Lately, I have been looking very deeply into women’s health. And by women’s health I don’t mean sexual organs health, but women’s soul, their whole body. After all, how else could an approach be truly holistic.
There is one area that came up recently and that is the menopause. I haven’t got direct experience with it in this lifetime, but here are some intuitive insights that I feel useful to share.
I have always held the crone energies very closely. Youth used to be somewhat of a hindrance to me most of the time, particularly because my youth was so difficult, and my experience gave me wisdom beyond my age. I used to have this childlike face which was rarely taken seriously, as in our culture, we somehow pose experience versus innocence. As if they couldn’t function together.
I’ve experienced a first aging jump in my mid-twenties, when I was working two jobs and it took a toll on my fresh appearance. But hey, battle scars happen, right.
When I really experienced the unthinkable mystery of growing older was just at about turning thirty – the first fine wrinkles all of a sudden appeared in the mirror, the hairdresser indiscreetly proclaimed finding a grey hair or two… So, on my thirtieth birthday, I made the decision to start living *for me*.
To my big surprise, I now find myself in my early midlife! Surprise because I wasn’t always at all sure I’d make it this far, and second because how did it even happen!?
But there’s no panic. If anything, I’m experiencing a settling into my bones, a natural withdrawal from the need of pleasing others with my looks, or with anything for that matter.
Growing into myself, consolidating and rewrapping my life experience, letting go of the baggage and mistakes of my youth, after all, it won’t be needed on this second half of my journey. The fears of society of ‘But aging is horrible, you’ll look terrible, it comes with illness and dementia and the smell of pee! You’ll become invisible to superficial men!’. Well, good riddance! These fears are just a distant echo. They’re not mine, and for me, they’re not associated with old age. I’ve been sick, I’ve been overlooked, I’ve felt ugly since a very tender age. I know better than to associate those afflictions with progressed life.
That’s just me. I guess it’s the perspective you get when nothing could hardly be scarier than childhood. The rest of the adult life becomes an object of curiosity rather than fear.
But, for most people the transition to crone-hood is very difficult to make. Inconceivable but not impossible.
Modern cultural values overtly and subliminally condition us to associate old age with sickness, loneliness and isolation. And for women, perhaps more than for men, their growing unacceptability through their aging looks.
These are blatant lies of artificially created unnatural conditions. Old age doesn’t equal illness. Just because one is old, doesn’t mean one has to be sick. Yes, there is the dulling of external senses, perhaps slowness of memory and movement, but as life force withdraws inwards, there’s a sharpening of the inner senses, consolidating of essence. Our value as individuals changes gravity, becomes more yin like, more grounded. It’s no longer about the hectic outgoing achieving movement in the world, it’s about realigning with the fulcrum on which the wheels of life turn. It’s about constantly touching the palpable impermanence of everything by having one foot and one arm already reaching into the otherworld.
This concentrating occurs as we are preparing for the next leg of our journey. Some things don’t work as we’re used to, but that’s only because there’s more wear and tear on the body which accumulates over time. Modern medicine has seemingly increased life expectancy, but failed to improve quality of life. Little known fact that the 4th cause of death are iatrogenic diseases, meaning conditions caused by the very medicines that were supposed to save us. Taking this into account, we see many elderly who are still living thanks to modern western medicines, but who suffer unacknowledged side effects of those that will eventually make them even sicker and kill them. Nowadays, it’s very rare to die simply of old age, today people die of disease, and paradoxically, its treatment. Modern western medicine has failed to provide cures and preventatives, yet it’s very successful in creating patients and maintaining their life for a very long time. Even despite death which it so fears.
Perhaps it’s this all-pervading institutionalized terror of death that prevents people from making the transition to elder age, and thus come one step closer. And so, we have a world filled with teenage boys and girls in mature bodies. People who never stepped fully into their internal authority. People who are still looking outside for someone to please. People who avoid meeting their finiteness and thus never embrace their totality, their wholeness.
The focus on physical and mental activity has become pathological as we deny anything resembling a movement directed within.
Perhaps that is why we’ve seen such exponential increase of debilitating uncharted illnesses affecting predominantly women in only the last few decades. Our bodies are literally forcing us to stop, and to find our value, the value of our life, independent of what we can achieve in the outer world. Because any such achievement which is disconnected from our inner source, lacks soul; and soul, the principle of interconnectedness, balance and cyclicity is what becoming fully human is all about.
So how do we make this transition?
How do we enter the life of increased fullness and richness of the second half of life for which we find no concepts, and rarely any role models in our society?
It’s about simply listening to our body. Listening even deeper than ever before, and without any preconceived notions. That needs to be the main guide whenever we enter uncharted territory.
Being on Earth, being in the physical realm, having a body is frankly the bottom line. Without a body there’s no point. We have to make listening to it our priority. It’s crucial for our survival, and for our thriving.
How does one listen to the body? Isn’t that the million dollar question?
Deep down we all already know what we need to do, but so few of us do it. As external authorities obviously failed us, looking within has become imperative in this day and age. But not only looking once in a month for an hour in a therapist’s office, but sensing the life inside and letting the wise stillness inform our outer actions on the daily.
It’s a practice, a progressive repatterning, a shift of focus, a paradigm shift, and it doesn’t happen overnight.
Start with baby steps. As you become more and more comfortable with acquainting the long repressed parts, as you slowly befriend them or rather they befriend you; once they begin feeling like a welcoming home again, you will find more and more desire to create a bigger space in your life to meet them.
Consolidating crude life experience into wisdom requires time for reflection. So, create that space. Make no expectations and prepare to fall in love with life and all of its expressions again. There is a home waiting for you in the large scheme of all things. It’s not a spot that can be reached through a journey planned rationally with a carefully studied map. It’s present just beyond a veil right here, all it asks is to take a breath and dive right in.