Insights From My Hot Flashes.

I had my first hot flashes last week. 

Whoa!

I might need to expand on my “whoa” as our culture tends to trivialize all menstrual-associated events. 

Let me start by saying that nothing, truly nothing in the whole trajectory of a woman’s fertility cycle, is trivial. 

It is not that there is no truth in much of what is written about perimenopause, but when partial truth on the mechanics of the body is divorced from depth and context, we tend to oversimplify things and lose the meaning completely. 

With that in mind, back to the “whoa”.

Just like giving birth, my first hot flashes were surprisingly powerful. Surprisingly because most of the literature that speaks about it is devoid of any sacredness it made me think of this “event” as casual, ordinary, and therefore not worthy of expanding on. 

Let’s double-click on this for a moment.

Birthing and perimenopause ARE in some ways casual and ordinary. Many women will go through them throughout their lives and that puts them in the box of “ordinary” things. But, the ocean, waterfalls, and blossoming roses are also ordinary, and yet most of us feel the sacred in them, even if we wouldn’t call it that.

When I had my first child I was so confronted with the power of that experience that I just couldn’t look at mothers in the same way. For about a year after I birthed my baby, I’d walk around looking at mothers on the streets saying: you are fucking unbelievable! (internally, of course, otherwise they’d find me weird!). 

No matter how a mother births her baby, no matter what happens on her birthing journey, I look at them and see the sacred. Just like the blossoming rose.

Throughout the years I have sat with hundreds of women and, as it turns out, this “gap” in how we (as women) experience these processes and how we see them framed or spoken about in the “outer world” is a tremendous issue because most of us preference the frames we hear and override our own embodied experience. 

This, of course,  has many ripple effects. One of them, and potentially the one we need to correct most urgently, is the interruption of intergenerational wisdom. 

My great-grandmother trivialized her role as a woman, so did my grandmother, so did my mother, and so on…

A lot of us have also trivialized our experiences to match the outer world and, even when what we go through literally breaks our body apart, like birth, we have learned to make it sound like nothing.

Oh yeah, I just birthed a human, Salad anyone?

The thing is. It is NOT trivial. It is sacred. 

Yes. SACRED. 

Lost wisdom, lost power, tremendous consequences. 

Bringing this wisdom back to future generations will take effort and time. It will take many of us to re-write this broken story. 

A more accurate way of describing my experiences of “hot flashes” would be to say: 

“My body is burning through the fire of its inner climate change while my brain is reconfiguring its operating system. My hormones wax and wane in unpredictable ways as an unruly ocean after the storm, powerfully burning the karma of modernity from my cells, preparing me to become what the future needs from its elders”.

If I couldn’t see the sacredness of this becoming and work as my own midwife even if the world has mostly forgotten I would, just like many other women, think of myself as going crazy. 

Our processes are not easy. They are soul-ranching, excruciatingly beautiful. 

Just like strong contractions in labor, at times, the thoughts that arise say: I can’t do this. I fucking quit!

But again, just like birth, I can’t say this out loud as a well-meaning person might hear and think they have to “save” me from my “suffering”. 

But no, thanks. Let me break open and find my power even if it hurts for you to see.  It is not trivial,  it is ordinary and sacred, just as life itself. 

So, I carried on the meeting I was at amidst “WHOA” hot flashes, as if nothing had happened. I chose not to share not because it IS nothing but because it would be dishonoring to myself to reveal what was unfolding to the ones that had lost the capacity to see.

I walk out of the meeting feeling one inch more broken open. One inch more whole. 

I grieve for our culture and the depth of its forgetfulness. Simultaneously, this forgetfulness fires (ha!) the impulse to move toward a collective re-membering.

Will you join me? 

More to come soon.