To take HRT, or bioidentical HRT, or another medication or supplement, is not the question!
If you’re experiencing perimenopause or menopause symptoms, you’ll no doubt seek out advice, do your own research and in the end, take what feels right for you, which might be nothing at all.
When we experience perimenopause and menopause symptoms, there are many ways that we can reduce our symptoms but there is one important question that we should ask:
What does my body want me to know?
THAT is the question.
Despite what our culture tells us, women are not designed to suffer through midlife.
A drop in estrogen does not equal symptoms.
Our hormones are doing the best they can with the conditions we create for them – they don’t need to be fixed!
Sometimes, when stress has snowballed, when years of a broken diet and an out-of-balance lifestyle take their toll, and when we're convinced that caring for our health should be outsourced, it may feel like our hormones are running wild. It may seem right to blame them.
Through the sweat, anxiety, dryness, rashes, frequent migraines, mood swings and a burning desire to feel like ourselves again, it’s not easy to return to the question: what does my body want me to know?
And it might not be easy to hear the answer.
But there is an answer.
I spent years turning down the volume of my symptoms through treatments, creams, potions and herbs. I was searching for an answer, but I was asking the wrong question. I desperately wanted to know what to do or take to "fix" myself, when I wasn’t broken.
Women do not break at midlife; we experience change.
And in that change, the body's wisdom bubbles to the surface, starting softly, becoming louder, pushing us back to nature's path, and our default well-being and joy.
Having turned down the volume of my symptoms, one day it occurred to me to turn the volume back up and step into change. I stopped searching for a way to fix myself. I stopped taking everything that I had hoped could help me feel like myself again and instead decided to sit in the orchestra of my symptoms. It was there I heard something new and discovered what my body wanted me to know.
That was my journey.
Every woman’s journey will look different, but in the end, we can’t escape a simple truth: it doesn’t matter what we search for outside of ourselves, transformation occurs when we look within.
Women often ask me about medicine and supplements. I’m not a doctor and supplements are not my beat. But I know that medicine, supplements and treatments can sometimes offer welcome relief. They can be just what a woman needs, at a certain time. And when relief arrives, it’s possible to see something new – a fresh thought, an insight.
And even one insight can change everything.
I am not anti-HRT or anti-BHRT or anti anything else that can offer women relief, safely.
But I am anti the assumptions modern medicine and the promoters of hormone therapies have made about women’s bodies.
I am passionate about deconstructing the estrogen theory, which arose out of millennia-old misogynistic beliefs about women’s bodies. The estrogen theory brings women no closer to understanding what creates and what can relieve their perimenopause and menopause symptoms.
I believe that after decades of women’s bodies being used for an extended pharmaceutical experiment (often with disastrous results), it’s time we took a very different approach to midlife women’s health.
I see brilliance in our bodies at every stage of our life-cycle.
And I recognize what society fears: the power of menopausal women, waking up to their wisdom and living a life with passion and joy.
LIKE this post? Feel free to share and check out other posts on my blog!
