A full ‘Calendar Round’ according to the Maya is age 52, and it was at this time that I found myself turning inward — beginning, quietly, to prepare for the transition through the menopausal portal.
At that point, menopause appeared to me as something of an ending. A closing down. A kind of death of a life I had known — with little, it seemed, waiting on the other side.
I had always held a deep attachment to my moon cycles. My experience of them had been life-affirming, rhythmic, and deeply connective. I delighted in their flow and power — in the way they linked me to the waxing and waning of the moon, to the tides of the ocean, to the circle of women around me, and to the generative force of life itself.
To imagine their ending felt, at first, like a loss.
And yet, something in me sensed there was more to understand.
A story from the threshold
Just before I entered perimenopause, I travelled to the United States to take part in a Moon Dance with a circle of women — an ancient tradition with roots in Mexico.
There, I met the grandmothers. The elders.
I remember speaking to them about my concerns — about what it might mean for something so central to being a woman, to cease. .
Would I lose something essential? My connection to the moon… to the cycles… to other women? To that deep, rhythmic intelligence I had known all my life?
They spoke to me about the body not as something that diminishes, but as something that transforms. About the energy that is no longer released through the monthly flow — how it does not disappear, but is instead recycled. Circulating within. Deepening. Gathering. Becoming available in a different way. There was a sense that nothing was being taken. Only reconfigured.
And as I sat with them, and listened, something in me began to soften and surrender.
During those days and nights — through prayer, through movement, through simply being in that field — I was also shown what eldership looks like, not as an idea, but as something lived. I was invited into the elder lodge and there, without words needing to explain it, I began to understand.
Elders were not invisible. They were central.
They observed, held, and guided the community — not through force, but through presence.
The younger women naturally deferred to them with great honouring. They would enter the sweat lodge after them, leave after them. Food was served to the elders first. There was no question of their place. It was simply known. There was a quiet dignity to it. A deep, embodied respect.
And within that, something else could be felt — a kind of steadiness. A presence that did not need to assert itself, and yet shaped the space around it.
For me, this was a profound reframing.
What I had unconsciously absorbed from the modern world — that this stage of life marked a diminishment, a fading, a loss of relevance — began to loosen.
In its place, something else emerged. A sense that this could be an arrival.
A deepening into a different kind of power — one not defined by outward productivity or reproduction, but by presence, by perception, by the capacity to hold and to see.
I remember thinking — if our wider culture held women in this way, what an extraordinary and even exciting transition this could be.
And yet, for so many women, the opposite is true.
Menopause is often quietened, medicalised, or made to feel shameful. Women can become unseen, their experience minimised, their transition something to get through rather than something to be entered into.
But something in me had shifted.
And I carried that with me as I stepped into my own experience.
I entered peri-menopause soon after this visit, leaning into the support of my own homeopath through the process.
In my own practice, I guide women through this transition in much the same way I support younger women with their menstrual cycles — by helping them come back into relationship with their bodies.
Often, when a woman begins to honour her natural rhythms — rather than experiencing them as an inconvenience or a burden — something changes. The experience softens. The suffering eases.
Your body is not your enemy. It is your companion.
From a homeopathic perspective, the symptoms that arise at menopause are not random.
They may reflect underlying susceptibilities within a woman’s constitution — patterns that may have remained quiet or compensated for over many years.
The monthly bleed itself serves, in part, as a form of release — an outlet through which the body can discharge and regulate. As this phase of life comes to completion, what has not yet been resolved may begin to surface more clearly.
In this sense, the symptoms of menopause can be understood as a call.
A call for attention. For healing. For letting go.
Suppression — whether physical or emotional — does not resolve what is seeking expression. It often drives it further inward, limiting the capacity of the vital force over time.
As a classical homeopath, I do not see this portal as something to be managed into silence.
It is something to be accompanied — with care, with skill, and with deep respect for the intelligence of the vital force.
Homeopathy is a medicine of the individual.
It does not treat menopause as a condition. Instead, it listens — to the whole woman. Her physical symptoms, her emotional landscape, her history, her inner world, and the particular way this transition is expressing itself through her.
From this depth of listening, the remedy emerges — one that resonates with her vital force at that precise moment in her journey.
In this way, homeopathy is uniquely suited to walking alongside a woman through this threshold.
It does not ask her to suppress what is arising. Nor does it ask her to return to who she once was. It supports the unfolding of who she is becoming.
Every woman’s experience is personal and unique. Symptoms that arise at this threshold are not mistakes. They are part of the body’s own language — asking for space, for attention, for completion.
And perhaps, if listened to gently enough, they may also open onto something quieter beneath it all — something that has not been lost, and was never bound to the cycles themselves.
Journeying with a professional homeopath through this transition means you do not have to navigate that language alone.
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