Aging Gracefully: Embodied Self-Knowing and the Counterclockwise Effect of Your Yoga Mat
The truth we can hear beyond the ear
Have you ever been in conversation with a friend when they said something that resonated somewhere deep inside of you? Their words ring as truth on alevel beyond the fleshy ear that caught the sound waves carrying them to you.
Most of us know this feeling. We also know its opposite: the quiet discordance when something is said that doesn’t quite sit right with what weknow of ourselves.
Now a more provocative question: have you ever muted that resonance/discordance filter while listening to someone in a position of authority? A doctor, a specialist, an expert in a white coat with a chart inhand, perhaps?
Same. I’ve also been the respected doctor advising the patient. I think this filter of ours might matter more than anything I, the supposed expert, could tell you about aging, and I’ll invite you to read my following thoughts on aging through the filter of your own deeper truth.
This piece is about that filter, shaped by my own lived experience, mylove for my patients and my fondness for those 60-110 years old, whom I have had the joy of working with as their physical therapist. In a way, it is about yoga philosophy: vidyā, clear seeing, the opposite of avidyā, the clouding ofthe mind or delusion, and one of the niyamas in particular, svadhyaya, or self-study, and how cultivating a deep, embodied self-knowing may be one of the most powerful things we can do to age with strength, balance and grace. It is also about the beliefs we absorb without noticing from our culture, from our healthcare system, and from our own histories of injury and suffering. And it is, above all, about hope. The wisdom traditions of yoga and Buddhism have been mapping the way out of these clouded beliefs for thousands of years, and the path home is still open beneath our feet.
One thing I want to say plainly before we go further: nothing here is aninvitation to dismiss your healthcare providers. It is an invitation to receive their care with your whole self, filter and all, because receiving guidance and absorbing a belief are two different things.
Whose beliefs about aging are you carrying?
Here is the question I want to place at the center of everything that follows: are your beliefs about aging truly your own? Or are you borrowing them, perhaps from your family, along with their worry and concern, or from a healthcare provider whose well-meaning caution is shaped by the oath to do no harm? That intention is genuinely good, and much of the guidance that flows from it is exactly right. And yet a subtle seed of fear can travel alongside even the best care, and that seed might grow into a limiting belief if it never passes through our inner filtration.
In 1979, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer ran what became known as the Counterclockwise study. She brought a group of men in their seventies to aretreat that had been carefully staged to look and feel like 1959: the music, the magazines, the news, the conversations. The men were asked not simply to remember that era, but to live as though they were their younger selves, in the present tense. The TV showed programs they would have watched 20 years ago, in black and white. They carried their own luggage. They were treated as capable.
After only a week, they showed measurable improvements in several markers we tend to file under "aging": things like posture, flexibility, hearing and vision, and even how old they looked to people viewing their photographs. The study was small and its methods have been debated, so I hold it lightly. What stays with me is the question it opens.
To me, this study pulls back a curtain on something that rings true. It suggests that some portion of what we call aging is not only happening to the body, but is being written into the body by what the mind believes about time, capacity and decline. If shifting the context of belief for a single week could turn some of those clocks backward, what might a lifetime of clearer seeing do?
This is the thread I want to weave through everything that follows: our beliefs wield great influence on what we become.
Strength: the accidental discovery
A few years ago I was in the clinic, working with a 91-year-old woman on floor-to-stand transfers, the practical skill of getting down to the ground and back up again. She was moving so well that I wanted to challenge her a little. I demonstrated a plank and asked her to try it.
She got into the plank easily. And then, without any prompting from me, she started doing mountain climbers.
I was surprised. Then I was delighted. It was an accidental discovery of just how strong she was, and it quietly exposed something about my own expectations. I assumed that a plank would challenge her. Was this assumption because of her age, or because holding a plank is challenging for most of my patients? She, however, performed the plank with apparent ease and took it to the next level, adding mountain climbers. No one told her to stop, and she could clearly perform the movement safely, so… why not?! She had clearly kept herself moving and lifting things, and her functional capacity was still there as a result. Not only that, but she believed she could. No one had convinced her otherwise.
The research supports her. Our capacity to build and maintain strength does not expire on a birthday. One of the best-known examples is a 1990 studyby M. A. Fiatarone and colleagues, in which nursing-home residents in their nineties took part in high-intensity strength training for eight weeks. They gained strength dramatically, and some walked faster or needed their canesless. Muscle, it turns out, keeps listening to the demands we place on it for our whole lives. My point being: you can be strong at any age!
Have you ever been in conversation with a friend when they said something that resonated somewhere deep inside of you? Their words ring as truth on alevel beyond the fleshy ear that caught the sound waves carrying them to you.
Most of us know this feeling. We also know its opposite: the quiet discordance when something is said that doesn’t quite sit right with what weknow of ourselves.
Now a more provocative question: have you ever muted that resonance/discordance filter while listening to someone in a position of authority? A doctor, a specialist, an expert in a white coat with a chart inhand, perhaps?
Same. I’ve also been the respected doctor advising the patient. I think this filter of ours might matter more than anything I, the supposed expert, could tell you about aging, and I’ll invite you to read my following thoughts on aging through the filter of your own deeper truth.
This piece is about that filter, shaped by my own lived experience, mylove for my patients and my fondness for those 60-110 years old, whom I have had the joy of working with as their physical therapist. In a way, it is about yoga philosophy: vidyā, clear seeing, the opposite of avidyā, the clouding ofthe mind or delusion, and one of the niyamas in particular, svadhyaya, or self-study, and how cultivating a deep, embodied self-knowing may be one of the most powerful things we can do to age with strength, balance and grace. It is also about the beliefs we absorb without noticing from our culture, from our healthcare system, and from our own histories of injury and suffering. And it is, above all, about hope. The wisdom traditions of yoga and Buddhism have been mapping the way out of these clouded beliefs for thousands of years, and the path home is still open beneath our feet.
One thing I want to say plainly before we go further: nothing here is aninvitation to dismiss your healthcare providers. It is an invitation to receive their care with your whole self, filter and all, because receiving guidance and absorbing a belief are two different things.
Whose beliefs about aging are you carrying?
Here is the question I want to place at the center of everything that follows: are your beliefs about aging truly your own? Or are you borrowing them, perhaps from your family, along with their worry and concern, or from a healthcare provider whose well-meaning caution is shaped by the oath to do no harm? That intention is genuinely good, and much of the guidance that flows from it is exactly right. And yet a subtle seed of fear can travel alongside even the best care, and that seed might grow into a limiting belief if it never passes through our inner filtration.
In 1979, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer ran what became known as the Counterclockwise study. She brought a group of men in their seventies to aretreat that had been carefully staged to look and feel like 1959: the music, the magazines, the news, the conversations. The men were asked not simply to remember that era, but to live as though they were their younger selves, in the present tense. The TV showed programs they would have watched 20 years ago, in black and white. They carried their own luggage. They were treated as capable.
After only a week, they showed measurable improvements in several markers we tend to file under "aging": things like posture, flexibility, hearing and vision, and even how old they looked to people viewing their photographs. The study was small and its methods have been debated, so I hold it lightly. What stays with me is the question it opens.
To me, this study pulls back a curtain on something that rings true. It suggests that some portion of what we call aging is not only happening to the body, but is being written into the body by what the mind believes about time, capacity and decline. If shifting the context of belief for a single week could turn some of those clocks backward, what might a lifetime of clearer seeing do?
This is the thread I want to weave through everything that follows: our beliefs wield great influence on what we become.
Strength: the accidental discovery
A few years ago I was in the clinic, working with a 91-year-old woman on floor-to-stand transfers, the practical skill of getting down to the ground and back up again. She was moving so well that I wanted to challenge her a little. I demonstrated a plank and asked her to try it.
She got into the plank easily. And then, without any prompting from me, she started doing mountain climbers.
I was surprised. Then I was delighted. It was an accidental discovery of just how strong she was, and it quietly exposed something about my own expectations. I assumed that a plank would challenge her. Was this assumption because of her age, or because holding a plank is challenging for most of my patients? She, however, performed the plank with apparent ease and took it to the next level, adding mountain climbers. No one told her to stop, and she could clearly perform the movement safely, so… why not?! She had clearly kept herself moving and lifting things, and her functional capacity was still there as a result. Not only that, but she believed she could. No one had convinced her otherwise.
The research supports her. Our capacity to build and maintain strength does not expire on a birthday. One of the best-known examples is a 1990 studyby M. A. Fiatarone and colleagues, in which nursing-home residents in their nineties took part in high-intensity strength training for eight weeks. They gained strength dramatically, and some walked faster or needed their canesless. Muscle, it turns out, keeps listening to the demands we place on it for our whole lives. My point being: you can be strong at any age!
Iatrogenic limiting beliefs on aging
Iatrogenic describes harm that is caused, unintentionally, by medical care itself. From my perspective as a physical therapist, I want to propose that one of the quietest forms of iatrogenic harm is not a drug side effect or a surgical complication. It is a belief.
Those of us in healthcare are shaped by our guiding principles, and the first and perhaps most emphasized is do no harm. In the real world, that oath is magnified by the pressure to mitigate liability, and our simple desire to be a responsible stweard of the care you entrust in us, so we err on the side of the safest possible option. Very often that means erring on the side of caution, and sometimes that caution comes at the patient’s expense.
The intention is genuinely good; we need to keep our patients safe. We do not want someone to re-rupture a repaired tendon by loading it before the tissue has the capacity to tolerate it. So we encourage protecting and guardingto allow for healing. The care itself is often exactly right; the story that grows up around it is what deserves our discernment. Protection, repeated often enough, can teach a person to fear movement itself.
And fear matters. Fear is one of the emotions most strongly associated with pain, and I would venture to take it a step further and say it is the one most associated with suffering.
So here is the paradox. Through our over-guarding, under-loading, over-protective desire to help, we can imply that older adults are less capable than they really are. Pair that with influences from society and the loving concern of a family member or two, and oh my. We can leave the impression that degeneration and frailty are simply what aging is. We rarely say it outright. We say it with the exercises we don’t prescribe, the weights we don’t add, the challenges we don’t offer.
We shape the beliefs of those who believe in us. That is a profound responsibility, and also a profound opportunity.
Healing on the clock we believe in
Ellen Langer did not stop at 1979. In a 2023 study titled Physical Healing as a Function of Perceived Time, she and Peter Aungle gave participants a small, standardized skin mark and then had them sit for the same real amount of time while watching a clock. The clock had been altered: for some it ran slow, for others it ran fast, and for the control group it ran at its normal pace. The marks showed more healing in the people who believed more time had passed.
Sit with that for a moment. The tissue was the same. The real minutes were the same. What differed was the story the mind was telling about time.
Now consider what we tell our patients. Tendons need six to eight weeks to heal. That timeline is grounded in real tissue biology, and it is useful. But it is also a belief we hand to people, along with an implicit sense of what they should expect to feel, and when. If perceived time can influence healing, then the stories we tell about time carry weight in the body. The calendar we give a patient may become, in part, the calendar they heal on.
This does not mean we should throw out tissue-healing science. It means we should hand it over with care, and with an awareness that the person receiving it is not a passive tissue, but a whole, knowing being. The balance between protection and actually facilitating healing, growth and adaptation to stress is a fine line, and it should be managed mindfully. What Ellen Langer’s work teaches us is that our beliefs, shaped by what we are taught in medical school, physical therapy school and beyond, may not be as rigid as we think. There is some room for variation, and belief seems to hold some sway here.
The first turn inward
So where does the protective filter come from, the one that lets some people hear a limiting message and simply not absorb it?
While I was trying to articulate all of this to my partner, who is studying psychology, she brought up the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. Winnicott wrote about the capacity to be alone: the moment an infantfirst experiences being alone, yet held within the safety of knowing that thecaregiver is nearby.
In that moment, it seems, the infant gets its first chance to turn its attention inward. In yoga we call this turning inward pratyahara, the withdrawal of the senses from the pull of the outer world. And what begins there is svadhyaya, the study of the self. The infant, safely held, starts the lifelong work of getting to know who it is.
I have noticed a common thread among the patients who seem to age most gracefully. They have a strong sense of self-knowing. And that self-knowing appears to protect them from the limiting beliefs I described earlier. The stronger and clearer their knowing of self, especially when it is not clouded by avidya (misperception), the more resilient they seem to be.
Iatrogenic describes harm that is caused, unintentionally, by medical care itself. From my perspective as a physical therapist, I want to propose that one of the quietest forms of iatrogenic harm is not a drug side effect or a surgical complication. It is a belief.
Those of us in healthcare are shaped by our guiding principles, and the first and perhaps most emphasized is do no harm. In the real world, that oath is magnified by the pressure to mitigate liability, and our simple desire to be a responsible stweard of the care you entrust in us, so we err on the side of the safest possible option. Very often that means erring on the side of caution, and sometimes that caution comes at the patient’s expense.
The intention is genuinely good; we need to keep our patients safe. We do not want someone to re-rupture a repaired tendon by loading it before the tissue has the capacity to tolerate it. So we encourage protecting and guardingto allow for healing. The care itself is often exactly right; the story that grows up around it is what deserves our discernment. Protection, repeated often enough, can teach a person to fear movement itself.
And fear matters. Fear is one of the emotions most strongly associated with pain, and I would venture to take it a step further and say it is the one most associated with suffering.
So here is the paradox. Through our over-guarding, under-loading, over-protective desire to help, we can imply that older adults are less capable than they really are. Pair that with influences from society and the loving concern of a family member or two, and oh my. We can leave the impression that degeneration and frailty are simply what aging is. We rarely say it outright. We say it with the exercises we don’t prescribe, the weights we don’t add, the challenges we don’t offer.
We shape the beliefs of those who believe in us. That is a profound responsibility, and also a profound opportunity.
Healing on the clock we believe in
Ellen Langer did not stop at 1979. In a 2023 study titled Physical Healing as a Function of Perceived Time, she and Peter Aungle gave participants a small, standardized skin mark and then had them sit for the same real amount of time while watching a clock. The clock had been altered: for some it ran slow, for others it ran fast, and for the control group it ran at its normal pace. The marks showed more healing in the people who believed more time had passed.
Sit with that for a moment. The tissue was the same. The real minutes were the same. What differed was the story the mind was telling about time.
Now consider what we tell our patients. Tendons need six to eight weeks to heal. That timeline is grounded in real tissue biology, and it is useful. But it is also a belief we hand to people, along with an implicit sense of what they should expect to feel, and when. If perceived time can influence healing, then the stories we tell about time carry weight in the body. The calendar we give a patient may become, in part, the calendar they heal on.
This does not mean we should throw out tissue-healing science. It means we should hand it over with care, and with an awareness that the person receiving it is not a passive tissue, but a whole, knowing being. The balance between protection and actually facilitating healing, growth and adaptation to stress is a fine line, and it should be managed mindfully. What Ellen Langer’s work teaches us is that our beliefs, shaped by what we are taught in medical school, physical therapy school and beyond, may not be as rigid as we think. There is some room for variation, and belief seems to hold some sway here.
The first turn inward
So where does the protective filter come from, the one that lets some people hear a limiting message and simply not absorb it?
While I was trying to articulate all of this to my partner, who is studying psychology, she brought up the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. Winnicott wrote about the capacity to be alone: the moment an infantfirst experiences being alone, yet held within the safety of knowing that thecaregiver is nearby.
In that moment, it seems, the infant gets its first chance to turn its attention inward. In yoga we call this turning inward pratyahara, the withdrawal of the senses from the pull of the outer world. And what begins there is svadhyaya, the study of the self. The infant, safely held, starts the lifelong work of getting to know who it is.
I have noticed a common thread among the patients who seem to age most gracefully. They have a strong sense of self-knowing. And that self-knowing appears to protect them from the limiting beliefs I described earlier. The stronger and clearer their knowing of self, especially when it is not clouded by avidya (misperception), the more resilient they seem to be.
The dance between caution and capacity
This is the fine line we have to dance. How do we respect the advice of the healthcare provider who is trying to keep us safe, while still holding onto a knowing of our own strength, capability and inherent capacity?
I don’t think the answer is to ignore medical advice. The answer is discernment. It is the difference between receiving guidance and absorbing a belief.
We can honor the tissue’s healing timeline and still refuse the story that we are fragile. We can protect a healing tendon, which we might discern to be prudent advice and guidance, without deciding that our whole body is now something to be protected from life. We can let our provider’s caution inform our choices without letting it author our identity.
That discernment is exactly the resonance-and-discordance filter we started with. And it is a skill. It can be trained.
Balance, and the woman who danced at one hundred
There is a common belief that balance inevitably deteriorates as we age. We have all heard the story: a beloved grandparent falls and, because of their frailty, breaks something, often a hip. The statistics that follow a hip fracture in older adults are genuinely intimidating. And so the fear grows, in the mind of the healthcare provider who is trying to help, in the mind of the patient, and in the minds of everyone who loves them. Our beliefs about aging morph to fit this new evidence, and the circle of caution tightens.
But there are people who keep challenging this myth that with age comes an inevitable decline in balance, and so they maintain it. Some maintain better balance than many twenty-year-olds. Why?
Look at Tao Porchon-Lynch, an icon and an idol of mine. She was recognizedby Guinness World Records as the world’s oldest yoga teacher in her nineties and continued teaching past her hundredth birthday. Well into her nineties she was still performing challenging arm balances, including peacock pose. She danced. She taught. She practiced.
She did these things yesterday, so why not today as well? She believed she could, and that belief was supported by evidence: she had done the pose just the day before. Her self-knowing was strong. Her mind had not been reshaped by anyone telling her she was "too old to be doing arm balances," and so her truth remained unclouded.
She could, and so she did.
In the same way, my dad has shown me proof of this same phenomenon: he is an arborist and a rock and ice climbing guide. He has simply never stopped climbing tall trees and ice walls, so he still can.
The mat as living memory
Yoga keeps us young: mentally, physically and biologically.
Fad diets, unregulated sawdusty supplements and peptide trends come and go, each promising to be the elixir of youth. Yoga has withstood the one true test, the test of time. And modern science is beginning to catch up with what practitioners have long felt. A growing body of research links regular yoga and meditative practice with healthier telomeres, the protective caps on our chromosomes that serve as a biomarker of physiological age. Shorter telomeresare associated with older biological age; practices that help preserve them may help us stay biologically younger than the number of birthday candles might suggest. The research is still young, but the direction is intriguing.
But yoga does something else that I find just as important. Day after day,it shows us what we are capable of.
I am strong enough to get up off the floor. I have the strength and balance to hold this arm balance.
The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, in The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, describes layers of self. There is the proto-self, the body’s moment-to-moment feeling of its own state. There is the core self, our awareness of the immediate here and now. And there is the autobiographical self, built from memory, the story we carry of who we have been.
The autobiographical self adds color to the lens through which we see our present selves. If my memory says, "Yesterday I did an hour of yoga with challenging strength and balance work, and I succeeded," then my lens today says: I am strong, and my balance is ready to meet today’s challenges.
But if my last memory of doing an arm balance is from thirty years ago, and I am surrounded by subtle and not-so-subtle messages that my abilities have an expiration date, there is a great deal of room for doubt and fear to grow.
The autobiographical self can go either way. In those who age gracefully, it appears empowering. They seem to have claimed their own narrative and become the authors of their own stories. For others, who have lived through environments that caused suffering and tried to steal their sense of self-efficacy, even more strength is required in the writing and rewriting of who they get to become. That rewriting is possible. And the mat is one of the places where we can write new pages, one day at a time.
The fog and the groove: avidya and samskara
To understand why some of us hear a limiting belief and let it pass, while others absorb it into the bones, we need two words from the yoga tradition.
In The Heart of Yoga, T. K. V. Desikachar explains that "avidya literally means ‘incorrect comprehension.’" It is a false perception, a misapprehension that confuses the gross with the subtle. Its opposite is vidya: correct understanding, clear seeing.
Where does avidya come from? Desikachar describes it as the accumulated result of our many unconscious actions, the ways of acting and perceiving that we have carried out mechanically for years. Over time the mind leans more and more on habit, until we accept the actions of yesterday as the norms of today. These grooves of habit are called samskara. Layer upon layer, they cover the mind with avidya, like a thin film clouding the clarity of consciousness.
The more samskaras we have accumulated, the denser the fog of avidya maybe, and the more work it takes to clear enough of it to find a safe place for our feet to begin walking a new path. Sometimes that means changing ourselves. Sometimes it means changing the environment we choose to be in. It is much easier said than done, but understanding avidya and samskara is a good first step.
A samskara written in muscle
The body offers a beautiful, almost literal illustration of this. Deep in the low back lie the multifidi, small stabilizing muscles that hug the spine and quietly switch on, ahead of movement, to support it.
After an episode of low back pain, research has shown changes in how the brain represents and timing of these deep stabilizers, a protective pattern that tries to avoid pain. Due to disuse, the big mover muscles, the erector spinae, are placed under more demand to maintain function. The brain blurs the line between the small stabilizers and the big movers, and as a result the multifidi struggle to do their job in supporting the joint.
More tissue wear and tear occurs due to lack of multifidi support, more percieved tissue damage signals are sent to the brain, more pain, more protective mechanisms kick in and the multifidi are told to remain quiet. The loop self-perpetuates. The cortical smudging thickens. The avidyā grows.
That is a samskara, written in muscle. The body has accepted the guarding of yesterday as the norm of today. It is a kind of physical avidya: the system is acting on an outdated perception of danger. And the remedy mirrors the yogic one. With specific, attentive retraining, bringing conscious awareness back to a muscle that had gone quiet, the multifidi can relearn their role. Clear seeing, practiced patiently, becomes clear moving. If you are exploring movement after back pain, a physical therapist can help you do this safely; you can also explore Mindful Embodiment’s back pain resources.
I will explore these ideas in more depth in future work. For now, my point is this: developing the autobiographical self sometimes requires an intentional lens. We get to choose how we review the past, and to direct meticulous attention toward the aspects of it that help us become the resilience, strengthand courage of the hero or heroine of our own lives.
Fear as a root of avidya
When your memory includes injury or suffering, it can cloud the present with a voice. In the same way that a provider’s desire to do no harm can carrythe seed of a limiting belief, your own voice can become a limiting belief, one that grows from a place of self-preservation.
The Yoga Sutras name this precisely. Patanjali describes five kleshas, the afflictions or obstacles that cloud the mind:
• Avidya: misperception, not seeing clearly
• Asmita: a mistaken or rigid sense of identity
• Raga: attachment, clinging to what has felt good
• Dvesha: aversion, pushing away what has hurt
• Abhinivesha: fear of death, the deep clinging to self-preservation
Patanjali teaches that avidya is the field in which all the others grow. Notice how neatly our story fits here. A painful injury becomes dvesha, anaversion to the movement that hurt. Repeated protection hardens into asmita, an identity: I am fragile now. I am someone who has to be careful. And beneath it all hums abhinivesha, that ancient fear for our own survival, quietly turning every stair and every curb into a threat.
Where the two traditions meet
The Buddha arrived at a strikingly similar map. His Four Noble Truths begin with dukkha, the reality of suffering, and then name samudaya, its origin. That origin is tanha, often translated as craving or thirst, and it takes three forms: craving for pleasant experience, craving to be or become, and craving to not be, to get rid of what we don’t want.
Lay these side by side with the kleshas and the overlap is beautiful. Craving for the pleasant echoes raga. Craving to be rid of the unpleasant echoes dvesha. Craving to become, to hold on to a fixed self, echoes asmita and abhinivesha. And in the Buddhist account of how suffering arises, the very first link in the chain is avijja, the Pali form of the same word: avidya.
Both traditions are telling us the same thing. Suffering grows from misperception. Samskaras, our habitual grooves, keep feeding it. And fear, the craving for safety at any cost, is one of its deepest roots.
But both traditions also insist on the next truth. The Buddha’s third noble truth, nirodha, says suffering can end. The fourth, magga, says there is a path. Avidya can become vidya.
Franklin D. Roosevelt said it in words ambiguous enough to leave room to fit the Great Depression and this conversation alike:
"Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear isfear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
Do not make yourself small, feeble and frail to fit expectations born of other people’s fear, or of the avidya clouding your own view. Know thyself, and let that knowing filter the well-intended, unintentional seeds of fear that even the most loving providers and family members can plant while trying to keep you from harm. Receiving their care and receiving their fear are two different things. We can take the first in wholeheartedly and let the second pass through.
Paths laid by the feet of our ancestors
There are paths that were laid by the feet of our ancestors thousands of years ago. And the wisdom found along them always seems to come in eights.
In yoga, Patanjali’s eight limbs: the yamas and niyamas, our ethical relationship with the world and with ourselves; asana, the postures; pranayama, the breath; pratyahara, the turning inward; dharana, concentration; dhyana, meditation; and samadhi, wholeness.
In Buddhism, the Noble Eightfold Path: right view, right intention, rightspeech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration.
Notice where each begins. The Buddha’s path opens with right view, whichis vidya by another name: seeing things as they truly are. And the yogic pathturns its gaze inward at pratyahara, the same turn Winnicott’s infant first makes, safely held, and then deepens it through svadhyaya, self-study, one ofthe niyamas. Both traditions treat clear self-knowing not as a luxury, but as the very ground the rest of the path is built upon.
Held within these great traditions is a semi-permeable fabric of wisdom that you can wrap around yourself and embody. Semi-permeable, because it does not shut out the world. It lets the love of the healthcare provider or family member in. It filters the rest by attuning to the inner chord of truth.
When I try to imagine what has shaped the common thread of character I seein my patients who have aged so gracefully, I imagine some combination of these teachings, lived out, whether they have ever heard the words or not. They have developed a protective knowing of their true selves, and of the false truths inthe world around them. It is a discernment through which they can filter the missteps of loved ones or healthcare providers who are being overly protective, while still receiving the love from which those suggestions arise.
They are not reckless in testing their boundaries. Rather, there is agraceful acceptance of change and of who they are today, accompanied by their freedom from confinement. They are who they are, and their abilities come froma place too deep for anyone else’s beliefs or fears to reach.
This is the fine line we have to dance. How do we respect the advice of the healthcare provider who is trying to keep us safe, while still holding onto a knowing of our own strength, capability and inherent capacity?
I don’t think the answer is to ignore medical advice. The answer is discernment. It is the difference between receiving guidance and absorbing a belief.
We can honor the tissue’s healing timeline and still refuse the story that we are fragile. We can protect a healing tendon, which we might discern to be prudent advice and guidance, without deciding that our whole body is now something to be protected from life. We can let our provider’s caution inform our choices without letting it author our identity.
That discernment is exactly the resonance-and-discordance filter we started with. And it is a skill. It can be trained.
Balance, and the woman who danced at one hundred
There is a common belief that balance inevitably deteriorates as we age. We have all heard the story: a beloved grandparent falls and, because of their frailty, breaks something, often a hip. The statistics that follow a hip fracture in older adults are genuinely intimidating. And so the fear grows, in the mind of the healthcare provider who is trying to help, in the mind of the patient, and in the minds of everyone who loves them. Our beliefs about aging morph to fit this new evidence, and the circle of caution tightens.
But there are people who keep challenging this myth that with age comes an inevitable decline in balance, and so they maintain it. Some maintain better balance than many twenty-year-olds. Why?
Look at Tao Porchon-Lynch, an icon and an idol of mine. She was recognizedby Guinness World Records as the world’s oldest yoga teacher in her nineties and continued teaching past her hundredth birthday. Well into her nineties she was still performing challenging arm balances, including peacock pose. She danced. She taught. She practiced.
She did these things yesterday, so why not today as well? She believed she could, and that belief was supported by evidence: she had done the pose just the day before. Her self-knowing was strong. Her mind had not been reshaped by anyone telling her she was "too old to be doing arm balances," and so her truth remained unclouded.
She could, and so she did.
In the same way, my dad has shown me proof of this same phenomenon: he is an arborist and a rock and ice climbing guide. He has simply never stopped climbing tall trees and ice walls, so he still can.
The mat as living memory
Yoga keeps us young: mentally, physically and biologically.
Fad diets, unregulated sawdusty supplements and peptide trends come and go, each promising to be the elixir of youth. Yoga has withstood the one true test, the test of time. And modern science is beginning to catch up with what practitioners have long felt. A growing body of research links regular yoga and meditative practice with healthier telomeres, the protective caps on our chromosomes that serve as a biomarker of physiological age. Shorter telomeresare associated with older biological age; practices that help preserve them may help us stay biologically younger than the number of birthday candles might suggest. The research is still young, but the direction is intriguing.
But yoga does something else that I find just as important. Day after day,it shows us what we are capable of.
I am strong enough to get up off the floor. I have the strength and balance to hold this arm balance.
The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, in The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, describes layers of self. There is the proto-self, the body’s moment-to-moment feeling of its own state. There is the core self, our awareness of the immediate here and now. And there is the autobiographical self, built from memory, the story we carry of who we have been.
The autobiographical self adds color to the lens through which we see our present selves. If my memory says, "Yesterday I did an hour of yoga with challenging strength and balance work, and I succeeded," then my lens today says: I am strong, and my balance is ready to meet today’s challenges.
But if my last memory of doing an arm balance is from thirty years ago, and I am surrounded by subtle and not-so-subtle messages that my abilities have an expiration date, there is a great deal of room for doubt and fear to grow.
The autobiographical self can go either way. In those who age gracefully, it appears empowering. They seem to have claimed their own narrative and become the authors of their own stories. For others, who have lived through environments that caused suffering and tried to steal their sense of self-efficacy, even more strength is required in the writing and rewriting of who they get to become. That rewriting is possible. And the mat is one of the places where we can write new pages, one day at a time.
The fog and the groove: avidya and samskara
To understand why some of us hear a limiting belief and let it pass, while others absorb it into the bones, we need two words from the yoga tradition.
In The Heart of Yoga, T. K. V. Desikachar explains that "avidya literally means ‘incorrect comprehension.’" It is a false perception, a misapprehension that confuses the gross with the subtle. Its opposite is vidya: correct understanding, clear seeing.
Where does avidya come from? Desikachar describes it as the accumulated result of our many unconscious actions, the ways of acting and perceiving that we have carried out mechanically for years. Over time the mind leans more and more on habit, until we accept the actions of yesterday as the norms of today. These grooves of habit are called samskara. Layer upon layer, they cover the mind with avidya, like a thin film clouding the clarity of consciousness.
The more samskaras we have accumulated, the denser the fog of avidya maybe, and the more work it takes to clear enough of it to find a safe place for our feet to begin walking a new path. Sometimes that means changing ourselves. Sometimes it means changing the environment we choose to be in. It is much easier said than done, but understanding avidya and samskara is a good first step.
A samskara written in muscle
The body offers a beautiful, almost literal illustration of this. Deep in the low back lie the multifidi, small stabilizing muscles that hug the spine and quietly switch on, ahead of movement, to support it.
After an episode of low back pain, research has shown changes in how the brain represents and timing of these deep stabilizers, a protective pattern that tries to avoid pain. Due to disuse, the big mover muscles, the erector spinae, are placed under more demand to maintain function. The brain blurs the line between the small stabilizers and the big movers, and as a result the multifidi struggle to do their job in supporting the joint.
More tissue wear and tear occurs due to lack of multifidi support, more percieved tissue damage signals are sent to the brain, more pain, more protective mechanisms kick in and the multifidi are told to remain quiet. The loop self-perpetuates. The cortical smudging thickens. The avidyā grows.
That is a samskara, written in muscle. The body has accepted the guarding of yesterday as the norm of today. It is a kind of physical avidya: the system is acting on an outdated perception of danger. And the remedy mirrors the yogic one. With specific, attentive retraining, bringing conscious awareness back to a muscle that had gone quiet, the multifidi can relearn their role. Clear seeing, practiced patiently, becomes clear moving. If you are exploring movement after back pain, a physical therapist can help you do this safely; you can also explore Mindful Embodiment’s back pain resources.
I will explore these ideas in more depth in future work. For now, my point is this: developing the autobiographical self sometimes requires an intentional lens. We get to choose how we review the past, and to direct meticulous attention toward the aspects of it that help us become the resilience, strengthand courage of the hero or heroine of our own lives.
Fear as a root of avidya
When your memory includes injury or suffering, it can cloud the present with a voice. In the same way that a provider’s desire to do no harm can carrythe seed of a limiting belief, your own voice can become a limiting belief, one that grows from a place of self-preservation.
The Yoga Sutras name this precisely. Patanjali describes five kleshas, the afflictions or obstacles that cloud the mind:
• Avidya: misperception, not seeing clearly
• Asmita: a mistaken or rigid sense of identity
• Raga: attachment, clinging to what has felt good
• Dvesha: aversion, pushing away what has hurt
• Abhinivesha: fear of death, the deep clinging to self-preservation
Patanjali teaches that avidya is the field in which all the others grow. Notice how neatly our story fits here. A painful injury becomes dvesha, anaversion to the movement that hurt. Repeated protection hardens into asmita, an identity: I am fragile now. I am someone who has to be careful. And beneath it all hums abhinivesha, that ancient fear for our own survival, quietly turning every stair and every curb into a threat.
Where the two traditions meet
The Buddha arrived at a strikingly similar map. His Four Noble Truths begin with dukkha, the reality of suffering, and then name samudaya, its origin. That origin is tanha, often translated as craving or thirst, and it takes three forms: craving for pleasant experience, craving to be or become, and craving to not be, to get rid of what we don’t want.
Lay these side by side with the kleshas and the overlap is beautiful. Craving for the pleasant echoes raga. Craving to be rid of the unpleasant echoes dvesha. Craving to become, to hold on to a fixed self, echoes asmita and abhinivesha. And in the Buddhist account of how suffering arises, the very first link in the chain is avijja, the Pali form of the same word: avidya.
Both traditions are telling us the same thing. Suffering grows from misperception. Samskaras, our habitual grooves, keep feeding it. And fear, the craving for safety at any cost, is one of its deepest roots.
But both traditions also insist on the next truth. The Buddha’s third noble truth, nirodha, says suffering can end. The fourth, magga, says there is a path. Avidya can become vidya.
Franklin D. Roosevelt said it in words ambiguous enough to leave room to fit the Great Depression and this conversation alike:
"Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear isfear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
Do not make yourself small, feeble and frail to fit expectations born of other people’s fear, or of the avidya clouding your own view. Know thyself, and let that knowing filter the well-intended, unintentional seeds of fear that even the most loving providers and family members can plant while trying to keep you from harm. Receiving their care and receiving their fear are two different things. We can take the first in wholeheartedly and let the second pass through.
Paths laid by the feet of our ancestors
There are paths that were laid by the feet of our ancestors thousands of years ago. And the wisdom found along them always seems to come in eights.
In yoga, Patanjali’s eight limbs: the yamas and niyamas, our ethical relationship with the world and with ourselves; asana, the postures; pranayama, the breath; pratyahara, the turning inward; dharana, concentration; dhyana, meditation; and samadhi, wholeness.
In Buddhism, the Noble Eightfold Path: right view, right intention, rightspeech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration.
Notice where each begins. The Buddha’s path opens with right view, whichis vidya by another name: seeing things as they truly are. And the yogic pathturns its gaze inward at pratyahara, the same turn Winnicott’s infant first makes, safely held, and then deepens it through svadhyaya, self-study, one ofthe niyamas. Both traditions treat clear self-knowing not as a luxury, but as the very ground the rest of the path is built upon.
Held within these great traditions is a semi-permeable fabric of wisdom that you can wrap around yourself and embody. Semi-permeable, because it does not shut out the world. It lets the love of the healthcare provider or family member in. It filters the rest by attuning to the inner chord of truth.
When I try to imagine what has shaped the common thread of character I seein my patients who have aged so gracefully, I imagine some combination of these teachings, lived out, whether they have ever heard the words or not. They have developed a protective knowing of their true selves, and of the false truths inthe world around them. It is a discernment through which they can filter the missteps of loved ones or healthcare providers who are being overly protective, while still receiving the love from which those suggestions arise.
They are not reckless in testing their boundaries. Rather, there is agraceful acceptance of change and of who they are today, accompanied by their freedom from confinement. They are who they are, and their abilities come froma place too deep for anyone else’s beliefs or fears to reach.
Listening beneath the ear
So I will leave you with the question we began with. The next time someone, however kind, however credentialed, tells you what you can no longer do, pause. Listen beneath the fleshy ear. Does it resonate with that inner chord of truth, or does it ring false?
Sometimes there is a real, protective reason for a limitation, and when there is, it is wise to heed it. None of this is a call to defy your providers; it is a call to be in honest conversation with them. It is also wise to ask: if this restriction is meant to protect a specific tissue from a specific stress, how long does it need to last? Most restrictions are temporary. They exist to give tissue time to heal, and the gradual reintroduction of stress is often the very thing that completes the healing we are after. A good physical therapist can work wonders in guiding you through that process, from protection back to capacity.
Then ask yourself: does this resonate? Why, or why not? Look for common ground with the people who are offering you their love through their care and concern. Allow their concerns to filter through a lens of discernment; some ofthe guidance may be prudent and some may not resonate.
Stand tall within your own skin, within your own abilities. Find the things you enjoy, whether that is yoga or working outside, that show you day after day what you can do. And keep doing them.
A word to my fellow healthcare providers
If you are a healthcare provider, I invite you to sit with a few questionsas you engage with your patients:
• To the best of your knowledge, is what you are saying true and necessary? If so, it of course must be said.
• If what we say were to plant a seed in this person’s mind, what beliefs might they grow into?
• Is there something else that is also true, that might also be necessary to share?
• Can we add something that might help shape that belief as this person learns how to integrate what we have just said?
• Can we try to empower people while still providing the necessary, and sometimes difficult, truths?
I would love to see us become just a little more mindful in how we deliver our guidance, and in how we cultivate our own beliefs about aging. Not only forthe sake of our patients, but because our beliefs become our own realities too.
Know thyself
Know thyself. Cultivate trust in yourself by listening mindfully to your own sense of what you can do, and build on it every day. Become the painter ofyour own autobiographical self, choosing each day the actions that shape the beliefs you wish to nurture. Then watch what flourishes, and what fades away.
Move through the years with intention, with strength, with balance andwith grace, cultivating a flourishing rooted in the resonance of your owntruth.
Take what of this rings true to you. Carry it with you and let the rest fall away. This is as much a letter that I am writing to lovingly hold you through the years as it is a note to self. May we find ourselves circling back to these ideas from time to time.
Written with Much Love,
Zoe
So I will leave you with the question we began with. The next time someone, however kind, however credentialed, tells you what you can no longer do, pause. Listen beneath the fleshy ear. Does it resonate with that inner chord of truth, or does it ring false?
Sometimes there is a real, protective reason for a limitation, and when there is, it is wise to heed it. None of this is a call to defy your providers; it is a call to be in honest conversation with them. It is also wise to ask: if this restriction is meant to protect a specific tissue from a specific stress, how long does it need to last? Most restrictions are temporary. They exist to give tissue time to heal, and the gradual reintroduction of stress is often the very thing that completes the healing we are after. A good physical therapist can work wonders in guiding you through that process, from protection back to capacity.
Then ask yourself: does this resonate? Why, or why not? Look for common ground with the people who are offering you their love through their care and concern. Allow their concerns to filter through a lens of discernment; some ofthe guidance may be prudent and some may not resonate.
Stand tall within your own skin, within your own abilities. Find the things you enjoy, whether that is yoga or working outside, that show you day after day what you can do. And keep doing them.
A word to my fellow healthcare providers
If you are a healthcare provider, I invite you to sit with a few questionsas you engage with your patients:
• To the best of your knowledge, is what you are saying true and necessary? If so, it of course must be said.
• If what we say were to plant a seed in this person’s mind, what beliefs might they grow into?
• Is there something else that is also true, that might also be necessary to share?
• Can we add something that might help shape that belief as this person learns how to integrate what we have just said?
• Can we try to empower people while still providing the necessary, and sometimes difficult, truths?
I would love to see us become just a little more mindful in how we deliver our guidance, and in how we cultivate our own beliefs about aging. Not only forthe sake of our patients, but because our beliefs become our own realities too.
Know thyself
Know thyself. Cultivate trust in yourself by listening mindfully to your own sense of what you can do, and build on it every day. Become the painter ofyour own autobiographical self, choosing each day the actions that shape the beliefs you wish to nurture. Then watch what flourishes, and what fades away.
Move through the years with intention, with strength, with balance andwith grace, cultivating a flourishing rooted in the resonance of your owntruth.
Take what of this rings true to you. Carry it with you and let the rest fall away. This is as much a letter that I am writing to lovingly hold you through the years as it is a note to self. May we find ourselves circling back to these ideas from time to time.
Written with Much Love,
Zoe
