Menopause
If you bring awareness to your throat, what do you feel?
When I explore this in myself, I feel a sense of vulnerability and an impetus to place my hand over my throat.
In my clinical work, the throat shows up consistently as an area of constriction, sensitivity, and stagnation. Particularly in the women I have worked with, this area of the body persistently asks for attention.
Why is this.
Do we suppress our voice to stay small, safe, liked?
In one framework I studied, we explored the five phases of menopause. The first of those is Betrayal.
Menopause forces a reckoning here. Specifically, it brings to light where and how we have self-betrayed. Where we have held back and stayed silent at the expense of our authenticity and often, our health.
Through the lens of our youth obsessed culture, menopause is framed as decline. What is rarely acknowledged are the abundant gifts contained within it.
Hot flushes are the body’s way of releasing stories that no longer serve us. As estrogen declines, so does the reflex to self-sacrifice.
Menopause serves as a threshold where the unsaid no longer bends to containment. It marks a shift from pleasing to speaking, from compliance to self-authority.
What we have resisted surfaces. What we have attempted to suppress reveals itself, offering us an opportunity for integration.
Grief has featured widely in my personal journey. I am becoming familiar with where it shows up in my body, how I tighten up against it in resistance. I am learning to sit with it, in stillness and silence, without trying to make it go away.
This work isn’t comfortable. But it’s essential.
Menopause is asking us to listen. Not to fix, override or transcend what arises but to stay. To remain present with what has long been unsaid. In doing so, something in us loosens. And what loosens begins to speak.