Personal Trials, Holy Opportunities & Profound Challenges
(An excerpt from my upcoming book, Lifeforce: The Magic & Wisdom of Menopause.) Andrea Iapaolo, Wise Women Productions
It is our highest privilege, as human beings, to learn, to grow, to transform and to become our essential, enlightened selves in this lifetime. For women, this means intentionally moving through our ultimate passage into the Mystic. Our own female spiritual evolution has been intricately woven into the design of life, such that life itself is the guru. If life is our guru, then so too is the mother of transition and physiological viability: Menopause. She is the masterclass and the teacher, the lesson and the experience, the journey and the guide. She breaks us open and pulls the darkness into the light. She brings chronic discomfort, a myriad of pains, emotional anguish, mental breakdown and a complete physical overhaul. It is our highest privilege to experience her. All of our holy rites of passage have the same amazing capacity to accelerate and expand our growth as they do to drag us down, beat us up and leave us forever in purgatory. It is up to us.
Much like life itself, Menopause is rife with personal trials of the spirit, holy opportunities of transcendence, and profound challenges of peace.
Also, as in life, it is our own free will that will ultimately determine our purpose and our experience of menopause. We are free to experience menopause matter-of-factly, unintentionally, or even traumatically, but we are not free from experiencing the consequences of those choices. For hundreds of years now, women have barely survived those consequences, resulting in generations of victim-consciousness, bodily shame, self-loathing, a lack of purpose, guilt and worthlessness. Yes, we are free to undermine her, downplay her, and to miss out on the massive, cosmic alignment and personal transformation that she has in store for us, but we would only be undermining and downplaying ourselves, our own potential and our chosen purpose. Haven't we already spent generations and generations undermining, belittling, undercutting, pretending, fracturing and downplaying ourselves? Just to be clear, it is our personal, spiritual evolution, our magic and modern mysticism, that is being controlled, manipulated and thwarted by the current system. Menopause offers women the chance to dig in to the truth and opt out of the control, manipulation and utter lack that the system mandates. She offers each one of us the transparency, space and time to find out who we really are so that we can live in our own self-determined system of existence, built from the inside out. It has certainly come time to use menopause as the sacred evolutionary tool that she is. To use her to embolden our strength, truth, freedom and femininity, is to use Menopause for what she truly is: a natural, internal support system that enables all women to relinquish the old and rise up to meet the new.
Her multilayered process emerges within us to provide the cosmic space and sacred time to deepen our spiritual work, practice our gentle devotions, make and follow through with our declarations, speak our minds, walk our talk and live in the integrity of life, while dying to our outmoded, repetitious and very limited reactions. She urges us to respond wholly to ourselves, to the most expanded levels of who we are and who we are becoming.
She places us at the forefront of the momentum of our ever-changing bodies, reverently pointing us in the direction of our self-care and unwavering self-consideration.
She challenges us to be responsible for the reality in which we choose to live, and to find grace in her relentlessness. Menopause is the beginning of a whole new body of work. Work that women were born to do. Work that is fulfilling, liberating, life-changing and sustainable.
Personal Trials
By expecting the system to take care of us, when we do not know how to take care of ourselves, we will indeed continue to fall prey to everything. All of us are beginning to wake up to ourselves and this counterfeit system. We are lost, worried, scared, sad and lonely. We all need help learning how to properly free our minds and spirits, so that we no longer allow ourselves to be led by a false representation of life. Our mental and emotional health is tenuous and we are spiritually fractured because we are not living in the integrity of our chosen purpose.
We have become so dependent upon this broken system, that we fear the integrity of our truth more than we fear losing that which no longer serves our becoming.
Telling the truth has become more despised than lying, and our silence buys us just enough freedom to survive. Fear will continue to fuel our choices until we replace it with purpose. Fear positions us at the mercy of a system which has us all inanely competing for what is already ours, earnestly believing that we are separate from each other, and grossly undervaluing our individual self-worth. It is death masquerading as life.
The personal trials that we face are a direct result of the generational trauma, the genetic pain and the overall suffering manufactured for us by an unjust and all-pervasive system of control. Menopause is a beautiful respite as well as a painful disruption, and she creates a deliberate pause for women to reconsider ourselves by offering us the life-changing personal trials of self-acceptance, courage and grief.
Self-Acceptance
Self-acceptance is at the very heart of what menopause has to bequeath us. Her hormonal ebbs and flows continuously and dynamically reform and transform our bodies, drastically threatening our long-held physical, mental, emotional and spiritual identities. She unceasingly changes and morphs our physical shapes, shakes up our moods, rattles our mindsets, jars our spirits and presents us with the ultimate trial: the death of our outmoded identities.
She beseeches us to let go of our old labels and beliefs and to come into a complete and sincere acceptance of ourselves and the true scope of her presence.
To integrate her plea, and participate in the spiritual work of our own self-inquiry through her tumultuous process, has the mighty capacity to bring each of us into true acceptance of ourselves, regardless, or even because of that tumultuous process. We must decide to face, accept and engage with menopause, for she will naturally slay our old ideas of ourselves and lay the multidimensional groundwork needed for women to surpass our own trauma-based ideas of ourselves.
Courage
Menopause has a natural ability to activate our courage by igniting our fear. She encourages us to remember that our fears are rooted in deceit, lack and trauma, handed down from an exclusive system of patriarchy, so that we may use them to intentionally activate our courage. Courage is our innate ability to use reason rather than fear to find out the truth of who we really are, and the upheaval of menopause has the power to drive us ever closer to our peace and calm in the eye of the storm. We embody true courage when we calmly stand up and declare the meaning of menopause for ourselves.
Grief
A critical personal trial that emerges from the dis-order of Menopause is grief. Grief is a tool of divination, self-recognition and honour, that takes us into the deepest consideration while we experience the countless peaks and valleys of change. Grief predicts and tracks our growth, delivers us into stillness, beckons us to be silent and invites us to take inventory. Grief is a powerful magic that updates and forecasts our lives.
Grief is a messenger for rebirth.
Each change results in a death and each death must be acknowledged and grieved to hallow the ground for rebirth. Grief is a vital companion to the many adjustments, developments and transitions of Menopause. We must intentionally grieve throughout our passage, in order to properly track our spiritual progress and to divinely reset and re-inform our journeys.
Profound challenges
At some point, our intense personal trials turn into the profound challenges of beingness. The challenge of beingness is met by living our truth and experiencing all facets of life on our own terms. Beingness gives rise to the contemplation and conscious practice of desire, risk and autonomy.
Reconnecting with our true desires gently coerces us to risk our comforts and perceived safety in order to live authentically. Being responsible for the risks we decide to take offers us the promise of our own autonomy.
Desire
The profound challenge of desire is to transcend our programming.
We shuffled our desires out of our minds long ago because we were convinced that only sinful women have desires, that desires are destructive, and that desires are merely childish whims and wishes that will never actually come to pass. That kind of programming vilified our sexual desire, and in turn denigrated the integrity of pleasure and prohibited pleasure from playing any part in our holy rites of passage. We have been indoctrinated to believe that there will be absolutely no pleasure in menopause. This belief betrays us and will do nothing to change our narrative or uplift our experience of menopause.
Desire has intelligence. It highlights pleasure, it encourages us to grow, it reflects our truth and it gives us coherence with life. Our desire to find out more about ourselves and our desire to want more for ourselves is inherent in life’s longing for itself. All of life desires to grow, expand and become more. Women are desire personified. To follow our deepest desires fosters a gentle devotion to our highest calling and paves the path for our continued evolution.
Risk
Like an addict in recovery, we must be willing to risk losing everything that is not good for us, if we are to heal. Not an easy challenge, but while our addiction to victimhood, codependency and pain is impersonating truth, it is a good time to risk letting go of those false self-narratives. We must instead risk being guided by our intuition and unapologetically speaking our minds, risk being disliked or called crazy, and continuously risk stepping into the unknown. Menopause isa vow we make to the unknown.
Into the unknown we must go, bringing our faith in her nature and our trust in her process of death and rebirth.
She is a refuge, a nature reserve within which we can finally swap our resentment for pleasure, our fury for empowerment, and our exasperation for spiritual evolution. The sole purpose of our holy rites of passage is to embody our innate feminine magic and to bring modern mysticism back into the world. We do this by allowing menopause to transform us into the Mystics that we came here to be. That, to me, is worth the risk.
Autonomy
Taking the required risks to fulfill our desires can only be boldly led by our autonomy. Autonomy acquires its worth from our willingness to take full responsibility for all of our thoughts, words and actions. Responsibility equals choice, empowerment, integrity and freedom. Without responsibility, we cannot sincerely embody autonomy and are relegated instead to the daily confusion and suffering of codependency. When we are stuck in the loop of blame and punishment, we start to believe that autonomy is but a myth. Again, Menopause provides us with just the right amount of resistance to profoundly challenge our reactions and respond to our true desires by taking full responsibility for our choices. A profound challenge of beingness indeed.
Holy opportunities
Menopause is resplendent with holy opportunities for modern alchemy, cosmic timelessness and ongoing spiritual evolution.. Through her slew of multifaceted, multi-dimensional transitions, menopause has only our best interests at heart, and very clearly and purposefully nurtures us towards our inevitable rebirth. Menopause isa complete rebirth that shows up in the final and most potent act of our lives. To properly take advantage of the opportunity that she affords us, we must utilize intention through the practice of discipline, so that we may learn to live in the freedom of her/our newness.
Intention
Experiencing menopause on purpose, by intentionally embracing her passage, instead of fearing and resisting her is step one. Intention shapes and foretells our reality. Intention creates momentum and places us on the tip of the arrowhead, soaring toward our total alchemization. Intention takes us on the ride of our lifetime, making us congruent with our abundant flow. When we step out and step up to ourselves, we are able to receive, integrate and access higher states of consciousness, while the external, limited states collapse. Intention highlights our abilities, remembrances, and knowingness so that we may more easily shift into internal alignment. When we decide to intentionally practice living in a brand new reality, our intention opens a portal to opportunity.
Discipline
Discipline is a daily, gentle devotion to our deepest self. It is the conscious release of instant gratification in favour of the daily practices that sustain the integrity of our spirit.
Without discipline we are trapped in the repetition of a small and disconnected life, always yearning for more, with absolutely no idea how to get it.
Discipline gives us the ultimate leeway, allowing us to choose wisely, and enabling us to take care of our needs and to absolutely fall in love with ourselves and our lives. Discipline presents us with the opportunity to have it all. As long as our discipline is the rule, we are free to enjoy all of the exceptions.
Freedom
Intention plus discipline equals freedom. Freedom is the experience of our own rebirth and the return of self-love. Every time a new part of our true self emerges, we expand our playing field and our capacity to feel free. We must stop using the constraints of menopause to make us feel like we're being held hostage, and begin to recognize how she sets us free. Her passage frees us from previous outside concerns, hollow commitments and the systematic grind, in order to instantly focus our gaze inward. She frees us from people-pleasing, doing, producing, consuming and forcing. She demands that we slow down, take care of ourselves, rest, be, reflect, give to ourselves and relax. If we recognize menopause as an evolutionary tool, our liberation will continue to grow exponentially throughout her process until we are quite effortlessly, profoundly and unapologetically living in the truth of our chosen purpose.
Death, beingness and rebirth: we were made for this. It is the living, breathing formula for evolution and sustainability, and it resides within each and every woman, in the form of our holy rites of passage. We are blessed!
Menopause, more than any other rite of passage, has the power to shift us into something clear, present and intentional, because she is the culmination of our individual experiences, transitions and wisdom. She is our great cosmic enhancement or our great cosmic loss. It's up to us. She has come to nurture and mold us into mystics, as sure as nature's magic defines the Divine Feminine. As long as magic and mysticism (women) are absent from the world, it remains a world of self-betrayal, subservience and consumption. It is up to us, our sacred sisterhood and our menopausal passage, to welcome magic and mysticism back to its rightful place in the world by welcoming it back into our own lives. We have a sacred duty now to create ancestral favour, healing and blessing by recreating ourselves through the use of our holy rites of passage as evolutionary tools of enlightenment. We were born to become mystics, all of us, and to use our wisdom as a light in the world of life. Let us heal and uplift ourselves through the power of Menopause, so that we may heal and uplift the world.