WomanKind #7 – Woman, rewilded

This is the seventh in a series, WomanKind, on reclaiming the feminine. 

The moment of bewilderment when I wake up from the trance. How did I get here? Where did I go wrong? How could I be so naive? I thought I knew my body. I’m 47 and unknowingly in my last bleeding year, earlier than the average age of 50.

Menopause is weirdly wonderful. We never know when this moment – the last bleed – will arrive, leaving many women bewildered and unconscious to its transformative power. I was struggling to make sense of my relevance and value to a culture intent on stigmatising, medicalising and avoiding this natural rite of passage. 

Nature had conspired to shut down my menstrual cycle early because I had stopped listening. And hadn’t been for a long time. Not listening to the whispers, then shouts and screams of a depleted, stressed and anxious body, trapped in a life for more than 10 years, that was untrue. My instincts had been deadened in a form of learned helplessness. Unable to act, fearful and paralysed in a dysfunctional, manipulative and controlling marriage, my soul starved of oxygen and nutrition to thrive. 

Maybe menopause is the evolutionary, biological imperative; shut down the mother’s fertility to be in a better position to ensure the survival of the family group or tribe. The grandmother theory suggests exactly this, that the tribe can have a higher rate of survival if mothers can be more involved with their children’s health and wellbeing especially during times of upheaval. 

I relate to this theory. In the coming 5 years my life would be rich in drama, I would find myself in a body navigating menopause – few hot flushes and no menstrual flooding –  but debilitating insomnia driven by PTSD, fleeing from a country that had been home for 20 years, an imploded marriage, financial erosion, death of my sister from cancer and a single parent in charge of my two daughters’ well being, aged 10 and 13.

It is a lot for one body to survive and the evolutionary cost was the disappearance of my menstrual cycle. 

When you have this moment of realization that you are in a delusion, and that everything you were doing was part of perpetuating the problem…there’s that moment of bewilderment. And I call that the fertile ground of bewilderment. Because that unknowing is an empty space that allows new responses to emerge.

Charles Eisenstein

There was no initiation process to go from bewildered to rewilded. No roadmap to navigate menopause from my matrilineal ancestors (nor the bewilderment of menarche). I was groundless and homeless and had to start all over again at age 50. To find my tribe, my supporters, to find navigators to show me a way to the medicine, take the tonic, be strengthened and find my way back home. The classic “sheroes” journey is the rite of passage of menopause.

It has taken me two years to create my own rite of passage, that has become known to me as the pause space; the empty, unknowable space. A space to stop, listen and feel; the ground to birthing a woman, rewilded, self worthy, and more embodied in her power physically, emotionally and spiritually. A creator, activator, curator and now flame bearer of the sacred feminine. 

Menopause is the initation into Woman, rewilded, standing in her power, her beauty, re-learning feminine intuition, feeling pleasure, joy, and resilience. Keeper of wild woman wisdom from the Maga years –  menopause – into the Crone years, to old age and beyond. We wake up, get up and get going to keep doing the work that reconnects the feminine – heart to womb, body to soul, beat to beat.

Image credit: Minnie Lumai, Yab-yabbe-geni-nim, Waringarri Aboriginal Art