She is the "world's oldest yoga teacher" who, at age 98, still teaches five classes a week. But above all, Tao Porchon-Lynch is a poster child for health and positivity in a world obsessed by wellness and longevity. The former model and Hollywood contract actress - who earned her title from Guinness World Records - still has a delicate, slender physique.

Tao, as everyone calls her, grew up in India and lives in the suburbs of New York, traveling the world attending yoga retreats. Stylish and fashionable, she zips from her Hartsdale home in Westchester County to the studio in a smart car. Once in the studio, she happily demonstrates yoga poses, even if she sometimes calls on one of her dedicated students to show off others.

But more than yoga, she imparts a zest for life that has sustained her through nearly a century of existence, marked by encounters with the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Marlene Dietrich.

"Don't be afraid," she tells her class. "Don't let others tell you what you can't do."

She cautions her pupils against giving in to fatigue. "Breathe, feel this life force within you."

In a Western society increasingly determined to ward off the onset of aging, Tao's bracing cocktail of longevity and practical spirituality has made her a celebrity with an avid online following.

"I believed in nature and I believed in breathing. I did not want to pray to something or somebody out of space. I wanted to pray to something that was inside of me," she explains.

"Look at the trees. The trees are hundreds of years old, at this moment they are all bare, they look like skeletons, they look dead, but they are not - they are recycling themselves," she says in a nod to the winter season. "Those trees are not getting any older, they are strong."

Her life did not begin, however, in the most auspicious of circumstances.

Born on Aug 13, 1918, at the end of World War I, her mother died when she was 7 months old, and her father entrusted her to an uncle and aunt who brought her up in Pondicherry, then part of French colonial India. She was raised a vegetarian. French and Hindi were her first languages.

The onset of World War II saw her leave for Europe looking for her father, who was called up in France. She found refuge with an aunt in the Rhone area.

After the war, she modeled for Lanvin before traveling to the United States for the first time in 1948. She returned to the US for good a year later and worked in Hollywood, under contract for MGM for several years. She was married to Bill Lynch, an insurance broker, for 20 years until his death in 1982.

And if yoga is not enough to keep her young at heart, she takes ballroom dances with partners 70 years her junior.

Tao Porchon-Lynch (pink shirt) instructs a yoga class in Hartsdale, New York. AFP