The Therapeutic Wisdom of Yoga: Yoga and Optimal Aging

The focus for this year’s online August training concerns optimal aging: how yoga provides a toolset for addressing the challenges and obstacles that come with age. Aging is a lifelong natural process, and it’s never too early to refine your practice for healthy aging, and never too late either! This is not a ‘yoga for old people’ training, though it will be designed to be accessible and enlightening for older participants And teachers working with older students. We have a broad palate of practices to draw from, though asana is usually the most emphasized. With regard to asana, we’ll take a different perspective from the usual emphasis on flexibility, emphasizing fundamental principles of fascial fitness that will transform your perspective and approach to asana practice. The fascia is central to the fundamental systems of the body which suffer inflammation with age, and yoga practices including asana make use of our built-in anti-inflammatory mechanisms. These mechanisms are not just part of our work with muscles, tendons, and connective tissue, but also of our work with the breath, which are accessed in particular ways in breath practices. It follows that we’ll be broadening our perspective beyond asana to include pranayama and more. The ‘more’ is an added dimension that is all to often ignored in yoga is that of mudra and drishthi (the gaze or focus of the eyes). We will be exploring the dimension of mudra especially in connection with its usefulness in breath practices in special after-sessions, which follow after the main lecture topic each day.