Yoga

A friend of mine suggested that I consider taking a yoga class. He was talking about Senior Chair Yoga, which is offered at a local wellness center. The class is constructed specifically to work with older adults, usually age 65+ or physically impaired in some way. I maintain a membership at our local YMCA, but I haven’t darkened their doors since my diagnosis. I haven’t felt up to walking the indoor track or hitting the workout machines. So I thought, why not try this alternative facility and Senior Chair Yoga.

The yoga movements are tailored for older individuals so the focus is on balance, stretching, and movement. The chair comes in for sitting postures and to use for stability when standing, if it is needed. I’ve only done two sessions so far and found them to be both uplifting and satisfyingly tiring. A couple of surgeries and a couple of accidents over the years have left me with some physical limitations. Add to those a good deal of osteoarthritis in my spine, and it’s easy to understand why a regular yoga class would be out of the question. Senior Chair Yoga is a good alternative.

As with most yoga practice, a good deal of attention is paid to breathing: inhaling during certain movements, exhaling during others. The class setting is calm, the group of 15-20 friendly and, most important, non-judgmental. Each person follows the leader’s movements to the extent of his or her ability. No pain, no strain. A bonus is that I can sign up and attend one session at a time, which allows me to fit it into my schedule.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I’m taking Sutent, which produces several side effects, one of which is tiredness. Starting the yoga class during the last week of daily meds before a break probably wasn’t the wisest timing. My energy, thankfully, has remained fairly high during this cycle but, still, each of the yoga classes took more out of me than I anticipated. And yet, in each instance I found the mindfulness of yoga practice calming as well as energizing. It is not too much of a stretch to think of yoga as a physical form of meditation.

I’m not sure these initial two sessions have been a fair trial. But they have been enough to convince me that I want to stick with the class, at least for a while.

“Mindfulness helps you go home to the present. And every time you go there and recognize a condition of happiness that you have, happiness comes,” according to Thich Nhat Hanh, the well-known Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk and author of The Miracle of Mindfulness and many other books on spiritual matters. Yoga practice is centered on one’s body and mindfulness when it comes to breathing and moving, and so it remains a way of focusing beyond everyday thoughts. I find that in itself is therapeutic.