I never imagined I’d be teaching yoga to older adults. When I started practicing yoga, I hoped it would help me avoid the painful osteoarthritis I saw my grandmother suffer through. Fast forward, I became a yoga teacher, and in the very first “All Levels” Vinyasa class I taught there was a 76-year-old female student!!  My inside voice was panicking, saying, “This is not what I expected!!!  I’m gonna have to modify every pose!! I’m not ready for this!”

I led an extra-slow vinyasa flow that day and themed the class around the word “ahimsa” (non-harming).

I rarely watch TV, but the few hours a week I turn it on I’m bombarded with commercials pushing pills to relieve the symptoms of depression. As many of you know, depression has been something I have struggled with throughout my life. While it’s hard for me to write about depression, especially my own, we keep losing family and friends to this disease and I long to help anyone that I can. 

Fall can trigger memories as we watch the process of life, the seasons of life, and remember loved ones and holidays gone by.

Meditation, Mantras and Creating YOUR Life

I’m not sure how long I’ve been meditatingconsistently. I started being more consistent when my yoga teacher suggested that “it will change your life!” during my yoga teacher training. Before that, I’d experienced a change in my life when I’d meditated every night for almost three months.

There was a lot going on for me at this time. I wasmiserablein my middle management, salaried position. I was still beating myself up for not completing dental school.

The ego is a Big Trouble maker!! It’s always criticizing and blaming us or others for our perceived imperfections, mistakes, or differences. It’s a bully inside of us, comparing us, telling us we aren’t good enough. The ego is so afraid of being perceived as weak, so afraid that others will see our imperfections. It fears that someone else will be better, make more money, get more stuff, get more love…in other words, have more of whatever the ego perceives as being lacking or scarce in that moment.

In the spring of 2006, I was finally getting an opportunity to sing with a band on the plaza in Kansas City—a big deal to me at the time. I was thrilled… but I had been taking allergy shots and pills for three years and I was still having relentless and intense allergic reactions. For the entire three hours we were on stage that day, my eyes streamed with tears and my nose seemed to drip in time to the blues of the rhythm section. I went through an entire box of tissues. By the end of the performance, my poor eyes were blood red and nearly swelled shut.

I started practicing yoga with my friend Jessica in 1998.  We were going for the  exercise and to relieve stress from dental school. Although I wouldn’t realize it for  years, practicing yoga became much more than exercise or stress relief. It  became my lifeline.  

Jessica went on to become a calm, cool dentist and MOM!

 We laugh at me sometimes…I can be the Grumpy Yogini. I wish I could say I’m always nice and happy, but I have always been a grump in the morning. It’s just my nature…maybe. I do notice a shift away from grumpy during and after meditation. My morning meditation helps me transition from foggy, sleepy, grumpy to less grumpy…and sometimes even to elated! Meditation is like cleaning off your camera lens before you take a picture, the lens of your mind’s eye, clearing and adjusting, shifting perspective.

I’ve been praying for as long as I can remember:

When my Dad died, my prayers went through many phases. In retrospect, I can see that they reflect the grieving process: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance…pleading, cursing, begging, crying at God in my daily prayers for years.