In a few weeks, I will celebrate a benchmark birthday. The number will go unstated here, but I assure you, it is very significant! I ponder how precious life is more these days. I attempt to be my best self every day and to always be kind. Sometimes I even succeed. Often feelings of invisibility, lack of vibrance, luster, and inability creep in. I notice well-meaning folks will do things for me, things I can still do quite well for myself. I appreciate the love and kindness behind this very much, but I shrink a little more every time it happens. When I make mistakes, I immediately feel that it is my age that is diminishing me, but if I think it through, which I rarely do, I see clearly that I have been making mistakes spectacularly all my life! It has little, if anything, to do with my benchmark number. So when I read a piece by Rob Breszny on Substack this morning, I actually cried. Yes, I do that a lot, and maybe that is age-related because the younger me didn’t cry that much. She was way too busy surviving, I think.
“I wish you an ever-deepening love affair with the unfinishedness of your life. May you regard yourself not as a problem awaiting completion but as a gorgeous, unruly experiment whose next revelation can’t be predicted from everything that has happened so far.” Those words hit me so hard and resonated with every fiber of my being. I have been feeling like a problem awaiting completion! Somehow those words reframed things for me in just an instant, and my perspective has changed. Head high, no more shame or doubt, I will move through my upcoming birthday and the year that follows with dignity and excitement. Thanks Rob.
Laura Ingalls Wilder published her last book at seventy-six. Grandma Moses (Anna Mary Robertson Moses) didn’t paint until she was in her seventies and had her first exhibition in her eighties. Iris Apfel, fashion icon and model, experienced superstar status as she approached her nineties.
These women inspire and excite me, but another woman of a “certain age” caught my eye last week, and I had not previously heard of her. She is Tao Porchon-Lynch. Perhaps you haven’t heard of her either, but she is worth knowing!
In her ninetieth decade, Tao told a CBS reporter her energy came from “…the breath of life. The breath of life is right inside of us, to feel the dance of life within you, and know that nothing’s impossible.” The Guinness World Record recognised her as the oldest yoga teacher and the oldest female competitive dancer. Tao first danced competitively at eighty-seven.
Tao Porchon was born on a ship in the middle of the English Channel, two months prematurely, on August 13, 1918. Her mother was Indian and her father was French. When Tao was only seven months old, her mother passed away, and her aunt and uncle raised her in Puducherry, India. She discovered yoga when she was only eight years old.” I wanted to do the amazing things that they were doing with their bodies.” Her aunt warned her that yoga was for men, but she began practicing anyway, although she didn’t do it professionally until later in life. She studied with some of the great masters and met Mahatma Gandhi, who was a close acquaintance of her uncle. She marched with him twice and later in her life participated in demonstrations with Charles de Gaulle and Martin Luther King Jr.
Tao’s early career was in the fashion industry. She was a successful model and won several titles, including one she was very proud of: “Best Legs in Europe.” She became a globetrotter, modeling in major cities, and when WWII broke out, she moved to London, becoming a cabaret performer, mentored by Now Coward.
When the war ended, Tao relocated to the United States and found work as an actress with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Tao also loved to dance. She learned the traditional Bharatanatyam in India and later African dance in French Somaliland. Later she showcased her dancing prowess, doing the tango, in various television roles such as I Married Joan with Jim Backus.She appeared in The Thief of Bagdad, Show Boat, and The Last Time I Saw Paris. She frequently offered free yoga sessions to fellow performers.
Tao now lived in Westchester County, New York, and she met and married Bill Lynch in 1962. Bill was an insurance agent, but also a wine aficionado. Tao’s uncle owned vineyards throughout Europe, and wine was also important in her life. In 1967, she and her husband helped found the American Wine Society. She was a wine judge and vice president of its Southern New York State chapter.
Tao became more serious about yoga during this phase of her life. She left the glitz of Hollywood and acting to become a full-time yogi. Back in 1976, she helped establish the Yoga Teachers Alliance and based her work in upstate New York. In 1982, Tao set up the Westchester Institute of Yoga, and students came from all over the world to study with her. In 1995 she flew to Israel to attend the Yoga for Peace International Peace Conference.
Shortly after her ninety-third birthday, journalist for the Westchester Times, Andrea Kurtz, asked her how she teaches thirteen weekly yoga classes, give master classes at yoga centers throughout upstate New York, take weekly dance lessons at the Fred Astaire Dance Studio entering national and International competitions, host wine lectures and tastings, lead international yoga retreats to India, and appear with the Dalai Lama on panels advocating world peace. She answered: “I don’t believe in letting age and broken bones get the better of my life. I believe nothing is impossible.”
When she was ninety-three, she broke the world record as the oldest yoga teacher, and in 2013, in collaboration with Tara Stiles, she released a DVD on yoga, Yoga with Tao Porchon-Lynch. That same year she published a book on meditation, Reflections: The Yogic Journey of Life.
Tao celebrates her age and says that “I’m going to teach yoga until I can’t breathe anymore.” She did. Tao passed peacefully I her sleep of natural causes when she was one hundred and one.
Now, I am certainly not a fashion icon, painter of any renown, or a dancer/yogi, but I write, and I am going to celebrate this new approaching decade with gratitude, zest, and deep appreciation for all that I have and all that I have accomplished. I am not yesterday’s news yet!. Perhaps that third book will be born. I am going to live, not as unfinished, but as joyful, grateful, unlimited potential! Join me?
