Shirley Bryson, a 73-year-old retired accountant and salesperson, has had some tough luck physically.
She once broke her tailbone in a freak square-dancing accident. She got pulled in two directions at once, she explained, and her back snapped like a pulley bone.
She has been rear-ended in traffic accidents six times, she says. Six! Once the impact was so intense it knocked a wig off of her head.
Another time, she fell down a flight of stairs, the last four a backward somersault. Still another time, she injured herself when she tripped and fell on a walking track.
These accidents took a cumulative toll on her health, and Bryson found herself crippled with back pain she describes as "100 times worse than childbirth."
Some days she would lie at home on the floor on her yoga mat, suffering and surfing the internet on her smartphone for clues as to how to fight back against the pain.
One day, though, she decided to get up and get moving instead of surrendering to pain meds or surgery. Now, she teaches a Saturday morning yoga class at Yoga East in East Brainerd.
"I feel better now than when I was 30," said Bryson, who has three grandchildren. "You can't just lie down and wait for doom to come, because it will."
Her story, at its core, is about the aging process and how people either get a second wind or surrender to a life of physical decline.
Bryson admits to being a Type A personality with an energy-sapping drive for perfection. Over a long career she worked in media sales and accounting. At other points she was a hair stylist and satellite dish saleswoman.
For years, she said, she balanced her high-stress jobs with a therapeutic yoga practice. But eventually, the series of accidents and mounting pain forced her off the mat.
In 2010, she said, she broke her tailbone in two places while executing a square dancing move - an activity she has enjoyed with her husband, Ronnie. Then in 2015, she took the spill on an uneven walking track around a baseball field in Ringgold, Ga., and re-injured her back.
It would have been easy to give up, she said, like the seniors with stooped shoulders she sees filing into her local pharmacy for their medicines.
She feels their pain, she said, but wanted to fight her backaches with activity instead of medicine.
She returned to her yoga practice last year, and eventually - improbably - even signed up for classes to become a yoga instructor.
Her expectations were modest.
"I think God expects us to do what we can to honor our bodies," she said.
Still, sometimes she had to be propped up at her yoga training sessions, and she never really thought she would become an active instructor.
She got a chance to be a volunteer instructor for a donations-only class one day at Reflection Riding Arboretum and Nature Center at the foot of Lookout Mountain and realized she was up to the challenge.
Later she was asked to teach a slow flow yoga class at Yoga East on East Brainerd Road and jumped at that, too.
"Age is just a figment of your imagination," she says now. "I'm doing everything I did before."
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com.