Lance Kinseth,
48”x60, acrylic/gallery canvas, 2014
This post appeared in a shorter form in YogaIowa,
Summer 2014, Volume 2, Number 2.
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Bodhisattva Sheer For
Kat
AGING OFFERS MANY gifts: The building experiences of life
can offer a sense of color or subtlety to life rather than rigid black &
white, a capacity to find meaningfulness in events that were more easily overlooked
when younger, and a value for presence versus production. These qualities of subtlety and
meaningfulness and presence are values that are at the heart of yoga practice
itself. And so, aging with grace
and a sense of remaining young at heart might be optimized in yoga.
Yoga offers suppleness that is crucial at any age, but
especially as you age. Yoga can
attend to physical aspects that are more relevant in ageing: lower back,
shoulders and upper back, neck, and balance. Next to influenza, physical symptoms due to compression of
the lower back or lumbar region have been described as the second most frequent
reason for medical intervention.
Beyond muscular-skeletal systems, yoga can optimize the internal systems
of the body such as the respiratory, neural, endocrine, lymphatic,
cardiovascular, digestive, and overall energy systems.
It is important to find the type of yoga that fits with your
physical conditioning. Yoga
emphasizes stretching which people across all ages tend to avoid. This often means finding a gentle
yoga for most people at any age as point
of entry, and it can remain as a primary ongoing practice.
Part of the problem in considering yoga practice is in the
expectations one brings to the practice before one even begins. If you see someone bending over and
putting palms on the matt or head to knee, and you cannot do this or you push
hard in an attempt to do it, you are likely to feel frustrated and give
up.
Change your expectations. Be kind to yourself.
In Awakening The Spine,
Vanda Scaravelli admonishes us to free the body rather than control it, and to
allow the pose to come to you rather than try to rigidly assume a posture. In Yoga Beyond Belief, Ganga White reminds us that
Yoga is a field where everyone
can win, because winning is not about who does the best asana
but about
learning to do the best asana for your body in each moment.
***
IN THE SACRED AND PROFANE, Mircea Eliade describes how profane, everyday activities express the
sacred in a real yet indirect way.
As we age, we might begin to recognize miracles and sacredness and
exquisite intelligence in events that we once found banal or mundane or
ordinary or secondary. With age,
little tweaks and turns in events challenge our assumptions. Especially with the experiences of
loss, we are offered an opportunity to recognize preciousness. Dividing the world into “special”
and “banal” reflect our limits—sometimes
our benign innocence and sometimes our intentional rigidity—that we place on
reality more than life-as-it-is.
Body-mind work can optimize and perhaps accelerate this
opening to the world as it is, and even offer an authentic or very real sense
of grace, especially as we calm and still and begin to deeply listen. By linking consciousness to body, “body
learning” adds a less conceptual and less culturally biased input that involves
access to a more intuitive sense that is a billions-years tested wisdom
inherent in body design. And yet
it is important to acknowledge that an experience that seems to be purely
intuitive may continue to reflect predominant cultural influence and to
challenge this information. But by
returns to such practices, a transformative serendipity becomes possible.
