Menopause is a rite of passage
The word menopause used to conjure in me feelings akin to the nauseated emoji. 🤢
The thought of it felt dull and lifeless, like being put out to pasture. Who wants that? It frankly terrified me, because everything I knew about it was not good. I kept my head buried in the sand for a very, very long time.
In a society that strongly values youth and detests aging, we’re fed a cultural narrative that:
Our lives are over, along with our youth, beauty, and “value” as fertile women.
Menopause is full of suffering and terrible symptoms. Misery. Hot flashes. Rage.
Menopause is something to be “fixed” or ignored as we’re encouraged to just keep working and going on with our lives as before.
Menopause is shameful and we should just keep quiet about it, suffering in secrecy, or it’s laughed at.
Pharmaceutical companies are flooding the market with hormones as fast as doctors can prescribe them. And while I don’t judge those who take them (you gotta do, what you gotta do), I do strongly object to the idea that this is just the way menopause. is. done.
In this recent New York Times article, it seems scientists are studying ways to medically delay menopause and keep those ovaries working.
Wait, WHAT?!
What if we dare to question all of this? What if it doesn’t have to be this way?
While it’s great that menopause is rising in our public awareness, most of the support materials out there are focused on symptom management or keeping us rolling along as usual in our careers and lives, ignoring that this massive change is happening to us.
There is a very crucial aspect of menopause that is being completely missed:
At its core, it’s a deep initiation, a disruptor to our lives, and it’s calling us to withdraw from the world, to rest, and to hold space for this profound process.
Initiations are meant to be challenging, and for sure when we come out the other side, we’re not the same person we were.
Menopause isn’t a disease or all physical symptoms to be “treated” or something to be “rebalanced” at odds against what your body is naturally trying to do.
It’s deeply spiritual. And I believe you instinctively know that, too.
We’ve lost our wise elder women who teach us the sacred and powerful ways of this important passage in our lives, giving us something to look forward to.
Until now.
We don’t have to live by this narrative our society gives us.
There is another way.
The truth can be this:
Menopause is when you actually step fully into your most magnificent, fiery power.
It’s when you just stop giving a fuck about what anyone thinks of you.
You find your voice and you start speaking up.
You step away from years of caring for everyone else’s concerns.
You find your deepest purpose and inner authority.
Your discernment is refined and you know how to set your boundaries.
You clear out the first half of your life in a great reckoning so you can grow into your post-menopausal years clean, clear, and vibrant.
You have much experience and wisdom to share with those willing to listen.
You may find yourself doing the most meaningful work of your life post-menopause.
You’re not beholden anymore to the roller coaster of your menstrual cycles and emotions and moods.
Doesn’t it seem a bit suspicious, then, that this rising of a woman’s most potent power and clear-eyed vision in life is so reviled, cursed, shamed, repressed, evaded, skipped over?
That the fiery truth tellers are ignored or laughed at?
I totally get it, it can be brutally hard for many women. I don’t discount that.
It’s just I personally believe that if we were given space for this incredibly important passage in our lives…
if we ourselves and our overall culture saw this as a profoundly transformative time in our lives…
if we deeply listened to what menopause is asking of us…
maybe the suffering and symptoms wouldn’t be there at all.
I’m here to assure you….you’re not going crazy.
You’re not going crazy.
You’re made for this. It’s encoded in your body and spirit. You got this.
“Menopause, at its best, is more than just a pause in our menses; it’s a sacred pause in the hurtling trajectory of life. As we slowly begin to burn away those old identities and outdated structures, and as our pale, exhausted visions begin slowly to recede, we enter a state of conscious incubation in which a nascent life can be dreamed into being.
These multiple acts of deconstruction and reconstruction are what menopause is for. Because menopause…is not a medical condition, it is an earthquake, shaking us to our deepest foundations, wiping out the edifices we’ve so carefully constructed on what we once imaged to be the solid ground of our life.
Menopause hacks us open. It tells us, above all, that there are new wisdoms in which we can now immerse ourselves, new ways of being in the world to be uncovered. Life is not over; it is simply, and irrevocably, changed.
~ Sharon Blackie, Hagitude”