00:00:00 Kate

When I say I can feel the brain pruning, it’s almost like revisiting these hormonal transitions in life, beginning with puberty, childbearing, postpartum, and checking in with, oh, now I understand what was going on for me. So I go back to that time. I can see that oh, I’m not that same person. I’m getting an upgrade of some sort. By feeling it’s my brain pruning or what other women speak of. We can see where we’ve come from. We are creating almost a new vision for ourselves that is taking these other parts with us. There’s also a repairing that’s happening these times where I didn’t speak about what was happening or I didn’t have the language, there wasn’t the safety. I’m going back to those versions of myself and I can witness it from this mothering, nurturing lens, integrating whatever need was there that couldn’t have been met. And so entering these later years of my 40s and then into menopause with a more wholeness. I can see that also repairs a lineage of women on both sides who I never saw relax. I’m pruning not just for my own self, but for everyone that is coming up before me and after me.

00:01:33 Rosemary

This is the Gifts of Trauma Podcast. Stories of transformation and healing through Compassionate Inquiry. 

Welcome to the Gifts of Trauma podcast by Compassionate Inquiry. I’m Rosemary Davies-Janes and this is the second episode of a new four part series on menopause. The first episode was released on July 9th. It’s called Claiming Your Power in Perimenopause, with Inés Zavalaga. The link is below in the show Notes Today. Inez is back. Welcome back, Inés.

00:02:16 Inés

Thank you so much. Thank you.

00:02:18 Rosemary

Oh, it’s great to have you here. We’re also joined by Kate Hazzlet. Welcome, Kate.

00:02:23 Kate

Hi.Thank you so much. I’m excited to be here.

00:02:25 Rosemary

Oh, it’s wonderful to have you. Today we will be talking about menopause from the lens of moving beyond medicalization to reclaim the natural processes. So before we begin, let me just briefly introduce you both. Inés is a clinical psychologist, a Compassionate Inquiry practitioner, and a psychedelic assisted therapies facilitator. And she has over 25 years of clinical experience in family, individual couples and group therapy. Her foundation promotes the research, study and responsible dissemination of information on psychedelic work. Inés also leads Horse Assisted Constellation workshops to create collective fields of human and equine energies that enable her clients to reclaim the goodness and love in their lives.

00:03:15 Rosemary

Whoa! Just take that in for a moment. Kate is a naturopathic doctor, a speaker, and also a Compassionate Inquiry practitioner. She specializes in women’s health and midlife transitions, which is perfect for this conversation. Kate, you help women through the burnout, the hormonal shifts and stress, offering clarity, compassion, and nervous system awareness, guiding them back to safety in their bodies, and authenticity in their lives. I’ll give everyone a minute to take that in too. This is gonna be a powerful conversation.

00:03:50 Inés

Yeah.

00:03:51 Rosemary

As you both know, as Compassionate Inquiry practitioners, we start each session of therapy with an intention. And I’d like to invite each of you to share an intention for our conversation today. I will invite whoever would like to go first to just jump right in.

00:04:09 Kate

I can go.

00:04:10 Rosemary

Thank you, Kate.

00:04:12 Kate

My intention would be that we can become curious about this important life stage and that we can develop this foundation of maybe a compassionate lens in which to view this life stage, because there is a lot of noise out there right now, and to provide some clarity that we can return to our bodies and trust what is happening at this time in life.

00:04:42 Rosemary

Beautiful. Thank you. Curiosity and compassion. It couldn’t be any more CI, which is how we all refer to Compassionate Inquiry to save time. Couldn’t be more CI than that for an intention. Inés, what would you like to set up for your intention?

00:04:58 Inés

I’ll go for the dark side. My wishes are that we have such an open, honest conversation with the beautiful resources that we have today, between us, that we can reach the corners where women are still hiding, not really knowing how to come back and be open about the inner reality that we’re all going through in life. To me, it’s been an amazing opportunity, a privilege to spend so much time alone at this point of my life and noticing the very good reasons why we keep on running, and we keep on being so busy and addicted to so many things. Cuz when you stop and you notice the situation inside of you, but you really notice, you clean with diet, you clean with movement, you really do the work. Or at least when you try. Having that privilege, I’ve noticed, the situation is just tremendous. It’s just hula. It’s so much that my intention is if we can reach other women and bring them to the conversation around the darkness and really what’s going on, that would be fantastic, at least for some corners, maybe not all.

00:06:18 Rosemary

So I love that Inés, you’re shining light into the darkness, because I’m sure for some women, menopause does feel like a dark period. And it’s interesting, as I was preparing for this conversation. I googled “what do women want to know about menopause.” And I’m curious. This is a question for both of you. What menopause related questions do your patients and clients bring to you? Kate, would you like to start?

00:06:44 Kate
Sure. My patients often come with… And this will sound maybe from the pathology end of things. They come to my office because they are pathologizing what’s happening. So they’re arriving with this question of, ‘What’s wrong with my body? What… What is happening to me?’ They’re not asking very specific questions about ‘What do I want to know about menopause?” They are in… like Inés was saying, in a dark place about what the process is unraveling and undoing. And there’s a disorientation that they’re arriving to my particular space with a lot of, we’ll say, unprocessed emotions that need to be metabolized. That’s always our jumping off point.

00:07:33 Rosemary

Yeah. So they come in thinking there’s something wrong with them.

00:07:37 Kate

Yes. Yeah. Which is very sad. I offer a lot of empathy and compassion to that, because that is a very destabilizing place to be in, and to find answers isn’t always that easy.

00:07:50 Rosemary

I think that really speaks to the silence that has been kept around menopause. It’s being talked about now, and it’s wonderful that these conversations are happening, because it wasn’t talked about very much. Now. Inés, I wonder if you could share your response to that question. What do women coming in to meet with you? What questions do they have?

00:08:13 Inés

It’s interesting, I feel like women are coming to me because they identify with something that I offer. Right? So I get to have the clients that relate to the work that I offer. So more and more it is, questions around how psychedelics and the psychedelic therapy can really help them go a different way than the medical mainstream kind of way. So it’s more questions now in regards to, ‘What can I do that is sustainable and it’s good for me too?’ Now that I understand that there’s a lot going on since probably the perimenopause can start so early in time, your 30s. Nobody would tell you that, when you’re in your 30s and you’re being a new mom or you’re starting a marriage, or you’re starting a chapter of your life, you will never wonder about perimenopause or menopause. That’s not on your radar at all. Now that there is more information. And in my town, I’m trying, really, to use all the spaces. And I’ve been invited to many places to encourage the questions around. Now that we know this is going on, what do we do? And so I have started circles of women here to talk about microdosing of both Psilocybin, LSD, what is the impact in a woman’s life and health? And so I’m more into that chapter of bringing different solutions into this period of time that sometimes feels overwhelming, and just walking together and observing amazing results that feel like, how is it that this is still a secret? How is it that this information is still not so much available? Because when you see the results, when you really see that there is a possibility to actually feel better, more spacious, then I feel like it’s a beautiful new chapter for also the psychedelic research in these days.

00:10:15 Rosemary

Beautifully said Inés. you said, you see the results, I think you feel the results. That’s very much to the point. Now, Kate, I’m wondering if we can just lay a bit of a foundation here by speaking about brain science. I know it’s something that’s a favorite topic of yours. You did mention, before we started recording, the concept of pruning. I wonder if you could explain that concept. When does it happen and how does it relate to menopause?

00:10:43 Kate

You are right. It’s one of my favorite things to talk about. I can nerd out on the brain pretty easily. So when I first learned the term ‘pruning’, it was actually in reference to… because I have two boys, one is in adolescence, the other entering that stage. I became aware of this term pruning through the work of Dan Siegel, as he referenced it to the adolescent brain. And then as I went through my own process, I’m in my mid-40s, so I can often literally feel my brain pruning, as it’s chopping away old, like, long outdated ways of thinking and being in my life. I dove into some of the menopausal research about the brain, and listening to podcasts and reading some of the work of Dr. Lisa Moscone. I heard her talking about the word pruning and I just became fascinated. What is this that’s happening? When estrogen begins to decline, our brain receptors start to literally just chop away, just much like they do in adolescence. Old ways of thinking in service to more authenticity, less attachment, more authenticity. It’s like a renegotiation with our roles, our identities. And estrogen will touch every organ system in the body, but most importantly in the brain. And we start to feel maybe not quite like ourselves. And pruning is going to bring in sort of a new identity, shifting roles so that we’re more in touch with our service and our sole purpose, and less defined by some of the roles that we’ve taken on at different life stages.

00:12:36 Rosemary

Beautiful answer. It really speaks to how nature is taking care of us, as we move through life. Because when we hit adolescence we don’t need the more childlike attachments, and as we move into midlife, we don’t need the earlier attachments there. I’m really curious, Inés, from a psychedelic perspective, what you just mentioned earlier, how does…. I’m not even sure how to frame this. How does what Kate just shared play into your world when it comes to psychedelics?

00:13:10 Inés

It feels like we are cooking a delicious meal here, because those ingredients that go first and then I feel happy to share, you know, what actually happens. Let’s talk about, I don’t know, let’s choose LSD to say why LSD? Because it has been proven to be the most precious medicine to take us all the way to the perinatal stages and to the transpersonal opportunities for the holotropic mind to really reach what is inside of us and hopefully in a good container be fully expressed when you are in a macro dose. So when we reach those stages there is this neuroplasticity going… The neuro system just surrenders to the opportunity for this beautiful open consciousness. I’m sure, I’m not so much aware and this is why I love the conversation with Kate so much, that the chemicals in our body just are not the same. When we start relating in the sphere of hope and richness and just surrendering to the opportunity of our nervous system to start making new connections where we feel the opportunity to become more authentic. And then when we come back, even if we’re microdosing or if we went to a major journey with macrodosing, we come back with new practices for life that are like, okay, I’m so sorry, but this is not that person I was. This is not necessarily what I’m becoming. And what I’m becoming is this new version of me and I’m going to need to eat different, I’m going to need to relate different, I’m going to need to sleep different, I’m going to need to be supported in a different way. We embrace the responsibility finally, to have a GPS for the others, so they know how to relate to the new self, if that makes sense. Same with mushrooms. Mushrooms for let’s say more the sadness and the depression, but they also affect the fear, over all the life experience and the transpersonal and LSD to say is more. More expanded to the cosmic opportunity, the spiritual and MDMA goes to more the anxiety and the fear. So who, which human, not talking about just women, but women in particular, has not in life experienced enormous amounts of fear and sadness. And that gets stored. And then when that happens and estrogen. I don’t know how to say it in English. Estrogen. You say it, Kate. Estrogen. It’s the hormone. It’s estrogen.

00:16:03 Kate

Estrogen.

00:16:05 Inés

That one. When that one starts to check out and be less present, then okay, if feels like we have to be prepared to actually allow the new person that is coming into our body by hopefully releasing. There’s a lot of release that needs to happen so that we have more space to feel that we are back to being present and more alive.

00:16:34 Rosemary

Thank you, Inés. And the pruning, it’s such a graphic concept. Anybody who’s done any gardening, like when you prune, you have this huge pile of natural waste that has to be cleared away. But you also, Kate said you can feel your brain pruning. So I’m curious as to what that feels like or how you explain this from a more medically based perspective.

00:16:58 Kate

It’s a good question. I’m not sure I have a very medical answer other than what I’ve witnessed through hearing other women and my own experience. When I say you can feel the brain pruning, it’s almost like revisiting these hormonal transitions in life, beginning with puberty, childbearing, postpartum. And my personal experience is that I’m going back as though I’m seeing it on a tape, almost. And I’m really drawn to revisiting those times and checking in with, oh, now I understand what was going on for me at that time. I can remember these sort of times in adolescence where I didn’t understand what was happening in my brain, but I wanted to have these dark thoughts kept secret. I didn’t tell anybody. So I go back to that time and I’m like, okay, now I understand what’s happening. And then I project to postpartum. And again I can see that, oh, I’m not that same person. I’m getting an upgrade of some sort. And the pile. And I’m a gardener as well, so I can see this pile that you’re referencing, Rosemary, and it’s these beautiful, like, deadheaded hydrangeas that is coming up for me. And these are representing these times in my life. And I’m going forward and I’m not quite certain where it’s going to land. And I welcome the transition, and I welcome the opportunity to discover these parts that are still remaining to be integrated. And so it’s by feeling, it’s my brain pruning or what other women speak of… We can see where we’ve come from and we are creating almost a new vision for ourselves that are taking these other parts with us because they’re important. There’s also a repairing that’s happening, because like I said in adolescence, these times where I didn’t speak about what was happening, or I didn’t have the language, there wasn’t the safety, perhaps. I’m going back to those versions of myself and I can witness it from this lens of compassion, because we’re witnessing it through this mothering, nurturing lens, and integrating whatever need was there that couldn’t have been met. And so we’re entering these later years of my 40s, then into menopause with more wholeness. That’s what’s coming up for me, is that there’s a wholeness that’s present, a harmony that I can see that also repairs a lineage of women on both sides who I never saw relaxed. I only have witnessed anxiety and grief and I’m starting to reconcile with, oh, that’s what that means now. That’s what I’m pruning, not just for my own self, but for everyone that is coming up before me and after me.

00:20:13 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 transformative power of Compassionate Inquiry, you are invited to join us for a six hour online experiential introduction to the Compassionate Inquiry approach and community. Whether you’re a healthcare professional, therapist, coach, or simply someone seeking trauma informed personal healing or professional growth, the CI Experience event invites you to witness live demonstrations, learn practical techniques, participate in reflective conversations and connect with a supportive community of like minded individuals, all in a single immersive day. This event will be recorded and as a participant you’ll have lifetime access to the event recording and so much more. To learn more and register, just follow the link in the show notes.

Thank you so much. I love what you said Kate, because you are looking forward to these changes, the shifts, the growth, the development. Change is something that’s been problematic for many humans and here’s where we get into the cultural aspect, for women, you’re in your mid-40s. You’re facing change. Culture idolizes youth and beauty. I’m wondering if this is part of the reason that so much has been pathologized about menopause. Because when you look at this natural process, it’s existed since human lineage began 6 million years ago. I’m just wondering if dislike of change might be part of what has made it into an illness that requires treatment. I wonder if you’d like to respond to that, Inés.

00:22:06 Inés

Yeah, I was having images in my head as I was listening to you. Like in nature, when birds are building a nest, who’s doing more and who’s doing less? You know, it’s a system. And I was thinking of the miserable ways that the system, the current system, has taken us all apart from the community sense, and we feel so apart from that community sense, that this, in my eyes, I wish it could be a systemic, organic thing that is happening to us all. If a woman is going through that stage, then we are all going into that stage. And that means that everybody should pay attention, not just us. So in Spanish, sometimes, when a woman is pregnant, some couples say, we are pregnant. So the man takes that role, which is funny for those that are not used to it, because he’s clearly not, and she’s clearly very much pregnant. But when they say, we are pregnant, then it becomes a matter of the couple, because it is. The woman goes in a different way than he does, walks that pregnancy, and receives the baby. And we do have different roles, but different roles doesn’t mean that we do not have responsibility in regards to the organic movement of life. And this is an organic movement of life happening in women’s bodies. But women and men, we want to remain together. That’s what we wanted, I believe, to have connection. I was listening to you and thinking of the women in the circles that I facilitate, 90% of them are not with the men anymore. They are trying to heal and be as good as they can be on their own. And that calls my attention, really, because we are looking for support and safety in our own… with our own selves, in these spaces that we have learned since we exist, that it should be us on our own, finding the solutions, since the beginnings of time. You look at recess, you know, in elementary school, in every corner of the world, and you’re gonna see the bodies of the males. They are running and they are fighting, and they are using the space, really using the space. And the girls are having more. You know, this is changing. Of course it’s just, thank God it’s changing. But we’ve been taught that really, to be a good girl, there are some guidelines and standards that the culture, the system, your family is going to expect from you. And along those lines is, you keep it secret, you keep on changing, but hopefully it doesn’t notice and it’s not a problem. 

Can I share something personal? Just two minutes? Just two days ago, I shared with the WhatsApp of my family a little… Just a little Instagram thingy on a boy explaining the changes at home with his mother. And it was kind of humorous. And it was just this boy saying he’s becoming a teenager. And then I send it and I have two cousins saying, what did you do? You keep on throwing these bombs and then you leave us all with that. And I’m like, tell me more to my cousin. And he was like, we are all dealing with our wives and it’s enough with what we have at home. And we probably feel uncomfortable that you keep on sharing this information. And I’m like, that’s fantastic that at least we are uncomfortable, cousin. Let’s be uncomfortable. I’d rather talk with you, at least one of my cousins, or two, and unfold this around. What are you expecting your woman to be? Still the same, still quiet, just not the true version of what’s going on for us. That really called my attention when you ask, what are women asking about menopause and what do they want to know? And my big question is, what do men want to know about menopause? How much do you want to be involved? How much is really a subject that interests you, as part of the system?

00:26:19 Rosemary

Yeah. Well, as the human being who’s living with a menopausal woman, there’s much to be gained for them by learning about the process and learning about what’s going on. And I think we’ll finally have got there when men start to say, we’re in menopause, not only, we’re pregnant. I look forward to that. Let’s move on and keep the lens on cultural and social contexts. As we all know, menopause is a natural process. It’s a developmental milestone of midlife for women. How can we get back to that natural process and just debunk the view that menopause is an illness? Maybe, Kate, could you say something from your perspective as a naturopath?

00:27:02 Kate

Yeah. I think like many things, when the lid gets pulled off of a topic, it gets quite loud and noisy for a period of time, as people learn and the culture shifts and then it sort of like, I don’t know, find its way, and a new topic will come in. But what seems fairly obvious to me right now anyway is that there is this cultural obsession with the evidence based menopause, and we’re leaving out lived experience of women who are elders who have the wisdom to share with us. And not that I’m saying that the evidence is not important. As a naturopathic doctor, I do look to the evidence to see what would best support women through whatever is happening with their bodies, but in a way of support and to trust the innate capacity for the body to reorganize itself, not from a place of symptom management, and that we’re going to suppress and push down these uncomfortable symptoms. Because with the symptom often comes an emotional pattern of some sort. And if we push down the physical symptom, we’re also suppressing the emotional pattern. I live in that land of both and… that we look to the evidence and we look to the lived experience. We look to our elders, women who are themselves postmenopausal, who may be able to share what it was like for them. If we leave them out of the conversation, we’re missing a real opportunity of learning and growth and self understanding and we miss that opportunity to repair those emotional patterns as well. So menopause isn’t a pathology, it’s not a diagnosis. It is a really important life stage that is marked with really interesting ways of relearning and repairing that relationship to self and our culture.

00:29:08 Rosemary

It sounds like there’s a classic Compassionate Inquiry question, ‘it’s not your fault’. So I’m wondering from a Compassionate Inquiry perspective, patients who come in that are really stuck in that, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ How do you handle their emotions? Are there beliefs in their ways of being?

00:29:27 Kate

Wow, that’s such a good reflection. Yeah. I’ve actually been thinking often these days about what would Compassionate Inquiry be like to bring to a focus group, particularly with menopause. I think what the beliefs that I often hear women come out with are the ‘I’m not good enough’, the funneling down of I’m not good enough and ‘there’s something fundamentally wrong with me’ and how far that goes back and offering that moment and that space of repair to tend to that young part who captured that belief in order to remain surviving. Our brains have that one prerogative and that’s to stay safe and alive. So offering that mirror of ‘this is not your fault’ and opening up to what’s possible and really having that woman build her own evidence sometimes what I call being her N of 1 so that she is her own experiment and that she’s building data about and information about her own lived experience that these are natural responses to the whole web of emotions, beliefs, body sensations. And in helping her do her own self inquiry.

00:30:48 Inés

There’s this piece of, ‘I’m not enough’, as you know, a universal belief that we had to come up with in order to survive. Because if I am not enough, then great, the system is fine. I’m the one that is the trouble and that makes it for the survival because we are dependent. So what if at this point in life, and this is what I love about family constellations, is the biological observation of the energetic truth. What if the energetic truth would be yes, I am not enough, I am not enough to keep on serving the needs of my kids, the needs of my men, the needs of society. I am not enough. And yes, I am guilty for bringing life in a way that is a good guilt. There is such a thing as good guilt. There is such a thing as the consciousness of knowing that we do not necessarily have to make it for everyone. So there’s one thing that is the belief that ‘I’m not enough to be loved.’ And in this stage of life, what we are doing, as women, is actually stopping the nonsense of giving all of our energy to everyone and coming back to us to love ourselves and say I’m in love. I mean love and enough for me. Well, I got myself, I know what I need. I don’t need to keep on playing the victim because I’m not getting it from anybody else. I know exactly the flavor of ice cream that I want and I know exactly what I need to do to sleep well and I am not enough for many situations. And to be, like, relaxed in that beautiful statement, just, you know, an invitation to think that might be, not so horrible. But an honest organic response to say, I’m fine with that.

00:32:47 Rosemary

I’ve got a question to ask you about being ‘not enough’ and being okay with not being enough. Because women do tend to take on a lot and from a functional perspective, you know what might be… If you were working with someone who’s overstressed, overburdened, trying to do everything despite the very real symptoms they’re feeling during menopause, what functions might they just say? ‘I’m not enough to do all this. I’m going to let this go and I’m okay with letting this go.’ So I wondered if you could just put your toe in that pond.

00:33:22 Inés

Yeah, I feel like allowing ourselves to. To really not be what we were expecting us to be. The ideal mother, a beautiful wife, you know, just to allow ourselves with a version that is very limited. Like Terry Real says, we are not going to ever be better than anyone or less. But our value is not questionable. We cannot return it, we cannot change it, trade it. It’s just been there forever. So I believe that we have to probably be curious about letting the idea of what we want go. So, Aisling, another beautiful lady that’s been also with you and I, we came up with this meditation at the end of October. We’re inviting other women to join for a meditation about dying in life. Just literally letting yourself die in a vision that can help you connect with who you are, because you are not this body. The body’s going through a lot. You are not the mind that is driving us crazy and the sense of who you are. And with the time that we have left in life, can we just be this very limited, very ordinary, delicious creature that has stopped trying to be more than enough?

00:34:49 Rosemary

I love that, Inés. And thank you. That meditation will be linked in the show notes. So we just focus fully on our beautiful authenticity and whatever the expectations were, which, you know, I think links to generational conditioning. Do we need to be the Cordon Bleu chef? No.

00:35:07 Rosemary

Do we need to be like the pristine housekeeper? Do we need to be always, constantly at our peak of beauty? What is worth hanging onto and what is worth letting go? Kate, I saw how animated your face was when Inés was speaking. What would you like to say about these expectations that we have of ourselves?

00:35:27 Kate

I would say that I’m right in the process. I feel like I’m in a trench of undoing a lot of patterning, a lot of adaptive coping mechanisms of everything that you just said, Rosemary, of the housekeeper, the chef, like to be all of these things. And my animated face was having this flip around in my thought process when Inés, like, twisted that question of the belief. Of course, I’m not enough to do all of those things. And so I’m… I’m having this moment over here where I’m processing this, this new lens, to see that question as I’m growing through those same patterns. And I think menopause really provides this opportunity to interrupt. It’s like an interruptive time where we’re going to break, maybe not break the cycles, maybe that’s too strong, but we can interrupt them. We can look back and notice, okay, this is what I’ve seen. This is what I’ve grown up with. I’m creating the new… The new path forward. I don’t have a model for this. And so what do I want this to look like? And I would pose that to women that come to me to sit. And what do you want it to look like? Because you probably don’t have a template for it. We’re creating it.

00:36:51 Rosemary

100%. And death can be the ultimate pruning. We get to choose what we carry forward and we get to choose what we prune and put on the bonfire with the sticks and the hydrangea heads, all of that stuff. And this really does take me back, because a lot of the patterns that menopause gives us the opportunity to interrupt would have been passed down through our female lines. And I’m curious if there are some that perhaps are harder for women to release than others during this pruning process. I’m sure some people would be delighted. Just as you were, Kate. I don’t have to do this anymore. But there may be others that are maybe a little bit beneath the surface that we don’t notice. Do I have to have my house always spotless? A little bit of dirt never hurt anybody. That one’s easy to see. But what tends to be a little bit more difficult to notice.

00:37:47 Inés

Yeah, I feel it in my skin. For me, if I had to choose one, I would choose the archetype of the ideal mother that is constantly preventing us from actually feeling the grace of life through our mother. Because we keep on fighting what we got. That is far from what we wanted, from what we needed, from what is the ideal. So as soon as the ideal mother, that seems to be a mother that exists in one of our friends houses, or it’s someone that is far from our house, that dresses beautifully, smells beautifully and cooks delicious meals, just not the one that we got because she is doing something very different. Sometimes just the idea of that archetype in our systems is preventing us from actually energetically again reaching the beauty of wow, I am alive. And I came to this plane through that body. And just for that, hey, thank you. That body that is my biological mother. And the grownups that were around, loving me, and making sure that I would make it as, again, when everybody’s not necessarily good enough for the role, but enough for us to make it. And life is the most precious thing at the end of the road. But if we keep on complicating our minds with… I was really hoping for something different, we’d lose time. We lose so much time because of the archetype of that ideal lady that is non existent. We are not ideal mothers. We are not ideal partners. We might even be… I consider myself to be more and more often inconvenient, like I said with my family. Right. I’m an inconvenient lady. And I’m like, yeah, guess what? Yep. I’m probably not so convenient. We can talk about that and connect with how you feel about me being inconvenient and laugh. But it’s the difference between who we are and what we expect to be and who we expect the other people around us to be. The archetypal information is playing a big role in preventing us from connecting with love in life.

00:40:13 Rosemary

Yeah. Thank you. Inés, you touched on depression, you know, there can be some sadness. I’m sure there’s grief also associated with this transition. I remember when I went through menopause, I was shocked. I had thought I would be so happy. But there was some grief. There was some sadness. So I’m wondering if the grief is connected to what’s dying anyway. Or maybe you can reflect on that a little bit. Where’s the grief when it relates to the pruning?

00:40:44 Inés

That’s for you, Kate, I believe.

00:40:46 Kate

Oh, is this for me? The pruning? We’re back to the pruning. What’s dying is the cyclic… How we know the cyclic relationship to our bodies. So we’ve got a few decades of tapping into this rhythmic… I’m going to say, for the most part, because I recognize there are, like a lot of women, experience irregularity with their menstruation, but there’s something reliable. You know, at some point this bleeding is going to happen, and there is this rhythm that is a privilege to be able to tap into it. Whether we can notice how our mood shifts, our energy shifts, the way that we perceive the world shifts. And I’m always fascinated to say, like, it changes four different times throughout the day that cycle through follicular and luteal phase.

00:41:37 Rosemary

Could you just very briefly for our listeners, just shine a bit of light on these four shifts? What are these four shifts?

00:41:44 Kate

So we have four different versions of ourselves that come out in and as we can have capacity to tune into that rhythm. And at menopause, the rhythm shifts. There’s, I believe there are probably new rhythms that we can lean into and rely on, but there’s this predictability that there’s something missing. I’ve had this part of me functioning alongside for so long, and grief seems like a normal response to that transition. Being able to tap into the body and maybe in somewhat of a predictable way.

00:42:27 Rosemary

Okay, thank you. Could you just very briefly for our listeners, just shine a bit of light on these four shifts? What are these four shifts?

00:42:35 Kate

Yes, so we have the follicular phase and the luteal phase, which are marked by estrogen and progesterone as hormones that just naturally go through some dips and dives, and then that’s broken up into menstruation and ovulation. So the four phases would be menstruation, follicular, ovulation and luteal. And the shining hormone that is present during that time will influence the brain, it will influence your perception of the world, it influences the different emotions that are going to rise to the surface. And so the best, maybe a relatable example that I might offer is premenstrually a woman is in her luteal phase, and during that time, estrogen in relationship to progesterone is different. So estrogen is a little less. Progesterone has more of a highlight at that time. And when estrogen is less, we want to retreat. When progesterone is the shining star, we want to stay home, we want to cuddle in, we want to nest, we want to probably clean house. That can shift how we relate to others, but also ourselves. And the female nervous system will shift at that time as well. So as progesterone is more dominant, we’re more in that dorsal aspect of the nervous system through the lens of polyvagal. And there’s a more restorative energy that’s happening in the body. It goes into repair. With that emotions can bubble to the surface and we can experience that more through sadness or what we might name as depression. It’s more likely to pop up at that time.

00:44:30 Rosemary

Kate, you’ve painted a picture of this hormonal ocean. So many changes, so many fluctuations, and it really does shine a light on us expecting ourselves to be optimally functional while we are adrift in this ocean. I’m wondering, Inés, could you suggest how we can manage this for ourselves? Because I’m sure there’s a great feeling of loss of control, for many people.

00:44:57 Inés

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think, you know, it becomes more and more our responsibility to be well informed. We are not so well informed about our own bodies. It’s beautiful to hear, Kate, because we are like taking notes. Oh, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that. We’re 50 something and we’re still not experts in our own bodies. So that to me is top number one. To become really more and more curious and attain expert level in how your body functions. Notice how those four stages match perfectly beautifully. Well the four seasons in a year. And how as the medicine wheel of the indigenous people of the north reflects the four stages of life, everything goes around that wisdom. So if we are better informed about the cycles in life in our body, every month and we can inform our community, not just our daughters, not just, hey, honey, come, we need to have a time. You need to know this. No, the whole community, just be inconvenient, let people know this is going to happen through the month. And maybe if in every house we have an expert in… You know what Kate explained, the four times in a month, maybe depending on how many young ladies and women are living in the same house, the atmosphere can be more respectful of that. And normally they match the period times when they are together, when they leave together, everybody comes with the same time with the period. So you’re like, okay, this is the moment where they need to rest. We cannot ask them to do triple. And this is the moment where they are ready to do triple. That I feel would be more respectful if we know better and we inform the community so that everybody knows better and we build the ‘we are menopausing’ or ‘we are with the period at home’. So we are going through this all together because even if they are suffering from the changes in us, they are part of it. So everybody is involved.

00:47:11 Rosemary

Thank you Inés. And as we are coming through the end of our time together and something that came up was, you said we need to educate ourselves. We need to know what’s going on with our body. Kate has offered a number of books which are in the resources section of the show notes. One title really jumped out at me. Kate, I wonder if you could just really quickly give us a sense of what’s in this book. It’s called Wise Power: Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause to Awaken Authority, Purpose and Belonging. That sounds like a book I want to read.

00:47:47 Kate

Yes, you do want to read it. Rosemary. It wasn’t that long ago I read this book and I couldn’t put it down. It was one of those page turners, just absorbing every ounce of wisdom that was on these pages. And it just helped formulate for me this pathologizing of perimenopause and then into menopause. And the author. There are two authors, but Alexandra Pope being the main author, really walk the reader through a transition of menopause. These phases of what to expect.. and it relates to the darkness that Inés brought to the top of our conversation that they sort of paint this picture of a betrayal and the underworld with the emphasis that this is a temporary experience. You have to go through this tunnel, so to speak, much, much like a birth tunnel. And you are arriving in this more energized, more empowered, more grounded place that is really ripe with wisdom. And there’s an overlay in there on Chinese medicine and the seasons so that menopause is like a second spring and perimenopause being the inner autumn. And so there’s this process of letting go of… the pruning is the letting go. And that the outcome of that is a joyful spring, a renewal, like a redo. I think of this time as, that’s a redo I get… And there’s a privilege of every woman to revisit the things and times and emotions that you get an upgrade on them. And I think if we can see through that lens, it tempers the darkness and the discomfort and the challenge of the body changes, the psychology changes, the relationship changes. We can be assured that on the other side there is something very wise that is coming.

00:50:00 Rosemary

Thank you. We have a question we tend to ask at the end of this podcast which is, you know, very simply, if you could share a few words, a pearl of wisdom that really encapsulates what has come up for you today. What would you like to leave our listeners with? Inés, I’ll invite you to start.

00:50:20 Inés

I would.say to open more space and grace for us to really feel the limitation of each stage in life as actually a beautiful boundary that the Great Spirit is placing for us. Okay. There are some limitations in this stage of life. Can I embrace them as the Great Spirit’s way of saying, it is enough up to here, Just sit with it, it’s fine. It’s going to be fine.

00:50:52 Rosemary

Wonderful. Thank you. Ines. Kate, what would you like to leave our listeners with?

00:50:56 Kate

That the invitation be that we approach this important life stage with wisdom, with self attunement and honesty, that we can all be kind and patient with ourselves. Because if you’re a woman going through menopause, you haven’t done it before. This is your first time going through this stage and what better time than now? When else are you going to be able to revisit some of these times and to really be honest with yourself, to excavate what is hanging fire, and heavy on the heart. So I think there’s a time that we can lighten, lighten the burdens in our heart at this time.

00:51:44 Rosemary

Beautiful. Thank you. Ines Zabalaga. Kate Hazlitt. Thank you so much for joining us on The Gifts of Trauma podcast today.

00:51:53 Inés

Thank you for bringing us together. Pleasure to meet you, Kate. And thank you J’aime. Thank you all. Thank you very much.

00:52:00 Kate

Thank you so much.

00:52:01 Rosemary

Yeah, I want to cue listeners to be sure to join us next week for the third episode in our Menopause series right here on the Gifts of Trauma podcast by Compassionate Inquiry. Thanks for being with us today. 

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