Three lessons from my 70-year-old dad’s journey with yoga; this is the third and final part.
My dad started his journey with yoga as a teenager. This was back when yoga was a hippies-only activity, best practiced at Woodstock. Armed with a spiral-bound book found in a local health food store, my dad started a 4-year-long practice of daily sun salutations and twice-daily meditations.
His practice even followed him across the country in 1975, when he biked across Canada. He’d start each day, without fail, with a set of sun salutations and meditation before clocking an average of 160km daily on his bike. Yoga and meditation helped him set himself up for the focus he needed for this physical feat.
Two years later, he did what many Western early 20-somethings set out to do: travel the world. It was during this time that his daily yoga and meditation practice fell to the wayside as he backpacked across Europe. It stayed a practice of his youth until the day he retired.
My dad retired from his teaching career at age 60, about five years before my mom retired. He needed some structure and activities in his day, as many retirees do. Knowing that he practiced yoga way before it was commonplace to do so, it was me, his daughter, who suggested he start back up again. Retirement gives the gift of time to do things that we once loved and maybe didn’t have time for in the rush of life. So, he started with videos on YouTube before finally going in-studio to practice in community.
For the past eight years, he goes to yoga class in Vancouver on average four times a week. He moved his practice back online during Covid, and took a brief hiatus after a surgery, but otherwise, you can find him on the mat with his fellow yogis.
Muscles atrophy from disuse. Practices are no different, both mental and physical. For me, if I don’t speak a language for a while, words become slower to grasp… they are still there, but they take longer to unearth. It’s like I am speaking with marbles in my mouth. Just because a muscle is weakened, doesn’t mean it has disappeared. The work that my dad put into his yoga practice lay in wait for decades. It could have stayed dormant until the end of days, but it didn’t. He reactivated the muscles that his body once knew so well. His body has aged and the poses may not look as they would have in his 20s, but the work he put into himself was still there.
What a joy it is to discover something we once loved, especially from our youth. To engage in play and movement. To return to ourselves.
