09/11/2026
It’s not something I chose. It rather chose me.
As a matter of fact, I didn’t even choose to become a yoga teacher. I did not go to my first teacher training with the intention of teaching. All I wanted was to learn about yoga.
By the end of the course, I realized that the knowledge I had been entrusted with was too precious to keep to myself. And even though I was always very shy, extremely introverted, and very much a behind-the-curtains kind of person, I decided that whenever I was asked to teach, I would never say no.
And so it went…
Very early in my teaching, while I was still in my 20s, I started noticing that the majority of my students were 40+. And that’s not exactly the group a young yoga teacher imagines as their “target” group.
Like many young teachers, I pictured myself teaching radiant pregnant women, working with underserved communities, or somehow changing the world for the better. My image of what my teaching would look like didn’t really include people in midlife.
Simply because hardly anyone is thinking about midlifers.
Midlife is one of the most invisible stages of life.
It can be a period of steadiness that we may have spent years working toward, and yet when we finally arrive there, we sometimes don’t know what to do with ourselves. Perhaps that is part of the reason for midlife crises and reinventions: the need to become visible again.
So I started learning about the needs of the people who actually came to my classes and figuring out how to serve them best, while also creating an atmosphere of inclusion rather than defining people by age.
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What I think midlife students appreciate about my classes are simple things:
♦ Predictability and logic. No class is completely free-flowing. It follows a recipe, but that recipe also slightly adjusts with out loosing its core to the needs of the group on any given day.
♦ It allows space to be with oneself, without constant noise (no music, no constant instruction).
♦ It is a place where we can be seen as we are, and where where we are in life is appreciated without judgment or the need to prove anything.
♦ It provides us with rest — something that, by midlife, we can no longer afford to go without.
♦ But it also keeps us engaged and provides challenges we can work with.
Creating a yoga class experience that is both inclusive and challenging is like walking on a razor’s edge. Luckily, traditional yoga provides the tools.
In my classes, you see people of all ages and backgrounds — from seniors to students, from computer scientists to people engaged in different sports disciplines, and yes, pregnant women too.
Because the things we need in midlife are, in many ways, the same things we need at every age — but when we are busy with life, we sometimes don’t have the time to deeply reflect on them.
Perhaps this is the most important lesson of midlife: we can spend these years looking backward, remembering the youth we have lost, clinging to what used to be, or looking ahead with fear of getting older, perceiving ourselves as more irrelevant with every passing year.
But we also have the choice to embrace where we are.
To be seen where we are.
To notice what we need now, rather than what we used to be able to do or what we think we should become.
That is why I teach Midlife Yoga — because when we stop trying to be somewhere else, or somebody else, yoga becomes simply yoga, in its purest form.
And Midlife itself becomes a symbol of this sacred space between one thought and the next, between the past and the future. It’s a chance not only to be in the now, but to fully and healthily experience it.
Text: Padma Germain
I used AI tools for grammatical and stylistic editing.
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Soon I’ll start sharing more practical details about my upcoming MIDLIFE YOGA STARTER — a 5-class workshop here in Honolulu.
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