Menopause. Initiation and Edges

Oh this menopause thing…

Thrown against the sides of myself.

Unopposed oestrogen, no longer buffered by the cool and loving arms of progesterone makes driving intensity just that…. Absolutely driving. A drenching madness.

Endocrine system scrambling for ground meets a nervous system wired for action, for doing, when there is stress or crisis. Others may retreat or shut down, but my early years priming swings me into action.

So these two beautiful systems and responses fold into a kind of activation that is almost untenable.

Raw, un restrained attempts to make all this better.

And given the collective, what a lot of bettering there is to do. Unwisely met, a recipe for absolute burnout or collapse.

And it is there for this…. And I am there for this. To meet the undone work of this life.

How to find the healthy path?

Menopause asks us to metabolise old patterns rather than outrun them. It strips old coping strategies. It takes us to the core.

Fuck.

It tests all I know about the value of going under, of the dark night of the soul, of the burning. From inside it feels impossible, impassable, like disintegration will never end.

Kind platitudes from the wise woman about the gifts of the deep places ring hollow from the day to day realities and swinging of being wrung out. The dripping intensity of a fire that’s more than any initiatory experience I have been through before.

But thank God for them. At least I know the territory. I m grateful I have some grounding in these ways. Glossy, seductive distraction does not feel appealing even though I sometimes scream for it. I want to initiate. But kindly, in a way I can cope, and still get up and tend the children. And not burn my house down whilst I go.

In a way that is compassionate to the lack of cultural holding at this time, and for why I might have wounds that need addressing in the first place.

Lifting blame. Tending what is here.

I long for a rich and loamy culture around me that could hold this. None of us have this in fullness right now, so thank goodness for love for friends, for a man who sees, for a lineage to reach outside the human for support from. For just enough. For the chance, through this life to remake the containers that can help the future ones navigate with more completeness and care and understanding.

I have spent so much of my life creating spaces where others can transform…….. can I allow my own to become one of those spaces?

Can each of us make an altar of ourselves? Grow the understanding around us through our living to reseed and remember something better?

And as we each do our own, properly, how that can ripple and become the collective.

How to find and how to make enough time to do the work that needs to be done to so this in a proper way?

To be within the limits of our current days and nights and time and still say yes. To fully commit to really addressing the gaps, heal the unhealed places in this life…. The things that make us leaky, yearn in the wrong ways, desperate to meet the huge gaps in childhood experiences that reveal themselves in these threshold moments.

And recognise how the inner and the outer dance

Our connection  - indivisible and inseparable.

The truths of the Womens ceremonies. Birth, menarche, childbirth, creative makings, menstruation, menopause, death.

Each one takes us in. Gouges us out. Unmet and untended they consolidate the old patterns. But each provides a window for healing that can change the course of a life time, our own and all we are in relationship with. We heal for ourselves but it is SO much more than that. We heal for what is congested and out of balance in our greater world.

When this is out of site, the fullness of it all can truly overwhelm.

We have to sit for days, for hours, for years in the midstream. Between states. Often not knowing. Trying to find a way to trust the tumbling movement and the changing state. The potential, the place between the old life and the new. Inhabit the unknown. Find footing in the current of today when all familiarity is washed away.

We deserve support. That support is for all of Life, not a private individual. But every touch and kindness counts. Eyes and hearts and hands should be with us.

We are life. Our blood and our cessation moves and metabolises. Renews and purifies. We are the sponge ones, the mycelium, the embodied mystery, the agents of transformation and of change.

We heal through our lives our bodies and our love. Through our pain and through our tension.

How can we separate, and do we have to, our personal woundings and making goods from all that we have carried inside of ourselves from centuries of power over extractive ways of living? 

They land the same inside.

We must find again the pathways back to healthy cultural patterns that knew how to connect and thrive together.

In our living move way from the arid landscapes that have shaped us and in our initiations grieve them truly, not just distract ourselves from the pain that they have caused.

We deal with all we have internalised, and we deal with an enormous degree of unprocessed trauma from colonisation and disconnection. There can be no separation. We may not even need to know exactly what. But whatever we can tend internally makes the external work of change possible into the future. I really believe this.

We carry something at this point in time, our generations in particular carry a certain loading, of meeting a congestion so immense. It is not a burden though it might feel heavy, it is a possibility. It is an obligation and an honour. A response and responsibility. A capability and a capacity.

Look at it wisely. Teachers I love say we are never given more than we can handle (though I doubt this sometimes!)

Womans ceremony touches all. Inside and out. No separation.

We stand on the crest of the wave of this life.

Embodied.

In these bodies we bring and we sing and we can move what is stuck through us.

Not for others as victims or martyrs, but as the ones in the unbroken line through time who have the means to meet the needed shifts. Simply by being ourselves and meeting what is arising inside the vessel that is our body, heart, mind and spiritual connection.

How we do this really matters. Our care and love brings the needed energy.

I have forgotten this many times recently, as inside the storm it can burn so hard…. but even in the darkest hours we cannot ever be alone.

Call out. Call to our human friends, call to our ancestors, call to the great powers of creation so vast, call to the future. Call because we love our children and love our other than human kin. Call because we have voices and hearts and blood. And we want to live, and the others to live.

With all my love

Jill