Low life: My head felt like an aquarium

Five of us, standing in a semi-circle on a varnished wooden floor facing the yoga teacher, breathing deeply in concert. In through the nose, hold, out through the mouth. Easter Sunday morning. Christ is risen. We slowly inhale and exhale to the sound of distant church bells and the cheeping of a pair of sparrows nesting somewhere in the eaves.

We’re learning Kum Nye, a type of Tibetan yoga. An all-day beginners’ ‘workshop’. I feel guilty about learning Tibetan yoga on Easter Sunday morning. Raised a Baptist, as a youth I was warned strongly against yoga. It empties the mind, I was told, leaving it open and unprotected. Satan, a ravening lion always on the prowl, spots his opportunity and rushes in. And once he’s got in, it’s the devil of a job to get him out again. Astrology the same. Also tarot, hypnotism, meditation and certain kinds of music. I can remember a charismatic church service in which a demon was evicted from one woman, and it flew immediately into another several rows back, from where it taunted the exorcisers most foully.