Midwifing Your Menopause

Midwifing Your Menopause by Feminine Attunement

A Gentle Honouring of the Rites of Passage into Menopause

Menopause is a profound rite of passage—a time of transformation that reshapes a woman’s identity. Like all initiations, it carries the power to guide and teach us, whether or not we consciously acknowledge it. These rites of passage reveal the significance and expectations of our emerging roles and help us embody them with intention and grace.

The milestones of menarche, childbirth, and menopause are too meaningful to let pass unnoticed. Each one offers a vital opportunity to welcome, honour, and celebrate our journey through womanhood. Menarche initiates the maiden into her Springtime—the fertile, sensual, cyclical phase of her life. Childbirth signals the transition into motherhood, the Summer season of creativity and nurture. Menopause completes the fertile era, closing the Summer and opening the Autumn of a woman’s life—the time of the Maga. After Maga comes Winter, the wise season of the Crone.

There is an old saying: when a woman stops bleeding, she holds her wise blood within. Her wisdom deepens. The Menopause ‘journey’ most often occurs from the ages 35 and is specifically marked by two years without menstruation. The preceding years—peri-menopause—may span from 2 to 13 years. How a woman navigates this threshold often mirrors how she has experienced the premenstrual phase of her cycles. Peri-menopause can feel like another great labour—this time, she births herself anew, transformed into a new version of who she is.

In our modern culture—steeped in quick fixes and disconnected from the natural rhythms of life—peri-menopause and menopause have been framed as a collection of distressing or dangerous symptoms to be suppressed or avoided. Pharmaceutical interventions promise to bypass the process altogether, reinforcing the idea that women lack the inner resources or “sufficient” hormones to move through this passage.

Yet every aspect of our lives reflects our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual wellbeing. Our bodies speak to us through symptoms, urging us to reexamine our beliefs, attitudes, and habits for the sake of our wholeness. Just as women have done for generations, we can meet this transition with both vulnerability and resilience, discovering what it has to teach us about ending one season and stepping into the next.

For too long, menstruation, childbirth, and menopause have been ignored or diminished, wounding the feminine within us and within our culture. By consciously honouring and celebrating these cycles, we help to heal the wounded feminine in ourselves—and in our world.

Join the ‘Midwifing Your Menopause’ movement—www.feminineattunement.com | @alissa_feminineattunement