Keen yoga students tend to want to do their own yoga practice and will likely want to be able to practise through the many ups and downs and ins and outs of their lives. Given that there are hundreds – possibly thousands – of yoga postures and practices, what do you need to know about piecing together a practice for the different seasons of life? What adaptations and considerations might you need to think about? As the great Indian teacher T.K.V. Desikachar is fond of saying, “Well, it depends.” It depends on your age, the season of the year and even the time of day, as well as many other factors. Your energy levels, emotional state and health all have a bearing on what yoga practice you do, but these are also influenced by your stage of life.
One of the beauties of yoga is that it is so versatile. Rather than doing a static routine you can do restorative poses when you’re depleted, postnatal yoga if you’ve had a baby, dynamic yoga when you’re ready to go for it and breathing exercises, relaxation and meditation at times of stress. It makes sense that as we ebb and flow during our lives we need to adapt and change our yoga practices to reflect what’s happening in the moment. Let’s look at some of the variables involved in choosing your yoga practice depending on your stage of life.
The four stages of life
The traditional Hindu view of life identifies four stages of life known as ashrama. The first one is the youth/student stage from ages 8 to 25 years. This is the stage of growing up and assimilating knowledge and values. Next is the householder stage from ages 25 to 50 years when the focus is on marriage, family, vocation and civic responsibilities. Then there’s the retirement stage around middle age. This is when one’s children have grown up and there may be grandchildren. The demands of work may have decreased or stopped and one has time to be more inward and is free to reflect on what lies beyond the mundane life. Last is the renunciation stage, which is usually associated with old age but can be entered at any age. In this stage, one is sometimes called a sadhu or sannyasin and may relinquish family attachments and withdraw from society. The forest or cave dweller is the stereotype of this individual.
While these divisions have a slightly different spin in contemporary times, we can use them as a kind of coat-hanger on which to hang appropriate yoga practices.
Childhood, adolescence and the 20s
Youth can benefit greatly from doing yoga. Young people usually have plenty of energy but there is a growing tendency for them to be sedentary and “screen-oriented”; that is, obsessed with the Internet, television, electronic games and SMS messaging. Fortunately, in recent times, children’s yoga has become very popular, even starting with preschoolers.
Yoga for children must be playful, energetic and fast moving because children have a relatively short attention span. Children’s yoga can be based on playing games, like “Statues” where the children imitate animal yoga poses, or imaginary adventures where yoga poses are woven into stories acted out by the children. Breathing practices can be introduced even at this early stage. Teaching children to “take five long breaths” can turn grizzly, disconnected children into a more co-operative yoga group. It may take several months of practice for preschoolers to become established in doing yoga relaxations. However, once they get into it, they’ll choose doing a relaxation over, say, playing a game.
Learning yoga so early in life, a child is introduced to the notion of looking after self and others. He or she also learns to listen to the body by bringing attention to whether something hurts or feels good. Children can tune into what their energy levels are like in the moment and adjust their physical activity accordingly.
Teenage energy can oscillate pretty wildly at times. When the famous Indian teachers B.K.S. Iyengar and K. Pattabhi Jois were teenagers, they first learned yoga from their guru, T. Krishnamacharya. He gave them a rigorous yoga practice that included “jumpings”; that is, literally jumping from one posture to the next in the salute to the sun for perhaps a couple of hours. This was the kind of practice their guru deemed appropriate to channel youthful male energy.
Yoga postures offer great help at puberty when a girl begins to menstruate. Seated forward bends performed during menstruation bring pure blood to the pelvic region. Variations of supta baddha konasana reduce cramping. A young woman can learn to listen to the signals of her body and accept her womanhood more comfortably by doing menstrual sequences.
Many high schools wisely offer yoga classes through their physical education departments. Because students are spending long hours studying for exams and working and playing on computers, they have much tighter bodies than expected of people their age. While they have to work at regaining flexibility through doing asana practice, they seem to take to the yoga relaxations very naturally.
The mental space yoga relaxations offer young people respite from daily stresses, which include the emotional and physical changes of adolescence and the pressure-cooker atmosphere of school exams and assessments. A teenager who learns concentration, body awareness and relaxation will have valuable skills as he or she shifts into the householder stage of adulthood.
These days, young people in their 20s are often still living at home. Still, this is a time when they are stimulated by new ideas, are pursuing higher education and are perhaps embarking on overseas travel. If their interest in yoga has been piqued earlier, they may want to experiment and try different kinds of yoga practices.
Householder stage
A more appropriate name for the early part of the householder stage could be “the 30-somethings”. It’s the time for setting up a home and assuming the responsibilities of marriage, having children, community projects and building a career.
With regards to having children, many women come to yoga for the first time when they’re pregnant. They want to foster their wellbeing throughout the pregnancy and have a good labour and delivery. Working with a knowledgeable teacher, the mother-to-be will do poses tailored for each trimester. Doing standing poses throughout the entire pregnancy helps a woman cultivate the stamina and strength (especially in her legs) that she will need for labour. Sitting poses such as baddha konasana and upavistha konasana facilitate flexibility and openness, particularly in the hips and pelvic floor area. A huge benefit to a pregnant woman is the quiet times in yoga practice when she can feel the baby within her and commune with it. If the mother-to-be has learned the lessons of letting go and breathing through difficult poses, she will be better equipped to face each painful contraction of birth. If she has learned to relax in savasana, she’ll make good use of the respites between uterine contractions in labour to rest and conserve energy.
After the baby is born, being able to do restorative poses, yoga breathing and relaxation in any free time helps a new mother recharge her body and lift her spirits. Often, the positive yoga experience she has had in pregnancy motivates her to get back to yoga classes soon. Because she’s learned yoga in her prenatal classes, she can now also do her yoga practice at home when the baby is quiet. Even 15 minutes of asanas or relaxation practice performed just for herself is worthwhile.
People in the householder stage like the challenge of strong physical yoga. Considering that working to be successful can take its toll, a yoga practice that combines the more physical aspects of yoga with breathing exercises (pranayama) and quiet meditation periods can bring balance back into one’s life. Pranayama and meditation help keep metabolism on an even keel and encourage a calm, detached view. It means one can advance a career and not lose track of the reasons for doing it.
Middle age
Ideally, as people move into middle age they have the time to do some of the things they were too preoccupied to do before, like taking up yoga. Attention can be turned to creating health of body and mind from a place of centredness because there is now more space in one’s life.
People in this stage might begin to notice that physical imbalances which have not been addressed before are coming to the surface. Often now, people who have suffered stress sports injuries look to yoga as a way to work with them. Specialised remedial yoga routines can re-align asymmetries and heal old injuries.
Yoga, as we’ve seen, is an activity that can be practised at any age, so even those who have not done any exercise at all in their lives can join a beginners course and progress at their own pace. Middle-aged people who have been doing yoga for years will probably find they need to modify their existing practice. There can be physical and emotional changes that require them to do more basic yoga practice. Loss of flexibility and joint mobility may mean that a practice like pawanmuktasana is required on a daily basis. Such joint-freeing exercises promote internal health and increase energy (prana), even for those who suffer from some joint degeneration.
Also, in terms of specialised practice, middle age is the time to begin to de-emphasise the physical side and turn more and more to pranayama and meditation practices. At this time of life, when the definition of self is changing, doing more of the introverted yoga practices will allow time and space for discovering balance within.
If you’ve never thought about studying the philosophy and history of yoga, it may have some appeal in this stage of life. Patanjali’s The Yoga Sutras will have much relevance for people who have rich life experience to compare to yoga philosophy. The Bhagavad-Gita addresses issues such as one’s duty in life, what it takes to live ethically, the right relationship to worldly attachments and how to quiet the mind.
For women, middle age is the time of menopause. The number of baby boomers approaching menopause brings attention to this life stage. It has been estimated that in the next 15 years 40-million women will go through menopause in the United States alone. The good news for menopausal women is that there are special yoga postures and approaches to help them manage some of the difficult symptoms. One can do cooling yoga poses, like the seated forward stretches, and pranayamas to help with hot flushes. Dr Geeta S. Iyengar is an authority on this stage of a woman’s life and teaches sequences to help soothe the nervous system and correct imbalances in the endocrine system. The right sort of yoga practice means a woman can make the transition to becoming an elder with the support she needs to face the physiological, psychological and emotional stresses that arise.
Old age
Retirees are often just as busy as they were when in the work force because they tend to take up volunteer work or some sort of community service. In doing so they can share their richness of experience and skills. Having said that, in the future we can expect to be working for longer, so yoga is more necessary than ever to keep our lives in balance.
It’s never too late to take up yoga. B.K.S. Iyengar says he began teaching yoga to the Queen Mother of Belgium when she was 84 years old although she had never done it before. In this stage of life, yoga practice must match an elder person’s anatomy, physiology and psyche. An active asana practice keeps an elder person fit, flexible and strong, however energy levels can fluctuate. The renowned American mythologist Joseph Campbell said of himself in his 80s: “I have more mass than energy!” In this stage of life, if you have learned the more meditative practices of yoga, it’s possible to tap into subtler underlying currents of energy and develop more refined levels of perception. You are aware of your needs and can manage your energy better.
Often, it’s the restorative poses that are very much needed and wanted in this stage of life. Judith Lasater, the doyenne of “Relax and Renew” poses, extols supta baddha konasana, viparita karani and the mountain brook pose, a supine pose where the body is draped in wave-like fashion over blankets and a bolster.
The thing about taking up yoga later in life is the realisation that there is now more at stake. Elder people know that if they don’t do yoga practice, the mental and physical health they want to maintain will be lost very quickly. Therefore, they tend to be slower, steadier and more persistent in their yoga practice. Those who take up yoga in adulthood almost invariably say they wish they’d started at an earlier age. This is because the more you deepen your yoga practice on all levels, the more the ease and freedom gained on the mat flows into the rest of your life.
Ultimately, the healthy practices you adopt at any age, such as asana, pranayama, relaxation and the study of yoga philosophy, are carried over to your relationships with your family, friends and even the public sphere. Yoga is, after all, life training. You build up muscles for taking care of yourself on all levels: body, mind and spirit. The energy you generate for yourself and your own healing can be directed outwards to humanity and the planet.
