By Ian Parker

A paradox gnaws away at the idea of a commercially run retreat: other people. Kristina could remove her grateful guests from most of the irritants of their fretful urban lives, but a package retreat, like any package holiday, will incstina was assisted by Michael Anastassiades, a man with unusually large eyes that made him look like a naively painted figure in a Greek icon. Their students were: Kristina˙s mother a tour guide in Athens who is only 14 years older than her daughter, who in the evenings liked to speak of poetry and philosophy, sign love songs, and report unflaggingly on the Greek derivation of English words; two women friends of Michael˙s from Athens; two Palestinian sisters from Knightsbridge a banker and a combative barrister; an energetic South African woman who had once taught Latin but now did corporate catering in London - she banged the table with a fork when she spoke; and a man who worked in a homeless shelter in east London, and who seemed surprised to find himself there. ‘I didn˙t tell my friends it was a retreat,’ he said, recalling slight embarrassment.

When I asked Eleni Petroulas, who ran the hotel with her family, what she imagined the yoga students were doing each day in the room below the restaurant, she smiled and said, They sit on their little blue mats and move their little arms and legs about.’ This was accurate. Beause there were so few of us (this being the first summer of Yoga Practice holidays), we met in one group. At the start of the week, one part of the room was set aside for buffoons; as an almost-beginner to yoga and a beginner to astanga, I was asked to sit here, but we were later integrated among the lithe and flexible. Together we did as we were told by Kristina, who talked us through the precise sequence of yoga poses established more than 50 years ago by the founder of astanga, K Pattabhi Jois. Kristina is one of only a handoful of astanga teachers in the world formally recognised by Jois, who taught Kristina’s husband, Derek Ireland. At 87, Pattabhi Jois still runs classes in America, Europe and in his hometown of Mysore, in southern India.

We stood, and sat, and twisted our little arms and legs into ambitious positions, and tried to synchronise these movements with our breathing-and we did this relentlessly, continuously, in an atmosphere created by Kristina that was quite serious but not pious. Sometimes she or Michael would take someone’s arm or leg and tug it further into a pose. We learnt that when we had done this sequence a thousand times we could move on to the next sequence.