IF YOU SIMPLY glanced at her face, Shirley Daventry French could be an average 72-year-old, albeit with a set of wise and clear blue eyes. She sits beside the desk of the Celestial Wishing Tree yoga studio in Central and says hello in an English accent that tells of the war years, and a voice crackly with age.
But then a glance below the neckline reveals something rather surreal. Dressed in pink leggings and a T-shirt, French is sitting cross-legged on a chair with a perfect posture. Her hands are wrinkle-free. The skin is tight and firm. Later she throws down a yoga mat and pulls herself up into an elegant headstand, before moving through a series of asanas (postures). Her flexibility in the face of age is remarkable and comes from a lifetime of yoga.
'What I'm discovering in this is that the limits we put on ourselves are very much in our minds,' says the Canada-based yoga teacher, who is in town this week to lead a series of Iyengar yoga classes before she jets off to celebrate the 85th birthday of her own teacher, BKS Iyengar at his ashram The Iyengar Yoga Institute in Pune, India.
Yoga has become such a fad all over the globe that it is fast becoming associated with young, supple and well-dressed bodies. Meeting a mature student like French who has been practicing for more than 40 years, is rare outside of India, and it offers a wonderful opportunity to see the effects of yoga on the body and the spirit. 'When I go and study with my teacher in India he doesn't accept any excuses from me,' says French, who to this day keeps a rigorous regime of more then three hours a day, with her own teaching on top of that.
'The last time I was there, was just after my 70th birthday. I had certain aches and pains and was thinking, perhaps I'm getting too old for this. I arrive in Pune, go into the studio and there was my 83-year-old teacher practising the most incredible poses. I saw how ridiculous it is to make excuses and put limits on myself. He opens up that possibility: you can do some much more - than you do.'
A life with yoga, says French, has been a process of continually breaking down the barriers of possibility - whether with her own physical postures or mental attitudes. When she began it was a discipline shrouded in mystery in the west. She discovered it shortly after immigrating to Canada in 1959, leaving behind an advertising job in the city of London. She moved with her husband, a medical doctor, to Victoria in British Columbia. Both were in their late 20s and within four years were the parents of three children.
'I woke up one day and thought what am I doing here on the west coast of Canada?' she remembers. 'It so happened that at that time people started looking towards the east - tai chi, transcendental meditation and yoga classes all started to appear.'
