When I walked into my first Kundalini yoga class in the spring of 2009, I didn’t know who I was. Six months earlier, I’d left a 10-day retreat on the island of Mallorca, where I lived, sure that I would never drink alcohol again. Booze had been a defining part of my life since I was 13 years old. I was now 46. That first class hooked me. My teacher, dressed in white, covered her hair with a white turban and sat on a white lambskin. A f ormer dancer, she moved through the kriyas with an elegance that masked how hard they were to do. I liked the way each kriya aimed to produce a specific mental and physical result – this one was intended to boost your immune system, that one was for creativity, and so on – and soon lost myself in the mantras, even growling along to ‘Long Time Sun’, the hippy folk song that closed each class.
I fell in love with Kundalini yoga because the breathing practices got me high. (I realised this after class one morning when I tried to speak to some friends outside a café and found I couldn’t string a sentence together.) But the best thing was the effect Kundalini had on me as a writer.