The kings and queens of the push through

I tend to work with a lot of high achievers who come to me in midlife in a quandary. They are either burned out, they have lost their motivation or they have lost their inner compass. They are incredibly capable people. Brilliant creatives, leaders and thinkers, the people everyone relies on to get the job done or come up with the solution.

When they come to me there is something fundamental happening underneath, deep in their system, that they can’t solve or workout. They have lost connection with their deepest needs and desires. Their emotions, what they value, what is important to them has become fuzzy. Something is wrong in their world and they cannot put their finger on it. They are overly tired or have lost their zest. This drives them crazy, they feel like a failure because they are so used to solving all the problems. They love solving problems and creating value.

It is a body in freeze.

For many of us, we are still functioning and functional freeze is the nervous system’s quiet survival strategy: a blend of dorsal vagal shutdown with just enough sympathetic activation to keep you moving, performing, achieving.

You look “fine,” you produce, you deliver, you impress people but you have lost connection with your internal world. You’re upright, responsive, competent but you feel dead on the inside. No real vitality, internal pulse or felt sense of self.

Digital Art - Kellie Stirling, People thawing their freeze

For many overachievers, this becomes the air they breathe until their body says No, not any more. Often it happens at midlife.

So how does this overachieving freeze pattern start?

Well most overachievers learned early in their life that there needs were either: inconvenient, ignored, criticised, overwhelming to caregivers, unsafe to express or simply too much.

So they adapted in the only way their system knew how, they turned down the volume on their body and turned up the volume on their mind. They became brilliant, fast processors, high-capacity thinkers. They became the problem-solvers, the responsible ones, the reliable ones.

But brilliance built on freeze has a cost. We stop listening to the signals from our body. We stop listening to the signs of tiredness, of what a NO feels like in our body. We learn to override our basic impulses. It is not coincidence. Is is a pattern.

Productivity culture is built on functional freeze.

We applaud over-functioning and self-sacrifice. We reward output and speed and we celebrate people who “just keep pushing through”. I think a lot of Gen X’ers learned to do this early, because in their teenage years they spent a lot of time on their own and just had to get on with life.

We call this excellent work ethic, resilience or commitment. But what if much of what we call “productivity” is actually a socially-validated freeze response?

I have had so many clients, mid forties to late fifties, post-menopausal, who make a big career change and then come to me saying, I don’t know what is wrong with me, I just feel out of sorts. I get stuff done, I am a doer. Nothing is wrong with any of them. Their body has just simply stopped cooperating with the override. Or guys who come to me and say they know their life has to change, they are on the precipice of existential change but they don’t know where to start.

When you have spent decades powering through the classic, go, go go. Your body has a way of bringing you back into right relationship with it. As we age, our hormonal cocktail starts to change and menopause has a way of stripping down and highlighting our compensatory strategies. The freeze structure that held everything together began to collapse. Remember the developmental challenge of midlife is radical honesty, come back to the truth of who you really are.

Gently and slowly we work together to slow down. My client's nervous system immediately start to show what they have been trying to outrun. The survival strategies that were created as children to stay safe aren’t working anymore. Their body is setting a boundary. The freeze is ready to be thawed.

This is why burnout in midlife spikes.

Women lose hormonal scaffolding that kept them overriding their body. and men hit existential thresholds where achievement can’t fill the inner void. Our careers peak while capacity starts to decline. Many parents carry the emotional and logistical load for teens and ageing parents. and many of us find the nervous system can’t run the childhood strategy anymore.

People think they’re falling apart. But what’s falling apart is the freeze, not the person. Burnout is both exhaustion and it’s the breakdown of the freeze scaffold. Burnout is the point where the body says, “I’m not going to keep doing this.”

Overachievers don’t lose their motivation they lose their override strategy. When the freeze starts to thaw, we start to feel all the things we have been pushing down for years. The anger, fatigue, hunger, sadness, longing, boundaries, desire and our No.

For many overachievers learning what a No feels like in their body can be a big revelation.

Many overachievers are very creative. They have lots of ideas. They get excited by their ideas, creatively, strategically, intellectually their mind is alive. They can get flooded by them too and want to put them all into action. Not doing so feels like a failure. Something I have learned personally that I help my clients with is our freeze makes us believe these ideas have to be acted on.

Every impulse becomes pressure, every spark becomes a project, every inspiration becomes responsibility something we feel we absolutely must do. This is where burnout can accelerate.

One of the most powerful shifts in my own midlife has been learning that you don’t have to act on every idea. You can feel it, sit with it and let it breathe.

Sometimes an idea is complete simply by being witnessed. Sometimes it is enough to journal it, or talk it through with a colleague or friend. Sometimes you just have to write it down and let it sit for a few months.

This is how you slowly retrain your system, that not every idea has to be acted on. You start to rewire your nervous system and you will notice that the compulsion to act will turn into more capacity. The pressure to act can turn into being present, and the need for action will become digestion.

To come out of functional freeze we work slowly, relationally and somatically. We learn to track micro-sensations and small pulses of movement. We learn how to set tiny boundaries, small steps at a time. We learn how to titrate our life. Small changes 1% more each day. We learn to enjoy receiving the co-regulation from our somatic therapists and/or coaches. We start to notice we are slowing down, 1% more each day and then we can recognise that rest isn’t a weakness it is a signal. We start to notice, that we are noticing how we feel and we let our ideas sit and percolate rather than having to act on them.

Most importantly we learn that our value isn’t earned by producing. Value is inherent because you are here, you are alive. Your body is your home, your garden, your temple. It is not a machine.

Your needs matter.

Fawning: why we mirror, merge and self-abandon

Seven years ago, I read Pete Walker’s book on complex PTSD, and it was the first time I truly understood the nervous system response of Fawning. I had known the behaviour as “people pleasing,” but I hadn’t realised until then that fawning was a protective response our body utilises. As I explored it more deeply, I realised it was everywhere and that it was not a personality trait, but a strategy our system uses to keep us safe, particularly in the face of a power-over dynamic.

How many times had I sat in conversations in the workplace where a person was labelled a people pleaser as it if was a personality flaw with no true understanding or curiousity of what was driving it. Let alone acknowledgement that this person does not feel safe. I realised right then that fawning shows up in so many ways. I see it in people who over-function, some organisations are run off the back of employing a workforce who constantly does this. Entire customer service cultures are built on fawning.

Fawning is a nervous system strategy that supports us to stay in connection when we feel unsafe and we are in a double bind; where there are real consequences for us not to fawn. We all do it. Women are a little more predisposed to it because we have lots of estrogen and oxytocin is the neuromodulator of our body. What that means is that bonding and connection helps us regulate and process our lives. It can come up at anytime because it is a strategy your autonomic nervous system uses to keep you safe. If it doesn’t work you go to fight and flight, then freeze. It is a cascade.

Men fawn too, not to soothe, but to belong. Male fawning often looks like “fitting in,” but underneath is the same physiology. In very masculine coded work cultures you see this all the time. Men fawn to avoid being the odd one out. They mute their sensitivity or complexity, mimic bravado or certainty, abandon their authentic relational needs and shape-shift to avoid being shamed.

Digital Art, Kellie Stirling. Woman merged with nature

When we fawn we shapeshift, so we morph into a version of ourselves that feels the most likely to keep us safe. For some people, fawning looks like becoming more of who they are; more charming, smart, generous, funny or adored. For other people it is about being less of who you are; less vocal, creative, smart, self-assured or even able to set boundaries. Fawning shows up sexually, in money situations or, in the constant emotional regulation of other people.

We all know about fight, flight and freeze. The fawning response is different because it is a hybrid of these. The hyperarousal part of fawning encourages us to lean into relationships that are causing us harm so we to appease the person. The flight response, self-abandoning to stay safe. The hypoarousal part, or freeze part, numbs our connection to our needs and desires, so we don’t feel the effects of the harm we are experiencing.

When we fawn, we mirror or merge with someone else’s desires or expectations of us to stay safe. We do this to defuse potential conflict because that is our best chance of maintaining safety. In most of these situations there is a power over relationship. Someone has power over us. When we merge or mirror, whilst it keeps us safe, we forgo our own desires and agency and become overly accommodating of others. We become shapeshifters moulding ourselves to each scenario and person. We abandon ourselves, what we care about, our opinions, desires and what we value.

Fawning is so culturally imbued in our society that we are conditioned from a young age to do it. Think of these statements: “give your uncle a kiss”, “be the better person”, “take the high road’, “be a team player’, “you have to learn to compartmentalise it'‘, “just go with it”. We say these every day and they normalise fawning.

Fawning is a common coping system for people dealing with ongoing relational trauma. It also occurs in larger systems of oppression or marginalisation where we must let go of aspects of ourselves to secure membership or a sense of belonging. Over time fawning becomes a systemic pattern.

Individuals don’t just fawn, systems induce fawning. Some examples I see frequently include: A leader who is dysregulated will have a whole team fawning to avoid triggering them. A family with a narcissistic parent creates children who become emotional caregivers or family systems with rigid hierarchy. Workplaces where vulnerability is punished. Relationships where one partner regulates through dominance.

Fawning is not a personal pathology; it’s a predictable adaptation to power-over cultures. So you can see it is not about being nice, it is a nervous system adaptation to relational power dynamics.

One of the deepest wounds of fawning I have observed is the disconnection from anger. Many fawners cannot feel their anger; not because it isn't there, but because it has been repressed for survival. Anger felt too dangerous, too destabilising, too likely to provoke retaliation or abandonment.

So internally, they learned that their anger was not safe and put them at risk. The thing is their anger doesn’t disappear, it goes underground. Into the unconscious.

Over time, this suppressed anger can turn into resentment, chronic tension because you are constantly bracing, exhaustion or collapse, health issues particularly autoimmune issues and a fierce inner critic who constantly self blames.

Restoring healthy aggression, the energy of our boundaries, clarity, and self-protection is essential. But it must be done slowly. Really slowly. Because letting that much anger thaw all at once can overwhelm the system that originally buried it to stay safe.

How do we stop Fawning?

Well it starts with finding safety in the body. You can’t talk yourself out of a fawn response nor can you mindset your way through it. Your nervous system needs to feel safe in the body to try anything new.

The work looks like being able to notice the early cues the anticipatory smile, the shallow breath, the scanning of the other person’s mood and gently interrupting the impulse to fix or appease. Learning to feel tiny drops of healthy anger in an incredibly titrated, slow and digestible way. Allowing the internal critic to soften, which often happens naturally when anger can finally move outward instead of being turned inward

Learning to stop the fawn process from being pervasive is the process of reclaiming power-within, instead of surviving through power-over dynamics. Our fawning response is wisdom it is not a flaw. It has kept us safe and will continue to do so, when we need it in the moment. Our fawn has kept the peace and helped us to function in environments that could not hold our full aliveness.

It is profoundly healing for us to notice our fawn patterns (and to continue to be able to notice them in the moment) and gently let them loosen their grip. Over time it becomes a survival strategy we have access to, not our default mode of functioning. When you start to let go of it you are not losing the nice aspect of yourself, you are becoming more You.

Ancestral Trauma and the Midlife Body

How midlife awakens the ancestral stories we carry in our bodies

Midlife has a way of loosening what’s been tightly held. As our hormonal landscape shifts, things that once stayed neatly tucked away, old grief, inherited fear, unspoken stories, they begin to rise. This isn’t failure or falling apart. It’s the body’s way of inviting us to heal what has been carried for generations.

Our body is the keeper of our stories, and sometimes it holds the stories of our ancestors that came before us. We know through research on epigenetics that this is true.

Sometimes the ache we feel didn’t start with us. Sometimes the heaviness in our chest, the tightness in our belly, or the deep tiredness that no amount of rest can soothe, belongs to a story that was never ours to carry. We are born into other people’s stories.

We inherit much more than eye colour and bone structure from our ancestors. We also inherit their nervous systems. This is shaped by the environments, events, and relationships that came before us. The body remembers what the mind forgets.

What is Ancestral Trauma?

Ancestral trauma refers to the transmission of unprocessed emotional pain, fear, or survival patterns from one generation to the next. These are not always passed down as explicit stories. More often, they live in silences, in the shape of a family’s nervous system, or in the ways we unconsciously learn to stay safe. Ancestral Trauma lives in the body’s tissues, rhythms and reflexes.

It can show up in many different ways. Chronic tension that never seems to release, or maybe a tendency to over-function, taking responsibility for everyone else’s wellbeing. Or for some it is deep fatigue or burnout that isn’t fixed by rest.

“When you heal the wound in yourself, you heal the wound of generations before you and generations after you.”
— Michael Meade

A grandmother who survived war may never speak of what she endured, but her vigilance might live on in a granddaughter who finds it hard to relax. I have worked with many women who come to me and say they literally cannot stop working and rest, even though their body is screaming out for it and they don’t understand why. The pattern often lies in what has been inherited in their autonomic nervous system.
A father who grew up in scarcity may raise children who, even in abundance, feel guilty resting or taking up space. These imprints are adaptive, they helped someone survive once. But what was once protection can become limitation when it’s no longer needed.

Why does this show up in midlife?

To be fair it can show up earlier. It is just that in midlife, part of our developmental challenge is to come back to the truth of who we really are. This impulse can show up in a myriad of ways. Many people ignore it, so it will hang around until they pay attention. In my experience with my clients, there is a deep discomfort with life and a strong impulse or urge to seek more meaning, purpose, or something different. They find they cannot continue on the way they have been travelling so far.

As our hormonal landscape changes, our emotional landscape does too. The hormones that once buffered and balanced our stress responses shift, and the body’s elegant system of containment begins to loosen. Things that once slipped neatly under the surface start to rise. Old grief, ancestral sorrow, unprocessed experiences; they all start knocking on the door of awareness. So it is not that life suddenly gets harder it is that what has been kept buried in the dark, suddenly starts knocking on the door asking to be seen. While this can initially feel unsettling, it’s also profoundly healing. The body, in its own divine timing, invites us to metabolise what we’ve inherited, so we can step into the next chapter lighter and more integrated.

Our body is a storyteller.

In my work, I see how ancestral stories express themselves somatically. The body carries what hasn’t yet been felt or integrated. Chronic tension, gut and reproductive issues, or a sense of deep fatigue, often emerge as the body’s way of trying to resolve inherited stress.

I’ve worked with many women who, even after hysterectomy or menopause, still hold a palpable energetic imprint in the womb space. These might be a story of loss, silencing, or generational grief that predates their own experiences. When the body is met with compassion and attunement, those old imprints can begin to release. What was frozen starts to move.

Healing doesn’t always mean understanding the exact story, it means restoring a sense of safety so the body no longer has to carry it alone and the pattern that has been long held, can be expressed and completed because there is enough of a felt sense of safety in the body for it to let what has been stuck, be released.

Recognising that an inherited pattern lives within us is not about blame or burden, it’s about freedom. When we see that our over-responsibility, perfectionism, or shutdown might have roots in someone else’s survival, we can meet it with compassion rather than self-judgment. In that awareness, something softens.
We begin to relate to our own patterns differently, not as flaws to fix, but as messages from the body inviting us to complete what was once incomplete.

It is important to remember that these patterns and imprints you inherit, they come from survival and they also come from love. A mother’s hypervigilance was once love and protection of herself and her family. A grandfather’s stoicism was a protective response, grounded in love to protect himself and his family system. They did the best with what they had to keep surviving.

The ripple of healing.

The beauty of this work is: when we heal, we don’t just heal for ourselves. The nervous system reorganises and recalibrates. We slowly and gently start to change how we show up in relationships, in our families, and in our communities. That healing ripples backward and forward . It honours those who came before, and is freeing to those who will come after us.

Ancestral healing is not a thinking activity it is a somatic and relational one. The best therapeutic modalities to heal it are somatic experiencing, internal family systems, somatic attachment work like NARM, family constellations work and ritual, ceremony and nature based practices. Rarely is it one modality. It is often a few woven together to integrate, depending on what is showing up for an individual.

Ultimately the goal is about restoring flow and connection, within the body, within the family system and within the wider relational field of our lives.

As you read this, gently place a hand on your heart or your belly.
Feel your breath, and remember; you are part of a long line of survivors and lovers and dreamers.
What might shift if you allowed your body to trust that it no longer has to hold it all alone?

The power of midlife initiation

Our culture, driven by the cosmetics industry, has created a very distorted, narrow narrative around women, ageing and menopause. One the one hand we are subjected to endless anti-ageing advertising that equates youth with worth, desirability and visibility. On the other side there is a one size fits all mainstream solution, given to women when they reach perimenopause or menopause that HRT will solve all their problems and you can carry on as if nothing has changed.

All of this ignore a deeper truth; menopause is not a problem to fix. It is a profound transition physiologically, psychological and spiritually. In many cultures, it has been seen as an initiation into wisdom and power. Our western productivity focused culture, dismisses that and is focused on keeping women youthful and functional rather than moving through this transition with dignity, agency and choice.

What is frustrating for me about this is it creates many big losses and maladaptive issues. The two biggest I see are:

• They don’t get the holistic support they need to actually learn to listen to their body, honour its new rhythms and integrate changes and,

• For society in general, we miss out on the leadership, wisdom and creativity once women aren’t hormonally geared toward reproduction and are able and free to channel that energy somewhere else.

When women step into this new season of life, they expand into their social and relational power. This is the stage of eldership, where wisdom, creativity, and leadership can flourish.

I am not saying HRT is wrong, it can be super supportive when you are going through this transition which takes years, but it shouldn’t be the only story. Midlife offers an invitation to step into a new way of being with our body and with life itself, rather than staying locked in the old story.

Menopause, when not pathologised, is often a time when childhood and ancestral trauma comes to the surface, because the body is less able and willing to keep these patterns locked down. Hormonal changes will drive changes in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) so layers of freeze stuck in the ANS can come up strongly. It is your body telling you it cannot carry this anymore.

I do a lot of work helping women reclaim healthy aggression and what I find is that we are so culturally conditioned to suppress our anger, which is suppressing our life force energy, our boundaries and our right to take up space. So doing this work to reclaim our aggression is deeply countercultural. Because what the cultural script tells women is quiet down, look young, stay useful in ways we deem okay (appearance, productivity and caretaking). The deep truth about menopause is it asks us to reclaim all of this. It is inviting us to reclaim our vitality in a different form, one that is fierce, wise, protective and deeply relational.

In modern society we see a loss of interdependence in modern family systems. In many cultures, grandmothers were never ‘done’ after menopause. They became pivotal in holding the community web, through storytelling, wisdom keeping, guiding younger adults, offering support to children without being a primary caregiver. Our isolated nuclear family model is what contributes heavily to burning women out, not the fact that they are ageing.

So the cultural story becomes ‘you are no longer fertile you are less valuable’. When actually the truth is the opposite. This is the time in life when women expand their social and relational roles, if the culture allows it. Throughout my career I have seen many women thrive once they entered midlife, either in new business ventures, in community work, in advocacy work. They really are in their prime.

So this life stage is not just about personal healing, it is about cultural repair.

Midlife is this pivot point: either a woman breaks free from the old narratives and survival patterns, or she risks staying trapped in victimhood, silence, or suppression. When a whole generation of women stays trapped, society loses out on the wisdom, leadership, and fierce love that could be shaping our communities, workplaces, and systems.

At a peace summit in Vancouver in 2009 the Dalai Lama said ‘the world will be saved by the western women’. Well I think its women globally actually. If women embrace this midlife initiation, they don’t just heal themselves, they begin to model a different way of being in power. A power that is relational, embodied, self-authored, and deeply interconnected into the web of life around them.

When a woman can step through her midlife transition with the right support, they don’t just attend to their own healing and personal growth, they become catalysts for cultural change. Connecting to their voice, their presence, expanding their capacity to step into and become their personal power, ripples out into families, workplaces and communities.

This is the work of midlife: not just healing ourselves, but reshaping the world through connection with the deep essence of who we really are and the authority of who we are becoming.

When Hormones stop hiding the Truth. Perimenopause exhaustion, the reckoning after survival mode

I was having a conversation with one of my sons the other day about parenting now versus what I received. He thought it wasn’t much different accept for the presence of technology and having to navigate the impact of that on children. I said it was different because our parents often had their parents nearby and we were also a part of a community who looked after each other. Today we live in such an individualistic way and whilst in our area we have a strong community, the fact remains that people are really busy and trying to get by the best they know how and having to do it largely on their own.

Then I thought to myself, so many of the women I work with arrive at perimenopause in survival mode. Completely exhausted from all their years of mothering. For many, the years of mothering where we have sleep deprivation, a heavy emotional labour that we carry and years of trying to juggle work and home, the endless giving of energy mean that they live in a constant state of adrenaline and cortisol, just to get through the day. The lack of the ‘village’, of communal nervous system regulation means women are doing it alone all the time.

The workplaces we are in are designed for male bodies that have a linear hormonal cycle, predictable energy no ebb or flow. Not a 28 day cycle that has big fluctuations. Women’s bodies are cyclical, not linear. Energy, focus, and capacity shift across the menstrual cycle, and later in life, across hormonal seasons. But the expectation is “always on,” with no space for luteal slowdown, rest, or recalibration.

As technology innovation, particularly with AI and productivity culture has become the norm we see 24/7 emails and messaging which results in blurred boundaries. The demand is: faster, always available, produce more. Women’s bodies , designed for rhythmic cycles of activity and rest, are being pushed into an unnatural pace. This results in dysregulation, burnout, sleep disruption, and a sense of disconnection from their body wisdom.

As we normalise this we tell ourselves, this is what mothering means today, this is what being an adult woman means today. But the cost is high because our nervous system becomes very frayed and depleted. So by the time perimenopause arrives and estrogen and progesterone are both low, we experience; disturbed sleep, small stressors can trigger big reactions, our emotional regulation is harder, and or body doesn’t bounce back the same way it used to.

Most of us haven’t learned much about the impact of our hormones on our nervous system at all.

So yes, there is a question we have to explore about learning about our hormones and their impact on our nervous system and our behaviour. But for me, the bigger question is; How do we design lives, workplaces, and communities that honour the body, especially the cyclical, relational, deeply intuitive female body? And if you are thinking male bodies aren’t impacted by all of this, think again. Until we address all of this, our health, healing our nervous system, learning to find some regulation, it will all feel like we are swimming upstream.

Perimenopause as Turning point.

The reality is perimenopause often reveals to us the impact of decades living in survival mode. As estrogen and progesterone decline, their buffering affects on the nervous system start to fade. Estrogen is supportive of bonding, it is the soothing and accommodation hormone, it supports oxytocin and the bonding and pleasure from connection that that brings. Progesterone brings us calm. Also these two hormones don’t decline in an orderly fashion during our perimenopause transition. Progesterone declines first and estrogen has lots of ups and downs that makes us feel internally chaotic, as it moves towards its lower levels once we reach menopause. What they do both reveal is nervous system exhaustion and without their support we can no longer mask the cost of being in survival mode.

Art - Visions in Blue

Oxytocin, pleasure and women’s nervous systems

Oxytocin is a key neuromodulator of the female nervous system. For male bodies Dopamine does this. Pleasure, touch, connection and community increase oxytocin, which builds resilience and vagal tone. Reduced estrogen can reduce oxytocin but pleasure can replenish it. Pleasure isn’t an indulgence, it is biology. Every moment of genuine pleasure — a hug, gentle self-touch, laughter with a friend, being moved by music, lying in the sun, safe intimacy, sexual and sensual pleasure — stimulates oxytocin, the neuromodulator that calms the female nervous system. Oxytocin counters cortisol and adrenaline, it strengthens vagal tone (our capacity to return to calm) and it builds a felt sense of safety and belonging. When you look at from this perspective, pleasure becomes medicine for midlife. It replenishes what decades of survival mode drained away.

Vagal Tone and Menopause

Vagal tone measures the activity of the vagus nerve, which regulates the body's "rest and digest" functions, and it's often assessed through heart rate variability (HRV). So Vagal tone is the body’s ability to regulate stress and return to calm. A lower vagal tone = more reactivity, poor recovery from stress, disrupted sleep. Estrogen decline may reduce vagal tone, making regulation harder. There are practices that help: yoga nidra, breathwork, gentle movement, singing/humming, somatic experiencing, safe touch. Yoga Nidra has been a game changer for me and I have found when I do it consistently, I sleep well. My brain also feels more relaxed. Somatic experiencing has many ways it helps but in this context it helps people build their interoception which is their ability to be with their internal experience - feelings, sensations, emotions. So when we become dysregulated it can be so helpful because we have a connection with all our feelings and emotions and have strategies to be with them and let them move through us. Rather than resisting them. All of this isn’t just “self-care”, it’s rewiring the nervous system for the next stage of life.

The bigger question: Lifestyle and systemic change

The real problem isn’t our biology - it is the culture we live in. Lack of community, unsupportive workplaces, and unrealistic expectations push women into survival mode. Women’s cyclical bodies need rhythms of rest and renewal, but society doesn’t recognise or honour them. We are made to feel like something is wrong with us. We are made to feel we are not resilient enough. Menopause is clever in many ways, It is a truth teller that often opens our eyes to dysfunction in our facets of our life. Culturally it reveals this mismatch. It’s not a personal failing; it’s a cultural design flaw. I wonder what would happen if work hours were designed around the rhythms of a female body?

Post Menopause brings Sovereignty

Menopause is not just loss, it’s an initiation into a new stage of power. With nervous system healing, women can access deeper calm, intuition, and authority. Post-menopause can be a time of reclaiming sovereignty, no longer running on survival mode but living in alignment with what nourishes us. Menopause is the autumn season of our life and often involves lots of reflection and review where we are called to let go of what we don’t need anymore. Many women often find their physical and mental health creates a strong impetus for all these changes to happen. It is hard to ignore what no longer works for us.

Menopause is not a medical “problem”it is a cultural opportunity: a chance to change how we live. Every time a woman honours her cycle, chooses rest, or reclaims pleasure, she disrupts the old patriarchal model and helps build a new one. So here we arrive with an invitation. What would it look like if we built a culture that truly supported women’s bodies — not just to survive, but to thrive?

For me the bigger question here is It’s not women’s bodies that are broken. It’s the systems we’re forced to live in that ignore how women’s bodies actually work.