When I turned 42, I entered perimenopause. According to my physician, all the boxes of confirmation were checked: family history, hot flashes, and irregular periods. The news took a while to sink in. I wasn’t ready to part with the privileges that my fertility had afforded me, a status that only at that point did I become acutely aware of. The sadness I felt was akin to losing an old friend whom I’d lost touch with years ago.
I was prescribed synthetic hormones — a quick fix to a pesky problem. I didn’t stick with it for very long, loathing the heavy perfume of chemicals that followed me to bed each night.
This wasn’t the menopause I had expected. Aside from the notorious hot flashes and night sweats, a host of other strange symptoms had me running from one baffled specialist to another: heart palpitations that lead to full blown panic attacks, momentary loss of vision from ferocious migraine attacks, and recurring cysts on my eyeball. They, too, were all traced back to my falling levels of estrogen.
What featured most prominently was my anger. The typical symptoms list of “mood swings, irritability, and crabbiness” barely came close to describing what I was feeling, which was a relentless rage that erupted at the slightest provocation. In those moments, I lost myself.
Meditation did little to subdue the emotional turbulence. Trying to hold space for it was impossible. When I tried to meditate, it only agitated my frantic emotions which seemed to need much more than gentle awareness. I watched in despair as that former sacred space between action and impulse swiftly dissolved. It felt like my years of mindfulness practice were erased. I was unmoored.
In search of an anchor, I flung myself into research. I found allies in writers who pushed back against the loss of a woman’s viability in society. Female fury at midlife was a reasonable and necessary political reaction against a menopausal woman’s ignominy in western culture. I found scientific studies that pointed to the significant neurological changes that occur during menopause, affording a certain legitimacy to a phenomenon that’s dreaded at best, and even reviled. The science validated me, normalizing my intense and erratic emotions — a drop in serotonin resulting from estrogen depletion. Menopause was clearly more than just a reproductive matter. The very homeostasis of the body is altered, as if its own mood regulation system seems to step back, letting nature take its course.
But none of this spoke directly to the distinct nature of my suffering. It was more than biology or cultural fallout. Instead, I found comfort in the views of Indigenous cultures where menopausal women are elevated to the status of healers, priestesses, and spiritual leaders. The Cree in Canada and the Mayans see menopause as a rite of spiritual transcendence. When a woman’s “wise blood” no longer flows out of her body but remains inside her, she is elevated to the status of a “wise woman,” a spiritual leader.
“I’d spent a lifetime working out my trauma in my head. The transition of menopause brought with it the spiritual dimension of my healing. My rage shattered my beatific bubble. It was a vociferous call to tend to the grunt work, the poison to fight my poison.”
This effortless reconciliation of the divine with the physical, the sacred and the profane, was the starting point of my own rigorous self-investigation which came to challenge my very sense of self. In the Tibetan language, gom means to meditate, to become familiar with the true nature of the mind in search of liberation. I understood that the path to knowing my mind didn’t circumvent my body, but instead went through it. Despite this realization, becoming familiar with my body was astoundingly difficult.
I had been predisposed to criticizing my body from the start. Growing up in the west, I favored reason and logic over emotions and intuition. Being a female in a male-dominant culture added yet another layer of denigration. On top of this were the wounds inherited by my generation within the Tibetan Diaspora. Unresolved trauma was passed on like DNA. It found expression in misdeeds that were largely ignored by the community, each of us bound by a shared understanding of cultural propriety and hence complicit in our silence.
It was against this backdrop that my understanding of Buddhism unfolded. The virtuous pursuit of transcending material attachments, the source of suffering, had given me the permission to ignore my body. My dharma was the equivalent of talk therapy. Safely ensconced in the airy space of the upper chakras — my words, ideas, and mental connections buffered me from those exiled parts of myself. Buddhism healed me, but I had also made it a weapon.
My earliest recollections of my faith were found through Tibetan thangkas, fabric scrolls depicting Tibetan Buddhist deities, that adorned the walls of my childhood home. I was often transfixed by the elaborate and provocative imagery of the wrathful, female emanations in the pantheon. Their metaphor was lost on my young mind, which instead drew literal interpretations of the sight of small figures being trampled on by the terrifying female deities. To me, they symbolized the fearsome woman whose fists and feet often descended on me without warning. My intense aversion to my own rage at midlife was less about cultural conditioning than about what it represented: a visceral reminder of the volatility and violence of my childhood.
Inside me lay the vast wreckage of this past. A lifetime of falsehoods and negativity of the mind had mingled with my wise blood and seeped into my physiology. When yet another new symptom of chronic low back pain emerged, I instinctively knew that it was somehow related to the spiritual call for more healing. The bottom of the spine, the source of my pain, represents the seat of our connection to the earth. Working with a pelvic health specialist, I began the process of releasing the constant holding — a state of tension and mistrust of the earth that had become as normal for me as breathing. In my first session, I felt a tremendous drop, followed by a steady stream of tears. They were quiet, disimpassioned tears — old and stale.
I’d spent a lifetime working out my trauma in my head. The transition of menopause brought with it the spiritual dimension of my healing. My rage shattered my beatific bubble. It was a vociferous call to tend to the grunt work, the poison to fight my poison.
Until that point, I only knew to sit in quiet contemplation in order to steady a turbulent mind, but I needed different skillful means to help my mind remain steadfast. Breaking from cultural tradition, I explored energetic release through an active engagement of breath, movement and sound. What may appear as mild insanity to an observer was true in a sense. It was only through “losing” my mind that I could drop down to reach a higher consciousness.
These methods now form part of my devotional practice, reminding me that I have a body, home to my feminine divine and sacred fire, and to honor her much like we should honor the earth for her healing energy and patient ability to take foul matter and transform it to create lightness and renewal.
It’s been eight years since my menopause began, and the hormonal storm is finally retreating. According to my calendar, it will be almost a full year without my period, marking the official start of menopause. As my symptoms soften, I find relief seeping in. I also find myself in search of the heat, leaving the safe clearing of calm awareness, and venturing towards its edges. I sway on this brink to meet and bear witness to my frantic emotions. I go there in earnest, again and again, and not without a sense of urgency, before the fire subsides and its glowing embers greet the morning light.
