Time for wholeness

I have written more than once in the recent years about my life experiences that are changing me as a woman but recently, thanks to what is happening in my inner world, I have been feeling more stretched than ever.
I have been making notes of what I am going through to be able to sit down and eventually write about this with the purpose to record this first and foremost for myself, but also to share it publicly because I firmly believe that I am not the only woman going through madness at this point in life and there might be other sisters out there that might have similar experiences and think they are going mad simply because they haven’t talked about it to anyone, even other women they know …
To break this silence that put us all in isolation, helps the status quo to go on unchallenged and to break the ice, I decided to share a bit more about myself and my depth.

The challenge of my perimenopause

I am in my fifty third year and have been perimenopausal for few years now.
How do I know?
Because I have been observing my female cycle since the start and by doing that I have acquired through decades of tracking it a huge amount of information about myself, therefore I have become very sensitive to any change that is occurring in my body.
I have been aware that my ‘best friend’ otherwise called my female cycle is dwindling and is gifting me with all sorts of emotions and mind states that are opening my consciousness more and more lately.
Here are some reflections of my states of mind, body and spirit that have been taking residence in me in the last couple of months.
Whatever happens in our life we experience emotions as we are emotional beings that can’t but feel all day long and during our sleep in our dreaming state too, either it be conscious or not.
This is valid throughout our life but what differs during the perimenopause is that everything is blown up out of proportion, so to speak, therefore it becomes overwhelming and as such it can create havoc in a woman’s life.
If the woman happens to be a highly sensitive one, as I am, it can take you by surprise and it will wipe you out at times!
Life becomes very challenging with this constant feeling of overwhelming emotions and states of mind that are not always manageable, actually the more one tries to control them the worse they become, sigh …
What has become evident to me more recently is that there is so much one can resist before succumbing to the load and there is also only a certain amount of time that one can endure under pressure, before cracking and being wiped out; these words might sound excessive, but they are the ones that describe at best what I have been experiencing.
The solution is to allow the wind to blow your hair wild and let it be!

The burden of emotions

As I don’t particularly like being a victim or feeling like one, I have discovered that the best way to tackle life at the moment is leaning in, in other words giving in to the emotions and allow them to take residence as much and as long as they want, because by doing that sooner or later they go and, once they do that, the relief is enormous.
The fact is that all these powerful emotions that are invading me at present are not only pertinent to what is happening right now in my life, but they are also the residue of my past experiences, therefore the load seems never ending in magnitude.
How do I know that this process wasn’t happening already before?
It definitely must have happened before in my life, but its impact wasn’t as big as it is now, therefore this led me to realise that what is different now is a bigger capacity to feel, think, conceive and observe compared to before.
It takes some courage to lean in and not fall into the trap of distraction, these days we have infinite ways to distract ourselves at the tip of our fingers, and instead just stay with the process until it is over, at least for that particular issue until the next one takes over and the process starts again: this can happen several times per day, no wonder why at the end of my day I feel exhausted!
The whole purpose of emotions is to be acknowledged, then it is down to us to draw our conclusions and decide to consciously heal ourselves.
Emotions affect us deeply, if we really open ourselves to them, hence we are left with a decision to be made: how do we interpret them?
As humans we are meaning making machines therefore we have to attach some meaning to the disruption of our emotions, otherwise they bother us relentlessly.
If we decide to be open to our lessons, we will find a positive purpose for the emotions that might have come up out of some negative and painful events: the moment we do that we heal and magic starts happening in our life again.
The healing process in simple NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) terms is a a reframing process where we consciously decide what meaning we want to give to an event that occurred to us.

My lessons

In more personal words one lesson that I came to acknowledge recently is that I have to take care of my needs first, otherwise I will never be able to be any good to anybody else.
You might think that this is obvious and makes sense, but in fact as women we have been collectively conditioned to attend to everybody else’s needs before ours, but during the perimenopause phase this issue becomes so imperative that there is no other choice than take care of ourselves.
Doing that in a time when everything feels overwhelming is not really that easy to do because any rejection will hit us tenfold when our energies are already super low, it is really an act of extreme courage to do that!
Another big thing happening for me is the realisation that what is, in other words, what I created, might not be any more what I want, therefore I have to start from scratch and create something new, alas!
No big deal, you might think, but in fact it is a big deal because it is easy to fall into the trap of labeling the change as a failure, rather than a change of circumstances and an act of intelligence to adapt to the new situation.
Remember that when one feels bombarded by emotions, the idea of having to destroy or abandon what one has created, can be super difficult and disempowering, rather than exciting.
Strictly related to our activity is the identity of who we are, thus all of a sudden this daunting idea starts looming at the horizon: who am I?
If one has been in a certain career for a long time for instance, this realisation and question can be really difficult to accept.
This is one of my present challenges in this period of emotions madness.
To be able to do the soul searching work that the revising of our identity requires obliges us to do as little as possible so that we have enough energy to do the inner work, easier said than done though, as our world validates mainly what we do, rather than who we are.
Resisting the temptation to engage with anything that comes our way and believe that somebody out there can help us on the way is really difficult, but the truth is that there is no better guru out there than ourselves, especially in this time of our life and there isn’t a shortcut.
It can be a long hard work demanding lots of patience, another precious commodity that is not purchasable!
Our own truth is not for sale in any shop, we can only discover it by ourselves inside ourselves with lots of patience and dedication.
Happiness is being the person we want to be, therefore I can’t but give time and space to myself to draw my own conclusions and reinvent myself when the creative juices will flow again.

The ‘inner autumn’ friend

This time of my life is really challenging to be totally honest, but going through all those ‘inner autumns’ of my previous female cycles spanning over five decades has prepared me enough to listen to my own inner authority, appreciate what my inner critic has to say and find the patience to gestate the new me emerging slowly slowly.
The perimenopause time is similar to an elongated ‘inner autumn’ with the difference that we don’t really know how long it is going to last, definitely not just a week!
It is a time when a woman gets a chance to become whole by healing all those aspects of herself that have been left behind in the first part of her life and need integration to make her feel wonderful and powerful again.
If you would like to discover more about your ‘inner seasons’ to prepare yourself for your perimenopause or to face your perimenopause happening already in your life, check my work with women on www.flyinginspiration.com.

 

Love and hugs from The Flying Witch