I am looking up at the underside of a Greek chair. Interlocking fibres that form the seat are held in place by three strong cords running from front to back; there are wire supports diagonally linking the chair legs, and the lower front strut now almost touches my forehead. My head and shoulders are on the floor, and the rest of my body is curved up and back over my head so that my feet can rest on the chair seat. This is what I know as hellasana (more accurately, halasana), a shoulder-stand modified to work with props to support different shapes and states of body. But it could be worse. Iyengar yoga, unlike more energetic forms like ashtanga yoga, uses blocks and straps and mats rolled up so that anyone can adopt versions of the ‘asanas’, poses in which we stretch muscles we never knew we had before. And, here in north-west Crete, we have found extraordinary new uses for chairs; we sit sideways, pulling ourselves against the backs, lean back and grasp the sides of the seats, and we even rest upside down with our legs stretched up and heads hanging between two Greek chairs.

Yoga would seem at first glance to be one of the quintessentially spiritual-therapeutic components of New Age subcultures, promising inner growth in the context of meditative postures and a harmonic relation with one's newly discovered self.