ACTIVE SHAKTI

Perimenopause does not arrive as one thing. It arrives as many things at once — anxiety that seems to come from nowhere, unexplained weight changes, sleep disruptions, a sudden intolerance for stimulation that you used to absorb without blinking. And for women who have built their lives around high output and high capacity, it can feel like the ground has shifted.

Gillian Evans is a psychotherapist, a yoga teacher, and a social anthropologist. She works with the body, the breath, and the talking cure simultaneously — not as separate disciplines but as different routes into the same territory. Her practice is oriented around a single question: what are the conditions for human flourishing?

Active Shakti feminine painting by Seema Chopra I walked into a room of girls recently and something stopped me. They looked lost. Chins tucked, eyes down, scared to take up the space they had been given. Not because they didn't want to be there. But because nobody had ever taught them how to stand proud in their own wanting. I held out my hand to welcome them in and I already felt the guilt coming back at me. The not-knowing. The not-belonging-to-themselves. Standing here no

The Guardian recently published research that shows that elite female athletes are more likely to experience urinary incontinence than sedentary women. Most never seek help. The ones who do are often told it is to be expected — a reasonable cost of training hard, of having had children, of getting older. The message, delivered in various forms across GP surgeries and changing rooms and online comment sections, is essentially: this is just how it is now.