15 Day Meditation and Yoga for Seniors Retreat in Kathmandu, Nepal

If you want to devote the rest of your life to the spiritual path, Nepal Yoga Home might be the best choice to step out and start your special journey. The third age could be the best time of your life to start a healthy and relaxing regular yoga practice, breathing exercises, and meditation.

Old age is just a cycle, a cycle that will take you through another beautiful phase of your life. This is the stage when you have more time for yourself and the spiritual part of your life. Then again, it is also the time when you are more susceptible to age-linked ailments and illnesses such as arthritis, rheumatism, diabetes, high blood pressure, memory loss, stress, depression, hormonal fluctuations, etc.

Yoga is beneficial for the prevention and control of these and much other common health and emotional problems linked to old age. Regular yoga practice is the best way to maintain a healthy life in the elderly stage.

Nepal Yoga Home provides a senior's yoga practice, focused on proper body alignment including physical limitations, aches, pains, and weaknesses. The yoga course for senior citizens is specifically designed for your physical condition which augurs your emotional and mental well-being. The yoga poses tone up your muscles, improve the circulation of blood, reduce stress, and ward off depression.

Yoga and meditation are the best option to keep a fit body and a healthy mind that lead to better health and a better ability to cope with the aging process. Senior people have to face many physical and mental problems, the reason why yoga meditation and the spiritual path will definitely make your life easier.

In most cases, seniors can absolutely do yoga. If you can breathe you can benefit from yoga. So, old age is not an obstacle to yoga and meditation. Most people think yoga is a physical exercise, therefore hard to practice in old age, but in fact, yoga postures (exercises) are only one dimension of yoga.

Yoga has different dimensions like meditation (techniques of peaceful and stable mind), pranayama (breathing exercise), pratyahara (mastery of sense organ), Dharana (more aware mind), etc. Everyone can be benefited from yoga if they really want. Many people with hectic schedules only find the time for activities such as yoga in retirement. Retirement is the perfect time to pick up healthy habits that will promote longevity.

When you were a child everything was beautiful, but you were enthusiastic to grow up because you wanted to experience life. When you became young, you felt life was different, when you come to old age, all the longings are over, the whole life is behind you and you are once again childlike.

The yoga seniors courses can be a very fruitful and wonderful experience for your entire life, you just need to accept the help of yoga and meditation. If you establish yourself in other dimensions of experience through yoga and meditation, your body and mind will become easy thing to balance and manage.

In old age, bodies have to face different degenerative illnesses, and physiological changes in the heart, blood vessels, lungs, nerves, and other organs. Ailments that are linked to old age are joint inflexibility, poor blood circulation, arthritis, vision problem, sleep disorder, breathing problem, stress-related problems, and chronic pains.

The reason for many of these problems can be insufficient exercise, overthinking, unwise eating habits, and shallow berating. This can be addressed by yoga, through exercises, thinking patterns, shallow breathing exercises, unwise eating, and the correction of other habits.

Benefits of yoga for seniors

Yoga and meditation practices are good to keep a fitter body, a calmer mind, and a more relaxed life. It helps you to be more in touch with yourself enabling you to accept who you are and the state you are in creating a positive approach in life for elder people. Yoga asanas are good to strengthen the bones and muscles, meditation aims to quiet the mind, and breathing techniques are designed to make you feel refreshed and to clean the air that passages through our nerve channels.

Physical balance decreases in old age, but yoga poses and breathing exercises help to regain the balance in the body. Attending regular yoga and meditation classes will also establish a sense of being young. Meditation helps to reduce loneliness and boost the immune system in seniors. Lack of movement and stretching leads to joint deterioration and loss of flexibility, yoga asana offers great results to keep flexibility in the body and healthy joints. It is also good to preserve heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and high blood pressure.

Yoga leads toward creativity, increases learning abilities, improves memory, and allows higher levels of moral reasoning. Yogic relaxation, meditation, and voluntary regular breathing are all great medicines for sleep disorders, diabetic type ‘B’, cholesterol, triglycerides, and anxiety.

Yoga and meditation have shown different benefits in seniors like

• Improve the quality of old age life
• Improve sleep quality
• Reduce stress and improve depression
• Keep balance in the physical and mental body
• Help to control blood sugar
• Enhance respiratory function
• Improve memory
• Improve arthritis pain
• Prevent osteoporosis
• Moderate chronic pain
• Increase joint flexibility
• Prevent and heal HBP
• Reduce body fat
• Cure back pain
• Improve poor blood circulation
• Improve vision problems
• Remove chronic pain
• Reduce the use of alcohol and other drugs
• Sustain or build strength and mobility
• Looking and feeling younger
• Decrease overall healthcare costs
• Increase longevity
• Improve cardiovascular health
• Reduce excess weight
• Enhance energy, strength, and overall feelings of well-being

Objective of this course

This course will be fruitful for all seniors who are looking to make their old age a healthy and happy path. The main objectives of this course are a big concern for seniors is to feel or to be useless after retirement. It leads the majority of them to depression, mental agony, and frustration. This course will show them the right path to de-stress and spiritual life.

Its main goals are to reduce old age stresses, increase the range of motion, provide a better balance, and help to regain strength and a calmer mind.

• To teach the right art of self-care and a natural way of healthy leaving.
• To encourage and support seniors to get the confidence to continue regular yoga and meditation practice.
• To make seniors' life more enjoyable and more manageable, yoga will make an enormous difference in their daily lives.
• To establish a sense of freedom, independence, and relaxation.
• To improve balance and strength.
• The ability to modify poses according to health circumstances.
• To maintain the mobility of the spine and to develop full motion for functional flexibility and Strengthening of the core muscle
• To encourage relaxation abilities for the mind and body
• To improve different diseases which usually comes due to aging such as stiffness, sleep disorder, depression, back and neck pain, arthritis, osteoporosis, knee, and hip pain, heart problem, blood pressure, uric acid, stress, etc.

What will be taught?

The following things will be taught in this 15-day course:

Yoga asanas (Yoga postures)

The Sanskrit term “asana” is translated as pose or posture. The final position of an asana is achieved when all body parts are positioned correctly. Learning basic yoga poses will ease a new yogi into practice gradually.

The yoga postures are designed for seniors of all fitness, and mobility levels. You can develop a simple sequence of moves for a great wake-up routine each day. These postures will increase strength, circulation, and flexibility.

Some suggested yoga poses for seniors are Easy pose, Wind reliving pose, Plank pose, Cobra pose, Ca pose, Cow pose, Tabletop pose, Warrior I, Warrior II, Triangle pose, Pigeon pose, Seated Twist pose, Tree pose, Half spinal twist pose, Shoulder Stand pose, Laying Twist pose, Happy Baby Pose, One-legged Downward Dog, Slow Single, and Double Leg Raises, Half Spinal Twist (Ardha Matsyendrasana), waist rotating pose, easy fish pose, simple balancing pose, etc.

Yoga style

You will learn how to unify body, mind, and spirit through the yoga practice in its authentic form. You will experience yoga as more than just a form of exercise. It will be a whole holistic experience that will rejuvenate the body, mind, and spirit. Even among those who practice more fitness-focused yoga, the experience will be different because different relaxing, breathing and meditation techniques will be applied.

The yoga styles are as follows:

• Ashtanga yoga - Patanjali authentic Ashtanga yoga is the main yoga. The core principle of Ashtanga yoga is truly inspiring and easy for older people. Ashtanga yoga leads step by step into a new level of peace and flexibility. It is specially designed for elders, it is a modified Ashtanga yoga for seniors.
• Anusara yoga - The word “Anusara” means “following your heart” or “flowing with grace.” Classes generally have unifying themes and are always conducted in a relaxed, non-competitive atmosphere.
• Gentle yoga - This yoga is suitable and especially helpful for seniors. Gentle movements and stretching through beginner yoga poses can reduce swelling in joints while increasing joint mobility and improving balance which helps reduce falls.
• Seniors yoga - This yoga has been designed by the founder of Nepal Yoga Home. This yoga is a simple and easy flow of breath and yoga postures that helps to improve stress of old age, cardiovascular health, digestion-elimination, improves sleep, and lower blood pressure and cholesterol. Many old people truly appreciate this style of yoga.
• Laughter yoga - Is indeed the best medicine to teach seniors and keep them in good cheer. Heartily laughter gets rid of stress, worry, and depression. Laughter generates positive thoughts and reduces negative strains.
• Therapeutic Yoga - Nepal Yoga Home targets problems by focusing on therapeutic yoga rather than a challenging physical workout. In old age, the elder needs therapeutic yoga (yoga according to their problem). They try to deal individually with each case, if someone has a complicated problem, they give them separate classes to heal the senior injury or problem. With this yoga, you will learn how to heal old age diseases like stress, anxiety, hypertension, heart problems, arthritis, mobility, sleep disorder, memory loss, back pain, obesity, etc

Meditation

Meditation can be a great friend for seniors because it will teach them to stay within themselves. Meditation is a technique that develops the power to be aware of the present moment, which creates unconditional peace and awareness. When the practitioner becomes aware he becomes free from the past and the future. Whatever is done with awareness is by definition meditation.

This could be breathing, watching the ocean, exercising, listening to music, etc. In essence, meditation is more than just a technique; it is a way of living. The “practice” of meditation is seen as a practice of living, a practice that increases awareness. The main techniques of meditation are:

• Buddha's style of meditation
• Breathing meditation
• Vipassana meditation
• So-Ham meditation
• Mindfulness meditation
• Silence meditation
• Guided meditation
• Soul meditation
• Kundalini meditation, etc

Pranayama, Banda, and Mudra (breathing exercises)

As you age, you stop breathing fully. Yoga reminds you that it is important to exhale as fully as you inhale. As you grow older, you lose flexibility in your ribcage and sometimes suffer from spinal deformities, creating less room for lung expansion. Most elders can lose up to 20 percent of their blood oxygen levels just by aging.

Fortunately, breathing exercises can help keep you perfect at any age. Breathing exercises will help you to fill your lung capacity from the bottom to the top and will develop elasticity.

Correct breathing involves relaxing your body and mind while bringing fresh oxygen into every of your body cells. Breathing exercises can: lower blood pressure, promote feelings of calm, and relaxation, and help to de-stress. Mindful breathing takes into consideration three purposes of breathing: replenishing, warming, and cleansing.

Focusing on full inhalations and exhalations serves to slow down the heart rate which, in turn, improves focus and increases concentration. Your ability to breathe correctly affects everything, from your strength and stamina to your mood. Some breathing exercises designed for seniors are:

• Natural longer breath
• Diaphragmatic breathing
• Thoracic breathing
• Clavicular breathing
• Throat lock breathing
• Abdominal lock breathing
• Root lock breathing
• Yogic breathing
• Alternate nostril breathing
• Nadi Shodhana pranayama
• Inner retention breathing
• External retention breathing
• Sheetali pranayama (cooling breathing)
• Bhramari pranayama (Humming bee breathing)
• Ujjayi pranayama (Psychic breathing)
• Bhastrika pranayama I and II (Bellows breathing)
• Kapalbhati pranayama (frontal brain cleansing breath)
• Surya Bheda pranayama ( Vitality stimulating breathing)
• Different gestures with breathing combinations, etc

Yogic relaxation and mantra chanting

They will teach yogic relaxation and mantras as an art of de-stress. Mantra has two components ‘Man’ means mind and ‘Tra’ means wave or vibration. Mantra is a technical practice that results in reliability and brings a peaceful experience to the mind. Mantras are the mind vibrations in relationship to the Cosmos.

The Science of Mantra is based on the knowledge that sound is a form of energy that has the power to affect the chakras and the human psyche. Mantras help to make everything less thought and create a more relaxed mind. Mental ‘fitness’ is as equally important as physical fitness.

In old age, mental functions start to decline with age which results in short-term memory loss, forgetfulness, and lack of concentration. Mantra chanting and yogic relaxation make an improvement in concentration and confidence. You will practice some powerful Vedic mantras.

Yoga Philosophy

The main philosophy of yoga is simply to integrate mind, body, and spirit. Yet there is a multitude of philosophical ideas developed by looking into the deeper dimensions of the body, mind, and spirit. So, you will be taught:

• Ashtanga yoga philosophy for your daily life
• Pathway to deepen spiritual peace through yoga philosophy
• Bhagavat Gita and its importance art for elderly people
• Patanjali Yoga sutra and its importance in old age

Health tips and lifestyles

Health tips and lifestyles will be taught. Also, you will learn the way of positive thinking. Many health concerns have been linked to the sedentary lifestyle which is typical of many older people so they teach them how to eat, how to sit, how to sleep, and how to implement the yoga art of living. You will learn how to improve relationships at home and at work, better social tolerance, and increased satisfaction in old age. You will get facts and tips on staying mentally fit and maintaining a good attitude as you age.

Precautions for seniors while they are practicing yoga

Here are some key things for elders to achieve good benefits from yoga. When people start yoga at age of 50 or older, they usually have various health issues commonly associated with the aging process so they have to take care of themselves.

• A slow practice is easier for seniors so, do not go fast and take relaxation in between every yoga asana.
• In practicing yoga, you have to know your body and respect its limits. Do not push yourself too hard in yoga postures. Yoga can only be effective if you practice it correctly according to your own capacity. The harder you try, the less you get. Be aware of health concerns and abilities.
• Older participants may not have the strength required to hold the pose for a longer period so observe yourself and make it shorter (ten to fifteen seconds). A pose can be repeated two or three times.
• Focus your awareness on your stretching portion of the body and gaze in a specific spot to assist with balance and peace of mind.
• Make some inspiration source (teacher) that encourages them to keep continuing practice. Create a supportive environment.
• Support and protect joints like ankles, hips, hamstrings, wrists, and pectorals need special attention.
• Know modifications for the asanas will make everything easier and will be more beneficial.
• Keep the focus on functioning
• Please do not practice watching television or YouTube, CD, etc., especially in complicated chronic conditions such as hypertension, osteoporosis, heart diseases, and depression. Please take help from a yoga expert.
• Yoga poses or stretches should never hurt; release the stretch if it is causing any pain.

Rules and regulation

Nepal Yoga Home respect you very much but they have some rules to maintain the purity and quality of the yogic lifestyle. Here are some rules and regulations:

• 1. This is a yoga home place to balance your body, mind and soul. Please do not compare it to a hotel or resort. This is your laboratory of life to experiment with yourself in front of truth.
• 2. Alcohol, cigarette or any other drugs are not allowed.
• 3. Nepal Yoga Home are vegetarian so they are providing you with vegetarian/ vegan food. You are not allowed to bring meat inside the yoga home.
• 4. If you have difficulty to adjust in vegetarian, Nepali and yogic food there is a restaurant within 5-10 minutes' walking distance. If you like to take additional food or something you can bring yourself from the city which is just 20 min walking distance from the yoga home.
• 5. Nepal Yoga Home provide laundry service at an additional cost
• 6. Please try to deepen in your own practice and try to deepen the silence after 9 p.m. Nepal Yoga Home normally closes the gate after 9 p.m. Their principle is early to bed and early wake-up.
• 7. Nepal Yoga Home are not responsible for injury cases but they suggest practicing according to your own capacity.
• 8. Nepal Yoga Home provide a shared yoga mat. If you need personal yoga you can buy an organic yoga mat with them.
• 9. Keep your room, toilet and yoga hall clean feel more responsible for cleanness as part of karma Yoga (selfless action).
• 10. Nepal Yoga Home have pure drinking water if you are very sensitive to changing the water you can buy distilled water in shops.
• 11. Upgrade of course is possible but downgrade is not possible.
• 12. Please do not speak during mealtime.