The Practice of Transformation
Pauline Drossart teaches Kundalini Yoga with a premise that runs counter to much of mainstream wellness culture: that menopause is not something to fix or endure, but a threshold to cross deliberately. For more than twenty years, she has built a practice around this idea, working with women through the hormonal upheaval of midlife using ancient yogic techniques paired with contemporary nervous system science. Her contribution lies not in either tradition alone, but in the way she has woven them together into something practical, embodied, and ritually coherent.
In a landscape crowded with solutions that treat menopausal symptoms as problems to be eliminated, Drossart has carved out a different approach—one that treats the transition itself as meaningful, and the body's responses as information rather than failure.
The Foundations: Kundalini and the Nervous System
Drossart's work is rooted in the Kundalini Yoga tradition as taught by Yogi Bhajan, a lineage that emphasizes kriya sequences, pranayama (breathwork), mantra, and meditation designed to move energy through the body's chakra system. These are not gentle practices. Kundalini Yoga often involves intense breathwork, repetitive movements, and extended holds—techniques intended to create physiological and energetic shifts that ripple out into daily life.
What distinguishes Drossart's teaching is her integration of polyvagal theory and somatic nervous system regulation into this traditional framework. She works with the understanding that the hormonal shifts of perimenopause and menopause aren't isolated events but catalysts that reveal and amplify existing nervous system patterns. Anxiety, insomnia, hot flashes, mood swings—these aren't just hormonal; they're also expressions of how the autonomic nervous system is responding to stress, uncertainty, and the loss of familiar internal rhythms.
Her methodology treats vagal tone, sympathetic activation, and the body's capacity for self-regulation as teachable skills. The kriyas become tools for rewiring habitual stress responses. The breathwork becomes a way to influence autonomic state in real time. The meditation becomes practice in staying present with discomfort without collapsing or dissociating.
A Turning Point Through Lived Experience
Drossart came to this particular focus through her own experience with women's health, though the specifics of that journey remain private. What's clear is that her path wasn't theoretical. She spent years apprenticing in Kundalini Yoga before narrowing her focus to the menopausal transition, and that refinement came through direct transmission—teaching in studios, at retreat centers, in one-on-one sessions, and adapting her methods based on what actually worked for the women sitting across from her.
This is teaching built from accumulated feedback rather than abstract principle. The program she has developed addresses the specific constellation of experiences common to perimenopause and menopause, but it does so with the understanding that each woman's nervous system brings its own history, its own patterns of activation and shutdown, its own relationship to safety and regulation.
The Work: Program and Practice
Drossart has created a structured program that combines Kundalini Yoga practice with nervous system education tailored explicitly to women in midlife. The format is both practical and ritual-based, offering participants a framework for working with their bodies rather than attempting to override or silence them.
Her sessions typically include kriya sequences designed to target specific physiological systems—glandular health, digestive fire, circulation, the release of stored tension. These are paired with education about what's happening in the nervous system during hormonal flux, why certain symptoms arise, and how different practices influence autonomic state. The approach is neither purely physical nor purely psychological; it treats the body as an integrated system where hormones, nerves, breath, and consciousness are in constant conversation.
She has taught this work in various formats: ongoing studio classes, intensive retreats, private sessions. The retreats, in particular, offer women the chance to step out of their daily routines and spend sustained time with the practices, allowing for deeper physiological shifts and a more embodied integration of the teaching.
Cultural Significance: Reframing Midlife
Drossart's work matters because it offers an alternative to the medical model that often treats menopause as a deficiency disease requiring pharmaceutical intervention, and to the wellness model that frames it as something to be managed, optimized, or transcended through the right combination of supplements and self-care.
She reaches women who are looking for something more coherent than symptom relief—who sense that what they're moving through has meaning, and who want tools that honor both the difficulty and the potential of the transition. Her teaching doesn't romanticize menopause or pretend it isn't hard. But it does insist that the intensity is generative, that the body's responses contain intelligence, and that there are practices capable of meeting that intensity without suppressing it.
In a culture that still largely treats aging female bodies as problems to be solved or rendered invisible, Drossart's work stands as a quiet counterpoint: a practice-based argument that menopause is not a decline but an initiation, and that the women moving through it deserve methods as sophisticated and demanding as the transition itself.
The Current Chapter
Today, Drossart continues to teach, refining her program through ongoing work with students and deepening her own integration of yogic and nervous system frameworks. Her teaching remains rooted in direct transmission—the ancient model of learning through practice, repetition, and embodied relationship rather than information alone.
She represents a growing movement of practitioners who are bringing traditional somatic and spiritual practices into conversation with contemporary neuroscience, not to validate the traditions but to make them more accessible and precise. Her legacy, still unfolding, is in the women who have learned to meet their own bodies with curiosity rather than fear, and in the quiet insistence that transformation, at any age, remains possible.
