What's missing when people think of yoga and perimenopause

I’ve done 17 one-on-one interviews with people around their perimenopause experience. It’s been a humbling, illuminating, and connected experience.

One of the questions I ask is, “What do you think you would learn in a workshop around yoga and perimenopause?”

There’s a mix around yoga poses to help with symptoms, relaxation, and meditation.

While yoga can help with those things, what doesn’t come up is one of the biggest things I think the yoga practice can help with the most: the ability to handle change.

How do you relate to change?

Whether you’re going through perimenopause or not, the way your body is going to show up each day is a mystery.

• Will your body be stiff and achy, feel more fluid, or somewhere in between?

• How much energy are you going to have?

• Is today going to be a day full of mood swings or will your emotions be more steady?

• Will your mind be sharp or will there be brain fog and you forget the word for that green fruit (or vegetable?) that has rough skin on the outside, is soft on the inside and goes good on tacos and is used to make guac? 🥑

Your body is constantly changing. While your changing body might be seen like a challenge, in yoga, it’s neutral. The way we’re taught to approach each practice is with non-attachment (aparigraha). 

You may or may not be able to do the same thing you did last time and that’s ok.

If you can touch your toes today, great. If not, great.

As you go deeper into your practice, you might work with more than your physical body.

If you can drop into meditative focus right away, great. If your mind was all over the place the whole time, great.

The important part is that you show up. As you do, you can notice all the changes from practice to practice and hopefully you see that there's more to you than how you show up through each layer of the koshas: physical, energetic, mental/emotional, etc. Hopefully you did it with care and kindness instead of trying to beat your body and mind into submission; but if that didn’t happen, there’s usually another opportunity to practice ahimsa (non-harm).

Your yoga practice is a container to work with change.

Your yoga practice is a container, which can hold many different things.

• You might fill it with yoga poses, meditation, or breathwork. 

• It might exist for a certain period of time: a breath, 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 90 minutes, 2 hours, etc. 

• There might be a certain type of yoga style you practice: vinyasa, hatha, restorative, yin, vini, etc.

• Maybe you have music, silence, or the voice of someone else guiding you.

Within those bounds, it’s also a space to meet yourself where you’re at in the present movement and care for the present version of you. Not the version of you that you wish you were or the version of you 20 years ago. The version of you now.

That version of you might even change throughout the practice. You might start off sluggish, but once you start moving you might feel more energized.

Since practice happens in the container, it might be easier for you to make “mistakes” or try something new. People new to the practice might feel as if they act one way in their yoga class and a different way the rest of their day as they try on these new ways of seeing and interacting with themselves.

Once you’ve built the capacity and skill of meeting yourself in the present during the container of practice, you might try and bring it to other aspects of your life. You start noticing how you’re showing up when you wake up in the morning and act accordingly. You check in with how you are between tasks. Maybe you had a plan to hike up Horsetooth Rock at the end of the day, but changed it because you felt wiped and didn’t feel bad or “less than” after making your decision.

How do you handle change?

One of my private yoga students asked me how she would know what to do in her own practice. I told her:

1. Check in with your body to see what you’re needing or wanting.

2. Pull something that matches from your toolkit.

3. Practice or act.

Since she had never practiced yoga before, we were working on slowing down enough to see what she needed and building her toolkit.

You might be in a different place. Maybe you have a toolkit full of 40 years of experience to pull from. Maybe you’re just starting. Maybe you have tools, but not the right ones for where you are now.

The exact version of you mixed with these current circumstances has never existed before, and will never exist again. You may or may not know how to care for your body now. If you’re more in the, “IDK what to do,” side, I’d love to chat to see if we could work together to add to your toolkit.