The Therapeutic Wisdom of Yoga: Yoga and Optimal Aging

A training-intensive for yoga teachers and inquiring students

The focus for this year’s annual online August training concerns optimal aging: how yoga provides a toolset for addressing the challenges and obstacles that come with age.

This is not a ‘yoga for old people’ training, though it will be designed to be accessible and enlightening for older participants. Aging is a lifelong natural process, and it’s never too early to refine your practice for healthy aging, and never too late either!

We will be exploring a broad range of topics, from maintaining joint and muscle health against inflammatory conditions related to aging, to fascial fitness and its role in maintaining bone strength, to neuromuscular coordination and balance, cognitive and neurological health, digestion and a resilient immune system, and more.

We have a broad palate of practices to draw from, though asana is usually the most emphasized. With regard to asana, we’ll take a different perspective from the usual emphasis on flexibility, emphasizing fundamental principles of fascial fitness that will transform your perspective and approach to asana practice.

The fascia is central to the fundamental systems of the body which suffer inflammation with age, and yoga practices including asana make use of our built-in anti-inflammatory mechanisms. These mechanisms are not just part of our work with muscles, tendons, and connective tissue, but also of our work with the breath, which are accessed in particular ways in breath practices. Thus we’ll be broadening our perspective beyond asana to include pranayama and more.

The ‘more’ is an added dimension that is all to often ignored in yoga is that of mudra and drishthi (the gaze or focus of the eyes). We will be exploring the dimension of mudra especially in connection with its usefulness in breath practices in special after-sessions, which follow after the main lecture topic each day.

Daily Schedule

The training will extend over 5 days, and the structure of each day will be:
 

15:30-16:30 (UK time) A guided asana practice centred around the theme of the day, which illustrates in its instructions and sequencing how this theme can be approached and incorporated into practice. Participation in the asana practices is optional, and they’ll be designed to be interesting to all-levels practitioners and teachers, with some fresh ideas for your approach to asana practice 
 

16:30-17:15 (UK time) Break

17:15-20:45 (UK time) The lecture topic for the day. Each day will cover a dimension of the topic of optimal aging, and specifically and experientially relate it to yoga practices. This will include principles of fascial fitness, as well as the fascial lines or ‘sutras,’ and their role in both asana and functional movement for maintaining the health of the joints and systems of the body. The lectures will get into the health of specific areas of the body, such as the wrists, hips, knees, and so on, and the best work for maintaining the health of these areas. 

20:45-21:15 (UK time) Break

21:15-23:00 (UK time)  An after-session focused on the use of simple mudra as a helpful tool for breath practices. We most often think of mudra in terms of hand gestures; but in the original hatha yoga tradition, mudra encompassed asana, bandha, drishthi, and levels of meditative states, as well as being specifically supportive in pranayama. This treatment of mudra will be step-by-step and logical in tying the practice to your experience of the breath and meditation. The variety of mudras can be overwhelming, and sometimes seem arbitrary; these lectures will give you a solid foothold in the practice. 

Daily Themes

Specifics on the daily themes will be available by June as Doug works on refining and organizing the training — it is quite new! You’ll be able to sign up for individual days, or for the whole training.
 

A manual for those participating in the full training will be made available in pdf form one week in advance of the training, in case you want to print it out. Each day will have a set of slides illustrating the points of the training, which will be available to those taking single days, as well as to those registered for the whole training. The manual is an easily printable version of those notes.

Replay

All sessions are recorded with high quality video and sound, and the recordings will be available for a year — and can be downloaded to keep indefinitely. The Zoom recording will be immediately available for those who are not able to make the sessions (such as because of time differences); the high quality edited versions will be available through Vimeo, and are usually ready within 24 hours of the broadcast.

 

Who is this for?

This training is for yoga teachers, yoga therapists and other professionals working with the human body.

For those who have taken this annual training in the past, this will be a refresher and an update, with fresh perspectives for moving forward as teachers in step with our times.

For those joining us for the first time, this will be an accessible introduction to a very modern and practical perspective on yoga. New teachers have comfortably put ideas from the training to use right away, and continued contemplation on the themes of the training has nourished their teaching for years afterward.

Certification

You will receive a Yogacampus e-certificate of attendance of 30 CPD hours. The workshop hours are eligible for Yoga Alliance Continuing Education credits and as an approved IAYT (International Association of Yoga Therapists) APD course.

Meet the Teacher

Doug Keller has been teaching workshops and trainings in the therapeutic applications of yoga for a decade, and is known not only for his effectiveness in communicating this ever-evolving approach in these trainings, but also for his extensive writing on the topic in magazines, journals and his two-volume work on Yoga As Therapy. He is also, in addition to his travelling and teaching, a Distinguished Professor at the Maryland University of Integrative Health in their Master’s Degree programme in Yoga Therapy. This programme is state-approved and accredited for granting a Master’s degree in this field, and is fully accredited by the International Association of Yoga Therapists.

Doug has degrees in philosophy from Georgetown and Fordham Universities in the United States, and taught philosophy at college level for several years. He also spent a total of 14 years in Siddha meditation ashrams worldwide. He has produced three highly-respected books on asana, pranayama and yoga philosophy. Doug’s teaching is focused on the yoga of ‘Swatantrya,’ the yoga of one’s own inner expansion and awakening, and is rooted in a vast and inclusive perspective of study and practice that honours the insights of the many streams of wisdom that flow into the river of yoga.