I began practicing yoga in 1982. I was twenty-two years old, newly arrived in India, and the practice was purely physical — a demanding, sometimes painful negotiation between what my body could do and what I wanted it to do. I was competitive about it in the way young people are competitive about everything. I wanted the deep backbend, the full split, the advanced inversions. I wanted the body to submit to the shape.

Forty-two years later, I practice differently. I am slower. I hold postures less dramatically. My hamstrings will never again do what they did at thirty. And yet — I mean this completely — the practice is the deepest it has ever been. What happens on the mat now is more interesting, more intimate, and more useful to my life than anything that happened in the years when I was far more physically capable.

I want to talk about why, because I think it is one of the best-kept secrets of a long yoga life, and I meet too many people who have stepped away from their practice in middle age because it no longer looks the way it used to.

The Body's Intelligence Becomes Audible

When I was young, I practiced over my body. I could push through signals that were asking me to slow down, to back off, to rest. I could override discomfort with willpower and ego and the particular kind of ambition that passes for dedication when you are twenty-five. The body was a vehicle to be disciplined, and discipline was what I brought to it.

What changes as the decades accumulate is that the body becomes louder. Not painful — that is something different, and worth attending to immediately — but simply more insistent about its own intelligence. The knee that used to comply silently now speaks clearly. The shoulder that was ignored now makes itself known. And here is what no one tells you: this is not a deterioration of the practice. It is an invitation into it.

When I can no longer override the body, I am forced to listen to it. And listening to the body — really listening, without the plan to manage what I hear — is the actual practice. It took me forty years and the gradual quieting of ego to understand that this was always what yoga was trying to teach me.

What Flexibility Was Always a Metaphor For

Yoga philosophy has always been explicit about this: the physical postures are a laboratory, not a performance. The body in the pose is not the point. What you learn about yourself while attempting the pose — your relationship to effort and ease, to control and surrender, to what you want to happen versus what is actually happening — that is the point.

Physical flexibility is a wonderful thing, and I am not dismissive of it. But I have sat with students who could fold themselves in half and who were among the most inflexible people I have ever met — rigid in their opinions, their identities, their capacity to respond to life's changes. And I have sat with students in their seventies who could barely touch their toes and who had a quality of openness and adaptability that brought tears to my eyes.

The flexibility that matters most cannot be measured with a ruler. It is the capacity to be surprised. To change your mind. To soften in the presence of something you did not expect. To remain present when what is arising is not what you would have chosen. This flexibility — the flexibility of the inner life — actually does improve with practice and with years. The body is simply the training ground for it.

The Gift of a Practice That Has Outlasted Everything Else

My yoga practice has been with me through marriages and losses, through motherhood and grief, through three countries and thirty years on the Osa Peninsula. It has been with me at 5am in the dark when I did not want to get on the mat, and at moments of such joy that the only possible response was to move the body in gratitude.

A practice that long becomes a relationship — with yourself, with the tradition, with the particular intelligence that yoga has been refining for thousands of years. It accumulates. The woman who gets on the mat this morning is not starting over. She is continuing something. The continuity itself has a weight and a meaning that changes what happens on the mat.

If you are sixty, seventy, eighty, and you are wondering whether it is too late to begin, or whether the body you have now can sustain a practice — please hear this: the body you have now is the perfect body for the practice that will serve you most. Not the practice you imagined at thirty. The one that is available to you today, exactly as you are. That practice is waiting. It does not require flexibility. It only requires the willingness to show up.

The posture is secondary. The showing up is the practice.