Six Things I Know About Yoga at Age 60

GRATITUDE FIRST.  Being 60 is like careening down a giant highway, seeing loved ones veer suddenly off the exits, never to be seen again.  You have become intimate with the random, mysterious nature of life. You know for certain that change is constant, always reforming, tearing down, building up, dissolving, and creating.  Every time, every single day that you have the opportunity to practice, you bow with great appreciation for that.

YOGA REQUIRES ENDURANCE, a falling in love kind of endurance that gets you up in the morning and on the mat.  Or guides your feet to class after a long day of work.  It's intuiting somewhere in the distance the form of yourself that you came into this world with, your unique body mind heart print.  Yoga mysteriously takes you closer to that, as it fine-tunes the way your heart beats, the way the chemicals flow in your bloodstream, the way you inhabit space, the field of your awareness. Love is how you overcome obstacles.

PHYSICAL FLEXIBILITY IS OVER-RATED, and mental flexibility is too little cultivated.  What use is the ability to put your foot behind your head, if you’re snappish and impatient, judgmental and unloving, with every little thing, including yourself?  I’ve known yogis with bodies like taffy and minds like blocks of stone, and newbies to yoga with their sweet stiff bodies, untalented in the kinesthetic realm, yet glowing with sweetness and open minded.  Let’s use all our practices to cultivate a mind that fluidly meets the daily round of life with creativity and wisdom.

ASANA IS IMPORTANT.  We do asanas to call forth inside ourselves the archetypal energies and images that each form or sequence brings to bear on our psycho-spiritual selves.  This process mysteriously awakens our blocked creativity, our insight, and our healing powers.  Asana clears us, it opens the sky inside us.  With just a few dedicated yoga practices a week, our wise and grateful bodies and spirits respond overwhelmingly with increased strength, vigor, and clarity.

ASANA ISN'T EVERYTHING.  We love our asana, and it loves us, but it's only the tip of the yoga iceberg.  The great texts of yoga are a vast resource of the highest investigations of the human soul and mind on this planet, a profound gift to the human species, from the Vedas to the Upanishads, from the Bhagavad Gita to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and on to later iterations of these traditions in the Tantric stream, like the Siva Sutras and the Vijnanabhairava Tantra.  Glittering gifts and endless pathways of insight await any who delve with devotion into these living texts.

YOGA MEANS MEDITATION.  If you step your toes into the texts mentioned above, you will observe the primacy of place that is given to the practice of meditation.  Meditation is the great, courageous, and intimate process of being with oneself, an outrageously radical thing to do in this culture of stimulus, constant distraction and external focus.  Meditation is developing a relationship with the eternal presently abiding.  It is making friends with all the ways that life expresses itself in the form of you.  Meditation is the great heart path of the yogi, the way to walk in the sky, the way to your birthright of freedom.

May all of your practices be blessed always with the fruit of inner recognition.