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Mother and daughter reaching yoga heights

The yoga studio where I practice my down dogs has a newsletter, which is in constant search of material to fill its "Why I Love Yoga" column. I recently helped out and am reprinting it here since I focused on my relationship with my yoga inspiration, who happens to be my grown daughter, and on the ways our relationship with our grown children evolves: the former teacher becomes the grateful pupil.

Here's the  column as it appeared in the Unity Woods newsletter:

Blogger Mom Becomes a Yoga Mom

Within weeks of graduating from college, my daughter shipped herself off to San Francisco–to paint, to write, to “find” herself. One of the tools she found was yoga. She started studying with Rodney Yee, then a West Coast Iyengar yogi. Her interest only deepened as time went on.

Moms being moms, and this mom being a blogger on parenting grown children, I had to know more about what was so important to her. She suggested I had an excellent opportunity to do so.  “You live right near one of the best yoga studios in the country,” she told me.

So it was that I signed up for Yoga I at Unity Woods. I spent a few years learning triangle pose and Warrior II … then promoted myself to … I-II for a few years of attempts at inversions …

Whenever my daughter came home or joined us for a family vacation in Vermont, we would roll out our mats and practice together. She could bend over backwards; I needed blocks and straps to keep pace with the simplest sun salutations. Even when she took up Ashtanga yoga, she managed to find ways to include me and my Iyengar yoga in a yoga routine.

Then came my hip pain and the replacement of one and, a year later, the other hip. This is where our yoga bond was tied into an even stronger knot. Four days post-surgery, she was figuring out ways I could practice yoga–seated for the first few weeks and then very cautiously using the wall for some easy-does-it uttanasanas.

Three years after the gift of my new hips, I am back in yoga class and, when my daughter and I get together (she still lives far away), we salute the sun, breathe deeply and Namaste  over the pure pleasure of our special bond.

 Double down dog

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