It Wasn't My Diet
I had eaten brown rice since before it was fashionable. I partnered in a macrobiotic café in the 90s. I fasted, I detoxed, I practised yoga at dawn, I studied shiatsu from the age of 17 and practised for 20 years. If clean living could buy a quiet menopause, I had paid in full.
During my presentation at Into Her Power, a conference on menopause at the Abbotsford Convent, I shared a part of my story: how I had been so conscious of my lifestyle, yet I still experienced perimenopausal symptoms. Intense restless nights, skin irritations, the rush of fury rising up through my chest in response to the smallest things.
I said, 'this is more than lifestyle', and several women spoke to me afterwards about how much that made sense to them.
The fire coming home
Chinese medicine is a wild beast, bigger than any of us, with a long philosophical history from Daoist and even older shamanic roots. It sees the body as part of life, and menopause as a big part of life. Sometimes it asks us to suspend our rational beliefs, to allow that two things can be true at the same time. Whichever lens we look through, the body is primary.
And Chinese medicine has an explanation. Through our menstruating years, a vessel called the Bao Mai carries energy from the Heart down to the uterus every month, if not for conception then for bleeding.
The Heart sends its warmth down into the land of your fertility, and when that chapter of producing life is complete, the energy has nowhere left to go, so it must return to the Heart.
Forty years of flame, having descended, now coming home all at once. Of course you feel heat in your chest and face, of course anger surges up before you can catch it. That isn't because you're broken. That's energy returning to where it began, asking to be met.
No smoothie or pilates class, or even a perfect diet, can do that for us. The question isn't what you're putting into your system, it's whether you have room inside you to hold what's coming back.
Widening the river banks
I think of it like a river. The fire is the water. Your capacity is the banks.
When the banks are tight and rigid, the water either trickles or bursts and crashes through. When they can widen and adapt, the same charge becomes warmth, clarity, a clear yes and a clear no.
We widen those banks through the body, through breath and movement, at your pace.
The fire is coming home. Let's make room for it.
If something here speaks to you, you can work with me in person at my clinic in Preston and at The Yin Palace gatherings in Melbourne, or online through my qigong community and Rage Rising. The Three Treasures Pathway is offered both in person and online.
With Love,
Anny 🌹
