More notes on menopause

I know, from deep and lived experience, from study, and from a lifetime of exploring the women's mysteries, that this initiation into womanhood draws up the unhealed and the stagnant. Every threshold we meet offers us the chance to renew and replenish. But there is no shortcut. We have to navigate and metabolise the unprocessed material from before.

We are connected, inherently and absolutely. What is congested collectively also meets our own systems. So we do our own journey, the inner work that allows the outer life to become possible, while recognising that the imbalances in the outer world profoundly affect our experience of the inner realms too.

We digest things, not only for ourselves, but for all that we are connected to.

These critical thresholds—birth, menarche, childbirth and creativity, menopause, death—are each portals. They are opportunities for healing, or for the consolidation and crystallisation of what has remained unresolved.

Recently I have been feeling on the edge.

On the edge of reason.

On the edge emotionally.

Physically.

Spiritually.

It feels as though the uncompleted work of my life is working itself through my menopause.

How, in this time and place, is it really possible to make enough time to do the work that needs to be done in the proper way?

This time brings things up because they are asking to be healed.

I want to commit to really addressing the gaps. The things that make us yearn in the wrong way. The things that make us leaky. The places where we flap around, desperate to fill the enormous spaces left by childhood experiences that were never fully met.

We live in a society that has become so eroded of the culture that once knew how to meet these initiations with the space, wisdom and support they truly require.

So we meet our stuff pretty alone for the most part

What still needs clearing.

What a gift.

What an offering.

What an opportunity.

And yet we are living in the backlog of generations of unhealed trauma. We meet that too—in ourselves, individually and collectively—without a culture that truly knows how to support us through it.

Our generation is trying to course-correct so much personal, ancestral and intergenerational wounding.

As sponge women, as the ones who heal through our own systems, I wonder whether very few of us really appreciate the extent to which we are also carrying and metabolising the unresolved trauma of colonisation, disconnection and cultural loss.

We have overridden grief for so long because, in many ways, it has been the only way to survive.

We override what is healthy.

We distract.

We keep going.

And underneath it all sits the grief.

The grief for the loss of healthy culture.

The grief for the loss of belonging.

The grief for how we might have lived, connected and thrived together.

That grief is on the table now.

It is asking to be felt.

On one level, it looks as though this is happening to me.

But I think it is happening for something much bigger than me.

if I can navigate this well, perhaps it can be of service.