On a cloudy Wednesday evening in mid-September, Charlotte Chopin assumed the position she has held for more than 40 years.
Dressed in a loose-fitting striped cotton top and pants, her short white hair a bit wild, she called her students to attention and began guiding them through stretches, encouraging them to follow her lead.
To a newcomer, Ms. Chopin’s slight build and reserved demeanor might initially be mistaken for frailty. Then they’d watch her do a series of warrior poses — her feet firmly planted on the ground, her arms stick straight, her form effortlessly flowing from one posture to the next.
Since 1982, Ms. Chopin, now 102 years old, has taught yoga in Léré, a French village in the Loire region. Its windy roads are lined with ramshackle homes and local businesses, many of the storefronts seemingly abandoned. You may encounter a sheep or donkey, but little else.
Nestled in this landscape is her studio — a small, square room with walls painted peach and housed inside a former police station. Its changing rooms were once jail cells. Her students that night were four local women, ranging in age from 35 to 60.
As class got underway, Ms. Chopin beckoned me to partner with her on a deep stretch. We both gripped a wooden pole and bent our knees, supporting each other in equilibrium. I hesitated at first, worried I would pull her over, but she matched my strength with little effort. Later, when I declined to do a daunting-looking move that involved flipping over while holding on to wall straps, she gamely demonstrated the exercise herself, then gestured for me to try.
“Voilà,” she said, when I succeeded.
In recent years, Ms. Chopin has become something of a celebrity in France, thanks to a 2022 appearance on “La France a un Incroyable Talent,” the French answer to “America’s Got Talent.” At 99 years old, she performed a dozen near-perfect poses on stage. “I feel good, with all these people who applaud me,” she told the cameras in French. “It’s unexpected.”
While she didn’t make it to the next round of the competition, her appearance caught the attention of local media — as well as that of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. Last year, India awarded her a civilian honor for being an outstanding ambassador for yoga. Since then, she has received a steady stream of requests for interviews and appearances. One of her four children, Claude Chopin, a former physical therapist and skilled yogi himself, has become her de facto manager.
Ms. Chopin makes no claims to be a wellness guru, nor does she seem to feel a burning desire to evangelize about her own approach to life. But people keep asking for her secrets to aging well.
Gratitude and good fortune
I met Ms. Chopin in her home, a cottage that was built sometime in the 1800s and has been in her family for at least 100 years. Claude, who is 69, joined us to translate. (Ms. Chopin speaks French and German.)
We gathered in her living room, decorated with natural landscapes and photos of family and statuettes in various yoga positions. A plaque on a cabinet read, in French: “Happiness is not about having everything you want, but loving what you have.”
Ms. Chopin didn’t try yoga until she was 50, at the encouragement of a friend as a break from housework. She started teaching a decade later, to avoid boredom when she moved to her small town.
When I asked what yoga offered her, she answered, simply, “serenity.”
That’s about as philosophical as Ms. Chopin will get about her practice — or her extraordinary longevity. She attributes the latter to good luck. “I don’t have too many problems,” she told me. “I have an activity that I like.”
It’s also one that she can’t imagine living without.
Two and a half years ago, shortly after Ms. Chopin turned 100, she fainted while driving home from yoga class. She crashed her car and broke her sternum. Three months later, she was not only back behind the wheel but also teaching yoga again.
Practice, practice, practice
As we sat in her living room, drinking black tea that she prepared for us, I asked Ms. Chopin if she felt like she was 102.
She belly-laughed, then answered carefully: only in the morning.
But after her usual breakfast of coffee, toast with butter and honey or jam and sometimes a spoonful of jelly by itself, “I’m back on track — I feel good,” she said. (“When we were children, she often said that breakfast was the best moment of her day,” Claude added. “It is still the case.”)
But the thing that has sustained her the most, both in her yoga practice and her life, are her students, she said, and the social support they provide. This jibes with research suggesting that people who defy norms of aging place a high value on social relationships.
For Claude, watching his mother remain so social in her later years has influenced his own approach to aging more than anything else has. “She loves people,” he told me, and “she’s easy with her contact with others.” He aspires to the same.
On the evening that I attended class, her students included a factory worker, a grocery shop clerk, a retiree and a housewife. They had all been coming to class with Ms. Chopin for many years, and they greeted each other with hugs and warm hellos.
Once class began, when she wasn’t posing along with us, Ms. Chopin walked around the room, correcting our form and urging us to push ourselves ever further. At one point, she pressed my achy, jet-lagged body so firmly into a stretch, I began to question my own limits.
Afterward, Ms. Chopin’s students described their teacher as a “perfectionist” but always encouraging. “She makes me want to grow old,” one student later told me in an email.
Ms. Chopin has slowed down as she’s moved further into her 100s. While she used to do yoga daily, she now only practices during the three classes she teaches each week. She can’t do all of the poses anymore, either — she ruled out handstands a few years ago. But she can still touch her toes, and she moves with the steadiness of someone decades younger.
I asked if her classes have evolved over the years, and she couldn’t understand why they would. “I always give my classes the same way,” she said. The poses are the poses.
For Ms. Chopin, that routine might just be the secret.
Danielle Friedman is a journalist in New York and the author of “Let’s Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World.”
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