There’s a fairly new idea in medicine known as epigenetics. Roughly, it is the idea that the environment—broadly described as everything that happens to you—can influence your genetics, leaving you more or less prone to disease or sickness.
Holidays were the hardest for her. At 87 years old, Elma, who lived independently in her own small apartment in San Francisco, spent most of her days alone—even Christmas day. When she was younger, Christmas was her favorite time of year, and her happiest memories were of huddling around the tree with her two boys and husband on Christmas morning, singing carols and opening gifts.
It was a dream come true for Laura when she was finally able to move out of a San Mateo nursing home back into her own apartment. Thanks to the Community Care Settings Pilot (CCSP) program through Institute on Aging, her inpatient rehabilitation after a major car accident didn’t go on longer than it needed to: She was able to return to the community where she feels at home.
One of the problems with aging in America is that, for various reasons, your world can become easily constricted. Streets and sidewalks aren’t designed with the needs of older adults in mind. Friends move away or pass on. Driving becomes more difficult. And for some reason, as a society, we feel that increased isolation is a normal course of events, rather than a series of choices.
We all have one special home we live in our entire lives: our bodies. When older adults are working against arthritis and other challenges to their mobility, it’s not just their physical fitness that backslides—they’re also likely to lose touch and feel disconnected from their bodies. When we’re not feeling actively in touch with those living homes, we feel displaced, and other aspects of our lives can get out of balance, too.
Your life is nothing if not a highly complex collection of interrelated parts and pieces. We navigate our colorful emotional journeys and simultaneously cultivate our roles in families, in the community, and in the workplace. And, of course, we manage the many layers of our health, our relationships, and our goals and dreams. These different parts can’t function altogether separately from each other. On top of it all, we must strive to build and maintain bridges between the interrelated elements of our lives.
For almost a decade, Deanna was “going to write a memoir.” For almost a decade, she just didn’t really know where or how to start. She collected all kind of photos and dates and evidence of life memories over those long years, but breaking into the actual writing was intimidating, so, again and again, she’d start and quickly stop in one notebook or the next.
There is no one tool or solution for achieving all-around balance—it takes a comprehensive strategy to avoid burnout—but yoga for caregivers can certainly be counted as a powerful force for peace and positivity amidst the challenges.
When I was a kid in the Midwest and summer was approaching, I always looked forward to the library’s summer reading program. It felt magical to me—and not because of the prizes they gave out (fancy pencils, little toys, pizza coupons) for reading a certain number of books. For me, the reading lists were incentive enough because I knew that as soon as I registered for the program, I’d have in my hands a thoughtful collection of the best, most creative works of literature to hit the shelves in recent years.
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