From Our New Blog Editor
by Lynda McCullough
Hello to readers of the Graceful Aging blog! My name is Lynda McCullough, and I am a community health educator with UCHealth’s Aspen Club. I am partnering with Bonnie and Kirsten from PAFC to edit, post, and facilitate the blog, and I am excited to help writers share their thoughts and wisdom.
I once worked as a writer covering health and mental health issues for trade associations and magazines, and I am also a yoga teacher with a focus on practicing yoga for healthy aging with the guidance (on video) from physician Baxter Bell. I am passionate about sharing the physical and mental-emotional benefits of yoga, and I follow Bell to learn about and enjoy the effects on mobility, agility, balance, cardiovascular, and nervous system health.
My other passion is hiking, and I love spending time with my fly-fisherman husband climbing mountains and then stringing up a hammock to relax while he fishes in lakes and streams. This love definitely fuels my desire to maintain mobility as I age.
It is likely the fact that my father was a physician and my mother a physical therapist that I have been focused on health and wellbeing in my career. But I found that my path was that of an educator rather than a practitioner. For one thing I’ve always been physically active, and I couldn’t imagine myself sitting through the rigors of study for medical or PT school, and for another, I was always interested in how we experience greater wellbeing and perhaps prevent or learn to thrive in the presence of health conditions. I have also been interested in how we become more aware of our bodies and more grounded so that we can be more authentic, relaxed, and at ease in the world.
I once taught yoga for the Aspen Club, but I have also taught yoga to youth in Larimer County Drug Court. It was immensely gratifying to help support healthy aging in the one class, and to support stress relief, grounding, and centering with youth in recovery. My experience in drug court led me to become a volunteer facilitator in the Fort Collins restorative justice programs, and I have found that really listening to one in a restorative circle practice, learning to understand one another’s stories, and learning to address harms contributes to greater wellbeing as well.
The Aspen Club is the perfect place for me to work to be able to facilitate classes on health topics relevant to those of us 50 and older as well as to learn from others. We have an amazing and knowledgeable staff that focuses on topics from mindfulness to brain and memory health to nutrition and incontinence. I am working to further develop the program in Weld County though I sometimes teach in Larimer as well.
I am excited to read about your experiences, thoughts, and wisdom gleaned in the aging process. It is great to be part of PAFC’s efforts to change perceptions of aging, to reflect on the wisdom and richness we have in our older years, and to share experiences with one another.
You can reach me at Lynda.mccullough@uchealth.org.
Lynda McCullough is a health educator with UCHealth’s Aspen Club, an organization that provides health education and related services to people 50 and older. She explored mental health and health careers and wrote on these subjects for various organizations before moving from Washington, DC, to Colorado and becoming a yoga teacher and educator. Lynda is a runner, hiker, and yoga practitioner, and she loves to go on mountain adventures with her husband, climbing mountains and stringing up a hammock to relax while he fly fishes. Her other interests are music and studying the ways yoga affects the brain, nervous system, and mental health.
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