As part of my initiation of turning 50 last year, i gifted myself a last step of integration that came with this pivotal birthday. As i have been immersing myself in womb healing training and offerings thanks to my perimenopause awakening, i felt called to receive a womb massage called Sobada from a traditional Mayan healer. Mexico has a special place in my heart and connects me to my mother. So, i took my family to Mexico. I spoke about the trip a bit in another post.
This part of my passage was transformative. The massage and womb ceremony were just what i needed to tend to my changing body. What happened at the end is what will stay with me for years to come. During the session i received Closing the Bones medicine. My body was encased in fabrics that are indigenous to Mayan culture. They are sacred, woven scarves called rebozos that create a womb-like holding of the body, very much like a chrysalis or Egyptian mummy.
My eyes were covered the whole time, and this offered me more internal visioning. It brought me down and through. It was during this descent that I felt the presence of my grandmothers. As my bones and body were put back in place, my red thread line joined me. My mother and grandmothers came to be with me from beyond the veil. They sat at my feet and offered me company, presence, and the missing community i have been searching for. What they also shared with me was gratitude for my decision to provide myself this loving touch because in doing so, i was also healing them. My healing was their healing. And i received the closure i needed, as well as the confirmation that i am on the right track.
What a true honour to be held this way. This session offered me the clarity and confidence i needed to step more calmly onto my next stage of life. In more ways than one, i am evolving.
Our ancestors knew something about gathering and marking times of change. No matter where your people are from or what they celebrated, it was with reverence and ritual. Births and deaths were honoured, sacred unions were celebrated, and all were seen as sacred passages of initiation and transformation.
We have lost this art of being in sacred gatherings. Our mothers and grandmothers maybe didn’t get to have this honouring as ageism and misogyny stole this from them. I never got to see the goddess rise in my own mother. Moreover, I wasn’t able to realize that my mom was a goddess. I am healing this mother wound and gate of grief in real time now, even after my mom’s death.
In a few days time, i will be offering a ceremony for women who are standing at the menopause threshold, or have already crossed it and didn’t get to experience an initiation for menopause. It is never too late to experience the ceremonial medicine that marks the blood rites of passage. I am doing it as a way to honour my mother and what she didn’t get to receive. I feel like i have her blessing now that she has been present during this stage of my becoming.
My mother’s death was a catalyzing experience for me. It created a shift in my timeline, and i think ultimately brought me back to my original blueprint. For the last 4 years, i have been learning the sacred art of anointment, both as a way to fully embrace my priestess path and spiritual devotion as well as honour my lineage. My mom was a chemist, and studied aromatherapy and essential oils. I inherited her many books and supplies about aromatherapy, herbal medicine, and plant allies. I will never know the whole story about her inspiration, but i do know she wanted more for her life and turned to creating art like this, so this is part of my motherline. I am finding my own way with it, by incorporating the oils i make with love and intention as part of my rituals and ceremonies, and regular devotional practice.
The stages in between times of transition, of blood rites and rites of passage like adolescence and perimenopause are thresholds. They are the liminal space between two landings. This is like the chrysalis stage in the story of becoming a caterpillar. Known as clay time as things make more of an impression of who were becoming in these rites of passage, we need to be held during this messy and tumultuous time.
In the book, The Menopause Brain, the author shared coming across the word “menostart” as an alternative to menoPAUSE. I appreciate this reframe because it is not true that things are only ending at this stage of life. So much also begins. Or at least there is the potential for it. That’s why we need to honour it with ceremony in order to reclaim this stage of life with the reverence it deserves.
I came up with a word that truly encapsulates this change for me – menomorphosis. It creates a helpful frame for the transformation that comes with menopause. There truly is alchemy in the goo that is perimenopuase. It is not just a fertile void or hot sweats – it is the fire that is coming back alive to help create something new from something old.
Thresholds like perimenopause offer us a chance to slow down and find intention in the initiation. Similar to pregnancy and birth, they offer us an invitation to step into our full experience in this rite of passage. Rites of passage are initiatory acts of crossing from one chapter in our life to another; from maiden to mother, to sage and crone.
Perimenopause offers us a reset. It is a time to step into our power as a woman and it offers an initiation of a spiritual transformation. The act of being witnessed through the change offer us the chance to step more confidently into the next chapter of our life story. Otherwise, we persist in a spiritual purgatory of sorts, a liminal space between two worlds. When we are not held in community, our soul and psyche struggle to find a place to land; it is our soul that is in crisis.
Pause before the Change
Developmental stages are physiological changes we all go through. Rites of passage fuse the science and biology of developmental stages with the spiritual initiation that is meant to support it. When we bring ceremony into the change, it facilitates a deeper initiation and ultimate ascent. We have lost the language and relevance of ritual and ceremony. This may be because we wanted to separate church from state, but i think it’s also because men in power didn’t want the strength and expertise of women to shine. It is in medicine, shamanism, ceremony and gathering that women are strong after all.
We need to endure the hardships in order to embrace the gifts that come with menopause.
While we surely need to embrace this inevitable change, we need to grieve our former self and what is now over. I’m not even talking about our bodies here. Don’t get me started on that, or maybe that is another journal yet to be written. This transition does come with a change in our energy and capacity as we clean house so that we can shed what is no longer needed. Luckily, with this loss comes an awakening – the birth of our “I Don’t Care” part – that had to grow out of the burn-out of the Good Girl and What About Me parts of us. What may be a consequence of that is the added loss of relationships as some folks who preferred us nice and polite will struggle with our new-found liberation.
A Way with Words – The Etymology of Words
The word sacrifice offers a hint to what is at its core – The root word of sacrifice is ‘sacer’ – to make sacred. So, when we sit with this reframe, we can see initiations as a sacred offering of what needs to die so that we can live more intentionally with what is still alive in us now. Sacrifice requires courage, devotion, and trust. It helps to think of our body as a story book character experiencing a fairy tale arc of surprise, surrender, and transformation.
Rituals bring us back in rhythm with life, and offer more harmony with nature, life, each other, and spirit itself. The word ‘rite’ bleeds right into its home in ritual. The Sanskrit word for ritual is rta and means ‘cosmic order’ or a natural flow of the universe. If we want to reclaim this ancient and universal understanding, this primordial truth, we need to remember that rituals are designed to honour significant moments and transitions in our lives. Be it starting school, graduating, our first job, or break-up, our home, all are thresholds we are meant to be walked through, not step across alone.
There is a song i love that keeps reminding me that life is a ceremony. We don’t need to host extravagant galas or go on expensive retreats to live a ceremonial life. The root of the word ceremony is ‘caerimonia’, the Latin word means sacred rites, religious worship, and a felt sense of awe and reverence. It is no wonder then, that being in ceremony changes us. It is meant to as it offers a deeper connection to our wombic home. Ceremony weaves us back into the original fabric that is our full aliveness, and it offers us a reminder of our shared existence on this living earth.
I have spoken before that ritual and ceremony are the first practices of therapy, of mind and soul medicine. In their beautiful book, The Seven Circles: Indigenous Teachings for Living Well, Chelsey Luger and Thosh Collings share a detailed list of benefits that ceremony offers folks. Participating in ceremony as a witness as well as the main guest of honour offer similar balms for ourselves. It can strengthen our community and re-villaging hopes as it restores our relationships and strengthens morale; it fosters both spiritual health as well as reminds us of our place within nature and the land, by also expanding and deepening our worldview, and it regulates our bodies to prepare for other life transitions.
It is through the practices of ritual and ceremony that we can mark a clear arc and story – through a beginning until the end. There is a clear container and they are meant to change us.
We are meant to be seen in our new skin upon stepping through the threshold. Group ceremonies that gathered folks together offered the witness element that is so missing now. Where are our elders, the village aunties who can pass down their wisdom? It is no wonder that social media is having a hay day with perimenopausal folks sharing their experiences – gone is the sacred ceremony and instead we have Instagram and Tiktok. This loss of feminine rites of passage has made way for a fabricated and soul-deprived world, and this loss highlights the even bigger theft that is the degradation of the Sacred Feminine.
Body and Soul
Since we are a body and also a mind and soul, it merits understanding that our identity also adapts, grows, and ultimately evolves with each threshold we step through. In order to become whole onto ourselves, we need to find our centre, that soul self within so that we can come into balance. This is where we can focus so that our self energy will be strong against the tides of change and external dis-ease. This is where ritual comes in, as a way to deepen into our devotion to our life.
For women and womb carriers, we have our own unique reproductive codes that mirror seasons. Starting from our mother’s conception and birth, flowing through to our own conception and birth, all the way past our birth, menarche, sexual initiation, and possible birth of our own children, we weave a tapestry of our lives right within our body. Each month offers a rite of passage with the phases of the moon, as well as our menstrual cycle – rites of separation, transition, and integration. Surely these are physical transitions and they are also emotional and spiritual. They are also relational simply because we are relational beings who thrive in connection, and become more fully actualized and initiated when we are witnessed and held.
It is the birth of our soul self and nurturing it that we come back in right relationship with ritual and the sacredness of each day, moving it from mundane and ordinary to divine and universal.
It is our soul seed that waits for us to find her, to nourish her, as it is this deeper connection with ourselves that allows us to move through descent and ultimate initiation. When we take time to listen to our inner knowing and wisdom that resides there, we can be met with our fullest self and move through life with more intention, presence and joy. It is a reclamation of coming home to self. When we drop the ego away and remember that our soft strength is in that seed, the soul guides us. We need to only listen.
Our body experiences this rite of passage so it’s more of a descent than an evolution. Like postpartum, we are not meant to bounce back. If we can reframe developmental stages as initiations, we are not as surprised by the sacrifice that is left on the altar. In this case, it is our former body.
If our body is a map, it is also a temple. I liken my womb to being my oracle so i treat her like an altar. I have learned to bow at her wisdom, and hold reverence for her story, as it is not mine alone. It is also my mother’s and all the mothers who came before me. It is also my children, and those that have yet to come.
Midlife is a threshold to get back on track.
We have forgotten that it is in mid-life that we are meant to retrieve our soul. Human developmental theorists like Carl Jung, Marion Woodman, Rudulf Steiner and Bill Plotkin show us this clearly. They also suggest rites to honour these bookends, or chapters of our life. It can be pilgrimage, quests, or sacred fire and moon dances. It can also look like a fresh hair cut or boudoir photo shoot for your eyes only.
I don’t need more information and content creation from 20 and 30 year olds who know things, surely. I love them for their passion and commitment to living their best life. What i need are elders who have walked a similar path to me already, who know something about life. Who laugh at the ego that gets in the way and instead embody eros without a second thought.
Healing is indeed a part of this process. We need to heal what is not repaired so that it stops being the force that moves us through life. That means we have to remove the internalized patriarchal lens about how we have been living our life till now.
It also means needing to heal from our own past experiences and trauma, as well as ones we inherited.
I don’t want to grow bitter or resentful, and fade away quietly, unseen and ignored. We need to shed the roles that keep us nice, polite, oppressed & repressed. (Thanks Sarah Durham Wilson for this phrase).
We need to remember it is our own life we are here to live. We aren’t here to take care of others and not rest or attune to our own pleasure, only to exhaust ourselves and die after a life of stress.
It is never too late to offer yourself a ceremony. Any time we do something with intention and ritual, our soul seed blossoms. This also allows for more healing and completion to happen, especially for the blood rites from our past that were not honoured. Maybe your menarche was not celebrated, or your baby shower was more a party than a women’s circle. It is never too late to complete the initiation that is woven in your womb – they are all connected as one red thread after all.
If we can walk our human journey called life with our eyes wide open, with a consciousness of knowing about where we’re meant to be going, we don’t just find ourselves in mid life stunned about how we got here. We can instead arrive at it with more surefootedness and clarity.
Being in ceremony offers you this commitment. You can’t go wrong when you commit to yourself.