This is changing the face of yoga. And this is episode one 10. My guest is Linda Lang and Linda was on, , earlier in the year, but she said something that really intrigued me. I have taught seniors, mature adults, , for over 10 years now. And the way she talked about it was very, very different from the way I taught. And I wanted to explore that a bit more. , I'm going to let Linda introduce herself and then we're going to start. So thank you Linda for coming on again. I appreciate that. And tell the listeners a little bit about yourself.

01:28                                     Thank you, Stephanie. I started practicing yoga in my late teens. I was part of a generation introduced to yoga when the Beatles brought their guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to the United States. So my foray into eastern philosophy and yogic practices began in my late teens and early twenties. I will be 66 years old this s mer. I always wanted to be a yoga teacher, but did not become one until the late 1990's so now I am full 20 years into a teaching career. During that period of time for about 15 years, I taught as full time as I possibly could in studios, community centers, memory units in assisted living centers. I worked for eight years at the Center for Integrative Medicine at George Washington University where I worked with patients in a clinical setting and taught medical students electives on yoga therapy so that they could learn how to embody the benefits of practice. And then take it into their medical practices, knowing that they would affect far more people in the course of their lives than I, than I ever might. So that's my work in a nutshell. I do my best to educate in the greater community in the Washington DC areas through the Smithsonian institution there, the Smithsonian associates educational programs, and I mentor other yoga therapists and train yoga teachers when I can.

03:18                                     You have the whole spectrum there. I appreciate the communication issue. I  think we were talking earlier and we decided the first thing we're going to start with is what does it mean or when do you become old? What criteria would you be looking at, Linda, if, if you had to define it.

03:46                                     Yes. Well, if I had to define it, I would emphasize the, the experience of working with individuals in their late forties and fifties who, because of illness or debilitating conditions or the impact of medicines, chemotherapy or radiation, accidents, trauma might consider themselves old because they are no longer feeling vital and already feeling quite limited on many different levels. So I can tell you, I've met people in their forties and fifties who have the characteristics of people who reach into old age and began to experience frailty on many different levels.

                                                I think of older students, quite frankly, as anyone over 60 years old is an older student, which doesn't mean that I have not taught headstands to people in their sixties. I have so you can approach older students and people with potentially severe limitations in some ways, but continue to teach them asana practice in ways that raises the bar in terms of what they believe they can do themselves. So, age is a huge factor, obviously and what makes a student old. But I just wanted to be clear that some people really do feel quite limited when they're younger than that.

05:38                                     And I think you brought up a really good point, which was self-limiting thoughts. That's it sometimes isn't so much what's actual as what you think it is. And I think that's an important topic that we might want to explore a little bit.

06:05                                     It is one of the greatest obstacles and because yogic philosophy focuses a great deal on obstacles and the deity of Ganesha is the remover of obstacles. It's nice to be able to literally bring these very profound images into the classroom, working with students, particularly older students and remind them that the stories that they tell you about themselves physically are meaningful to them. But when I hear people talk about what they cannot do or things they no longer do, I asked them to think about things in terms of realistically, is it because you're choosing not to do it anymore because you physically cannot do it anymore. Really important to differentiate on because you know, Stephanie as well as I do that you start to do something in a class and somebody will say, oh, I can't do that. And then you give them some modifications and 30 seconds later they're doing it. So, my suggestion to anyone who wants to know more about self-limiting thinking is to think of the things that you feel you cannot do or in the past did not think that you could do that you have already overcome. That's our job as teachers working with people who are feeling very limited because of age. Our responsibility is to eliminate possibilities for them to modify practices so that they can feel successful but still hold out hope that they actually will be able to achieve something beyond what they might expect for themselves.

07:58                                     You said in our earlier podcasts that you actually help them set goals.

08:04                                     I do.

08:06                                     And, and could you kind of explain that and give us an example of what you mean by that?

08:14                                     Yes, I'd like to differentiate intentionality from goal setting. If I come to the mat with an intention of quieting and calming my mind while stretching and relaxing my body. That's a very nice intention. But if my goal is to create strength, then I approached my practice with a different intention. I'm being very specific that there's an outcome. Goals have outcomes. So let's imagine well this just happened to me this morning. One of my students is 82 years old and she works with a physical trainer. She's got a lot of individual strengths in her body, but she has some inherent weaknesses in her feet and her hands. So if we don't pay attention to building strength from the tips of her fingers up into her knuckles, her palms, her wrists, all the way up to her elbows and shoulders, whatever strengths she has and her biceps and triceps and her trapezius muscles and whatever's going on in her neck and back. If she loses strength in her hands, she will become diminished with her strength in the rest of her body. Same thing is true with her feet. So we set a goal this morning of being able to literally to bear weight longer in her hands, doing a variety of different postures that we're not totally weight bearing, where she had a lot of control over her movement and she was ecstatic because she started off saying, oh, my arms are tired, my shoulders hurt already. We just went immediately to the modifications and she said, oh, this is great. Oh, Oh, if I just do it, isometrically, oh, I really can feel my strengths there. Oh, I really feel the weakness there, or I really feel the vulnerability in my neck. So by being clear about the goal, she started sensing things in her body and asking me questions and giving me feedback that I could use to illuminate her challenge and help her feel successful by building on existing strengths rather than saying, oh gosh, well, I guess that's just going to be a weak spot and going on to something else. Another goal, for instance, it's really important with older students is being able to walk longer distances to build endurance and resilience, able to hold certain poses longer. So let's say my goal with you, let's say that when we practice tree pose, you always hold onto the wall or the chair. My goal with you might to be, you're going to practice tree pose using my index fingertip. And then the ultimate goal is for you to be able to practice tree pose without using a support, having it close enough by, but to begin to play with the possibility of becoming stronger, more balanced, more grounded. Another goal might be to say, you know, normally we practice 15 minutes doing these specific asanas. Let's expand to half an hour. What is my expectation of you in your home? Practice your homework. I don't want you to just practice this for 10 minutes once a day. I'd like you to practice it for 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes at night. That kind of thing. Finite goals.

12:14                                     These are all more or less physical goals - balance and endurance and resilience. Do you also work with them on emotional or mental goals?

12:26                                     Yes. This same woman this morning has a lot of aches and pains and she said to me, Oh, you must be so tired of me complaining. And, I said, you know, for me to grow tired of your complaining isn't really part of the nature of my experience with you. You're complaining is your way of communicating to me your frustration. And my question to you is, is what are you really frustrated with? So the goal setting that she and I have has to do with acceptance. She's 82 years old. She's going to have aches and pains. What I did tell her was that given the nature of what she complains to me about, I would take every one of her complaints in the grand scheme of things, it's what she's complaining about is not so bad as I see it. And she wanted to know more about that. So I'm not afraid to open the door to inquiry through yogic lens, I'm not trained as a psychologist, but when someone says to me, asks me how I feel about, their complaining to me, it's an opportunity. Another example of this is when she's in Shavasana and another student that I work with, their hands start speaking. You know what I mean? They get a little impatient and all of a sudden I see the hands starting to move. And so it's an opportunity during the Shavasana or guided imagery to say, I notice that impatience is present. I see movement in your hands telling me that you're feeling restless. And then I'll give them some breathing cues. I might ask them to place their hands on their belly. So for instance the goal of my noticing, I will be very clear about it. I will ask them to put their hands on their belly and a specific mudra. I will tell them what the intention of that mudra is. And that for me it would be a goal, help them set the goal of calming and comforting themselves whenever impatience or restlessness is present.

15:18                                     You're basically giving them a tool to help manage that. Did you ever ask them or give them the invitation to kind of explore why they're restless during Shavasana?

15:35                                     You know, I have. And usually the answer has to do with the fact that people are challenged by stillness. They're happy to move at my instruction or invitation. They're happy to try the pranyam. Lying quietly in the presence of another person has a certain intimacy to it. And sometimes somebody will say, it just feels weird for me to be lying here quietly with my eyes closed or open in front of you while you're just talking to me and I'm not doing anything. So the answer to your question is yes, I will ask them, but not all the time. Sometimes I will simply notice and invite them into the opposite of what I'm noticing. So if I noticed restlessness, I invite them into patience by guiding them and giving them something else to think about. Yes, I think it's important to inquire as to where that might be coming from. I will do that. But it depends if it's during the course of class, but if it's already in Shavasana and I want to try to set a tone that they can remember, I might not, I might not do the inquiry then maybe if I'm doing yoga Nidra with them, it might be more appropriate to inquire, but sometimes I just will guide them to, to a state of mind that would be more, what shall I say, appropriate.

17:20                                     I understand. I'm just fascinated by this idea. I feel like I've really concentrated on the physical issues of people aging and that I haven't been as noticing or open to some of the mental issues. I have, as I'm sure you do, that insomnia can be a problem. I always do a Yoga Nidra at the end and that always went very well. But I know what you're talking about. That's the first thing I would do as I was talking, I was looking around and saying, is there anyone restless here? Is there anyone that's not really going into it? And yeah, I think that's something you do, but I never, addressed it.

18:15                                     You have permission, you have permission to do that. And I think that that's part of your voice. And I will tell you that I think it's one of the things that has made the biggest difference in my teaching when I ask someone to come into bridge pose, which I very rarely practice bridge unless it's at the end of a session because that's just the sequencing that I like to use. It could be an hour long session or it can be a 20 minute session, but bridge is always a transition from an active dynamic aspect of practice moving into quieter, more yinful mode. So I always talk about transition in bridge. Setu bandhu is a construction where your head and your shoulders are in one place, but your feet are in a very different place. And I might even invite them into a visual imagery of what that might be, but especially working well, people of all ages, but especially when you're working with older population transitions are profound and rarely discussed. So in bridge pose, I invite them into the idea of this is a transitional pose from one part of practice to the other. Just the way there are things in your life right now that are in transition. And I want you to savour this pose as a symbol of transition. And breathe softly, deeply, gently. And so I build the experience of being in bridge pose into something metaphorical. The other thing I want to tell you is that all of my poses, so imagine you're standing with people in there in mountain pose, they close mountain pose at the end of every post, I have people close the poses. You bring your hands in front of your heart and Anjali Mudra you close the pose and you keep your hands in front of your heart until you begin the next pose. Because every pose has a beginning, a middle and an end. So let's say you're practicing eagle pose and so your hands are together in front of heart and you get the guidance to float into Eagle and very frequently people fall out of eagle pose and then they step back in and then they step out. But when it's over, it's over. And in a yoga pose, if you're practicing eagle and you lose your balance or control, you step out, you close the pose. It's just a pose. So you close it and then we talk about control. And so over a short period of time the person in your class or the people in your class all begin to acknowledge that I use the control I have at the beginning, in the middle and then I learned to step out of my asana with control and I close the pose. But if I lose control I just close the pose anyway. So by teaching, people about transition and process and beginning, middle and end, you opened the door to deeper conversation.

22:02                                     Yes I can see that. That would be something that is very easy to take off your mat and think about how much control do I have? And walking, not walking away, but closing something down that really needs to be closed down. Because sometimes, at least I used to run into students who were really, well, the word you used was acceptance, which was, you know, no, I know I'm this age and yes, my body's changed, but I can still do all this stuff. Well, okay, but have you thought about doing it this way? I really loved that idea of closing the pose. I never have done that, but I just might take that one up. I just think it has real value.

23:01                                     People move through life with certain sets of expectations and believe that part of my responsibility as a teacher of yoga is to help people have realistic expectations. And sometimes that can be demoralizing. It's my responsibility to keep it uplifting and life-affirming. So I might have realistic expectations for one student who at the age of 72, retired and immediately fell into quicksand, emotional quicksand, psychological quicksand, physical quicksand. It manifest as a quick onset of arthritic conditions. Die hard, tough man who went through a series of falls, triggered by one very terrible fall and we have been in the process over the last two and a half years of reclaiming strength.

                                                Now, something else I want to talk about teaching older students, and this is really important given our scope of practice as yoga teachers, it's really important that your students know the impact of side effects of the medications they're taking. It doesn't come up in yoga classes in the community, but it will come up when you start teaching older people because there is a tendency, unfortunately for people to be on more medicines. I can't tell you how many people I've worked with who have after hour classes sat down with their physicians and gone through the physical complaints that they have had once they realized that the onset was coincidental with taking these medicines.

25:17                                     So in our work it's critically important for us to be very clear with students that some of the things that they may talk about in terms of self-limiting or aches and pains that create something called kinesiophobia, which is fear of movement can really arise from side effects of medicine.

25:46                                     Yes. When I had my intro forms, I always asked how much medicine they were taking. And I was sometimes just appalled and 15, 18 different kinds of pills during the day. And I thought, how can anyone figure out how all of those side effects are acting and interacting? It's a very important thing to do because often it does affect balance rather badly. And so that's something you want to be aware of and I'm kind of anti-pills these days.

26:29                                     It's easy to be, but it's important for people to know that many cholesterol lowering drugs create extreme joint pain drugs and not sure what family Tamoxifen is in, in terms of, of the type of drug that some people will be put on a five year regimen after a cancer treatment. Those drugs can create inordinate joint pain that simply go away when the drug is discontinued at the end of those five years that people don't know it. There's this fearfulness and this is the other thing that's really important when we're working with older students is that there are legitimate fears. The fear, I mean, not that no fear is ever not legitimate, but if my short term memory seems to be fading and I'm taking Lipitor and I stopped taking Lipitor, the chances are very good that my short term memory will be better. And that's a side effect that's on the bottle. So we need to be aware as teachers that without coming across inappropriately, we want our students to be as well informed as they can possibly be about what they're experiencing in their bodies. And why and continue to try to build strengths where there seems to be weakness, but be really careful because if, if I have a lot of pain in my shoulders, I'm going to be afraid to move and that fear alone is going to trigger pain. So that's the other thing I would, I would say in this realm of working with people who are older and whose bodies may be becoming more compromised and more compromised because of the impact of medicines, we need to know more about what our students are experiencing and why and tailor our asana and pranayama practice with them. And whatever philosophical discussions we have to really try to help them cope with what can be quite overwhelming.

28:48                                     Well, you really wouldn't want to make a decision of taking something like, the cancer drug that supposedly keeps it from coming back as opposed to having all the side effects. I mean, that would be a horrible decision.

29:07                                     But my idea is not that I would, I would never, so this one woman, I, who used to be in my classes stopped coming because she developed terrible pain in her wrists.

29:16                                     And I suggested that she never had pain in her wrist before. And that my hunch was that it might, I'm not a diagnostician, I'm not a doctor, but it might be something to do with her medicine, but just to keep it in mind. But she was becoming so demoralized that she thought this was an arthritis. She thought it was another comorbidity. And in fact, at the end of those five years when she went off her medicine, she had no pain in her wrists.

29:50                                     So really it's more of an education; these kinds of things might be happening, but it might not be your body. It might be a side effect, which to me, if someone told me that, that would be a very positive piece of information for me because, it can turn around if you stop taking the medicine for whatever reason, it's no longer diagnosed or whatever. I think that's really important. I have someone who has Parkinson's and the mental fog of Parkinson's I sometimes think has much more to do with the medicine than the actual disease. And so it's important to know that yes, medicine is good, but there may be things that you also will be dealing with because of that. And I'm with you. I don't have that kind of background, so I can't say for sure, but I think it is something like that. Just in general, we as teachers of older people can say, you know,  medications do have side effects. Just be really, really aware of what's happening.

31:21                                     Yes. And as you know, it, it, it can also get into sleep patterns. It affects diet. It, it affects so much cognitive functioning. One other thing I didn't want to forget to talk about is that especially with older students, when they present with a new ache or pain or if you, or if you haven't worked with them before and they've got anything going on in their hips and low backs, this is really fun ask them when they think these symptoms started and ask them if they've gotten a new car. Oh, the new car chassie's are a little bit higher than many of the old frames and so people have to step up a little bit higher and swing themselves into a seat that's a little bit higher. And I can't tell you how many times people look at me and their jaw drops open. Then they go, oh my God. And I literally go out to their cars with them and teach them how to get in and out of the car was less strain and, and so that's taking your yoga off the mat. If you think about balance lunges, twists, all of those things are required when you get into a larger car. And when you go to get out of your car and you swing your leg and you throw one leg out and the other leg is following the impact on people's knees is not to be underestimated. So I see my responsibility as a teacher, especially of older people, is to really think outside the box and think about where else is this person moving? What are they doing on a regular basis that might be exacerbating pre-existing conditions or creating new ones.               

33:28                                     No, that's amazing. I'm glad I always have old cars. Linda, this has been great. I love the way that you approached this; it's really different from, from how I do it and I think I need to learn from you. But I want to thank you. Is there anything else? I know you've been really good about bringing out stuff that you thought the listeners might be interested in and, and need to know about, but is there anything else that you would like to finish the podcast with that you would really like to explore in more depth or just bring up a new topic?

34:12                                     Quite frankly, one thing that drives my teaching and I would discuss it with students is that and it can come up many times during any class. People are frequently wondering how long, when, they wonder if ,they wonder why. There's a lot of specific wondering and I invite them into wonderment so that when we're in an asana or we're practicing the cues, the invitations, the language, the vocabulary the cadence, the tone is to inspire a sense of wonderment so that when they step out of, let's say, a more challenging pose or move out of a longer yin hold that what they're left with is a quiet state of appreciation. So that's one thing. The other thing is that there are a great many things that we can know but more things that we cannot. And so being able to embrace the unknown and the unknowable is really fundamental when I'm working with older people because they want answers to questions that may not even be the right questions to be asking. So I try to create time in all of my classes for some type of dialogue driven by whatever's on the student's mind that I can then respond to through this yogic lens where we're looking to find the extraordinary and the ordinary and approach the unknown and the unknowable with a sense of wonderment.

36:15                                     Yes, I think that's a really critical in that perhaps as we age, we do lose our sense of wonderment in it's important to cultivate it.

36:40                                     Yes, yes. And what you do and what I do puts us in a position to shine a light on that path towards wonderment, just like any other piece of the landscape we want our students to dwell in.

36:57                                     Excellent. Okay. Well this is as usual been a fascinating podcasts. I love talking to you, Linda. I think you'll find that she's an incredible Yogi who has really taken the precepts of what we all do and applied them in very interesting and creative ways. Thank you so much, Linda. I appreciate it so much that you came on again. And I think this is a great podcast. Podcasts on yoga for older people have proven to be extremely popular and I think this has many new ways to think about it. So thank you so much.

38:38                                     You are so, so welcome. Thank you.

Contact:

Email: Lindalang @Theopen-hyphen door.com.

Websites: www.therapeutic yogaDC.com and www.yogaaslifestylemedicine.com.