an everyday thing

“What is happiness except the simple harmony between a person and the life they live?” ~ Albert Camus

I have a friend who rose before dawn for six hundred days in a row. On every one of those mornings he took a cold shower, practiced a Kundalini yoga kriya, and exhaled a hundred vigorous Sat Nams into the dark. Along the way, he reported, he fell back in love with his life. He lost weight, found contentment, parented three kids and took a second job. He began teaching yoga himself and wearing white.

His dedication to the spiritual path was inspiring. The only things I’ve ever managed to do every day are brush my teeth and make my bed. My husband flosses seven nights a week. I try, but sometimes, for no good reason, I just skip it.

A decade ago, because I adored the teacher and because I was impressed by my friend’s dramatic transformation, I enrolled in a local Kundalini yoga teacher training and made my own commitment to cold showers and pre-dawn yoga practice. Getting out of a warm bed in the chilly darkness, leaving my sleeping husband and dog, gasping as the icy water hit my body at 4:30 in the morning, wrapping a white cotton scarf around my head before doing fifty squats and chanting mantras, I felt empowered but also tired and a little silly. Give it time, I told myself. You’ll get used to it. I didn’t.

Although the training was just one long weekend a month for ten months, the three-minute cold showers and pre-dawn yoga were meant to become daily lifelong rituals. I gave it a good try. Yet while my classmates reported emotional breakthroughs, newfound calm, and moments of epiphany, I felt increasingly resentful and exhausted and ridiculous. Also, I felt like a failure, by turns fraudulent and peevish, annoyed that this thing I had committed to doing seemed more like a ball and chain in my life than a liberation of my spirit.

Why, I wondered, did a routine that forms the basis of an entire school of yoga, one intended to calm your mind and energize your body, make me so miserable? I loved so much about that introduction to Kundalini yoga — the ethereal music, the chants, the energizing Breath of Fire, the sequences that were said to clear old hurts and scars and heal the endocrine system, and the spicy black tea we students sipped together after practice. But I also realized I was never going to become a Kundalini yogi. My entire system rebelled. I wanted to wake up with my husband, not an hour and a half before him. I wanted a hot shower. I felt uncomfortable with my head swaddled in a turban. I wanted to move my body in ways that felt supportive and good, not according to a sequence of poses written down years ago by someone who didn’t know me.

Most of all, I didn’t want to do anything every single day. Humbled, struggling to accept myself as a person lacking the self-discipline required for spiritual enlightenment or rigor, I left the training two months before it ended, rolled up my white headscarf and tucked it away in a drawer, and returned to my old weekly yoga class.

I had my first Dexa scan three years ago, a few weeks before my first hip replacement. The results, I was told in an email from my doctor’s office, could be found by logging into a patient portal: osteopenia. At the time, the news that my bone density was lower than normal seemed like the least of my worries. A dear friend had just died. I was preparing for two major surgeries. My doctor didn’t seem to think the condition warranted so much as a conversation, let alone an office visit. I made a mental note to think about buying some hand weights once my two new hips were in place and went back to reading about post-op PT. I barely gave osteopenia another thought

In November, realizing I’d met my insurance deductible for the year, I asked my doctor if it might be a good idea to recheck my bones. She’d never mentioned it again, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me to request a follow up had the test not been covered by insurance. This time, I got a phone call to come in to her office for the results.

“You have osteoporosis,” the doctor said mildly, without looking up. “A considerable amount of bone loss, which puts you at a high risk for fragility fractures, which are breaks that happen spontaneously, without any warning. I’ll write you a prescription. You can take this medication for four years. After that, we don’t recommend you continue because there are side effects with long-term use.”

I didn’t know much about osteoporosis at that point. But sitting there, absorbing this news as she stared at her computer, I did know one thing: my doctor was not seeing a person in front of her whose life expectancy had just grown dramatically shorter, she was seeing some numbers on a screen. She would be happy to write me a prescription, but she had no interest in the long-term health of my bones. Or in me. I was going to have to become my own student of bones.

Back at home, I scooped some yogurt (calcium!) into a bowl, switched on my laptop, and dove into my new assignment. If you’ve ever turned to Google to learn more about something happening in your body, you know: for every scrap of advice you turn up, there seems to be some other opinion that contradicts the first. But when it comes to bones there are quite a few facts that are universally agreed upon, from the mortality rates of hip fractures and the sobering statistic that one out of two women over fifty will experience an osteoporosis fracture in her life, to the importance of vitamin D, calcium-rich foods, and regular weight-bearing exercise.

To me the biggest surprise was that I had become so porous so fast, a fracture waiting to happen. I’d been pretty sure I was already taking good care of my bones. I exercise and practice yoga. I do eat well. I take a walk most days and turn my face to the sun. And yet, according to the numbers, my 60-year-old bones are equivalent in mass to those of an average 85-year-old woman. In three short years, I’d lost 27% of the bone density in my wrist and forearm. I was at risk for more bone loss, fragility fractures, and kyphosis. Suddenly, the possibility of a slip in the kitchen or a fall on the ice had become terrifying.

When I first sat down with my Dexa scan results in front of a website that helped me translate all the various measurements, I went from shock and disbelief to anger. Why had the doctor completely ignored the osteopenia three years earlier? Why had no physician ever talked with me in the past about my own high risk for osteoporosis and how to prevent it?

Would I have listened? If I’d known twenty years ago, at forty, what I now know at sixty, could I have avoided this condition altogether?

I suspect the answer to that last question is yes. There is so much I could have done, had I only known what to do. I also realize there’s no point in looking back with self-reproach to all the collard greens and almond butter I didn’t eat, the weights I didn’t lift, the Vitamin D I didn’t take.

But I feel certain I made the right call when I walked out of the doctor’s office that day without a prescription in my hand and went in search of another path.

Over these last few months, I’ve had so much blood drawn for further tests that the lab at the hospital sent me a “thank you” card signed by all the members of the staff. (When you get an osteoporosis diagnosis, the first thing you want to do is have some other things checked, especially your thyroid and Vitamin D level.) I’ve read a whole stack of books by doctors and chiropractors and nutritionists. I’ve spent countless hours on line and compared notes with friends who are in the same boat I am, our zest for life and our sense of ourselves as healthy and strong butting up against the reality of our fragile skeletons.

Bones, it turns out, are amazingly complex living structures that require knowledgeable care and feeding from many different sources. And it’s never too late to start making them stronger and healthier.

I’ve learned a lot about who’s most at risk for osteoporosis (white, thin, small-boned, fair-skinned, post-menopausal, women like me, for starters), why bones become brittle and how spontaneous fractures happen, why this condition, although invisible and painless until fractures occur, can’t be ignored, and how medication, though sometimes necessary, creates its own set of risks and problems. I’ve changed doctors and I’ve changed my diet. (I do not come home from the grocery store without brussels sprouts, bok choy, kale, almonds, and figs.) I’ve started a regime of supplements and vitamins. I’ve also changed the rhythm of my days, the way I spend my time, and even my attitude about being alive and growing old.

One of my first internet searches was “yoga and osteoporosis.” One click, and I was ordering Dr. Loren Fishman’s groundbreaking book Yoga for Osteoporosis, which offered exactly the encouragement I was desperate to hear: namely, it is possible to treat osteoporosis, in part, with the thing I like to do most. According to Dr. Fishman’s research, a regular practice of a series of twelve classical poses has been proven to strengthen bones and help prevent fractures. (He’s done a clinical study. It works. YAY!)

What I didn’t quite grasp, until my friend Maude and I took a fortuitously timed weekend workshop with Dr. Fishman at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health a few weeks later, was that just going through the motions wouldn’t build our bones. Therapeutic yoga poses for osteoporosis have to be done every day, seven days a week, for maximum benefit. Poses have to be held, ideally, for a full minute. Held with full-on effort, precise alignment, and maximum resistance. Held with every muscle engaged, every breath complete, every ounce of intention and energy summoned and brought to bear while you work harder at your yoga practice than you have ever worked before. (Gentle yoga? Forget it.)

For two days, we repeated the same twelve familiar yoga poses with every possible modification. We held them as if our lives depended on it, which, in a way, they do. We left on Sunday afternoon exhausted and exhilarated and hopeful, and feeling the very opposite of fragile.

“By our sixties,” Mary Pipher writes in her illuminating, insightful new book Women Rowing North, “we may think the way we did in our forties, but our bodies don’t act that age. Intimations of mortality can make us sad and fearful, but they can also wake us up. Until we understand how short life is, many of us make the mistake of thinking our routines will go on forever.”

Since turning fifty, I’ve lost three close friends who didn’t make it to sixty. Each of these dear women, in her own way, approached the too-soon end of life by finding deeper satisfaction in the small pleasures and unexpected moments of grace that are so easily missed or taken for granted in our mindless rush to get to the next thing. Each of them transformed their initial “Why me?” reaction to a terminal diagnosis into a philosophical “why not me?” acceptance of the truth: that life is random and death inevitable, that tragedy is universal, that good health is not a given, and that each moment that we’re still here on the planet with our loved ones is a gift. When death draws near, we see at last what really matters. We have an opportunity to approach what time is left with more awareness, intention, and gratitude. Suddenly we can choose to live as if the moments, the days, the years really count. I sensed that myself as I blew out the candles on my birthday cake last fall: there’s no more time to waste.

I still feel like a beginner at being old. But I learned so much about how precious life is, and how ephemeral, from my friends who are no longer here. “Live your life,” my friend Diane urged me during many of our final conversations. She wanted me to write my books and to spend time with my family, to travel and to keep climbing mountains. She wanted me to carry on after she was gone in a way that wouldn’t ever give rise to regret for moments missed or love unspoken.

“You have osteoporosis,” is not good news to receive, but it’s a far cry indeed from a terminal diagnosis. I am just one of the eight million other women in this country with low bone density. For me, however, this new reality has been a wake-up call.

This diagnosis has brought home to me, in a way that even three years of arthritis pain and two hip replacements did not, the fact that life is finite and so am I. It has revealed that my body and I (“I” being that voice inside my head) are in a partnership, and that we must work together for the greater good of us both for as long as we are able. Osteoporosis has given me no choice but to take charge of my own health, to learn all there is to know about how to take better care of myself, and to make well-informed choices about what medications and supplements I take, what I eat, and what I do.

I would like to live for a long time — to live without cracking a rib when I sneeze, without losing an inch of my height, without rounding forward with a succession of hairline spinal fractures, without fear of getting hurt.

Of course, I also want to live without giving up the things I love to do. And this is where surrender comes in. Adjustments must be made. And so I’m learning that, with the right attitude, letting go is possible. I may not run or shovel snow or do forward folds and headstands anymore, but perhaps the very fact that I must give up a few things allows a deeper sense of gratitude for all that’s left, which, at this point is plenty. I do take extra care walking across the driveway after it’s snowed, but I can also put on my IceSpikes and hike up the mountain with ease. I can return a backhand to my husband on a (clay) tennis court. The day will come when these physical activities, too, will be a memory. My hope is that by then I’ll have grown more skilled at this task of accepting what can’t be changed.

As I watch my parents, both in their eighties, greet each day with good cheer and appreciation, I realize how much they still have to teach me — lessons of fortitude, resilience, and grace. Their own health issues are never far from any of our minds, and yet they do what they can with joy and good humor. This week, I’m with them in Florida, savoring the pleasure of being nothing but a daughter. Each morning, we gather in the living room and I guide my mom and dad through a yoga practice; for an hour or so they are my willing students, breathing their bodies into unfamiliar shapes and places, stretching muscles they had forgotten they even possessed. The learning, if our hearts and minds are open, can flow both ways.

“We shouldn’t be taking all this time out of your day,” my dad protested yesterday. On the contrary. My father is a man who feels naked without his shoes and socks on. To watch him lift and spread his bare toes, inhaling and exhaling, trying something brand new at age eighty-three, is both a delight and a memory to be stored. There is nothing I’d rather be doing.

Maybe this is how enlightenment works. You get the wake-up call, the clunk on the head, the message that is too loud and too insistent to ignore. And then you have a choice. You can turn away and go back to sleep, or you can dive in deep and allow the current of your life to carry you to places you never expected to go. As the time in front of us grows shorter, life’s beauty comes into sharper focus. There is something energizing about seeing the truth of one’s own mortality more clearly.

These days, I’m more aware than ever before that the moments I spend with the people I love are to be treasured not squandered. I’m more grateful than ever before that I am fit enough to climb that mountain, to take a nine-mile hike, to sweat it out for thirty minutes on the elliptical machine at the gym. In deference to my bones’ need for exercise, I actually find myself sitting less and moving more. (That does also mean writing less, alas, at least for now.)

And there is this. Ten years after my failed attempt at pre-dawn cold showers and Kundalini kryas, I’m doing something I never thought I could: thirty minutes of intense, challenging yoga a day. Every day. I stand in tree pose, unwavering, for a minute, breathing steadily. I am stronger than I’ve been in years. I’m not quite ready to say that my low T score was a gift, but it may turn out to be.

If you wish to strengthen your bones with yoga, Dr. Loren Fishman’s Yoga for Osteoporosis is your bible. There’s also a YouTube video to get you started. Work hard. Wrap your muscles around your bones. Hold the poses.

The best book I’ve found about the science of osteoporosis, what steps to take if you’re diagnosed, and the general care and feeding of your bones is Dr. Keith McCormick’s The Whole-Body Approach to Osteoporosis. Grab your highlighter.

Dr. Lani Simpson’s No-Nonsense Bone Health Guide is an invaluable resource packed with advice and encouragement. Also, she offers a comprehensive discussion of calcium supplementation and how to do it right.

In a holistic approach to healing, your kitchen is your pharmacy. Start feeding your bones (and learn what foods to avoid) with Annemarie Colbin’s The Whole-Food Guide to Strong Bones.

I swore I would buy no more cookbooks, but I did succumb to The Healthy Bones Nutrition Plan and Cookbook by daughter and mother team Dr. Laura Kelly and Helen Bryman Kelly. Lots to chew on here, with 100 practical, inspiring, tasty recipes.

Finally, I can’t recommend Mary Pipher’s Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents as We Age highly enough. Although Mary claims to have written this book specifically for women crossing from middle age into old age (if we’re being literal, that means anyone over 50, right?), her wisdom and insight into change, loss, and growth are welcome no matter how old you are. She’s the kind of writer who feels like a friend. I found myself on every page.

Originally published at www.katrinakenison.com on March 10, 2019.