This is one of the themes running through our six-week Yoga & Menopause course, beginning Thursday 2nd July and included in your free 15-day trial of The Frog Project. Find out more here.

It's Your Turn Now

The word queenager has been gaining ground in recent years, and I think it's for a very good reason. It pushes back against the narrative that perimenopause is something to be managed, endured or quietly got through, and offers something different in its place: the idea that this transition is the beginning of something, not the end.

A queenager is someone in the second half of life who refuses to be invisible. Who brings experience, clarity and hard-won wisdom to everything she does. Who is, in many ways, only just coming into her own.

Yoga and the ancient traditions that sit alongside it have known this for a very long time.

Autumn: The Season You're In

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, perimenopause is understood through the lens of the seasons, and perimenopause is Autumn.

It is a beautiful and instructive metaphor. Autumn is the season when the trees begin to release. The leaves, which were necessary and vital through spring and summer, are let go of as the light changes. The tree is not diminished by this, but is conserving, preparing, turning its energy inward. The outward exuberance of summer is giving way to something quieter and, in its own way, more profound.

This is the invitation of perimenopause. To begin releasing what you no longer need: the roles you've outgrown, the expectations that were never really yours, the habit of putting yourself last. The season is asking you to turn inward, to find out what is actually there when everything quietens down.

That can feel disorientating at first, particularly if you have spent decades with your energy directed almost entirely outward. But it is not a diminishing. It is a reorientation.

The Ayurvedic Shift

Ayurveda maps the same transition onto its framework of doshas, or energetic qualities. The productive, fertile years are governed by Pitta: fiery, focused, highly effective at getting things done. Most of us in these years are very good at being busy, at showing up, at driving things forward.

The shift into perimenopause marks a natural movement towards Vata energy: lighter, more spacious, more changeable, more internally oriented. Pitta fire that once went outward is now looking for a different direction.

This is where the queenager concept becomes genuinely useful. The fire doesn't go out. It redirects. The question is not how to dampen it, but how to channel it towards something new: towards creativity, towards wisdom, towards a life that is more deliberately, consciously yours.

What Stress Has to Do With It

Here is something that doesn't get said often enough: the stress you carry during perimenopause is not just emotionally uncomfortable. It is physiologically impactful.

As oestrogen declines, its natural anti-inflammatory effect on the body is reduced. The menopause transition is, at its core, an inflammatory process. And stress makes inflammation worse. This is the central principle underpinning our Menopause Yoga: "Rest. Do Less. Reduce Stress," by Petra Coveney.

Not because we are giving up. Not because we have become less capable. But because reducing the stress load is one of the most genuinely powerful things you can do for your body during this transition. The research is clear on this.

Which means that putting yourself first during perimenopause is not self-indulgence. It is, quite literally, medicinal.

How Yoga Supports This Season

Yoga, understood through this lens, is not primarily about fitness or flexibility. It is about self-inquiry. About developing the capacity to notice what is actually happening inside, and to respond with care rather than react on autopilot.

One of the practices we use for perimenopause is Supta Baddha Konasana, a reclining butterfly pose, with a bolster supporting the spine and blankets beneath the arms and knees. You lie back, let everything be held, and simply receive. For people who are very used to doing, this can be quietly revelatory.

The body needs to be held at this stage. It needs warmth, nourishment, and the experience of not being required to produce anything. Restorative yoga offers that, and there is something deeply Ayurvedic in the approach: props as instruments of Kapha, offering the earth and stability that Vata energy craves.

The breathwork we practice, the journalling, the circle we create at the beginning of each class on the course: all of it is designed to create space for the turning inward that this season is asking for.

Try it now - just for you!

The Most Powerful Chapter

I genuinely believe that perimenopause, when it is understood and supported, can be the beginning of the most liberated and purposeful phase of a person's life. Not in spite of the transition, but because of it.

The queenager is not diminished. She is distilled. The fire hasn't gone out. It has found a better direction.

Yoga can be a map for that journey. Not because it offers answers, but because it offers a practice of listening. And in the Autumn of your life, learning to listen to yourself might be the most radical and important thing you can do.

Join Us This July

Our six-week Yoga & Menopause course takes you through each phase of the journey, from perimenopause to the Second Spring, through yoga, Ayurveda, TCM, breathwork and community. Six Thursday evenings beginning 2nd July, 7-8.30pm, with recordings available the following day.

Included in your free 15-day trial, no card and no commitment required.

Start your free trial and join us

Where in the journey do you feel you are right now?