Lessons of a 99 year-old Yogi

On Thanksgiving Eve, I went for my much overdue annual physical. More than eight hours had passed since my last meal. My bladder was on the verge of exploding due to my paranoid obsessive over-hydrating. I was hangry and in a state.

Despite my efforts to hydrate, it took the lovely woman drawing my blood a hour to find a vein. When I got home and back online for work, I could barely type. With each keystroke, I felt like more blood was being drawn from me.

Light-headed, semi-starved, I made it to a lovely pre-Thanksgiving dinner with my family. Instead feeling refreshed and rejuvenated the next day, I woke up unable to turn my head left. The recurring literal pain in my neck had joined me for Thanksgiving day.

Not wanting to disappoint anyone, including me, I pulled myself together and headed to see my husband’s family. There I was greeted by the soulful smile and glittering eyes of Tao Porchon Lynch, also known as the world’s oldest yoga teacher and a close family friend of my in-laws.

We had barely started to speak about her recent trips to India where she had taught an audience of 11,000 people, when she kindly asked me to give her my foot. As she pressed firmly and deeply into the sole of my foot, the tightness in my neck started to wane. Enthralled, humbled and honored to have this precious moment with her, her words filled my soul. “Every day, I say, ‘this is the best day ever,’ and it is,” she explained. Truthfully, I was also a bit ashamed that she was helping to heal me, when as the supposedly younger one, I should’ve been taking care of her.

I could go on and continue to process this amazing Thanksgiving gift. I will probably write more about it as more epiphanies come to me. I just wanted to take a moment to write about the experience and share Tao’s spirit and loving heart is an example to us all. Wherever she goes, her pure soul brings out the best in others.

-Kajal