Reviewed by Mark Mathew Braunstein
Age Like a Yogi: A Heavenly Path to a Dazzling Third Act
by Victoria Moran
Foreword by Sharon Gannon
Monkfish Book Publishing
January 2025, Softcover, 234 pages, ISBN: 978-1958972595, also audiobook, audio CD, and eBook
Enumerated as 75 years, three-quarters of a century is a nice roundish number that makes reaching the age of 75 a milestone. For an author, publishing your roundish-numbered 15th book shortly before reaching your 75th birthday marks a further milestone. Both landmarks describe Victoria Moran’s Age Like a Yogi, published in a year with another rounded-off number, 2025.
The twin subjects of Age Like a Yogi are the sister sciences of yoga and ayurveda, both derived from Vedic knowledge. In this book with a modern vibe, their ancient wisdoms are demystified and westernized. Drawing from both disciplines, Victoria Moran compiles health hints and lifestyle hacks for aging gracefully. Many Westerners are familiar with yoga. Many might have engaged in it as an exercise regimen reaping its physical benefits. Some have achieved improvements in their mental health. Still others have more deeply explored its spiritual realm. And some might have sought through yoga all three.
Ayurveda is another matter, until recently relatively unknown to most Westerners. As a traditional Indian modality of medicine and therapy, it’s comparable to our Western healing systems such as allopathic, homeopathic, osteopathic, and naturopathic medicines. The most celebrated contemporary proponent who has merged conventional allopathy with traditional ayurveda is Deepak Chopra, MD.
Moran’s book is akin to letters to her readers in which she shares her enthusiasm about the two ancient Eastern traditions. Passionate about her subjects, her inspired writing makes for inspiring and effortless reading. In her radio shows, podcasts, and videos about other subjects, you get the feeling that she’s speaking directly to you. Similarly, her conversational writing style can make you feel like she’s writing directly to you.
The author covers a lot of territory, namely the Indian subcontinent and its five millennia of traditions. Condensing all this ancient wisdom and their complex concepts into a single volume is an ambitious project. While summarizing traditional practices, this book avoids sounding like “Yoga for the Masses” or “Ayurveda for Dummies.”
Moran is not pushy in the way a sports coach might push her team. Instead, she cheers us on. In Chapter 5, “Exercise, Physical and Metaphysical,” she motivates us to regularly engage in strenuous exercise, which is universally acknowledged as a prerequisite for health. In Chapter 35, “Concentration, Mediation, Connection,” she explores meditation as physical activity’s complement. In Chapter 6, “Asana: The Proof is in the Posture,” she explains how yoga unifies exercise with mediation.
When Moran first investigated yoga in 1967, it was still a “misunderstood oddity.” Nowadays, “Yoga is far more a practice than a belief system.” (193) By simplifying its practices, this book might encourage you to adapt a few of them because, “Yoga is a buffet, not a menu.” (page xxii) First dabbling in it in 1976 though soon abandoning it, I already knew a thing or two about yoga. Now I know more. I especially appreciate Chapter 36, “What Kind of Yogi Are You?” a survey that skillfully sorts out the various branches of the yoga tree that has taken root in our Western world. I savor that chapter as though it were titled,“Yoga for Armchair Travelers.”
The book equally simplifies ayurveda. For instance, in Chapter 13, “First Thing in the Morning,” the author admits that if we attempted to accomplish everything that spiritual teachers and ayurvedic doctors advise us “… to do first thing in the morning, it would take until afternoon.” (72) Instead, she has reduced their recommendations to “The Foremost Five.” Practicing yoga’s asanas (poses) is one of those five, yet it, too, is optional.
Before reading this book, I knew nothing about ayurveda, so now I’m better informed. By shining light upon them, the book serves as a field guide for exploring the unfamiliar worlds of ayurveda and yoga. In some places, however, I felt lost and in the dark. Discussions about the three Doshas, the three Gunas, the seven Chakras, and the countless Yamas and Niyamas, all named by their multisyllabic transliterations from Sanskrit, sometimes washed over me without quite sinking in. Mundane me.
In contrast, Part Ten, the book’s grand finale, was absorbing reading. Meaning, I absorbed it all. Possibly this is because instead of being named Dharmas they are called, in plain English, “Dares.” Its penultimate chapter, Chapter 39, “Dare to Make Peace with Mortality,” is the book’s shining crown. Its initial paragraph is worth quoting at length:
Death is such a nuisance. It’s hard to get here in the first place – ask any mother – and learning to operate a body and cultivate a mind takes twenty years or more. We have little time as it is, yet we spend a third of it in sleep. Even if we’re blessed with longevity, indicators surface – cloudy vision, a bum knee, a senior moment – to remind us that we’re only passing through. (192)
As in the above passage, some of the thought-provoking chapters serve as folksy sermons that could have been delivered by a Sunday school teacher or a Unitarian minister. Others are like pep talks with which some nonsectarian yoga instructors initiate or conclude their classes. Such chapters remind me of Moran’s fifth book, her 1999 bestseller, Creating a Charmed Life. (I refer you to my detailed reader review posted on Amazon in 2019, twenty years after the book’s publication.) Still in-print, that book’s 75 short essays can be described as inspirational, or maybe as motivational, or maybe even (horrors! horrors!) as self-help.
No fan of the category of New Age self-help books that typically are churned out by the spiritual-industrial complex, I am baffled by its gravity-defying concept. “Self-help” conjures in my mind an image of a drowning man desperately trying to save his life by tugging on his hair in an effort to pull his head out of the water. Despite my reservations about its genre, I applaud most of the heartfelt advice dispensed in Creating a Charmed Life, and had considered that book to be Moran’s magnum opus. Until now.
As you’d expect from an author of several books about the plant-based diet, she emphasizes in Age Like a Yogi that food is a key factor in promoting health and longevity. After all, in pursuit of optimal health, you are not required to rise before dawn every morning. You don’t need to do yoga. You are not obligated to run around in circles on a track field. You don’t need to sit in meditation. But (here’s the big “but”) we all must eat. She advises us to eat only real food that provides nourishment “… so we’re less likely to seek the meaning of life in a bakery.” (page 65)
Moran is well aware that hers is predominantly an affluent readership endowed with the cash to buy the book and with the time to read it. Hence, in matters of food, “Those of us fortunate enough to have a choice would do well to choose wisely.” (67) Indeed, proper nutrition has a higher purpose than just to make us look good and feel good. “Ideally, breakfast will make you feel that you’re up for the grandest gift anyone was ever given: one more day.” (75)
Make that one more day free of debility or disease. Because the aim is not merely to prolong our lifespans, but to extend what’s recently been coined our “health spans,” so that our elder years wil remain as vibrant and active as when we were younger. Because the goal is not merely outer beauty, but inner peace. Because the path to inner peace is steep and rocky if we suffer in poor health from “… soreness that can’t be blamed on being over the hill or having just climbed one.” (35) Because inner peace fosters compassion, a gift of “… peace and power and purpose, all wrapped up in a box with your name on it.” (127)
Ninety-five percent of the health advice that the author gleaned from ayurveda and yoga is relevant for any age group, not just for elders immersed in their “dazzling third act.” Hence this book is worth reading regardless of your health or age. I wonder why its title addresses only aging, and its subtitle only elders. Perhaps they are book marketing tools intended to distinguish this book from other surveys of ayurveda and yoga, some that Moran has listed in her bibliography for further reading, eloquently titled, “Brilliant Books.” Whatever its title, this, too, is a brilliant book.
Nevertheless (that daunting and foreboding, “nevertheless”), this book has one slight shortcoming. The author has built a stately mansion, but on a less than firm foundation. The book’s title is a premise based more on fancy than on facts. “To age like a yogi” is a convention or catchphrase whose validity seems elusive to me. Do yogis and yoginis really live longer and age slower?
Chapter One, “Yoga and Extended Youthfulness,” provides a fleeting reference to the concept of Blue Zones, geographic locations of cultures “… around the globe where people were living both long and well,” and where “… robust longevity is common.” (page 4) None of these Blue Zones appears on any map of India. The closest is the remote Hunza Valley of what is now called Pakistan, on its northern tip bordering Afghanistan and China. Its dominant religion had been Buddhism, not Hinduism. Its dominant religion now is Islam. No yogis there.
Mythical Shangri-La can be more than wistful idea or wishful thinking. I point to the 2016 book, Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life, which references the World Health Organization (WHO) for according Japan as the nation with the world’s highest human life expectancy and the highest ratio of centenarians. (121) And while its life expectancy is high overall, the residents on the Japanese island of Okinawa exceed Japan’s national average. (122) For further documentation, I cite the 2002 book, The Okinawa Program.
Age Like a Yogi is missing a chapter. The author provided only anecdotal evidence of the role models that she has been privileged to have met in her own active life rich with personal experiences. While short-term scientific studies attest that individual adherents of yoga or meditation do indeed reap many physical and mental benefits that can prolong longevity, such individuals are scattered around the world.
India is an immense continent teeming with diverse cultures, so no surprise that no overwhelming evidence can be pinpointed there. And no surprise if no long-term epidemiological studies have been conducted of lifelong residents in ashrams or yogic communities. Yet even in the absence of such studies, lawyers know that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.
Absent of such multi-generational scientific research, for its next edition the author could compile a list of celebrated yoga teachers or ayurvedic doctors. She could cite their achievements as elders during their own “dazzling third acts” and could identify the advanced ages to which they had lived or still are living. Recently trained as a yoga instructor while a septuagenarian, she could head that list.
As for me, I’m a good forest bather, but a bad meditator. And a good vegan, but a bad yogi. This book taught me a lot about yoga and ayurveda. While awaiting its next edition, I embrace it with healthy skepticism. Yogic and ayurvedic practices can enrich my life, yet I am not altogether convinced that they can lengthen it. My one safe bet is that none will shorten it.
About the reviewer: Mark Mathew Braunstein is the septuagenarian author of six books about health, food, and drugs, most recently the 2022 book, Mindful Marijuana Smoking. He has also contributed countless articles, essays, and reviews to periodicals, including in December 14, 2024, a review of Seeing through the Smoke in Compulsive Reader. Find the review Here.