YogaTherapyWeb.com Home: Study yoga online. Greatest resources for the therapeutic benefits of yoga. Yoga therapy for back pain, yoga for depression, yoga for stress relief, yoga for kids, yoga for insomnia, yoga downloads, and more.
Gladys Morris is a yoga teacher from Manchester, UK. Popular among her students, she teaches four classes a week, and spent her last birthday teaching her usual Monday class. But Morris has something that sets her apart from most other yoga teachers: she’s 90 years old.
"For a 90-year-old, she's absolutely grand. She's an inspiration to us all." said Lynne Grimes, one of Morris’ longtime students.
Morris began teaching yoga 40 years ago. Now her students are petitioning the Guiness Book of World Records to bestow upon her the title of World’s Oldest Yoga Teacher. If she gets in, she’ll beat the current record holder by five years and three months.
But Morris isn’t the only nonagenarian yoga teacher around. Tao Porchon-Lynch is a 90-year-old former screenwriter turned yogi and competitive ballroom dancer. Her feats might be daunting to someone half her age, but Porchon-Lynch isn’t phased by anything.
“I’ve never thought about age in my life,” she said. “In fact, it’s only when I had a hip replacement that somebody said, ‘You won’t be able to do this anymore.’ So I sent the doctor a photograph lifting off the ground in lotus, and he was amazed I could do it.”
Embedding is disabled, but watch a video of Porchon-Lynch here.
And then there’s Canadian Ida Herbert. Herbert is 93, and didn’t start practicing yoga until she was 50 years old. Now she teaches regular classes, and attributes her yoga practice to her health and vitality. And others are taking notice, too: recently, CARP (the Canadian Association of Retired People) named her one of the top 50 Canadians over 45.
No matter who gets to be in the Book, all three women are impressive examples of the yoga lifestyle. And just to further prove that yoga teachers can come in all shapes and sizes, here’s one of the more valiant efforts we’ve seen in awhile.
For serious yogis, the term “yama” means the intense ethical discipline practitioners undertake to enhance their practice and achieve the ultimate union between mind and body. But it’s also the name of one of the yoga industry’s most intensely capitalistic ventures yet: a talent agency for yoga teachers aspiring to guru status.
YAMA, which stands for Yoga Artist Management Agency, is the first yogi-only representation firm. Founded by Ava Taylor (a former Lululemon marketing agent), it’s a small but powerful operation. YAMA is meant to help rockstar yoga teachers manage their schedules: planning teaching tours, juggling speaking engagements and launching DVDs—all the things a traditional talent agency does, but with a yoga twist.
Critics will say that it’s a ploy to maximize profits, but Taylor says her motivation behind YAMA was to reconcile the “duality between being a [yoga] teacher and living in the real world.” And in an interview with YogaDork.com, client Sadie Nardini defended her involvement with the agency as necessary to maintaining her “sanity”:
If [people] knew the amount of work it takes to organize just one teacher training at one studio, then multiply that by a hundred for all the classes, workshops, trainings, retreats and travel we are asked (and want) to do each year, just to be able to reach and then teach all our students, they might see past the apparent quest for stardom, and into our desire for plain old sanity!
The fact remains that yoga is a $5.7 billion industry and is only growing. Are endeavors like YAMA necessary to keep up with the growing demand for yoga, or are they merely symptoms of our yoga industrial complex?
But, whatever the response, there seems to be no stopping YAMA. At the time of its launch in spring 2010, it already had bicoastal representatives and a roster full of heavy-hitter clients, and has only grown since then. You can definitely expect to hear more from them in 2011.
