by Beth Shaw, C-IAYT, E-RYT 500, Founder of YogaFit Worldwide
I was tempted to call this blog “Senior Student,” although I’m not sure I’m quite ready to claim the senior label. Then again, when the AARP mail starts arriving, perhaps the universe is trying to tell you something.
I have always considered myself a lifelong learner. In my 40s, I went back to business school and completed a three-year program at Harvard Business School. My classmates were business owners from around the world, and the median age was 44. At times, I felt like a small fish in a very big pond. YogaFit was smaller than many of the businesses represented there.
But I have always believed there are many ways to measure success. YogaFit’s social impact has been—and continues to be—enormous. For 29 years, we have created waves of positive change by educating yoga teachers who carry what they learn into their own communities.
This fall, I have gone back to school again—but this experience looks very different.
I enrolled in a sports nutrition program through the Great Lakes Culinary Institute at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City. Going to culinary school has been on my bucket list for years. The campus is on the water, the setting is beautiful, and the time finally felt right. At the same time, I took a part-time job at a winery.
Neither decision was necessary for my career. After nearly three decades of building YogaFit, training teachers, writing books, speaking, and working in health and wellness, I don’t need to start over in another field.
But the fact that I can excites me.
There is a line from Bonnie Raitt’s “Nick of Time” that begins, “Life gets mighty precious.” It has stayed with me because it raises an important question: What are you doing with your precious life—and your equally precious brain?
I want to keep walking into rooms where I am not the expert. I want to learn unfamiliar skills, spend time with people from different generations and backgrounds, and place myself in situations that challenge my mind.
What does “back to school” mean at 40, 50, 60, or 70? Learning is not only for the young.
Every fall, we associate going back to school with children and college students. But why should they get all the fun? Maybe each of us needs a back-to-school season—a time to ask, What am I going to learn next?
We know our bodies require challenge as we grow older. I have written and spoken extensively about maintaining muscle, strength, mobility, and balance. If we stop challenging our muscles, we lose strength and function.
But are we challenging our brains enough?
The adult brain is not fixed. Neuroplasticity—the brain and nervous system’s ability to adapt in response to experience—continues throughout life. Aging can affect how quickly we learn or recall certain information, but getting older does not make us incapable of learning.
Research on adult education is encouraging, although we need to describe it responsibly. Some observational studies have found associations between adult education and better cognitive outcomes, including a lower observed risk of dementia and greater hippocampal volume. The hippocampus plays an important role in learning and memory. Other research has not found that beginning continuing education slows long-term cognitive decline.
In other words, we cannot honestly say that taking a class prevents Alzheimer’s disease or dementia. Cognitive health is influenced by many factors, including genetics, cardiovascular health, sleep, nutrition, exercise, and social connection. What we can say is that learning gives us meaningful reasons to stay curious, mentally engaged, and connected to other people.
That is reason enough for me.
Culinary school has been a perfect experiment because cooking is far more cognitively demanding than it may appear. I am learning new terminology and techniques. I have to remember sequences and procedures, work with my hands, think several steps ahead, and pay attention to timing, temperature, texture, taste, and presentation—often all at once.
My classmates are not international business owners this time. Some are not even old enough to drink legally. They are beginning careers, considering their next steps, or changing direction. Their lives look very different from mine, and that is part of the gift.
My winery job provides another kind of education. I am learning about wine, hospitality, customers, products, and the mechanics of an industry in which I have never worked. I am standing and moving, meeting new people, remembering information, and answering questions in the moment. Even learning the point-of-sale system stretched me at first.
And I am not the boss or the CEO.
That is more important than it may sound.
After we have been successful in a profession for a long time, we naturally develop an identity around our competence. We become accustomed to being the person who knows. Others come to us for answers. We teach, manage, advise, and lead.
There is something surprisingly liberating about entering a new environment where your résumé means very little. You are simply the new person. You ask questions. You make mistakes. You learn.
It is humbling—and I view that humility as a spiritual practice.
Yoga gives us a wonderful concept for this: aparigraha, or non-grasping and non-attachment. We often think about attachment in terms of possessions, but we can become equally attached to our identities:
I’m the CEO.
I’m the teacher.
I’m the successful one.
I’m the expert.
I’m too accomplished to take that job.
I’m too old to sit in that classroom.
Those identities can become possessions, too. If we hold them tightly enough, they begin to determine which experiences we are willing to have—and limit how much we can grow.
I do not want my past accomplishments deciding the boundaries of my future experiences.
There is nothing embarrassing about taking an entry-level job in an industry you want to understand. There is nothing embarrassing about being the oldest person in the classroom. There is nothing embarrassing about asking someone younger how something works.
Humility does not require pretending our accomplishments do not matter. It means not needing those accomplishments to establish our importance in every room we enter.
You can be an expert and still say, “Teach me.”
You can lead one day and learn the next.
One of the most valuable things we can practice as we grow older is becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable. I say this often at YogaFit: “Get comfortable being uncomfortable.”
That does not mean ignoring pain, overriding our limits, or believing discomfort is always good. It means recognizing that meaningful growth usually asks something of us. Learning requires effort, vulnerability, and the willingness not to know.
Over the years, I have noticed that people naturally gravitate toward YogaFit trainings that reinforce what they already know and enjoy. That is understandable. If you love meditation, another meditation training sounds wonderful. If you love the physical practice, you may choose another movement-based training.
But what about the subject that makes you a little nervous? What if you deliberately choose an area in which you do not already feel knowledgeable?
YogaFit Seniors asks us to understand how yoga can evolve with the body across the lifespan. Balance, strength, mobility, bone health, and adapting practices for older adults are not niche subjects. They are increasingly relevant to our students, our families, and ourselves.
YogaFit for Warriors invites us to learn about veterans, military communities, trauma, and nervous-system responses. We may be asked to understand experiences we have never personally had and to become more sensitive, compassionate teachers. That is more than professional education; it expands our capacity for empathy.
Yoga for Cancer Care asks us to face illness, vulnerability, and uncertainty—subjects many people avoid until cancer enters their own lives. Yoga for Caregivers explores the very real physical and emotional demands of supporting a parent, partner, or loved one. Our trainings in grief, sleep, mental health, anatomy, and nervous-system regulation offer their own opportunities to grow.
You might take a training because you want to teach the subject. You might take it because someone you love is going through something. Or you may simply realize, I don’t know enough about this.
That may be reason enough.
If anatomy intimidates you, study anatomy. If you believe you cannot meditate, learn about meditation. If you have never imagined working with older adults, learn about healthy aging. If trauma makes you uncomfortable, study trauma-informed teaching and the nervous system. If you have always considered yourself “just a yoga person,” learn about strength—or business.
Choose something that expands you.
Two other yogic concepts belong in this conversation: tapas and svadhyaya.
Tapas is the discipline to remain engaged when something becomes challenging. We often experience tapas physically. Our legs begin to shake in a posture, and we want to stop. We breathe, observe our reaction, and make a wise decision about whether we can safely remain present.
Learning has its own tapas. Show up. Ask questions. Practice. Let your brain work. Think of learning as a mental gym, because it is.
Svadhyaya means self-study. When being a beginner feels uncomfortable, we can examine that response instead of immediately escaping it.
Why does it bother me not to know this?
Do I care if someone sees me struggling?
Do I believe I am too old to learn?
Is my obstacle truly my ability—or is it my ego?
Sometimes the greatest barrier to learning is not cognitive capacity. It is our attachment to looking competent.
One of the most unexpected gifts of returning to school has been the people I am meeting. It is easy for our worlds to become smaller without our realizing it. We spend time with the same colleagues, the same friends, and the same routines.
School—and taking a part-time job in a completely different industry—has expanded my world again.
Younger generations have grown up with technology, social media, artificial intelligence, and ways of thinking I did not experience at their age. They know things I do not know. I have decades of life and business experience they have not yet had time to acquire.
It is not a competition. It is an exchange.
Those of us who grew up before smartphones and much of the technology that shapes daily life have a choice. We can complain that the world has changed, or we can continue learning how the new world works.
We all have something to teach one another—and something to learn.
As I work on my longevity book, I keep returning to the idea that longevity is about far more than looking younger. The anti-aging conversation often revolves around wrinkles, supplements, procedures, and appearance. Those things may have their place, but I think about aging differently.
I want to stay strong, maintain muscle, protect my bones, hike, travel, carry my own luggage, and practice YogaFit for as long as possible. I also want to remain intellectually alive. I want to keep asking questions and stay fascinated by the world. I want to continue walking into rooms where I am not the smartest person—because those are often the rooms where I learn the most.
That is one reason I remain so passionate about continuing education at YogaFit. Our specialty trainings are not simply certifications to collect. They expose us to subjects, people, and life experiences we might never encounter otherwise. They can make us better teachers, but more importantly, they can make us more aware, compassionate human beings.
Growth often begins with a little discomfort. Walking into culinary school on the first day felt uncomfortable. Working at a winery after decades as a CEO felt uncomfortable. Learning unfamiliar technology felt uncomfortable.
Each experience reminds me that being a beginner is not something to avoid. Sometimes it is something to seek.
Your next step does not have to be culinary school. It could be a YogaFit training, a community college class, a language course, photography, music, artificial intelligence, gardening, or volunteering somewhere new. The goal is not necessarily to reinvent your career.
The goal is to keep reinventing yourself.
I have spent my career encouraging people to challenge their bodies because that is how we remain strong. Today, I believe we should challenge our minds with the same intention. Lifelong learning and brain health belong in the same conversation as strength, mobility, and physical well-being.
If yoga has made a difference in your life, perhaps it is time to discover what you could learn—and what you could share—through YogaFit teacher training. You do not need to arrive as an expert, and you do not need to know whether you will ever teach professionally. Many students begin because they want to understand yoga more deeply, build confidence, or bring safe and accessible practices to the people they love.
YogaFit Teacher Training Foundations: Level One is a place to begin. From there, you can continue toward a 200-hour teacher training certificate or explore specialty trainings that challenge your thinking, deepen your practice, and prepare you to serve different people and communities.
Stay curious. Stay humble enough to ask questions. Stay willing to be the beginner in the room. Your next chapter may begin with one class, one training, or one brave decision to say, “Teach me.”
There is no age at which we should graduate from curiosity—and you are worth the continued investment in yourself.
Take your practice and teaching to the next level with our 300-Hour Advanced Yoga Teacher Training.
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