TS: Welcome to Insights at the Edge, produced by Sounds True. My name’s Tami Simon. I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I’d love to take a moment to introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation. The goal of the Sounds True Foundation is to provide access and eliminate financial barriers to transformational education and resources, such as teachings and trainings on mindfulness, emotional awareness, and self-compassion. If you’d like to learn more and join with us in our efforts, please visit SoundsTrueFoundation.org.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Susan Willson. Susan is a Yale-educated certified nurse midwife with more than 40 years of experience in the women’s health field. She’s taught at the Omega Institute and is a frequent lecturer for the American College of Nurse Midwives, where she lectures on women’s health and the emotional work of menopause.
With Sounds True, Susan is the author of a new book, it’s called Making Sense of Menopause: Harnessing the Power and Potency of Your Wisdom Years. Susan helps us open up a real conversation about menopause, bringing it out of the shadows, a place where it’s a taboo topic, and instead embracing the passage through menopause as an important passage, one in which we can come to claim more power and creativity as wise women and truth tellers, humble and intensely intelligent. Susan is one such wise woman. You can listen to my conversation with her here.
To begin, Susan, can you share with our listeners a bit about your journey to becoming a certified nurse midwife?
SW: Sure. I have always been interested in children and at one point I just realized—it came to me as a flash of insight when I was in my early 20s—that I was to be a midwife. And back in those days, Frederick Leboyer was just coming onto the scene with his book Birth Without Violence. And I remember sitting in a lecture with him one time and all the lights were out, and they just played this heartbeat. And it just took me straight back to the womb, in a way, and really put me on a path of understanding how conscious we are, even when we’re in the womb, that infant consciousness, human consciousness is around from probably even before we jump in the belly.
I’ve always approached midwifery from that place, looking at what’s going on with the baby, as well as what’s going on with the mother. And I was already at that time involved in women’s health; that was back in the ‘70s. I was volunteering at the community crisis center women’s clinic in Atlanta. And it was a time when people were really exploring, women were exploring their bodies, and starting to think about how their care should be and beginning to talk to each other. Consciousness—looking at that was opening up. And I’ve always also been interested in other cultures, I feel like they show us the birth tradition, show us the heart of a culture, so those were my first inroads.
TS: [Yes.] You’re known as a cross-cultural midwife, and I wanted to hear more about that. I read that you have experiences working with the Navajo and in Africa and with Alaskan natives and Pacific Rim cultures. What did you learn from those experiences that have really formed your approach to women’s health?
SW: Well, I’ve always looked through all cultures for what connects us as humans. What is the same about all of us? And then, what the difference in a culture that kind of adds spice to that basic recipe? And from the time I was a small child, I was interested in how other people lived. I had story books that had stories about children from other lands, and I would read those and try to imagine what it would be like to be a child living a very different life.
At four, my family, on a trip to the mountains, stopped at the Cherokee reservation, and I remember sitting there watching the dances and feeling very swept up in that. So even as I entered nursing school, after I had already been a traditional midwife for a while, I was very interested in that, so my first job out of graduate school was on the Navajo reservation. I felt very at-home there, because many of the beliefs by which they lived and went through a pregnancy were very similar to mine, in terms of infant consciousness and how the experiences that you had when you were pregnant might affect the baby or might not.
I didn’t deliver babies in Africa. I was there working for the CDC, helping the Kingdom of Swaziland to update their maternal child health policies and to do a child health needs assessment, but I spent a lot of time meeting with the midwives and talking to them about their practices. I think what is true in other cultures just informs us of what it is to be human. I found at the core of all of the cultures that birth is just a fundamental, beautiful thing. It’s both same and different, but it’s treasured and revered everywhere, of course.
TS: Susan, you’ve written a new book, Making Sense of Menopause. One of the things that surprised me right at the beginning of the book is that you track us back in terms of understanding our menopausal journey, not just to when we were in the womb, but even to three months before conception, in terms of understanding what might be happening in our current experience as a menopausal woman. And I have to say I was stunned. I was like, “What? We’re going before conception? Three months before conception to understand my current symptoms?” Help our listeners make that connection.
SW: OK. As humans, I’ve always been so fascinated by the human body; it’s just, to me, a total miracle, what it does and everything that is working on multiple levels at one time, all for the same goal. And one thing that we’ve learned a lot in the last 10, 15 years with the science of what they call epigenetics is just that humans are amazing adaptation machines in a way. I don’t see the body just as a machine, but we are made to adapt, and our bodies don’t really change that much. We haven’t since we hit the planet, whenever you believe that was. But the world we live in is so different than it was even 50 years ago, 100 years ago. So, our bodies have to have a way to adapt to what is current.
Three months before the egg ovulates that becomes you, the gene sequencing is starting to be laid down in that egg, and it is taking in cues through the mother of the environment. So, the way this might connect in terms of a woman’s menopause is that if a mother is very stressed and has a lot of stress hormones circulating in her system, the body is feeling, “OK, this baby is going to be born into a world where it needs to have a pretty quick adaptation response to stress.”
This also continues once the brain begins to form, so it kind of wires you for stress, if that is the case. For the baby that’s born wired for stress, to react quickly in the face of “danger,” and another baby whose mother had a serene pregnancy, you could have those two women in exactly the same situation and one of them would see it as stressful, and the other one wouldn’t. And stress builds, if we start out with that kind of hair trigger response to stress, it tends to kind of compound through our lives.
Stress is critical when we get to menopause, because the whole system in the body that’s supposed to take over when the ovaries wind down to produce hormones are adrenal glands, which are there to modulate our fight or flight and stress responses. So, the woman who’s been stressed all of her life and ends up coming into menopause with very depleted adrenals is going to have a hard time making enough hormones, she’s going to have a lot more symptoms, and that’s how it connects.
TS: Yes. I mean, I have to say, when I hear you say that a part of me is like, “Oh, God the first couple years of my life just keep exerting this influence on everything.” And I wonder what you can say to that person, who says, “Yes, of course I was wired for stress. My mother was under stress. Yes, yes, yes.” Are you going to say something that’s going to make me hopeful at this point, Susan?
SW: Yes. I think there’s always hope. And to say that isn’t a prescription that you’re going to not be able to make this transition in a way that’s healthy, but it’s to say that some people arrive with a little more work to do because often menopause sneaks up on us. Women are going through their lives; they always are putting one more thing on their plate and adapting to it. We don’t even realize sometimes how stressed we are when we arrive at that place.
When the symptoms start happening for a lot of women, they are not really sure what’s happening, even though we all know we’re going to go through menopause, we haven’t talked about it a lot in our culture until recently. And many of the symptoms that women experience in perimenopause and menopause at any other time of life would be considered signs of illness. Like if all of the sudden you’re very fatigued and you can’t sleep, or your hair’s falling out, or you’re having abnormal bleeding, you might think something’s really wrong with you, but these are all normal signs that happen to a lot of women during this transition.
When women go in to see physicians, often, with all the medical literature that’s out there, we tend to look at things in terms of pathology in Western medicine. A woman will come in with what are very normal perimenopausal symptoms and end up going through a whole barrage of tests and things to track down each one of those symptoms without the doctor ever putting it together. “Oh, this woman is in perimenopause.”
It’s always hopeful because if we catch up to present time and if stand where we are and begin to put some rhythms into our life and begin to address what we need to address, get some help to rebalance, it all works out fine. I think part of it is that we expect it to be bad, but I like to remind women, “You’ve got this. You’ve done this before. You’ve been through puberty.” Many women have been through a pregnancy. These are all times of huge change, and we navigate them, we find our feet afterwards and move on as new beings.
TS: You said something that caught my attention: we haven’t historically talked a lot about menopause. Why do you think that is?
SW: Well, I think in a lot of ways women’s issues have been marginalized somewhat through history. I mean, we are living in a somewhat patriarchal culture, but also there’s been a lot of shame for women around women’s issues. Our culture tends to do that, and for a long time our mothers didn’t really have a lot of information. In my generation, mothers often didn’t even talk to you much about changes that were coming. I think part of it’s a lack of information, part of it is that we’ve taken on a certain level of shame about things, and that often the stories that we even tell each other as women are kind of the horror stories.
I first noticed this with pregnancy, that when most women were talking about pregnancy to another woman, it was about the things that went wrong, not about how powerful she felt or how wonderful it was to give birth. Everything we see in the media or on television, it’s always made into a crisis where the baby almost dies or something happens in the cab on the way to the hospital. I used to wonder why that was, and can only think that in some ways women have been so traumatized by the way we’ve been treated in medical culture that they’re still working out that trauma, and that’s why they need to tell their stories.
And we do need to tell our stories, we need to tell our stories and have them heard, and I really hope that women will take this book and find a group of women that they trust and maybe read it together and do some of the self-inquiry together so that they can talk to each other, share their stories, and begin to heal.
TS: [Yes.] Just to bring myself forward here, I’m turning 60 this year.
SW: [Yes.]
TS: And here we go, I’m menopausal.
SW: Congratulations.
TS: Thank you, Susan. And in a way it’s funny to say it, because it’s like, “Of course. You’re turning 60, Tami, of course you’re menopausal.” Like, “Big deal.” And yet, I can feel that it’s a kind of taboo, almost, to say it out loud. But it’s ridiculous. That’s ridiculous.
SW: [Yes.] Our culture has made it feel like life is over at menopause and a lot of women have bought into that myth. And that’s certainly the way allopathic medicine sees it. I mean, when I sometimes receive articles on the pathophysiology of menopause and how to treat it, it’s all about failure. It’s about the failure of your fertility system, the failure of your ovaries, your reproductive life being over. And certainly—I’m almost 10 years older than you are—and certainly in my generation women were often valued by their looks or what they could offer to a man, many women even went to college to find husbands more than they did to pursue their own intellectual curiosity.
So there has been, and that’s one of the first things that I noticed working with menopausal women, is that when they were offered an opportunity to tell their stories and to really sit and talk about what it felt like to be there, I noticed that so many of them were kind of looking over their shoulder backwards, that what they had lost and what they would no longer ever have. And I realized that menopause is really the fork in the road for a lot of women. It’s the time at which they either do the work they need to do and move forward, thriving into the next arc of their life, or they just begin to diminish.
TS: Tell me more about this notion of the fork in the road. I know you write in your book, Making Sense of Menopause, that “menopause is a crossroads at which women generally decide to either move forward and thrive or begin to diminish.” What’s the work we need to do to move forward and thrive?
SW: What I feel like we need to do, because menopause is a shift on so many levels, it’s not just happening physically, but it’s also happening emotionally, and […] it’s evolutionary. It turns us into wise women who can actually further the evolution of our culture. And the hormones that shift, the estrogen that has been highest in our bodies during the reproductive years that runs our menstrual cycle and our fertility, that hormone, estradiol, really kind of hits centers in the brain that make you want to nurture everything and that allow you to be kind of the doormat for your family, or your community if you don’t have children, that you are giving and giving; it almost puts you into a hormonal trance that allows you to do this at the expense of your own needs, often. At menopause, that estrogen reduces, and we have another estrogen, estriol, that rises at that time, and that triggers the creative centers in our brain.
This is when women want to write that book, dance that dance, paint that painting, begin to step out and give their gift to the world. There’s something that they call the grandmother hypothesis these days; anthropologists look at it and say that it wasn’t until we actually lived past our reproductive years as women—when we did this, those women were able to gather more food. They could take care of children that the mothers could no longer give their full attention to because they were already pregnant with another child, so their resources were going to that child. And they also kept the long view of the tribal stories, the history of things, so grandmothers were able to help wake up a whole different part of the brain that allowed us to evolve to be more of what we consider being human these days.
To move forward, thriving, I think is number one, to embrace this, to say yes to menopause and to the changes that are happening, and not to try to cling to old identities and old ways of seeing ourselves, and placing value on ourselves is one thing. And we often do this, I think, by catching up into present time and really grieving the things we need to grieve in our life, celebrating what we have accomplished, accepting what we may or may not be able to do from that time forward. And then to take all of that, to say, “This is who I am now, and this is where my passion is leading me. The gift that I want to leave behind in the world.” Because far from being lost, menopause is the harvest. That’s when we get to pick that juicy fruit and really eat it and savor it and then take those seeds and plant them for those coming behind us.
TS: OK. So, let’s say someone’s listening and they’re like, “Yes, I’m inspired by this idea of saying yes to menopause.” But, at the moment, I’m saying no, and let me tell you why, Susan, I’m saying no. I haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep in X number of years, these hot flashes have me throwing the covers off, my libido seems at an all-time low. And so, until I address these things, it’s hard for me to say yes.
SW: I think you’re absolutely right, because we do need to address those symptoms before people really can fully be in present time and move forward. Now, many women have the foresight to come in early. I’m thinking of my practice; they would come in early and say, “I know this is coming down the road in the next couple of years, few years. What can I do to prepare and make it easier?” And that allows you to be proactive in getting ready for it.
Most women who would come in to see me were deep in the throes of symptoms. And it usually takes addressing that before you can move on the next step, and there are many ways to do that. Some of them are lifestyle changes, some of them are using like a small bit of bioidentical hormone or something just to help your body have the raw materials to do what it needs to do, because when you’ve dug a deep enough hole, sometimes it’s difficult to even be able to look up over that and see the lay of the land. So, finding a good practitioner who can help you look at your rhythms, create better sleep, help your adrenals to heal and get yourself to a place where you’re not constantly in this spin cycle is important.
TS: Do you think it’s possible—and you’ve worked with women—that they can go through menopause and not have problematic symptoms? That is a possibility.
SW: That is absolutely a possibility. I talk about this a lot in the book, what we can do in terms of self-care at this time of life to help smooth that out—and as you’ve brought up, sleep is a huge issue. It’s directly connected to adrenal health and stress, and therefore what your hormone balance is going to be. There are many things that you can do lifestyle-wise to help with all of this.
TS: Why don’t you share what you think the key lifestyle changes are to support a thriving process and say yes to menopause?
SW: Well, I think that it’s important as we move into midlife and beyond to create rhythms in our life, because it’s kind of like a bank account. Energy, if we overspend and we’re just random about it, doing whatever we feel like in the moment, we don’t end up having a savings account out, in a way, to draw on if we need to. So, to create rhythms in your life so that your body knows roughly when you’re going to be going to sleep, when you’re going to be waking up, when you’ll tend to be more active and need more energy, what times of day you eat, that sort of thing. It can have the appropriate amount of energy available for you at that time, but if we’re random, all over the place, the body has to have high energy available all the time, because it never knows what it’s going to be asked to do, and therefore we end up using more.
So, to create rhythms, sleep is a huge one, and the way we live our lives these days does not tend to lead to deep, restful sleep. Being on devices or screens, staying up much after 10:00, 10:30 at night, all of these things will lead to higher levels of cortisol, which will disrupt your sleep. Blood sugar can drop in the middle of the night if we don’t keep our blood sugar stable, and that will make fight or flight happen when your blood sugar drops, and you’re not eating, you’re not going to eat soon, the body mounts fight or flight to raise your blood sugar because the brain operates on a very narrow window of blood sugar to keep it safe. And the body wants to keep the brain safe at all costs, because it kind of runs the show.
If our blood sugar drops in the middle of the night, we’re going to wake up and we’re going to be tossing and turning for two or three hours, because that’s how long fight or flight lasts before we can go back to sleep again. There are many things, like setting a regular bedtime, kind of having a period of at least an hour off of screens and devices before we do go to bed, having a little kind of ritual that lets our body know that it’s time to go down, keeping our blood sugar stable. All of that will help with better sleep, and sleep is really key because it’s when we regenerate and it’s when your adrenals regenerate.
TS: OK, so as a menopausal woman who’s not sleeping so well, I’m just going to go ahead and ask you, what do we need to do to keep our blood sugar stable?
SW: It depends how far out of balance it is. If someone’s adrenals are really weakened and tired, then that person is going to need to get up and have some protein within an hour of waking up in the morning and then have a little bit of something every three and four hours during the day, even if it’s just a handful of nuts or something, to keep their blood sugar stable so the adrenals don’t have to keep kicking into fight or flight to manage their blood sugar.
If someone’s adrenals and their blood sugar are very stable, they can do that differently. In fact, there’s a lot of good literature out there suggesting that intermittent fasting helps a lot. But if your adrenals are tired, you’re not going to want to start out in that. So, you just need to make sure that you’re paying attention to what your body needs. And many of us are so busy all the time that we’re not, we don’t even pay attention to our hunger signals anymore and then just end up grabbing something, whatever’s there, when it finally gets big enough to intrude.
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Now, one thing that got my attention as you were talking about managing our stress is you write, “Our body sees good stress and bad stress the same.” And I thought, “Huh, that’s interesting.” So good stress might be really enjoying projects, and enjoying the creativity of your work, but the body is still going to interpret it as stress. Can you explain more about that?
SW: Right. Yes, I would see many women who lived fast-paced lives in the city who had reached a place that they really liked what they were doing. And they would be up early, they would hit the gym, they were fueled by their lattes. They would spend a day doing a fast-paced job they enjoyed, meet friends for dinner, go away on weekends. If you asked them about their life, they’d say, “I love my life. This is great.”
A lot of women wrote, “Stress—not much.” But then when we would actually get into the granular details of their life as to how much sleep they were actually getting, their food patterns, how much caffeine they drank during the day, that sort of thing, you could see that they were living their life on stress hormones, on adrenaline. And adrenaline feels great, but it will deplete your adrenals if you’re always using that to give you your energy.
TS: OK. And we’re still working towards this, saying yes to menopause. What about the sex drive for menopausal women? Is it possible that it could remain strong, healthy?
SW: Oh, absolutely. In fact, many women find their postmenopausal years the best years ever in terms of sex. I think there are several things going on with this. And one is that in our current culture, we tend to live parallel lifestyles to our partners. We often have separate jobs with different schedules, different deadlines, different responsibilities, and the time that we communicate around housekeeping details, children, that sort of thing, the only time we’re in close enough proximity to have sex is usually at the end of the day.
For men that works fine. They’re wired more visually. They tend to go to sex for their—they will have the relaxation response afterwards. For women, we’re wired more to need to feel relaxed and connected before we’re really wanting to engage in sex. If it’s the end of a long day and we’re exhausted, it feels like one more thing on the to-do list, so we’re not as interested.
I feel like it’s really important, number one, to communicate with our partners, to set aside time just to hang out and be with each other and remember who we are and why we fell in love with them in the first place. And begin to have shared goals about what’s coming next in our life, because especially for women, that connection is important. Sometimes when you’ve been in a relationship for decades or for a long time, it’s become kind of known.
Libido has as much to do with our connection to our partners as it actually does to hormone levels. And for some women, there is a little shift in the libido when the hormones are up and down, but they even out in the end, and that will be steady state again, what we really need to connect with, I think, in a lot of ways is our partner and to communicate.
TS: [Yes.] OK. We hear jokes about male menopause. Is there such a thing?
SW: Yes.
TS: What is it?
SW: They call it andropause, and it’s a similar process to where their hormones are changing too. When you think about it, we start out latent, both girls and boys, and then nature polarizes us strongly in terms of creating reproduction. So when the hormones come at puberty, the men get a lot of testosterone, the women get a lot of estrogen. Then when both of us are through our reproductive years, things tend to come together again, women lose estrogen, men lose testosterone, and we all kind of balance out in a more similar place in the middle again, and the task then is integration.
Men as well, I think, are under a lot of pressure in this culture, same as women. It’s a different pressure, but a similar thing—all the jokes about men having midlife crises, and the sports car, or the new 20-year-old girlfriend, something like that. Men are pressured to remain macho, but they may be going through the same thing. That’s another reason that communication is so important. If we don’t communicate with our partner and we just start drifting away, a lot of times it’s taken personally, and the divide gets even wider. But if we can talk about what we’re going through with our partners and they have the opportunity also to talk to us, we often find that we’re you in a more similar place than we realize.
That’s when you can take a deep breath and say, “OK, here we are at this place. What do we want to do with it? How do we want our lives to look, our sexual lives, our lives in terms of how active we are, how much we work, what we want to create and leave for the world?” And I have many women that I’ve seen who actually kind of step it up after menopause, and they have a more robust sexual life than they’ve had in quite a long time, because there are no longer the concerns about getting pregnant, they’re often not working or working as hard or on the same kind of schedule. They have more time with their partners, they know themselves better, they know their bodies better.
One thing I talk about in the book is that I feel like it’s very important for women to know what their own path to pleasure is. And many of us were never encouraged to explore our own bodies or to know what really brought us pleasure and how to get there, and that’s something that if we have not spent any time with it, this is a great time to do that and to find out, “What is it that I really like, and how does it happen, and how can I make that happen?”
Some women choose to just take a break for a while and to sit with it and see, “OK, what does this mean for me now?” There are many different ways to approach that, but sex can be better than ever. Now, it usually does take a little longer for full arousal to happen after menopause, but that’s just more time for fun ahead of time.
TS: Now, Susan, you introduced this word, “andropause,” that I’d never heard before, the proper description for male menopause. What are the most common symptoms that men experience as they’re going through andropause?
SW: Well, I’m not as in tune with the male part of it, given that I’ve worked with women all of my life, but I do know that they also go through a shift in hormones, and often the man boobs, and the bellies that we all love to laugh about—just like the women’s, bellies getting bigger. It’s similar in a lot of ways. We’re all kind of coming back toward the middle again.
TS: All right. You write in Making Sense of Menopause that during this passage one of the things we could do is have a ritual of some kind to mark this time in our life. You refer to it as a becoming a crone, a croning ritual, or a menopause ritual. And I wonder if you can share more about that, and did you do such a ritual. If so, what was it like?
SW: Yes, I think it’s important in some ways to mark our passages, and there are some tried and true ways that we do it in this culture with baptisms or wedding ceremonies, funerals. We don’t as often have what some cultures would call the blooding rituals, or the croning rituals. We don’t do that as much here, but I feel like it’s very important because it’s part of bringing this transition to a conscious place and saying, “This is where I am, and in the presence of my community this is what I want to dedicate the next part of my life to.” And my own, I did choose to do one, and I made invitations, painted invitations, sent them out to about 15 women friends.
I had come to this community in my mid 40s, and that’s the time at which I had my own child—I was almost 45. So most of the women in the community that I’ve been a part of since then really knew me as a mother. And they knew me as the women’s healthcare provider, and the kind of Earth-mother figure. They didn’t really know anything about my previous life in the theater and other things. What I did is I went through my big box of photographs and kind of took my friends through my early life, where I started out, some of the important things and my important people in my life and important events so that they could get to know me more whole.
Then I decided what I was going to dedicate my energy to in the next part of life, and I spoke that aloud to people. We had a lot of good food and danced for a while. But I’ve known women too—sometimes they create a statement for themselves, have everyone there sign it on a beautiful kind of painting; or I’ve been to one where a woman had everybody make a decorative set of robes for her that she would wear when she did ritual, because she used to do it a lot.
But it could be as simple as gathering some friends together and just making a statement—“I’m wanting to honor the fact that I’m now in menopause,” to something more elaborate. I think it really depends on the woman entirely and what kind of sparks her creativity.
TS: [Yes.] In Making Sense of Menopause, you write that there are four elements to a ritual like that. An acknowledgement of what’s being left behind, an acknowledgement of what is being brought forward, a commitment or vows to the next phase of life, and we’re going to go back there in one moment, and then the fourth element is that this passage is being witnessed by other people, by your community. So, in terms of a commitment or vows to the next phase of life, you talked about how some women make a statement. Did you have a commitment or vows to your postmenopausal life?
SW: I did. And it was kind of a vow to honor consciousness, the whole continuum of it in our lives. And as a midwife, I kind of entered the work through many different places throughout my life as a midwife, because I’ve been at this point doing it for about 45 years. And in the beginning, it had a lot to do with women’s self-empowerment and then I was really focused on infinite consciousness and ensoulment, and then I was focused on the birth process.
As I aged I became interested in gynecology and then in the menopausal years, and part of me wanted to pick up that stitch again of infant consciousness and really putting some energy toward helping parents to really know what it was they had in their hand when they have a baby, that it’s a fully conscious human being and how to be with that child in a way that honors it and makes it most possible for the child to become who they came to be.
TS: Well, thank goodness you’re doing this work. I salute you. And hearing about how so many of us were wired for stress before we were even conceived, I’m just so glad that, as you said, you’re picking up that stitch and doing that work. It’s wonderful. Thank you.
SW: Thank you. Yes. I do love this work and I’m just fascinated by what it is to be human.
TS: In describing this ritual for menopause or becoming a crone, becoming a wise woman, you mentioned that sometimes people choose to do blooding rituals and I realized I’ve never been to a croning ritual, and I’ve never been to a blooding ritual. In fact, I’d never even heard of blooding rituals, so could you describe that to me?
SW: Sure, insofar as I know what they are. I know in other cultures rituals happen at puberty for both boys and girls because it’s acknowledged by the whole community, particularly in tribal societies, that their role is changing in the community. And often for girls, that ceremony was prepared for them by their fathers, which I found very interesting.
It’s a celebration, when a girl has her first period, acknowledged by the community, acknowledged by her father. I know in our culture, I find it very interesting girls say they think their father should know that they are now having periods and things have changed, but most of them don’t really want to talk about it to their dads. In our culture, that’s one more passage that’s just kind of kept under the rug a bit.
TS: OK. So, menopause as a crossroads, a time we can say yes and decide to move for forward and thrive. And you described this period, that it has the potential that we can become a wise woman. And I wonder if you could describe to me more when you think of a wise woman—who knows, maybe this is a composite for you, or maybe there’s an actual figure that comes up in your mind—what are the qualities, the characteristics of a wise woman?
SW: Yes. And I certainly don’t have the end-all, be-all definition, this is kind of the way I think about it. I think about it as a woman who knows herself, who has done the work to really know who she is, who owns herself, who doesn’t hide. If I’ve heard anything more than anything else working with women, it’s hearing them say, “I just don’t care what people think so much anymore. I’m going to do what’s important to me and let the chips fall where they may.” I think that wise women kind of have the long view, and so I would say that’s a few things.
TS: Well, what do you mean by the long view?
SW: I think that if we really integrate our experience and that, yes, we live in the moment, but we’re not completely wrapped up in the moment, we can take a step above and look down and see the pattern whole, that that helps to do that. And I know in my own life a lot of it is not getting swept up in all the polarities that we’re so encouraged to get ourselves involved in these days. We have people identifying with ideologies more than what they see in front of them, and I think it’s important to remember that we live in the world, with the people that are around us, regardless of what their beliefs or political views or whatever might be, that these are the people we create our community with.
To be able to see, again, what connects us as human beings. I don’t care what your ideology is—I would bet that you love your children and you want to see them safe, and you want your family to have a roof over your head and food to eat. We need to join, I think, on the level of basic needs and taking care of each other. I recently came across a quote from Mother Teresa that I really loved that said, “If we don’t have peace, it’s because we’ve forgotten that we belong to each other.” And I think we really need to remember that.
TS: Are there actual role models or historical figures that you could point to and you go, “That’s a great example”? Great example of someone who became a wise woman.
SW: Well, I pointed to a couple of them in the book. I have a place where I noted that the one that jumps to mind first is this woman that in her 60s became the mayor of a town in Ontario, in Canada. And she kept her job as mayor until she was 95 and gave it up willingly. And during that time, the town grew, the people had their needs met, they never had debt. She was able to balance the various roles that she needed to balance by staying in touch with the people themselves, and I would say she used wise woman qualities to do her job.
TS: Susan, you talked towards the beginning of our conversation about how our body knows how to do this. Like, our body’s got this, that we have inherently this type of operating instructions, if you will, that direct our hormones, whether it’s at puberty or through pregnancy, or through perimenopause and menopause. It’s just interesting to me to hear you say that, and then to see how many women suffer so much and don’t have the experience of like, “My body’s got this.” I wonder if you can just share a little bit more your vision, if you will, of how we could be so in sync with our own nature that we would actually have this experience. “My body’s got this.”
SW: Well, I think a lot of that is probably personal, probably how we were raised. As I said, I’ve always kind of been in awe of the body and believe in its intelligence, but we live in a culture that doesn’t see it that way. I mean, medically, our bodies are expected to betray us and there’s always something to fix. I’m old enough to remember when they started the direct-to-consumer advertising about drugs on TV. And if you’re somebody that’s kind of been marinated in that whole thing about, “Have this symptom? Ask your doctor about this drug, this is what’ll fix it for you,” the sense that you’re broken and need to be fixed. We’re just kind of marinated in that all the time.
When you look at the way nature cycles and look at even the way, if you knew about all the layers of what’s going on in your body all the time, everything working together, everything doing its own job from a cellular level on out, even if we’re not aware of it, our bodies are working always toward health. And one thing I like to do when I’m working with women is I think that if you can see what the symptom you’re having is trying to accomplish, then it gives you back a measure of control about it and it’s not something you need to fear that’s being done to you.
But you can see, “OK, you’re having this symptom because your body’s trying to get to this place and it doesn’t have what it needs right now to get there and that’s why you’re feeling this and this symptom, so let’s try to get on board and work with your body to get it where it needs to go, where it wants to go.” And women really can respond to that, and it gives them something positive that they’re working toward.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Susan Willson, she’s the author of the new book, Making Sense of Menopause: Harnessing the Power and Potency of Your Wisdom Years. To conclude, Susan, what do you hope people will get out of this new book? What’s your highest hope?
SW: My highest hope is that they will begin to see that this is not something to fear, that this is a robust and wonderful time of life where you really get to enjoy and use everything that you’ve gathered up until this point. And it would be so wonderful to me if women would gather together with people that they trust and talk to each other, do this work together. There’s self-inquiry throughout the book that a woman, if she’s interested, can [use to] follow the breadcrumbs of her own life as to how her identity as a woman was formed, and whose voices went into that, and whether that’s real and true for her now, and come to a place of authenticity; because I really feel that the world needs the voices of mature women more than ever now. I would love for women to rise up and speak.
TS: Indeed, we do need those voices. Thank you for being such a voice.
SW: Most welcome.
TS: Susan Willson, the author of the new book Making Sense of Menopause. Thanks for listening to Insights at the Edge. You can read a full transcript of today’s interview at Resources.SoundsTrue.com/Podcast. That’s Resources.SoundsTrue.com/Podcast. If you’re interested, hit the Subscribe button in your podcast app. And, if you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave Insights at the Edge a review. I absolutely love getting your feedback and being connected. Sounds True: waking up the world.
