Tao Porchon-Lynch Turns Age On Its Head With Yoga And Dance
June 7, 2010
Ninety-one year-old yogi and competitive ballroom dancer Tao Porchon-Lynch isn’t balancing herself in front of her classes like a human teeter-totter these days. But that’s only because she recently broke her wrist and isn’t quite ready to put full weight on it, she explained during an early morning class in Hartsdale, New York.
Following her in Down Dog, Half Moon, and Warrior Pose, a gawking visitor half her age was quickly disabused of any doubts. Porchon-Lynch, who was raised in French Pondicherry, India, pretzeled a leg behind her neck and demonstrated how far she’s come since she had a hip replacement in 2003 and despite a surgical pin that was implanted in one leg in the late 1980s. She credits the spinal twists of yoga practice, which she does in the morning with her students and at night before bed, with staying lithe.
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Tao Porchon-Lynch
At the time of her injury, skeptical doctors warned, ” ‘You won’t be able to do this, you won’t be able to do that.’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to know what I won’t be able to do. I won’t improve that way,’ ” she recalled. A few weeks later, Porchon-Lynch sent a photograph to her physician of herself practicing mayurasana, or peacock pose, balancing her body on her hands, with her nose pointing to the ground and her straight legs arrowing up.
“Just like nature does, you can renew every part of your body,” she tells her students now as she exhorts them in a whispery voice to use their fingers and particularly their “lazy little toes.”
Porchon-Lynch began practicing yoga during her childhood in India, but she didn’t teach her first yoga class until she was in her 40s, and then informally. She didn’t land her first paying gig as a yoga instructor until she was 50, when Jack LaLanne spotted her giving classes at a health club he was buying and offered her $15 a week.
By then, she had already lived a storied life. During World War II, she worked in the Resistance in France with an aunt before escaping to England. She danced London’s nightclubs and acted in shows, cast for parts by Noel Coward, who, she remmebered, taught her English with such phrases as, “I presume that your presumptions are precisely incorrect and your sarcastic insinuations too obnoxious to be appreciated.” A glamorous beauty, she modeled haute couture in post-war Paris, modeled hair permanents for Lever Brothers in the United States, appeared in several Hollywood movies, wrote screenplays and, in the 1960s and 1970s, documentaries in India. She was also hired by UniTel to help establish TV stations in India in the 1960s.
Yoga has not only helped her maintain her flexibility of body and mind, it’s kept her wardrobe costs down. While she may no longer have a 17-inch waist, thanks to her unwavering practice of yoga and her minimalistic vegetarian diet, she can still wear the size 2 dresses of her Parisian youth. “I don’t eat much and I don’t get tired,” she said.
After her Indian mother died in child birth, her French father gave her to his brother and sister-in-law to raise in India. She studied yoga with Indra Devi in Pondicherry and, in Pune, was one of the first women to study under B.K.S. Iyengar, credited with popularizing yoga in the West. Since founding the Westchester Yoga Institute in 1982, she has trained and certified hundreds of instructors. She also maintains a demanding schedule of teaching yoga classes at the Fred Astaire Studio in Hartsdale and the JCC in Scarsdale, NY, giving workshops at such yoga centers as the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, MA, and the Satchidananda Ashram-Yogaville in Buckingham, Va., and leading trips to India and Sri Lanka.
And then there’s competitive dancing. “I dance as much as I can afford to,” said Tao Porchon-Lynch, who will demonstrate the Argentine Tango and other dances with a 22-year-old dance partner on June 12 in Tarrytown, NY, at the Fred Astaire Dance Studios regional New Comers competition. “I’d rather dance than eat. Dancing with someone who likes to dance can make you feel at one. It turns on the energy and lights up your body.”