Encountering the Ancestors in Menopause Season
By Kari Grady Grossman
…there is deep nurturance available from the magic of the ancient wise and well ones who lived in a time when the feminine cycle of Life was honored.
I did not know when I entered the menopause transition that I would be in an initiatory container for 8 years, progressing slowly, irregularly, and annoyingly toward an unavoidable great void. I might have developed the skill to navigate this darkness with grace if anyone had told me that my monthly menstrual cycles were a fractal template on which a lifetime scale of the feminine cycle expresses itself. If the wisdom of my ancestors had not been snuffed out.
Nearly a decade of difficult peri-menopause symptoms had taken me deep into this void of the unknown with all the things you hear about – brain fog, blood sugar comas, crazy bleeds, absent bleeds, weight gain, joint pain, cervical stenosis, frozen shoulder, and an insane barrage of hot flashes and night sweats. Who the hell is this imposter that has co-opted my mind, body and spirit? Why hadn’t anyone told me about this? My entire life, I had only heard menopause referred to in a hushed whisper as ‘the change.’
This is the most understated euphemism ever uttered by humanity.
Menopause is a psycho-spiritual transformation that is sacred to the survival of human existence. The profound and powerful leadership that has led the survival of our species throughout its 50,000 year history is serious Grandma energy. There are only two other species, whales and elephants, that evolved a menopause lifecycle for the prioritized purpose of educating the next generation. Like them, elder human females taught the next generation about their interrelationship with the living world around them and how to survive in it.
Menopause is an initiation like no other. It deconstructs our identity, like a caterpillar crawling into a chrysalis, dissolving us into an unidentifiable mush. In this primordial soup we shed all the layers of culture, expectation and drive thrust upon our ego by a patriarchal world that does not understand the archetypal power of the feminine cycle. What held us for 30-40 years of monthly hormonal cycles, hardwiring the mind-body system to channel spirit from the quantum field and manifest it in physical form, whether we birth a human or not, slowly dissolves. It leaves behind an energetic imprint with the moon as our guide. Hence the reason she is called Grandmother Moon by many indigenous cultures, the ones who have not forgotten the sacredness of this divine feminine design.
The Mayans, with their profound understanding of the cycles of time, don’t even call it menopause; they call it “The Plenitude,” meaning completeness. A vernacular to describe how we come into our Self completely, to be honored for the sacrifices made, the sustaining Life given, and the wisdom gained in the process. The dark void of our menopause transition holds the potential to reconstitute us into the authentic Self of a beautiful, wise butterfly. From this resource of wise power, grandmothers have led human tribes to survive for millennia.
I call this process the Long Autumn - a journey through the sacred darkness that alchemized my life story, burned away my ego illusions, repaired my losses and left me with a naked Self standing in the light of Truth finally ready to accept the medicine I was sent here to receive, and permission to transmit it from the unique position of elderhood. Thankfully, I had already reclaimed a relationship with my ancient ancestors before the five deep stages of menopause claimed me. During the descent into the forge, the literal internal melting associated with hot flashes, I sensed those ancient grandmothers holding my hand guiding me to let go, navigating me energetically through the great void in an embrace that transcends time. They taught me to trust the process. To hold to my sacred “No” and allow the house to burn down.
Across the globe we can see that our ancient ancestors understood the cycle pattern of Life in the sacred spiral designs they left behind in all forms of stone carvings, petroglyphs, and artifacts. Women hold this sacred geometry in our bodies, embedded in our monthly hormonal cycle, capable of opening a portal to channel a spirit being from the cosmos into physical human form. Expand this cycle to the span of our lifetimes, and menopause delivers us into synchronicity with the cycle of Earth seasons and lunations through all the layers of time.
Within this feminine fractal the menopause season is ancestor season. We find ancestor honoring holidays and rituals the world over in the autumn, when the veil between the seen and unseen is thin. As a woman enters her Long Autumn (what the medical world calls peri-menopause) the veil between her and her ancestors also thins, for better or for worse, depending on how well her ancestors are in their deathlessness. If she knows how to turn and face them, ask for healing of the burdens they carry and the damns they built to shrink their power and survive patriarchal oppression, she has an opportunity to be held by them during her season of initiation.
As the Long Autumn turns to Winter and the five phases of deep menopause unfold, there is deep nurturance available from the magic of the ancient wise and well ones who lived in a time when the feminine cycle of Life was honored. Whether we are conscious of it or not, this holy process is not complete without them. We need their wisdom to guide us as we emerge back into the world as elders, in the second spring we call post-menopause, no longer estranged from our ancestors but accompanied by them to bring our wise power, our medicine and our healed, whole Self to teach the next generation how to thrive.
With humanity on the brink of self-destruction, perhaps it is time to bring back the honor of Menopause season as a portal for Ancestral Wisdom to be channeled from the cosmos into physical human form and teach the next generation about their interrelationship with the world and how to survive in it.
