Yesterday I found myself diving into the depths of the earth - down, down, down into the fathomless, bottomless, infinite earth. Around me were other meditators diving down their own chutes. Yes, this is San Francisco, the land of the experimental. And yes, we’ve been know to explore some interesting landscapes. Only this time we were taking a journey with, and into, our bodies.

The idea of this body-focused meditation is this: by imagining you’re falling, you leave behind your regular or habitual thoughts, and discover who you are - when you’ve just got your body for company. It’s quite an eyeopener really. You're forced into an intimate relationship with this one and only familiar ‘friend’, way down there.

Similarities with the journey of menopause abound. There's that falling feeling when the bottom drops out, flailing in the dark depths, coming face-to-face with each ache and pain in your joints, in your heart, in your temperament.  It's in the dark that your body begins to talk to you. 
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Bodies talk really, really quietly and really, really slowly. So you have to tune in to hear it, especially if you're doing a lot of running around.  If you ignore it - like when you don't get enough sleep or when you hang out with that person who doesn't treat you kindly - it has to start raising its voice so you pay attention. Then one day you begin to notice ... ​

{Read more}

My recent guest blog for Menopause Goddess Blog ~ the straight-from-the-hip, full-of-integrity, genuinely helpful musings of the lovely Lynette Shepherd and her merry women.  {It also happens to be one of Healthline's Top Menopause Blogs of 2014}.  

"There’s lots of talk these days about how feeling disconnected has long term effects on our health. Not that we need more research to confirm what we know in our gut.

We humans are wired for connection. Our digestion is better when we eat with others, and even better when we luxuriate in conversation and laughter. We feel our whole parasympathetic (rest and relax) nervous system kick in as our breathing syncs with our loved one and we drift off to sleep. We even attune with other creatures – we all know how our four-legged companions warm our hearts and bring us joy.

Here’s the flip side of all that yumminess:"  read more here ...

Don't you sometimes wonder about those societies where there aren't any words for PMS or perimenopause - experiences that remain unnamed because they aren't experienced? Are they fortunate enough to live unstressed lives? And if they are stressed - do they metabolize it differently so as not to have symptoms? Research please, anyone?

I want to emphasize that, for the most part, we are not to blame for our stressed lives. Our world is out of whack, no doubt! Just note how difficult it is for us to agree that our first order of business as a society is the wellbeing of each other. (This is why we need older women to take over the reins - oh come hither, Conscious Menopause Revolution!). No, clearly there's something wrong with this picture, that there are so many obstacles to accessing:

• wholesome empowering affordable health support,  
  
• affordable wholesome food, 
• clean air and water, 
  
• and this less examined: wholesome in-the-flesh community, family and friends
  

However, we are a tenacious lot, us humans, and we all know deep down that we deserve a fulfilling, healthy and joyful life. We are swept along by that ingrained imperative and it's in recognition of this unstoppable force that I offer these three steps.  They're simple, but they give you back your power. Once taken, you can expect the grip of moodswings, insomnia, irritability and anxiety to loosen, and for the opportunities for restoring balance to your garden to become self-evident.

Step One:  Shift the blame
Shift your orientation to see stress as the problem, and let your hormones off the hook. 

When you do, you'll be freed up to take an honest look at what's not working in your life and change it! 
It's in your power to:

• eat better
  
• learn to love yourself - warts and all
  
• be nourished and appreciated and even cherished in your relationships
  
• rest and laugh and celebrate more

Shifting your focus from blaming your hormones to tending to your wellbeing is like installing a sprinkler system - providing ongoing, sustainable, reliable watering. Unless you turn your disapproving frown from your body to your environment, you cannot win this battle.  Relying on pills or remedies to fix or suppress the problem, without cultivating a collaborative relationship with your hormones by learning to listen to them, will just relocate the issue to another part of the garden, and trust me, weeds will pop up there too.  

Once you've taken the biggest step - shifting your focus to identify the real culprit - you're ready for ...

Step Two: One small stress for womankind … 
Step two has you looking at an aspect of your life that feels off - and changing it.  Here's the kicker: make sure you can succeed! 

Don’t choose the giant oak first - like leaving your disrespectful partner or buying a RV and hitting the road in the dead of night.  Hint: a great place to start, especially for us 'good girls', is to learn to say no.  I see over and over again how insidiously this one sneaks into our daily lives. 

See if there’s one demand you can let go of and let someone else pick up. Leave the dishes dirty just once, or ask your child's friend's parent to drive them this time, or wait a beat before volunteering for that one extra thing.  Choose one small step per week, or per month, but make sure you choose one where you are guaranteed to succeed. You get bonus points if you treat yourself to something you love doing instead. And if you’d like to take it a step further, you can keep a record of the changes you make and your symptoms to see how they're related, and watch what flowers ...  

Step three: Get support
If reducing stress was easy, wow, we’d all be grooving along - hip hopping our way through our lives. Trying to do this alone is stressful in and of itself and makes it so much harder to succeed. 

No matter how motivated and disciplined you are, it’s simply more meaningful to share your experience with and be inspired by other women choosing to shift gears too. Life is so much richer and more fun (and success so much easier to achieve) when we share our insights, reflect what we see and hold hands while we struggle. We women are wired for connection - and we bring out the best in each other when we hold ourselves accountable to one another as we tend to our wellbeing. (If you don't agree, here’s a stressor that might be impacting your health). 

I know this because for the last few years I've sat in Circle with women in peri/menopause. I've seen extraordinary moments of vulnerability tempered with a deep knowing that emerges as a woman lets go of her adversarial relationship with her hormones and finds her way back to home.  Like the difference of making love to yourself and a romp with your beloved - I believe simply being in the presence of women who are drawn to share this curious and remarkable life allows for more in each of us to be revealed.

What's your undiscovered Wisdom? Here's how you can find out - join us on the crazy good adventure!

Menopause is Coming
You turn around and here you are, in your 40’s, at this middle(ish) point in your life and you start hearing faint whispers of those dreaded words: “Menopause is coming”.  But just as quickly you reassure yourself - no, it’s not happening to you, your periods are just as regular as ever.  They might be a little lighter (or heavier), they might be coming more or less frequently (but just by a few days) but they are still coming - so hey, perimenopause is not happening to you - yet.

At the same time, you’ve noticed you’re not feeling ‘yourself’ exactly.  You’re a lot less patient than you used to be - in fact, you’re discovering an inner volcano that can erupt without warning. Perhaps you’re attributing this to the shortage of sleep you’ve been having lately or the way everyone’s just more annoying.  Either way, you feel this deep, incessant calling well up, that’s pulls you away from your life.  If this impulse could speak … wait, it wouldn’t speak, it would shout: “Leave me alone.  I just want some time for myself!”  

The cry of the perimenopausal woman as you step into the Change of Life.

Here’s what you can no longer endure: sticky relationships, repetitive conversations, meaningless niceties and all the demands, demands, demands. You really need some help to liberate you from these soul-devouring quagmires - please!
You could wait for some gorgeous deux ex machine to fly in and save you, or ... you can give yourself permission to try something else. Like juiciness over “good-enough”. Like empowerment over obligation.  Like self-love over approval.

Contrary to popular belief, you can choose how to move through menopause  
You can wait for the ‘symptoms to strike’ or … you can consciously enter this pivotal rite of passage with curiosity, smarts, an open heart, irreverent humor and a band of sisters to guide and support you. When you do, you’re saying no to the limiting, and quite honestly demeaning view of menopause we’re offered.  You’re choosing instead to engage with your desires, your dreams, your wellbeing, your wisdom and your need for sisterhood (yes, we’re wired for each other - it’s how we metabolize our collective Wisdom) to have this rite of passage be meaningful and real and transformative. 

We said real: this menopause stuff is not a walk in the park.  Just like at menarche (the decade between budding breast and regular cycles), you're tumbling about with your fluctuating hormones as you learn to tap into your unassuming but potent menopausal hormones.  

Wait a minute.  You thought the problem at menopause is that your ovaries stop releasing eggs, right?  And that this is the beginning of the end, the fork in the road that just leads downhill?  While it’s a true biological fact - you stop ovulating, and eventually stop menstruating - it’s not true that this means our health is compromised and we’re on the way out.  It also doesn’t mean your value as women diminishes - an insidious unconscious message of menopause.  

Sexuality in menopause and beyond
We can choose to see your hormones through a different lens? Really?  Let’s ponder our sexuality to explore this:
You’ve heard some women say sex just gets better and better with age, right? (And other women switch off their sexuality with relief - I have some ideas why that might be, which I’ll save it for another time …). If we were just dependent on our reproductive hormones for our satisfaction and responsiveness, how come most women say their lives improve after menopause - that they’re happier, healthier, and have better sex lives than when younger?

Something else must be happening.  I often wonder if there are some undiscovered energetic ingredients in estrone and estriol (the estrogens produced by our adrenals, fat cells, liver and ovaries which kick in big time at perimenopause) that turn you into a full-blooded orgasmic older woman.  Just as a caterpillar dissolves to re-reform as a butterfly, you shape shift to transform from Mother to Queen, from being hormonally-sexual to being soul-sexual.  And as you transform, you gain access your mature, full-bodied, feminine wisdom - that Wise Woman knowing you feel growing stronger and stronger.

This is stepping into Menopause consciously 
I know, I’m taking you on a bit of a paradigm shift - an empowered way to move through perimenopause? 
Let’s play with this a little:

• If menopause (with a small ‘m’) is a smorgasbord of inconvenient symptoms, Conscious Menopause moves beyond “symptom-management" -  to discover the changes your soul wants you to make.  
• If menopause is pathologized and makes you afraid, Conscious Menopause chooses to engage in discovering what’s truly possible in this second half of your life. 
• If menopause makes you feel helpless and out of control, Conscious Menopause holds you accountable for your own wellbeing - including your commitment to harness the potency of this decade of transformation.
• If menopause makes you want time to stand still, Conscious Menopause embraces The Change - you revamp outdated beliefs, update your relationships, and, of course, 'pimp your ride' (aka embrace your new and changing body).

More good news: no woman left behind
Not for the feint of heart, indeed, but here’s more good news.  If this seems like a lot of work - shifting always does - I invite you to join me and the groundswell of savvy, sexy and life-honoring women who are claiming menopause as we’ve claimed menstruation.  We are gathering because we recognize what a remarkable and unstoppable resource we already have in perimenopause - each other.   

Here's how we midlife mavens hold each other up:

• We give ourselves (and each other) permission to include in our daily diet those handpick, soul-nourishing ingredients that turn us on
  
• We allow ourselves (and each other) to "learn-by-stumbling" as we birth into our full womanhood with heart-laced authenticity 
  
• We set our own (and our collective) sights on a richer, deeper, spicier, belly-laughing, tea-spurting, soul-satisfying second half of life
  

Let's declare: We Wise-Women-in-the-making are stepping into our Change together - courageous, sexy and adventurous sisters embracing the transformative power of menopause!  And we're bringing each and every woman along for the ride!

Conscious Menopause, the movement
If this turns you on, you’re invited to a free online class on Sept 10 called The 5 Steps to a Conscious Menopause.   We’re gathering there, and also in Conscious Menopause Circles (online and in the San Francisco Bay) - an easy, intimate and profoundly delicious way to tap into this collective wisdom.  

Let’s meet our maturity with barefaced, courageous honesty. Let’s choose the luxuriant, meaningful and fierce compassion embodied in our creative, menopause-enriched, full-body feminine wisdom - and spread its life-giving mojo with our hungry world!

Have I lost my marbles asking women to add one more thing to their crazy, busy days - in the interest of their health?  They’re having a hard enough time getting exercise and eating well.

Well, that’s just it.  It’s our lives that are out of whack - really. Thankfully, our bodies are remarkably resilient - adapting to the many fluctuations and stressors our modern lives present.  Until they don’t. 

What if I told you that the early warnings of depletion and too much borrowing from “Petra to give to Paula” can be seen visually long before the body sends us a message via ‘symptoms’ of distress.  (Hello, PMS, perimenopausal symptoms and more! ).  Im not talking about hormone tests or x-rays or MRI’s. Im talking about a low tech ‘visual aid’ that allows you to see and discern, on a daily basis, if your body is functioning just as it should. 

And here’s the kicker: in the process of learning to create this visual aid (yes, it’s self generated) you develop skills that support your health for the rest of your life.  You don't have to wait for your body to start malfunctioning to begin. 

So what is it, this ‘visual aid’? 
Simply put, it’s charting your body’s ‘events’ to get a remarkably accurate and detailed picture of your current (and future) health.  You do this by generating a visual of your hormonal profile (and thus overall reproductive and general health, too).  The beauty is that it’s not a one time snapshot (like hormone tests) but an ongoing, interactive, biofeedback tool that simultaneously deepens your relationship with and understanding of your body. 

This tool, aka body literacy*, is designed to grow with you as you move through the different stages of your hormonal life.  
In the ideal world, body literacy
So in the ideal world, body literacy would begin at puberty, support a young woman through the her first hormonal transition through adolescence, setting her up with an understanding and appreciation of her body.  As with all the hormonal phases of her life, she will learn what she can do to have ease in her monthly cycles (PMS needn’t be endured, and in fact is a distress signal from the body).  

In the reproductive years
Body literacy in the reproductive years (20-35) allows a woman to maintain optimum health as reflected in regular periods, smooth pre-menstruation and menstruation, healthy skin, stamina, restorative rest, balanced emotions and the like. 

It also gives her an intimate knowledge of her fertility - so she knows where she is in her cycle, when she ovulates, when her cycle deviates from her normal pattern, and why that’s happening.  In this way she tracks her health and fertility, so that she’s not surprised later to learn that she has been depleted hormonally without knowing it. 

In addition, and this is a HUGE one, she develops confidence in knowing at any time when she’s fertile and when she’s not.  She then has the option of using her body literacy to practice natural birth control, avoiding hormonal birth control options that suppress her endocrine system.  (At best they can make her feel crappy and lower her libido and at worst they can compromise her fertility and reproductive health). 

She’ll also have an embodied awareness of her fertility to make important career/family decisions, avoiding the regrets that so many modern women feel when they haven’t tended to their reproductive health and/or arrive at perimenopause without warning. 

A smooth perimenopause is possible
In our ideal scenario, a body literate woman notices she is perimenopausal somewhere between 35-45 - when her hormone profile begins to change, usually long before her period starts changing or skipping.  If she hasn’t already tended to her hormonal balance, her body will begin sending her messages in the form of symptoms. 

Our modern lives are stressful. I know this is ‘normal’ for many of us, and many of us feel there is no way around all these stresses.  We have demands on our time and energy from our families, our relationships, our jobs - we are ‘on’ all day until we collapse in front of the TV or in bed at night, only to start over the next day.  

From our hormones' perspective, as the stresses continue, our bodies need to produce more and more stress hormones to maintain this state of ‘chronic’ stress and it starts to ‘borrow’ from our sex hormone production, as well as overtaxes our thyroids and adrenals.  If we are ‘lucky’ enough to make it to perimenopause without visible signs of depletion, you can expect, as our hormones shift into non-reproductive mode, for these symptoms to call for your attention.

Body literacy at this time can mean the difference between enduring symptoms that can make us feel crazy and/or disrupt our lives and having a smooth transition through perimenopause into a healthy, sustaining menopause and beyond.  Charting our symptoms and what’s happening in our bodies shows us the dietary, lifestyle and stress management adjustments we need to make.  They also serve as a powerful biofeedback tool that inspire us to actually make these changes.

Having empowering choices
As we know, if a woman doesn't want to rely solely on consultations with her doctor but wants to take a more pro-active role with her health, she has to sort through a lot of confusing and often conflicting information.  

Charting and body literacy empower her to understand the causes of hormonal imbalance she finds, and give her non-invasive, restorative, sustaining and natural options that affect her physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing.  

Here's what I find, with others and myself: charting is good, clean fun.  Staying attuned to your body as an investment in 
the future, hmm, it doesnt get better than that, right? 

Here we go - 
A idea came to me in the shower, as they tend to do. 

It started with a question:  How would it be to have a community of women wear their hormones 'on their sleeves'?  And then I remembered I was going to two of my favorite summertime gatherings - the Northern California Women's Herbal Symposium and the Honeyroot Women's Embodiment Retreat - where there will be hundreds of women. Plus these are women who are interested in bodies and health and new realities and such.   I know they will be game to participate in this never-been-tried-before (as far as I know) collective experiment. 

The visual came next.  Women with different colored yarn on their arms - symbolizing where they are in their monthly cycle (left) and in their life cycle (right).  Some suggestions of ice-breakers to whet their appetites and the fun begins ...

Like - 
You see a woman is premenstrual (increased sensitivity) and you ask her to help you be more attuned. 
You see an elder (a wise woman whose blood is now being held within her) and you ask if there is anything she’s seeing that will be helpful for you to know.
You see a premenstrual (contemplative, reflective) woman, and you tell her about a wonderful quiet spot by the creek where no-one will bother her (ditto a perimenopausal woman).
You see a menstruating woman and ask if she needs a back rub with some delicious smelling oil.
You see an ovulating woman (lots of energy, willing to connect) and you have a new friend.
You see a perimenopause woman and ask her to show you how to stop worrying so much about what others think.  

Introducing ... The Cycles of Life Project 
Now that it's manifesting, I think this idea has been incubating for many, many years.  Possibly since my own struggle with PMS in my 30's, when my self-care took a nosedive - taking my self-esteem with it.  Perhaps while watching my daughters traverse the rough waters of menarche and adolescence without much support or compassion for their fluctuating emotions. Certainly as I sit with women learning to chart their cycles and I see the dots being connected before my eyes. (Ka-ching!) And now, in my late 40's, as my friends transform from sweet, accommodating self-sacrificing young women into boundaried, strong no-bullshit purveyors of Truth, it makes sense that now's the time to ask these questions out loud. 

If our hormones were transparent, out in the open, for all to see, would we relate to each other differently?  
Would we feel more at ease in our bodies, and with that, would some of our hormone related symptoms diminish? 
How would it be to live in a world where our hormonal/cyclic nature is regarded as an asset?  What if our hormones were not only respected, but actually honored for the variety, color and richness they possess?  

We're about to find out.  I've devised a questionnaire for the participants in this exciting experiment.  And I will use this blog to let you all know what happens ... 

Stay tuned ...