Religion News Service
WASHINGTON, D.C., November 17, 2003: It’s the great American question: What’s the return on my investment? Stephen Cope sought to answer it on the subject of yoga, putting the question to 25 of the top yoga and meditation teachers in this country and Canada in his book “Will Yoga & Meditation Really Change My Life?” “As I look around at my peers, I realize that many of us are going gray, and contemplating our retirement packages. Well, what do we have to say for ourselves?” asks Cope, who explores everything from family to social activism to aging and death through the eyes of those who began their yoga practices in the ’70s. “The biggest ah-ha (of the book) is what the spiritual teachers had whittled down from grandiose expectations,” says Cope, a psychotherapist and yoga instructor for three decades. Yoga teacher Sylvia Boorstein summed up her years of practice with: “I got kind. I am kinder to myself and about myself, as well as kinder to other people. And the kindness has made me happier,” she says in the book’s first essay. Patricia Walden, 57, one of the most senior teachers in the Iyengar method of yoga, has learned to live with “impermanence.” She no longer has to know the outcome to feel safe. She developed, she says, the “grace” to pause before taking an action and stand back and look at life objectively. “Yoga has strengthened me in a very healthy way,” she says. Cope, scholar in residence and senior instructor at the Kriipalu Center for Yoga & Health in Massachusetts, says he is still the 13-year-old who loves church and singing. But at 50, he has also experienced “radical self-acceptance.” He has evolved from wanting to change everything to being present with the way things are, says this article.