yoga for menopause and beyond: guiding teachers and students through change

In recent years there has been a surge in awareness surrounding the challenges experienced by menopausal women, along with impassioned calls for more specialized support from health and wellness professionals. In Yoga for Menopause and Beyond, author Niamh Daly shares how yoga teachers can help answer these calls.

Written in an open and heartfelt conversational style, this book is a reimagining of yoga viewed through the lens of menopause. It will help you understand which elements of yoga are already ideal, what may be unhelpful, and what you might add to support symptom relief, health, and self-esteem.

Daly addresses topics such as

• biochemical, physical, social, and emotional impacts of menopause;
• specific physiological effects that necessitate a changed approach to asana;
• changes to the nervous system that influence what practices we choose;
• changing health risks and how the benefits of yoga can help reduce these risks;
• using movement for comfort and pleasure through somatics and instinctual movement;
• reconsidering your language to be inclusive of the broad array of possible experiences, including trauma sensitivity;
• incorporating what you learn into a class or workshop;
• empowering women through knowledge and recommendations;
• research and the importance of transparency in offering yoga tools for menopause; and
• practical advice, for within a class and outside, including sections on nutrition and medical options.

Yoga for Menopause and Beyond is the ideal guide for anyone wishing to create a relevant and supportive yoga practice for women as they journey through menopause and into the postmenopause years.

Niamh Daly has been teaching since 2004 under the banner of Yinstinct Yoga. When her own perimenopause began in 2015, she saw there was very little consideration in the yoga world for the evolving needs of women in menopause and beyond. To fill that need, she developed her Yoga for the Stages of Menopause program and in 2020 launched her yoga teacher training (YTT) of the same name, which has now trained hundreds of teachers worldwide. She also runs a continuing professional development course on yoga for bone health and menopause awareness courses for psychotherapists and fitness professionals.