Finding the Gift in Menopause

Exploring how women in the past and in other cultures have approached menopause was fascinating to me, and I used it as a guide to open up and deepen my own experience.

Part of continuing to expand my understanding of menopause meant, for me, finding simple ways to keep it real and maintain lightness. I tend to learn more when I don’t get hooked into an intensity of trying to absorb knowledge and information. It has to make sense in my body so I can experience the feeling and mark that as a learning point to use as my guide to evolving. One of the examples of this was my choice associated with experiencing the hot flushes.

I decided to rename “hot flushes” as “my meeting with the Elders”.

Menopause, Motherhood and Ageing: Discarding the Ideals and Discovering True Beauty

I recently became aware how the ideals of motherhood and related beliefs have an enormous longevity and persistence in women and girls of all ages, and can even affect how we enter and experience menopause.

I have observed girls and women from ages 12 to 50 make the possibility and reality of motherhood the focus of their lives: their sole purpose of being a woman. The number of women seeking fertility treatments has skyrocketed over the last two decades as the desire, and often desperation, to have a child kicks in, with the promise of motherhood and a complete family. In truth, and perhaps, surprisingly, this motherhood ideal continues after menopause.

Menopause: a Deeper Connection to Myself as a Woman

My journey into menopause began as I started noticing and feeling certain changes in my physical body: my shape rounded slightly around my hips and lower abdomen, and there came a series of what felt like a volcanic heat erupting in my body, particularly from the chest upwards. These sweats would come and go quite quickly in duration but vary in their intensity as well as their frequency. At times the heat felt prickly and all consuming, and at other moments it was a feeling of letting go, with a quality of freedom. There were intermittent feelings of frustration, with a yearning to understand more of what was going on inside me. I found I experienced varying degrees of feeling light and heavy within my body throughout the months, and the cycles of no bleeding became longer and longer until a year had passed with no period.

What I am describing here are only some of the physical changes I began noticing. But there is more to menopause than just the physical symptoms.

Menopause and Me – A New Chapter in life, Listening to My Body and Making Wiser Choices

I was truly inspired after reading the blog My Reincarnation through the Menopause by Susan Lee. I couldn’t agree more that there is definitely a life afterwards, and that older women are not ‘over the hill’, or ‘invisible’!

The Change

I am a woman of 61, and I went through the menopause about 9 years ago at aged 52. I am married and had my 2 children in my 30s. In my 40s I was very curious to know what to expect from both a physical and emotional standpoint, it seemed a rather bleak outlook with nothing much to look forward to after ‘The Change’. I even went to a conference on menopause with experts speaking on different topics, like HRT, and I reflected to myself asking, “Isn’t menopause just a natural and normal event in a woman’s reproductive cycle and not a disease?” 

My Reincarnation through the Menopause

My menopause began when I was 47 years old and this was at a point in my life when everything was changing. My marriage had come to an end and my daughter and my son were preparing to leave home. Little did I know at that time that this was just the beginning of life, and that I was about to be reincarnated. I use the word ‘reincarnated’ because that is how it feels in retrospect – as though:

All that I had been before was a shadow of the woman I am today.

I am now 69 and the intervening years have been a gradual unfoldment from a point where I felt discarded and where:

I had no concept of how it would be to live life without the recognition of being needed.

Hot flushes, Menopause and True Responsibility

By Sharon Gavioli, Registered Nurse, Birth Educator, Counselor, Brisbane, Queensland

At the age of 46, my body decided to commence the first signs of impending menopause with intense hot flushes.

This came as a shock to me, as my mother had told me she did not reach menopause until she was 55 and that her periods had continued regularly, until one month after which they never returned. I felt at 46 that I was too young for menopause but despite my objections this cycle had begun.

I experienced irregular cycles and significant hot flushes for the next five years.

Menopause – Not the Poisoned Chalice you Might Think it is

by Dragana Brown, London, UK

There is a misapprehension (or two, or three…) and a certain (stale) air around menopause which says (in an unspoken way) that a woman has reached her best before – or even worse, her expiry date – when menopause looms.

So what happens if the ‘use by’ date occurs during your unripe and not ready-to-be-written-off-the-shelf age?

HOT HOT Flushes – Embracing Menopause

by Bina Pattel, Age 51, London UK

What are hot flushes, who gets them and why?

I was out there looking for something – anything to take away what I thought was the worst thing ever, and to top it all off, they just didn’t stop.

My hot flushes have been around for about 3 years now. At first, I was convinced they would be gone in a few months; I noticed how much I reacted to them and this made it worse. Well, they are still around and how I react to them has changed for sure.

Stripping off my clothes and creating a drama got a bit boring as they were happening a lot and my laundry room was full of washing! Now I have accepted them as a part of my life. Wearing layers and never covering my neck with a scarf helps, especially on public transport.

I went to the GP who told me that HRT (hormone replacement therapy) is given in the form of a pill to suppress the hot flushes.  However, once I stopped taking them, the hot flushes would come back. The GP thought there was no point as she felt I was “managing” them well. I could not understand why any woman would want to delay something like this for a later date – better out than in, I say!

Celebration of the Cycle of Menopause

 

by Bernadette, Self-employed in Community Services, Australia

Last month I attended ‘the first gathering’ in Melbourne for a group of women in the cycle of menopause. If I’m honest, I attended because I have loved being with the women who attend the women’s meetings, the sharing that occurs and the unifying experiences that remind us of our true power as women – the power of learning to truly be ourselves, connecting to our ability to be still, to really feel our bodies and to appreciate and celebrate the well of wisdom they contain.

This specific Menopausal Women’s Group I attended because it was another opportunity to have this wonderful experience again… AND I was eligible because I biologically fitted the criteria (not that that was necessary)!

What occurred was profound for me.

During the evening I was moved by all the different ways in which women experience the cycle of menopause.

There were women who were parents of very young children sitting beside a grandmother who was just learning to say no to the demands of her adult daughter. One woman told of her 70-year-old pattern of rescuing her sister that she had recently broken, whilst another woman was facing risky surgery for cancer the following week.

Menopause – Not The End Of Life As I Know It

by Adrienne Ryan, BEd, Brisbane, Australia

At a recent presentation by Serge Benhayon of Universal Medicine, I came to a deeper understanding of the beauty and power of menopause.

This is the stage I am coming to next in my life cycle, where my body will say: the time of bearing and raising children, of ‘bringing life into the world’, has completed and now it is time to nurture and care for others in a different way to:

Support them to take responsibility for the quality of life they are building, knowing that this quality is what they will take with them into their next life.

It is very beautiful to be reminded that women bring life into the world and later support life to leave the world too. I don’t have children but nonetheless children have always been and still are around me in my day-to-day life. Mothering is a quality I have expressed with children and others – it is a part of how my body impulses me to relate to the world as a woman.

EVERYTHING HAS ITS STAGE IN LIFE’S CYCLES