In your midlife years, there may come a moment when you realise that you simply can’t maintain business as usual anymore. And that you actually don’t care to. In fact, you don’t care about anyone or anything.
It’s a seditious and liberating feeling. As if the contract you’ve had with life suddenly doesn’t hold anymore. You’re done with propping up the world, or at the very least partners, children, friends, work colleagues. Denial and resistance fall, and you simply want to walk away. Feeling no shame. It could be subtle, or it could be very intense.
You head off without shame or regret, throwing the proverbial match over your shoulder and, without even looking back, disappear into the sunset. As Mirella in the Red School community said, ‘I don’t give a f**k. I’ve started to care less and less what people think, becoming more and more shameless.’ How magnificent.
The Irreconcilable Cut
It’s also very important to acknowledge that for some, the desire to cut and go may be so intense that it turns up as suicidal thoughts. If this moment in menopause isn’t properly understood and recognised for the extraordinary initiatory moment it is, and people feel there’s just no support for them in their family or community, or that they’ve been abandoned by Life itself, they might indeed feel driven to end their life.
In chapter 16 of Wise Power, we unpack this extraordinary feeling of the ‘irreconcilable cut’ more deeply and show how to claim it as initiatory. And in the chapter 13 we give you your emergency ‘menopause triage’ to help stabilise and presence yourself as you negotiate this great ending.
Time to Radically Slow Down
You may suddenly want to grind to a complete halt. This was the case for Susannah, who shared in an interview with me (you can listen here) that ‘it was like I was driving a fast sports car on a high mountain road and suddenly ahead was a hairpin bend.’ She had to find ways to radically slow down to make that bend safely without careening over the edge of the mountain.
Equally, and especially if you don’t have the resources or support, you might careen over the edge of that mountain. Be kind to yourself. You don’t yet know the full power that menopause wants to awaken in you.
We need a New Understanding of Menopause
One of our Menopause: The Great Awakener students, Amelia’s burn the house down moment led to the huge career shift of leaving her job and becoming self employed and she hasn’t looked back since. She says;
“In my own burn-the-house-down moment I left my job last year and set up independently.
I am a psychology graduate, and work in the field of ‘Trauma Informed Education’ - basically I regard myself as one switched on lady! But menopause hit me like a bullet train. I thought I was broken, mad, surplus, disposable, feeling so sad about now having to go and sit quietly in some corner somewhere and not really knowing what this might look like.
This new understanding of menopause is helping me heal… The veil has been lifted from my eyes; once you know, (or rather remember!) you can’t un-know.”
A surefire sign you’re in menopause
As I mentioned above, the burn-the-house-down moment is a clear sign that you are inside the initiation of menopause. Of course, the final arbiter of whether you’ve crossed that magic line into menopause or not is you. And it may only be in retrospect that you know.
It’s often accompanied by a feeling of all your reference points falling away, and you might feel as if you’re going mad or have fallen into the dark night of the soul. Don’t worry, you’re right on track: you’ve arrived in menopause.
Congratulate yourself. You have full permission to no longer maintain life as normal. The fierce encounter is a meeting with limits. We want to encourage you to meet your limits as an emissary. A gateway into expanded consciousness. It’s a warrior moment. Challenging and tough, but it’s waking you up.
Menopause: The Great Awakener
If you’d like support through your own burn-the-house-down moments, come and join us and a global circle for our online journey through the five phases of the spiritual initiation of menopause: Menopause: The Great Awakener
Wise Power
