Yoga For Women Over 40
Monday, November 02, 2026
Cindy Garza | yogalebrity Podcast episode 151
Yoga for Women Over 40: Learning to Embrace the Practice and Yourself as You Age
Women who practice yoga over 40 is not about pretending that nothing has changed. It is about recognizing that your body, mind, and life are changing, and allowing your practice to change with you.
Today's Yogalebrity Podcast with Angelica Govaert, special guest speaker and yoga teacher Cindy Garza shared what it has been like to practice, teach, and create for women over 40, including women in menopause and postmenopausal women.
Her message is both honest and encouraging: aging may require a different approach to yoga, but it does not mean you have to stop challenging yourself or stop growing.
Why Yoga for Women Over 40 Deserves More Attention
Cindy has worked in health and wellness and fitness since she was 20. She owned a women's-only health club for 21 years, with a focus on helping women move forward, become empowered, grow stronger, and stand in their power.
Over time, she noticed that women over 40, and especially postmenopausal women in their 50s, 60s, and beyond, were not often the focus of the yoga and fitness spaces she encountered.
The opportunity to teach online allowed her to reach women beyond her local community: women who, like her, were moving through significant changes in their bodies, minds, and lives.
That focus is important because yoga for women over 40 is not necessarily the same as the yoga many women practiced earlier in life. As Cindy described it, the practice may need to reflect changes in the joints, hormones, energy, and overall experience of the body.
The Biggest Shift May Be Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual
For Cindy, the first change was not simply physical. It was mental, emotional, and spiritual.
She had been accustomed to practicing and teaching hard. She wanted to return to intense yoga, work hard, and keep doing what she had always done. But she found herself hurting all the time and asking why she was continuing to practice in a way that no longer felt right for her.
Part of the challenge was identity. She had always taught in a certain way, and people had come to her for that kind of practice. Changing her approach brought up the fear that people might not like her anymore if she no longer offered the same intensity.
Eventually, she realized that many women were going through similar changes. Instead of fighting those changes, she began to embrace them. She started thinking about how to change her sequences so that students could leave with what they really needed, not simply what she wanted them to have.
That shift is at the heart of yoga for women over 40: learning to listen to what is needed now instead of forcing the body and mind to recreate an earlier version of the practice.
Menopause Yoga May Require Letting Go of Old Expectations
The transition through menopause and into postmenopause can challenge the expectations women have carried about themselves.
Angelica described trying to return to a practice she had done before and finding that it made things worse. She talked about feeling more stressed and about having to embrace a slower practice, even though she initially felt angry about slowing down. To her, it felt as if she were losing the authentic version of herself.
Cindy recognized that struggle. Women can feel as though they have placed themselves on a pedestal and that everyone expects them to continue performing as they always have. But, she said, what people may really need from us is guidance toward peace, self-love, and a better way of showing up in the world.
For her, accepting the changes in her body was one of the most difficult parts of the journey. She was no longer as lean as she had been when she practiced hot yoga, intense vinyasa, and hard workouts. She had to slow down, return to her spirituality, meditate, and ask for guidance.
She also had to become comfortable with the possibility that her body might not return to the exact shape it had before. That acceptance did not mean giving up. It meant choosing to feel good and to stop being angry about losing who she used to be.
As Cindy put it, women are not necessarily losing themselves as they age. They may be looking for themselves because they are trying to force themselves to remain who they used to be.
Yoga for Women in Menopause Is Also About Self-Acceptance
Aging can bring up powerful messages about how women are supposed to look. Cindy and Angelica discussed the pressure created by images online, including AI-generated images of women who appear to be much younger than they are.
Those images can make an already difficult comparison even harder. They can contribute to the feeling that women are not good enough, and that aging is something to hide or correct.
Cindy has chosen to embrace her real appearance, including wrinkles, cellulite, and the changes in her body. She described rejecting filters when they made her feel as though she were presenting someone other than herself.
For her, embracing aging has become a meaningful part of her work and her identity. She believes that when women openly accept who they are, they give other women permission to do the same.
There is also a broader question: Why should women be expected to look 20 forever? Men are often described as becoming more attractive with age, while women are not always granted the same freedom. Cindy and Angelica spoke about honoring the bodies that show the work women have done, including the work of motherhood and carrying responsibility for a family.
Yoga for women over 40 can be part of that larger process of coming back to what is real. It is not an attempt to erase age, but a way to live more fully in the body and life you have now.
Stop Spending All Your Energy Worrying About How You Look
Cindy also connected this process of self-acceptance with her spiritual practice. She and her husband study A Course in Miracles, and she described how that study has helped her become more peaceful, open, creative, and accepting.
As someone who teaches asana and fitness, she found it interesting to explore the idea that we are more than the body. Her practice has increasingly focused on what is within her and on letting go of the worry that can consume so much energy.
Her message is simple:
You cannot change the things you worry about, so let them go and embrace what you can.
That does not require ignoring the body. In fact, her work remains deeply connected to the body through yoga, movement, balance, and strength. It means not allowing worry about appearance to become the main measure of health, worth, or progress.
A Slower Yoga Practice Can Still Help You Grow Stronger
Cindy's approach is not based on the idea that every woman over 50 or 55 must practice only gentle yoga. Her goal is not to make women afraid of challenge or assume that their bodies will fall apart if they do more.
Her goal is to help women become strong and continue to thrive well into their 80s and 90s.
Her course, Come Home to Your Body, begins with foundational work. It focuses on building a strong and safe asana practice, slowing down, and not being in a hurry. The course begins with a restorative practice, then builds into more challenging sequences.
For Cindy, this approach reflects her own experience. After years of putting stress on her joints, she wanted a practice that would support her in gently strengthening them, improving her balance, and moving slowly through transitions.
Moving slowly does not mean deciding that a posture is impossible. It means developing the foundations that support the practice while continuing to leave room for challenge and growth.
The course includes five 15- to 20-minute lessons and one 50-minute lesson that brings the material together in a longer practice. The intention is to keep evolving rather than stopping at a certain age.
Yoga for Women Over 50 Can Continue Evolving
One of Cindy's strongest messages is that aging does not mean reaching a final stage of yoga.
She does not want to stop at 60 or create a practice that assumes women should only do less and less as they age. She wants to continue aging, continue teaching, and continue helping women evolve in both their yoga practice and their lives.
That perspective makes room for both acceptance and ambition. You can acknowledge that your body has changed without deciding that you are finished. You can slow down without giving up strength. You can practice restoration while still progressing toward more challenging movement.
For women in menopause and postmenopause, this may mean releasing the expectation that yoga must look exactly as it did before. It may also mean finding a new relationship with practice, one that supports the body instead of constantly fighting it.
Coming Home to Your Body
The name of Cindy's course captures the feeling many women experience during this stage of life: "Where did my body go?"
Come Home to Your Body is her way of responding to that feeling. The practice begins with foundational, heart-centered yoga and builds toward a stronger, safer, more balanced approach to movement.
But coming home to your body is not only about physical alignment or the poses. It is also about accepting what is changing, releasing the pressure to be someone else, and learning to love yourself more as you become a new version of yourself.
Yoga for women over 40 can be a practice of strength, balance, restoration, and continued growth. It can also be a practice of accepting the woman you are now, not because you have stopped evolving, but because you are still becoming.
And as Cindy's experience shows, you are not finished at 40, 50, or 60. You can keep learning, keep practicing, keep building strength, and keep finding your way home to yourself.
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This site is not a part of the Facebook website or Facebook Inc. Additionally, this site is not endorsed by Facebook in any way. FACEBOOK is a trademark of FACEBOOK, Inc. Due to the digital nature of our products, ALL SALES ARE FINAL.
All Testimonials are REAL. Results will vary based on each individuals efforts and situation. Starting an online business is hard work. Yogalebrity does not guarantee results for anyone, we offer yoga business courses and mentorships. We do not offer results. You and many factors like the market, niche, and other resources determine your results. We provide education for yoga teachers who want to build online yoga businesses. Please do not invest with us if you are not financially able to support your yoga business.