Shari Ser Joins Yoga for Healthy Aging

Through the Forest
by Michele Macartney-Filgate

We're pleased to announce that Shari Ser, a physical therapist and Iyengar-style yoga teacher, has joined the staff here at Yoga for Healthy Aging. She'll be posting regularly, and will be available to answer questions on a weekly basis. To begin, we've asked her to tell us all a little about her background in physical therapy and yoga. —Nina

Before I trained to be a physical therapist, I had a degree from SUNY Buffalo in Women's Studies/Labor History/American Studies—really useful, no? But it was circa 1978, and I was very involved in the food coop scene, eating healthy, growing your own food, collective households, communes—the personal was the political. I traveled for two years in Asia and ended up in London at a whole foods bakery. So it was either go into nutritional sciences and get married in England for citizenship or come back to the US and go to Physical Therapy school. I was always interested in taking care of your body, women’s health and alternatives, and thought PT would be a venue where I could be covert. Ironically, how wrong I was, because at the time PT's were some of the most conservative individuals I ever met. PT school was grueling and there are no words to describe how hard it was, but maybe that is where the yoga came in because it was a place I could be and not be judged, and just explore with my teacher the boundaries of my physical body.

I started practicing yoga in 1980. I was involved with San Francisco Zen Center at the time and someone suggested I check out this class nearby led by Roger Cole. I did and just continued practicing. I liked it and it made me feel good but it wasn't like “love at first sight.” Roger eventually moved on but he directed me to Judith Lasater's class at the Iyengar institute and she became my main teacher after that. At that point I was in Physical Therapy school at University of California, San Francisco, and it was nice to be studying with a teacher who “spoke my language.”

I studied with Judith from 1980-1987 till we moved to the East Bay. I was on bed rest for my first pregnancy on IV tocolytics from week #24-36 and Judith would visit periodically. She gave me Geeta Iyengar’s woman's yoga book (Yoga: A Gem for Women). During that time of bed rest, I would do yoga in my mind and had a whole bed routine that I did on my side—out of bed only to pee. Talk about weakness when you are finally allowed up! I had four days of late pregnancy till I gave birth to my daughter but wasn’t allowed to go back to yoga till I wasn't bleeding. That took another six weeks. Judith was very solicitous and kind to me in class when I came back. Then ego took over and I had to progress to her more advanced 3-5 class, and I just had to be able to do handstand!

So then I was in the level 3-5 class and met Donna Farhi. I was also informally taking some of the advanced studies' classes at the Iyengar Institute. We moved and then I found Donald Moyer through Judith. I assisted Donna and Roger at a class they taught at the Institute with my infant daughter in tow (when she began to crawl it wasn't a possibility any more). I also took a body work training that Donna co-taught. Why did I stick with yoga? It just became my time where I could leave my responsibilities of being a mom and working, and have my own time. Going to class was the only thing I did for myself at that time because trying to find time to practice was almost impossible (working full time with an infant).

One pregnancy down, a move to the East Bay and my realization that unless I committed to yoga more formally no one would “take me seriously,” so I enrolled in the Berkeley Yoga Room's Advanced Studies Program. I didn't quite know how to bridge physical therapy with yoga, though at the time I was working in outpatient orthopedics and was doing a lot of back care rehabilitation and taking a lot of continuing education classes for different manual therapy skills. Yoga was something I did in another life. After another pregnancy and another bed rest, I finished the program in 1999. I began teaching at the Berkeley Yoga Room soon after that.

I continued to work in outpatient orthopedics but yoga was creeping into my clinical practice. I changed into home health to allow me the flexibility of raising two children and working. I slowly began to add “more yoga” into the guise of therapeutic exercise. You have to be careful with some people in how you talk to them because not everyone is open to things they don’t understand. I still don't call what I do yoga in the home care setting—it is still “therapeutic exercise” or “Home Exercise Program”—but there is more attention to breathing, awareness and responsibility in health choices.

What I have learned from being a physical therapist is not from my education per se but learning to listen to my patients as they share their lives with me. In home health I am a guest in their homes and I have to learn to be respectful. My agenda and their agendas may not be the same. I currently have a 94-year old retired astronomy professor who sustained a fall in his home and broke his arm and foot. When I first met him he was very persnickety and didn’t want to do anything I said until I changed the wording and it was “what would you like to do today?” or “would it be alright with you if we did....” Once he was given permission to say no and he knew I would respect it, he began to trust me and work with me to regain his mobility and to work with his fear of falling again. That to me is the most valuable lesson I learned is to respect the word “no.”

I suppose that is where I am now. I think that bad things do happen to people who do all the right things; people die too early when they aren't ready, and it still hurts. What I try to do now is give people tools that they can use or not, but allowing them the information by which to make their choices. I do a lot of education about health and how one is part of the team, and a lot of encouragement for people to learn how to talk to their physicians. As to aging: what can I say? It is happening to all of us and I am just like the next person who doesn’t like the limitations that my body is starting to exhibit. I continue to push the envelop so to speak, but am mindful of injury more now than when I was younger, partly because it takes so much longer to heal as we age and prevention is the best path. It isn’t easy to acknowledge one’s limitations but maybe that is the new definition of aging. —Shari

Autumn Healthy Aging and the Ayurvedic Dosha Vata

by Timothy

Autumn Leaves Scenario 
by Flemming Christiansen (via Wikimedia)

It's late September and the trees surrounding  my Northern Vermont cabin are turning orange, yellow and rusty brown, and only a few the bright red of the most intense foliage seasons. From an Ayurvedic standpoint, fall is the season of vata, the dosha or humor, associated with the “air element.”Is that something that readers of this blog should care about? Crazy as it sounds, I'm going to argue yes. So today I'll give you just a taste of Ayurvedic thinking, with  more coming in future entries.

When I first got interested in yoga therapy, I kept reading about people who incorporated an ayurvedic perspective into their work. When I started to work on my book Yoga as Medicine, however, I decided to not write about Ayurveda at all. With its five elements and three humors (vata, pitta and kapha), it reminded me too much of ancient Greek medicine, and we'd all learned that was some ancient superstition that couldn’t possibly be useful in the modern world. Since I was trying to take a scientific approach to yoga, it seemed sensible to leave Ayurveda out. But the universe, as they say, had other plans.

While spending a year as a scholar-in-residence at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, where I finished the book's manuscript, ayurveda was everywhere I turned. Kripalu was just starting an ayurveda training course, and prominent teachers like Vasant Lad and Robert Svoboda were visiting. My housemate, Swami Shivananda Saraswati, an Ayurvedic practitioner who taught in the program, was a lively man who hailed from the Netherlands and looked like a 19th century Kris Kringle, except he always wore orange. He and I began to have regular discussions about India's ancient indigenous healing art and the oldest continually practiced medical system in the world.

Swami Shivananda made a few simple lifestyle suggestions for me, which I found surprisingly helpful. And the more I tried, the more I found this holistic science spoke to me. And, yes, Ayurveda did make its way into the book Yoga as Medicine, and now forms an integral part of the yoga therapy work I do and teach. In fact, as soon as I handed in the last edit of the book, I flew directly to Kerala, India, for Ayurvedic treatments. It was during that trip that I met the Ayurvedic master, Chandukkutty Vaidyar, who I’ve been studying with ever since. I have come to believe that if you are practicing yoga and not paying attention to Ayurveda, you are missing a piece that could deepen your practice and improve your health and well-being.

Based on an interview and a pulse assessment, a subtle art very different from the way we take the pulse in western medicine, Swami Shivananda concluded my vata was too high. Not a huge surprise in retrospect, since I’d already been working non-stop on the book, and was just in the process of moving out of Boston, where I’d lived for years. Since I moved into Kripalu in October it was vata season then, too, and Ayurveda teaches in the vata time of year, anything associated with this dosha tends to get worse. Typical vata problems include anxiety, restlessness, digestive troubles, insomnia, degenerative diseases, disorders of the nervous system, and a worsening of any painful health condition.

According to Ayurveda, vata islike a fall breeze: cold, rough, dry light, and erratic, and anything that has the opposite properties can lessen it. Dietary measures are generally the starting point in Ayurveda, and my Swami friend recommended eating warm, soothing foods, like well-cooked soups, vegetables and casseroles.

Probably the most helpful suggestion Swamiji gave me was oleation, both internal and external, that is, putting high quality oil on your skin and into your food. Warmed sesame oil (raw, preferably organic) can be rubbed into the feet before sleep (put on old socks afterwards to protect your bedding), or applied daily and allowed to soak in for several minutes before showering. With all the traveling I've been doing over the last several months, regular oil massages, followed by a nice warm bath, have done a lot to keep my vata in check, though it’s been an ongoing struggle.

An erratic schedule of sleeping and eating, and doing too much in general will tend to increase anyone’s vata, even for someone like me who doesn’t have a lot of vata in his ayurvedic constitution. Your nature or prakriti is said to be determined at the moment of conception. But I am over 50, and that is according to Ayurveda the vata time of life. Increased vata is said to be why older people tend to get dry, cracking skin, become more fearful, and have increased trouble sleeping—and why they move to warm climates. In my own case, and in the yoga therapy work I do, I’ve found that just trying to eat meals and sleep at regular times can be surprisingly effective for insomnia and other vata-related conditions as an adjunct to whatever other measures, yogic or otherwise, you use.

But entering my 15th consecutive week of traveling in the US and Europe—and with all the dislocation and air travel, both said to increase vata—I’m feeling it. I’m tired even after a week of relaxing. The last few days I've done a lot of Malasana (Garland pose), and long holds of forward bends and twists, along with my usual inversions and alternate nostril breathing, all of which are helping bring my vata back into balance. Before this downtime, I’d gotten two separate colds in just over two weeks, as many as I’d had in the previous several years combined, as well as a painful shoulder condition. My body—and my vata dosha—has been trying to send me a message! And I'm listening.

Still, there’s one more Yoga as Medicine workshop in Boston in a couple of days. I had been planning to return to my Vermont cabin afterward. But it’s getting cold and windy up here, so yesterday I changed my ticket to fly back to Northern California a week early. For increased vata, there’s no place like home.

In Loving Memory: This article is dedicated to Swami Shivananda Saraswati, yogi, ayurvedic practitioner, and my dear friend, who passed last summer after a good, long life.

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