Beautiful Menopausal Woman
Beautiful Menopausal Woman
by Roslyne Sophia Breillat
Death and Rebirth – part two
(part one)
Such a deep descent ~ you are dropping in, moving down, slipping silently into the wise depths of your womb consciousness, your chalice of love, your ancient heart, your female soul. And here in this dark cave of menopause you will find grace filled serenity and gentled peace. But first your womb must release its waves of sorrow, its repressed disappointments, its unreceived love, its withheld passion. This is such a profound death of your former patterns, conditioning, structures, doubts, fears, insecurities. This is such a joyous birth of the Crone’s wisdom. You will never be the same woman again.
This unique pilgrimage is for initiating the insightful ways of female wisdom and for kindling the passionate fires of female transformation. 
To entirely embrace the totality of this transitional journey a woman needs to graciously accept her increasing need for space and solitude. She also needs to surrender to an ever-opening, ever-deepening trust in her body’s inherent wisdom and her spirit’s inherent presence.
As she opens more deeply to her menopausal journey, the emanation of She, the immortal female essence within the depths of her womb, will lovingly and courageously lead her through this void of death into her shining new life as the Crone.
We live in a culture of increasing technology where the intimate beauty, sweet surrender and tender openness of lovemaking, childbirth and death almost carry the shameful fear of being acknowledged and seen. The infinite truth of the female spirit, of a woman’s innermost being, is so shamefully polluted by the false and greedy layers of the modern world.
The purity of her deeply nurturing wellspring of love and her abundant source of creativity still remains repressed. The awesome essence of her spirit is so deep, so inner, so beyond physical existence. It takes great perception, great awareness, great openness, great love for her to be truly seen and reached within her place, her mystery, her wisdom.
The profundity of the menopausal process flows from this place, in the deep, far beyond all rational descriptions and technical explanations. This profundity cannot be dragged to the surface, conveniently labelled as an illness or a medical condition, just because its power and purpose are so little seen or understood by the modern world.
The contemporary world thrives upon a deep fear of female power and wisdom that has seeped through its psyche for far too long. Driven by an unreal obsession with youth, it ignores every woman’s intrinsic need to move with grace and serenity into her rightful place as the wise crone. To reap the wisdom of her menopausal rebirth, she must first die to society’s unreal concepts of her femininity and to the world’s false interpretations of her physical and emotional “symptoms”.
She, the ancient one within her womb, is the true healer, the guardian of her mystery, the intuitive priestess and muse who knows All. Her hot flushes, the burning flames of the Dark Moon Goddess’s purging fire, do not need to be quenched, sedated or controlled. For they embody the pure passion of kundalini power sensuously unfurling at the base of her spine and deliciously stirring the depths of her womb. This pure fire of her love, of her life energy, of her sexuality is not dying. It is being transformed.
The completion of her former life as a fertile woman is frequently experienced as a death. For she has been seduced by unreal shadows and ignorant concepts that belie the depth of her inner reality and the wisdom of her inner truth. Her task now is to courageously pass through the Crone’s purging fire and prepare to rebirth as the impersonal Mother of All.
It is not really the death of her fertility that grieves her, but the death of her false identification of femaleness with fertility, of sensuality and beauty with youth. The menopausal woman emanates a radiant joy and a sensual grace when she embraces the glory of her bounteous wisdom and her uninhibited need for space and freedom. For menopause is a catalyst that deepens female power, births female wisdom and awakens impersonal love.
The modern world misinterprets your body’s fertile phase of life as the reality of your femininity. Although this phase contains much beauty, fulfilment and joy, it does not express the totality of the female essence. During your menopausal transformation, you are asked to die to this mass conditioning. For you are now entering a place of power that is beyond fertility and a facet of femaleness that is beyond mothering.
In ancient cultures you have been honoured during all the sacred cycles of your life. As the wise elder you have been respected, revered and loved for your wisdom and power. These are precious jewels that glow beneath the layers of falsity that have burdened the feminine psyche. This is a deeply spiritual phase of your life, an awesome rite of passage.
When lived consciously, it will ultimately bestow you with the freedom to live your life from the limitless source of your profundity. Like your beloved mother earth, you will become more beneficent, more conscious, more powerful, through your many transformational cycles of death, rebirth, replenishment and renewal.
And so she descends into the desert, across the ocean, The Valley of Death and The Dark Night of the Soul. Along the way, she is stripped of her family conditioning and the conditioning of the collective feminine psyche.
And it is so very important for her to honour this death, for new life, new light will emerge from the glowing embers of her past. She is clearing, emptying, purifying her body and psyche of the worldly identifications she has absorbed during the first half of her life.
All her acts of doing will soon flow directly from her inner place of being, becoming finer, becoming more whole. She will rebirth into a deeper inner reality that aligns with her awakening power. She is not to consciously know this yet, for she is still immersed in transformation, in metamorphosis, in change.
Her new wings are not yet ready to unfurl. They await, fluttering and glistening wet, to carry her into and beyond soaring heights she has never before known. The ground of her psyche is being transformed from suffering to joy. The truth of menopause is beyond hormonal fluctuations and changes. It is beyond being labelled as a “medical condition” profiting pharmaceutical companies that prey upon women’s doubts and fears. The truth of menopause is about woman becoming more womanly through being in her natural place of peaceful serenity, loving wisdom and impersonal power.
A woman’s distress, her despair, her fear, her grief, rage and sorrow during her menopausal transformation are simply because she cannot find her true place in contemporary society. Nothing of the world truly prepares and educates her for this mighty transition. And nothing of the world gently eases her into the wise woman whisperings of her feminine heart.
It is not really ageing that she fears, but not being loved for simply being who she is. The menopausal woman is too frequently ignored and displaced within a society that does not value or honour the gracious presence of the female elder, the creative wisdom of the ancient muse, the beneficent counsel of the eccentric crone.
Beautiful woman, you are an exotic flower with a delicate fragrance that opens sweetly to love. When your essence is dishonoured, you close your petals, your womb, your heart. Menopause opens a chasm within your psyche, stripping you bare and stirring every part of you that has never been faced, felt, loved, acknowledged or lived in the past.
The Dark Moon Goddess purifies your psyche in preparation for your initiation as the Crone. Your dawning wisdom will reveal the finality of this death. And your arising power will reveal the radiance of this rebirth. You can never go back. From now on your life will encompass a deeper, more spiritual, more loving, more powerful, more open way of being.
The simple yet profound truth of menopause has been suppressed for many generations. Its revelations are many and its power is unique. When a woman listens to the silent voice of her menopausal heart she sensitively attunes to her deepest passions, longings and wise, wise ways.
Her transitional journey embodies the awesome power of her emerging wisdom and the mellow presence of her ripening maturity. She becomes new. She becomes real. And she becomes free of attachments, identities and roles. As she softly opens to the mystery of this death, this rebirth, her intuition and her insight deepen. She gains inner strength and wholehearted courage. Her doubts are diminished and she loses her fear.
As you die to your personal identification with your menstrual cycle, your innate need for lovemaking separates from its connection with ovulation. If you surrender to the wild power of your wisdom you will ultimately have no emotional need for lovemaking. Yet from within the exquisite stillness of this place, you will remain open and available to sexual loving that is truly intimate, impersonally profound and sensitively attuned to your awakening power and deepening truth. You will then love and make love from the vast depth of the menopausal mystery.
As a woman becomes more aligned with her menopausal death and rebirth process she also faces the fact of her physical mortality. This is not a morbid pre-occupation, but a natural phase filled with perceptive insights that ultimately draw her energy more into the present moment. Through dying to her past, the potential of her perceived future transforms as she stands upon the threshold of a new life.
As the Dark Moon Goddess reveals to her that her love will never die, she simultaneously becomes more aware of the remainder of physical life awaiting her. There is great joy and peace embodied within this insight, for it creates more fullness, completeness and simplicity in her daily living. Everything in her life then embraces the sacred reality of “only for now”.
When a woman opens to the spiritual power of her menopausal journey she is inwardly nourished by an inherent need for change. This calls her entire being to transmute on a cellular level. Any woman who tries to resist this adventurous change through ignorance, suppression or fear is denying the sacred awakening of her female wisdom. If she does not respond to this potent calling she will feel incomplete and unfulfilled.
For somewhere deep within her heart of hearts, she will know that she has compromised her inner truth. Hormones will not bestow this completeness, nor will facelifts or anti-aging pills. Only through living from the maturity and profundity of her wise inner goddess will she receive peace-filled completeness of being. If she is to make any real contribution to the power and wisdom of this earth this will be revealed through the awesome mystery of her menopausal death and rebirth.
© Copyright ~ Roslyne Sophia Breillat
Not to be reprinted without author’s permission
Sophia is a woman who lives, writes and paints from the heart
Website ~ www.wildheartwisdom.com
Susun Weed at Women’s Herbal Conference '07
CORRESPONDENCE COURSES 
Green Allies explores herbal medicine through direct experiences with plants, plant spirits (fairies, devas), and plant medicines. For those who want to deepen, rather than broaden, their knowledge of plants: a year's worth of investigation and experimentation with one plant ally. 
