Hello everyone,
I have been coming here for a little while, helping myself to your questions and answers and decided that on my birthday I would make the effort to join as I might like to pose some questions of my own. Having gone through the registration process I feel (as an IT illiterate) almost traumatised:( and am not at all sure that I have done the right thing by joining!
But I do have questions, so I hope I will get around to asking them - sometime, before it’s too late to process the answers. 
Welcome to the Forum. This is actually an easy to navigate Forum and I am sure if you ask one of the Admin people by sending them a Private Message (PM) they will be able to assist you.
The “right thing”?
LOL.
You’ll be fine, I assure you.
The worst is over.
Submit away (questions that is).
Wishing you a warm welcome and a very happy birthday!
Thank you Pandara, InnerAthlete, Nichole and Hubert for welcoming me with encouraging words, Birthday wishes and Hubert’s link to the appropriate song!
(Just as well you did as the one my son had posted I couldn’t get to work at all.)
As it is likely that I will come here more often to ask questions of the properly initiated, practised and advanced I thought it might be best to introduce myself more fully to make it easier for those who will be good enough to answer any of my queries:
A few months after giving birth my eldest daughter felt she might like to join the local Hatha Yoga class but she needed the moral support of her younger sister to join (with me left to hold the baby - literally, that she could attend). She only went a few times whereas the ‘moral support’ kept going, and I used to take her and pick her up gain. That was ten years ago almost.She has, with some interruptions in her student years kept it up and is now training to be a Yoga teacher herself.(Parttime on certain weekends as she works fulltime as an English teacher.)Yet, it is only in the last few years that I have been able to see both her and her brother(who also started in his student years) in action, as it were, in my house. Another reason for this is that I live in a socalled Welsh Longhouse which is only one room deep (not very deep at all!), so there is no space to do asanas in private in a bedroom out of the way. Therefore it cannot be helped that one may have to wait for a suitable moment to step around a ‘posing’ person.
It was watching them that made me wonder if I myself could have a go. That was just under two years ago, and I have joined the same local class with the same teacher, as that is all there is in my tiny town. I was, am, the oldest person there. My teacher told me that the best age to start was between twenty-five and sixty-five. So, it seems, I got there just in time. Hence my User name. But I am female.
I am 5ft9, slim, athletically built, have always enjoyed movement but am not at all sporty. Swimming in local pools is free for the Over-Sixties, so I am making full use of that by going at least 3times a week, usually more often. I have had four fractures in the Nineties. I also permanently damaged my left elbow through recklessness, trying to uproot a rather big shrub by myself. I succeeded but my elbow bent through the wrong way and I didn’t seek medical attention, with the result that it healed somewhat crookedly, and, of course, arthritis has set in. I have arthritis in my neck. Also, through injury, in my lower spine, and now some in my knees. All of which make it both imperativ as well as difficult for me to keep moving. I have only fairly recently learnt that my livelong flexibility is actually hypermobility - most of my siblings have it and I have passed it on to my three children (and my grandson, it seems), who already complain of difficulties, especially my Yoga-training daughter.
Unfortunately my teacher is not very interested in Un-health issues, and I find it difficult, if not impossible, to find out what is actually beneficial movement for me, and what not. Perhaps there are postures that I should not even contemplate trying, let alone, achieving? For example I have read here somewhere that forward bends are not advisable with spinal problems. Yet, they have never posed any difficulty for me getting into. In fact, I used the sitting version always as a rest pose even before I ever started thinking about Yoga.
There are some questions here already, so I better leave it at that for today. There is still time left, I assume.
Thank you in advance for useful information and, perhaps, advice that any of you may be able to offer!
I better tell you, however, being such a novice, I am not very familiar with the names of asanas.
Hi JustinTime and welcome to the forum.
I don’t have any answers for your health related questions but I can help you in some other way. As this is the “member introductions and greetings” section chances are that nobody will answer those questions in this section. You will have better luck answering those questions in the “Q & A on Yoga Practice and Yoga Therapy” section of the forum. Its also generally a better idea to ask many precise questions rather then bundling them into one post. This way individuals don’t feel like they have to dedicate too much time and thus not answer. But you will get all your answers through the collective of all the people in here.
Thank you, jlg, for pointing me in the right direction - I had gathered as much but not got around to begin with my questions. My son was home for a lttle while and hogged the computer, so I left him to it. At my age one has learnt to wait.