Autumn is connected to the queen, virgin, mage or wild woman archetype. It is also the perimenopausal portal for folks with wombs and blood cycles. Just like a queen or virgin forest, we are whole unto ourselves. The threshold that stands in our way at menopause is the chance to reclaim our life, and what our soul’s code was meant for. It is a time to remember what we love, reclaim what we were meant to do with our life, and also to re-wild in the best possible way.
Fall is the time where we balance light and dark. It is the time where we start to compost and shed what is coming to completion. Known as the harvest season, we honour the Earth and the Earth that is our own body. September honours the turning of the wheel, October is when we notice the veil is the thin between our world and our ideally departed. If our womb is our oracle, the luteal stage is the shape-shifting truth teller.
We are in the Chrysalis of our life. We’re turning even more towards the darkness.
I’m tired. I’m feeling the drain of my perimenopausal portal. I haven’t been sleeping through the night in months, and my hot flashes keep reminding me of the stress that I carry. I have started to love them as a conduit of the collective rage i feel on behalf of women and bodies with wombs. There is a lot to be angry about.
And so, when I don’t have the energy or capacity to do the things I like, I turn to social media as a way to feel connected with the world. And then it pulls me too far in: I have been in a relationship with my “smart” phone and it’s keeping from living my life. I had a light bulb moment that it’s a Part of me that relies on social media for company. And it is sabotaging me from actual connection. It’s a limiting belief and legacy burden of loneliness that is keeping me stuck. There are some cycles when my luteal lows are just insufferable. My most recent menstruation experience highlighted for me just how old this feeling is in me. I recalled my teenage self and her loneliness. I am becoming more like myself at 15 and 20 than in my 30s, with what interest me as well as my emotional wellspring. I lost myself there for a while, especially by internalizing patriarchy and becoming a mother. I am now coming back in alignment with my Self. Some of it is the modern-day experience of being busy and burning out because my soul knows it’s time to make an upgrade. What has changed is the version of me know has the capacity to hold the feelings.
Our core wound is the work that has to heal still. Mine is my loneliness that shows at my door uninvited, like the blood hungry vampire she is during my luteal stage. It is our soul’s calling to heal the bite marks, and also the use this wound as a portal to a bigger purpose. One way the see-saw is present is I have a Perimenopausal Part that holds wounds and a bit of guilt about not knowing more about my mother line, and their experiences with menopause.
I never got to see the goddess rise in my own mother. More so, I wasn’t able to realize that my mom was a goddess. We all are the embodiment of Her. My mother’s menopause was not honoured, a lot like her life in general. I have no idea when she moved through the portal and what her experience was like. Sometimes i feel guilty about this. And then i realize no one really understood menopause back then, let alone discussed it. So i give myself compassion. And i honour it now, i speak about her story now, i have been initiated by my own cycle, which moves as a monthly descent and initiation as it is.
Menopause is not just a physical change, a time of hot flashes, insomnia and changes in our menstrual cycles. it is not just brain fog, emotional irregularity and dysregulation. it is not just a change in our arousal and less kindness to others. Folks are concentrating so much on the symptoms that are distracting us from this bigger truth that we’re meant to evolve and reclaim our wisdom.
Venus of Willendorf and the primordial female statues were devotional goddess figures. And they were not postpartum bodies. They were menopausal and post-menopausal bodies.
Menopause is actually a spiritual transformation and an ancestral healing opportunity. It is the initiation into elderhood and it comes with sacrifice, the blood that is shed is that of our former fertility. We are stepping into our shamanic resonance, our medicine, our elderhood. Menopause is when we drop these good girl masks to step into our power. And if our own mothers didn’t get to do that, there is so much at stake for us to be able to repair and reclaim.
Not all rites of passage are physical but the ones that are also connected to a lineage of red threads. Our birth is connected to our mother’s personal red thread. In fact, at the half-way point of her journey, we are born. My womb was in my mother and before that her mother created the seed that became me. My womb carried my children: I love how our stories are woven together in this way.
The transition from maiden to mother is the first rewiring of a woman’s life and yet it’s one that we are wanting, that we asked for, that we have chosen to be initiated by. It’s one thing altogether to be initiated by perimenopause because it is a wake-up call or reconfiguration and a possible complete rewiring of what we thought our life was.
For an uninitiated maiden, the sacrifice is their full self. They chose to be the good girl or pretty one. For midlife, it is their former self they are sacrificing in order to step into their full power – to become the conscious virgin.
If matrescence is a deep initiation and identity shift, perimenopause is the invitation to our own death’s dress rehearsal (thanks Kimberly Ann Johnson for this reference). It is an opportunity for us to look back at our life at this moment in time and notice what we might want to still do or what we might want to change or become. This is why it’s called initiation into the second act of our lives.
We are living longer than our ancestors did. The average age at death is 78, so that is at least 20 years post-menopausal. Surely there is a reason we survive after menopause. We are becoming more seasoned by life, a well-seasoned woman is one that has lived a long life.
The Seasonality that Lives in Us
With this current reality, i turn to other species of nature that have existed long before us. The mother trees, Inanna’s story, metamorphosis, roses. Each has a season, a cycle of birth, death and rebirth. So too do we – each stage of our menstrual cycle has a connection to a season.
For instance, the follicular stage is known as Inner Spring. It’s when we have more energy and access to our creativity, and possibly a lighter mood. There’s a fresh energy similar to someone on a maiden journey.
Summer is associated with ovulation as our body opens a pathway where creating life is possible. It is not just about being pregnant with babies, but with life, with tending to our gardens and our dreams, cultivating the life we want. Summer is the halfway point of a year just like the initiation of motherhood is the halfway point of the stages of womanhood. It is the balancing act between two halves of the story.
The Autumn time is our luteal phase, when things start to feel darker and more heavy. The luteal phase is when everything that hasn’t been addressed rises to the surface. PMS is not a dysfunction in the body – it’s a message that some work to do to cleanse and clear. Sometimes it’s because you’ve taken on a lot that particular month and you are overwhelmed. Sometimes it’s because there are emotions and needs that haven’t been heard or honoured. This is the time to prune and compost what we no longer need and also harvest our potential, our purpose, our passion project for our life. This is the time that is needed before the winter years of our life. It serves as the portal to the descent. It is like the third stage of metamorphosis, that in-between time of no longer being a caterpillar, and not yet becoming a butterfly.
This flows into our menstruation time in Winter when we’re shedding and releasing, but also needing time to rest and cocoon just like winter offers. Every time we shed skin or let go in menstruation, we release something that is no longer needed and gives us more spaciousness and ease for what is becoming, and emergent. It is a messy process, destabilizing at times and also a cleansing for the next stage. This is the rebirth that comes from death, and is similar to our own monthly bleed and cyclical nature. It doesn’t have to be painful but it is a spiral descent and ascent process.
We are encoded with the birth, death and rebirth transformation in the depths of our body. Menopause offers recalibration, as it is a redefiner of our life. It is an opportunity for us to look back at our life at this moment in time, and notice what we might want to still do or what we might want to change or become still. This is why it’s called initiation into the second half of life. It starts with our body trying to get our attention.
These seasons continue in our post-menopausal time of life. Known as the Second Spring, this new season of life is no longer creating life outside us. It is a time for us to reclaim our own creativity. What we’re creating now is our spiritual awakening, our leadership, and stepping into our soul’s purpose and power.
When we enter perimenopause, this is a reckoning that takes place. Perimenopause is the last reproductive threshold for women. It’s the final opportunity to receive a report card, showing us how we have navigated our fertile year. What we have learned about our body via the menstrual cycle and monthly blood. It is a different type of blood test.
Let’s recognize the midlife transition as an initiation of the power and magnitude I had not experienced before. It is the invitation for individuation and sovereignty. Those of us with wombs and regular blood cycles experience a rite of passage each month, a ritual and ceremony offering, and an initiation if we are open to the blood mysteries underneath the physiological experience.
It’s time to gather, to sit together and learn from the elders, to be mentored by each other. It’s time to challenge ageism and the misogyny that co-exists with it. Our elders are not meant to run around but bestow wisdom from a body of rest. Let the young folk run around. They have the stamina for it. We need women in different seasons of life to come together. In order to recognize what season we are in, we need women in the same or other seasons. This is where our hormones dance and weave a shared tapestry together of mutual support and appreciation. The interplay of hormones, the mitochondrial DNA in women, the endocrine systems that reach towards each other, that send subliminal codes from one womb carrier to another, to sync up our cycles.
Perimenopause is known as the second puberty as it mirrors the influx and overhaul of hormones similar to adolescence. It is also a time machine portal because old traumas and emotional wounds can come back up to the surface.
Remember that connection we have to our mother, that womb that was our first home? Going through the perimenopause portal can bring up these earlier wounds of attachment. If our own mothers are our first experience of attachment, identity, safety, and relationality, these memories get stored in the body, especially in our womb. We need to offer ourselves care and that may mean we need to put down the hat of caretaking when it is at our own expense. Maybe this is why our hormones fluctuate during the stages of menstruation and drop more fully in perimenopause. If progesterone sedates us from feeling the heavy feelings and estrogen is the bonding hormone, it may serve us that they are depleting with age.
Our mom may activate us more when we are perimenopausal. It may be old wounds from her that have transferred onto us. We start to dissolve the daughter identify and become more embodied as the adult in the room. “If your mother suffered in silence, resented her life, never spoke her truth, you may be carrying that inheritance.” Shavita Kotak offers this truth bomb as a stark challenge to us to pick up the baton and do the work of healing.
Gone is the daughter archetype. The mother role is also now dissolving. You are becoming. Menopause isn’t the end but the beginning of selfhood. I may be a daughter but i am also an adult in my own right, stronger and more evolved than my own parents. And that is the way it should happen. And yet, why do we regress in the company of our mothers?
Perimenopause awakens past trauma and unhealed wounds as our body starts to shift and metabolize in midlife. The coping strategies that have accommodated and hid our wounds for so long start to not work as well. And at the same time, the roles we have become to identify with (namely wife and mother) start to lose their significance. It is at this life stage that we start to see unresolved wounds more clearly. The invitation is to turn towards them and heal the younger versions of ourselves now, when we have more clarity and time. This is why mid-life is an awakening and feels like a crisis – because it once was and we are lucky enough now to know what to do for our younger self.
Perimenopause is this opportunity to give ourselves a corrective emotional experience.
The second half of life is when we fine-tune our wisdom, we narrow down our niche and specialization. We move away from peak intense learning where our brain can take in a lot in our 20s and 30s. Our early adulthood is about enterprise and landing on what we want for our life. It’s in our 40s and 50s that we start to specialize as we can’t take in as much information. This is the time for contemplation and pausing so that we can start embodying all that the first half taught and gave us. That’s why we also need to start pulling in our soul self that seed within that lives underneath, so we can discern our own purpose and not be sued, but external move from ego to individuating. That’s why we call this time midlife crisis an emergence.
“At menarche a girl meets her power, through menstruation she practices her power, at menopause she becomes her power.” ~ Indigenous saying, author unknown