Her name is Suza Francina, and I am enormously lucky to have found her. She’s been teaching Iyengar yoga for some thirty years now, and is probably one of the best instructors in the world.
I was only thirty when I first began to suffer from sacroiliac pain. I used to take nine Advil a day, and was always in pain. I lived for my appointments with the chiropractor and the massage therapist. And they kept telling me how I needed to take up yoga.
Now, I am congenitally clumsy. Embarrassingly so. No way was I going to go to any class where I would be invited to stand on my head.
But by the time I was forty, the pain got much, much worse. And then my mom became terminally ill, and my sister died, and I knew I had to do something to deal with stress of it all. And when I was taking care of my mom at her home, she fell when we two were alone – and I was not strong enough to lift her, and when I tried, I hurt myself.
I promised myself from that point on that I was going to learn how to be strong, so that if anyone was sick and weak and needed lifting, I could do it – and I wanted to be limber, too, so that I could do it without hurting myself. I wanted to be the one who took care of others, not the one who needed to be taken care of.
So I started taking yoga classes with Suza. I was a klutz, the worst yoga student ever (after a decade, I still haven’t figured out how to kick up into handstand on my own – I need a nearby bit of wall or a chair to help me “sneak” up). But Suza was patient. She’s like the morning sun in late spring (look at that heavenly smile!) – gently radiating such profound, joyous warmth that it’s impossible to remain tense or surly in her presence; people just melt into little puddles of bliss. Which is a good thing, because I was horrifically stiff and sore. I couldn’t touch my toes, and when Suza told me to lie on my back and lift one leg straight into the air at a 90-degree angle, I thought she was kidding. Then, when she told me to grab the big toe of that leg with my thumb and forefinger, I laughed. But when she then followed her own instructions, and managed to keep her shoulder flat on the ground and her leg perfectly straight at 90 degrees, I calmed and took notice. She got up and handed me a strap and told me to start at my own pace, and breathe quietly so I could listen to my own body.
I started out barely able to hold onto the strap. And now I can catch my big toe between my thumb and forefinger. And my back pain went away, so I stopped taking Advil altogether. And I came to love standing on my head.
Suza, especially, inspired me, as did her students. She has a regular class for students of all ages, but she teaches a special class for seniors – for people who are in their 70s and 80s and 90s – and the first lesson in her class is always how to get up off the floor. She helps her students to remain limber and strong and independent.
She has written her third book now, THE NEW YOGA FOR HEALTHY AGING .
The pages are full of pictures and stories of strong, nimble seventy-, eighty-, and ninety-year-olds whose lives were changed by the practice of yoga. It’s also chock-full of how-to advice on how to use yoga to safely strengthen and stretch and achieve glorious health.
Why am I telling you this, in a blog that purports to focus on women in history? Because we writers and readers sit too much, and it often causes us great pain. And because if you were my very best friend, I would send you Suza’s new book and encourage you to take up yoga. I would tell you how it freed me from pain and gave me the grounding and strength and sanity to endure my mother’s death and my husband’s bout with cancer and chemotherapy. I would tell you that if people found a good teacher and gave yoga an honest try, it would make them feel so good they would never want to give it up. I would tell them that yoga shows that old age does not always have to bring frailty and inactivity and the sicknesses that result.
