3. No better way to start my WOW days

Two of the many things that I love to do are practice yoga and sing. (Not both at the same time of course. Though, I’m sure somewhere in the world there’ll be some sort of singing yoga class…!) So, I felt like the Festival’s morning programmes had been written especially for me when I saw that the first session on Saturday was ‘WOW Morning Yoga’ and the first session on Sunday was a ‘Dawn Chorus Sing Along’.

I’m a fairly recent convert to yoga. My old self dismissed it — without ever really trying it — as ‘simply’ stretching. I thought it was too slow, too spiritual and sort of silly.

How very, very wrong I was.

I can’t remember what prompted me a couple of years ago to try a yoga class while on holiday at La Santa Sport, but I’m ever so glad I did. By the end of that session I was converted and I’ve been regularly practicing at home or in classes ever since.

Every yoga session’s different. Sometimes I feel more flexible than other times, sometimes I can hold the balances for longer than other times. But all times when I roll up my mat at the end of a practice I feel so very much better — both physically and mentally — than I did when I rolled it out at the beginning.

This morning’s yoga in Perth Concert Hall was no different and — after spending an hour with a lovely group of women, of mixed age and ability (like most yoga classes), under the gentle guidance of a local teacher — I left feeling relaxed, energised and ready to embrace whatever Women of the World has in store for me over the course of the rest of today.

After a quick change of clothes I’m now in the main hall sitting waiting for ‘WOW Views on the News’. It’s billed as a flick through the morning’s headlines, with an emphasis on what those headlines might mean for women and girls.

The hall feels vast, and I actually feel a bit lost in it.

I think it’s a combination of the contrast in size between this space and the last space I was in (a huge and rather cool auditorium as opposed to the small and cosy studio where the yoga practice was held) and the contrast in the number of people in this hall last night and this morning. Last night the auditorium seats were mostly filled and this morning many of them are vacant.

There’s no-one sitting either side of me (in fact, there’s no-one sitting in my row), and there’s no-one sitting in front of or behind me. There are plenty of other people in the hall, but it’s such a huge space to fill, and we all seem to have chosen seats as far away from each other as possible.

I kind of want to stand up and shout out, ‘everyone move up and in, let’s all be in this together!’, but I think I’ll not…!

Instead, I’ll use this as an opportunity to carry on where I left off during Savasana at the end of the yoga class; being mindful and thankful of the opportunity to just sit here, enjoy the peace, and do absolutely nothing till this morning’s newspaper reviewers, Jude Kelly and Val McDermid, take to the stage.

Well, nothing, of course, except scribble in my notebook…

(From my notebook, Saturday 28 October 2017, 10.15am)