Are older yoga teachers the best yoga teachers?

This article of mine was published in The Yoga Lunchbox a few years back. Hope you enjoy it!

‘So many younger people are taking to yoga these days as opposed to the 80’s when I was cutting my teeth as a student and yoga was still considered way too esoteric for your average citizen.

And what an assortment of choices on the yoga menu today!

Back in the day you were either an Iyengar student (and this was truly cutting edge) or doing what my teacher somewhat disdainfully and condescendingly called ‘fruit salad’ yoga (or old lady’s yoga).

Nowadays there’s a dizzying confusion of yoga ‘styles’ to choose from.

And precisely because yoga is attracting so many young people, hundreds of young yoga teachers are emerging and trying to get established.

I started teaching when I was forty-five, pretty old by today’s yoga teacher standards.  I’m now in my seventies so I guess that makes me really old by today’s reckoning!

So how do I manage to compete with the flood of gorgeous young things, all of whom look a whole lot sexier than me?  And who may well be able to bend and stretch and pivot and hold and reach rather better than me?

Do I still have what it takes?  Am I still relevant?  Do students want older yoga teachers?

I guess the answer is some do and some don’t.  It all depends on why the student is practicing yoga.

If a student has not yet dug deep and is still ‘doing yoga’ as a form of exercise like many beginners (and hey – we almost all start there), then chances are they’ll want a yoga teacher who’s a little more spicy than me.  Check out the hot and sweaty classes, the power classes, the Astanga classes – they’re full of young (and wannabe young) students.

There’s no way I can compete with those kind of classes.

My teaching can only reflect my own practice if it is going to be ‘true’, and over the years my practice has become less complicated, less physically demanding, less strenuous.

It’s much more about the breath, the mind, meditation and the notion that yoga is a twenty-four hour a day practice rather than simply the hour or two we spend on the mat.

But send me the student who needs a bit of therapeutic yoga for their back pain, or the one who suffers from anxiety or depression or is simply overworked and stressed.

Send me the student who understands that yoga is a way of life.

This is where the older yoga teacher often shines.

Our years of experience have taken us from where we thought we knew everything (or at least we felt as though we needed to convey this notion to our students) to where we realize that in fact we know very little.

But what we do know we have learned through personal experience, so that knowing is deep and certain.

Society would have us believe that growing older is a bad thing.

What I believe is that aging is a gift that not all of us are handed, and as such, it is a time to be treasured and exploited to the fullest.

Our priorities change.

We can see that life is far less serious than we thought it was.

We learn (hopefully) to take ourselves less seriously too.

We begin to understand that it’s not all about  ‘What’s in it for me?’ but rather ‘How may I be of service?’

We can say with certainly ‘This too shall pass’ for we have seen this to be true over and over again.

We begin to understand that life is about joy and loving and being happy with the simple things. And that if we want to be happy we need to look within.  We need to find that place where happiness abides.

And then we can invite all  our students to take their own journey with us.’