oldest yoga teacher – Yoga Beautiful

DEAR YOGIS,

I have a new goal. To be the oldest TEACHER OF YOGA in Australia!

Please hop onto this link and have a look at this wonderful yogi who only started yoga in her 90’s! What an inspiration to us all. In this time of covid, what we can do matters, not what we can’t – nothing changes.

It’s easy when you get to my age to just rest on your past and think things don’t matter, but when you think things matter less, is mostly when you discover they matter most.

In my present incarnation and time I am forced to retrace my steps and remember what has been internalised and forgotten.

I find I need to focus on process. This discipline applies to anything. To art, yoga, even rugby (anything)…you must become immersed in the fundamentals in order to have any potential to reach a high level of understanding. To get anywhere you must learn the asana and the philosophy. In living yoga these two themes will be considered at once, but over time your intuition learns to integrate more and more principles into the sense of flow. Eventually the foundation is so deeply internalised it is no longer consciously considered but is lived. Then you can forget what you learned – it is part of you. You have seamlessly integrated yoga into the person called “you”.

When you get to this point, yoga will be silently guiding you.

Although I began as a tough kid to teach – because I thought I knew everything, not because I felt I knew nothing – a lifetime of yoga has not cooled my desire to know more. I have grown to love study, and teaching above all else. I thrive under adversity. If I encounter “easy” I always make things difficult and work my way through the chaos. When everyone else is climbing the walls I have great ease and confidence. If I lived in the desert I would be a camel.

When I find I path I like I dedicate myself to it. Unhindered by internal conflict. When I locate or re-locate the path I don’t have doubts.

To be excellent you have to embrace a long term learning process, and give up the luxury of living a soft, static, safe mediocrity. Like a hermit crab, at a certain point this luxurious shell safety is too small and you will be forced to leave the and go into the difficult world. Learning to negotiate this dangerous space between one way of being and the next, as difficult and dangerous as it is, is where the real growth can occur.

In my experience, successful people shoot for big goals, put their skin in the game and eventually discover that the lessons learnt along the way are more important than the goal. Even the losses are embraced.

The hard bit is to keep walking towards the goal even if you are under fire, even if you are hurting, even if the world is “going to hell in a hand-basket” (as the saying goes)…this attitude of trust is at the heart of the experience called “living yoga”.

STUDY HARD, LIVE LONG AND PROSPER…

NAMASTE – JAHNE