I’m never sure what to make of the story in my dog eared copy of The Ancient Secret of the Fountain of Youth by Peter Kelder. Some of it reads like an absolute fairy tale, but there is no denying that the actual exercises presented make a really good, if brief, set of yoga. I’ve always found them to be particularly good in strengthening the spine and core of the body and really, as a routine for the average person, they are more than enough. But the story in the book, oh the story!

When I first picked up a copy of the book (a good few years after I originally learned them), I was more than ready to believe all manner of paranormal, more than ready to ascribe mythical powers to a simple set of yoga. Maybe I just wanted it to be true; that you could actually attain eternal youth. I am a lot more practical now than I was back then. Probably more skeptical and a touch cynical when it comes to marketing anything that is considered alternative or complementary, but I still love the Five Tibetans.

For those who haven’t read the book or aren’t familiar with this set of yoga, basically the story goes as follows:
Young Peter meets an old man called Colonel Bradford, a retired British army man who while stationed in India heard of a bunch of Tibetan Lamas who had discovered how to reverse aging with a set of yoga. The colonel, at the beginning of the book is an old man, but he has one last mission in him and he sets off to find the mythical rites that will give him back his youth. He returns, years later and when he knocks on Kelder’s door, is so youthful, that for a while Kelder doesn’t recognise him at all. After being convinced that it is indeed the colonel, Kelder convinces him to teach the Five Rites.

The theory of the Tibetans is that doing the exercises makes the chakras spin correctly, thus ensuring the health, vigour and youth of the practitioner. There are fantastical claims about grey hair turning back to it’s lustrous youthful colour and the old becoming young again. And though it may be an absolute pile of rubbish, it doesn’t really matter, because it makes for great reading and great motivation to keep practicing every day.

Now the further controversy around the Five Tibetans is that they were actually a set of yoga put together by Kelder himself, and aren’t Tibetan in origin at all. Some people claim that the set is remarkably similar to some other Tibetan systems and perhaps even originated from Kum Nye. I’m not sure myself, though really, I’m no historian. What I say though is that really, it doesn’t matter where these came from. Even if Kelder did make them up or simply synthesised them together as a good simple routine and then pasted a bit of myth and mystique around them to make them sell, it doesn’t change the fact that they are a fun and challenging set of yoga, while at the same time being very simple to learn and remember. Don’t let the simplicity fool you though, there’s depth to these that isn’t immediately apparent. I’ve been practicing them for many years and I still find new experiences in them, subtle corrections to posture and new ways to approach them. Like any yoga then I guess. The interesting thing about the Five Tibetans, for me at least, was that they were the first set of yoga I was introduced to that emphasised continual flow between postures, making them more akin to training Tai Chi than yoga, at least back when I bumped into them.

So, I’ve been doing the Five Tibetans for a long time now. I stumbled into them in a sort of art imitates life, or in this case more like life imitates art kind of way when I was in Africa. I met an older gentleman who was seventy something, but looked younger (don’t all good yoga teachers?). How much younger? well I’m not going to lie and say he looked in his twenties, but he definitely looked more like a sixty something than a seventy something. I was in a class he was offering on some body work and muscle testing, in among the hand written notes that he had photocopied and handed out was the set with a bunch of stick figures to illustrate the moves. Someone else asked him if they were good and he sort of brushed the question off with a “yeah, you can do them if you want, they’re not bad”.

I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time, but a few months later picked up my notes and started to train them. But it wasn’t love at first sight. I played with them a bit and did them occasionally, until slowly, they sort of insinuated themselves into my practice and the Five Tibetans really began to take hold. Now I really love these. And I love showing them to people – they just leave me smiling every time I do them. This post has gone on quite long enough – I’ll describe the actual exercises another time, but I hope you’ve been inspired to at least try these out, or pick them up again if you already know them.

The only other question is……did I really learn the Five Tibetans from a septuagenarian or did I just pick them up from a book?