A book called ‘The Burning Question’, which I recently came across, has convinced me that unless all countries agree fairly soon to stop digging up and burning fossil fuels, we are headed for a situation where, within the next 50 years, the Earth’s temperature will rise beyond repair, the ice caps will melt, and the world’s entire population will have to somehow squish together on a bit of land the size of Europe, because everything else will either be under the ocean or be a desert.
I found myself thinking about it during my hot yoga class.
Hot yoga, in case you haven’t tried it, involves holding some challenging yoga poses in 40 degrees heat. In a cramped room, with about 3 centimetres space between mats, sweating yogis contort themselves into adventurous positions whilst having instructions barked at them by lithe, muscular teachers. This carries on for an hour and a half, or until you keel over – whichever comes sooner. The upsides include: killer abs, toned arms, and beautiful skin (if you like the shiny, red-cheeked look).
Anyway. Standing there, in between the ‘half-moon’ and the ‘awkward’ pose, I suddenly had an epiphany:
If indeed, 50 years from now, entire countries will have been wiped out of existence and we will all be living together forty to a room, summer temperatures exceeding 40 degrees – then hot yoga is in fact the perfect pre-apocalypse boot camp.
Reasons why Hot Yoga is the Future:
It teaches you to breathe and stay calm in a hot, sweaty space. I actually noticed the benefits of this during a particularly sweaty heatwave in Paris a few years ago. I found myself calmly wandering around, breathing through my nose, and chanting ‘Ommmmmm’.
It makes you practise tolerance – especially in relation to severe overcrowding: 40 to a room, with only a mat and a sarong to call our own, trying not to strangle the neighbour for accidentally thrusting his sweaty feet in your face.
Hot yoga teaches you to do things like drink water only during designated water breaks. Hot yoga instructors are really much more cunning than politicians and military leaders at rationing precious resources. How do they do it?… No-one knows. They tell me to put my bottle down; I am powerless to argue.
Hot yoga has a ‘Tree Pose’. Remember trees?… No?… Well, they looked a bit like this.
Maybe if you sort of squint your eyes a bit at the ragged yogis of the future, you’ll even be able to picture a whole forest.
Hot yoga teaches you to keep your gaze in the mirror, contemplate your own reflection, and meditate. When it’s all going to shit 50 years from now, I like to think that, in the face of the advancing apocalypse, instead of all the screaming and panicking you see in the movies, we would all be standing shoulder to shoulder, an army of lean and self-disciplined gurus, all whispering ‘Namaste’ and preoccupied only with ‘finding our inner stillness’.
