menopause

Crowning glory

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

If you are a mature woman, perhaps especally if you have (or are going through) health challenges, what is your relationship with your hair? Women who have been through serious trials and tribulations...such as a trauma that turns hair suddenly white, stress-induced hair loss and cancer...can use a renewed relationship with their hair to reclaim themselves most powerfully in the aftermath; like saying "look at me, I'm altered inside and out but its all good, I embrace and offer forth the new me". An assumption that making the most of our hair so we can take on our lives means having to make ourselves look younger than we really are feels like making a declaration of power and intention which lacks heart and substance, like we are putting on a brave front...which stops abruptly where the roots meet the ground. If this happened in Nature, the tree would fall down. When we allow our deeply embedded roots to grow up from our core and to show themselves as they are...including if they are grey or white... declaring (not hiding) the story of all our lives, we claim the source-power that we are already generating from lifetimes worth of experience; and we bring that up and outwards to help fuel whatever projects we happen to be taking on now and going forwards, facing the world as our most authentic selves. This feels like an often un-tapped source of power for the mature woman (that is, being who you really are, the whole amalgam of your life's experiences to date, and being prepared to show that to the world, operating from that place of grounded strength) and it heartens me every time I hear about yet another woman tapping into that by revealing her most natural self. This may only be hair we are talking about...but are we, really? From experience, it feels like there is so much more to it than that.

Migraine as the primal scream of the suppressed feminine

~ Helen White ~ 1 Comment

The heat that comes up in the mature woman reaching her power-phase can feel like a primal scream trying to gain our attention...for that is what it is. It reminds us of a time before child rearing, before strict gender roles, before many of the constructs we have turned into the hardest expectations, rules and limitations of our man-made culture....Exploring the portal that can present as pain and which is really our biggest oportunity yet; individually and as a whole.

Tending the inner flame: from self-destruction to thriving

~ Helen White ~ 1 Comment

What gets us hot under the collar; how do we work with that flame to transmute circumstances that feel "off" to us and without scalding ourselves and others? By getting to know what all versions of these triggers are in their very core essence. For me it is injustice and a sense of being made an "under-dog", in all its forms, that sets me off; felt keenly on behalf of anyone being treated thus, hotly for all women, painfully for anyone amongst my family or friends, excruciatingly when it's on behalf of my daughter, self-destructively when its anything to do with me since that version feels like the very inflammation in my cells that becomes PAIN and crashing health. Even now that inflammation is all-but gone from my daily experience, a circumstantial trigger can switch it back on in an instant so I know its time I got to work on this final bastion of my healing...by tackling the very triggers themselves; but how since I can't single-handedly change the ways of the world? Big questions and lots of new thoughts in this week's fiery blog. What I realised today is a whole deeper level of what I have been realising more and more on this topic and feels so on-time for where we are getting to in the tranformation of ourselves in tandem with the joint transformation of our world.

How do you see yourself?

~ Helen White ~ 2 Comments

How long does it take to reinvent our cells? Well, in my experience, the body renews itself in a way that feels noticable in around 6months (our bone cells in around 3 months, red blood cells every 4 months, DNA in 2 months and we turn over new brain cells in up to a year) so it takes about that long to make some serious difference - something I’ve used to my advantage many times when visualising the healthier summer ahead. The area where things have become grayer, for me, are where I’ve allowed the perception of others - even when well-intended - to undermine my own inner work. Even when its considered "harmless" or for fun, even as family jest, whether delivered by our well-meaning children or our unrealising spouse, we should take note of areas where we are being painted to ourselves in terms other than those that we would choose to paint the best-possible picture of ourselves. Being habitually depicted as small or frail (or fat, stupid, forgetful, “getting old”….the list goes on) is not at all helpful in such a game plan yet its something I’ve noticed people, especially women, succumb to as they get older; especially within the so-called "benign" family setting where anything goes. Yet when we take stock of how much time we spend with our families and anyone else who might play with us in this carefree way, that's a lot of time spent succumbing to these viewpoints. With habitual repetition, we take on these flippant characatures of ourselves, surrendering ourselves to a comic moment even when that doesn't serve how we feel on the inside. These comedic outlines of who we are, “drawn” in haste as an in-joke between well-meaning people, can become the very bones and organs of our future self. Women, in particular, tend to have the kind of visual-creative approach to physicality that shapes their cells according to how they see themselves in their imagination; which can be such a culturally or circumstantially dictated thing, their self-image distorted by so-called "harmless" throw away critiques dressed-up as desplays of affection. Even if this is way too abstract to explain to your family, its enough that it matters to you and is a first step in reclaiming your own body to take such a step. While other people might not "get" why its so important that you get to drive the way that you interpret what is going on with your body, in YOUR terms, all you need to do is ask that they respect that and let you lead your own way in what is, primarily, your own domain. For my own part, I intend to have that family chat to lay down some lines of my own and insist that they remain uncrossed since its up to me to take responsibility for the future version of myself that is currently in production in my mind's eye; and the same goes for all of us - its a matter of survival. Its also made me think a lot more about how I speak to other people and is no bad thing for my daughter to learn about as she steps into young womanhood and the onslaught of so many cultural opinions about what she should and shouldn't look like!

Repairing your myelin

~ Helen White ~ 2 Comments

I keep noticing how nature has this weird and wonderful way of offering us clues to our own healing; often through locational juxtapositions (a cure found growing very close to the trigger "event") or visual clues. So when I came across Lion's Mane Mushroom as a possible route to repairing myelin, the coincidence of it resembling a sea anenome...our common ancestor when it comes to the evolution of our nervous system...took me aback and excited me, all at once! I just knew I was on to something...(read more).

What our mothers have to teach us

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

Maybe thats the thing about oestrogen – it buffers us from ourselves until – suddenly no longer there, there is nothing left to stand between us and the life we have embodied for years and we are left to face up to it all, in one almighty effort. The brick walls that kept away the view we didn’t want to see, the unholy mess we didn’t want to deal with, is suddenly crumbled away, the view exposed and no avoiding it and so we either sink or swim as life’s full tidal wave comes in for us to surf or get crashed by. Put simply, we have to get our shit together really quickly or it can be all too much for us, whatever’s waiting on the other side of the thick smokescreen we put up. That mess could consist of terrible, habitual, lifestyle habits or a thoroughly rotten marriage – or it may just mean we need to make some tweaks and do some straight talking – but, whatever it is, there’s no buffer any more and we feel it – oh how we feel it all...

The oestrogen effect

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

By virtue of its key role - preparing for an egg - oestrogen has come to stand for and embody a protective urge. It dominates the process by which we prepare for and protect that egg before its release into the world; it safeguards the hoped-for pregnancy yet only travels as far as the threshold of that potential being realised, stepping no further forward with it, like a mother stood waving at the door. It knows only "hold" and "protect" as its inner mantra - and this is oestrogen in a nutshell, without frills and, yes, generalised down to its very essence as we all know that not every egg leads to the realisation of a new beginning, nor do we want it do. Yet there is a very real truism in this stereotype of oestrogen as the egg-holder, the homemaker, coddling her creation tightly to her bosom because, when a women is in her oestrogen phase, this is what a woman tends to do and there is very real evidence that she becomes single-minded, withdrawn and less independent during that phase. To quote Leslie Kenton (Passage to Power: Natural Menopause revolution) "She is more willing to adjust herself to the needs of others. When oestrogens are running, women like to attract a mate not so much to draw him into her body as to comfort, admire and care for her. Her ovaries seem to be smiling - 'whatever you want, I'm happy to give' they seem to say". She continues: "A few women who by nature are high oestrogen producers feel quite dependent on others for approval, and for the definition of their being". Any wonder that so many doctors, even some husbands, have been so keen on advocating oestrogen hormone replacement in order to maintain this personality type in favour of its alternative, the independent, outward-thinking woman...

Meeting our electric selves

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

What do you do when you find out you are super-sensitive to something to the point where it causes you actual pain...it could be anything but take, for instance, electricity. This is what happened to me; and, it turned out, there were some things I could do about that "problem" but also some that I wasn't prepared to consider and that included anything that looked like "hiding away" from it or making myself a victim to it. For instance, I wanted to get out and travel more, not less, over the next few years and how would creating an artificial safe-zone equip me to do that? I have experienced many times how, the more you protect yourself from something deemed undesirable, the more you then react to it when it is back in your experience range…and I didn’t want that; I wanted recovery to mean full integration back into my humanness, without limitations. To lock myself away from the current reality of this planet would be to make an enemy of the present-day living conditions on this planet and I wasn’t prepared to declare war in that way. I want the rebalancing of my health to mean I am fully equipped to lead a life that means I can say “yes” to any experience I choose without feeling compromised by my health and that means the kind of recovery where I feel truly robust, not maintaining some sort of fragile equilibrium by walking a knife’s blade of carefully managed circumstance. A recovery on those terms would feel conditional in so many ways and I am shooting for the fully unconditional variety! What happened next...well, it was transformative and it taught me such a lot about stepping into my own power and meeting myself - my electric-self - on its own terms, learning how to optimise all that I am, without compromising.