The industry machine (including the yoga one) thrives on and promotes this addiction to youth. But this addiction while it may seem to promote life and vitality is in actual fact anti-life, for we, like life, have our seasons and pass through them one to the next.

The spirit of the Ashtanga Yoga Summer School first spoke to me 8 years ago.

By any standard Tiruvannamalai (Tiru) is a filthy place. A dirty, filthy place. Even in the ‘nice’ neighbourhoods the cloudy grey-blue water of the open drains stenches the hot thick air and bleeds into it an endless supply of newly born and bloodthirsty mosquitos. Rubbish is piled up in haphazard piles only to be dispersed again throughout the day to be re-piled tomorrow. A thick cover of top-soil-like dust covers much of the town and its inhabitants (though it lends a welcome toning down to the psychedelically coloured buildings).

n its more extreme forms we think of discipline as a kind of self-punishment or torture. We have all seen the images of self-flagellators whipping themselves into a frenzy, their bloody backs red and raw and streaming. Funnily enough even the whip they use is itself called ‘a discipline’. To me this kind of discipline is not a virtue – it is a pathology, a poison, a sickness.

YS 1.5 - The five thought patterns are troubling or not.

We like to imagine we are free thinkers but we are not.

Yoga philosophy is far more radical than this typical carrot-on-a-stick sales techniques of modern yoga. Hidden in plain sight, in the heart of the mantra so many chant every day before their Ashtanga Yoga practise there is a warning. ‘Beware,’ it says, ‘enter the brave’. ‘Your’ life may never be the same again.

Here are a few of the books that have helped me come to my current understanding of yoga and/or spirituality in general (though increasingly less what it is and more what it is not). Each of these in their own way has provided, to a greater or lesser extent, some kind of ‘Aha’ moment.

It is easy to look back in retrospect and tell the story of “me”, to create the meaning of ourselves in terms of a story. That is what we do. It could be, as I think yoga suggests, that there is in reality no story, and with it no “me”. I, of course, have my own stories as much as anybody else has theirs’, and while I know fully well that they may not be true…