Age Like a Yogi

in the works

Age Like a Yogi:

A Heavenly Path to a Dazzling Third Act

“Iris was nearing eighty when I knew her, and I was a freshly minted twenty-one. A veteran traveler on the spiritual path, she had the glow that we think requires youth and good lighting, but hers came from the inside. We all have this essence, what Robert Browning called the ‘imprisoned splendor,’ but we forget it or ignore it or no one ever told us it was there. Yogic tradition has it that this forgetting is the root cause of illness, and it can certainly render the aging process a discouraging downhill slide. Or we can see life as a spiritual adventure and aging as spiritual practice. We can choose to grow older the way Iris did it. Each of us has the glorious option to age like a yogi.”

So begins my newest work—well, I’m working hard (and praying hard) that it will be my next book. I’ve completed the proposal, an in-depth sample-and-marketing document which goes out to publishers to—fingers crossed—find the perfect fit. I love the process of publishing: it’s a divine collaboration of committed professionals and the end result is, to my mind, something sacred; a book that will reach people and change people, in some cases doing that beyond the lifespans of those involved.

This book, Age Like a Yogi, is for people—mostly women; women read my books and are drawn to these topics—who want to age exquisitely. It’s made up of 40 compact chapters delving into ayurvedic health and healing for the body, and yoga philosophy and practice for the soul. Ayurveda, the “science of life,” is the medical and lifestyle tradition that grew up alongside yoga in ancient India. It is still recognized by the World Health Organization as a viable healthcare system.

I’ve been around yoga since I found three books on the subject in the Kansas City Public Library when I was seventeen. Even then I had a sense that these ancient teachings were effortlessly adaptable, both to the world in any era and to us at any age. Remarkably, embracing yoga can help us both delay physiological aging and deal with the forward march of time.

It will be surprising to some that only one of this book’s 40 chapters has to do with asana, postures, the physical practices that we in the West think of when we hear the term yoga. In fact, yoga is rich spiritual practice.

Patanjali, the sage who codified its teachings some two thousand years ago, defined yoga as “quieting the fluctuations of the mind.” The postures came later as a means to help create a body that could sit comfortably for long periods of meditation. Age Like a Yogi invites people over 50 to look at the decades of maturity as a grand adventure, sustained by healthful living and enriched by an inner journey that never gets old.