This Is Guernsey

Most of us can only dream of making the great escape from everyday pressures to discover inner happiness. But one Guernsey woman did just that by taking her yoga mat along too. Emma Despres shares the highs and lows of her travel journal and reveals why it changed her life LITTLE could I have imagined on 1 January 2004, as I lay on the settee, Bridget Jones-like, nursing a new year hangover, that the direction of my life was about to change.

Of course, like everyone else, I’d made a number of resolutions. The usual stuff - stop smoking, do more travelling, read more, eat healthily and be happy. But, also like everyone else, I expected to have broken them all by the end of the first month.

However, for some reason, I felt that this year was going to be different. I was determined. I had been unsettled for some time with my former job in the finance industry as a team leader in an accountancy firm. But I also felt I had little choice as it paid the mortgage and gave me the lifestyle and material possessions I bought to make me feel happy.

But who was I kidding? It’s like they always say - you can never buy happiness. You are simply attempting to fill the empty void. In short, I was stressed, miserable and, at times, very depressed.

Which is why I decided to seek out yoga. I’d read a few articles, all suggesting it was the ideal way to cope with such symptoms. The actual postures, as well as dealing with the physical, influence the chemical balance of the brain. It therefore has an overall holistic impact, relaxing the body and calming the mind.

I started attending classes twice a week and then, with the help of a book, began to practise a few days a week on my own at home. After a couple of months I was doing six days a week and taking my yoga mat with me on trips abroad. I wasn’t aware of it at the time but subtly my whole lifestyle was changing.

I read up on nutrition and started eating a more balanced and healthy diet. I lost any inclination to eat meat, although continued to eat fish for nutritional reasons and cut back on alcohol. It is a recognised fact that regularly practising yoga will naturally draw you towards lifestyle choices that nourish your well-being.

Yoga also brings self-awareness, enabling you to analyse what motivates you. The mind has a tendency to be preoccupied with the external world - we often guide our lives by our ego. I had been deluded by a material existence. But times were changing. I became more aware than ever about how unhappy my lifestyle was making me. And I realised that the only person who could do anything about it was me.I resigned from my old job and took a three-month contract position to provide me with the flexibility I needed to investigate my career options.

A few weeks later, my brother - who I co-owned a house with - confirmed that he was going travelling for a few months before moving to the UK. Yet more change. So we decided to sell our house, neither of us wanting the responsibility and burden of covering the payments. Thankfully, my parents agreed that I could move back home short-term with my cats while I decided what I actually wanted to do with my life.

It was time to start listening to what I really needed, not what my mind wanted. This was quite a frustrating process and it wasn’t until I was moaning to a friend about my predicament that I finally came across the answer. I mentioned that all I really wanted to do was to go travelling and do yoga. Hey presto - there it was.

I didn’t even realise what I had said until my friend pointed it out to me.

My immediate reaction was to deny this was even an option.

After all, at 29, shouldn’t I be thinking of settling down and getting a pension? But I knew that was simply not going to bring me happiness. So what to do? Where to go? And just how was I going to tell my parents?

I played around with a few ideas, but, strangely, I already knew where I wanted to go - Byron Bay, Australia. I made contact with Matt James who teaches the Ashtanga style of yoga around the world and who suggested I stop over in Singapore on the way to Australia to attend one of his classes.

My brother was due to travel around New Zealand so I decided to join him for a few weeks.

And I have a friend in Melbourne, a part of Australia I have never visited. So after an hour on he telephone to a Travelbag representative, it was all booked.

To ease myself into travelling solo, I booked a week’s yoga retreat at the wonderfully named ‘The Hill that Breathes’, in Urbino, Italy. Situated within 100 acres of untouched woodland in the Marche region of north-east Italy. It is so called because there are literally tens of thousands of pine trees - the most prolific producers of oxygen and chi-energy. This was certainly a rural ‘back to basics’ experience, including daily yoga, wholesome organic vegetarian meals, walking in the hills, guided meditation, breathing work and even a spot of belly dancing in the tepee.

Needless to say, I did experience a renewed sense of clarity on my return to Guernsey.

After a few recovery days at home, I then set off on my main trip, first stop Singapore. I attended a few classes at Gaia Yoga Studio just off Orchard Road, the equivalent to London’s Oxford Street. The majority of these were the epitome of commercial yoga - nothing more than a sophisticated form of callisthenics. Thankfully, the disappointment was short-lived, as Matt James’ Ashtanga class was amazing.

There were 15 of us crammed into a small studio, with stifling humidity and no air conditioning.

Within minutes the sweat was flowing and at times we had trouble trying not to slip off our mats.

This was clearly hardcore ashtanga and its effects were immediately obvious - I was able to stretch into positions far more easily than normal. I was buzzing for hours afterwards.

After a few days in Singapore, I flew to Brisbane and caught the coach to Byron Bay, 183km south, over the border in New South Wales. I was intending to stop there for two weeks, but ended up staying six.

I didn’t realise it initially, but the town of Byron is renowned for its healing energy, which is said to ‘attract people and hold them until they are ready to leave’. Discovered in the 1960s by those seeking an alternative lifestyle, Byron today is a mecca for surfers, hippies, writers, travellers and yoga. It is like a village set beside the main beach - a long strip of white, powdery sand - where fast food chains have been banned by the local community and strict height limits have been imposed on buildings. Basically, it is my kind of Utopia.As luck would have it, I was staying in a laid-back hostel, 20 minutes’ walk out of town and situated a minute’s walk from Byron Bay Yoga Studio and the inspirational John Ogilive.

John, who has been practising for 25 years, is married to a Guernsey girl and taught yoga in the island many years ago. He is truly dynamic and energetic, someone who encouraged confidence and enthusiasm.

Primarily integrating the different yoga styles of Ashtanga and Iyengar, classes with John were challenging, yet fun and joyful.

He had us doing unsupported handstands, back bends up and down the walls and headstands using chairs. After one session, I was hooked.

In my first class I also met Frida Lezius, a yoga teacher and a wonderful massage therapist. She concentrates on clearing physical and emotional blockages within the body, enabling a deeper recognition and dissolving of hardened old defences. While the massages themselves were brutal, Frida taught me much about the breath and the effect this has on the body. Before I met her, I had never realised the extent to which our emotions manifest themselves physically within the body. Things started to make a bit more sense.

Another lucky meeting was with Lance Schuler. Having taught yoga for over 20 years around the world, his classes - again a mixture of Ashtanga and Iyengar - are dynamic and encouraging and enhance vitality, flexibility, strength, stamina and the balance of the body and the mind.

Because I was doing so much yoga in Byron - sometimes six hours a day - for a while I felt as if I was on an emotional roller coaster. I didn’t realise this until much later, but all the yoga was clearing away years of embedded emotions.

During this time I would go through periods of insomnia and then be plagued by really vivid dreams featuring people and situations I had not thought about for years. It was as if my mind was cleansing as much as my body. Physically my body was detoxing and I lost my tolerance to alcohol, experiencing a bad hangover after a mere glass-and-a-half of red wine. I also finally lost my desire to smoke cigarettes, a miserable addiction for years, and found myself eating only raw food - lots of vegetables, fruit, hummus, seeds and nuts, muesli, soya yoghurt, cold brown rice and wholemeal pitta bread. Looking back, it really was an intense experience.

It felt as if people came in and out of my life in Byron for a reason. It was strange.

I left after five weeks to go to New Zealand to meet my brother. I can make excuses - the weather was bad, I had driven around New Zealand previously and didn’t enjoy doing it a second time, the yoga was not as good, it was expensive, I wanted to be on my own. But the truth is, I felt drawn back to Byron after only 11 days.

I was positively relieved just to be in Australia again.

My last week or so was excellent. Not only could I feel the changes in both my body and my mind, but I realised how many friends I had made and how well I knew the town. I had created my own Byron life without realising it and, more importantly, a few future opportunities arose with John, Frida and Lance. It was as if I needed to go back to ensure I return in the future on the next stage of my travels.

I ran into three Guernsey people I know from my days at the Grammar School in my last few days in Byron, all on their travels. This was good timing as it brought me back down to earth. And with a four-day stop over to visit a Guernsey friend now living in St Kilda, Melbourne, I was able to adjust to life outside Byron.

As for going home, well the Christmas Day swim that year at the Bathing pools was slightly more challenging than usual. But I woke up on 1 January 2005 without a hangover, having read and experienced far more than ever during the year before. And yes, feeling happy.

So it just goes to show, I suppose, how quirky life can sometimes be, as well as how it can be perfectly possible to fulfil those life-changing resolutions - if you really are determined.

Article posted on 2nd April, 2005 - 12.00am