The Inner Yoga of a woman. Our internal seasons of Menstruation, Autumn

Because Yoga offers us a holistic approach to self-healing and cultivation of conscious awareness, it’s practices also encourage us, if shared from a place of duality – wholeness in our lives which are patterns of inter-connectedness.

This can be very helpful, especially for women who live in a way that they feel profound disconnection, not only from their ancient roots and the natural world but also from each other.

Consider for a moment, that not all Yoga is from this perspective, and fails to support a woman’s natural body shapes, time of life, time of the month, and cyclic rhythms.

There is nothing linear about the shape of a woman’s body

Because a woman’s shape is not linear, Yoga shouldn’t be a routine aimed at aligning your body to fit what we think the pose should look like. The more we engage in the dance of things like Mudra, chant, feeling the body through movement, introspection, breathe work, ceremony, art, creativity,  gratitude, nourishing our body according to our moon time, or if we aren’t bleeding, with natures season and the moon, the more we have the capacity as women to accept our natural life experience marked out by our natural pattern of the cycles of a woman’s life.

So, is there any wonder many women, especially aging women, and women in bodies who express their feminine embodiment through abundance in the flesh, do not feel part of the community that is often ageism and yoga consumerism focused, not to mention, Yoga teachers who bypass the true teachings or have created cultures within their traditions or communities who only value youth and beauty in the yoga pose?

A Natural Imbalance

I feel this creates a natural imbalance to our intrinsic nature as intertwined, interconnected cyclic beings, aligned to the cycles/circles in nature and a whole of life woman experience. This resistance we feel contradicts our mental and spiritual wellbeing for our whole lives are marked out by cycles of continuous change and shifts.

Yoga as a holistic way of life can provide comfort, but also a realization that when we face up to changes within our bodies’ natural rhythms, each of these transitions has its own intrinsic worth and value.

Understanding all of these “separate” roles, the young maiden, the maiden, the mother, the wild and the crone (the girl, the sexual woman, the mother, the middle-aged woman of confidence, and the wise woman), we realize all of these are part of the whole. We are whole. And finding a Yoga community to support this unique value system is like coming home.

Home, to a nest.