Teaching this old dog a new trick is a bit of a stretch, says Brendan O’Connor as he takes out the yoga mat

Needless to say, I can’t do the yoga. I mean I can do it, but not really. But that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Isn’t that why I’m learning? But it’s not entirely natural for me if you know what I’m talking about.

And see, it’s hard when you’re a grown man to learn something new, something that is out of your normal range. I’m used to being able to do the things that I have to do. So it’s vaguely humiliating to become like a kid again.

For some reason it’s more difficult for me because it’s a man who teaches me. I don’t know what that says about me, but I feel more comfortable learning things from women.

The last big thing I learned about the body was to swim, and it was mostly learned from a woman. And for some reason I have no problem letting a woman have that dominance over me, where we go to a place where I don’t know and I have to make myself vulnerable by trying something new that I can’t do . While she knows everything and is responsible.

So here I am, a reasonably responsible ape for most of my life. I feel like I’m a junior monkey for the yoga classes, taking a few steps in the monkey pecking order, and giving that power to another monkey.

This is in his realm, and it’s an area where I am uncertain and take cautious little steps. I need to look at the zoom classes to practice the routines. So I have to listen to myself talk too much, ask stupid questions and not be sure. “Shut up you foolI want to yell at myself in zoom class. Passing me, yesterday I was, embarrassed me.

But I don’t see any choice but to continue. This painful birth into the realm of the body must be done.

I’ve lived in my head for half a century now and it’s getting me nowhere exactly. I have thought of everything as much as I can and it is time to accept that I am not going to think out of my situation.

The universe has been telling me this for a while. For example, how can you explain that you’ve never heard of the book? The body holds the score For 50 years it suddenly kept popping up last year.

Standing near a funeral, I finally decided to read it when a friend I hadn’t seen in a while told me how to read it.

Technically, the book is about trauma, but the pull to it is exactly what it says in the title. We carry our wounds, our neuroses and our scars in the body and cannot speak or think from within everything. We have to somehow free these spirits from the body.

While I was reading The body holds the scoreI interviewed world famous Cork philosopher Richard Kearney who wrote a wonderful book about the meaning of touch. The universe is knocking again.

What I had left of Kearney was that once a friend of his was recovering from depression and doing everything he could to recover, at one point he said gently, “Enough of that, back to the body. “And that was the final phase of recovery for him – touch, nature, animals, body.

So, as you can see, it’s a very intimate journey that I’m on here with this yoga business.

Swimming and running are all very good, and in fact, like most people, I do it more for my head than my body. But none of these things are really related to the results this body is holding.

There is no hiding place with yoga. I am here with this stranger who is a man which means I have difficulty seeing him as an educator and we delve into the full story that this battered flesh has to offer.

Aside from the physical scars and wear and tear, there are the ghosts that make me hold myself the way I do and the things I’ve held onto over the years that don’t do me any good.

Here, with this stranger, I make myself vulnerable, peel off the layers, try to learn a new way to do the dance of life, try to learn to let go. I spend my life getting my head in flow, but now it’s time to get the body to flow or flow as much as possible for an uncoordinated lump like me.

And I know what you’re thinking “Jesus Christ, he is now able to rethink yoga. It’s just a little stretching. There is no hope for this poor fool. It will never get out of your head. “But I’ll keep trying for now. Because if I don’t do it now, I will never do it.

When we get our lives back, there are other things to do.

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