Yoga for Arthritis – Gentle Ways to Support Your Joints with Yoga

If you’re living with arthritis, you’ll know how it can sometimes feel like your body is working against you. 

The stiffness, swelling, and pain may make you want to avoid movement — but, the right kind of movement is one of the best ways to support your joints and ease discomfort. This is where yoga comes in.

Yoga is not about forcing yourself into shapes or striving for perfection. It’s about meeting your body with aroha, listening to what it needs, and moving in a way that brings relief and balance.

🌿 Why Yoga Helps Arthritis

Yoga offers more than stretching. It can:

 • Ease stiffness by gently moving joints through their natural range.

 • Build strength to support and protect joints.

 • Improve circulation and bring nourishment to tissues.

 • Calm the nervous system, helping with both pain and inflammation.

 • Enhance balance and coordination, reducing the risk of falls.

💭 What to Keep in...

Yoga for Wāhine during the Menopause Transition: A Path to Balance and Renewal

Menopause - Ruahinetanga is not an ending, but a powerful transition — a time of deep wisdom, reflection, and renewal. For many women this season of life can bring both challenges and opportunities.

In Chinese medicine it is referred to as The Second Spring, not an ending but a new beginning.

Hot flushes, sleep disturbances, mood shifts, and changes in energy are common, but so too are insights, clarity, and the chance to reconnect with our bodies in a new and more compassionate way.

Yoga offers gentle yet profound support for wāhine in menopause. It’s more than stretching or exercise — it’s a wholistic practice that nurtures the nervous system, supports hormonal balance, and helps us meet this stage of life with grace.

🌿 Benefits of Yoga During Menopause

 • Regulates the Nervous System -

 Breath work and restorative poses activate the parasympathetic nervous system, easing anxiety...

Menopause- Ruahinetanga, and peri - menopause- are a time of transition.

Some traverse this transition smoothly, and others not so much. If you are the later it is important to remember that you are not alone, and although your practice may change, it may not be necessary to give up completely.

If you're feeling tempted to give up yoga during perimenopause or post menopause, please remember there is a practice for you.

Through my own experience I have found many ways that yoga helped, and it can help you too.

Firstly we may need to be more mindful about what, how and why we practice.

For example Slow, mindful yoga helps to reset your nervous system, and can decrease cortisol, and inflammation. 

Yoga helps us to move our bodies and keep our joints and bones healthy and strong too. 

The postures can offer a mix of movement- for joints and tendons, flexibility, and also strengthening poses such as warrior, goddess pose, plank and so on. Poses help us to maintain ...

POV - you don't fit the 'standard'  image of yoga - 

Have you ever heard yourself say that you are too big, stiff or old to do yoga? Or maybe heard others say this, as I have heard 100's of times in my 23 years of teaching.

It's a fear that many people carry, and I too am not immune to the fears of being judged - in fact  many teachers carry shame - for not 'measuring up' to the 'standard' image of a yoga teacher. 

....And then comes the fear of being 'too old', so much so that many yoga teachers and students opt out of yoga - at precisely the time they are a well spring of knowledge, when they have the most to offer, or as a student, can benefit from it the most!

We all fear being judged, and with social media it has become a minefield, although this depends on what you look at and allow into your 'feed'.

Thankfully, there is also a growing movement happening now - a much healthier one that is embracing differences  - shape, size, gender, age and ability, so that m...

 - You are ready to start your home practice journey...

but you don't know exactly what to do?... you are not alone, this is something I hear often at workshops and classes, so this post aims to give you a simple way to look at what to do, with 5 essential things to include.

With a little home practice you create more space for true transformation, rather than just coming to a class once a week to catch up on your wellbeing, which is still an awesome thing to do!

Is your time in class like therapy? For many years I have often asked students what they would like in the session, and almost every time it turns into a list of body parts and muscle groups that need attention! This is understandable, but total focus on only the physical can be a block to going deeper in yoga. 

Is yoga physical therapy?

Yes it can be with a knowledge teacher, and it can be more too, because yoga is about the elimination of suffering.

However, remember that a 'general' yoga class is often shared with...