
What is Yoga?
– An interview with Paul Harvey on BBC Radio Bristol Feb 1986.
I. Yoga is often portrayed as sitting still perhaps in rather bizarre positions communicating with the depths of human relaxation and comprehension. How accurate a picture is that?
I am delighted to welcome to the Programme this afternoon Paul Harvey who among other things teaches Yoga at the Centre for Yoga Studies in Bath and at the Whiteladies Natural Health Clinic. You also, I think, have a couple of diplomas haven’t you?
PH. Yes I have though I feel that my main training has come not from diploma work but from the closer experience of studying and practising Yoga in India.
I. You’ve only recently come back from India I know and you spent what two years or so in India in the late seventies or early eighties?
PH. Yes that’s right.
I. Where did your own interest in Yoga come from then Paul?
PH. My own interest in Yoga came from a vague understanding of Indian thought and Indian philosophy in the late sixties and early seventies and from looking at the idea of meditation and at what meditation was.
One of the first things I found was that I couldn’t sit still. It was impossible to sit because of the stiffness in my back and the discomfort in my legs and it was my wife who saw an advert for a Yoga class. This was in 1972.
I. But…..A Yoga class? One imagines them all sitting with their legs behind their neck in rather odd positions as I mentioned before. Was that the picture you had in your own mind of Yoga at that time?
PH. I’m sorry to say that the first class I went to was like that. The teacher stood on his head and waved his stomach in and out. He had a rather large stomach so it was quite an extraordinary sight and when we finished the class we all went down to the pub afterwards.