Tag: Ginny East Shaddock

The Truth about Yoga Teacher Training for ages 50 Plus

One day, when I was around 55 years old, I decided to pop in and enjoy a morning class with the yoga teacher trainees in Heartwood’s 200-hour program. It was a beautiful winter day in Florida with the sun shining bright, the temperature a perfect 75, and a teacher who had had tipped me off that she intended to deliver a mindful, nature-oriented practice. The class was being held outside to take advantage of the gentle breeze, the blooming flowers, and the peaceful ambience of Heartwood in November. I set my mat up in the back thinking I might pause and take a picture or two for the group to enjoy later. This kind of class was just what I needed today, and what a treat it was going to be to be a student rather than the teacher for that hour.

I was truly enjoying myself, but halfway through the practice, the flow got a bit more dynamic than anticipated and I dropped into child’s pose to take a break. A thought ran through my mind. Wow, I’m certainly glad I took my yoga teacher training at 48, because this is hard. I would have a hard time getting through the demands of a 200 program if I tried getting certified today.

After the practice, as I was sitting in the garden with a cup of tea watching a few students practice teaching sun salutations on the lawn, I began considering my yoga journey and all I have done and continue to do to contribute to the world through yoga. For the first few years after gaining my certification, I taught classes, but soon after, I opened a studio. Within a few years I opened another, then another. I eventually founded Heartwood Yoga Institute and began training teachers and developing what today is a 7-acre yoga facility that offers a profound healing and educational experience for hundreds of people yearly. As my career evolved, my involvement in yoga found its own cadence and purpose and in the last 15 years I have trained literally thousands of yoga teachers at the 200-, 300- and 800-hour yoga therapy level with a continually evolving career that fills me with purpose, meaning, and a respectable income. I’ve touched the lives of many people, both the students I teach directly and the students I teach indirectly as my graduates move on to create yoga communities of their own. I’ve also worked as a yoga therapist and had the honor of impacting the lives of many, many individuals whom fate had the foresight to bring to Heartwood at just the right time for us both.    

What a shame it would have been if I had avoided taking that step to formally gain a yoga certification at 48 because I didn’t want to be the “older student” in a course with mostly 30-somethings. What if I had listened to that voice that said I was too old to learn something new, and besides, what really am I going to do with yoga at this stage in life? Worse yet, what if I had waited until I was 54 to consider yoga training? At 48 I was still teaching dance and had energy, flexibility, and stamina. Little did I know what was to come just down the road, both physically and personally. I faced unexpected health challenges in my 50’s. I began having issues with arthritis, had both feet operated on, and was unprepared for the weight gain and other shifts that came with menopause. I had new personal challenges to maneuver, including a financial crash, a devastating divorce, my children leaving home, and the loss of beloved family members. Add a few more years to my maturing self and I had a massive heart attack to add to the mix.  Could I have possibly gotten through a 200-hour yoga teacher training during that decade? Probably not! Did yoga help me accept and move through that decade with grace and positivity. Absolutely! How much harder life would have been without my deeper relationship with yoga, gained thanks to a yoga certification program.

I felt good from the practice, albeit slightly frustrated that I struggled a bit, and I sat there considering my yoga journey, thankful I had done my training when I did, but also realizing that had I avoided taking that step for whatever excuses I made up, it would have been a huge loss to the world. Had I not become a yoga teacher at the ripe old age of 48 (or if I had waited longer) dozens and dozens of people whose lives I have changed would be in a very different place, not the least of which includes my own. Heartwood would not exist, and frankly, many other studios would have failed to manifest since so many of my graduates were inspired by my teaching and as result, opened businesses and forged careers and made waves of their own in the world. In my very own “It’s a Wonderful Life” moment I took stock of the measurable ways my becoming a yoga teacher was central to my service to the world.  I can say with absolute certainty that my involvement with yoga was the best decision I ever made, at any age, and my maturity has never held me back.  In fact, I believe my age and coming to yoga at midlife made my reinvented career a richer experience.        

It was in that moment, feeling my age, a little tired and sore from the yoga practice, but deeply aware of how important my yoga journey had been to both myself and others, that I decided Heartwood needed to offer a yoga teacher training for ages 50 and up. I imagined how many dynamic beautiful souls were out there with wisdom and compassion to share, who might miss the opportunity to embrace the role of yoga teacher due to perceived physical obstacles or doubt standing in the way.  Yoga teacher training shouldn’t be a physical hurdle we must get past. It should be an inspirational, positive beginning of a lifetime love affair with a practice that makes life ever more poignant and meaningful. I knew in that moment Heartwood needed to create a special program for ages 50 and up that took into account some of the challenges YTT presents to those who are not in their prime physically.

I got to work with the Heartwood staff planning Heartwood’s first RYS-200 program geared to mature students and a few months later we offered our first YTT for ages 50+ to seven enthusiastic teacher trainees. In the 8 years since, Heartwood has hosted dozens of successful RYS-200 programs for ages 50 & up in both a weekly program for local students in a course that spans months, and in a 16-day immersion format for students that choose to join us from all over the country and beyond offered twice a year. I can honestly say that some of the strongest and most successful teachers we’ve trained have come from the 50 plus program, including some of our own staff members. The graduates are in their 50’s, 60’s, even 70 and beyond. Some are extremely fit and others successfully complete the program despite MS, Parkinson’s, Autoimmune issues, Injuries, or just the lack of confidence that comes when you haven’t been in school for decades.

People often ask how the yoga program for age 50 and up differs from the Heartwood traditional 200-hour yoga program where all ages participate. To be honest, the syllabus is the same. All yoga teachers, regardless of age, must learn philosophy, anatomy, alignment, methodology, and take a deep dive into the 8 limbs of yoga. Yoga Alliance defines what a teacher must know to prove competency, and considering I’m older myself, I’ll be darned if I’m going to dummy down the program as if age narrows a person’s capacity in the area of yoga. I’m proof it doesn’t! In fact, at Heartwood we have noticed mature students are often more apt to study, practice, and connect because they are less attached to the expectation or attachment to instant gratification that often is a result of being raised in our complex society today with social media, the quicker pace of everything, and what seems to be endless options making focus and commitment to any one thing harder than it once was.

Since most mature students choose to work with others in their age group, and the teachers too must learn to take care of their own bodies as time will inevitably stress their joints, ligaments and bones regardless of how in-shape they may be, we do spend a bit more time on modifications and contraindications to provide safe and effective practices for aging bodies. We skip aggressive practices such as Ashtanga that they are less likely to use when they begin teaching, and opt to add a bonus training of Chair and Assessable yoga to round out their skillset.

But the real difference between the 50 plus program and the traditional 200 program is mostly the community that joins together to study. People who have been on this earth a little longer have shared experiences and a certain wisdom that comes from surviving life’s ups and down. Most everyone in the program has experienced loss, be it a divorce, financial problem, career change or retirement. Most everyone struggles with the complexity of aging, reinventing themselves as time and circumstance forces life in a new direction. They all wrestle with the complexities of aging parents, family dynamics, children leaving home (or not leaving home), career shifts, dealing with spouses, ex-spouses, and personal trauma. They have witnessed friends or family members pass, become caregivers, dealt with disappointment, addiction, or abuse. They have experienced firsthand the health problems that come with age, be it a torn ligament or bursitis in the shoulder, cancer, heart attack, weight gain, or some other challenge. They know without question that nothing is permanent in this life, and yet they sign up for a yoga training because they want to keep growing as an individual and they believe in the promise of endless possibilities still.

All of this makes an older practitioner uniquely qualified to be a truly remarkable yoga teacher. The empathy that comes with having suffered from and survived life’s slings and arrows opens a person to the full potential of yoga. Most importantly, maturity helps a student keep in perspective the limits of the physical practice in the greater scheme, and ego or romantic notions of being hailed the next big instafamous yoga star takes a backseat to earnest personal development and skill building to share this knowledge with others.   

Rarely does the 50 plus crowd care so much about mastering an advanced pose for their next social media post. They are less about documenting the yoga teacher training journey on Instagram and more about applying the teaching to their lives. As they grow stronger, physically, and mentally, they feel deeply inspired and called to help others gracefully maneuver through life’s challenges, the aging process, and shifts in the world. They see yoga not as a vehicle to make a killing in the wellness industry, but as a beautiful and powerful tool for acceptance, insight, and balance. And after years of sacrificing for others, mature students are ready to embrace their right to focus on themselves and to grow spiritually. And one of the greatest things I’ve witnessed in the 50 plus program is the support and acceptance the students show one another as lifetime friendships form, and the students support and empower one another to get past their obstacles and make the later chapters of life remarkable on so many levels.

These results can and should be found in any and all authentic yoga teacher training programs. But for some reasons, awareness and growth comes easier and with more lasting impact in a program where all the students share relatively the same energy, a bit of history, and a broader view of life gained from experience. The RYS-200 Yoga Teacher Training Program for ages 50 Plus at Heartwood is a good reminder that yoga is timeless, and so are we.

Ginny Shaddock is an ERYT-500 Yoga Teacher and IAYT Yoga Therapist and the founder of Heartwood Yoga Institute. Heartwood offers three RYS-200 Yoga Teacher Training Programs a year specifically for ages 50 plus; a 16 day immersion every fall and spring and a one day a week program for local students offered once a year starting in October.

If You Build It – they may or may not get it.

The other day, a yoga teacher visited Heartwood, toured the grounds with my daughter and said, “What a gorgeous and unusual place, I’d love to buy a center like this one day.”

Denver smiled and replied, “You can’t buy a place like this. You have to build one from scratch. Nothing was here until my Mom got an inkling to make a yoga center out of an old piece of agriculture property. Only vision and hard work leads to owning this kind of place.”

She didn’t get the feeling that the woman fully believed her.

Later Denver said to me, “Everyone loves the idea of Heartwood, but I don’t think many understand how much work and ingenuity was required for you and David to create this place. And they have no clue about how much work this little 7 acres is to maintain. Some yogis may think they want a Heartwood of their own, but they’d change their mind once they realized that the work is never ending and most of what they love out here cost money and demands ongoing effort, but doesn’t support paying the bills.”    

That is certainly true, but David and I don’t mind the effort because we look at Heartwood as “living art”. Sometimes, hard work has a purpose unrelated to the equation people so often make of calculating a measurable return on investment for their time and money. Art for art’s sake fuels something deep inside. For the creator, there is an alignment of creative energies that makes the artist feel connected to self and the divine. For those witnessing and enjoying the creation, there is pleasure and the reminder that beauty & inspiration can provide us with opportunities for insight and inner connections.   

David and I design spaces that meld with nature and celebrate our love of Yoga and spiritual studies. We seek utility with each project – a view or place to sit, dream, meditate or practice. We imagine people visiting and being called to pause, breathe and convene with the natural world. Considering we started the idea of Heartwood with just a run down, overgrown agricultural property and scant resources to devote to development, what we have done thus far feels satisfying. We know we won’t have the stamina to keep at this forever, and our limitless dreams for this place will never be fully realized (at least by us). We have inspiration for dozens of projects that most likely will never manifest due to our age and limited resources. But for now, Heartwood still calls to our creative spirits.

The Elements Firepit as a “possibility” and as a manifested space to sit around for discussions.

Our favorite pastime is walking the grounds with a cup of coffee after hours, looking at what is blooming or enjoying evidence that people are using our spaces. We take stock of all the work needed to be done to maintain our projects, then share ideas for upgrades or new spaces that start with “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if . . .”

We call Heartwood “Living” art because, like life, our creations often grow, thrive, then decline and die. (For the Yogis, I’d say the gunas are truly represented here-  Rajas, Sattva, and Tamas in all stages around the property.)  

We once had a beautiful bottle garden gracing the property. Dozens of reclaimed colored bottles hung from trees and surged up out of the ferns. I scoured Goodwill looking for colored bottles and dragged dozens of huge bottles home from Homegoods. The bottle garden turned out so beautiful Country Garden’s Magazine featured it along with our Chakra garden in an 8 page spread. Our bottle garden became a signature area of Heartwood. David designed all kinds of contraptions for keeping frogs out of the bottles and to stop the dog from knocking them down. He designed a variety of caps for the tops, landscape lighting to illuminate the bottles at night and mounts so that when the ferns grew too robust the bottles would be elevated for display. I had to clean the bottles every few months and took charge of replacing those that broke or wore out. Again and again I sealed the tops and changed the wires to hang them so they would catch the light.

Despite our efforts to maintain this pretty area, time and the Florida sun slowly deteriorated the bottles.  Hurricane Irma took down several of the trees holding up the bottles. Slowly our bottle garden grew tired and old.  I tried moving the bottles, but the new location just wasn’t the same. Eventually, that lovely little work of landscape art became history. Am I sorry we put so much time and effort, not to mention money into all those bottles, considering they are now history? Not at all. Because that bottle garden was not only fun to create but left us with memories of Heartwood’s early stages of development that will be with me forever. And how is missing the bottles any different than my missing the tulips that boom for only a few days each year? All things are impermanent. What is important is to appreciate what you have while you have it, and not grasp onto what is meant to die or no longer be present for you.    

The law of the universe reveals that while something fades, something new comes into existence.  Creative inspiration usually starts with an innocent comment, like, “Gee Dave, look at this cool labyrinth picture on this journal therapy e-mail I received. Wouldn’t it be fun to have something like that out front where those dang trees keep dropping limbs and nothing will grow? Of course, that would be a huge undertaking, and who knows if anyone would ever walk a labyrinth way out there. We certainly couldn’t afford to make a big old labyrinth when there are so many practical things we need . . . but dang, doesn’t that look fascinating . . . ”  and thus, the seed of an ongoing conversation has been planted.  

For fun we start talking about what kind of labyrinth we would make and how big, if only . . .. We next start reading about labyrinths, sharing history, folklore, and other tidbits of information over dinner (which is a much nicer conversation than talking about bills or politics). We start noticing Labyrinths in our travels or around town.  In time, our random comment has blown into a loose plan that if ever we can spare the time and money, we will certainly build one.”

Before you know it, our random idea has become a quest, and we skip taking a vacation one more year and instead, David is out there mathing it up, plotting out a labyrinth with engineering precision and I end up spending what would have been my vacation time that season and the next 2 laboriously and painstakingly painting the dang thing over and over to keep the path from fading. Just like when you buy a couch and suddenly feel you have to paint the living room and buy new rugs because they now seem shabby, we start landscaping the area and adding additional details. Up comes a “before I die” board, and a river rock path. This spills out to a bamboo grove with meditation benches. And since it is so lovely out there now, why not build a pavilion so we can practice yoga near the energy of the labyrinth? Voila! Who can miss a bottle garden when there is a whole labyrinth to maintain!

For many people, building a labyrinth would seem a frivolous or wasteful use of limited resources, but every time I spy someone walking the labyrinth, I’m convinced that what was at first an unlikely idea was meant all along to be a collaborative project bringing purpose and meaning into our marriage and our world. No, I never regret any of the time or effort devoted to the artistic unfolding of Heartwood. Building Heartwood fulfills our Dharma.

The medicine wheel was another project fueled by curiosity and inspiration. David and I have been long interested in Indian history, spirituality and Shamanism and one day we started a random conversation about medicine wheels which turned into our both doing some research (not many pictures of formal medicine wheels for public use out there, so we didn’t have much to go on). We addressed the issue of a medicine wheel being of a different tradition than yoga, and perhaps no one would want to go out there even if we built one. We debated designs and different regional and cultural versions and then found a tradition that spoke to us. Once the concept of building a medicine wheel was a go, we had to figure out how to do so affordably. Of course, we agreed grudgingly that the best place to put this medicine wheel was an overgrown thorny area filled with tree stumps (clearing the area cost more than the actual project!) But before we laid the first stone, I could see it there in my mind.

We had a formal Medicine Wheel ceremony, laying the stones in the rain since nature chose not to make this easy, and later, completed the project with more colored stones totally blowing the budget. David built a huge bench around the entire ring inviting students to sit wherever energy called to them and made a 6-foot hoop for a dream catcher to enhance the décor of the area. To display this, we cut down some carefully chosen trees on the side of our property and dragged them over to the area to cement into the ground like goalposts. The dead trees deteriorated over time and a hurricane came a year later and knocked them down. That same storm flooded the medicine wheel so it all but floated into the ferns. Generous students arrived to help us clean up that mess and rebuild the wheel and months later, David built a more solid structure out of timber which he planted true north to hold the dreamcatcher and new windchimes. Next, he planted a shamanic garden with sage, sweetgrass, Indian Tobacco and cedar trees (all native plants used for shamanic ceremony) and we added small stone statues of animals to represent spirit guides for fun. The native herbs didn’t make it in the harsh Florida climate, but two of the three Cedar trees survived.

The medicine wheel is probably my favorite area of Heartwood. I teach a nature yoga class out at the wheel involving a semi-seated practice on the benches. The meditation and poses are steeped in shamanic themes. Unfortunately, this area can get uncomfortably sunny midday so some seasons the heat prohibits me from bringing students out to the wheel.  But never fear, David and I purchased two metal gazebo roofs some time ago at an end-of-season close out sale, and for more than a year we talked about making a few covered decks by the Medicine Wheel area so people (mostly me) could practice out there or meditate and have a shady, protected space to journal or hang out. The idea circled between us long enough that recently, we both felt it was time to act.

So David built two staggered, 12 foot covered decks. As is the case with almost every project we’ve done, people didn’t “get it” at first. They just didn’t see the vision we saw in our heads. David had several conversations with students that went something like this . . .

“What are you building out there?”

“Decks for people to practice on.”

“Where are you moving them to?”

“Um…. They’re decks. I’m building them where I want them to be. They are right where they will go.”

“Hummmm….. interesting. Don’t you think they are rather obvious, two big decks out there by the medicine wheel?”

“No more obvious than the 24 foot Medicine Wheel and 6 foot dream catcher, I suppose.”   

More than one person took me aside to say, “How do you feel about what David is building? Are you OK with that?” (As if I wasn’t the one nagging him to build those decks for two years and hadn’t given him my opinion about exactly where I wanted them. Ha.)

This week David put fans and lights in the ceilings of those newly finished decks so they will be more inviting. We are now planning some nice landscaping to keep the practice area partially hidden when you drive in and to add ambiance to the natural setting. Strategic planting will create a “room” feel for this space, but new plantings will require a watering system too. That means more work for a project that will not generate revenue, but man, what a beautiful and unique area this will be for visitors (and us) to practice. Like everything we’ve built here, it takes times for new spaces to “settle in”. Nature fills in the blanks left from construction, a few fun details will be added and soon it seems the medicine wheel had always magically just been a part of the landscape here.

I’m aware that building something like a Medicine wheel and practice decks seems an odd and unnecessary choice to those who don’t see a practical point in art for art’s sake. But if David and I didn’t find meaning and joy in Heartwood’s “living art” and instead focused only on practical projects that supported the revenue operations of this business, Heartwood wouldn’t have the charm or uniqueness it has. And I certainly wouldn’t feel as fulfilled as I do, dreaming up the next artistic project and marveling at David’s talent in making a vision manifest.  

About a week after David finished the decks, he went out to get the mail. When he returned, he handed me a cup of coffee and said, “There are two students out at the medicine wheel practicing on the decks. We both knew they had many places to drop a mat to practice, but they chose that one.

We looked at each other knowingly and smiled.