This month, meet Catriona, who has been volunteering since last September, teaching a weekly chair yoga session for a group of Elders members.
“I am vindicated. I was right all along.”
“Most of the yoga I teach is quite young, quite ego-based. Very sporty, very focused on how things look. This is completely the opposite of that, and it’s really nice to teach.
I got involved because the lead tutor, who had been running the class for a while, asked me if I wanted to help out. And it made sense to me straight away. I really notice how much physical ability, as you get older, affects every aspect of your life. So it’s massively impactful for people to be active, and they are.
The sessions run on Monday evenings. We start with five or ten minutes of breath work, a little meditation, a body scan, and then move gradually into the practice. From there we do some gentle warm-up work, neck, shoulders, fingers, wrists, hands, before getting into what we call sun salutations. Normally I teach those standing up, but here we do a chair version. They’re quite dynamic sequences of movements, and the group handles them well. We finish with a little more stretching and a few minutes just closing down, bringing the breath back before we come out of the practice.
There are around fourteen regulars, and the group has shown a real improvement in fitness, stability and mobility over the years. They’re quite good, actually. It’s over-50s, and I’m over 50 myself. But most of them are quite a way ahead of me in age. What I didn’t expect was how much that would change the feel of the room. Usually I’m the oldest person in my classes, and people tend to look to me for everything. Here, there’s a lot more wisdom in the room. They know a lot, a lot more than those much younger people in my usual classes, with all their flexibility.
What also strikes me is how much more is happening than the yoga itself. There’s the breath work and the work on the nervous system, learning to create a bit of space in the mind. But there’s also the social side. They have a chat before the session, they’re out of the house, they’re making regular contact with people. Even in the really dark winter months, they still show up. I think they all quite enjoy just being part of something.
They’re also quite funny. One of the group implied once that my sessions weren’t quite as hard as the usual ones another volunteer had led. Something like, oh, maybe we’ll have a little bit of a rest. She’s been blaming me ever since whenever things get too tough.
For me, the chair yoga itself has been a new challenge. I’m usually a dynamic vinyasa flow person, and adapting sequences for the chair means holding the whole standing version in my head and converting it as I go. It’s a different way of thinking. And I’m much more aware of people’s bodies than I normally need to be, much more focused on safety and stability in a way I’m not used to.
But I think what it really shows me is something I’ve been saying for a long time: the more you invest in your body, the better the life you can have.
Everything I’ve been banging on about for a long time seems to be true. I am vindicated. I was right all along.”