By Ian Parker

Throughout the week-long yoga retreat held late last summer in a hotel high above a remote, empty bay on the Peloponnese peninsula, nothing was ever said about chakras, karma or journeys to inner peace. There were no scented candles, and no sign of the device I had read about in Yoga Int;with disappointment-‘Breathe!’

‘The important thing, the only thing, is the breathing,’ our teacher, Kristina Karitinos-Ireland, said afterwards. We were sitting on the hotel terrace, with birds of prey flying overhead and hard-boiled eggs on the table. Kristina-an open, easygoing woman in her early 30s-was born in Greece but now lives in Brighton, where she teaches a form of astanga yoga that, unfashionably, does not ask students to nod along in feigned agreement with something that is plainly untrue. ‘In England, people want to see yoga teachers as demi-gods,’ she said. ‘People have tried to find a religious aspect in astanga, but they don’t realise that it is what it is. It’s the practice itself.’ Then, after some prompting, she took hold of her leg as if it were a piece of firewood and put it behind her head.

The class has lasted two testing hours, during which Kristina had said ‘Breathe!’ about every 10 seconds and also sometimes given more mysterious instructions, such as ‘Hands should be opposite the head.’ When our hands were not opposite the head, she had said, ‘What is that?’ Her style, which has at frist seemed sternly unadorned, became beguiling in time; and now, as we began a day of almost incess mantra, battered mile after mile by duelling ballads.