Menopause as a portal to spiritual growth

Menopause is a wonderful opportunity for women to embrace this significant transition in their lives and to see the opportunity it offers for immense growth – in all aspects, emotional, mental and above all spiritual.

Our culture today is focused on science and medicalising many issues, including menarche, menstruation, and menopause which are intrinsic parts of life itself and without which our human species would become extinct.

In some cultures, menstruation is called ‘the curse’, and women are banned from entering certain sacred places when they’re bleeding. Women are taught to do their best to ignore the inconvenience, to carry on as usual and to not give themselves time to turn within for these few days every month.

This is particularly true in a career-oriented place like Hong Kong, where daily life is focused on productivity. Menstruation (and perimenopause and menopause) ask us to slow down and be present, tapping into the slow, reflective yin energy, rather than the driving, upwards force of yang energy that our city embodies.

Modern life is unsympathetic to natural cycles of women’s bodies. Throughout our fertile years, we have to juggle the innate wisdom of our body with the demands of the working corporate world, designed to maximise efficiency.

We wrangle with high intensity demands and deadlines during our luteal phase – while our body requests that we slow down. We medicate period pains instead of being able to stop, rest and recharge. On top of that, we navigate the judgement that comes with menstruating – being labelled moody, or less than. 

Awareness of what our body wants, not paracetamol, remaining present, is what allows, rather than suppresses, this natural process.

People going through menopause may notice the physical symptoms that are preventing them from achieving their goals: hot flushes, difficulty sleeping or joint pain. They focus on the disruption to their current rhythm, rather than seeing that they’re being invited to embrace a new, different rhythm.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, menopause is referred to as the ‘Second Spring’ - an invitation into a new way of life - one directed towards self-nourishment - rather than the discourse of decline that Western culture often focuses on when discussing the subject.

Perimenopause: a return to the yin, a shift from loss to liberation

What if the script is flipped? What if menopause is not just an ending but a potent, albeit challenging initiation into profound spiritual growth and awakening, the swapping of one type of creation for another – creative expression, mentoring, activism, wisdom sharing.

Developing awareness is how we prepare for menopause when we have the opportunity to turn within to discover ourselves – the reality of who we are - our Self - and to prepare for the second stage of life, unencumbered by the physical necessities that allow us to procreate. 

Menopause means ‘pause’. The ceasing of menstruation creates a profound biological stillness. Spiritually this is an unparalleled opportunity.

Often in my practice, I find Jung’s work useful during these types of transitions. Marie Louise von Franz in her book “The Interpretation of Fairy Stories from a Jungian perspective”, describes how in a large number of cultures there is a theme in their fairy stories which serves as a metaphor for our life. 

The king is dying and needs to choose a successor. He has two sons, one who is very intellectual, and the other more heart centred. The first is chosen to succeed him. 

The younger, heart centred son is banished from the kingdom and addresses some specific tasks in the underworld - the realm of the feminine. He passes the first two tasks and in the last he meets an ugly, unhappy frog. He feels such compassion for this creature, he kisses it. Freed from a curse put upon it, it turns into a beautiful princess. They fall in love and return to the kingdom, which is now in total disarray under the tyrannical rule of the elder son. 

Everyone is delighted, the couple ascend to the throne and the future of the kingdom is assured. 

During the first part of our lives, we spend the first part using our intellectual mind to build the scaffolding of our external lives – career, maybe marriage, home, a financial base, but around mid life, it does not have what is required to carry us forward and ensure our future happiness. 

We need to engage with our ‘feminine’ power (the tasks the younger son completes in the underworld) our heartmind, go within, and become whole, healed - rejoined with suppressed aspects of ourselves. Just as the prince and princess come into union through compassion, so do we need to embrace the totality of who we are. This is true happiness, true power. For women, perimenopause is an invitation into the underworld. Perimenopause arrives around the time of  mid-life crisis – which is written in Chinese as ‘danger plus opportunity’.

We need to recognise the opportunity to embrace our feminine -yin- while retaining the already developed yang. We all need balance and to be able to recognise and draw on these different aspects of our being. 

Physical menopause provides an invitation to embrace our yin. Having engaged successfully in the world with yang energy, we now need to listen to our almost forgotten yin whispers. Our bodies invite us to slow down, explore, evaluate, integrate. 

With this freedom from our childbearing years we can focus on our intuition, on listening to our heartmind, on becoming a sage, an unapologetic crone who shares her wisdom with the world. By now she has embodied her wisdom which gives her great gravitas in her offerings to her family, community and the world.