The more familiar you get with yoga, the more sensitive you become to your inner landscape and the more tuned in you’ll be to the outer surroundings and your reaction to them. If your room is cluttered, if the lighting is unhelpful, if the very fact of Zoom’s electronic waves zaps your energy, that’s because the Feng Shui is wrong and it can be fixed.

Dear Yogis,

I have to laugh when I think how people may excuse themselves from yoga because they can’t touch their toes. No one offers the excuse that they can’t walk around in crab as they used to in the primary school playground. That’s the better goal.

Over the years I have taken classes with teachers who have promised me that I can get high. They themselves seem very happy and, possibly, high. They promise euphoria, higher states of consciousness and transformation. Some talk about the drugs they used to take before discovering yoga.

Amazing positivity comes over me on one day of the year! (10th October). Isn’t it funny! One day is not so different to the day before or the day after but when a birthday comes along it’s absorbingly lovely. The day produces a shot of positivity that feels so powerful, it seems to illuminate a higher self and a better state. This state of self-generated specialness seems to bypass the thinking mind.

Dear Yogis,

A yogi mentioned Seasonal Affective Disorder this week. SAD starts to appear in journals and columns about now, along with advice to take vitamins and exercise. The darker days can affect non-depressive people like depression. It’s not hard to understand. You know what it feels to look up at a galaxy of stars (not in this country!) and feel the wonderment and positivity and amazing emotions when the glorious view enters under your skin and into your grey cells and gives you joy… Well, clouds can also get under the skin and into the grey cells and do what clouds do - dull the light.