“Say ‘hello’ to your shoulder blades!” Diane raised her voice, as if imploring us to transform the momentary discomfort into a celebration that it was well worth it in the long run, finding this underused part of our bodies.

We lay on colorful yoga mats, almost prismatic, backs to the floor in our bedrooms and living rooms, arms bent at elbows, allowing our fingers to interlace behind our heads, moving our elbows up and down. By 9:30 every Sunday and Thursday mornings, twenty to twenty-five women and sometimes a few men, all middle-aged and late middle-aged, met together, if only through Zoom because pandemic regulations now prevented in-person class gatherings. We were devoted to the healing potential of Diane Thompson’s Bone Strength Yoga.

“And now, relax,” she said, her ever-present earrings invisible to us as we did so. The warmups always led to a variety of yoga poses we were all becoming familiar with or had become familiar with already, depending on how long each of us had been practicing.

I was a novice, and at 66, sometimes the poses challenged me. “How do I get my balance back so I can stand right for tree pose for 30 seconds? How in the world do I ever stay in plank pose for 30 seconds? When did I lose so much upper arm strength?” I wonder.

It was unlike any yoga experience I’d had, with Diane giving us options—telling us to use a chair if it felt right, coaxing us into a less strenuous position if it felt right, and offering a reading, something life-affirming, to think about at the end of class, as we transitioned back into our daily lives. Diane helped us feel comfortable on our mats, even if some of the poses were out of our reach. She helped us look inward for strength.

I was indeed on a journey, out of my psychological and physical comfort zone and depth. Yet, there was still that peace of mind at the end of class—that hadn’t changed from the yoga practice I had cobbled together at forty when I lived in Denver, reeling from a divorce, needing to heal, but not taking myself or my practice seriously enough. Instead, I took a leave of absence from graduate school, got into the “best” shape I had ever been in by cycling and jogging, went out with unusual men, and in my own complicated brain-first kind of way, kept the enduring psychological benefits of yoga at bay.

Not only was the yoga at 66 unlike any I’d tried, Diane proved to be unlike any yoga teacher I’d had. One day I paid her the compliment that her teaching had opened me up to accept my aging, that I had a lot of catching up to do.

“The word ‘yoga’ means union, the balance of mind and body. In yoga, we let the brain follow the breath,” she said brightly.

“What is your philosophy?” I really braved that question, as I had a habit of thinking any yoga teacher was unfathomable. Again, Diane proved to be the exception.

“I want to inspire folks to learn about themselves, rather than just put an ankle here or there, behind a neck. I want clients to be aware of how the brain and mind respond to outside stimuli. For example, what can you learn on the mat and then take into the next decision you make? Stop, think, breathe.”

I was just beginning to understand. According to the experts, yoga is complex, comprising many different elements, including physical poses, breathwork, concentration and meditation, ethical tenets, spirituality, inward attention, and self-knowledge (Park, C.L. et al 460-471).

While the roots of yoga and the growth of it as a practice are by males for males of certain standing and spiritual discipline, modern yoga practice is populated by more women than men. When yoga entered the consciousness and awareness of the West, there was a gender shift. More women than men opened themselves up to the practice and began to integrate it into their lifestyle (www.treehouserecoverypdx.com).

Diane related that yoga is not oriented outside each person in competition, criticism, or comparison with one another like most athletic endeavors in the West. In that way, it is possible that women internalize the practice more readily than their male counterparts and find it strengthens the body and the mind because it may offer us self-reliance, maybe even independence from more grueling forms of exercise. Quite possibly, women are more attuned to self-care than men. Yoga has become known as a “soft” or feminine practice.

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When I was younger, I believed that buying and wearing a variety of leggings to yoga class was essential to my spirit of enthusiasm for this healthy practice. I felt especially good about myself when I sometimes stood and walked taller. I tried to keep up with my teacher, whose adherence to the yoga popularized by Yogi B.K.S. Iyengar, emphasized precision and alignment in the many yoga postures or Asanas she put us through. She walked gracefully, purposely, among us and adjusted our arms, our hips, our legs, our necks, almost any part of us, it seemed, as we watched, listened, and as I aspired toward improved health. I had just turned 40, and a personal crisis had brought me to yoga and would take me away from my practice, as well.

Yoga adherents, practitioners, yogis all have their stories. My most recent story with Bone Strength Yoga was different, yet it fit me, by allowing me to feel my age when I did not in my other walks of life. It was also a story about accessibility to the teacher, which I had never had before—Diane was a different, a real, kind of teacher, so my story involves my connection to her, too. Mine is one of millions that bring people in search of healing to find themselves on the yoga mat.

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I met Diane Thompson at a fundraiser for Don’t Shoot Portland, in December, 2017, 23 years after my mid-life crisis. At our table, the four of us had all come of age during the 1960s and 70s but could only imagine the pain and strength that pulsed through the surviving mothers’ veins. Our small table group was there to address racial injustice in the Portland Police Department, and there were many more tables like ours.

I remained a bit longer, but only enough to hear Diane tell us she was a new yoga teacher in town and had donated both individualized yoga instruction and group yoga classes. She was practical and compassionate. I let it register. And then walked off to my silent bidding, excited to make a difference. All of us there that night wanted to make a difference.

Three weeks later, I clearly remembered Diane from the auction: serious, grounded, doing what she could for racial justice. Comfortable in a group of strangers, more comfortable mingling in a crowd than I had ever been, she had confidence. I was impressed. First impressions had motivated me to make the highest bid for Diane’s Yoga Just As You Are Studio classes. “What could I possibly lose?” I asked, and then scheduled the classes with Deb, a neighbor who was interested in sharing them. I needed to lose weight, and still remembered that fleeting peace of mind at the end of each class in Denver. Maybe this time I could make it last, I thought.

My saving grace as I started yoga this time: a dawning awareness that I was out of shape and had not listened to my aging body for years, except to take 30-minute leisurely walks three or four times a week. I wondered, “Could yoga help me improve my fitness and mental health? Or, would I continue to deny my own aging and keep my fitness bar low?”

My surface understanding of Diane’s philosophy of her niche in the yoga market, Yoga Just As You Are, for men and women, mostly women and mostly of a certain age, sank in to my psyche in microscopic ways only. All I knew was that my body was not performing as I had hoped it could. Instead of adjusting my arthritic knees to bend, Diane suggested optional positions. She did the same for other students. She even reached down to adjust my chin once during our cooling off pose, Savasana.

Deb, on the other hand, was succeeding, moving on to Bone Strength Yoga with Diane, in her attempt to prevent the osteopenia and osteoporosis that had stricken her mother. My attendance was erratic for the next five or six months, and then I stopped altogether. All was not lost, however. The experience became etched in my mind, as it was directed by my teacher, an attempt at joining my past and present. While I may not have been fully responsive to Diane’s teachings while on my mat, they had made a lasting impression that my work had just begun, that it was incomplete, to be remembered and pursued in a future incarnation. I was old physically, and out of shape, but, how can I put it, couldn’t quite accept it yet on my mat.

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Two years later, I decided to include Diane’s email address in the list of friends, family, and acquaintances to whom I regularly sent thanks and updates during the long hard cycles of chemotherapy during the spring and summer. I had received regular emails about her class offerings at the many venues she had found in addition to her studio, so I thought she would possibly remember me. Her bubbly personality and sincerity drew me in again.

I had been diagnosed with breast cancer in February and was glad when she replied the day after my email, positive that my excellent prognosis and the extended treatment “should just about have it licked.” In that phrase, I heard the British accent and envisioned the mannerisms I had first noticed when I met her at the fundraiser. I also remembered her once sitting in front of us before class and opening up that she’d recently set her alarm for the middle of the night to watch the live news coverage from England of the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. She had been ecstatic.

It was all I could do to keep up with walking the dog to the park and back during chemotherapy, yoga out of the question. Then came the successful removal of the tumor at the height of summer four days before my birthday, and a month of radiation therapy once I was recovered from the surgery. Still no yoga.

There was no yoga in sight until my oncologist ordered a bone density test before my hormone therapy was to begin. The test found osteoporosis in my left hip and osteopenia in the lumbar area of my spine.

In layperson’s terms, osteoporosis and osteopenia, the beginning stages of osteoporosis, are disorders in which bones become brittle and weak. Left untreated, it increases the likelihood of fractures. Both women and men develop the condition. While there is no medical cure for osteoporosis, established medical treatment, a variety of prescription medications, can help prevent the bones from leaching but does not strengthen bone building. Women are found to be most at risk for osteopenia, especially after forty (www.mayoclinic.org).

My new study of Bone Strength Yoga would soon begin. This time, my enthusiasm from earlier attempts at yoga was subdued by a serious medical diagnosis, and Diane took on new, even urgent, importance.

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Diane was born in northern England and came to the U.S. at the age of 33 for a job in the chemical industry in Cincinnati. She categorized her three careers, including at the end, her study, practice, and teaching of yoga, as “the three Cs, chemical research, computing, and community.” She found success in each one, making the transformation to yoga, she told me, “as a corporate cast off looking for community.”

“I was ‘on’ all the time, living in my head. I was sucked in by the Western work ethic. Being ‘on’ had depleted me.”

She’d started the on and off practice of yoga in her 40s, but in 2011, when she moved to Portland she started the regular practice of it as self-care.

“When I moved to Portland, I didn’t know what was happening to my body. I was ruled by my intellect, and, literally, losing my balance. I lost my balance walking, once.”

She also had a bone density test as part of a panel at close to the same time she started practicing yoga as self-care. She was found to have osteopenia in her hips and osteoporosis in her spine.

“Osteopenia was not so devastating,” she said, adding that her mother had severe osteoporosis and had lost her mobility. “I was scared of my own thinning bone developing into osteoporosis and was interested in natural aging.”

In two years, another bone density test indicated that the osteopenia and osteoporosis were improving. In 2015, heartened that her self-care yoga had produced success, she decided to attend yoga school, and started a daily practice. Wanting to learn how to teach Bone Strength Yoga, she began with the method’s source: Ellen Saltonstall and Loren Fishman, M.D. Together, the two had written Yoga for Osteoporosis: The Complete Guide, still considered the most important book on the method.

Dr. Fishman is a pioneering, international spokesperson on yoga for the treatment of numerous disorders in addition to osteoporosis and osteopenia, including scoliosis, rotator cuff tear, and piriformis syndrome. He is the author of 98 academic journal articles and 11 books. He has written extensively about yoga as an adjunct to medical treatment and has over 25 years of experience treating patients in his own offices at Manhattan Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation in New York City. Before obtaining his medical degree, Fishman studied yoga with B.K.S. Iyengar in India (www.manhattanphysicalmedicine.com).

Diane received her training from Dr. Fishman in San Francisco in a one week 40-hour training course where she learned how to build yoga into a bone building specialized practice. “He was a huge eye-opener, an amazing person with a magical presence,” she said.

“The emphasis was on sustained effort, right alignment, and practice at the correct level of ability,” she said. In 2020, Dr. Fishman accepted her invitation to visit Portland and teach a Bone Strength Yoga training course, with her assistance. “It was a wonderful experience,” she admitted.

Her students in Portland remarked Diane’s similes and imagery readily guide them through the twelve poses the Fishman method teaches and helps them find the right alignment for results.

“She’s my idol—her talking and thinking, her mindfulness, the options she gives us,” said Mary, 73, who has osteoporosis. She has regularly practiced in Diane’s Yoga for Seniors class at Mt. Scott Community Center, three times a week for a number of years. She has been practicing Bone Strength Yoga for the last two years and has seen improvement in her bone density test results.

“I don’t find much difference between regular yoga and Bone Strength Yoga, but there is more twisting and alignment in Bone Strength Yoga, more emphasis on alignment, keeping the back straight, the spine straight. Diane’s focus on talking us into thinking helps us focus more on the yoga,” Mary said. “I have three of her videos now and do those on the days we don’t Zoom. That helps a lot. I practice almost every day. It’s a trick. If I want to be strong and healthy, I have to do it.” Mary’s resolve is as admirable at 70-something as the resolve found in a 20-something year old who adopts a vegan diet for good health and to save the animals. Maybe even more so, considering the aging process.

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In ancient times, yoga was often referred to as a tree, a living entity with roots, a trunk, branches, blossoms, and fruit. Hatha yoga, popularized throughout the world and from which Bone Strength Yoga borrows 12 poses, is one of four commonly accepted branches. The others include raja, karma, bhakti, and jnana yoga. Each branch has its unique characteristics and function, representing a particular approach to life. Practitioners need not be limited to one expression. You may practice hatha yoga, taking care of your physical body, while simultaneously cultivating the lifestyle of a bhakti yogi, expressing your compassion for everyone you meet. Yoga expressions continue to increase in the contemporary world, also (Ambrosini, Instructing Hatha Yoga). Most recently I have heard of goat yoga and laughing yoga.

In the 20th century, a development of hatha yoga, focusing particularly on Asanas, or physical postures, became popular throughout the world as a form of physical exercise. This modern form of yoga is now widely known simply as yoga. In many practices of hatha yoga, it extends well beyond being a sophisticated physical exercise system and integrates ideas of ethics, diet, cleansing, breathing exercises, meditation and a system for spiritual development of the yogi (Park, C.L. et al 460-471). From the estimated 200 poses known to be part of the hatha yoga practice, Loren Fishman and Ellen Saltonstall chose 12 essential poses to be part of the bone strength yoga method.

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A student in Diane’s class, Maxine, 67, has also gone through yoga teacher training, and finds “bone strength yoga makes perfect sense, even without the [bone density] score. It is super preventive, my strength, flexibility, and balance are all improving.”

She has been diagnosed with osteoporosis in her hips and spine. Medical treatment was her first choice, yet she found the medication caused heartburn. She has been regularly practicing bone strength yoga with Diane for nine months during the pandemic and sporadically for a year.

“I think Diane’s good at describing precision with cues, and she provides great pacing for building osteocytes. I like the British accent,” she added.

My neighbor, Deb, 65, still practices regularly with Diane. She has found her yoga sweet spot with Bone Strength Yoga. She has had no bone density tests and is wisely in it for the prevention.

“I like the emphasis on tailoring each move to do the best with what you have. So many options. The poses are in general less challenging in the area of balance than regular yoga. I’m on more solid footing, always centered and stable. Diane is gentle and cheerful, shares her own story. She’s middle-aged, and I can relate. She has a good vibe, and the practice keeps me safer for other exercise,” Deb said.

Since November of 2020, even I, at 66, have been gradually changing an erratic practice into something more stable and gratifying. I attend Diane’s Sunday Zoom Bone Strength Yoga class and if I can’t attend the Thursday Zoom class, I practice with one of her videos. Who knows, though? Sometimes I feel so good about my yoga practice, I might add another day.

I continue to walk at least two miles three times a week, with the plan to increase to three and then four miles three times a week. I weight train three to four times a week to rebuild my upper arm strength. I have accepted I am unable to climb Mt. Hood again, like I once did in 1983. I have accepted that all of this is up to me.

Additionally, I have recently begun to medically treat my osteoporosis and osteopenia, knowing, too, that the chemicals fight cancer. I like the variety. I want to keep my yoga practice, though. I’m still a novice, but, then, maybe that’s the point. There is lots of unexplored room for growth. Diane has been good for me.

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The medical establishment, according to Dr. Fishman, has yet to fully endorse the benefits of bone strength yoga even though his extensive and reliable research proves its effectiveness. We are simply finding out on our own, as we set up our appointments for regular bone density tests. We report back our results to Diane and the many other teachers like her. We let our successes register the realizations and satisfactions that it is worth it. For some of us, it is a trick, a requirement, that we can be to yoga class on time in the morning, even if that means waking up later, as Diane suggested once to me.

I have shed the need to buy and wear yoga fashion leggings. Diane once acknowledged the “fashionability of yoga” and reminded me of the youthful desire of so many young women who go at yoga for a “yoga butt.” The superficial gestures of youth and yearning for the “just right” body image and look remind me I was once much younger—but at a cost. The wisdom and prerequisites for me to understand my own aging body now are invaluable. Yoga has helped me to slow down, breathe, and quiet my mind, to live within limits, and simultaneously expand my spirit both inward and outward.

Keeping up with aging is a rite of passage. I am closer to accepting the unknown and uncertain quality of life that comes to visit women at and after middle age than I have ever been. I admit, I may have been tied to my past during that lingering mid-life crisis when I was 40, in need of liberation from inhibiting and even harmful habits we women sometimes acquire from growing up in just about any kind of household across the country. Whatever stage women are at when freedom from toxicity in our culture happens is the right stage, though.

Yoga has been one of my avenues to that stage. Some women may voice a feeling of invisibility after a certain age. Alternatively, we need to find a new way of being in the world. Maybe we need to meet Diane. She strengthens more than bones.

Her yoga teachings, including her coaxing us into optional positions, her voice, her readings, her cheerfulness, just her presence, help do away with the old notions of comparison, criticism, and competition, so prevalent in Western athletic and exercise endeavors. I, for one, was hungry for alternatives and in need of self-study and self-care. Diane told me yoga is not a science. “It’s magic,” she said. “But you’ve got to put in the effort.” At last, I find I am just where I need to be—within, the magic is within my body.

Works Cited

Ambrosini, Diane M. Instructing Hatha Yoga: A Guide for Teachers and Students, 2nd Edition.
Human Kinetics, 2015.

“Diseases and Conditions: Osteoporosis.” Mayo Clinic, Patient Care & Health Information, 19
June, 2019, www.mayoclinic.org.

“Masculinity And Yoga: Revealing The History of Yoga.” Tree House Recovery PDX, Tree
House Recovery PDX, 1 March 2018, www.treehouserecoverypdx.com.

“Our Practice.” Manhattan Physical Medicine, www.manhattanphysicalmedicine.com.
Park, Crystal & Braun, Tosca & Siegel, Tamar. (2015)

“Who Practices Yoga? A Systematic Review of Demographic, Health-related, and Psychosocial Factors
Associated with Yoga Practice”. Journal of Behavioral Medicine. 38.10.1007.