With 76.4 million boomers entering the last half of their lives, healthy aging is becoming an increasingly popular buzz word. But when we talk about healthy aging and how yoga helps perhaps facilitate a more healthy aging process, we usually only think in terms of about preventing aches and pains and prolonging the years we can stay functional and active.
While that has obvious value, there are other important values that the aging process brings along, notes Iyengar yoga teacher Gabriel Halpern. We do not have a choice about becoming older. But we do have a choice about becoming an elder, someone who actively participates in and contributes to our community. This is a choice that is a part of a conscious aging process.
In this course, Gabriel Halpern explores the concept of conscious aging and how to engage in a more authentic and empowering process life process at any stage of life. Conscious aging is not about being 55 or 65 and trying to make our body look like we’re an 18 year-old cheerleader, says Gabriel. It is a conscious decision we make to cultivate and honor certain aspects of our own life process.
Yoga has always been about developing the wisdom-insight that brings a spiritual deepening and even the enlightenment of Self-Realization. When we cultivate a lifetime of experiences to domesticate our intuition and deepen our connection to our spiritual inheritance we can then pass on that knowledge. We honor the past, animate the present, and give vision and hope to the future.
What You Will Learn
- What is conscious aging, and what role does our yoga practice play in laying the foundation for healthy aging on the level of the body, mind and spirit?
- What does it mean to empower ourselves to mature in a more authentic, unconditioned process, and how do we embrace this process?
- How does aging predispose us to open to our inner spiritual nature and how do we facilitate this deepening?
- How can we recover a sense of purpose as we age and expand our range of influence?
- Why the role of the elder in a society has almost been lost, and how yoga provides a model for transmitting our life experiences and the skills and knowledge that we have to the greater community.
This Course Also Includes:
- Yoga Practice—Introduction to Breath Awareness: The breath becomes an increasingly important practice as we get older. As part of the course, you will receive a 30 minute videotaped yoga practice with Gabriel, in which he introduces you to the power of the breath to facilitate a deep calm and deepen your yoga practice.
- Recordings of Both Sessions: Yours to keep. It’s generally acknowledged that many people only retain 10-20 percent of what they learn in a workshop. You will get the recordings of both sessions (MP3 – downloadable & MP4 – streaming online), enabling you to go back and listen to the workshop as many times as you like.
- Transcripts of Both Sessions: Ever wanted to refer to a certain part of a course? Even the best note takers miss a point every so often. With the transcripts of the sessions, you can go back and refer to particularly important passages or clarify sections you were in doubt about.