcord and a sense of serenity that drove all my friends mad. For all the recuperation of the slow pace of life at the Sivananda ashram in Kerala, Devereux has created a place in Ibiza that you return from stronger, braver and absolutely in tune with the extraordinary number of muscles in your bottom and groin.

(originally published in The Sunday Times 2nd March 1997)