00:00:00 Inés
Recover the power of the energy that we were supposed to have since the beginnings of time. Starting with the trauma of birth, the transgenerational trauma. Everything that is in my body as a container is a lot of that, plus joy and pleasure. And we want to enjoy life. So let’s enrich the conversations and the solutions, from grief to pride, the pride of being born, the pride of going through shared pleasure in life so that life is the psychedelic experience without psychedelics, because it is a mess and it’s beautiful. We just need to be safe and contained by this time in life. Look at people’s eyes and see, “We’ve got you, Honey Bunny, we’ve got you. Of course we’ve got you, because you’ve been doing it all. And you don’t have to do it alone.” That’s all. And you can melt in those arms. You know, that image… Ahhhhhh.

00:01:07 Rosemary
This is the Gifts of Trauma podcast stories of transformation and healing through Compassionate Inquiry. 

Welcome to another episode of The Gifts of Trauma podcast. I’m Rosemary Davies-Janes, and I’m here today with J’aime Rothbard and our guest, Inés Zabalaga, and we welcome you to listen to our conversation where we’ll be focusing on everything related to menopause. Inés, welcome to the podcast.

00:01:50 Inés
Thank you. Thank you to you both, Rosemary and J’aime. Thank you very much. I am so grateful for the opportunity, for many reasons, but also I feel like I carry with the voices of many women that would be expecting the conversation as a way to start again… conversations that we’re not having so that we are having one today.

00:02:13 Rosemary
Thank you, we will include your full bio in the show notes, but I wonder ,how would you like to introduce yourself? What other than the dry facts do you want our listeners to know about you? Who are you?

00:02:30 Inés
I’m a very curious creature. I think that’s been the case since the very beginning. I am made of melted circumstances and cultures. Was born in Bolivia but grew up in between Mexico, Central America and Uruguay, and then I went to leave to Bolivia when I was 25 until now that I live in between Bolivia and Canada. But I feel that in me there is this combination of so many elements that by the time I started studying, I wanted to study myself. So that’s why I started psychology. Probably that’s behind every psychologist. The curiosity around what is this combination of things and how can I make sense of the way I think, the way I feel, the way I move, how I choose my relations, What happens after? So I did study clinical psychology and then I saw the iceberg as a whole because I was just looking at me as a tiny little piece of it. And then the systemic approach was like, wow, this is huge. And then the systemic approach, which is one of my main interests, taught me how to see the relation of everything in all. And from there I moved to family constellations because the systemic approach brings a lot of information and knowledge around the relations and the communication. But family constellations completed the opportunity for us to see really the energetic factor, which is information that comes from the past and from past generations and how it is transmitted to our bodies and then into our life experience. So I do that. I work with people, sometimes in groups, sometimes in retreats or in one-on-one, helping people and trying to, yeah, show us as an element of just facilitating the opportunity to go deeper into the understanding of what is going on, what is going on with me, what is happening, and why am I building around me, the world that I’m building. So to question that is one of my passions. That would be me, a very curious creature.

00:04:59 Rosemary
I love that. What a beautiful introduction.

00:05:02 Inés
Thank you.

00:05:03 Rosemary
As you may have noticed with your clients, in the media there is a lot of talk, a lot of questions, on menopause these days. I wonder if you can take us into what is going on there.

00:05:20 J’aime
And I also have to just jump in and say I want to make specific space for perimenopause in this conversation as an often overlooked or invisible thing that so many of us are experiencing right now. And so the invitation is expanded to also name perimenopause in the conversation. 

Inés:  Absolutely Yeah.

00:05:44 Rosemary
Since you are a systems person, what is the entire system of menopause? Does it start at perimenopause and end post menopause or can you sketch that out for us? Is there a structure?

00:05:58 Inés
Formally, menopause would start after you have been one year in your irregular cycles and then it’s gone for one whole year and then you can call yourself, ‘lady in the menopause.’ What I find in this way of dividing, also the experience of us all is probably another way of understanding, but also of controlling what’s going on so that we can relate to stages and bring the medicine that is for that stage. When in reality is, I don’t know, sitting and seeing a flower bloom and say, OK, exactly when is it that the fourth pedal is going to do what it has to do so that we can know and we can bring solutions to that. I find that has been forever a way of teaching us how to relate to our body, according to our natural cycles. So it can be so brutal the way we understand our natural way of being, if we divide it into all those stages that actually happen, that actually from a biological and in a general health perspective are useful, of course, But at the same time keeps on erasing the nature of it, which is this is a natural process. And we’ve been treating it as a medical issue, something that we need to relate to so that we have an understanding of the why’s and the what to do’s, so. And so in Uruguay, for example, where I grew up, when you get your period, the language is ‘I’m sick.’ That’s what we are taught to say, So, when you are 13 and 14, once a month you’re sick. And it’s in a very low voice that you say “I’m sick”. You start numbing what’s going on and pretending that everything is alright. And that’s just, I find it so sad. So I’m not even in that stage of… I still have my period and I have it in very regular and very crazy ways. But I found myself last year starting to relate to menopause because it’s coming, and because supposedly I have to get ready if I’m going to go for hormone replacement, or if I’m going to go crazy, or if I need to go to the doctor. So I was already in that system of beliefs that I’m going to have something that is going to be so difficult, and is going to be so different, and nobody’s having the conversation around yeah, it might be difficult, it might be different and it is going to be OK. And that sensation is what that kind of sensitivity is what we are missing, the sensitivity around we need to feel safe in our bodies because the body is doing the work of nature. Instead, we feel like the body is against us on many occasions. And that belief, talking about trauma and how it operates in menopause, imagine I believe, working in our bodies like they are the enemy. I just got.. how you call it?

00:09:11 J’aime
Goosebumps. I’m already appreciating the way you’re framing this conversation up. The baseline of beliefs this established, in your case, in Uruguay. “There’s something wrong with me. I’m sick.” That is the introduction into this very natural process. Is that still, what you talked about as a girl.. this is how it was. Has that progressed at all… or I’m curious, is it still something people say in Uruguay is I’m sick? Yes, Big yes.

00:09:39 Inés
Yes, yes, absolutely. Yes, this is called… referred to that way.

00:09:43 J’aime
And then what do people call menopause? How is that framed?

00:09:48 Inés
Yeah, menopause, but at the same time as… it’s the end of so many things. So it’s the end of you being a reproductive being, you being productive, you being young, You being a possibility for the… so many things in life. It’s the end of so many things and I feel it brings a brutal, brutal overcharge in our bodies that are dealing with the history of everything that we have done already and are tired. We are exhausted women. We are so tired, and we are supposed to keep it up. and what it is missing in the conversation also, even in the in most of the feminists narratives that are about us getting to places of more equal opportunities, is, and this is not at all me being feminist or any other ideology behind what I’m going to say, but the lack of support, the lack of support from the system in general, but particularly from men. The way that they are dealing with their own processes. But the ways where they are not supportive because they went away because they were violent, have created this rupture where one of the most important and most common trauma related symptoms is that we have convinced ourselves that we are alone. Even if we are in a relationship, deep inside is that voice, we are alone. So again. We are constantly, maybe not even consciously dealing with this belief that we need to make it work. And we are like a big spider trying to check on every corner of that multidimensional net. So I’m wondering honestly right now as we talk, how much is the organic, natural process of a body that was getting ready to reproduce life? And we are that, we bring life and then it’s the moment for more connection with ourselves and the wisdom of nature and the wisdom of the existence. And that’s hopefully when we’re supposed to be more in contact with us in giving knowledge, giving different things, not life. But then the stress of the body and the mind and the spirit in the changes, gets into this… not feeling safe. And that is just, I feel, one of the factors that is the most brutal and we don’t talk about that. I have found myself in situations where… I got divorced twice and it’s been very difficult to see myself again in a possibility of… this was just my experience related to my repetition of trauma, because my father was also violent. And so, I probably… I am repeating and I start the healing process and again, we lack the systems of support for us to get there and feel so much support that the natural process will be totally different.

00:13:15 Rosemary
Yeah. I really appreciate that you got back to that point in this, because what was going through my mind as I was flashing back to my early days in perimenopause, and my first irregular period…. the first thought is, Oh my goodness, am I pregnant? And there’s so you describe the image of a spider. I was like a spider scurrying all around the web. Could this have happened? And looking at my calendar and what was I doing on that date? And it was… so I wonder, could you… you work with women in this Inés. I wonder if you could share a story or two that sort of illustrates the arc of what women have gone through, that you’ve worked with, and maybe match that up with how you would love to see them received, how you would love to see them supported going forward.

00:14:01 Inés
Yeah, for sure. You’re saying that… I remember. So I work as a psychologist also supporting women with psychedelic assisted therapy. And let me tell you, when I’ve been in retreats with men and women, and in retreats with just women, the sound of it gets into your skin, like something very different. The way men are healing and the way we women are healing. It’s such a loud scream, such a loud scream. Women, we are craving forever for support. And the support might be in between, women with men, but in general with the system. There was one one of my clients that started working with me probably 2 years before she came to this retreat. She was working with her stepfather as her boss at work, and that was the abuser of all of her infancy years. And I think this is one of those cases where you are like, OK, this is how much our system is going to continue trying to pretend that we are OK in situations that were never OK. So, our sexuality and the ways that we have not been feeling, start from so young, so early in times, that if you work in a retreat or in a group of women or in a group of… or in a group of mixed men and women and you ask who has suffered sexual abuse as a child? You’re going to be super surprised to see how the majority, but probably two or three are raising hands. So when it comes to women, this lady, she started just, war therapy process for. I like to work on preparation for retreats. I dedicate so much time to preparation that sometimes psychedelics are not needed because we made it to understanding what was needed before that. But in this case, she really needed it. So she went to the retreat and started connecting with, so many times where she was abused not only by this man but by others. And, you know,in a  big fire. She was able to just burn pictures and burn little objects from the altar and have a full expression, cathartic expression of the body and of her emotions in a safe place where she was held, where she was finally crying. What she needed to cry, screaming, bad wording. Is that how you would say it when you speak only bad words?

00:16:52 J’aime
Like cursing.

00:16:53 Inés
Aha.

00:16:54 J’aime
Cursing.

00:16:55 Inés
So that the space was open for her to really do what she needed to do, so that at the end of that process… and now it’s been probably 2 years since, she was able to see how much she was in constant threat and her body was constantly given the sign that she was never going to make it. So she left the work and started a very different process, which is doing nothing. And that’s another space where we are totally not used to. A woman never does nothing, we don’t do nothing. We are constantly doing something. And that, that was her conclusion of the whole retreat. I need to do nothing. I need to experience the tiredness and the sadness and the grief for some time. And we did a beautiful work of also including the possibility for her to do family constellations and the systemic approaches. Consider how you are in the family. So the mother and the father of this woman, a full adult, supported her through that process where she was doing nothing but looking after herself. And that was luxurious, when it should be part of our life that we go to the doctor and we get something more like “it is natural and you’re OK and I’m here to assist you. Let me know how would you like to be assisted?” Instead, we go to doctors with perimenopause, menopause. We go to doctors in those stages. And it’s most probable that they will give you antidepressants so that you don’t feel sad or you don’t feel the emotions that it carries. And here we go again, pretending that we are fine and buying the beliefs and the narratives of a broken system that says just go with it and try to be functional. So stopping and not doing nothing in this case was the medicine that probably we all need. Like, you know, give me a break. Does that make sense?

00:19:12 J’aime
Yeah, it makes sense. I was wondering if you could say a little bit to the woman who’s out there listening, who invariably is going to say that’s not possible for me. And what can doing nothing look like for a woman? We did a little research and found, for example, in this midlife study of women aged 42 to 50, 75% of them are parents and 85% of that same sample are employed. And we found similar studies in the Netherlands, 80% of all perimenopausal women are employed. Of those women, 68% are supporting not only children but also elder relatives. Let’s talk to that woman. What can doing nothing look like on a more micro dose level?

00:19:59 Rosemary
We’re taking a brief pause to share what’s on offer in the Compassionate Inquiry community. Stay with us, we’ll be right back. 

If you’ve been listening to our podcast and are curious about the Compassionate Inquiry^® approach developed by Doctor Gabor Maté and Sat Dharam Kaur, consider joining the Professional Training Program. It’s open to all healing professionals, including naturopaths, physicians, body workers, coaches, and therapists. In addition to learning how to use compassion to support your clients in their most vulnerable moments with greater empathy and authenticity, you’ll also deepen your own internal process. If you’re interested, look for the link in the show notes.

00: 20:39
J’aime: What can doing nothing look like on a more micro dose level?

Inés
I think it is when we steal ourselves from places without permission, regardless, unapologetically. We steal ourselves and I find the little group of women, call it circle, call it… but that is frequent, a place where women are healing between women. And why just women between women and men with men because we deal with different circumstances and this is an organic, totally different experience, to be this ecosystem in relation to the bigger ecosystem that is the world. The combination comes up in a very different way. So when we are in between women, we are in the opportunity of stopping the hiding, because when there is a man in the room, we hide more. Stop the hiding, even if that is once a week, once a month you go with a group of women that is a yoga breathing retreat. Whatever we do as a group, and it may grow. I work with circles of women that is just an open space for women to come and join. And if they want to do it one month and not the other, it has to be a breathing room, a flexible opportunity for us to relax and find others and sometimes find the support of others, to reconnect and rebuild the social fabric. We are not going to go back, probably to the times when men and women were living and nothing contemplating nature was part of life. We’re not apparently going there. So we need to build little bases that make sense for us to relax and to have the sweetness and the love and the opportunity to reconnect with whatever it is that is true for us. That is our truth, and that is not keep on buying the information about how to deal with the problem that has been medicalized and that you are again, you know, the problem and you need to solve it on your own. All those are symptoms of trauma and collective trauma in the body of each of us. 

So when we go to the group, it feels like it makes sense. Even if it is 2 hours where we can hold hands or just looking at each other’s eyes. And if it is facilitated, Compassionate inquiry has circles that are beautiful. If it is facilitated, you may have an opportunity to express what’s going on in that week for you. And that means a lot, when it makes sense for us and it’s not something that they build it for us so that we can go back to a different box. Now that we are more wise, we are more wise than ever before. As we get older and we find less room in those little boxes, Hopefully they are never ever again comfortable, if that makes sense as a method for the boxes where we hide and where we just buy what the mainstream is saying that we have and that is coming and that we better get ready for the most challenging of all the stages of pretending that we are OK. Yeah. So I would recommend that, the power of rebuilding a little bit of the social fabric, connecting, and there are so many. I’m happy to give resources for women that need that connection, and so powerful, so powerful, because in the arms of another woman, we all can relax. Men also need that. I don’t know how much time we have, but I have some words for men also, because it’s… wow!

00:24:25 J’aime
Inés, in this conversation of nothing, or alternatives to nothing, you did something that really got my attention when you said, once you get to a group of women, you’re supported and you can, “ahhhh”.  And that exhale to me represents some degree of that nothing we were talking to, because there’s a level of unburdening that you’re speaking to.

00:24:50 Inés
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We need to relearn also how to relate to women in a way that we feel safe around women because we all come from a mother. And this is again, if we wanted to talk about trauma and menopause, how those two relate. It is very difficult to find a mother in the generation before us. I’m 51, so that generation and ever fathered our grandmas find one that was in the possibility of really feeling supported, doing nothing when she’s tired, or when she’s grieving or when she… and she feels that she can dedicate her life to raise this baby, take care of the baby until the level of dependency allows her to just let them go. 

So we all come from very difficult experiences of our mothers, some more, some less. But the reality is that if we relearn how to go to women in these opportunities, therapeutic retreats, Compassionate Inquiry circles, if we learn to go there with trust and enough love and we really melt into… We’ve been through the same. We are all the same. There’s nothing particular, there’s nothing private. And you spend time, I’m talking physically. I’m saying go back to the possibility of trusting the body of another woman. I’ve been lately in Bolivia with a beautiful team researching how to go back to the possibility of really feeling safe in the body of another woman after we have had a difficult experience with our mother. So we call it the laboratory for reconnecting with our mother, and we do LSD in high dose, for two women at a time, just two with a team of three. And because LSD is one of the finest, most beautiful ways to go all the way back with a big chance that you may find yourself in the realm of the perinatal stages, and even before. So when they go there, and it happens so often, all that information of tension that comes from the confusion of when we were babies and then when we got separated from our mothers and the, you know, giving birth being probably one of the main traumas that we carry in our body. And that happened with her. So when we heal, that’s a big one. That’s a super, major, big one, that reconnection with our mother and with the energy and for us to feel relaxed there. Stanislav Grof says that men has they have a more difficult time because if it was so difficult for them in relation to the energy of the mother, then in time, unless it’s processed, they carry with this tension in and then the tension goes against the possibility of really, truly seeing women in a beautiful, respectful, adorable way. It’s just, there’s going to be a lot of fight. There’s going to be a lot of rupture, and it’s going to be different for women because we need to renegotiate with nature. We need to renegotiate if we wanna be mothers, if we want to be sisters. We need to make a different deal with nature.

00:28:15 Rosemary
Yeah, I wonder, could I just interrupt with one of my special interests? I was adopted as an infant and speaking for adoptees. In my case, I was adopted because my mother was unable to have a child. She had an early hysterectomy and she didn’t go through menopause. She went, I think maybe she went through menopause when she was 35 and I was very young. That’s interesting what you were just saying about the LSD journeys because, I had no role model and I had birth trauma, must have, because being given away as an infant. So I just wanted to bring that up. Do you find that people come to you who have similar mother issues? If I can just bundle it that way and that impacts or weighs into their menopausal journey?

00:29:06 Inés
Absolutely and I wish we could. It would be more people doing that recognition with that fundamental energy from where we’re talking and I listen to you and it was like J’aime at the beginning saying can we acknowledge that we are a little bit, you are a little bit with the sore throat, Inés, and you’re a little bit sick. Can we acknowledge that you come from 2 ladies that were unsupported. You don’t come from just one. You were not adopted because she was not able to have kids, but because the other one also was not in the possibility. So the lack of support is major there and the fear that grows in our bodies because of the lack of support. I think there’s… I don’t know if there’s research around trauma, being this amount of fear causing all these chemical, also, situations where we feel that we are not going to be able to reproduce, to produce, to be beautiful, to be all that we are requested to do, and the worst is coming. It’s so scary!

00:30:10 Inés
So scary. So to be able to reconnect in… anyway that, bring our bodies the beauty of hey, no, you are a beautiful miracle of life and you’re going through different moments, and it is going to be OK. And you’re never alone. And we’re going to find a way to do this together, and we’re going to stop the nonsense once we are like, OK, we can do this together. And it’s OK if you go crazy one day. If you have a bad day, 

I always tell my daughter, kiss Julia. She’s 20. She’s a beautiful young lady and I’m always like, honey, you know what, if you see a crazy lady like around my age, just having count, there’s so many good reasons that are behind someone that is going nuts in this stage of life. But not just women, but also if we can heal together, and we can see also how much the wound of not feeling supported now in these days, is coming backwards. Like women now we are attacking them. We are being really difficult. The whole gender violence is flipping over to, you know, how women now… we are not showing up with respect for them. Doing psychedelics as a way of therapy, to be able to reconnect and understand how much fear and how much anger comes from the energy at the beginning of times. And we can release it. And we can be humble and sweet and come back to this beautiful opportunity of, in reality, what we want is connection. That’s all we want. And compassion and to be seen and that men can see us and they’re like, wow, you did so much. And we can see them and say you’ve been doing so much as well. Just we’ve been doing different things. And in this moment, I do not wish to be treated as someone that is sick and is going to be unable. I would just… would like to be treated with the highest respect.

00:32:25 Rosemary
Yeah, respect and compassion. Yeah. Be a soft place for me. Treat me… Treat me as someone who needs care and love.

00:32:37 Inés
That is medicine. That is medicine right there.

00:32:40 J’aime
Yeah, it’s huge medicine. What I’m really appreciating from this conversation, what you’re articulating Inés, is we’re able to really draw back into the beginning of time, our time, even the birth, even in a non traumatic birth, that’s not actually true. Every birth is traumatic because it’s a ripping away your first home.

00:33:04 Inés
It’s and don’t… it’s dying. We’re dying. We’ve been an aquatic being for 270 days and then we are totally different. It’s the rupture of everything. Without advice you don’t know how much it’s going to be prolonged suffering. So LSD has been calling my attention so much and my eyes to maybe we can do something for what happened there. Because now… what is happening now in these days, let’s say Bolivia, my country, if you go… I had my babies natural, but that doesn’t exist anymore. Maybe in the rural part of Bolivia, some, but not in the official medical system. Women are not bringing life like that anymore. It’s a programed surgery.

00:33:53 J’aime
Can I just, Yeah, I was gonna interrupt you from it and ask what do you mean by they don’t get a natural birth? So what you’re saying is that if I’m a pregnant woman in Bolivia and I go and see my doctor, they’re going to schedule a cesarean. That’s just, that’s how a baby comes in, bar none. That’s just how it’s happening.

00:34:10 Inés
That’s how it happens and the majority of the cases. And iff you hope for something different between women, between doctors and between in general, the society? You’re crazy. Why would you do that if you can program it and it can be without pain, why would you do something different? So we are so apart from that. And what is happening is that if the baby and the mother, in that moment, they do not make the effort to survive in that particular moment. All the power of believing that I am worth this life also is playing a role there. So we are stealing women and babies. Doesn’t matter if it is a baby, male or female, with a chance to start life with the sensation of, I made it through and I have the energy of… it was difficult. It was tremendous, but here I am. And that power is just, I believe also one of the invisible situations that is the systemic and the collective trauma that we are creating. And then when you are in these stages, like if we want to relate that to perimenopause, we carry with so much that for God’s sake, of course we’re gonna as would they say in Uruguay, we’re gonna get sick when we are in these stages and we’re going to get more foggy and more emotional. But I wonder if it is so much the whole organic process or the way we’ve been dealing with this, the ways we’ve been dealing with this as a problem.

00:35:51 J’aime
Can we also just say that this is the first time… I’m 48, I’m in perimenopause and I feel at once so lucky, because for the first time, I think our generation is the first one that gets to actually name what’s happening when we’re in it, perimenopause. It’s also to me, frustrating to see my life and to understand that there’s not very much in place to support me moving through it, as we’ve been talking about. I have to, that’s another thing I have to go do. I have to go and create that for myself. And I have to also do the awareness in my family, and in my relationships, about this is what’s happening to me right now, whether you believe it or not. But I look at myself so lucky compared to Rosemary, compared to other women, to my mother, who I think back and I remember now, she was going through that and I treated her like a crazy woman. I treated her…. I was in adolescence and I treated my mother like a crazy woman. So now I feel horrible about that. But let’s talk a minute about what’s it like for you, Rosemary, as you are witnessing this surgence of awareness? What’s it like for you?

00:37:05 Rosemary
It’s amazing,.because when I was going through it, it was very much, you don’t talk about that, you know, like not even to girlfriends. Nobody wants to talk about that. And I remember being so puzzled because theoretically, when I had thought about going through, I think we didn’t even give it the name. I think the change. And when I thought about going through the change, it’s, Oh, it’s going to be great, I don’t have to buy tampons. It’s not going to be this mess every month. But then I fell into this deep grief that took me totally by surprise because, again, in my isolation, it’s, I’m losing a key part of what it is to be a woman, as you mentioned earlier, and it’s… I can’t reproduce. This diminishes my value as a woman to society. This turns me into an old person. All that. It was all just rattling around in my head. I’m so happy to see today the conversations are being had. I’m less keen on the medical conversations because the western world, from my perspective is far too quick to medicalize and pharmacize and diagnose issues that probably would be very easily worked through with regular conversations. Stealing time away to meet with your women friends, jumping into a circle, even just meeting with friends for coffee or lunch and just talking about what’s going on. Because typically friend groups are around the same age. And it’s… If it’s happening for you, it’s happening for others. So again, less reliance on experts and more reliance on just natural wisdom and wise women and grandmothers and that type of thing.

00:39:00 Inés
Yeah. I think of also, another piece in this puzzle is how are we having the conversations around sexuality? They are more and more open, thank God. Finally, when we get together with friends, female friends, and we have this very open conversations about sexuality, we may start treating our bodies with a little bit also of more respect and opportunities. Respect and opportunities with the way we ask the questions that we ask ourselves, the way we talk about our bodies and our… about our own experiences and in particular the way we are having, or not having, conversations around pleasure. You think about the conversations that we have like sexual education at schools or, and it’s all about fear of getting pregnant. It’s, you need to have this information so that you take care of that not happening to you. But in reality, we want you to do that at some point, just not now. So our body is a machine of trying to… it’s coming in Spanish… would be like…. How do you say complacenta, to please the system, to please the system, please the system in the requirements that the system has. And then one day we find ourselves not even wondering about pleasure. There’s so many possibilities that are coming up late in life. Oh, I didn’t know that was a possibility or that existed. I had a conversation with Julia. I remember when she was 16, around pleasure and she was like, this is weird, but at the same time it’s interesting. So where did you say I had that thing? And there is a possibility that I find it on my own? That I find my own clitoris, before it’s discovered, like America was discovered by Spain?

00:40:54 J’aime
Or before your clitoris was discovered by a man.

00:40:58 Inés
Yeah!

00:41:00 J’aime
Inés, I’m fast forwarding as I’m listening to you talking and I’m bringing that to the lived reality of many women going through perimenopause. And I just want to bring back a couple of things I’ve heard both of you say. Rosemary, speaking to how our understanding in the conversation about menopause and perimenopause is very medical right now. And if I think about the most popular podcasts that were listened to in 2024, they were about perimenopause, but I’ll tell you, they were quite medical conversations. Our bodies are going through so many changes that we don’t have words for, understanding for… We just think we’re anxious. We just think we’re full of rage and we’re and then there’s the shame that happens on top of that. So I appreciate all of the information that’s coming out, that no, this is actually like a neurotransmitter issue that my serotonin is out of whack, that my sleeping hormones, my melatonin is out of whack because I’m… I’m not sleeping through the night anymore because I’m getting up to pee four times. There’s just so many things that, like we’re getting awareness of, that’s medical that I so appreciate. And at the same time, quite often the call to action in these conversations is hormone replacement therapy, HRT. That’s usually the endpoint of a conversation. But if you’re me, then you have history of breast cancer in your family and it’s not a good option for you. So it’s not a panacea, and we’re still not being given like a full spectrum of options. And I think that’s one of the things that you’re really carrying and bringing into this conversation right now. Let me say one more thing, which is on the sexuality piece. If perhaps, like my clitoris was left to be discovered by me instead of Christopher Columbus, it might be possible when my sexual drive disappears after I have a child when I’m 37 that maybe I wouldn’t have blamed myself so much. What is wrong with me? What happened to my sex drive? This is so many women, that I’ve talked to and worked with over the years that then had to deal with shame. And it’s a whole other deep layer of what’s wrong with me that I cannot show up for my partner’s pleasure. So I really am hearing it in a new light as you’re talking about the pleasure conversation, that if we put ourselves in the centre of it, then we’re much more equipped to be at the centre of what’s happening when we encounter perimenopause. So I just wanted to say all those things that like, it’s great we have a medical conversation, but it can’t stop there.

00:43:37 Inés
Yeah, we can combine them. Whatever is good for one body that is not the same for the other. It’s not polarizing, but let’s be honest and bring the whole conversation, so that it enriches our possibilities to make sense and decide and total freedom. But I think you mentioned something that is key here, which is, recover the power of the energy that we were supposed to have since the beginnings of time, starting with the trauma of birth, the transgenerational trauma. Everything that is in my body as a container is a lot of that, plus joy and pleasure. And we want to enjoy life. So let’s enrich the conversations and the solutions. If microdosing LSD is working for me, I’m not in menopause, but I’ve been saying that I was menopause last year. I would think, what the hell, why I was doing that to me because my friends were doing it and it’s OK, I guess we’re doing it and it’s coming and I’m not there. It’s removing, stealing ourselves from every time we notice that it’s been a conquered space in our bodies, from narratives, from medicine, from beliefs. Every time we notice let’s go and steal ourselves and do something different from the grief of whatever was difficult and sad, to the pride. It’s the ultimate space where we need to go so we die with a big smile. From grief to pride. The pride of being born, the pride of going through shared in pleasure in life so that life is the psychedelic experience without psychedelic, because it is a mess and it’s beautiful. We just need to be safe and contained by this time in life. Look at people’s eyes and see. We’ve got you, Honey Bunny. We’ve got you. Of course we’ve got you because you’ve been doing it all. Then you don’t have to do it alone. That’s all. And you can melt in those arms. You know… that image.

00:45:44 Rosemary
Stealing time, stealing time away, liberating ourselves when we notice we’re sinking into the conquest. And I love the whole conversation around pleasure. And what I would just like to add is, sensuality is alive and well post menopause. That does not end. 

Inés:
No!

Rosemary:
Those myths about you’re no good anymore as a woman. Total myth.

00:46:07 Inés
Maybe what we are not good at this point in life and maybe we are not noticing our body saying I am tired of giving service, then because we relate sexuality to having sexual relationships with the man or with another might be a woman, but another, giving him pleasure. And maybe this is a time where the satisfier are our hands or whatever fantasy we’ll do a beautiful work for us to connect with pleasure. It’s just it’s back to us. And this is the challenge of these days, that we recover the power, bring it back to us and stop buying what is not serving.

00:46:47 J’aime
Yeah, I love that we’re landing here. That was where I hoped we would land, because the most beautiful way that we can be framing up this time we’re living in with the awareness we have is also the power that’s available to us to reclaim. That Rosemary’s talking about, she’s saying it’s alive and well on this side. And I came across a statistic that post menopausal women are 65% happier. And I was just wondering, with that big smile on your face, Rosemary, what you would have to say about that.

00:47:18 Rosemary
Inés touched on it, the whole putting yourself second, serving others. We’ve grown old enough and wise enough to have realized that’s not a healthy way to be. A lot of us, I won’t say everybody, everybody’s different, but a lot of us have matured through the process. And I’m single, I’m happy to have a relationship, probably don’t want to get married again because that’s that other, that’s that service. It shifts, I think as you get older and many people have spoken about this… Oprah very publicly… you get really clear on what you will and what you won’t do and what’s OK and what’s not OK. And I think that’s one of the great pleasures, even when it comes to a sensual, sexual perspective. Certain things that you might have tried to please a man when you were younger, it’s like either, definitely yes, or hell no, I’m not going there. We’re just much clearer, perhaps to men we’re less confusing. We know what we want and we express it.

00:48:20 Inés
But I think we’re a big challenge also. We represent a horrendous challenge of accepting that the mother is gone, even for our partners, that the mother is gone, that we have to be equals, and that I can see you and you can see me. And that’s very… It creates a lot of uncomfortableness around us because we are not doing what we’ve been doing. If we are heading towards a healthier opportunity, for us its to be connected with ourselves that we cannot betray that any more.

00:48:53 Rosemary
Yeah. And you mentioned it earlier when you talked about societal expectations. Society expects a lot of us at different stages in our lives. I’m expected to be retired. That’s not happening. I’m expected to live a certain way. That’s not happening either. So I think just really, I loved that liberation from the conquest. If we think of societal expectations as aspects of personal conquest, let’s just free ourselves.

00:49:21 Inés
Yeah, absolutely. I love the metaphor of colonizations. Now I’m going to see colonization in very different eyes. The decolonisation of our bodies and our hearts and our minds. That’s probably a beautiful way to to think of what can we do, what can we do? We can do this. This is the work.

00:49:44 Rosemary
Excellent. Inés, Thank you so much. I wonder if you could just speak very briefly about the retreat. I’m sure listeners will be very intrigued as to, we’ll post the link in the show notes, but can you maybe just walk us through how it is for someone coming from overseas, or out of country, or out of area to participate in one of your retreats? 

00:50:12 Inés
Yeah. So I’ve been doing that. I’ve been living in Bolivia for the past 24 years and now used recently last year, my partner being from Canada, and needed to come here, and so we moved and I’m partially there and here. So I’m a little bit still finding again, where’s my land to land, and maybe it’s going to be like this for some time. So we host retreats in Canada and in Bolivia now. We do the work together and the retreats are available for people that are clients of us or people that have a very clear referral from someone we know. So that the space is curated in the safest possible way. Especially because psychedelics are still in that area where it’s it’s not not totally legal. Some places of the world are for some substances, not for the others. So we always try to pay attention to, let’s work on preparation and with people that we know so people can make contact with us. And the most probable, is that we’re going to start conversations that are going to end up looking more like a whole therapy process before a retreat. So that’s one thing that is important. In Bolivia, we normally are there between the end of the year, November. And in November. we have retreats? We actually have two coming in November. For both, it’s mixed groups, men and women and then cross possibly in March. In Canada, we are hosting one in September, now, this year. But for women, it’s normally when I am there and in my growing Canada or in the world so I can make grow groups or opportunities or… and I love to have conversations just one-on-one that may help people to grow their own spaces and possibilities. We normally also take volunteers to come and join us to learn, which is a beautiful spot for those that are interested in learning about the work. That’s also interesting sometimes because it has to be like the mycelium of life, it has to be shared.

00:52:27 Rosemary
Yeah. Beautiful, Thank you so much. So there will be a contact form on your website that people can use to to get in touch. Beautiful. I have one, one final question. We’ve covered a lot of ground today. If you could leave one thought, one gem or pearl of wisdom for our listeners to contemplate after the show, what would you like to say?

00:52:51 Inés
It would be something like going back to the rules of… the rules of truth. Stop the noise and the nonsense and steal as much as you need to steal – for the time for you to go on an individual solo journey, whatever that is a walk, cup of tea group. Let’s stop pretending that we are OK in doing this on our own. Let’s do it together. And if you are alone or suffering, make the effort and reach out. I know there are many women like me that will be happy to just make it grow, an opportunity for healing.

00:53:32 Rosemary
Thank you so much. Those words of wisdom will no doubt resonate with our listeners. Inés Zabalaga, thank you for being with us today. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and your perspectives. It’s been inspiring and enlightening and I’m sure a lot of listeners are being left with so much to consider.

00:53:53 Inés
Thank you.

00:53:55 J’aime
Inés! Woman made of melted circumstances. Thank you so much for being here with us today.

00:54:00 Inés
Thank you to you both, Rosemary and J’aime. Thank you very much.

00:54:09 Rosemary
The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma, healing, transformation, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. 

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