“I am the Crone. I feel my way along paths following the energy and warmth that others have placed here. Trusting the dark, I am guided not by light, but by the flowing movements I sense. I am like the water that follows, without sight or foreknowledge, the ancient river’s channel.”

The above quote is from Susun Weed, one of my favorite menopause transformation authors. (New Menopausal Years: The Wise Woman Way

I have been thinking about water recently and its influences on me. I am a fond proponent of feng shui and the use of the elements to create balance in our environments. I am also in the process of rearranging our whole house. We live in a historic 1895 home and for the last 2 1/2 years have been living in the owners quarters upstairs and operating the rest of the house as a B & B. Now we are moving from the upstairs which is a quaint, rustic attic space with all knotty pine (floors, walls, ceiling-all pine!) into the lower level which is 10 ft ceilings and touches of elegant Victorian styling….quite a shift!

What was interesting was that I was not finding ‘room’ for many things and in particular just did not feel inclined to bring down any of my extensive basket collection. I am notorious for piling things into baskets! Other ‘earthy’ type things just didn’t seem to want to come, like I just did not need the wood and earth elements anymore or had too much of it. My feng shui instincts said, hmm, water element…you need more water element! And it is no coincidence that we have been very much in drought mode here in Arkansas for months.

Now less than a week after this moving project and my awareness of water qualities lacking in my environment we are being deluged with daily rains! Yeah, glorious rain - all of nature is lapping it up, the frogs are ecstatic, the pond is full again so the fish are happy, and the green of the grass and newly leafed trees is breathtaking. It seems all of nature is in flow again. And I, settling into my new home environment, feel again the movement within, a sense of more spaciousness and nurturing flow within, guiding me in the direction of my desires.

Generally as women reach menopause age their life becomes quite a bit simpler and choices and decisions come with more ease. But for many women, old patterns hold on tight and the inner work of connecting with their authentic self and releasing old beliefs and ways of being takes a few years at least.

Most of my coaching clients decide to try coaching to reach some specific goal or end result, they already have an idea of what it is they really want - they just feel stuck in some way. On the other hand, I have had a few clients that really can’t get in touch with what it is they are looking for, what that illusive happiness or fulfillment might be. In both cases, I highly recommend an exercise to uncover what it is that they are tolerating in their life.

What are the numerous things that you ‘put up with’ day after day, year after year? How have these tolerations road-blocked you and sapped your energy and passion?

You have probably heard the ‘positive attitude’ question posed: If you could not possibly fail, what would you set out to accomplish? Maybe it works for some people afraid of failure. But I sense that it is more common for women at menopause age to fear success, of being GREAT, being POWERFUL.

All the positive talk and affirmations in the world can not help someone who is so stressed by their ‘tolerations’ and so void of energy because of all the ‘pretending’ in their lives. Some things will need to drop away to make room for the forward movement. So maybe you would like to do an assessment - make a list of all the things that you are tolerating!

I invite you to share some of your insights - add your list or other thoughts on this process.

My biggest success story as far as natural remedies for pre-menopausal symptoms has been the natural herb Maca. Maca is a Peruvian grown root that has been used for 3800 years! The Indians of Peru have considered it a staple and both men and women use it.

What I find wonderful about this natural remedy for balancing hormones is that it relieves you of needing to test to see which hormones are out of sync on which days. This applies to your whole endocrine system - thyroid, adrenals, pituitary as well as your balance of estrogen, progesterone and testosterone.

I also like that you can’t really hurt yourself by taking too much. For many women as little as 1/2 teaspoon of the raw powder a day works but you can take a tablespoon twice a day if that seems right for you, no problem. It also comes in capsules but I actually like the earthy, rooty taste and texture of it, adding it to my smoothies or sprinking on granola.

Some of the extra benefits besides reducing the typical menopausal symptoms of emotional swings, hot flashes, fatique, etc is that it can also boost your energy levels and overall sense of well-being and enhance your libido if that is something that has diminished with all the shifts of your body changes.

Learn more at www.macaweb.com - click on Maca Facts. This site has the best prices and I have been ordering from them for some time.

The winter always seems like the perfect time for reflection, reading books I haven’t had time for during the ‘longer’ days. Also spending more time online, searching, exploring, reading what others are doing, opening to new concepts I can enrich my life with. So here are some of the things I am exploring - this one from some info on Improvisation and how this art teaches us new ways to approach life…..from the book, Improv Wisdom: Don.t Prepare, Just Show Up by Patricia Ryan Madson, www.improvwisdom.com

This is going to sound crazy. Say yes to everything. Accept all offers. Go along with the plan. Support someone else’s dream. Say “yes”; “right”; “sure”; “I will”; “okay”; “of course”; “YES!” Cultivate all the ways you can imagine to express affirmation. When the answer to all questions is yes, you enter a new world, a world of action, possibility, and adventure. Molly Bloom’s famous line from Ulysses draws us into her ecstasy. Humans long to connect. Yes glues us together. Yes starts the juices rolling. Yes gets us into heaven and also into trouble. Trouble is not so bad when we are in it together, actually.

The world of yes may be the single most powerful secret of improvising. It allows players who have no history with one another to create a scene effortlessly, telepathically. Safety lies in knowing your partner will go along with whatever idea you present. Life is too short to argue over which movie to see. Seize the first idea and go with it. Don’t confuse this with being a “yes-man,” implying mindless pandering. Saying yes is an act of courage and optimism; it allows you to share control. It is a way to make your partner happy. Yes expands your world…

With the rule of yes, we call upon our capacity to envision, to create new and positive images. This yes invites us to find out what is right about the situation, what is good about the offer, what is worthy in the proposal. Exercising the yes muscle builds optimism. However, we sensibly understand that the practice of affirmation is not a guarantee of outcomes. Saying yes to life will not banish problems or promise eternal success. A positive perspective is a constructive one, however, and it is easier on those around us.

try this:

For one day say yes to everything that’s offered. Set your own preferences aside. Notice the results. See how often it may not be convenient or easy to do this.

I’ll let you know more on my experience with this….I’m working on “yes, and…” where I get to set my boundaries of willingness! Your thoughts and experiences are welcome.

No I’m not going to say anything specific right now about ’sex’ - and no I have not even read this new book yet - just released this week! But I have been reading the excerpts and interviews, Gail’s blog, and visited the Seasoned Woman Network to read comments. I think the media is playing big with the ’sex’ aspect of the book when there is a lot of very important dimensions to what Sheehy is offering up in this newest book which explores the Second Adulthood (ages mid 40s to 70s) and marks the 30th anniversary since her book Passages and more recent The Silent Passage about menopause.

What makes a seasoned woman?

Time.

A seasoned woman is spicy. She has been marinated in life experience. Like a complex wine, she can be alternately sweet, tart, sparkling, mellow. She is both maternal and playful. Assured, alluring, and resourceful. She is less likely to have an agenda than a young woman—no biological clock tick-tocking beside her lover’s bed, no campaign to lead him to the altar, no rescue fantasies. The seasoned woman knows who she is. She could be any one of us, as long as she is committed to living fully and passionately in the second half of her life, despite failures and false starts.

Just how old is a seasoned woman? I define it very much the way Auntie Mame’s friend Vera did when asked, “How old are you, anyway?”
“Somewhere between forty and death.”

It’s not over at 45 or 50, “it” being sex, intimacy, discovery of a new identity and a new passion in life. On the contrary, it begins all over again. Today, 50 is the start of a whole new cycle. You may have already lived an entire adulthood, but now you are at the beginning of another one—a portion of the life span that I identified in 1995 as our Second Adulthood.

Women’s lives are long and have many seasons. As contemporary women, if we’re healthy, we will likely be around longer than our mothers were. As I first reported in New Passages, epidemiologists say that a woman who reaches the age of 50 free of cancer and heart disease can expect to see her ninety-second birthday….

Time is perceived differently after 50. People begin counting backward, thinking in terms of years left to live. But that may be forty years or more, and we can elect to make something magnificent of it. This is a huge cultural shift, making possible what I call the Pursuit of the Passionate Life.

If you would like to know how others are responding to this new book, check out the Seasoned Woman Network. And feel free to post your comments here also.

The following is adapted from a section in Pema Chodran’s book, ‘When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times‘. I have taken the liberty to revise her comments on ‘well-being’ finding that I could substitute the buddhist term well-being with ‘wisdom’.

Although I have stated that it is almost impossible to describe an actual point at which one suddenly has ‘wisdom’, the metaphors in this quote really help me envision both the process and the result - the content and context of crone wisdom.

“[WISDOM] of the body is like a mountain. A lot happens on a mountain. It hails, and the winds come up, and it rains and snows. The sun gets very hot, clouds cross over, animals shit and piss on the mountain, and so do people. People leave their trash, and other people clean it up. Many things come and go on this mountain, but it just sits there. When we’ve seen ourselves completely, there’s a stillness of body that is like a mountain. We no longer get jumpy and have to scratch our noses, pull our ears, punch somebody, go running from the room, or drink ourselves into oblivion. A thoroughly good relationship with ourselves results in being still, which doesn’t mean we don’t run and jump and dance about. It means there’s no compulsiveness. We don’t overwork, overeat, oversmoke, overseduce….

“[WISDOM] of speech is like a lute without strings. Even without strings, the musical instrument proclaims itself. This is an image of our speech being settled. It doesn’t mean that we’re controlling, uptight, trying hard not to say the wrong thing. It means our speech is straightforward and disciplined. We don’t start blurting out words just because no one else is talking and we’re nervous. We don’t chatter way like magpies and crows. We’ve heard it all; we’ve been insulted and we’ve been praised. We know what it is to be in situations where everyone is angry, where everyone is peaceful. We’re at home in the world because we’re at home with ourselves, so we don’t feel that out of nervousness, out of our habitual pattern, we have to run at the mouth. Our speech is tamed, and when we speak, it communicates. We don’t waste the gift of speech in expressing our neurosis.

“[WISDOM] of mind is like a mountain lake without ripples. When the lake has no ripples, everything in the lake can be seen. When the water is all churned up, nothing can be seen. The still lake without ripples is an image of our minds at ease, so full of unlimited friendliness for all the junk at the bottom of the lake that we don’t feel the need to churn up the waters just to avoid looking at what’s there.”

Whether we are ready to call ourselves ‘crone’ at this stage is a matter of personal preference. The true stage of menopause or cronehood begins approximately a year after the last menstrual cycle: do we just suddenly become the ‘wise one’? How could this be?

No, of course, just as it took a lengthy stage of perimenopause and premenopause ups and downs to reach the physical aspect of cessation of the menses, likewise revealing of the inner wisdom expressed by the mature crone is also a process.

No one can tell you how to reach this stage for yourself though shamans such as Susun Weed and Lynn Andrews advise that it is important to give yourself a crone’s time off - maybe a year even but at least a month or a week to just be with yourself, rediscovering who this new person is! Time in nature, journaling, drumming and dancing, prayer and meditation, are all excellent tools for the inner journey of connecting with your authentic self.

And how will you know when you are a crone? Well, it makes me think of the Buddhist saying, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!” If you think you have reached enlightment, you have surely been tricked. There is no single mountain top from which you can claim “I am here!” And as far as calling yourself a ‘crone’, I think it is significant to note that one who walks the path of a shaman will never refer to him or herself as a ’shaman’ or a ’shamanic healer’. There is no need for a label, one is simply what one is and what one does is to simply BE!

Though there are an almost infinite number of possible symptoms/reactions/tangible messages of the advent of menopause (Susun Weed’s Menopausal Years: The Wise Woman Way explores over 30 categories), the one that seems to stand out most dramatically from the others is the ‘hot flashes’.

Symptoms like depression and irritability, migraines and fatigue are not new to women in this day and age - stress of the workplace and relationships in general have given us all a headache or depressed state on numerous occasions over the years! So these are often easy to discount as true indicators of the approach of menopause. And though not every woman will experience hot flashes or night sweats, most do at some point. Many try to explain it away as overeating or stress induced, and eventually they will recognize the flashes as something speaking to them from a deeper, inner place, not really about the outer causal influences at all.

So, what about HOT FLASHES? » Read The Rest

“Give me your full attention, young Crone,” says Grandmother Growth in a voice deep and resonant. “For you will pay attention, I assure you, when your menopausal Change lets loose lightening-like hot flashes and waves of energy that free your feelings and stir your spirit. As you hold the wise blood inside more and more, menstruating less and less, strong energies will move in you. The women’s mystery teachings of menopause urge you to take time off to adapt to these energies, to take, symbolically or actually, real Crone’s Time Away and allow those hot flashes and sleepless nights to guide you into metamorphosis and initiation.”

-from Susun Weed’s Menopausal Years: The Wise Woman Way

Menopause - are we talking the same language when we communicate about ‘menopause’? Whenever I mention to women in my area that I offer workshops for women going through menopause, I get lots of comments like “Oh, I’m done with that!”. It seems most women relate menopause as an ‘event’ that is related only to the cessation of their menstrual flow.

My perspective is that menopause is a stage of life - as a woman begins to feel and sense changes in her body and emotions she enter this stage and it is formally / clinically called perimenopause or pre-menopause. Once the menstrual cycles have not occured for approximately a year, a woman can say truly that she is ‘ IN menopause’ - but not that she is ‘DONE’ with it! Sisters, this is when the interesting part begins! » Read The Rest