Menopause - Step into the Fullness of Your Power

The biggest secret

I want to start by telling you a fabulous, explosive and joyful secret about the menopause. And I want to tell you this before we go any further because there is so much publicity about how the hormonal changes around menopause can make you feel exhausted, hot, angry, forgetful, anxious and overweight. I’m not disputing that hormone changes and symptoms before and after menopause can make life feel really hard, AND I want to share a fabulous fact about reaching menopause that is often not talked about…

You will be able to reclaim the HUGE amount of energy it takes for the bodies of menstruating women to drive (rather relentlessly) the human reproductive cycle. 

Between the time of puberty until some point in your 40s or 50s, your body primes approximately 500 eggs ready for fertilisation and the creation of another human being. This monthly event is akin to a hormonal super-summit, a finely tuned operation of great skill and vast amounts of energy and physical resources. 

Whether you are preparing for, navigating through, or on the other side of the menopause, I hope you are able to take in the vital understanding that when you are post-menopausal you can have access to that vast reserve of energy for your own life rather than prepping for another life. 

Can you really take that in? 

It is essential that this is our starting place as we prepare for and experience the menopause. This isn’t just some horrible phase that we have to endure to get over it and creep into old age. This is the releasing of our obligation to be physically prepared to grow another member of the human race. In releasing this obligation we are giving an immense gift to ourselves and entering physical, emotional and spiritual rites of passage that will change us forever.

As women, it isn’t that your energy drops as you get older or are post-menopausal. For a moment, think about some of the inspiring women in your life who are in their late 50s/60s. They are often the ones who are running businesses, or charities, or setting up community groups, spending their days gardening, cooking, running after grandchildren. They ski in the winter and do open-water swims in their bathing suits when the younger women are in wetsuits. They are the women that we will be. They hear society say that they are not very useful anymore; they can’t produce children, they have too many wrinkles, and when they walk they wobble in all the wrong places. 

Post-menopausal women hear this. And they don’t care. 

They know the truth, that they are filled with a secret power, a powerful yearning to create that different world, for themselves and for their grandchildren and THEY JUST GET ON AND DO IT. And they thrive. 

So what actually is the menopause?

Literally, it means the 'pause of the monthly cycle’ or ‘pause of the menses’ and refers to the time in a woman’s life that begins when she has not had a period for 12 months. 

There are usually three main stages to a normal menopause that your body is gradually heading towards from the moment you are conceived.

1. Getting reading for change (perimenopause)

2. The change of life (menopause)

3. After the change (post-menopause)

What I have observed in looking at the energy of thousands of women is that the subtle but definite shifts of perimenopause generally begin at about the age of 36. That doesn’t mean that we move into full blown menopause at this point, as the average age for most women to experience their menopause is between 45 to 55, but from 36 we begin to shift away from reproductivity and towards the menopause. 

It is important to state here that the menopause is such a personal time of life that the concept of ‘average age’ or ‘average woman’ or ‘average menopause’ is a bit redundant.

You are unique, in everything that you are, and your experience with this powerful transitional time of life will also be unique.

So, in the ‘average’ situation, from some point in your late 30s, it is very likely that your body is already preparing for the menopause and the choices you make at this stage will determine much of how your menopause years will happen. Getting into a great relationship with your hormones now is a wonderful tool, as the more we know about them, the more we are able to adjust to the continual shifts in our hormonal patterns.

And this is also true of those of you who are going through the menopause now, and those who are already through that period of your life. You still have hormones! They might be changed in their production and quantity, but everything we are and do in life has hormonal involvement and to be as close as we can in our relationship to our hormones makes life easier, more joyful and much more juicy.

The problem with stress

I don’t want this blog to be about the specifics of your sex hormones and what they do in menopause – I have some great courses that will help you understand more about that and how to bring your hormones back into balance, but I do want to highlight something really important here in this blog, and that’s the impact that stress can have on your menopause journey. 

The first thing to know about stress and menopause is that if you are experiencing stress, your body has to choose whether to make stress hormones OR to keep sex hormones balanced – you can’t have both being produced in a balanced way at the same time. This is because cortisol, a key stress hormone, and progesterone, a key sex hormone, share the same parent hormone called pregnenolone. On top of that, they also compete for the same receptor sites in the body. When you’re under stress, cortisol is likely to be prioritised both in production (a situation known as pregnenolone steal) and when binding to cell receptors, leading to a low level of progesterone in the body and imbalanced sex hormones. And this is not so good for your menopause (small understatement there!). Chronic stress, and the resulting pattern of over-producing stress hormones at the expense of sex hormones, can become entrenched over the years, leading to consistently elevated cortisol levels and lower progesterone levels, and that means more severe symptoms during perimenopause and beyond. 

It is the job of your adrenal glands to secrete your stress hormones, like cortisol or adrenaline, whenever you are dealing with any kind of stress. Before menopause, they are also a secondary source of sex hormone production, but it’s your ovaries that secrete most of your sex hormones at this time. A key understanding that I want all women to know is that during your menopause transition, when the ovaries stop producing your sex hormones, the adrenal glands become the primary source of sex hormone production – they take up the role of producing the smaller quantities that is natural and normal during and after menopause, and will become the new normal for you. Problems can occur if your adrenal glands have been too busy producing stress hormones as a response to many years of perceived stress in your life, and their ability to manage their new role of grand estrogen producer will be greatly compromised! 

Keeping the adrenal glands balanced energetically and physically becomes a vital priority for us as we move through all stages of our life.

This is especially true as we move towards and through the menopause, as adrenal health will determine our resiliency, our vitality and our ability to regulate our hormones. These small but mighty glands communicate closely with all parts of our body, especially the thyroid and pancreas, forming a triad that greatly impacts our vitality and our health.

I’m sharing a video here in which I talk more about the adrenal glands, and lead you through some gentle but powerful techniques to start restoring and rebalancing your adrenal health at a deep level. Try and do these practices regularly, especially if you’re going through a stressful period and trying to balance your hormones.

I want to leave you with an important understanding to take away with you. Often we can lose sight of what is needed for whole-system balance by getting side-tracked chasing after a specific problem and what may provide the ultimate magic pill for this problem. This approach can cause us to focus simply on the ever growing problems that we are experiencing. And where is the joy or health in that? 

When we become deeply involved with our story of ill-health or hormonal havoc it is very stressful, meaning stress hormones flood the body and deflate the natural healing forces that live in every cell and every space between the cells.

But I am very happy to tell you that there are some simple but incredibly impactful ways that can help you physically, emotionally and energetically to bring much more balance to your hormones, and connectivity, joy and vitality to your life, and I want to share them with you in my online class called Menopause Magic.

In this 90 minute class, we will explore the easy, effective ways to work with your energy to:

• Get rid of brain fog! It can be so debilitating to feel like you can’t think straight or remember what you were half way through doing. Let’s get your clear thinking back!

• Minimise your hot flushes and night sweats so you can feel more confident and at ease as you go through your day.

• Get good quality sleep so you can start off each day feeling revitalised and energised instead of wiped out and drained.

• Shift the lethargy and exhaustion so you are able to re-engage with your life, your friendships, your family and your beautiful world work that only you are here to do. 

• Become emotionally resilient so you can get off that roller coaster of emotional highs and lows, but instead feel good, even joyful, as you go through your day.

You can access the class and start learning right away by clicking this button

Sign up to Menopause Magic!

Wishing you hormonal harmony, today and always.

Prune