#294: Victoria Moran - Age Like a Yogi and Embrace Your Third Act
What if aging wasn’t something to fear, but a journey to embrace?
In this inspiring episode, best-selling author and wellness advocate, Victoria Moran, shares her wisdom on aging with grace, purpose, and joy.
Drawing from her new book, Age Like a Yogi, she explores how plant-based living, yoga, and mindfulness can transform aging into a spiritual evolution, including:
How to shift your mindset around aging
The connection between plant-based living, yoga, and longevity
Cultivating joy and fulfillment at every stage of life
Victoria redefines what it means to grow older, proving that every stage of life holds new opportunities for fulfillment.
About Victoria Moran
Victoria Moran has written for publication since she was a teenager—teen mags first, then health food store and vegetarian publications, and spiritual journals. She’s written 13 books about well-being, spirituality, and vegan living. Her 14th, book, Age Like a Yogi, was published in January 2025, and is currently available everywhere. VegNews magazine listed her among the Top 10 Living Vegetarian Authors, and she was on Oprah twice which, at that time, was like being initiated as a genuine writer. She is a passionate animal person and longtime vegan, honored in 2024 with induction into the Vegan Hall of Fame. Read more in her own words at victoriamoran.com.
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Full Episode Transcription via Transcription Service
I'm Rip Esselstyn, and you're listening to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast.
Embracing Aging with Grace
[0:04] What if aging wasn't something to fear, but it was a journey to embrace and thrive? Today, I welcome back bestselling author and spiritual adventurer, Victoria Moran, to discuss her new book, Age Like a Yogi, and how to embrace aging with grace, purpose, and joy. We'll have this inspiring conversation right after these words from PLANTSTRONG.
The Power of Mindset
[0:33] Music.
[0:38] Aging isn't just about the passing years. It's about how we choose to live those years. In this thought-provoking and uplifting episode, Victoria Moran explores the power of mindset, movement, and mindfulness in crafting a life of vitality and meaning. And let me tell you, it doesn't matter how old you are. In fact, Victoria encourages us not to see age as a decline, but as a path to deeper enlightenment through mindfulness, movement, and yes, a whole food, plant-based diet. If you're ready to embrace aging with purpose and passion, then grab a cup of tea, get cozy, and enjoy this conversation with a pioneer in our movement, Victoria Moran.
[1:28] Victoria Moran, wonderful to see you. How in the world are you doing? It's been about five years since I've had you on the PLANTSTRONG podcast. You were episode number 55, if I'm not mistaken. And it was such a fantastic conversation. And I can't wait to reunite with you and see everything that's been going on, talk about your new book, and all things Victoria. Oh, well, thank you. Such a pleasure. Yeah, I remember that other time, too. We were in person in New York City, and that was before we forgot how to be in person. And now we're learning that over again.
[2:13] You're exactly right. No, that was right before the pandemic hit, for the most part. We are almost approaching episode 300 of the PLANTSTRONG podcast. Wow, congratulations. Thank you. Our audience has grown tremendously. And so for those that haven't listened to our first interview, I'd love to just kind of get them caught up to speed really quickly with you. You've been a lighthouse, an absolute lighthouse in the plant-based movement for over 35 years. For all you listeners out there, Victoria is an avid writer. She's written, well, actually now, 14 books, right? Yeah. 14 books. You've got a radio show that you've been doing for a long time called Main Street Vegan. You came, you know, when we spoke last.
[3:03] Prayer, a prayer for compassion is just getting ready to launch.
[3:08] Yep. You have the Main Street Vegan Academy where you certify vegan lifestyle coaches and entrepreneurs all across the world. You have got a whole ecosystem that you have around, you know, around this whole Main Street vegan brand and it's phenomenal. And so I also want people to know that, and you're not shy about sharing, you're in your, what are you, are you 73? Yeah. Well, actually, March 21st, 75.
[3:38] Okay. Wow. Wow. And started a long time ago. When I was 17, I discovered three books about yoga in the Kansas City, Missouri Public Library. And one thing that I remember from all of them, one thing that they had in common was they all said, if you want to be serious about yoga, you have to stop eating animals. So I started on this vegetarian path, which was very different then. There's the idea now that we're kind of in a couple of camps and you're either plant-based and you care about your health or you're vegan and you care about animals and you eat a lot of Oreos. I don't think those are accurate, truly accurate, fully accurate even now. But back then, we were both and all and everything and the health nuts and and even just being vegetarian because i hadn't heard about vegan and plant-based wasn't even a thing because we're talking.
[4:39] 1967 68 you know it was a long time ago and so yeah it's been thrilling number one to live this way and kind of evolve into living more and more purely plant-based and and healthier and all that as time has gone on, but also to watch this movement and see what all we've done and all the different branches we have. I remember Rip at the, I guess it was Vegetarian Summerfest, which is now called Vegan Summerfest, and it was held in Baltimore in 1983 or 4. My daughter was in arms. And I'm not sure if she was like infant or probably 84, probably she was able to run around. And this really tall guy showed up. And I was saying to people, who is that? Is he a basketball player? And they said, no, he's a medical doctor. And I was like, a medical doctor? We've never had one of those before. Well, it turned out to be Dr. Michael Clapper. And that just sort of opened the doors for all the amazing things that have been happening ever since with combining this wonderful way of eating with the science and its philosophy.
[6:01] Pretty cool. Well, you bring up Dr. Michael Clapper, and I've gotten to know him really well over the last probably eight years. He's been part of our PLANTSTRONG retreats. For a number of them, he was our medical director, and he is a national treasure. He really is a renaissance man and can't say enough great things about Michael Clapper. You are interested in aging in slow motion. Yeah, I have been interested in aging in slow motion ever since I realized that I was indeed aging.
[6:38] And that even, you know, people who eat plants age, plants age. I mean, it's just the nature of life. So my first real foray into that was way back in 2004 when I wrote a book called Younger by the Day. And that's a day book, something to read every day. And a lot of people love it. A lot of people read it every day and still write to me about it. I see some things differently now. And just little things like back in 2004, we were still using the word vegetarian a lot when we meant plant-based and or vegan, because those were just weird kind of terms that people weren't familiar with yet. But yeah, I think ever since I hit 50, you know, some people say 50 is when you get in touch with your mortality. I did not. I was just starting to get moving at 50, but it definitely got me in touch with
Victoria's Journey into Yoga
[7:40] the idea that it's kind of like living in a vintage house. It can be a fabulous place to live, but it's going to take more upkeep than if you'd moved into something that they just built last week.
[7:53] You have said that when you're happiest, or I think maybe, let me rephrase this, the happiest moments in your life were when you were pregnant with your daughter and then when you're writing one of your books. Yes. And so You just wrote this book, Age Like a Yogi, and this wasn't, to the best of my knowledge, when we spoke last, about four years ago, You didn't mention this. So this is probably something that has kind of bubbled up in your being in the last, well, obviously it must have started three, four years ago. But tell me, why age like a yogi? Why now?
[8:40] And yeah, what inspired this? Well, I think it's an interesting story, especially for anybody who's interested in books and publishing and finds that whole world interesting. So I, as I said, started yoga when I was 17. And then I went vegetarian at 19 and vegan, which was whole food plant-based in those days because we didn't have any other food, at 33. So I've done all those things for a really long time.
[9:10] And it never occurred to me that because I don't stand on my head on Instagram that I didn't have a right to write a book about yoga. So yoga is in so many of my books. Every one of my other books has a chapter or several mentions or something about yoga because it's been there all my life and all my journey. So during the pandemic, I finally had enough time at home to do yoga teacher training. So when I first started studying yoga with my lovely first teacher in London, Stella Cherfis. She's 99. I dedicate the book to her. She still teaches one yoga class a week. She lives in a third floor walk up. She has a wonderful salon every Sunday morning in her flat. And the only rule is no opinion is censored. She's so cool. So there was all that background and it was all dribbled through books. I used to be a contributing editor for Yoga Journal Magazine.
[10:16] And yet, when I was... First doing this, the way that you became a yoga teacher was your teacher said, you are now ready to teach up to this level. So when I moved back to the States from London, my teacher told me that I could teach beginners. And I never aspired to be a full-time yoga teacher, but I taught on the side, you know, on and off some, and that was fine. But finally in 2020, during the pandemic, I thought, well, you know, everybody's doing all these yoga teacher trainings and they're getting these RYT 200, 300, 500, whatever it all means. I'm going to do that. So I did it and it was wonderful. I was 70 and that was kind of cool.
[11:03] And I loved it so much that after the pandemic was over, I took another intensive Zoom class to be certified as a Raja yoga teacher. And that's the philosophic part of the thing. But I'd always been really interested in that too. I mean, I got my degree in comparative religions. I mean, I've been to India a couple of times. This has always been something that's close to my heart. And the book started brewing, I think, during that first yoga teacher training because it was very clear to me that to do well in later life, you need two things. One is you need physical vitality because I just see it in my own family and looking around whenever the focus is on the body is falling apart, nothing else works. It's just the saddest thing. So, you know, we look for that, what do you call it, um.
[12:06] Where you make the morbidity less toward the end of life. Mitigation of morbidity, I think they call it. And then the other half, though, is because it's the nature of things that we're all born or hatch or sprout, and we reach maturity, we have the opportunity to reproduce, we start to decline and we move on to the next adventure. And because that's a reality, we've got to have some sort of way to make peace with that and there are all kinds of ways to make peace with that you can make peace with that as a completely humanistic atheist person who does not believe there's anything after but your legacy is going to be what's after and at peace with that is cool at peace with religious teachings and what they have to say about that that is cool at peace with the yoga way of looking at things, cool too. But if you don't have peace with something, then that's going to interfere with
Aging with Purpose
[13:11] your excitement, enthusiasm, joy, and peacefulness in those later decades. So I thought, sure, if you could age like a yogi, you'd have both. Well, and your dedication, if I may read it, your dedication goes like this, to compassionate warriors, spiritual seekers.
[13:32] Ageless elders, and Estella Scherfus, who first gifted me with yoga, who you just said she's alive today. She's 98 and still doing yoga once a week. Incredible. Yeah. We all aspire to that. We do. We may not all make it. And that's the other thing. It's like one of the things that I found, Rip, when I first came into this movement, the.
[13:59] The way that people learned about living on plant foods at that time in America was through Jay and Freya Dinshaw and the American Vegan Society.
[14:10] And Jay always said, this is an ethical stance, but you have to be healthy. Because if you're not healthy, you're not helping anybody. And at that time, in his view, the way to be healthy was to be a natural hygienist. Well, the natural hygiene movement, which has now morphed into the National Health Association, wonderful, wonderful group, at that time was really strict, a lot of raw food, a very, very simple diet. And there were a lot of things they didn't believe in. They even didn't believe in yoga because it was foreign and they didn't know what to make of it. But, you know, we were doing the best we could to live really, really vibrantly. And one of the wonderful kind of stories that was kind of going through the very, at that time, small movement was Jay's father had died at, I believe it was, 96. And I thought until very recently it was falling out of an apple tree. But evidently it was while meditating. And so that was where the bar was set. And I just always figured, well, I have to be super healthy till 94. And then if I'm ready to leave, I better climb a tree and make it look accidental.
[15:32] That's how we do it. And I see now that that's not how everybody does it, but everybody is entitled to living as long as living is sweet.
[15:46] Even with obstacles and difficulties. Yeah. Let me ask you this. So, you know, you say you're a Midwest girl. You found yoga at 17. You were looking for God in a public library. In the book, you mention a gentleman named Marcus Bach, a theologian that says a vagabond who calls himself a vagabond in the wonderful world of spirit. And I'm wondering, it sounds like you're similar to that, very much so. And I'm just wondering, has that accelerated as you've gotten older or has it maintained a steady pace throughout your life so far? What an interesting question. I actually think that I have yet to maintain the degree of depth of spiritual interest and practice that I had when I was young, simply because I work so much. I put so much into all the things you talked about in your introduction that I remember. I mean, I had my first spiritual experience when I was in a stroller. I hadn't turned three yet. My nanny took me out. Late at night, probably my parents were having an argument. I don't know what we were doing out with the stars in the sky. And I looked up at the stars, and my little two-year-old self was like, hmm.
[17:09] That's home. This is fine. I'm doing this now, but it is not home. It was a very deep philosophical thought, accurate or not, for somebody of that age. That's just the weird little kid that I was. My parents both worked. My dad was a physician. It was before daycare. They hired a live-in nanny. She was into spiritual stuff. She raised me on some ideas that not everybody growing up in Kansas City in the 1950s got. And when I was in seventh grade, I met my best friend, Rebecca Gott, and her mother had all kinds of books on Christian spirituality, Christian mysticism. So, The Cloud of Unknowing and The Seven-Story Mountain and all these wonderful practice of the presence of God. And we tried to read them. I think mostly we just carried them around. But that desire to have an understanding of the big picture was always there. So when the Beatles came on the scene, I was 14, and I had a Beatles fan club pen pal who asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I said I want to be a mystic. And she said, she was from the East and very sophisticated, she said, well, maybe you should just be a progressive lady theologian because you could go to college for that.
[18:37] So it's been a long time. And then, of course, and this is all very interesting in terms of yoga and some of the things that I write about in the book, because part of it is about yoga philosophy and part of it is about Ayurveda, which is an ancient Indian way of looking at healthcare. And they talk about phases of life. And the second phase of life, when you're out there in the world, completing your education, finding your life partner, building a home, having children, establishing a career, taking care of elderly parents, all these things that happen to most people, that's a big out-in-the-world push. And because of doing so much um with professionally with the writing and the speaking and main street vegan academy and all the other things that i do i'm kind of still doing that and it's not really in keeping with where i probably should be at this time of life and i am looking at some ways to kind of maybe cut back a little but this yeah it seems it's it seems like It seems like, especially...
[19:50] Reading the book, it almost seems like that's a distraction for you from where your true passion lies. Well, I'm very passionate about this movement. I mean, I've always been passionate about saving animals. You know, the idea that it's 2024, we are still eating animals. And if you do very much on Instagram, there's this huge backlash right now about, I mean, people are after plants. I mean, it's so interesting. It's like, I can understand why people get passionately opposed to lots of things, but to be passionately opposed to plants, I mean, are you seeing these posts like, we're not designed to eat blueberries. We're not designed to eat almonds. And it's like, I mean, please, and don't even get me to, we're not designed to eat greens. I mean, it's, I don't know, it's a wild west out there. So I am passionate about this. And I never want to fully leave this movement, this work. But there's also a great pull, I'm finding at least, at this time of life, to go within.
[21:13] And really –, touch those moments of peace, to transcend, as the transcendental meditators call it, and also to study, read all the books that I already have and haven't read yet. Yeah, that's very appealing. Yeah. Let me ask you this. What would you say, if somebody was to say, what's your faith? What's your religion? What's your answer? Yeah, I am a yogi who loves Jesus.
[21:51] That's really awesome. A yogi who loves Jesus. Well, you know what's interesting? I've talked to people who've trained as Christian missionaries, and they tell me that in their training that the teachers always have a sort of caveat for India. Because there are certain ways to, you know, it's almost like selling to convince somebody to look at a different way of seeing the world. And they're taught to do this, but the teachers would say, but when you go to India and you say, Jesus is God, the people in India will say, oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, he was. And yet they're not going to come to your church on Sunday because they have this odd way of looking at things that the divine has incarnated more than once. And with all due respect to all my Christian friends, I understand that sometimes we see things just a little bit differently, but to me...
[23:00] It's bigger than I understand, but when I read the sayings of Jesus juxtaposed with the sayings of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, you'd think they were the same person, and millions of people around the world believe that that's actually a fact.
Exploring Spirituality
[23:20] It's interesting. You wrote about how you're a believer that we're going to go around this. We're going to have the opportunity to go around this merry-go-round a couple times reincarnation and continue to try and i think, improve our enlightenment each time around you're married to somebody that thinks it's just one and done yeah i find that fascinating that um you know you guys are so diametrically opposed when it comes to thinking about that well you when i met my husband he was just humanist um i suppose agnostic because he didn't even give that sort of thing enough thought to be atheist. And that was how he was raised. He said that there was no talk ever of any kind of religion in his house, nor did his parents ever sit down with him and say, we don't believe in anything that cannot be measured by scientific terms. And we think that people who do have deluded themselves. No, None of that was ever said. He told me that he was in high school before he knew that Christmas had anything to do with a religion.
[24:31] So we got married, and that was fine. I had always dated spiritual vegetarians. I had been married to a lovely spiritual vegan, bless his heart, who passed away. And so who would you date except a spiritual vegetarian? But I was finding that it just wasn't working. And I was 47. And that seemed at the time approaching elderhood. So I thought, just go out with somebody nice. It's not like you're going to get married at your antique age. And so that's how I met William. And we had so many things in common. We had such a good time together. And he was always really good about my spiritual stuff. The food stuff, he came to a little bit gradually, but he got off meat really fast. It took longer for some of the other animal products and for some of the other food. One of my favorite stories about William is I made him a green smoothie and I knew he wouldn't drink it. And so I put it in one of those coffee mugs with a little bitty tiny hole in the top. And he looked in the little bitty hole and he said, that's green.
[25:48] But I will drink it. So, you know, we've had this kind of evolutionary thing. And then in 2019, he said to me, I want to go back to school. And I thought, well, that's not weird. You know, guy in his mid 60s wants to study whatever. And then it was, well, what? He said, I want to go to theology school. And then I just about fell off the chair because it's like, wait a minute, and if anybody's going to theology school, it's me, that he explained that he really wanted to study how the religions of the world look at animals and nature. And so he ended up at One Spirit Seminary, became ordained as an interfaith minister. And it's funny, because I had been literally praying for many years. Could he just have enough interest in this stuff that we could sometimes have those cool conversations. I didn't know he was going to get ordained to have cool conversations. So that's what happened.
[26:52] Wow. That is really interesting. You have another quote in your book, and it's by Rumi, who's a Sufi. And he says, I looked in churches, temples, and mosques, but I found the divine within my heart. So it's funny. Sometimes we We look everywhere imaginable for that light or whatever it is, and we just have to turn inward, don't we? Yeah, there are all kinds of stories about that, you know, like the fish looking for the water. And that I believe, and I believe that in the kind of inner teachings of all of the wisdom traditions, there is this idea that we're an expression of the divine, made by God, but more than that, an expression of God. I even remember in catechism class in third grade, one of the nuns saying, well, God made you from himself because there was nothing else. And in yoga, the idea is that this light lives within us. We think of it being at the heart center.
[28:10] And this connects us to our true being, to our true self, which is the real purpose of yoga, to quiet the mind enough so that we can remember who we really are. But it also connects us to everybody else. And people you hear thrown around a lot, we're all one. Well, according to yoga, We really are. And that's why sometimes we look at another person and there's this connection or what's happened to me a few times in my life. I'll be on the subway in New York City and everybody looks like an angel. And that doesn't last, but those moments are just so real and they feel like truth with a capital T until I get back to reality with a small R, which is not everybody on the subway is an angel. You better watch your back.
The Essence of Yoga
[29:12] Another thing you say is that yoga is far more a practice than it is a belief system. Yeah. Which I found really interesting. But I would imagine diving into the practice leads you to discover things that maybe change or affect your belief system. Well, if you really delve into yoga as opposed to taking asana class at the health club, because what's happened now, it's really interesting. And I think we're seeing it in the plant-based movement, too. I mean, I remember 10 years ago, 15 years ago, plant-based meant plants, you know, things with leaves. And then now we're seeing, I don't know, plant-based nail polish remover. Like, don't drink that. And so as things spread and as they get more around the world, there's an upside and a downside, which is also a yogic teaching, that everything on earth, you know, that upside, downside, hot, cold, all that. So when we're thinking about...
[30:22] How we're going to use these teachings to get through life. You can just do the movements, the Hatha yoga, which is fabulous and wonderful. And some people are like, but what does that have to do with your inner life? What it has to do is that when you're doing certainly the kind of yoga that I grew up in, where you hold the posture.
[30:47] In that time, you've got to focus. So let's just say you're standing on your head. You can't be thinking about everything else in your life because you would fall over. So there's the focus. There's a point of focus. The breathing goes along with that. And so even the physical part of yoga is also a way to get to know yourself inside. But Raja yoga, the yoga of Patanjali, which is what I delve into in the book, has eight limbs, and asana is only one of them. And a couple of those eight have five parts each. So there is a lot of it. And you don't have to believe anything, you just start to do. And this is especially interesting for people who have never had much of an interest in their inner life, but they start to do asana practice because maybe they've got back issues or they're tense or they do a lot of weightlifting and they're really stiff and they want something that's going to stretch them out. So they start doing yoga. And then sometimes people will find this is the first time in maybe years that I've ever been really, really still.
[32:12] This is the first time that I've ever just sat with my breath. And so sometimes people will start seeing the world in a different way because of that. Yeah. And in this culture, you know where we are right now, I think the vast majority of people don't take the time to be still with their thoughts and their breathing, right? It's like, oh, let me check Instagram. let's see what what's the latest on netflix and then when we're exhausted we fall asleep so we don't we don't ever we're not grounded or centered you know into really getting to to know yourself and you talk about you know um learning how do you identify you talk about how to identify with that part of yourself that has been with you all your life and and if you can like this youthful nature will kind of spring out from within you. And I, I love thinking about that. And it made me reflect on like, all right, what, what is that part of me rip that has been with me my whole life? And how can I continue to nurture that, that, that quality? Exactly. And so, yeah. And so I would ask you, you know, according to the sages, who are you, Victoria Murray.
[33:36] Well, I guess according to the sages, I am Brahma. And that's an Eastern, obviously, a Sanskrit term that is the great absolute first cause. And in yogic teachings, each of us has some of that within us. It's so individualized. It's the Atman. And you can call it soul. You can call it spirit. Again, you don't have to buy these terms or the specifics of the belief system. So if you're Jewish or Christian or Muslim or something else, you can still get so much from yoga. In fact, one of the first books I read when I was very young was by a Catholic priest, Father Deshanais, Christian Yoga. So I wanted to make sure that I wasn't leaving behind the beauty that I had brought with me thus far. and he was pretty good at convincing me of that.
[34:36] So one of the... Ideas, especially when we feel that we're far away from the kind of peace that we'd like to have, I think just about everybody would like to have, when we're riddled with fear or we're angry or we don't know which way to turn, is to remember that as Robert, let's see, Tennyson, it was Tennyson, who wrote.
[35:06] Closer is he than breathing, nearer than hands or feet. The idea that we can't really be separated from God, because as George Fox, founder of the Quakers, talked about, that of God in every man. And we all have that. And if you don't like God, then just call it the great beneficence you know what whatever nature um the force from star wars but that there is something within us you know like people will say to you sometimes if you're in a really bad way you've got this and you'll sometimes hear that and think no i don't but there's something in you that does and and the goal of of yoga is to just help you remember and something that's really interesting too, because yoga, even though it's got the physical asana practice as part of it, it's really a spiritual way of looking at things and living life with extra peace.
[36:14] But with Ayurveda, which is that health aspect of things, it's called Yoga's Sister Science, they say that if you really, really, really go deep into any kind of disease condition, the ultimate cause was forgetting who you were. So for your body or for your soul, good to remember who you are. Well, you say yoga is perfect peace and Ayurveda is perfect health. Yeah, that's the idea.
[36:44] And throughout the book, I mean, it sounds like they are, they complement each other perfectly, don't they? Or they're very, very, very, they're like the, what is, would it be a two-legged stool? Something like that. But yeah, something that's really interesting, because I'm a history buff, so I always think that everything that happened before now is really interesting.
The Connection Between Yoga and Ayurveda
[37:05] But yoga has been around it in the West for a very long time. And it had this big surge of popularity in the late 1960s, the 70s. And now, you know, it's this giant industry with all kinds of, you know, clothes, sticky mats. I mean, I'm going to sound so ancient, but when I started, we didn't have sticky mats. We just put a blanket on the floor. And so it is what it is.
[37:30] But Ayurveda, many people have never heard of, and some people have heard of kind of sort of a little bit. And that's because when the British colonized India, they didn't touch anything that they thought of as religious or spiritual, because they had learned as colonizers, you don't mess with how people see things. You let them have that, but you take away their culture. And so Ayurveda was considered cultural medicine. So that was outlawed and didn't become able to be practiced again in India until 1947 when the British left. So there hasn't been nearly as much time to get that information, but it's quite widely available now. Deepak Chopra's first book, Perfect Health in 1990, was about Ayurveda, and I've probably read that book 30 times. It's been very, very helpful to me.
[38:25] Wow. So you really have been a voracious reader on this topic for a long, long time. Yeah. Because it's fun. Yeah. I want you to know that you have so inspired me to, A, want to read this really, really closely, and then B, take action, right? And explore things.
[38:51] At a much deeper level through the techniques you talk about in this book, who am I? And how can I get in touch with myself and that inner light in a much more focused, profound, meaningful way? Well, then something I would recommend, because I can hear this in you, I can hear, and it doesn't surprise me. There are different types of yoga. When I talk about the Raja yoga that's basically what I've written this book about, but I have another chapter called What Kind of Yogi Are You? Because there are several different kinds of yoga that can be practiced exclusively or just pick and choose and put some into your life. And somebody who is really on fire with this, who am I?
[39:39] That's a Jnana yogi. And that starts with a J, J-N-A-N-A. And that is the engineer, the scientist, the person who really wants to know i i have a teacher in in illinois in indiana who is um an engineer is an elderly gentleman late 80s i've been so blessed that that he's been willing to to teach me this kind of yoga through a system called vedanta which is not technically yoga but they're related. But if you're really interested in this, who am I? I recommend the works of Ramana Maharshi or anything from Vedanta, so Swami Ramakrishna or Swami Vivekananda.
[40:31] Yeah, all the Vedanta stuff really gets into that. And the kind of yoga that most people practice has all kinds of things you can do to learn to quiet the mind because the goal of Patanjali's yoga is quiet the mind. But if this passion for knowing who you are is really strong, then I would veer you to Vedanta. And so in your list of the different practices of yoga, you talk about what those for the most part entail. You talk about how what you like to practice is the integral yoga. That's kind of your choice, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, that's where I go for asana practice. But that's raja yoga. So raja yoga, it's got the asana, which is the exercise part. It's got pranayama. It's got this idea of turning from the senses periodically because life is so noisy. I tell a story in the book that I never really understood that when it's like, how do you turn from your senses? I mean, it just doesn't make any sense to me. So my husband was going somewhere on a train, and I decided to walk back uptown with my dog.
[41:56] And as I walked from Penn Station at 34th Street and was approaching 42nd Street, Times Square, I was listening to an audio book, and he was talking about this practice of just removing ourselves from sensory input. And there I was at Times Square, and all the horns and all the sirens and all the billboards and the guy preaching through a bullhorn. And then I just laughed because it's like, oh, you don't understand this? Well, this is what it isn't. So that's one of the limbs of yoga. And then we've got concentration and meditation and connection, which is called samadhi in yoga. In Christian mysticism, it would be called the mystical experience, the beatific vision of just coming to know that truth is, And then back to your life, which is also part of the practice.
[42:59] This jhana yoga is a little bit of a different system with the idea of who am I, who am I, who am I? And like you. Yeah, well, you know, like one of the things that I highlighted.
[43:15] And this is under chapter three, which is you you call this auditioning for enlightenment and i think there's a quote in here that our time on earth is an audition for enlightenment which which i love um but there's a quote here i think it's from uh pierre telehard chardin the paleontologist either way all that matters for your life to have an astonishing amount of meaning is to own that everything you're engaged in and everything you're going through is an opportunity to discover who you are like who you really are yeah right yeah i mean obviously i was i'm drawn to that yes all that stuff well we'll have to talk later about that because when i find somebody who is interested in this it's just like oh goody goody goody you're part of my what some people would call a soul group yeah well i just find that it's it's kind of like the next thing that is awakening within me that i want to discover and understand to the best that i can and um get my head wrapped around it and there's more i just feel like there's more right and this is what that more is well Well.
[44:40] And that's a thing, and I think that any of us who have been eating in an enlightening manner for a while, we kind of set ourselves up for wanting to know more. According to yoga, when you eat a pure diet.
[44:59] And this is so interesting because the yogis looked at diet, we're talking 4,000 or 5,000 years ago because these traditions started as oral traditions before they were ever written down. And they were looking at every way of life that would enable someone to have a better chance at auditioning for enlightenment, to be able to sit, to be able to meditate for longer periods, to be able to do selfless service, all these things that are part of the many aspects of yoga. So when they looked at food, they were seeing things in this idea of the three gunas.
[45:43] Aspects of nature in the physical world. So one of those aspects is called rajas, and that's energy. That is the power, and it's building things, and it's making things, and it's doing things, but it can also be aggression and anger and push, push, push. And so if you eat foods that are too stimulating, so we're talking a lot of caffeine, a lot of really hot spices. Eggs are really stimulating this way. Salt is really stimulating. Sugar is interesting because it's both. It starts out really stimulating and then it becomes something else. So too much of that kind of stuff, how are you going to meditate? You're going to be just, you can't do it. And then there's another energy called tamas, and that's the energy of inertia. And it's not terrible because we wouldn't have any compost if it weren't for inertia we wouldn't have sleep if it weren't for tamasic energy but you don't want too much of it because it's also the energy of lower thinking of criminality of not caring for others or for the betterment of the world. And in terms of food, this is food that's old and rotten.
[47:03] Like, for example, so many oils get rancid really easily, so they're tamasic. Meat is tamasic because it's rotting. I mean, there's a fish market on my block, and you walk past that thing, and just the smell is like, oh my god this is rotting stuff um and and high fermented uh cheeses um alcohol all that kind of stuff that's the tamasic that would make you try to meditate you're going to fall asleep or you wouldn't even want to meditate to begin with but in the middle there's this beautiful energy called sattva and sattva is the energy of balance it's the energy of beauty like you're sitting with your untrue love and you're getting along really well and you look across at that person and it's just like.
[47:53] Peace and harmony. That is so sattvic. Art, nature, beauty, wonderful music, all that sattva.
[48:01] Food, guess what? You've never heard of these before, so I'll say them slowly. Vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds. Now, the one difference between what we're hearing so much now in a lifestyle medicine and what the yogis talked about was they also included milk from healthy cows. But I don't know that you're going to find healthy cows around in the world, and I don't believe that there's any karma-free milk. So we will just agree to disagree with people 5,000 years ago when life was very different on the milk part. But the rest of it is a whole food plant-based diet that these reishis got from doing two things. Deep meditation and seeking to learn the laws of nature and observation of nature and witnessing what happened when people did certain things so you've been eating a yogic diet anyway and so that's going to put you in a better position for approaching the philosophic part you have a whole section on eating peacefully chapter 10 is about veering towards vata if I'm pronouncing it right, veering towards vata.
[49:19] Which is more of the comfort foods, I think, as we get older. And you talk about how do different foods kind of make you feel? How do they sit with you? How does it work?
[49:33] And you almost are telling people to kind of – you almost should try and figure out intuitively what foods –.
[49:44] Um resonate with you and which ones don't how would you explain well i don't think it's it's i mean it might be a little bit i mean i know people are very much into the idea of intuitive eating um yeah i've never done much with that simply because my background was as a food addict and just like if if you ask an alcoholic what their body is telling them intuitively that they need right now, they would say vodka. And so, you know, I think maybe intuitive eating after you've been eating really healthfully for a while, maybe you can come to trust yourself in that way. When I talk about vata, to me, this is a really exciting in terms of the health aspects of Age Like a Yogi. To me, it's this giant well-kept secret that everybody should know about by the time they turn 50 or heaven forbid 55 and that is that and i won't go into the doshas of ayurveda because they get complicated there are three of them but everybody's a combination of all three so whatever your doshic makeup is and if you're interested in what that is you can just go online and and google dosha quiz and take a quiz and kind of get an idea of what that is and that's how you're imprinted at the moment of conception, that's always who you are. However, when we get to be somewhere in our fifties, somewhere kind of between 50 and 60.
[51:14] This vata influence starts to increase in everybody's lives, regardless of your own personal body type. And just like we talked about that that kind of prime of lifetime, we're in this energy that helps us do all of these out in the world things that we need to do.
[51:35] Vata is a light, airy energy. Its elements are air and ether. And so when you start to notice more vata influence, you might find your cast iron digestion is resting a little bit. And some of the foods that you used to eat and do just fine with, all of a sudden are like, ooh, that wasn't quite right. Or you notice other little weird things, like, okay, I had... Bean soup for lunch yesterday, and it was fine. But I had bean soup for dinner tonight, and my stomach is giving me fits. Well, that's because according to Ayurveda, your digestive fire is hotter in the middle of the day. And so while you've got this vata influence that is maybe making some things a little bit not quite work as robustly as they did before, you can cooperate with that and eat your heavier foods or some of the gassier foods like in the middle of the day, and you'll tolerate them a lot better. So I live here in New York City, and you can walk down the street, especially on the Upper East Side, and there are these wonderful names for these clinics.
[52:51] Things like, you know, the such and such center to avoid aging. And there's just all the people trying, please, please, please don't let me die, but don't let me get old either, which is pretty, pretty hard thing to get. But what you can get is the best possible health and vitality in your later years by doing many of the things that we already know about. And I think adding on some of these ideas from Ayurveda, one of my obsessions is the ex vegan the person who was vegan or plant-based and then all of a sudden they're not and it's usually a new boyfriend but when it isn't it's something vague it's never an actual diagnosis it's like you know i didn't quite have enough energy or or i was just feeling like a little off. Well, in Ayurveda, if you can.
[53:55] Accommodate what you're doing to yourself and the season and the time of day and the time of life, then you don't have to run back to eating foods that the human body was never designed to deal with. You just need to take a little more customized care of yourself. So we talked about digestion with vata. Vata also can lead to joint issues, a little bit of stiffness, a little bit of discomfort there, coldness. I always wondered when I would visit my mother in Florida when I was younger, why is everybody here retired? Well, because when you live up here in the North, as I do, and you get to be my age, it is colder than it used to be. Even if the temperature is not, it feels colder. And so just little things Ayurveda would say, like keep yourself warm don't worry about putting on a sweater when nobody else is having it don't put ice in your drinks just have everything room temperature warm or hot and this is not rocket science obviously so then if you're cold make yourself warmer but according to ayurveda it's really really important and to know how to work with vata you know we'll still get older that's just what's going to happen. But we can get older in a way that is so much more balanced and so much more comfortable.
Insights from the Book
[55:24] I want to bring us out for a second, and I want everybody to know that in your book, you have 10 sections, right? And I just want to go through those really quickly. Section one is age is a spiritual construct. We've talked a little bit about that. Moving into maturity eating peacefully is is number three number four is your sacred schedule five is the glow factor six is in search of sattva seven is the uh the yamas moral precepts eight is personal discipline nine is the soul of yoga and then ten is warrior challenges like you have four big kind of dares.
[56:07] And so, I mean, I really feel, Victoria, like this could be a course at a university. I mean, you have so much information that is in this book. Will you tell us, in search of sattva, what is that about? Well, we talked a little bit about sattva, that beautiful energy when we talked about the fruits and the vegetables, that those are sattvic foods. Well, there's all kinds of sattvic stuff out in the world that we can, live in connection with. So sometimes we're going to be out in the world and things aren't going to be wonderful. We might be in a city street where somebody has thrown garbage. We might hear somebody yell something unkind. So these are all energies that are not sattvic. But when we have the choice to what I'll do sometimes walking in New York City is if I see a Catholic church and there are some candles flickering, I go in there and light a candle. That's a very sattvic practice because I'm entering into a space that has a sattvic energy because people have been praying and having high thought for, in some of these cases, well over 100 years. And I just walk in and it's like, ah.
[57:35] Now, people that love nature, same thing. They would duck into a park, into somebody's garden. These are beautiful, beautiful sattvic ideas, the kind of music we listen to, the kind of people we hang out with. I consider what we're doing right now a sattvic experience because I'm just absolutely crazy about you and your whole family and your work and everything you stand for. And so having this wonderful, blessed opportunity to talk to you at length is just a wonderful uplift. And even I'm talking to you now from a room where I don't usually do interviews. I was telling you earlier, my neighbor's kids are playing in the hallway, so I've retreated in here. But this little room I've painted in colors that I find just really wonderful. And I have some images here that are uplifting. My little altar is here. And so you have these little pockets in your life that lift you up. That's sattvic space. And so anything that you do that uplifts you or uplifts those around you, that's sattvic energy. So what is it?
[58:53] The grind. If you're working at a job that doesn't mean anything to you, but it's necessary for right now that you stay there, you can do wonderful practices to infuse that with better energy, but just by itself, the way it is now, that's not sattvic energy. Being in a relationship or having to deal with people who are argumentative or who don't want to allow you to be your full self who want to stifle your richness and vastness of your character and all that, that's not sattvic. But in life, we sometimes have to deal with that. We can't just live in this wonderful sattvic paradise, although I think some people come pretty close. But it's just to look for what activity right now is going to uplift me, even just a little bit. And sometimes it's just simple it's like hanging out you know for me hanging out with my dog i mean some people have a guru i have a dog and and to just that that purity that innocence that love and he's a rescue so there's this incredible appreciation you know that's a sattvic connection so you look for those and your life becomes clearer and things get a bit easier.
[1:00:21] Do you think it takes a certain strength and almost selfishness to be able to go down that path and continually try to find that? It's definitely self-care. I wouldn't call it selfishness because things can be sought that are totally selfless. I mean, if you're volunteering at a shelter or doing some of these wonderful heroic acts that people do, it's sattva, even if it's not easy.
[1:00:57] So, yeah, not selfish, but with an understanding that even though we can't choose our environment, our activities all the time, we can choose our attitude all the time. We can choose how we interpret the circumstances of our lives. And that's really hard. And I've been going through that lately because my husband has had a lot of difficult things over the past five years. he was in a very serious accident. And it now looks as if he may have had a seizure that precipitated that, but nobody knew that until after some other, really, I don't want to say tragic because he's still alive, but very difficult stuff. And so now I've got caregiver tacked on to my other various jobs. And I just have to be the first to admit, I have not done well with this. It's just like, okay, wait a minute. Life isn't supposed to be like this. I'm supposed to have more freedom and things are supposed to be easier and my husband is supposed to be getting better.
[1:02:05] And some of that I just have to accept and reframe. And that's the great gift we're given, that I can look at my situation and be grateful for the fact that my best friend is still with me and that we're going down this path of life still together and make the choice that when other things are driving me nuts, which even after 56 years of yoga, things can really drive me nuts like the United States healthcare system, that I have a choice how I frame that. And that's the only freedom there really is.
[1:02:51] I'd love it if you would just give us some top line notes on some of these different sections of the book. For example, The Glow Factor. What can you tell me about The Glow Factor? That's a fun one because when you've got the word aging in a title, people want to know, is it going to make me look better? And something that I have seen is that when we're first starting not to be young, you know, for women especially, around 50, I read a book, you know, the old, nature religions of Europe used to categorize a woman's life in three categories,
The Glow Factor
[1:03:32] the maiden, the mother, and the crone. Well, oh my goodness, who wants to be called a crone when you were just 49 last week. And so I read a book. The author was saying baby crone. She's talking to women in their 50s. You're a baby crone. But at that time.
[1:03:49] Aging is about how we look and how we appear. And I can remember just right around menopause, which I expected nothing would happen because I ate plants. Well, guess what? Stuff happened. And one of the stories I've told before is I woke up and there had been invasion of the body snatchers in my bedroom. I used to have this nice flat stomach and this nice round butt. And I woke up one morning and they had been flipped. It's like, what? What happened? And then I started looking around at other women, you know, at the gym and places. And it's like, okay, you're pre-menopausal, pre-pre-post. Aha, I got one. Pre-pre-post. I could just tell because changes do happen with the body. And so in my 50s and when I was writing Younger by the Day, I was really, really interested in the physical aspect. And I know that I'm still, I mean, I have to be honest. I still color my hair. So, obviously, I am not without vanity, although I'm ready to stop coloring my hair. I think it's going to be really cool. I would have done it before this, but they put my picture with my brown hair on the book. So, I got to give it a year. But anyway, the glow factor is about how… What color is your hair? Oh, it's your color. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, kind of white. I mean, I started getting gray hairs in my 20s. And, you know, you just get kind of used to doing what you do.
[1:05:18] So with the glow factor, we talk about physical and inner life stuff that can be done to help you, feel wonderful about how you look and how you present to the world. And for some people, that's going to mean doing whatever they need to do to look younger than they are. And for other people, they can look exactly their age, but they look really good. And it's not that demeaning thing of, well, you look good for your age. It's like, no, you look good. And good doesn't have to mean under 35 so uh yeah that's what the glow factor is we talk about hair and skin and yeah hats what about personal disciplines yeah because i i feel like that's something that maybe many of us uh could afford to lean into yeah well i'll talk about the the chapter before and that one because these are the yamas are the moral precepts of yoga and the niyamas are the personal disciplines. And it's interesting for your listeners who presumably are plant-based or aspiring to be, that the first moral precept of yoga is ahimsa. That is harmlessness, nonviolence, reverence for life.
[1:06:41] And not eating animals is a good way to practice ahimsa. So you're already far down the road on that one. And then there are other moral precepts such as honesty and not stealing and not being greedy and that kind of thing. But then when we get to the personal disciplines, these are less about how we relate to other people and more about how we relate to ourselves. So the first one, Saucha, is cleanliness. And so cleanliness of the body, like yoga would say, whenever you're going to meditate or wherever you're going to do yoga asana practice.
Understanding Personal Disciplines
[1:07:28] It's really nice to wear clean clothes, to reserve some clothes that you only use for that. And I know nowadays everybody wears yoga clothes all day long, but the idea that we really want to be clean, especially as we approach spiritual practice. And then there's santosha, which is contentment. And that's a little bit what I was talking about before about changing our attitude about circumstances, because sometimes we can change circumstances. I mean, that wonderful serenity prayer, the serenity to change the things I can, but the courage to accept the things that I can't and the wisdom to know the difference. So, Santosha is about this contentment. And so often in our culture, and I think especially earlier in life, it's like, okay, okay, as soon as I get, as soon as I get the raise, as soon as I get. So for me, it was always when I was much younger, as soon as I lose weight, as soon as somebody falls in love with me, and then a little bit later, as soon as Oprah notices me and has me on her show, then I can be content. And yoga is saying As long as there is an out there factor to being content, you're never really going to be content.
[1:08:53] And so we have this wonderful list of all these things that help us just be content.
[1:09:03] More at peace with how things really are. A lot of people think, oh, yoga is spiritual, so that's all kumbaya and whatever. But it's not that. It's really very, very practical. And one of the lovely ideas of yoga is that you can be a jivan mukti, and that means you can be enlightened while you're still walking around. And all these practices are for that. So another one on the personal discipline is called tapas, which I know that's an appetizer. But in yoga, it's these special disciplines that people like you who are athletes are very used to. It's like you're going to challenge yourself. You're going to do something beyond what you think you can do. And only when you try to do it, do you know. And then there is one that is study of the self and the sacred, because yoga teaches that to know yourself is to know a great deal of the truth, and also to study these great writings of the world. So whether it's the Indian scriptures, the Bhagavad Gita.
[1:10:11] Or the Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, whether it's the Bible, the Hebrew Bible, or Old and New Testament, whether it's beautiful Buddhist scriptures like the Dhammapada, that you can spend a lifetime just delving into one, or you can be more like me and kind of, you know, read all of them. And then the final one is, it's a beautiful word in Sanskrit, is shvara pranidhana, which is basically let go, let God. It's surrender to the divine. It's surrender to God. Life. And for me as somebody, my overeating issue, I got over in a 12-step program. And in the 12 steps, the third step is to turn your will and your life over to the care of God as you understand God. So when I find this in yoga, it's always very resonant with my 12-step background too, that we still have to take care of ourselves. We still have to meet our obligations. We still have to do what is in front of us to do. And yet the outcome, if we can really leave that in the hands of some people from my generation would call it the flow, we tend to go better.
[1:11:32] You mentioned that you had the eating disorder. How long ago was that and how long did it take you to, I don't know, resolve it or figure it out or move beyond that? How long did that take? Well, I guess it took me 33 years because I was 33 when it finally happened. So for me, I believe I just brought it to this world. I mean, I think it came with me. There's a picture of me at age one. It's my first birthday. And I am literally lunging toward the cake. And people would say, oh, there were candles and you were a baby. It's like, no, I recognize that look. That is cake. That is mine. I was very precocious about desserts. And so that was a struggle to.
[1:12:22] Through my whole childhood, adolescence, 20s, early 30s. My dad was, as I said, he was a doctor and even though he was an ENT, he was kind of a diet doctor on the side because that was very lucrative and very needed. People were hurting with their weight, especially at that time when it was so expected that everybody was supposed to be the same size and for women that was skinny. Um and then i found overeaters anonymous when i was 24 but it took me a long time to finally get it and and when i did i was 33 my daughter was an infant and i really wanted to raise her on a plant-based diet for a whole variety of reasons and i knew that i had to stop slipping and sliding around with the thing or I couldn't do it. And so I went back to OA with more humility than I'd had before. And it was a combination really of that surrender that, okay, I'm not in the food business anymore.
[1:13:36] I've kind of lost my ability to know how to handle that. So I'm going to let somebody help me. And then the other thing was that I was finally able to be plant-based. And that was really interesting because I didn't get that from OA. OA is not supposed to have anything to do with food choices. You're supposed to be free to have your own food choices. But because humans are humans, and we're talking the 1980s.
[1:14:07] The idea of not eating animal protein was just like, then you're just going to eat all those horrible carbs, and that's what makes compulsive eaters to begin with. And so there was some of that pushback from some of the individuals, but I knew as soon as I surrendered, as soon as I turned everything over, it was so clear to me, of course, you're supposed to be plant-based. I, like higher powers, was never stopping you. You were stopping you. So yeah, it was that spiritual turnaround on the inside and eating plants as a daily practice that changed everything for me at age 33. How long have you been as open about this as you are now? Quite a while, because I wrote a book about this. back in the first edition was 1992. It's called The Love Powered Diet. And that book really proves reincarnation because it went out of print and then another publisher picked it up and published it for a few years with a name.
The Soul of Yoga
[1:15:15] I never liked this name called Love Yourself Thin. And then it went out of print. And then, you know, JP, Jean-Pierre?
[1:15:21] So he was photocopying it back in the day for his clients when they couldn't get it as a book. And he was saying to me, you've got to bring this book out again because I'm doing a lot of photocopying. And so I went to the good people at Lantern Books. And so they brought it out in 2009, once again, as the Love Power Diet. And that really tells my story.
[1:15:47] And the first half is interchange and the second half is plant-based living and to me that's pretty much happily ever after certainly on that issue yeah what is what is the soul of a yoga well there's so much you can do you know, as a yogi. But then there's also just the essence of what yoga is. So the idea of the soul of yoga is that we look at these other limbs. We talked about giving your senses a rest, the pratyahara, that's one of them. And then there's the concentration, meditation, and connection. And of course, you really can't have yoga without meditation. They're just hand in glove because the whole point of yoga, according to Patanjali, is the stilling of the mind. And the nature of the mind is to think people have such a difficult conception of meditation and the.
[1:17:05] General perception means that people don't want to do it because they don't think they can do it. They don't think it's possible. And like, I can't make my mind a blank. Well, most people can't, maybe nobody can. And so that's why meditation is really prolonged concentration. It's focusing on one thing and bringing the mind back. And it's such an interesting process because you're meditating and maybe you've got a lovely phrase. Maybe you're doing something like, God is love or all is well, or maybe you've got a Sanskrit mantra or whatever it is, and you're there for a few seconds. And then all of a sudden, this idea comes, Whoops, we're out of peanut butter.
[1:17:58] You know what? I'm forgetting a lot of things these days. Do you think I'm getting Alzheimer's? Oh my gosh, my great-grandmother had Alzheimer's. You know, you're back in 1876 before you even know that you lost your mantra. And that's not bad. That's just what happens. And then you bring yourself back. It was St. Francis who said that thoughts during meditation are like birds flying around your head. There is no problem with them being there. You just don't want to invite them to build nests in your hair. And so it's this bringing the focus back from wherever it is. It's never like, oh, that was terrible. It's like, no, that's the mind. The nature of the mind is to think. And when it starts going off, you just kind of bring it back.
[1:18:43] And why should this bring so much peace? We didn't really know scientifically until the 1970s when a fascinating cardiologist named Herbert Benson at Harvard started looking into this stuff. And I find connections really interesting. So Dr. Herbert Benson was the uncle of Patty Brightman. Do you know Patty? Patty. Patty used to be the literary agent to the vegans. So she was my agent, but she was also the agent for John Robbins and Ingrid Newkirk and Howard Lyman and Dr. Neil Barnard. And so, so many of those wonderful books in the 90s that really moved our movement forward were Patty, who was Dr. Benson's niece. So anyway, what they started to see and in research still going on today at Harvard and elsewhere is that there really is this body-mind connection and so many incredible things happen physically from meditation that even if you're kind of, I don't know about all this auditioning for enlightenment thing, it's a really great practice just for physical health and well-being.
[1:20:08] That's so good. You explain all that and describe it so well. But the warrior challenges, you
Warrior Challenges and Living Fully
[1:20:17] want to tell me about one or two of those dares that you have at the end? Yes. So when I started out doing Hatha yoga, the warrior pose, which for anybody listening who has taken yoga, I mean, you know the warrior poses. Warrior two warrior one warrior three they're in at any younger class that you would ever want to take so that's why i call the section warrior challenges and what they are is just kind of an idea of can i do this can't can i manage this thing so the first one is actually fun because challenges aren't always difficult and awful, and that is to dare to live fully. And that sounds like it's not too hard, but it's really hard for a lot of people when you get older because so many things that you had to look forward to, you no longer have to look forward to. And life tends to get smaller.
[1:21:24] And so how can you live fully at any age? Well, one way that you can do it is to look to people who've already done it or who are already doing it. And so in this chapter, I talk about people that I admire, and two of them happen to be your mom and dad. And I was inspired to include them. I mean, I admire them anyway, but what really made me think, oh yeah, you got to put them in that chapter were some pictures of them dancing.
[1:21:54] And that, to me, is living fully in one's 80s, 90s, and whatever the chronology has to say about you.
[1:22:05] And then there is dare to do your dharma. And dharma is a yogic idea and a Buddhist idea as well, that you have a soul's assignment, that there is something that you came to Earth to do that nobody else could do. There's an interesting line in the Bhagavad Gita that you're better to do your own dharma imperfectly than to do somebody else's flawlessly. And so one of the cool things about being older is sometimes people had a dream in their youth, but practicality meant that they had to do something different. And so maybe, you know, if your dream was to be an Olympic gymnast, you're not going to retrieve that at 70. But for many, many people, this dharma, this, you know, I really do have something in me to write or to share or to do. And we can be one of those older people that reinvents themselves at a time when most people aren't reinventing. And it's a beautiful thing when you're doing your dharma, you know, you are just right on time doing fine. Like I mentioned to a lovely older friend of mine here in the city that I was going to do this podcast, and she said, oh, he has the firefighter diet. I just love him.
[1:23:30] Well, you do your dharma in your life, and that lifts her up, and you don't even know her. It's very, very cool. And then we've got Dare to Make Peace with Mortality because there's a line in one of the.
[1:23:46] Old, old yogic texts. Oh, I know, the Mahabharata. It's this long epic that I actually read in its entirety during the pandemic. I can't imagine anybody having time to read something that long without a pandemic. But it is said, what is the strangest thing on earth? And the wise answer comes, the strangest thing is that seeing all around us people die, we believe that we never will. So it's not a fixation with morbidity. It's just that you take care of it. You get your will, you get your living will, you get all that stuff out of the way. You focus on living every day, but you also have in the back of your head how you're going to leave.
[1:24:41] And that's an art that in many cultures is nurtured. In many cultures, people are just very much aware that this is everybody's destiny. And so you want to be prepared for it. And one of the ways you prepare for it is by living fully in the here and now. And the final one is to dare to elevate everything. And I love that we're all using this word elevate now. It's this wonderful new use of the verb that we just want to lift every activity up. We want to lift every day up. If a particular day looks like it's full of stuff you don't want to do, you find something in there that is going to lift things up. And you can, of course, lift things up for yourself and for others.
[1:25:30] Hmm. Hmm. So there's so much there. Um, it, yeah, I suppose you just step, you start with one step at a time, but I'm like, wow, I've got a lot to do. I just turned 60. I'm 61. And I'm like, I've got a lot to do. Well, personally, I loved my 60s. They were my best decade. When I think of every decade of my life, the 60s were just knock it out of the park. Fabulous. Why? You remember why? Everything that I had done before started to fall into place. And it was like dominoes. One thing led to another, led to another. And I was able to do some things that I never thought I would do in my life. I mean, I'm an artsy kid. No, I write, you know, I'm not going to have a business. And then Main Street Vegan Academy kind of fell in my lap and was a wonderful, wonderful experience in person in New York City. We now do it on Zoom. And I don't think I would have had the nerve to do something like that before I was 60. So yeah, it's a great time to be alive.
[1:26:58] Yeah, isn't it funny? You say you wouldn't have had the nerve to do that before you were 60. It is amazing how sometimes we just got to get out of our own way and find the nerve, find the... The inner strength to get out of our comfort zone and not be afraid of failure, right? Brilliant. Yeah.
[1:27:24] Everybody that is listening to this podcast right now, I want to highly recommend Age Like a Yogi. Most of our audience is between the ages of 45 and 70. So I think this is the perfect present to yourself as you start gliding into those older years. Where can people find you, Victoria? What's one of the best places to buy the book? Can you give us some information on that? Oh, sure. Well, my writer website, my author website that I'm really very proud of. I never really had an author website. I always had my mainstream vegan website, but victoriamoran.com is really fun. It's got this book and all my backlist books and some of the cool people who have said nice things about them. I even have a photo album of stuff going on in my life. So I hope you will visit at victoriamoran.com. And then mainstreetvegan.com talks a lot about Main Street Vegan Academy and the Main Street Vegan podcast. And on social media, it's at victoriamoranauthor.
[1:28:36] I'm there on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Would love to connect with people. And in terms of where to buy the book, you just buy the book wherever your heart tells you is the best place. I do love indie booksellers, but I must say the book is also in an Audible format, audiobooks.com or audible.com or just go to Amazon and click on the Audible version. And I got to read it. have you read some of your audio audio books have i read some of my audio books narrated oh oh i i know what you mean have i yes yes i get it uh no and it kills me that i didn't especially the first one the engine two diet if i could go back they wanted me to spend a week in new york city and this is when i had two young kids and it just.
[1:29:31] I couldn't break away. But yeah, you recommend it, don't you? For me, it was one of the best experiences of my life. I was in that little studio in New York City for three days and we could have finished in two, but I wanted to stretch it out.
[1:29:46] You know, there are certain things about fulfilling the needs of your former self. You talked earlier about when we can relate to that person we've always been, that it's kind of a rejuvenating practice. And I've really seen this. I talk about that in the book that sometimes when I'm there at Integral Yoga Institute taking a yoga class, and at the end of most yoga classes, there's a relaxation and the teachers like relax your feet, relax your calves. And so often as that's happening, I hear Stella, my first yoga teacher, and it's like I'm back there in London, and I'm 18. And I just believe that that's kind of aging backwards. So anyway, I got away from where do you buy the book? So yes, recording that audio book was just this wonderful experience. And oh, I know why I brought the youth thing up. it's in the building where the capizio store is and any little girl that ever went to ballet class the fact that you're gonna go work for three days in the building with the capizio store is just incredibly cool so that was really fun and i love the audio but yeah i think it's pretty much everywhere and if it's not at your local brick and mortar tell them about it.
[1:31:13] Let me ask you this before I say goodbye to you. Would you say you have a lot of friends or do you have just a select few close ones? I have a lot of friends. And I think like everybody else, you've got your super close tier and then your little bit further tier and your little bit further tier. And I think one of the things that's happened with the internet is that we spend a lot of time on people that we don't know who they are because they're they're friends on Facebook or I just really am feeling especially at this age that just checking in on those close people and a little bit further and a little bit further, but just keeping track. One of the things that I find at my age is I want to make sure everybody's okay. And I have had a couple of further tier friends and relatives leave this planet, and I didn't know that they had.
[1:32:24] And I just, yeah, I want to stay close to friends, because I don't want to lose anybody without knowing that. Yeah. Well, the reason I bring that up is because I find you to be such a curious soul, such a just riveting conversationalist. And it makes me think if I lived in New York City, I would want to go out with you. I would require you to go out with me at least once a week to get a bite or sit in the park or something like that. And then you're just such a sage and I would want to just drink up everything that came out of your mouth. Well, if I get any more vata and New York City feels any colder than it does today, I may just end up in Austin.
[1:33:09] All right. That would be wonderful. As we wrap up, I just want to say that, you know, Kathy Freston about you says, your native tongue is spirit and her teaching is truth. And I think Kathy says that really, really well. I just want to repeat this. I may have said it, but I want to repeat this as we're tuning out here. And that is, aging like a yoga is nothing other than grooving into yourself and finding that inner light that always has been there. Love it. Love it. Love it. Victoria, will you give me a PLANTSTRONG virtual fist bump on the way out? Absolutely. When do we do that? Ready? Hold it up and ready? Boom. Keep it place. I'm Victoria. Wait, I'm going to do the other hand. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Yes. Okay. There you go. There we do. Thank you so much. Until next time. All the best. Absolutely. Bye. Thank you. Namaste. Namaste back to you and my pleasure.
[1:34:20] Age Like a Yogi is available wherever books are sold. And you can learn more about Victoria's work at her website, victoriamoran.com. And as always, I'll be sure to drop a link in the show notes for you. Truly, every stage of life holds new opportunities for joy and growth. And I hope that you embrace the wisdom of Victoria as much as I did. Thanks so much for listening. And as any good yogi would say namaste and also always always keep it PLANTSTRONG, the PLANTSTRONG podcast team includes Carrie Barrett, Laurie Kortowich, and Ami Mackey. if you like what you hear do us a favor and share the show with your friends and loved ones you can always leave a five-star rating and review on apple podcasts or spotify And while you're there, make sure to hit that.
[1:35:22] Music.
