Joy in old age with Ann Richardson

Women + Wellbeing Interview #6

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“I feel very free on my head. It’s a whole different perspective on the world and I feel very comfortable there…I get on my head and I feel like smiling.”

~Ann Richardson

This is the sixth installment of the Women + Wellbeing interview series. Today’s interview is with Ann Richardson, mother of two, 30-year yoga student, and author of the Substack

The Granny Who Stands on her Head

. This is the first interview I’ve done with someone who is not a yoga teacher. Ann’s perspective on life as an 82-year-old yoga student who still loves doing headstands was too intriguing to pass up. I’m also trying to interview women from all stages and walks of life to present a full picture of embodied wellbeing in this series.

Meet Ann Richardson

Ann Richardson is 82 and has been writing all her life. She has four books currently in circulation all on completely different topics, the most recent of which is a book about why she likes being old, called The Granny Who Stands on her Head: Reflections on Growing Older.  She writes a Substack with the same title, where she explores any topic that captures her imagination.

Be sure to subscribe to Ann’s Substack

The Granny Who Stands on her Head

. I hope this interview brings you as much joy as it brought me.

The Interview

ASHLEY ZUBERI: What does wellbeing mean to you and how, if at all, has it changed throughout the course of your life?

ANN RICHARDSON: That's a big question. If well-being means good health, the truth of the matter is that I'm an extremely healthy person. I always have been. I don't sleep easily, so wellbeing for me is when I've had a good night’s sleep. It's not something I think about a lot because I'm well most of the time.

ASHLEY: I read that you started practicing yoga in your 40s or 50s. Have you always had a physical practice or any type of exercise, nutrition, or other healthy practices that you've paid attention to?

ANN: I started yoga when I was 50 and I did go through menopause around the same time. It’s a bit hard to remember – when you're 82 menopause seems a long time away – and I don't think about it very often, but I did have a difficult menopause.  I don't know that yoga helped, and that isn't why I started yoga.

My history of exercise is very patchy. I was the worst in my class in sports. I really didn't think physical education and me had much to do with each other. I hated it.

When I was in my 20s I decided I really ought to do something because I was going to work in an office from 9-5. I started doing a dance class when I lived in New York. Then I came to London and I was pregnant so I didn't do anything because I was busy with the baby. Then I discovered something called body conditioning, which was a kind of physical exercise at a local sports club. I did start doing that but I wasn't very religious about it. At some point I started swimming.

Nowadays I try to swim once a week and do yoga once a week, and I walk quite a lot. I don't have a car. Everything I do is by walking, aside from when I'm on the Tube. I am aware of physical wellbeing and try to do something, but I wasn't always doing so by any means.

In terms of food, I've always believed in eating well. I think I'm very healthy now, partly because I do eat well and I sleep as well as I can, and I exercise reasonably.

ASHLEY: What I hear you saying is that you have a moderate approach to wellbeing. I believe that, similar to what you described, as long as you take a moderate approach and you eat generally well, you move generally throughout your day, even just walking, that’s enough. We don't have to all be athletes.

You mentioned that menopause was difficult for you. Can you share what was difficult, if you remember, or what stood out?

ANN: I had lots of hot sweats, which wakes you up at night. My mother claimed she never had a hot sweat in her life, and she just thought everybody made too much fuss about menopause, so that's what I was brought up on.

And when it hit me, I suddenly thought, “Wait a minute, this isn't so nice.” I probably felt slightly off my stride generally, but it was mainly the not sleeping. You wake up sweaty and you can't get back to sleep. It's one of those wonderful things to forget, like childbirth. Our body and brains are amazing.

I did go to a homeopath during that period. I went through a period of being into all kinds of natural remedies. The homeopath's remedies worked up to a point, but they didn't work very long. It wasn't very satisfactory. In the end, they put me on HRT–and it was wonderful. Suddenly, everything was easy.

ASHLEY: That's interesting because of all of the recent stuff over the last 20 years about HRT and how everybody was on it and then it was all poo-pooed and now everybody says it's fine. We just get all this information and you have to sift through and find what's actually true and listen to your own body and make sure that you have access to high quality information.

What drew you to yoga? Why did you start?

ANN: I have done yoga just about weekly for 30 years. I was having a lot of back aches. I went to an osteopath and the osteopathy would help for about three weeks and then the pain came right back. She said I really needed something like yoga. People had been telling me to go to yoga for years and I had never really believed that it could be remotely interesting to put yourself in a funny posture and stay there. It just didn't make any sense to me. If I was going to exercise, I wanted to move.

A friend of mine was very high on Iyengar yoga, and she told me to go to a particular teacher who was one of the real experts in Britain. She was then in her 70s or 80s. I loved it so I just kept going. Every week I went to my yoga, come rain or shine. For a long time it was hard and I didn't feel I was getting anywhere, but after a while I did find I was getting stronger.

It's interesting because I have a friend I've known for nearly 40 years who is a yoga teacher. Although she's been my friend and we see each other quite often, she'd never seen me do yoga, and I'd never seen her teach because getting to her studio takes me 40 minutes. But after my most recent yoga teacher unexpectedly died, I went to her class and afterwards she said to me, “You're very strong.”

Nobody has ever said that to me. I don't look strong. I'm less than five feet tall because I've lost height in old age. It just says that yoga has done something for me over the years.

ASHLEY: Have you found that your yoga practice has changed throughout the years?

ANN: When I didn’t have a teacher, I always intended to do it by myself. A really good yoga student should do it on their own. But it's damn hard. I'm very disciplined and do lots of things that other people find hard to do. But I find it terribly hard to do yoga on my own.

I tried after my yoga teacher died. I kept saying, “I'm going to do it. Maybe not right now. I'll do it this afternoon. No, I'll do it tomorrow morning.” I was always putting it off. Once, I said, “Right, I'm going to do yoga now.” I did every posture I could think of. Forty-five minutes went by and I couldn't think of anything more. I usually do an hour and a half a week. So I'd only done half of what I should have done. I presume I didn't hold postures as long.

I found when I do it at home, you do a dog pose and you notice under the couch there's some fluff or something. You start to notice all the stuff in your house and you don't concentrate on your yoga.

I just am not disciplined to do it on my own. That's why I will travel for 40 minutes to my friend's yoga studio. I like doing it with other people. It's better than doing it online.

From age 50 when I started, I got better and better into my sixties. Once I was into my seventies, I found it was a struggle to keep at the same level. I can't do Lotus now. I'm conscious that my balance is going. It's not terrible. It's pretty damn good for 82, but I'm finding it hard to do poses like Triangle Pose. I begin to wobble a bit. I can't do Tree Pose easily because I just wobble. You feel very annoyed that you can't do the things you used to be able to do.

ASHLEY: What is it about standing on your head that you love?

ANN: I like the whole feeling of it. I feel very free on my head. It’s a whole different perspective on the world and I feel very comfortable there.

I just feel very at ease. My old yoga teacher said I must have been a bat in a previous life, or an opossum. I was never frightened of being upside down. I'm quite happy with all the upside down postures. I just feel happy there. I get on my head and I feel like smiling.

ASHLEY: That's awesome. I was reading about some of your work and I saw that you wrote a book celebrating grandmothers. I'm curious because this idea used to be celebrated but in our modern society our elders are not respected like they once were. I'm curious why, in your experience, grandmothers play an important role in the cycle of a woman's life?

ANN: I think being a grandmother is one of the most wonderful things in the world. It's the most fabulous relationship. It's so much more meaningful in a way—better than being a mother.

Being a mother is a struggle because you're always worried you're doing the wrong thing. You never really know what you're doing and you think you're going to ruin your kids. And they talk back and they're difficult.

Grandchildren come to you with a willingness to be loved and they don't look to you for any discipline. And furthermore you're older so you know that what you do isn't all that important.

My view is that kids come with a hell of a lot of their personality and their nature born into them. The effect we have on our children is less than we tend to think. When you're a grandmother, you realize that and you relax and you just have fun. I feel so comfortable and easy with my grandchildren.

My daughter-in-law learned she had cancer when her baby was eight months old. My son was in the middle of doing a PhD. It was a terrible time. It was all hands on deck because she needed a lot of very heavy chemotherapy.

We were all rushing about looking after this poor baby. But it meant, to my surprise, that we got very close to him. He's 14 now and he comes over by himself and he just loves being here. It's such a comfortable relationship.

You talk to a new mother about her baby and she'll light up, but she'll say, “Oh yeah, he's having teething problems.” You ask a new grandmother about her grandchild and she will just light up like a Christmas tree. Grandmothers are head over heels in love with their grandchildren.

And I never knew this. I had two grandmothers, but one lived so far away I saw her probably three times in my life. The other grandmother was a rather cool lady who did come quite frequently but took no interest in us. So I never had grandmothers myself who took an interest in me. When I had my children, my parents were on the other side of the ocean and were rather old, and so they weren't terribly involved. My husband's parents had died. So we never had grandparents for our children. It's really only when I became a grandparent that I discovered how wonderful it was. That's why I wanted to write a book on the subject.

ASHLEY: Is there anything else that you wanted to add about wellbeing or your yoga practice?

ANN: This may not be what you are expecting from an old lady, but I think having a good sex life is very important for your wellbeing. I would say to young people, don't stop. Don't stop because you have kids and you feel too busy. Make sex important. Even if you have to make a plan, do it. Don't leave it until 10:00 at night when nobody's got the energy to do anything.

It's important for people to know that you can get old and still have wellbeing. I think the image of old people is of being frail and having illness and you're worrying about dying and your life is very limited. That's not true for a lot of people. I'm not saying it's easy. The famous saying is “Old age is not for sissies.” But there's plenty of healthy people out there who are getting into their 80s and still enjoy life.

You don't have to think that wellbeing stops by the time you're 50, 60 or 70. I'm still doing fine, thank you.

I do get tired, I will say that. I will do a lot and at some point my body will suddenly say STOP. I don't get sick often, but I do get tired and I just have to take to my bed like a Victorian. I have to just lie in bed all day and not do much. After a couple of days I'm fine. It’s annoying because you want to do things. It's like a gate coming down saying, “Nope, you're not going to do what you plan to do today.” So you have to expect that.

I don't know what I was expecting in old age, but it's a hell of a lot more fun. My husband and I are always having fun. We're always laughing. I'm 82, we’ve been married 61 years, and it's still fine.

I just wrote a post about the difference with being young. My grandson has just finished his A levels—that’s equivalent to finishing all your high school exams—and it made me think about this period. At 18, you can be miserable, worried about whether you have done well enough in your exams, worried about whether you’re going to get into the college you want. You don’t know what you’re going to do in life.

It's an exciting time to be 18 and the whole world is in front of you. But it's also a very hard time. I wouldn't go back to being 18 for the world. When you're older, you're much more confident and life feels so much easier. That's part of wellbeing.

Wellbeing is feeling good with yourself. Confidence is something that begins to come more in your 50s and even more in your 60s and even more in your 70s and so forth. It's something that grows and you don't even realize how unconfident you were. It’s like when your baby starts to sleep, you think, “Oh my god, I'd forgotten what it was like to get a good night's sleep.” It's the same thing. You say, “Oh my God, I didn't realize what it could be to feel confident in myself.”

Confidence gives you an enormous boost in wellbeing that I hear from a lot of old people. I never heard it before I was old—no one ever told me. There's lots of things people don't really tell you about. But I'm telling you now that it's possible to be old and healthy, to have a sex life, and to have fun.

ASHLEY: In this interview series, I want to interview people from all stages of life so I'm really grateful for you for taking the time to talk with me. I love the perspective that you're bringing and what you're sharing about wellbeing being possible far into your life. That's certainly not a message that is commonly seen in our society.

ANN:  People just think of old age like you're heading towards hell. You shouldn't be thinking about old age too much. You should be getting on with your life. But if you do think about it, don't think it has to be horrible. I'm happier than ever.

Please subscribe to Ann at

The Granny Who Stands on her Head

to learn more from her!

If you enjoyed this interview, please forward it to a friend, share it as a note, or share on social media. And be sure to subscribe to Yoga for Women’s Wellbeing for monthly interviews with women wellbeing luminaries, plus yoga practices to support women’s wellbeing through all stages of life.