Page 124 of The Love Position

Closing his eyes, he tried to empty his mind, but it was too full of Sophia. And behind the all-consuming awareness of her, his head was filled with noisy confusion.

Turning away from the meditation garden, he made his way slowly down the stone path, tiredness weighing heavily in his limbs. It had been three days since the storm and he’d worked nonstop fixing what had been broken and toiling at the Sisyphean task of clearing sargassum from the beaches. Swami Vishnu and Mohan had been teaching the TTC, so he hadn’t even had a chance to speak to Sophia. And now Jessica was staying in her room, there was no opportunity to see her at night.

Isaac knew he was dangerously fatigued. His brain was slower, his movements clumsier. He’d slipped on the dorm roof the previous day and nearly fallen to his death. After that, he’d refused to go back up or let anyone else, telling Swami Vishnu that the ashram had to pay for craftsmen from the mainland.

His guru had nodded and patted him on the arm, telling him he needed to slow down. But that statement was quickly followed by a list of other tasks he wanted Isaac to attend to.

‘Hanuman!’ Mohan was hurrying down the path towards him. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’

‘Everything alright?’

‘Guruji wants you to finish teaching the main lecture today.’

Isaac glanced at his watch. It had started twenty minutes ago.

‘Why does he want me for the lecture? I thought you and Guruji were now teaching the whole course?’

Mohan didn’t meet his eye as they strode through the ashram. ‘I’ve already taught the first section. I’m going to help out at the beach now. They’re in hall five. I’ll see you later.’

He jogged off, and Isaac paused, watching his retreating figure. What on earth was going on?

Then he stepped into the asana hall and his heart sank into the pit of his stomach.

Kriya day.

‘Ah! There you are!’

Swami Vishnu sat on his throne, beaming from ear to ear, the course participants on the floor in front of him.

Isaac forced himself not to look for Sophia.

‘Mohan has already demonstrated Kapalabhati, Tratak, Nauli, and Jala Neti for our students. We’re running a little behind schedule, so I thought we could skip Sutra Neti and move straight onto Dhauti.’

There was a table to the left of Swami Vishnu, on which stood eleven buckets of salt water, sections of plastic tubing, strips of cotton gauze and drinking glasses. Isaac stared at it as if looking at the tools of a torturer’s trade. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the worried glances of the students, all sitting with small plastic neti pots beside them.

There were traditionally six yoga kriyas, designed to accelerate one’s spiritual progress. Most schools of yoga didn’t touch the more physical practices, believing that a kriya was an internal action, achieved through breathwork or postures.

However, the founder of the organisation, Swami Devanandara, believed they were cleansing practices that could rid the body of everything from asthma to leprosy.

Isaac had only done the more extreme ones once before, on his own Teacher Training Course. It had been an experience he’d never seen the point of repeating, and had reduced most of his fellow students to hysterical wrecks. Since that day, whenever he’d taught the TTC, he’d neither demonstrated, nor prescribed, that students should do them.

‘Why don’t we start with Plavini?’ said Swami Vishnu.

Isaac resisted the urge to ask if his use of the word ‘we’ meant that his guru was also going to be joining in.

Clearing his throat, he faced the group. ‘Plavini is wind purification. For this exercise, you need to take a mouthful of air, then swallow it. Keep doing this until your stomach is full, then slowly burp it out.’

‘What’s the point?’ Jessica asked.

Isaac let his gaze be drawn to the back of the room where she was sitting next to Sophia, her expression hard with challenge.

Keeping his eyes on Jessica and not allowing them to drift to Sophia, he replied. ‘By doing Plavini, you remove the foul gases from the stomach along with the air.’

‘The gases caused by breaking down the food we eat?’ Jessica continued.

Isaac didn’t know what to say. He’d never believed in the science behind the exercise.

‘Maybe we wouldn’t have such “foul gases” if we weren’t living off lentils, beans, and cabbage? Surely the most effective way to purify the excess wind in my body is to stop eating rabbit food? If we didn’t sleep with the window open at night, then Sophia would be gassed to death by morning.’

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