What’s a Nice Girl Like Me Doing in a Yoga Class for Seniors

Carmelene Sinai

A few years ago, I attended my first yoga class for seniors. Not a gentle yoga class for those who practiced regularly, but a real, honest-to-God, yoga class for seniors, with every pose done in a chair.

It was wonderful.

Not the yoga, though it was great. But I’m talking about the people in the class — the “seniors.”

You know how in yoga everybody is kind of there in their own space? I mean, it’s like they have an invisible wall around them that says, “I won’t bother you; you don’t bother me.”

In fact, the teachers say: “Keep your mind on our own practice. Don’t pay attention to your neighbor.”

Well, this class was about as far from that approach as you can get.

“You’re new here aren’t you, honey?”

“Here, let me get you a chair.”

“You’ll need a ball.”

“No. I’ll get the ball for her.”

“Just follow me if you get confused.”

It was like being adopted by a cluster of hens.

“I have one student who’s 100 years old,” the instructor — also a senior — told me in my “get acquainted meeting” following class. (“Get acquainted meeting.” How old-fashioned. How kind.)

I had always shunned such classes for seniors. After all, despite that I was, at the time, 75 years old, I told myself I wasn’t a senior — or if I was, I wasn’t one of “those” seniors.

I was different.

In a way, it was true. That time. I had come as a loner to a class that didn’t have any other loners. Rather, they struck me as a community of friendly, warm, welcoming people who went out of their way to make this newbie feel comfortable.

They didn’t seem to mind being seen as individuals (loners?) who were part of something larger than themselves or thinking of themselves as “the class.”

“Oh, we’ve been coming for years,” one woman called from her chair. “We’re all friends here.”

As I said — it was wonderful.
After class, during the five-minute savasana (a relaxation exercise pronounced “shuh-vah-suh-nah”), I could feel the warmth melting my loner status.

In my mind’s eye, I took in the room.

Behind me, a Japanese man. Had his family been among those sent to relocation camps during World War II?

To my left, an immigrant from Hungary. Had he escaped the Nazis?

To my right, a woman who came in pushing an oxygen cart.

Farther away, a woman bent from the waist as if she had a broken back.

These could have been my neighbors, raising their children in the crazy ’60s. Some of them could have been raising me way back in the ’40s and ’50s.

In reality, I wasn’t surrounded by “seniors,” I thought to myself. But by ordinary people — moms, dads, waiters, professors. People whose collective wisdom, insight, history
and experience might light up the entire city.

Contrary to the feeling I’d had when signing up — of wanting to distance myself and not identify myself as a senior — I began feeling something entirely different.

I wanted to be one of them.

“Fold your hands in front of your chest and take a deep breath,” the instructor was saying.
Those around me weren’t people I should shun or that I should distance myself from.

They were my generation.

“My people.”

“Here, I’ll put your chair away for you,” the Japanese man smiled.

“Thank you,” I said.

“It’s all right,” he joked, “just don’t expect me to do it every time. When you come back, you’ll be one of us.”

We laughed.

I felt a little surge of pride.

I felt like a senior.