Menopause Resource Center
Wise
Woman Ways
Post-Menopausal Climax Years
by Susun S. Weed
The post-menopausal years symbolically begin on the
fourteenth new moon after your final menstruation.
(And continue, of course, for
the rest of your life.) Hot flashes, aching joints, heart disease,
incontinence, vaginal atrophy, and broken hips may
diminish the quality and quantity
of these years. Use of Wise Woman ways in the post-menopausal years
can halt and reverse osteoporosis (the bones accept
calcium once again),
keep estrogen- and progesterone-sensitive tissues in the vagina and
bladder from weakening and drying out, and maintain
a healthy, vigorous
heart and circulatory system.
Eat
vegetables, fruits, and grains instead of meat. Eating meat and meat
fat weakens your bones as well as your heart, promotes cancer, and
may contribute to post-menopausal hot flashes.
Move,
dance, walk, stretch, go, inquire, keep active. The essence of vitality
is change. Now that you've been through the Change, don't stop, keep
changing. Break the rules and the taboos. Become an expert on pelvic
floor exercises. Take up belly dancing. Pump iron. Wear purple.
Write
a legal will. And revise it every ten years. Face your own death. Plan
for your own death. This completes the second stage of your initiation.
Nourish
yourself with every bite. Aging increases our needs for many nutrients
while reducing our digestive ability. Make every bite count toward
optimum vitality and step up digestive efficiency by using dandelion
root tincture before meals. Discover new ways to serve yourself calcium-rich
foods at every meal. Use herbal vinegars regularly. Gradually replace
bone-depleting white flour products (bread, pasta, pretzels) with fiber-rich
whole grains and whole grain products. Drink vitamin- and mineral-rich
herbal infusions instead of mineral-depleting coffee, tea, and soft
drinks. Try yogurt and fresh fruit instead of ice cream for stronger
bones and fewer vaginal infections.
Plan
your Crone's Ceremony of Commitment to Her Community. Anytime after
your second Saturn return (age 57-61), you are ready for the third
stage of your menopausal initiation: rebirth. You are She-Who-Holds-the-Wise-Blood-Inside.
You are newly crowned, newly born, baby Crone. After isolation, after
death, you rejoin the community. In your isolation, you revisioned
yourself. By giving death to yourself as Mother, you claimed all of
yourself. It is time to share that vision, to name yourself publicly,
Crone, woman of wholeness.
"I am the Crone. I feel my way along paths following the energy and warmth
that others have placed here. Trusting the dark, I am guided not by light, but
by the flowing movements I sense. I am like the water that follows, without sight
or foreknowledge, the ancient river's channel."
My Native American teachers tell me that we are in the midst of earth changes
that will culminate around the year 2013. They say the earth changes will bring
heat, and floods, and upheaval on an enormous scale. I am struck by the fact
that 50 million women will have achieved menopause by 2013. Since we, as women,
are one with the earth, is our massive, collective Change Her Change as well?
Can we moderate her hot flashes? Give her ease from flooding? Soothe her emotional
uproar? Emerge transformed together after our changes? How will we do it? With
drugs, against the problems? With nature, blessed by all we are given? Will it
matter to the Earth, Gaia, what choices I make in my menopause? What stories
I tell myself? What I tell other women?
copyright © Susun
Weed
