Not too long ago, I went to a Toronto Blue Jays baseball game. We arrived early and watched the players stretching.

The beefy players were on the ground with their legs coiled beneath them. They were curling their bodies like pretzels, arms flung to the side at right angles.

The stretches were not unusual. They could have been done by a million physical fitness enthusiasts across the country.

In fact, they looked remarkably similar to what I do in yoga classes. So much for the exoticism of yoga, or professional sport.

Indian police perform their early morning yoga exercises at their camp in Allahabad in June 2010. (Kumar Singh/Associated Press)

I recall reading a sarcastic piece in The New Yorker that suggested yoga postures were actually taken from British army exercise manuals.

The cynic suggested yoga was merely flim-flam, aimed at spiritually starved Westerners ever eager to feast on exotic fare.

Actually, the process is reversed. British army personnel translated and absorbed sacred Hindu practices in the 19th century, while India was still the "jewel in the crown" of the British Empire. The exercise manuals came later.

Get the yoke

Yoga, as all my teachers like to say, means "yoke," although I have read other translations, like "union" or "God."

Certainly, breathing is taken seriously, though in my classes, I rarely encounter anything more than a taste of New Age spirituality and a nod to stimulating certain pressure points, not unlike those found in Chinese acupuncture.

Like particle physicists, some yoga teachers like to talk about "energy" as a universal form of currency.

Of course, my teachers don't quite mean it the way Einstein did. They employ no mathematics, no E=MC2. For them, energy is really more a feel-good, poetic metaphor.

So why would an Ideas Guy put up with all this touchy-feely stuff, you ask?

Good question. I should confess upfront that this interminable agnostic has become a yoga convert.

The subtle body

Of course I am interested in all intellectual fashions and books are now being published about the social history of yoga.

Did you know it has more than a century pedigree on this continent alone?

In The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America, Stefanie Syman informs us that Ralph Waldo Emerson, the eminent dean of American letters in the 19th century, was fascinated by all things Eastern and was, in fact, part of a movement called The American Transcendentalists.

A similar Eastern fascination ran through Henry David Thoreau, of Walden fame. Syman calls him the "first in the line of American yogis."

Members of the yoga project known as Y-8 practise their Alsteryoga on frozen Alster Lake in the northern German town of Hamburg, in January 2010. (Christian Charisius/Reuters)

Who knows, maybe Thoreau conceived the idea for civil disobedience while counting his breath and bending over, observing the natural world.

In The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America, Robert Love tells the story of Pierre Bernard, an early 20th-century guru and showman, who had extraordinary breath control.

Bernard would enter into trances before large audiences while a large needle was passed through face.

He felt no pain or, if he did, he stored it in his cosmic consciousness.

Death trance

Bernard's highlight trick was called Kali Mudra, the death trance, and with it he became an overnight sensation.

He later opened a spa for the wealthy and the famous, like so many celebrity spiritualists since have done.

Bernard was a mix of spiritual athlete and entrepreneur — a favourite American combination. Later in his life he would own dog-racing tracks and even a bank.

But I am not so easily huckstered (I think). So why am I drawn to yoga?

Is it merely a fancy, more mindful way of stretching, good for those of us who work at desks and computers?

Let me suggest one possible answer, beyond faddish exoticism: It is that, despite attempts to promote yoga competitions and, dare I say, even acquire a spot as an Olympic sport, yoga is relentlessly non-competitive.

In classes, practitioners hardly ever look at each other. Even peeking seems tawdry.

People sidle up near each other, week after week, without a hello.

The Machinery of Judgment

To the uninitiated, this can seem like feckless narcissism. But this isn't a spinning class. Nobody cares what anybody else is doing.

Everyone is locked into his or her own embrace.

In fact, this may be one of the very few places in our modern, urban lives where we do not operate under what I will call the Machinery of Judgment.

While earning a living or performing however many tasks we do throughout our day, as social animals, we commonly operate on a terrain of comparison.

Just think of the column you are now reading. You can click "Recommend" or point those cartoon thumbs up and down to vote on the reader comments you want to agree or disagree with.

In this way, you are part of the great Machinery of Judgment, like the ancient Roman emperors consigning gladiators to live or die, by flicking a finger on a computer mouse.

Needless to say, journalism, the trade I practise, operates in much the same way.

We are relentlessly in the blame game: Did the cops overreact at the G20? The protestors? Tell us why.

Deep breath

As social creatures, we seem to spend much of our day rating, blaming and making critical (or even frivolous) comparisons.

Every problem is someone else's fault. Or society's. And, if that fails, we can always point to human nature.

But in yoga, my arms can't reach above my shoulders and some balance postures are nearly impossible. I have trouble standing on one leg. And even when my body is accommodating, it feels as stiff as a board.

But, I make my own adjustments and my fellow practitioners barely seem to give me a thought.

In my sublime stretching, unlike those Blue Jays splayed out on the artificial turf, I have, for the moment, escaped the Machinery of Judgment.

I have escaped the judgments of myself and others.

And so, as this is my time to take a break for the summer, dear reader, I will escape yours. I leave you with namaste, a yoga salutation, my bow to you.