Carol Krucoff - Relax into Yoga for Seniors: A Six-Week Program for Strength, Balance, Flexibility, and Pain Relief

As advances in medicine help us to live longer, we now face the challenge of how to maintain our vitality, often while also dealing with various chronic conditions. Increasingly, yoga is being recognized as a way to improve and maintain ones mental and physical health when practiced in a safe and appropriate way. In RelaxintoYogaforSeniors, Kimberly Carson and Carol Krucoff provide the program all seniors need to integrate yoga into their lives and improve their health and well-being.

AdamPerlman, MD, executive director at Duke Integrative Medicine, and associate vice president at Duke Health and Wellness

Kimberly Carson and Carol Krucoff are two of the most trusted, and trustworthy, voices in the field of therapeutic yoga. RelaxintoYogaforSeniors is a perfect introductory guide not just to yoga, but to a philosophy of embracing the changes that come with age. This book and the practices described will help you find the strength, energy, and ease to engage with life fully.

KellyMcGonigal, PhD, health psychologist at Stanford University, and author of YogaforPainRelief

RelaxintoYogaforSeniors is a well-researched and thoughtful book that leverages the authors many years of practice experience as well as their work and close ties with the world of integrative medicine. It provides older adults with a practical, effective compendium of yoga practices that they can readily adopt. Whether they are well or experiencing distressing chronic conditions, RelaxintoYogaforSeniors practices can enhance their quality of life.

JohnW. Graham, PhD, senior investigator at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hills Gillings School of Global Public Health

RelaxintoYogaforSeniors brings together Kimberly Carson and Carol Krucoffs experience in teaching their IntegrativeYogaforSeniorsProfessionalTraining at Duke Integrative Medicine. It describes a step-by-step approach to yoga for healthy aging and how to relax into yoga. This is a masterpiece book, which should be an essential resource for seniors, health care professionals, and yoga practitioners, who will find themselves coming back to the text time and time again for deeper study and practice.

DilipSarkar, MD, FACS, CAP, associate professor of surgery (retired) at Eastern Virginia Medical School; fellow at the American Association of Integrative Medicine (AAIM) and American College of Surgeons (ACS); president of the International Association of Yoga Therapists (IAYT); and chairman of board at Life in Yoga Institute

Carson and Krucoff have skillfully taken the complex, confusing world of yoga and made it practical for anyone, not just seniors. The magic is that in simplifying from their many years of practice with seniors, they have solved how to make yoga safe and effective for the full spectrum of abilities in this diverse population. RelaxintoYogaforSeniors needs to be embossed onto every prescription pad printed!

MatthewJ. Taylor, PT, PhD, yoga safety expert and past president of the International Association of Yoga Therapists www.smartsafeyoga.com

In this inspiring and accessible book, Kimberly Carson and Carol Krucoff offer you peaceful ways to prioritize your positivity and wellness. Relax and enjoy!

BarbaraL. Fredrickson, PhD, Kenan Distinguished Professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of Positivity and Love2.0

Yoga, as a mind-body practice or a way of life, is transformative and leads to improved health, wellness, and connection to self and others. A daily yoga practice is especially important to foster healthy aging. RelaxintoYogaforSeniors is a wonderful guide to help people start practicing yoga at any age.

LorenzoCohen, PhD, professor and director of the Integrative Medicine Program at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and coeditor of PrinciplesandPracticeofYogainHealthCare

Publishers Note

This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering psychological, financial, legal, or other professional services. If expert assistance or counseling is needed, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books

Copyright 2016 by Kimberly Carson and Carol Krucoff

New Harbinger Publications, Inc.

5674 Shattuck Avenue

Oakland, CA 94609

www.newharbinger.com

I Would Rather Make Wine of Life from Your Life is a Masterpiece by Rebecca Folsom. Copyright 2007 Rebecca Folsom. Reprinted with permission.

Cover design by Amy Shoup

Acquired by Jess OBrien

Edited by Marisa Sols

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file

Asana must have the dual qualities of alertness and relaxation.

Patanjalis Yoga Sutras, translated by T. K. V. Desikachar

With great love and respect, we dedicate this work to our elders. Thank you for teaching us about the depth and mystery of aging and the resiliency of spirit.

I Would Rather Make Wine of Life

I have died a thousand times

clinging to life.

Breath stops

and muscles go rigid

trying to freeze frame it,

do it over again,

reshape it,

perfect it,

be better.

I am done wrestling the life out of my experience.

I would rather make wine of life.

Each experience juicy and unique,

ripe, picked, squeezed, savored.

Not about perfection,

for it is the mixture of all these flavors

that makes wine sweet,

an elixir to be shared with friends

as we sit around smiling,

saying That was a good year.

Aged well.

Rebecca Folsom, from Your Life Is a Masterpiece

It takes a long time to become young.

Pablo Picasso

A seventy-eight-year-old man walks into a yoga class may sound like the opening line of a joke, but with Relax into Yoga for Seniors, Kimberly Carson and Carol Krucoff propel us from contemporary stereotypes of aging onto an extraordinary bridge between modern Western culture and ancient Eastern mind-body-spirit traditions. This novel bridge literally opens a transformative gateway to those of us who continuously redefine seniors as everyone else at least ten years older than me.

For almost a decade, Kimberly Carson and Carol Krucoff have matured a unique approach, teaching Western yoga instructors the adaptation of yoga practice through their Therapeutic Yoga for Seniors programs at Duke Integrative Medicine/Duke University Medical Center. Now the authors offer their combined practical skills and vision directly to those of us older folk whose breathing, mobility, strength, flexibility, balance, joy, and overall peace of mind may feel impinged upon by our aging, by pain, or simply by the effort to avoid feeling lost in the midst of an ever-accelerating Western civilization.