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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Lifestyle
Phil Daoust

I spent 60 years sneering at yoga. It turns out I love it – and it does make you healthier and happier

Phil Daoust at the Hotpod studio in Brixton.
‘I have the spirituality of a brick’ … Phil Daoust at the Hotpod studio in Brixton. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

It’s 7.30 on a Saturday morning and I am contorted and sweaty, but oddly happy. I’m on all fours, more or less, with my bum raised and one leg up behind me, rotated at the hip and bent at the knee. I must look a little like a dog cocking his leg. There are a dozen other people around me, all wearing as little as possible. That’s because the air has been heated to 37C – blood temperature.

Somehow, at the age of 60, I have got into yoga. And not in a teeth-gritted, I-will-persevere-because-it’s-good-for-me kind of way. I love it, enough to pay for a couple of classes a week and an online subscription to help me practise at home. I do hot yoga, in an inflatable “pod” like a bouncy castle, and not-hot yoga, in a shabby room above a theatre. I haven’t tried goat yoga, or dog yoga, or paddleboard yoga, but it’s only a matter of time.

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