The body you tend in private
What the body asks for when no one is watching
This morning I wanted to work out.
Not because I had to. Not because I was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t. I just woke up and felt it. A pull toward the mat, the weight, the light coming through the window. My body is asking for something, and I actually want to give it.
I stood there for a moment before I started, just noticing that.
It hasn’t always felt this way.
For years, I showed up at a yoga studio seven days a week. Then a gym with mirrors on every wall and music loud enough to keep you from thinking. I worked hard. I was there. And under all of it, a quiet hum I didn’t name until much later: I was watching myself the whole time.
Not checking the form. Watching. I wonder what I looked like. Whether I was doing it right. Whether anyone noticed if I wasn’t.
Nobody was watching. But I hadn’t figured that out yet.
I work out in my room now.
Teal mat on the carpet. A kettlebell is near the shelf with the pothos. The Thai Constellation catches the morning light through the big arched window.
There is a mirror in this room. I barely look at it. There is just the weight in my hand and what my body can do today.
Some days it is a full session. Some days it is ten minutes before I sit with my tea instead. Both count. I stopped keeping score a while ago, and nothing fell apart when I did.
I think a lot of women do this. Perform their workouts for an audience that isn’t there.
Show up to class and feel like they have to look like they know what they’re doing. Go to the gym and feel watched, even when no one is looking. Work hard and still come home feeling like they did it wrong somehow.
I did it for a long time. The performance felt like an effort. It felt like enough.
It wasn’t an effort, though. It was just noise.
I don’t know exactly when the shift happened. Perimenopause, maybe. Or the slow work of being in a body long enough to stop fighting it.
The body in perimenopause stops going along with the performance. It gets tired in ways that don’t respond to pushing through. It asks for something different, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets louder. Mine got very loud for a while.
I used to train to look a certain way. Then I trained because I was afraid of what would happen if I stopped. Now I train because I understand what is at stake.
Perimenopause changes things. Hormones shift, and the body responds. Muscle, bone, mood, sleep, the way energy moves through you on a given day. You can fight all of that, or you can work with it. I chose to work with it.
Kettlebells for strength. Yoga for how the body moves, bends, and opens. A hike at least once a week for the part of me that needs to be outside and moving through something larger than a room.
The room is part of it. I didn’t expect that.
There is something about lifting a weight next to a plant that refuses to rush that settles everything down in a way a gym never did for me. The monstera doesn’t care what I lifted. The pothos is just there, doing its slow work, same as always.
I am doing my slow work too.
Being seen and being witnessed are not the same thing. In a studio, I was seen. In my room, I witness myself. No one grades it. No one waits to see if I quit. It is just me and the light and the weight in my hand.
That quiet is where the real work happens. Not the reps. The returning.
This morning I wanted to work out. And I did. And it felt good.
I’m still getting used to that being enough.
The body you strengthen in perimenopause is the one you will live in for the rest of your life. That is reason enough.
I’ll be here next Friday. Same time, same quiet.
Come sit with me,
Tew Green
In The Pause Life
Transition·Tend·Strengthen·Savor·Become