COW FACE POSE VARIATIONAging is totally uncelebrated in our society. I
wish there was some way to change the attitude
of Western culture toward aging and the aged.
Because it’s so stupid to try to fight it. We all get
there—we all age. You can’t do anything except
to stay as healthy and mindful as possible, and to
try to get as much as you can out of life. Am I at
peace with aging? Nobody is at peace with aging,
if they’re honest about it.
The majority of people at a lot of yoga studios
are young. I mean young. I took a three-day work-
shop recently, and half the people in there were
decades younger than I am. At my usual studio,
there’s a wonderful age range. Still, at seventy-
eight, I’m the oldest person in the room, for sure.
It doesn’t bother me at all. I’m just used to it.
If everybody in the entire room is twenty-two,
they might look at me sort of weirdly when I
walk in, but I am more self-conscious about how
I look as an older person when I’m in front of
my own mirror at home and I see that my skin
isn’t the way it was twenty or thirty years ago.
But when I’m doing yoga, I don’t even think
about that.
Everyone’s whole body is changing all the
time. It isn’t the same between the left and
the right sides, between morning and evening,
between today and Thursday. What happens to
me—and this might be age and it might not—is
that I find that just because I’ve nailed a pose
doesn’t mean I can do it every time. Some days
I can do pose X but not pose Y, and some days I
can do Y but not X. Some days I can do both, and
some days I can do neither.
You learn in yoga to be able to say, “Yeah,
today my balance is terrible. Yesterday my bal-
ance was wonderful.” You can accept these
things, instead of saying, “I did this yesterday;
why can’t I do it today?” You can’t do it today
because your body is different today.
And it doesn’t matter. I don’t mean this as a
platitude, and I’m far from a Pollyanna. But what-
ever you are is what you have. That’s what is. You
might as well allow it to be OK.