Yoga School Dropout by Lucy Edge
Travelling in India to Study Yoga: A Spiritual Journey?
A Quest for Deeper Meaning
Having become disillusioned with a successful career spent in advertising, the book’s author realizes that there must be more to life than shopping for handbags, endless deadlines and drinking copious amounts of Pinot Grigio. This leaves her other burgeoning love, yoga, to provide life’s answers and thus she resolves to make a pilgrimage to the birthplace of yoga, India.
Edge is refreshingly honest about her high hopes and expectations of the trip. Whilst she hopes to find her yogic guru and “merge my Eternal Self with the big pool of cosmic bliss that is the universe”, she also acknowledges her desire to return home “the embodiment of feminine perfection…a magnetic babe”.
Travelling Light?
It might all sound rather po-faced were it not for Edge's gently tongue-in-cheek, lightly self-satirizing voice, which characterises the tone of the novel throughout. This is sometimes a necessary antidote to what could easily have become a rather self-absorbed book of metaphorical and literal navel-gazing.
Edge has a light and breezy style, and as she describes her experiences of the numerous ashrams in which she studies and the various yogi’s and their contrasting wisdoms as though she were comparing different shopping boutiques back in London.
With typical honesty, Edge is always quick to acknowledge her own contradictions: “One minute I was beyond materialism and sleeping on an inch-thick mattress, the next I was dropping £130 in Amethyst.”
This may prove frustrating, however, for someone reading this book in order to gain a greater understanding of Yoga or the practice of Yoga. Edge acknowledges that she and the other students are often posture-obsessed and fixated on the physical body but the lack of a powerful enough sense of any inward or emotional journey may prove disappointing to some.
Yogic Chick-Lit?
Edge makes much of the contrast between her materialistic Prada-buying London existence with her girlfriends "the cappuccino girls" and the relatively frugal life of the ashrams. How much the reader would find this interesting or amusing would probably correlate with any attendant interest in Sex in the City.
Similarly, there is an ongoing sub-text of ‘will she won’t she’ have some kind of romance or sexual encounter, either with a fellow student or one of her teachers, the ‘swoony swami’. Understandable, given the heat and exoticism of India and all those sweaty bodies in unusual positions, but nothing really ever happens; there is no steamy sex, no love affair, and subsequently it just feels a little as though that element of the book was unnecessarily contrived to appeal to a demographic.
A Love Affair With India
Where Edge really succeeds is as a travel writer, her real love affair was evidently for the country itself. She evokes well the sights, sounds and smells of India in lively, unpretentious prose. This would be a great read for someone considering a first-time trip to the sub-continent or simply for someone who likes their travel writing to be page-turning and with an easy-going sense of humour.
Yoga School Dropout by Lucy Edge is published in the UK by Ebury Press (2006) an imprint of Ebury Publishing. ISBN 009189923-0
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