Teaching Reflections: What Does Practice Mean As We Age?
Notes from my Tuesday seniors' class
Every Tuesday afternoon, a group of remarkable women gathers on the mat with me — most in their early 60s, alongside a handful of students in their 80s. At this stage of life, the body often tells the story of decades of habits, imbalance and movement. Tight shoulders, bunions, knocked knees, flat feet — these are common sights in the room, the cumulative result of how a body has been used, and sometimes neglected, over a lifetime.
Designing a sequence for this class asks something different of me than a general yoga class does. The intention isn't to teach postures anymore — it's to help them build a different relationship with their bodies altogether. Everything I teach on Tuesdays stems from five guiding principles:
- Deepen awareness of the body.
- Cultivate greater compassion towards the body.
- Help each student understand the uniqueness of their own anatomy and movement patterns.
- Increase sensitivity to the breath and its intimate relationship with movement.
- Build strength, resilience, and confidence to remain self-sufficient for as long as possible.
These aren't absent from my general classes, but on Tuesdays they come first.
Recently, a student asked a question that took me by surprise:
"Teacher… we're not getting any younger, how do we continue to practise when our bodies get older week after week?"
I was struck by her honesty, and her realism.
So much of modern fitness culture rests on an unspoken assumption: that next month we'll be stronger than this month, and next year stronger than this year. Progress is expected to travel in a straight line, always upward. But ageing teaches us something different. Eventually, every one of us reaches a point where simply maintaining our current abilities is the achievement. The trajectory shifts — no longer continual improvement, but gradual change. When I watch my students in their 80s return to class week after week, this is exactly what I wish for them.
How the Purpose of Practice Changes As We Age
When we're young, we practise to achieve — chasing flexibility, strength, endurance, mastery. Later, it becomes less about acquiring something new and more about holding onto what we have, with some dignity.
The body may grow weaker even as our relationship with it grows wiser.
So the measure of a good practice shifts. It's no longer whether we can touch our toes, or hold a pose longer than we could last year. It's whether we're moving with less fear. Whether the mind quietens when we practise. Whether we can watch our breath and body with more acceptance, and treat this body — with all its limitations — with less judgement and more kindness.
The Real Practice
Some of us, with enough effort, keep getting stronger. But everyone's body declines eventually. What can keep growing is everything else: awareness, compassion, wisdom.
That's the real practice — not resisting the body's changing nature, but meeting each season of life with curiosity and care.
Growing older happens on its own. Growing wiser in how we inhabit this body is still a choice, every time we step onto the mat.
