Menopause is a Sacred Rite of Passage
Midlife begins when a woman can no longer abandon herself to keep her life intact.
☬
THE IGNITION 🔥
The ground that was once so comfortable and familiar, suddenly shifts beneath you.
Your body, heart, mind, relationships, work and creative life... all now demand your full attention. The life you prior built from the version of yourself you thought you had to be, becomes excruciating and constrictive. You can't breathe like you once used to. Here you find yourself... standing at a threshold of reckoning you did not ask for, yet cannot avoid. How will you find your way through? ☬
|
|
Through the menopausal gateway, a woman's body, mind and heart suddenly change without conscious intent or permission.
Tolerance for falsehood evaporates.
Her nervous system speaks through extreme heat, grief, rage, exhaustion and longing.
The DEEPEST of longings...
The spectrum of feelings and symptoms aren't a dysfunction or personal failure.
This is life's innate wisdom. Your sacred call.
Midlife does not always arrive into a woman's life gently, yet it always arrives as truth. And when something feels off in the body of a heart-centered woman, everything feels off ~ because her world up to now, has been tenderly braided together: self identity, creativity, relationships, sexuality, work, health and purposeful meaning.
Menopause doesn't present itself at this stage to be fixed or adorned.
This passage is not only hormonal. It’s deeply existential.
First the fire awakens ~ hot flashes, fury, restlessness, impatience, grief that’s been waiting decades to be felt.
Fire is our elemental signal that something essential has been suppressed and diluted for too long in a world unable to meet a woman alive to her own source energy.
The scorching heat is not our enemy. It's acknowledgment of what we're made of... and for.
Menopause is our time to embrace the flames and remember holy embodiment. 🔥
Tolerance for falsehood evaporates.
Her nervous system speaks through extreme heat, grief, rage, exhaustion and longing.
The DEEPEST of longings...
The spectrum of feelings and symptoms aren't a dysfunction or personal failure.
This is life's innate wisdom. Your sacred call.
Midlife does not always arrive into a woman's life gently, yet it always arrives as truth. And when something feels off in the body of a heart-centered woman, everything feels off ~ because her world up to now, has been tenderly braided together: self identity, creativity, relationships, sexuality, work, health and purposeful meaning.
Menopause doesn't present itself at this stage to be fixed or adorned.
This passage is not only hormonal. It’s deeply existential.
First the fire awakens ~ hot flashes, fury, restlessness, impatience, grief that’s been waiting decades to be felt.
Fire is our elemental signal that something essential has been suppressed and diluted for too long in a world unable to meet a woman alive to her own source energy.
The scorching heat is not our enemy. It's acknowledgment of what we're made of... and for.
Menopause is our time to embrace the flames and remember holy embodiment. 🔥
Your experience and symptoms of menopause aren't due to misalignment, dysfunction or personal failure.
THE RECKONING ⚖️
Midlife asks a woman to look without flinching at the life she has built ~ and the life that has been built around her.
☬
|
Without self-criticism or judgment...
This is just the beginning... ☬
|
|
The time during our midlife reckoning can feel disorienting, often terrifying.
Careers lose meaning. Relationships strain or dissolve. Self identity and body image transfigure right before our eyes. Health issues surface. Parents age and die. Growing and adult children need us more than ever.
Our body speaks loudly, oftentimes painfully.
Society has labeled this a crisis of aging.
We're told something needs to be fixed, medicated or optimized.
If you go deeper, you discover our passage into and through menopause is something else, entirely.
It's a sacred threshold.
And thresholds are not meant to be rushed, bypassed or navigated alone.
A woman entering this portal is a guardian, a keeper of her own life.
Here she stands at a clarifying precipice, holding her personal initiation and the collective intelligence that her womb has been gestating all along. ⚖️
Careers lose meaning. Relationships strain or dissolve. Self identity and body image transfigure right before our eyes. Health issues surface. Parents age and die. Growing and adult children need us more than ever.
Our body speaks loudly, oftentimes painfully.
Society has labeled this a crisis of aging.
We're told something needs to be fixed, medicated or optimized.
If you go deeper, you discover our passage into and through menopause is something else, entirely.
It's a sacred threshold.
And thresholds are not meant to be rushed, bypassed or navigated alone.
A woman entering this portal is a guardian, a keeper of her own life.
Here she stands at a clarifying precipice, holding her personal initiation and the collective intelligence that her womb has been gestating all along. ⚖️
Your body is not betraying you. It's opening you to the truth on behalf of the collective.
THE UNDOING ꩜
Midlife is not about becoming someone new.
It's about walking the wisdom of your blood trail home.
☬
|
Traditionally, midlife was seen as a time when women “dried up” ~ when our beauty, relevance, sexuality, creativity and value were presumed to fade away.
This collective history is false. And it's violent to a life that is always naturally unfurling. WHAT HAPPENS DURING MENOPAUSE IS AN UNDOING OF: 🐉 false identities 🐉 inherited roles 🐉 the internalized gaze that taught you to measure yourself through productivity, youth and approval ☬
|
artwork by Molly Gur
|
Alongside initiatory menopausal fire, there is water ~ grief, tears and tenderness. 💧
There is blood ~ memory, lineage and wisdom of cycles. 🩸
There is earth ~ her body being refashioned in the name of Creation with slowness, truth, rest and rooted authority. 🌍
This is not when a woman needs to work harder to become someone new.
It's about learning to be safeguarded as you walk your blood trail home.
When a woman is supported into and through menopause, she becomes an oracle for nature's wisdom.
Her creative and sexual energy, intuition and heart, all begin to harmonize with the universal intelligence that has been living inside her.
There is blood ~ memory, lineage and wisdom of cycles. 🩸
There is earth ~ her body being refashioned in the name of Creation with slowness, truth, rest and rooted authority. 🌍
This is not when a woman needs to work harder to become someone new.
It's about learning to be safeguarded as you walk your blood trail home.
When a woman is supported into and through menopause, she becomes an oracle for nature's wisdom.
Her creative and sexual energy, intuition and heart, all begin to harmonize with the universal intelligence that has been living inside her.
At her first bleed, a woman meets her power. During her bleeding years, she practices it. At menopause she becomes it.
~ from Native American Indigenous Wisdom
THE VOW 🕯️
photo @ Sharon Ann Rose
I vow to walk with women through midlife without minimizing what is at stake, to tell the truth about this passage, to stay when it's uncomfortable, and to help women remain in their bodies, lives and inner wisdom as everything essential is re-made.
~Sharon Ann Rose
☬
|
I am a woman who's danced and wrangled with her menopausal passage.
I tried to accept it and override it. I tried to surrender to it, letting go again and again. I tried to figure it out, analyzing minutia. I tried to overcome it, and I gave up. Eventually, I found myself praying my way through. These weren't easy prayers, nor delicate ones. They were honest, gravity-defining ones... Asking that whatever I was living through now, might one day serve another woman. ☬
|
photo @ Carla Forte Orr
|
During perimenopause, I searched everywhere for guidance. I sought teachers, practitioners, alternative protocols and frameworks. What I needed most, I would not find outside myself. It was the deep intelligence of creation inside my body, calling me home.
Then came the inevitable softening...
I loosened my grip on outer authority. I released myself from the binding I'd mistaken for safety. I listened to a different cadence, one without maps or reassurance. I showed up and began to hear the ancient ones. Voices of women who'd walked this passage, breathing fierce incantations into my bones.
I surrendered to the madness and let life undo me.
I learned what had to be released ~ and what was sacred to hold onto.
I let the grief of Earth rise inside my body... I could feel land and soil being stripped. The cutting of forests and silencing of ancestral ways. In my blood, I viscerally met what the Earth lives through.
Our menopausal bodies are not separate from this story. As women are severed from the Earth ~ from her rhythms, intelligence and reciprocity ~ our blood now speaks within us for what has gone ignored.
Menopause becomes the place where collective rupture and resilience is revealed.
We're asked to stay steady within ourselves, and to cease the battle with trying to change our life. This is our season of allowing life to reveal how we change our relationship to our lived experience, discovering wellsprings of deep pleasure and satisfaction.
No longer would I ignore where I'd become enmeshed to outer authority. Where I'd slipped into inner victimization, hungering for someone to save me, tell me what to do, and carry me through.
There was nothing to be saved from.
I was here to remember how to love my life — from fire’s igniting breath, from air’s reckoning with my mind, from earth’s refashioning of my body, from water’s kiss upon my forehead. This is what originally birthed me. This is what would guide me home...
Then came the inevitable softening...
I loosened my grip on outer authority. I released myself from the binding I'd mistaken for safety. I listened to a different cadence, one without maps or reassurance. I showed up and began to hear the ancient ones. Voices of women who'd walked this passage, breathing fierce incantations into my bones.
I surrendered to the madness and let life undo me.
I learned what had to be released ~ and what was sacred to hold onto.
I let the grief of Earth rise inside my body... I could feel land and soil being stripped. The cutting of forests and silencing of ancestral ways. In my blood, I viscerally met what the Earth lives through.
Our menopausal bodies are not separate from this story. As women are severed from the Earth ~ from her rhythms, intelligence and reciprocity ~ our blood now speaks within us for what has gone ignored.
Menopause becomes the place where collective rupture and resilience is revealed.
We're asked to stay steady within ourselves, and to cease the battle with trying to change our life. This is our season of allowing life to reveal how we change our relationship to our lived experience, discovering wellsprings of deep pleasure and satisfaction.
No longer would I ignore where I'd become enmeshed to outer authority. Where I'd slipped into inner victimization, hungering for someone to save me, tell me what to do, and carry me through.
There was nothing to be saved from.
I was here to remember how to love my life — from fire’s igniting breath, from air’s reckoning with my mind, from earth’s refashioning of my body, from water’s kiss upon my forehead. This is what originally birthed me. This is what would guide me home...
photo @ Sharon Ann Rose
What undoes a woman at midlife is the same force that returns her to herself... to rebirth her as the wisdom of creation.
THE INITIATION 💧
Midlife is not an invitation to improve yourself. It is an initiation to live life honestly, as you are shaped into a woman capable of carrying revolutionary love, truth and care forward.
☬
photo @ Natalia Newman
Majestic is a sacred rite-of-passage for women in midlife. A container of witnessing, perspective, guidance and whole-bodied listening for those navigating menopause as vital initiation (not a dysfunction to fix).
This passage does not dismantle a woman ~ it matures her.
Her body, psyche and spirit are being refashioned for what the future requires: a woman capable of holding complexity, tenderness, truth and care without compromise or collapse.
This passage does not dismantle a woman ~ it matures her.
Her body, psyche and spirit are being refashioned for what the future requires: a woman capable of holding complexity, tenderness, truth and care without compromise or collapse.
|
MAJESTIC IS FOR THE WOMAN WHO IS:
☬
|
|
Within Majestic, you're not seen as a problem.
You are not optimized, replaced or discarded. You're honored.
Here, you are met as a woman whose body, soul and wisdom are reorganizing themselves in service of a truthful life and an honest world.
Midlife is when a woman reclaims inner authority.
Through maturation and becoming capable of sustained love.
This is when a woman becomes dangerous to falsehood and devoted to what's real.
This is when the elder whispers and starts to take form.
Our menopausal nervous system teaches us about care and belonging, creating an inner stabilized field.
During our midlife journey, we're shaped into women the future needs: humane, grounded, discerning and kind. We become the Earth's renewal, embodied in form.
*This work can deepen and complement other forms of menopausal care ~ therapies, hormonal support, nutrition, and movement practices ~ while going further. It engages the soul, body and lineage, guiding a woman through her midlife passage with initiation, ceremony and sacred witnessing.
You are not optimized, replaced or discarded. You're honored.
Here, you are met as a woman whose body, soul and wisdom are reorganizing themselves in service of a truthful life and an honest world.
Midlife is when a woman reclaims inner authority.
Through maturation and becoming capable of sustained love.
This is when a woman becomes dangerous to falsehood and devoted to what's real.
This is when the elder whispers and starts to take form.
Our menopausal nervous system teaches us about care and belonging, creating an inner stabilized field.
During our midlife journey, we're shaped into women the future needs: humane, grounded, discerning and kind. We become the Earth's renewal, embodied in form.
*This work can deepen and complement other forms of menopausal care ~ therapies, hormonal support, nutrition, and movement practices ~ while going further. It engages the soul, body and lineage, guiding a woman through her midlife passage with initiation, ceremony and sacred witnessing.
