It takes a long time to become young.
—Pablo Picasso
“A seventy-eight-year-old man walks into a yoga class” may sound like the opening line of a joke, but with Relax into Yoga for Seniors , Kimberly Carson and Carol Krucoff propel us from contemporary stereotypes of aging onto an extraordinary bridge between modern Western culture and ancient Eastern mind-body-spirit traditions. This novel bridge literally opens a transformative gateway to those of us who continuously redefine “seniors” as “everyone else at least ten years older than me.”
For almost a decade, Kimberly Carson and Carol Krucoff have matured a unique approach, teaching Western yoga instructors the adaptation of yoga practice through their “Therapeutic Yoga for Seniors” programs at Duke Integrative Medicine/Duke University Medical Center. Now the authors offer their combined practical skills and vision directly to those of us older folk whose breathing, mobility, strength, flexibility, balance, joy, and overall peace of mind may feel impinged upon by our aging, by pain, or simply by the effort to avoid feeling lost in the midst of an ever-accelerating Western civilization.
Factually, as the authors point out, seniors are the most rapidly growing sector of the Western population. As most of us will come to experience, Western culture spends far more time considering what to do with the elderly—costs of health care, high-tech tools to further extend life, specialized facilities to manage their care—than it spends considering elders as sources of wisdom or lynchpins for family and community. And even in our “eighty is the new fifty” era, neither our culture nor our medical sciences have a ready understanding of what an optimal approach to extended life spans actually entails.
Also factually, the progression of age through senior years brings with it an excruciating Western medical calculus. Just by virtue of age, seniors are more likely to develop infirmities of the body—high blood pressure, heart trouble, stroke and neurologic disorders, arthritis, bone fractures, and kidney and lung disease, just to name a few. And, just by virtue of age, seniors are more likely to both develop complications from their disorders and suffer complications from the pills and surgeries used to treat those disorders.
Spiritually, not surprisingly, Western seniors thus commonly experience aging in daily life as an ineluctable path of progressive debility, powerlessness, and isolation—a lived experience palpably connoting “the end of days.” Immersed in such daily experience, this sense of the fading of the flesh is often managed with the mind’s most reductionist dark-humor baseball bats, such as “aging is not for wimps,” or “aging stinks, but it beats the alternative.”
But aging does not have to be this way, and Relax into Yoga for Seniors provides a comfortable and accessible guide to transforming our senior years into a very different physical, mental, and spiritual life experience.
Kimberly and Carol reach out to seniors beginning with the most familiar and comfortable crossroad of East and West: the breath. They invite seniors to begin wherever we are in the moment—whether in pain, recovering from a procedure, feeling stiff as a board, or feeling pretty good and wanting to stay that way or better. The authors guide us to approach aging not as an evolving disability but as an enriched and natural time for a new beginning. This deep resource uniquely empowers us to pursue a personal practice of healing and growth.
Perhaps most important, they reach out to us with an antidote to Western aging’s social and personal isolation: reconnecting us within; turning the mind to heal the body; turning the body to heal the mind; turning the practice of yoga, centered around the very breaths that we draw, into a process of revitalizing the Spirit. And through revitalizing mind, body, and Spirit, yoga practice promotes a reconnection to the world around us, recovering the world as a place where beauty, joy, and the wisdom of elders not only coexist but actively complement one another.
The authors also recognize another unique dimension of the reality for Western seniors interested in yoga: physical safety. Unlike Eastern seniors, for whom yoga asanas (postures) or tai chi forms may be practiced from childhood into life’s later stages, Western seniors interested in yoga for the very first time warrant more personalized approaches to beginning a safe, steady, and joyful practice. Kimberly and Carol thus emphasize awareness of the body, including some fundamental knowledge about how the body changes with age relevant to initiating a yoga practice in later stages of life.
These important safety principles are fully contextualized in the vision of the real fruits of relaxing into yoga: gently advancing breathing capacity, strength, mobility, balance, and awareness itself, from wherever we begin today toward a more vital, fluent, connected, and empowered presence in both our inner and outer worlds. This gentle book provides a bridge between East and West, an ancient path adapted particularly to transform “the end of days” into the blossoming of a new stage of life and living in the modern Western world. Why would a seventy-eight-year-old man walk into a yoga class…indeed. Read on.
—Mitchell W. Krucoff, MD, FACC, FAHA, FSCAI
Professor, Medicine/Cardiology
Duke University Medical Center/Duke Clinical Research Institute