Meet the world’s oldest yoga teacher


She might be 93-years-old and have a hip replacement but that has not stopped Tao Porchon-Lynch from striking the perfect pose.
Guinness World Records has named her the oldest yoga teacher on the planet - and she has no plans to stop any time soon.
“I’m going to teach yoga until I can’t breathe anymore then I’ll just fly away to the next planet,” she said.
“I just, I love yoga, it brightens my day and makes everybody smile.”
Tao has tried her hand at many activities throughout her long life including acting, modelling, and even burlesque dancing.
But it is yoga that really gets her going - despite her hip replacement. She said her doctor told her the operation would stop her doing yoga, to which she replied: “I don’t want to know what I won’t be able to do because I don’t believe it”.
When he saw a photograph of Tao doing yoga after the treatment, the doctor called her ‘the miracle woman’, she said.
Tao first became interested in the discipline when she was eight years old.
After seeing some young men doing yoga on the beach in her hometown of Pondicherry in southern India, she decided she could do anything a boy could do.
Tao, who has been teaching yoga for 61 years, runs classes at a dance studio in Harstdale, a suburb 25 miles outside of New York City. One of her pupils, Marsha Mendel, has been studying with her twice a week for more than 20 years.
“She has the most wonderful, positive spirit and that just draws me here it really is magical,” she said.
But when asked for her secret, Tao said she regularly practices her favourite pose, the lotus, and does not follow any particular diet.
It is not just yoga that gets the nonagenarian going - she is also a keen dancer.
This summer Tao will travel to Puerto Rico to compete in a Tango competition, with a dance partner 69 years her junior.
“Yoga and dancing are sort of something that lives within me,” she said.         –Sky News

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