Meeting THE HEART,MIND & SPIRIT OF PERIMENOPAUSE: THE WISDOM OF YOGA and AYURVEDA

I didn’t know it at the time.

I sat up after a very quiet and still savasana practice guided by a teacher I loved. It was a moment when everything coalesced in my brain and I had a thought I had not had before.

Yoga school. Yes, I will enroll in yoga school. It made perfect sense in my heart & spirit, I had been a long time practitioner and it felt like a good step. Everything in my body agreed.

My life was on the front end of major change. I was in my early 40’s and coming to some uncomfortable reckonings. Do you know those? The ones that mean that a lot is going to have to change. And that change would largely be implemented and executed by me. I knew I could not stay here any longer knowing this. Knowing that I had lost my way. Admitting that I needed a course correction which was also going to be hurtful and painful to the people I loved most in the world.
I would lay awake at night wishing, hoping, willing it to go away. I would think to myself

“Do I really have to do this? Put energy here?”

I really wanted the answer to be NO. I kept asking.

But the very center point of my being was not interested in my negotiations. I was connecting to something very deep inside me that had been pushed aside for a long time and had some how managed to break free and rise to the surface of my life.

So I did the only rational thing I could think to do. I jumped in. I jumped into Yoga and into Ayurveda like my life depended on it. And in many ways it did. My long time practices had always been a source of supporting my physical health but I was in a different place now. I was looking for something much deeper. I was preparing to swim through the oceans of fire and transforming it into something that only seemed like distant visions at the time. The only thing I carried with me was my heart that had learned a few things over the years, a call that was growing louder inside me and the changing frame of my hormonal body (though unknown to me at the time).

Yoga met me that year with a thunder that formed the quaking grounds of change, clearing some paths to explore this thirst for deepening . Yoga showed up, kept me in my body and asked me to draw inward. Yoga gave me tenets and understandings that help support a deep knowing within me that was calling out, a calling in and looking to. Yoga gave me tools, beyond the physical that helped some of the suffering, the heartache and the grief and turned it into understanding, compassion and care. Care for me, for community close by and community I did not know.

I noticed some things over that time period which was so many years back. I noticed that what was really fueling me was not about the physical. Sure, it was a vehicle, but at that time I was listening to a different call. I needed calibration and smooth and steady, I needed codes that held and guided a deeper commitment to the way I wanted to show up in the world, I needed to feel like all parts of me that had been holding onto the grief, fear, sadness and the curiosity could be woven together and heard. Yes, yoga and ayurveda learned me this and still do each day.

Upon reflection, the years in between here and there were the early stages of perimenopause, hindsight is always so clear. Now firmly on the other side of the cessation of bleeding and time and space to be with it has given me opportunity to see how these amazing practices both on and off the mat have informed the person I am today. When I look back to that time and to that heartbreak, I see how divine the timing was. With a broken heart, yoga and ayurveda moved in and filled the spaces. Don’t get me wrong, there was no/ is no love and light moment but a slow and dedicated commitment to myself using these wise and generous sciences as they ushered me through it. For the easy and the hard of it all. Over and over again.

They became the steady foundation to stand on when the world around felt like it was reeling. The physicality of it all soothed the tension in my body so that my nervous system had a place to land more safely. They taught me how to care for myself in a deepened way, wrapped in the sweet and caring arms of Ma, in her many manifestations: the trees, the earth, the temples, my heart, my body. All the places and spaces from within and without that have taught me, directed me, honored me and understood me became alive again. Yoga & Ayurveda are divine. And by that I mean something so much bigger then who we are here but through time and dedication, something magical and real grows and breaths inside. That is divine, perfectly imperfect.

I cannot think of better ways to sync my bones and my breath during times of high shift, stress and uncertainty. It feels true for me now as it was during those days of early perimenopause. These practices, these sciences, these ways of living can embody us. They can settle in just like my dogs do when they find that special nook in the bend of my knee. A perfect fit.