The menopause - a fresh perspective
This is a copy of an article I wrote for the Guernsey press, which was published on Wednesday 5 April.
On the one hand it is good news, the menopause is no longer as stigmatised and shamed as it once was, but we still have a long way to go to welcome it as the potentially empowering and positively life changing transition in a woman’s life that it can be.
Sadly there is still a lot of fear around menopause and the medical mindset is often one of deficiency and ‘management’, requiring women to take medication for fear that as soon as they ‘go through’ menopause their bodies will simply fall apart and waste away, that ‘normal’ (whatever that means) will never be quite the same again.
Hoorah I say. Who wants to be ‘normal’ anyway. We are all of us different and unique with different and unique needs and often all the menopause is highlighting is where we are out of alignment with our individual needs as a human being, both mental, emotional, spiritual, psychological and physiological.
If we can find the courage to go within, to cultivate respect for this natural process, then we may actually find it an incredibly empowering and life affirming experience, as we literally transition from one way of being to another.
There is much I could write about the pressures of our ageist culture, about our attractiveness as women as sexual objects and the accompanying fear around how we might become dry, brittle, parched and devoid of our sexual energy, or how we might turn into the eccentric crone or witch of fairy tales with our hairy moles to boot, or simply become invisible to the rest of society, redundant now that we can no longer pro-create.
But really this is all nonsense, general cultural negativity that is not true and yet feeds some of our fear around the changes that the menopause creates. Yet in reality, no other time in a woman’s life provides quite the same potential for understanding and tapping into a woman’s power as this one. This of course, if a woman can negotiate her way through this cultural negativity that has clouded and indeed shrouded menopause for centuries - and supports any nutritional depletion in her diet – otherwise a negative and self-destructive experience of menopause can manifest.
However if a woman can challenge the negativity and address her specific nutritional needs after years of most likely being all things to many different people - raising children, running a household, building careers, founding businesses, looking after elderly parents, supporting friends and extended family members – then she has, during the menopause, an opportunity to discover a deeper layer of self, which brings with it increasing freedom and self-love/worth.
Essentially, at menopause, women find themselves at a crossroads, where they have the choice to both burn away much of the rubbish from the first half of their lives and complete some of the tasks that they started in adolescence. At this time, a woman may look back at her life and question her journey, where she has been and what she has done, achieved and experienced. Now is the time to let go of and grieve broken and unrealised dreams, and prepare the foundations for the later stage of her life. It is possible that a crisis ensues which has nothing to do with hormonal changes, but is more so about where she has directed her life thus far and whether she feels that she has fulfilled earlier dreams and ambitions and allowed herself to follow her passions.
It is at this stage that women begin to feel a deep need for self-expression that likely went ignored after adolescence as women instead did what was required to “fit in” and ignored various unique aspects of self.
As Dr Christiane Northrup writes in her fabulous book, “Women’s bodies, women’s wisdom”, “I like to think of midlife women like myself as dangerous – dangerous to any forces existing in our lives that seek to turn us into silent little ladies, dangerous to the deadening effects of convention and niceness, and dangerous to any accommodations we have made that are stifling who we are now capable of becoming”.
Menopause is a time when women may scrutinise all aspects of their lives and let go of dead end relationships that lack the love and intimacy that she craves, quitting jobs and ending careers that she has now outgrown, that are no longer aligned with her deepest truth and may well never have been, but she lacked the courage until now to do something about it. Essentially she begins to clear all dead wood that no longer serve who she is becoming, that waste her time and energy and in some way limit the truth of who she is at heart and soul – that person she was in adolescence!
Menopause is truly an exciting time if women can do the developmental work – the inner work – that her body and her hormone levels call out for. This is a time for her to honour her heart and soul and to live from this perspective, to truly give to herself what she most needs, and to let go of anything out of alignment with this. When she dares to take herself seriously and realise her power, then she can truly prepare for the unfolding of the second half of her life.
