Mind over mat
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.'
It was 1968. French tried her hand at all the disciplines, but yoga took a hold. Just three weeks after her first class, the late German aristocrat-turned-dancer-turned-yogi Swami Radha visited Victoria to deliver a lecture in yogic philosophy. She had established an ashram in British Columbia. 'I went along and listened to her and thought, my God, this makes so much sense. Because of the changes in my life, everytime something was not going very well, I tended to blame my husband, Canada or my children.'
Yoga offered a new focus, and it gradually took over her life. Because of the shortage of yoga teachers at that time, she took up teaching very quickly. I ask how people responded in the 1970s. 'Suspiciously,' she flashes back. 'My children reacted with horror. My son said to me one day in exasperation, 'I wish you were a normal mother'. Many of my friends were very suspicious and felt my doing yoga was a reflection of their not doing yoga, they would be very defensive.
'I avoided telling my mother because she's very conservative, but I didn't like writing letters and not mentioning it. One day I plucked up the courage and wrote a very heartfelt letter ... very quickly I got a letter back saying are you getting a divorce or are you having a nervous breakdown?'
Fortunately she had her husband's support, he also practiced yoga and today (like his wife, Mr French is still going strong and not even thinking about retirement at the age of 72) he incorporates it into his medical practice. In 1979, at the height of the hippie trail, the couple visited the Iyengar Institute in India. 'It was very much a sense of opting out, dropping out, giving everything up and not being concerned with jobs or careers,' she remembers. 'Which is a mistaken view of the philosophy of yoga. From my teachers I learnt rather to use whatever gifts I have, for yoga.'
She recalls when she arrived at the ashram, 100km outside of Bombay: 'I was in shock. I couldn't believe the teaching could be at so high a level. It was brilliant,' she becomes animated as she explains. 'There is an expression of his 'to the maximum'. He doesn't accept excuses. And when a teacher expects more, you do more.'
As well as a physical leap, French encountered an attack to her ego. 'On the second day he [BKS Iyengar] confronted me and I wasn't understanding - his English is hard to understand at first. I had a struggle with pride and ego because of the way he was talking to me, but in that instant I knew that I could have my pride and ego or I could learn from him.'
In the decades since French has learnt a vast amount directly from Iyengar, both in the yoga studio and in philosophical discussions. A skilled writer and editor, she has worked closely with him compiling and editing his biography Iyengar: His Life And Works, which was first published in 1987. Of course it gave her a great opportunity to ask him questions on the philosophy of yoga. She has also become a pivotal figure in the North American yoga scene, having founded the Victoria Yoga Centre in 1976, and spearheaded a teacher certification system for Iyengar instructors, known as the Canadian Iyengar Yoga Teacher's Organisation. French has witnessed the dizzy rise of yoga in the west, from the marginal to the mainstream. I ask her how it has changed over the years.
'It's swung from when I started,' she answers. 'People were looking more for the spiritual side, there was the Vietnam war and people wanted change and began to look at the spiritual dimension to life. The physical side was sort of looked down on ... Now the pendulum has swung, the physical side has taken root and its do, do, do. Wear the right clothes.'