Janette Tomes is telling me about a recent fall she took while gardening. While later life falls have the potential to be very serious, the 72-year-old is almost gleeful in her account of the incident. “I just bounced back! I didn’t bruise at all – and I think it’s because of the strength and flexibility I’ve developed from yoga. That, and all the falling over in class. I landed on my arm and my leg – someone else my age could have broken a bone – but I just carried on. Yoga helps in all manner of things.”
Tomes was 62 when she started doing yoga regularly at her local studio in Rhys, North Wales. “I was always interested in alternative things from being a teenager back in the sixties,” she says. “I’d learned transcendental meditation in the eighties and wanted to take up yoga, but with family and other commitments, I never had the time.” Now, she is a convert who has discovered incredible health benefits and practices every day upon waking up. “Yoga is part of my life,” she says. “I just love it.”
A 2011 diagnosis of arthritis in her feet and knees had a big impact upon Tomes’ quality of life. “It’s got worse since then,” she reveals. “Sometimes I was unable to walk very far and felt tired – but I didn’t want to take medication for it,” she says.
