Menopause

If you bring awareness to your throat, what do you feel?

When I explore this in myself, I feel an intense vulnerability and an impetus to place my hand over my throat. I am also aware of a tightness, a sense of congestion.

In my clinical work, the throat shows up consistently as an area wanting attention. Particularly in the women I have worked with, there tends to be a feeling of stagnation or suppression here.

Why is this.

Do we suppress our voice to stay small, safe, liked?

Menopause forces a reckoning. Any Shadow material we haven’t yet integrated will likely surface at this threshold. It shows us where and how we have self-betrayed, what we’ve been holding back at the expense of our authenticity. Menopause, if navigated consciously, 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.

Hot flushes can be seen as the body shedding stories that no longer serve. Knowing these stories is not an intellectual pursuit. The mind’s allegiance is to safety and familiarity – not truth.

For this deep work we must go into our bodies, to listen to its whispers, to its screams.

Symptoms are our bodies’ way of communicating. They show us where we are out of alignment with ourselves. If we can meet them with presence, they can lead us back to wholeness.

Grief has featured widely in my personal journey with menopause. 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.

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.