Yoga for Healthy Aging: A Guide to Lifelong Well-Being

482 Pages·2017·79.81 MB·English

by  Baxter Bell

“All the yoga in the world will not stop us from getting older, but it can help us
approach the journey with more grace, agility, and assuredness. Baxter Bell and
Nina Zolotow show us how in Yoga for Healthy Aging. Their conversational
style and gentle humor make their comprehensive medical knowledge and yoga
teaching wisdom easily accessible to everyone—from beginning students to
advanced teachers. And I love that they’ve given us concrete ways of
celebrating who we are—instead of dreading what we fear we’ll become—with
each passing decade. A true gift for all ages.”
—LINDA SPARROWE, author of The Woman’s Book of Yoga and Health
and Yoga at Home
“Thank you, Baxter and Nina, for creating this important yoga gem, which both
allows us to refine our practice to be a boon to our health as we age and to create
a sharper lens through which to know ourselves.”
—RODNEY YEE, author of Moving Toward Balance
“Baxter Bell and Nina Zolotow share a wealth of information on using yoga
safely to age with greater flexibility, strength, balance, and grace, both
physically and psychologically. This user-friendly book will be a gift to yoga
practitioners (and would-be practitioners), as well as those who teach them.”
—TIMOTHY MCCALL, MD, author of Yoga as Medicine
“We might imagine from the title that this is a book only for the seniors among
us. But in fact, the practices and supporting material will benefit both young and
old alike. It will help the former establish a solid foundation for their future well-
being and teach the latter how to maintain that well-being long into their
‘golden’ years.”
—RICHARD ROSEN, author of Yoga FAQ

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
PART ONE: HOW TO PRACTICE YOGA FOR HEALTHY AGING
1. What Is Yoga for Healthy Aging?
2. Preparing to Practice
3. Yoga for Strength
4. Yoga for Flexibility
5. Yoga for Balance
6. Yoga for Agility
7. Heart and Cardiovascular System Health
8. Brain and Nervous System Health
9. Stress Management
10. Cultivating Equanimity
11. Yoga Philosophy
PART TWO: ESSENTIAL YOGA POSES AND VINYASAS
Appendix: Contraindications for Medical Conditions
Notes
Index of Poses and Sequences
Index
About the Contributors
E-mail Sign-Up
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When we got together to go over the list of people who had helped us with this
book, we were amazed, humbled, and ever so grateful. There were so many of
them! We are very fortunate indeed to know so many people who have a solid
expertise in science, medicine, or health care combined with a deep appreciation
of yoga.
We need to start first by thanking Dave O’Neal, senior editor at Shambhala
Publications, for “discovering” us. It really was like the movies. At the end of
our first Yoga for Healthy Aging intensive, one of the attendees—who we only
knew at that point as “Dave”—approached Nina with his business card saying
that if she really did want someone to pay her to write a book (something she
had joked about during class), he’d be interested. Thank you so much, Dave, for
appreciating our work and believing in us!
Special thanks are also due to Bradford Gibson, PhD, and Rammohan Rao,
PhD, both from the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. Brad was there for us
from the beginning, helping us to create our blog and teaching us about what is
known—and what is not known—about aging. And when it came time to write
the book, Brad helped Nina write the first chapter and reviewed the entire book
for scientific accuracy and clarity. Ram, a neuroscientist, joined our team on the
blog in year two as our expert on brain health as well as on several aspects of
yoga. Our chapter on brain health wouldn’t have been possible without him, as it
is partly based on information we learned from him. He also reviewed the
chapter after it was written for scientific accuracy.
Besides Brad and Ram, we had a whole team of experts who helped us out
with their careful reviews of chapters that focused on their areas of expertise. So
thanks to: Dilip Sarkar, MD, for reviewing the chapter on heart and
cardiovascular system health; Laurie Baccash, physical therapist, for reviewing
the chapters on strength, flexibility, balance, and agility; Matthew J. Taylor,
physical therapist, for reviewing the chapters on strength and flexibility; Wayne
Diamond, physical therapist, for reviewing the chapters on balance and agility;
and Daniel Libby, PhD, for reviewing the chapter on stress management.
Thanks also to Anita Carstensen, MD, who took the time to review our long
chapter on yoga for medical conditions, which, in the end, we could not include
because, well, we were a bit overambitious about the initial scope of this book.
We also need to thank all our friends and members of the Yoga for Healthy
Aging community who contributed their personal stories to our book, helping us
to vividly illustrate how powerful yoga is for real life. We appreciate your
openness and honesty—the fact that you were willing to tell the unvarnished
truth is what made your stories so compelling—and the time you took to write
for us. Here they are in alphabetical order by first name, with the name they
wanted us to use: CJ Keller, Veterans Yoga Project Ambassador; Anita; Dan
Libby, Veterans Yoga Project (for forwarding two veteran stories); Debbie
Cabusas; Ellen Pechman; Elizabeth D.; Elizabeth Ann Gibbs; Evelyn Zak; Jill
Satterfield; Mary Ann Avallone-O’Gorman; Melitta; Nina Rook; and Victor
Dubin.
Thanks also to Bonnie, Carol, Jim, Judie, Krista, and Ramona for their stories
about how yoga helped them with various medical conditions—we loved all
those stories, though we couldn’t use them in the end. We’re saving them up,
though!
Although our colleagues Dr. Timothy McCall and Shari Ser did not contribute
directly to the book, we have learned so much from them over the years that we
want to thank them for all they taught us—the book wouldn’t be the same
without you. And words cannot express our gratitude to our longtime teacher,
Donald Moyer. Donald, so much of this book reflects knowledge that we gained
from you, both about the asana practice and about what being a “yogi” really
means.
Whew! All that was just about the words in the book, but a yoga book is
pretty useless without photographs. Our photographer, Melina Meza, who is also
a longtime yoga teacher and a certified Yoga for Healthy Aging teacher, really
put her heart and soul into our project! Thank you so much, Melina, for taking
such care to get each photo of every pose exactly right—some angles were quite
tricky. And thank you to our model, Sandy Carmellini, who, like Melina, is a
longtime yoga teacher and certified Yoga for Healthy Aging teacher. Thank you,
Sandy, for the beautiful work you did in performing the poses, for your
enthusiasm for our four different versions of every pose, and your patience
throughout a demanding photo shoot.
Finally, thanks to Beth Frankl, our editor; Breanna Locke, Beth’s assistant
editor; and everyone else at Shambhala Publications for turning our text and
photos into this beautiful book.
PART ONE
HOW TO PRACTICE YOGA FOR
HEALTHY AGING
1
What Is Yoga for Healthy Aging?
FOR US, THE LIFE STORY OF OUR FRIEND MELITTA’S MOTHER, Nancy, personifies
“healthy aging.” Born in San Francisco on December 12, 1921, she died on
August 27, 2015, at the age of 93. Nancy was very active all of her life. She
played sports in school and was the shot put and discus champion at her high
school and college. She loved skiing, sailing, hiking, horseback riding—all
things outdoors—and worked as a wrangler at ranches around California. Even
in her last years, she power walked every morning along the beach with her
buddies Elaine and Ellen. When she started having back problems with spinal
stenosis, Melitta gave her a yoga mat and some back-care yoga poses to do.
Nancy did them faithfully every morning and was so pleased when they really
improved her back.
Nancy also loved traveling and during her lifetime, she went around the
world, visiting every continent. In 2011, she returned to Turkey, her favorite
country, and in 2012, she took her last safari in Africa. She then gave up long-
haul touring, although she continued to travel within the US to spend time with
family.
Nancy volunteered at her church until about age 91, and she had a rich
network of friends and family. She lived independently in her apartment until
her last few days. At age 90, she made her own decision to stop driving.
Although she didn’t have any hired help, her friend Elaine took her shopping
after she stopped driving.
It was only in the last year of her life that Nancy began to slow down, and at
that time she and Melitta discussed her fear of decline—and Melitta’s fear of her
decline. In July 2015, she had surgery for a bile duct blockage. Then, in August
2015, she had emergency surgery for gallstones, but she also developed sepsis.
Although the doctors “threw all the antibiotics” they could at her, her organs
were failing, so the family followed her directives and discontinued care. When
Melitta got to the hospital, Nancy was still conscious but unable to speak
because she was intubated. In the joking way they had with each other, Melitta
said, “It must be bad if I am here.” Nancy laughed as best she could. She died
two days later, with her children holding her as she passed on.
We’ll come back to this story later when we discuss in detail what healthy
aging means to us, and why yoga is such a powerful tool for fostering it. But for
now, let’s take a look at what aging itself actually is.
W I A ?
HAT S GING
All living things age, and every species has a natural, built-in life span. Although
giant tortoises and koi carp can live up to 200 years, the average life span of a
human being is around 79 years. A cat lives to around 20, a dog to around 10, a
mouse to around 2, a worm to only 10–30 days, and the infamous mayfly only
lives a single day. But, no matter how brief their life span is, all of these living
things go through a natural aging process (yes, even worms get all wrinkly in
their old age), similar to the ones that we ourselves go through.
The formal definition of aging is “the process of a system’s deterioration over
time.” From our perspective as human beings, this means that as we move
through time and get older, our bodies just don’t work as well as they did when
we were younger. We’ll be discussing this in some detail in chapters 3 through
8.
Now you may think that with all the scientific breakthroughs of the last
century, from determining the structure of atoms and the properties of subatomic
particles to mapping the human genome, we would have a pretty good
understanding of why all living things age and how it happens.
Nina’s husband, Brad, who is a medical researcher with a PhD in
biochemistry, had this same impression when he started working sixteen years
ago at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. On his first day, as he entered
the elegant I. M. Pei building on the top of a beautiful hill in the Marin County
countryside, he was excited to start applying his knowledge of chemistry and
technology to slowing down aging and eliminating age-related diseases. Instead,
he was amazed to find out that there were many different—and often conflicting
—theories on aging. Here’s how he described it:
As I examined theories such as the free radical theory of aging to