Shari Ser Joins Yoga for Healthy Aging

We're pleased to announce that Shari Ser, a physical therapist and Iyengar-style yoga teacher, has joined the staff here at Yoga for Healthy Aging. She'll be posting regularly, and will be available to answer questions on a weekly basis. To begin, we've asked her to tell us all a little about her background in physical therapy and yoga. —Nina

Before I trained to be a physical therapist, I had a degree from SUNY Buffalo in Women's Studies/Labor History/American Studies—really useful, no? But it was circa 1978, and I was very involved in the food coop scene, eating healthy, growing your own food, collective households, communes—the personal was the political. I traveled for two years in Asia and ended up in London at a whole foods bakery. So it was either go into nutritional sciences and get married in England for citizenship or come back to the US and go to Physical Therapy school. I was always interested in taking care of your body, women’s health and alternatives, and thought PT would be a venue where I could be covert. Ironically, how wrong I was, because at the time PT's were some of the most conservative individuals I ever met. PT school was grueling and there are no words to describe how hard it was, but maybe that is where the yoga came in because it was a place I could be and not be judged and just explore with my teacher the boundaries of my physical body.

I started practicing yoga in 1980. I was involved with San Francisco Zen Center at the time and someone suggested I check out this class nearby led by Roger Cole. I did and just continued practicing. I liked it and it made me feel good but it wasn't like “love at first sight.” Roger eventually moved on but he directed me to Judith Lasater's class at the Iyengar institute and she became my main teacher after that. At that point I was in Physical Therapy school at University of California, San Francisco, and it was nice to be studying with a teacher who “spoke my language.”

Through the Forest by Michele McCartney-Filgate

I studied with Judith from 1980-1987 till we moved to the East Bay. I was on bed rest for my first pregnancy on IV tocolytics from week #24-36 and Judith would visit periodically. She gave me Geeta Iyengar’s woman's yoga book (Yoga: A Gem for Women). During that time of bed rest, I would do yoga in my mind and had a whole bed routine that I did on my side—out of bed only to pee. Talk about weakness when you are finally allowed up! I had four days of late pregnancy till I gave birth to my daughter but wasn’t allowed to go back to yoga till I wasn't bleeding. That took another six weeks. Judith was very solicitous and kind to me in class when I came back. Then ego took over and I had to progress to her more advanced 3-5 class, and I just had to be able to do handstand!

So then I was in the level 3-5 class and met Donna Farhi. I was also informally taking some of the advanced studies' classes at the Iyengar Institute. We moved and then I found Donald Moyer through Judith. I assisted Donna and Roger at a class they taught at the Institute with my infant daughter in tow (when she began to crawl it wasn't a possibility any more). I also took a body work training that Donna co-taught. Why did I stick with yoga? It just became my time where I could leave my responsibilities of being a mom and working, and have my own time. Going to class was the only thing I did for myself at that time because trying to find time to practice was almost impossible (working full time with an infant).

One pregnancy down, a move to the East Bay and my realization that unless I committed to yoga more formally no one would “take me seriously,” so I enrolled in the Berkeley Yoga Room's Advanced Studies Program. I didn't quite know how to bridge physical therapy with yoga, though at the time I was working in outpatient orthopedics and was doing a lot of back care rehabilitation and taking a lot of continuing education classes for different manual therapy skills. Yoga was something I did in another life. After another pregnancy and another bed rest, I finished the program in 1999. I began teaching at the Berkeley Yoga Room soon after that.

I continued to work in outpatient orthopedics but yoga was creeping into my clinical practice. I changed into home health to allow me the flexibility of raising two children and working. I slowly began to add “more yoga” into the guise of therapeutic exercise. You have to be careful with some people in how you talk to them because not everyone is open to things they don’t understand. I still don't call what I do yoga in the home care setting—it is still “therapeutic exercise” or “Home Exercise Program”—but there is more attention to breathing, awareness and responsibility in health choices.

What I have learned from being a physical therapist is not from my education per se but learning to listen to my patients as they share their lives with me. In home health I am a guest in their homes and I have to learn to be respectful. My agenda and their agendas may not be the same. I currently have a 94-year old retired astronomy professor who sustained a fall in his home and broke his arm and foot. When I first met him he was very persnickety and didn’t want to do anything I said until I changed the wording and it was “what would you like to do today?” or “would it be alright with you if we did....” Once he was given permission to say no and he knew I would respect it, he began to trust me and work with me to regain his mobility and to work with his fear of falling again. That to me is the most valuable lesson I learned is to respect the word “no.”

I suppose that is where I am now. I think that bad things do happen to people who do all the right things; people die too early when they aren't ready, and it still hurts. What I try to do now is give people tools that they can use or not, but allowing them the information by which to make their choices. I do a lot of education about health and how one is part of the team, and a lot of encouragement for people to learn how to talk to their physicians. As to aging: what can I say? It is happening to all of us and I am just like the next person who doesn’t like the limitations that my body is starting to exhibit. I continue to push the envelop so to speak, but am mindful of injury more now than when I was younger, partly because it takes so much longer to heal as we age and prevention is the best path. It isn’t easy to acknowledge one’s limitations but maybe that is the new definition of aging. —Shari