A 99-year-old yoga teacher’s amazing life and youthful spirit, and the people she’s known, from Gandhi to Marlene Dietrich
Tao Porchon-Lynch defied her aunt to begin learning yoga aged eight, and was taught by masters such as B.K.S. Iyengar. At 87 she took up ballroom dancing, living up to her advice that ‘within you is the possibility for you to do anything’
As she slips into the yoga studio and works her way to the front, Tao Porchon-Lynch takes in the expectant faces eager to see, hear and feel her message of hope and possibility.
The world’s oldest yoga instructor – she turned 99 in August and still teaches several classes a week – has been practising her pranayama (controlled breathing) and asanas (yoga poses) from the age of eight, when she joined a band of boys on a beach in India, who “were doing something wonderful”. Despite her aunt’s protestations that it was not play, but yoga, and certainly not for girls, she kept going back.
“I said if the boys can do it, I can do it, too,” she recalls, those eyes twinkling, that French-Indian- accented voice stronger than you would expect from a soon-to-be centenarian. She would repeat those two key words, “can do”, often as she retold her life’s tale with a few helpful interjections from moderator Teresa Kay-Aba Kennedy.
Porchon-Lynch was born in the middle of the English Channel to a French father and Indian mother, who died in childbirth. It was a sad start to what would blossom into a remarkably full and adventurous life, growing up in Pondicherry, then a French colony in India, with her aunt and uncle, and later travelling the globe.
“My mother died on my arrival [in this world]. I was brought up by my uncle because my father had gone to Canada to start a horse ranch, and he said, ‘What am I going to do with this little baby, only two days old?’
“So I was brought up in French India. That’s where I met Mahatma Gandhi, a friend of my uncle’s. I just walked in and saw this little man sitting on the floor and everyone bowing to him and I didn’t know who he was,” Porchon-Lynch says.
