Feminine yoga for women’s ages and stages
What is a feminine approach to yoga and how can the right kind of yoga support women of all ages and stages?
**Please note that whenever I use the words, ‘woman’, ‘she/her’, ‘mother’ in this blog, I also mean this to refer to any person of any gender who identifies as female, or with their feminine essence, or any person who has a uterus. “When we’re in our flow, all we have to do is walk across a room to be mesmerizing. We feel confident in ourselves because we’re connected to the earth and in harmony with her rhythms, cycles, and moods”
Yoga is an ancient system—thousands of years old—that was originally created by men for men. Traditionally the practices were passed from male guru to male student. These days however the majority of yoga practitioners and teachers are in fact women. Why then are we persisting in practising yoga like men?
Too many female yoga teachers and students adopt a more masculine, ‘yang’ approach to yoga that is not serving our unique needs as women.
Women yoga practitioners would do well to remember that we are inherently cyclical: our hormones are in flux throughout our monthly cycle as well as throughout our life cycle—from menarche through to menopause—which has an impact on us physically and emotionally. Our yoga practice can support us more if it harnesses and reflects these changes.
A feminine approach to yoga means moving with, not against the fluctuations of our wombs. In my book Moving with the Moon: Yoga, Movement & Meditation for Every Phase of your Menstrual Cycle and Beyond I encourage female yoga practitioners first and foremost to develop a home practice; that way they’ll learn the sensitivity to listen to the unique feminine rhythms of their bodies. This is particularly important when we then go to a group class. It’s so easy to get carried away by the stronger, less sensitive ‘yang’ energy in a group class, which may then leave us feeling wiped out, the opposite to rejuvenated and supported.
A feminine yoga practice is eclectic, harnessing a combination of multifaceted tools from yoga, pilates, movement practices and somatic traditions that help us embody a new, non-linear, cyclical perspective. In this way, we discover that every time we step on our mat our practice may be different and we are able to enhance our health, wellbeing and connection with our bodies and the cycles of nature.
“At menarche a young woman enters her power, throughout her menstruating years she practices her power, and at menopause she becomes her power”
The stages of a woman’s life
Moving with your Moon: yoga for the four phases of the menstrual cycle
The first and usually longest stage of a woman’s life encompasses the menstruating years. A woman can expect to menstruate up to 500 times during her fertile life. Most women understand from personal experience just how much their moods and energy levels can fluctuate before during and after their period. This is where learning to move with your moon®—using your yoga practice to support and mirror the waxing and waning of the uterus as its lining builds and then sheds in an endless cycle‚can help us actually fall in love with our bodies and our cycles rather than resening its irrevocable rhythms.
For example, when you are menstruating it’s a time of natural low-ebb in our energy and a feminine, moving with the moon® approach advocates you avoid certain dynamic postures (including inversions) and instead practise in a very gentle and restorative way. Whereas when you are ovulating or leading up to ovulation, a time when your energy is building again, you might naturally benefit from a more dynamic practice.
There are in fact four energetic phases of our menstrual cycle (corresponding to the phases of the moon) and for each of these phases I suggest we can adapt our practice in quite specific ways (these phases are covered in detail in my book Moving with the Moon: Nurturing, Movement, Yoga and Meditation for Every Phase of the Menstrual Cycle and Beyond).
The added bonus is that if a woman takes the time to adjust her yoga practice (and by extension her expectations of herself in her daily life) so that it responds to the natural, monthly ebb and flow of her energy, she is creating a foundation that will also stand her in good stead to manage the changes and challenges that accompany the other key life stages such as pre-conception, pregnancy, birth, motherhood, and ultimately, menopause.
Supported forward bends are cooling and restful during menstruation
Creating a Fertile Space: yoga for fertility and conception
After spending many of her adult years trying not to get pregnant, a woman may get to a turning point where she decides she would actually quite like to get pregnant, and so begins a new stage —pre-conception. This is when the right kind of feminine, fertility-focused yoga can help a woman in so many ways during the journey to pregnancy.
It should be noted that an overly dynamic, ‘yang’ yoga practice could actually be counterproductive as research indicates that vigorous exercise may be connected to greater difficulty in achieving pregnancy.
Our focus in our yoga practice during this stage of life is therefore gentle, nurturing yoga that is all about ‘juicing up’ the woman’s natural ‘yin’, femininity; creating a receptive ‘womb space’; nourishing the reproductive organs; and preparing a woman’s body, mind and emotions for pregnancy and motherhood.
Fertility focused yoga is all about creating space for a pregnancy to occur: we nourish the physical space of the uterus and ovaries with hormone-balancing practices, as well as working with the non-physical practices that include meditations and visualisations, to create the energetic space for conception.
Baddha Konasana (the groin-opening posture) is one of what I call ‘The Classical Women’s Postures’, that open the hips and pelvic area, and boost the ‘shakti’ energy in the pelvic bowl—beneficial for menstruation, fertility and pregnancy.
Yoga for Two: yoga for pregnancy
Once a woman succeeds in her goal of becoming pregnant, or perhaps she unintentionally conceives, she then enters the brief, intense and very sacred stage of pregnancy and birth. Perhaps for the first time in her life, she becomes motivated to actively seek out ways, like yoga, to support and enhance her health and wellbeing in order to give her unborn baby the best chance. For many women, prenatal yoga may be their first introduction to yoga which ushers them into a life-long relationship with this ancient body-mind practice.
The benefits of prenatal yoga are well known. Many doctors and health care practitioners recommend yoga as a safe, effective way to support a woman during her pregnancy as well as to help her prepare for the rigours of birth.
Additionally, prenatal yoga can help deepen a woman’s connection with her unborn baby which has flow-on effects for their health and wellbeing. “If the communication was abundant, rich and, most important, nurturing, the chances are very good that the baby will be robust, healthy and happy,” writes Thomas Verny, MD in his groundbreaking book, The Secret Life of the Unborn Child.
If the woman is able to let go of any ego and yang-focus in her yoga practice during pregnancy and instead approaches it with a gentle, surrendered, feminine focus, she is offered the special opportunity to move into a new understanding: she is now practising yoga for two. In other words, it’s no longer just about her.
A pregnant woman’s practice then becomes something very sacred in its simplicity and internal focus and may move beyond her mat into her life with an embodiment of a key tenet of yoga philosophy—the idea of ‘ishvara pranidhana’. There are many translations of this concept that appears a number of times in the ancient yogic text, “The Yoga Sutras”. In this context, it means ‘surrender to the universal flow or to the divine’. The right kind of feminine-focused yoga helps her feel more accepting of the many changes to her body and her emotions that she experiences during pregnancy.
Yoga also helps her prepare for the complete surrender that will be required of her during birth—no matter what kind of birth she ends up having. And, this philosophy helps her cultivate a more positive attitude towards the irrevocable changes to her life once she becomes a mother. Ultimately, yoga teaches us about surrender and letting go of any set expectation of how things ‘should’ be during our pregnancy and beyond.
Nurturing the Nurturer: yoga for pospartum mothers/ parents
A still somewhat neglected stage of a woman’s life is the period after she has her baby and faces the challenges of new motherhood. A great deal of the attention is placed on the pregnant and birthing woman and the new mother may be forgotten by our society. In addition to the inevitable sleep deprivation of new motherhood, a woman may feel lonely, isolated and anxious in response to her new responsibilities. Her post-pregnancy and birth-body too is in a weakened and vulnerable state. This is where postnatal yoga and the joys of mothers and babies yoga can have such positive benefits for a woman, supporting her during this unprecedented stage of her life in which she ever after becomes responsible for another little being.
The philosophy here is all about ‘nurturing the nurturer’ – rebuilding a woman’s depleted physical and emotional strength and energy so that she can go on giving to her baby and family. Yoga can become a lifeline—a brief sanctuary in her busy, parenting day in which she is given permission to focus just on herself.
Restorative Yoga postures like this supported backbend (what I call one of the ‘Heart-Opening Postures’) are a boon for rejuvenating a woman’s energy postnatally, as well as for the premenstrual and menstrual phases of the menstrual cycle, perimenopause and any time when our energy is depleted.
The Wise Woman: yoga for perimenopause and menopause
The final major life transition for women is the menopause, or what I like to call ‘the wise woman stage’. For a lot of women this can be a very rocky transition that can span a number of years and is characterised by multiple, unsettling physical and emotional symptoms.
The time leading up to our final menstrual period, when our body ceases ovulating for good, can span anywhere from 2 – 15 years, and is called the perimenopause. During the Perimenopause, which is still little understood by many women, our bodies go through a tumultuous hormonal dance in which the normal patterns of our menstrual cycles may become more intense and we may experience a number of vexing symptoms including heavy bleeding, irregular periods, tiredness, depression, irritability and insomnia—to name just a few!
Yoga can support a women during this often bewildering stage in which everything again shifts in her life— not only by helping balance her hormones and nourishing her nervous system but also by providing those philosophical tools for accepting and surrendering to her changing body and emotions.
If, during our menstruating years, we have been tracing our monthly cycle with a moving with the moon® approach that adapts our yoga practice to the various phases of our menstrual cycle then we already have a ready template for living that we can now transfer to this new life-stage. It can be beneficial to have at our disposal yoga-tools that support us during an extended or intense premenstrual phase, or distressing bout of heavy bleeding which are common during the perimenopause.
Even after menopause when a women no longer ovulates or menstruates, she can continue to practice in a feminine-focused way that follows the phases of the moon. In this way, she is able to stay connected with the echoed-cycles of her feminine body and of nature and therefore maintain an internal rhythm that will help support her as she moves into the ‘‘Autumn’ and ‘Winter’ of her life.
For more information on the principles, guidelines and practices of feminine yoga, in particular yoga for the menstrual cycle and menopause, see my book Moving with the Moon: Yoga, Movement & Meditation for Every Phase of your Menstrual Cycle & Beyond.
Ana is also now available for 1:1 yoga sessions via Zoom if you’d like a personalised sequence for your feminine age or stage. See here for more info and to book a free 15 minute intro chat.
Practice with me anytime, my package of feminine yoga recorded zoom classes are now available here.
