My new online class Hormonal Sovereignty: Reclaiming Your Body Wisdom In Your Queen Era is LIVE! Come to find out creating a class platform on my website is complicated. Thank you to my in-house tech guy, Vid who is a paragon of skill and patience.
It is almost impossible to suss out what is our biological reality and what is culturally dictated. It has been my plan to hold the tension of those two realities until the magical 3rd option appeared. Have I landed on that magical 3rd option? Perhaps. Or at least I have for myself.
Ultimately I can only share what worked for me. A mix n’ match approach of a lot of inner work, lifestyle work, recently some intervention, rejecting stereotypes, investigating the symbolism of symptoms, and looking deeply into my belief systems to find why my body was speaking to me in this particular language.
My best guess is that because I had my 7th baby in my late 40’s and was breastfeeding until age 50, I skipped almost all of the “peri” symptoms many women experience in their 40’s. I figured I was part of the lucky 20% of people who experience no symptoms. Wringing out every last drop of fertility is very likely what our ancient ancestresses experienced and it likely reduced the amount of time they spent in perimenopause. On average, I have had a baby every 5 years for the entirety of my adult life which is about the world average. I imagined I would continue to nurse my baby which would hormonally suppress my menstruation and that by the time I weaned her I would naturally reach the end of my fertility and cycling. Tada!
Things turned out a little different. By age 50 I began having little hints here and there. My period did return after weaning— but was heavier. And sometimes I would skip a cycle. I started noticing things in my life that I no longer wanted to tolerate. I began finding immense relief in saying the whole sentence and not just the parts I knew would maintain harmony. I was willing to lose things and to grieve things that I had held on so tightly to before. I began to see symptoms as crystal clear communication from my body—how wise and powerful my body is! I’ve always prided myself on being someone who had a lot of trust in myself— I had a lot of trust in my thoughts, values, and intellect. But trusting my body was the chapter that got written after the intense mothering of infants and toddlers shifted. For over 3 decades, my body was attuned to a frequency of trust for the wisdom of my reproduction, fertility, and sexuality. I loved pregnancy and birth and nurturing my babies. I became a mother very early and did not have experience with being a woman who was not tuning into my body as a conduit of care and nourishment for my children. My Queen Era was now demanding to attune to wisdom of my body as so, so, so much more.
I am about to turn 54 years old and have still not entered menopause (menopause being the one day anniversary of 12 months without a menstrual period— everyday after that is considered to be post-menopausal) The Hormonal Sovereignty class is not so much a what to do class as much as it is a how to make your choices class. We examine what options are available— doing absolutely nothing, all the way to getting an Rx from a medical professional— because ultimately you and you alone will be living with those choices and identifying HOW you wish to wade through those choices is the ultimate sovereignty.
So I hope you will join me if you have felt confused and shocked about what is changing in your life. Or if you have concerns about this transformation happening in the future. We will cover common (and not-so common) symptoms and ask what they might mean symbolically as we also look at what might be happening physiologically. Ultimately, I wanted to make my post-pregnancy and post-fertility years a sovereign journey of powerful agency and self-trust. I think I’ve succeeded. If that sounds like something you’d be down for, stay tuned. Get 33% off with code QUEEN at checkout!
