We spend our childhood growing, building our mind and our body, we then move into the second phase of our life when we start and finish our periods, our menses, adulthood.

We spend these years outwardly doing, a need to achieve and accomplish, engaging with the outside world, for many of us feeding a need to fit in, and it is during this time we will have many different identities mother, daughter, colleague, partner, friend…

We then reach the time when we go through our Perimenopause. The energy of our body changes because our ovarian function starts to decrease and the main use of our reproductive system shifts. Whether we choose to or not, we are no longer intrinsically focused on procreating. The energy that we had used outwardly for all those years is still very much there, it just naturally goes from being spent on the external needs of our life, to a much more inwardly focus.

I like to think of this transition as a bridge, and as we cross the bridge from our Perimenopause into our Menopause we move from being women whose main biological purpose is designed to bring new life into the world, to be being women in ALL aspects of our life. As we leave our childbearing years behind we begin to embrace a bigger life, away from the more outward driven and approval seeking cultural restraints of society.

This transition is no bad thing, we are going to age, the key is to not resist it. But here’s the issue, many of us were never educated on Menopause and so we find ourselves resisting this natural change and dealing with symptoms because nobody told us how important it was that we take care of ourselves from the age of 35.

So we are trying to cross this bridge with accumulated, unprocessed experiences, trauma and grief. Little knowledge of the impact foods, thoughts and lifestyle, are having on what should be a period of wisdom and grace.

The prep work may be out of our hands, but we can still use daily lifestyle choices and awareness to help us cross that bridge with minimal symptoms and enter this third stage of life with insight not defeated before we begin 🙏🏻