Eighty-Year-Old Yogi Stretches Expectations

Today Oak Park has a wealth of options for students of yoga. But it wasn't always so. Just ask Mary Louise Stefanic, the 80-year-old yoga instructor who teaches twice a week at Loyola University Chicago.

Stefanic says when she first took a yoga class at the West Cook YMCA in 1966, “People were so suspicious.” Back then, yoga was strange.

But the class changed the south Oak Parker's life. Stefanic lost twenty pounds in three months, and says she found “peace and tranquility.” She began teaching yoga out of her living room, and when her class grew too big she moved to Dominican University (then-Rosary College), the Euclid Avenue United Methodist Church and Ascension Catholic Church.

In 2001 she moved to the Loyola Center for Fitness, where she has taught yoga to patients at the Cardinal Bernardin Cancer Center. She now teaches the biweekly “gentle yoga” class at Loyola.

Last Thursday's gentle yoga session brought about 20 students, mostly women over the age of 65. The poses Stefanic taught were moderate.

“It's my first class!” exclaimed one student while trying to hold a relatively strenuous pose. “Welcome to the third circle of hell,” joked Stefanic. “No, this is gentle yoga.”

Among other traditional yoga poses, students at the class kneaded their stomachs, bent over and coughed, and even held their feet with their palms, baby-style. Interspersed throughout the session were deep breathing — “Yawn with your mouth closed,” said Stefanic — and guided meditation.

Gentle yoga joins hot yoga, naked yoga, laughing yoga, dog yoga (or doga), and countless others in the list of popular yoga brands today. According to market research firm IBIS-World, yoga in the U.S. is a $7 billion industry. By the end of this year, an estimated 25,558 yoga studios will keep Americans doing downward dog.

“I think it's changed the face of America,” said Stefanic.

Yoga didn't just change Stefanic's life in the '60s. As an octogenarian, she says yoga keeps her lively today.

When she sees old classmates, she says, “I am caught with how age has said it's OK to slump, to walk in a very limited, stiff way.” When she feels stiff, she asks what yoga teaches about stretching and relaxing her muscles. Then she does it.

From 45 years of experience, the 80-year-old yogi says this:

Do nothing that causes pain or anxiety, no matter what your teacher says. Listen to your body, it's your best teacher. Learn to trust it. And learn to challenge it. To go just a little bit more. Can I stretch more? Can I twist in a way that I didn't last week. But don't hurt. Don't get scared. And the more you trust your body, the more your body will teach you what is good for it.