Home » » Menopause Naturally » Menopause - The Wise Woman Way

Menopause - The Wise Woman Way

© Susun S Weed

WHAT IS MENOPAUSE?

To the MD, menopause is the last drop of blood a woman sheds. A woman can be peri-menopausal (around menopause) or post-menopausal (after menopause) but she can never be menopausal, according to this definition.

To most women, however, the years between the first suspicion of change and the final menses constitute the menopausal years, and we are menopausal throughout that time. This decade of transition is compared by some to non-stop PMS, by others to an extended pregnancy. I see it as a second puberty.

Menopause is puberty prime, and the change from a familiar, known self to new and unknown self is the same: amazing, difficult, rewarding, exasperating, and momentous.

"Do not become alarmed when you experience yourself in totally new ways," sighs Grandmother Growth tenderly. "You are changing, getting ready to be initiated into the third stage of your life. Are you ready for the ride of your life?"
Susun Weed, Menopausal Years the Wise Woman Way, Woodstock: Ash Tree, 2002

THE STORY OF MENOPAUSE

The onerous physical/emotional changes that accompany puberty and menopause are strongly influenced--both positively and negatively--by cultural, familial, and personal beliefs.

If we expect our new self to be more powerful, more exciting, more interesting than our old self, we willingly undergo discomfort, pain, sleeplessness, emotional variability, and a host of annoyances and distresses. In America today, this may be the case when we experience puberty, pregnancy, birth, and lactation.

If we expect our new self to be a weaker, less interesting, grayed-out version of our older self, we will naturally resist changing and find the normal abnormalities of change intolerable. This is often the case when American women encounter menopause.

The purpose of this article is not to examine why this is so, or how it came to be so, but to offer a different view of menopause. I want to share with you the teachings I have received from the Ancient Ones, the ancient grandmothers who tell the women's mystery stories, that your journey may be made richer.

"The joy of menopause is the world's best-kept secret. Like venturing through the gateway to enter an ancient temple, in order to claim that joy a woman must be willing to pass beyond the monsters who guard its gate. As you stand at the brink of it, it can appear that only darkness, danger and decay lie beyond. [But] ... as thousands of women from all cultures throughout history have whispered to each other, it is the most exciting passage a woman ever makes."