My recent menopausal ‘eureka moment’ has led me to re-assessing
what has been going on in my life over the last five years. In 20011 and 2012 I went through a
huge emotional storm and up until now, I have never even considered
that it was part of my menopausal process. While I was aware that I was
perimenopausal because I was having physical symptoms, so much else was
going on at the time, I didn’t recognise that perhaps some of the inner turmoil
I was experiencing was also connected to the beginning stages of my transition.
2012 was without a doubt the darkest year of my life. I
regularly found myself chanting to myself ‘I want to die, I want to die, I want
to die’. I didn’t really want to die, I
just wanted it to stop. - ‘it’ being a relentless 18 month hammering on every
level of my being that I just couldn’t see a way out of. So much happened to me
that the only way I could make sense of what I was experiencing was to
attribute it to some kind of spiritual crisis – I knew in my heart the only way
I was going to survive was to surrender to whatever process I was going through
and let Spirit carry me through. I have been walking a challenging spiritual path my whole
life and right before this happened I thought I was finally ‘on the way up’.
Despite 20 years of conscious healing from severe childhood abuse,
2012 was the year I finally reached my rock bottom. I knew I
couldn’t trust a single soul to truly help me and so I was forced to do the only
other thing left to do; I retreated deep into my relationship with the
Goddess and prayed that she would deliver me to the other side.
It all started with a major wake-up call around my 40th
birthday regarding the relationship I was in. It was like someone pulled the
plug out of the bath and all I could do was stand there helplessly looking on as the water
slowly drained away. Five months down the line and all I was left with was the empty bath - and I couldn’t believe what I’d been doing to myself because of my desperation to be in a relationship. A
couple of months after we broke up my step mother did something that was jaw-droppingly
outrageous but also very typical of her, something which highlighted the
appalling way she had treated me since I was a little girl. After 20 years of
‘working on our relationship’ suddenly I could tolerate her no longer – it was
like someone flicked a switch in me; I just packed my things, drove away and
never went back.
A month later I had a second prolapsed disc – this time it
was so bad I was hospitalised and had to have an emergency operation. I was
sent home to recover even though I lived on my own and had no one to look after
me. Neither my mother nor my sister offered to look after me, at my house or
theirs, - my mother picked me up from the hospital, stayed the night then drove went
back to Birmingham in the morning leaving me to fend for myself. My sister
didn’t come and visit until I was well enough to collect her from the station
so she didn’t have to drive. I was so emotionally defeated, it took me a full
six months to realise what had happened and start the process of ending those relationships too.
I had no partner, no job to return to and only a handful of
new friends as I had only recently moved to the area (to be with my ex). After
the operation I couldn’t drive or even really sit for four weeks. I felt so
fragile and sensitive, I couldn’t even deal with the radio or watching T.V. so
I just stared out of the window or read books. I was sent home from hospital on
a cocktail of tramadol, amitriptyline and diazepam and was not offered any helpful
guidance on how to come off them. I was no longer in excruciating pain so I
came off them all over the space of two or three weeks and then I hit a wall. By the time I realised what was going on it was too late to go back on them and withdraw slowly. And
all that was just 2011! Entering into 2012 was like stepping off a cliff into
an abyss. My life was so dark I literally couldn’t see my hand in front of my
face - I really couldn’t imagine how on earth I was ever going to get out the
other side of whatever was happening to me and my life.
Up until now I have put all that previous inner turmoil down
to the pharmaceutical drugs and the insane circumstances that unfolded in my
life. While I fully understood everything that happened in 2011 – 2012 was part
of a deep spiritual process, I could also directly link my feelings to tangible
events and circumstances. When those feelings recently started to come flooding
back I really couldn’t understand it, especially as I am happiest I have ever been. I started to fear that perhaps I was ‘on the wrong
path’ and about to suffer another spiritual battering even though I know I couldn’t
ever possibly ever go back to the way it was before. It just didn’t make any sense!
The only thing I could possibly attribute my emotional state to to was an adverse reaction to St John’s Wort which I was taking for my libido – so I stopped just in case it was triggering a
chemical reaction in me like the pharmaceuticals from before.
Now I have started to join the dots, I can see that it is extremely
significant that I had my first night sweats and first rosacea outbreak around
the time my relationship started to break down and that it is clearly no coincidence
that the beginning of the biggest emotional and spiritual crisis I ever had coincided
exactly with the beginning of my
menopause. As I become increasingly conscious of the connection between the
menopause and my spiritual journey, it makes perfect sense that I would be
experiencing another ‘big wave’ because I am still perimenopausal!
After the intensity of the first stage lost its grip, I was
slowly released back into the world and a semi-normal life. Since then I
have been feeling like I have been living in a surreal, weird kind of limbo –
it’s felt like my old life has definitively ended but my new life has not yet
properly begun. At times this has bothered me as I am usually
a dynamic ‘go getter’ kind of person, but one of the (hardest) lessons I learned
during my Shamanic Death was that I need to learn to accept ‘not knowingness’. So I
have been consciously choosing to ‘go with the flow’ and to trust one day it
would all make sense...
And now it finally does! I can see that the first big wave
enabled me to break me free of the past, to let go of the people and emotional patterns
I was still hopelessly attached to despite years of ‘working on myself’. It turns
out the purpose of all that work was to prepare me for the enormous battle that was
one day going to take place within my psyche – it never really fixed the
problem, but it did give me all the inner tools I needed to face the menopausal 'trial of
fire' and to live to tell the tale.
Perhaps
this second wave is about opening up to expand my understanding and to finally
prepare me to transition into the future I never imagined was possible…
Goddess Blessings ♥
