What does courage look like in the elder woman, because I don’t think it’s about proving ourselves or competing? I am beginning to think it’s about being who we truly are in a world that would prefer we just disappear from view. And many of us have taken that route in the contemporary sense, by leaving our corporate jobs. I did just that in early menopause.

1 in 10 women who worked during menopause said they had left a job because of their symptoms, and the original research estimated this equated to approximately 333,000 women in the UK. 1

The tension rises to the point where, even though it makes no material sense, there is, from a personal perspective, no choice. It takes courage to begin excavating who we really are. In truth, I believe this begins in perimenopause, followed by the menopause descent journey that strips away the old version of who we thought we are, so that we can be reborn as the elder we are meant to be.

Of course, it doesn’t always go smoothly, and I know enough of my own journey and that of others to know that this isn’t all about rainbows and unicorns. Sometimes we stay in the descent for years, and if our symptoms are debilitating, this can cause ruptures in our lives far beyond anything we have previously experienced.

When I went through my own menopause journey, I didn’t know about the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) concept of Second Spring. The phrase describes the years after menopause, a time that our culture often portrays as decline, and yet within this paradigm, it is expressed as a new beginning.

In the tradition of Chinese Medicine, menopause is known as “Second Spring.” Far from an ending, it is understood as a new beginning — a renewal of energy, a redirection of life force, and an initiation into a new season of being. This reframe is not poetic idealism; it is rooted in both the physiology of the body and the philosophy of Daoism, where cycles of birth, growth, decline, and renewal mirror the eternal rhythms of nature. 2

Menstrual blood is also seen as sacred, which, given what we now know about its miraculous healing powers, particularly in respect of wound healing, makes a lot of sense. At menopause, the bleeding stops, but the blood is now held within the womb, becoming a powerful catalyst for creativity and inner wisdom.

This new beginning described by TCM can be experienced as a clearing and sharpening of our creativity, and a beginning of a new relationship with ourselves. This energy is now in service to ourselves rather than our cycle, and along with it comes less tolerance for fragmentation and much less willingness to spend our days in service to people or organisations that expect us to tolerate the intolerable.

We are living through an age of uncertainty. The climate is changing around us, and as a result our communities are under pressure. Institutions that once seemed solid feel increasingly fragile. Many of us are carrying a low hum of anxiety about what is coming next. And it is Second Spring women who are responding not by becoming smaller but by taking back control and stepping more fully into themselves. Whether they are beginning non-profits, writing, or showing up in their communities, they don’t have all the answers, but they have lived enough life to understand that certainty was never the point.

These women know how to stay when things are uncomfortable, and how to keep showing up when there are no guarantees. They have learned through the process of menopause that transformation is rarely tidy.

It is the hidden gift of ageing, to begin a relationship with grief and to live life fully regardless. I don’t think it’s any coincidence either that many women of this age step fully into a deeper relationship with the natural world. We suffer the grief of that, too; alongside it, we also receive reciprocity. Spending time in nature gives us a serotonin boost.

And that’s important because for the menopausal woman, serotonin acts as a semi-replacement for the loss of oestrogen. Boosting mood regulation, sleep patterns and temperature control. It turns out that old ladies spending time in forests is a really good idea. (I happen to think it’s a good idea for everyone but didn’t have any idea until I started this research how important it is for women my age).

Supporting our natural serotonin production can also be aided by choosing foods high in Tryptophan such as eggs and tofu. Watching the sunrise each morning and going for an early walk can also work wonders.

I know that we are nature, and I think that as we reach perimenopause and move towards Second Spring, our connection to the natural world becomes not just a nice-to-have but vital, and I think there is something within our psyches and our bodies that knows this.

We often talk about women leaving jobs during menopause as though it is solely a problem to be solved. And of course, debilitating symptoms are real and deserve support. But I wonder if there is another story here too.

The science tells us that serotonin becomes increasingly important as oestrogen declines. The wisdom traditions tell us that the life force once used by our cycle becomes available for creativity and insight. Different languages, perhaps, describing the same phenomenon.

A body seeking conditions that allow it to thrive and a woman seeking conditions that allow her to become herself.

Perhaps this is why so many women find themselves drawn towards nature, creativity, community and a different relationship with work during Second Spring. Not because they are withdrawing from life, but because they are moving towards conditions that support life.

And perhaps this is what courage looks like in the elder woman, the courage not to endure what diminishes her or perform a version of herself that no longer fits.

Instead, it’s the courage to listen, trust what the body already knows, and create a life that honours it.

Up until a year ago, I had never heard the term Second Spring. I knew menopause, of course and its symptoms: hot flushes, night sweats, brain fog and invisibility. I also know the language of endings, the language of the descent journey. That’s not to say that the process was made any easier by understanding, more that I had lived through peri-menopause, and then menopause and knew what that process had been for me. I had also made the decision to fully embrace the descent and to not take HRT. (A personal decision that was made based on a much longer story, about my journey of initiation through the body, that is too long to share here, but that I might share in another post).

What I had no concept of was what came next. Was it menopause, and then what you disappeared and finally died?

I had never heard anyone describe this next stage of life as a spring. And spring is not decline; it is the time after winter and a time of beginnings.

Spring is a beginning.

I learned that the phrase comes from Traditional Chinese Medicine, where the years after menopause are sometimes described as a Second Spring. Not a return to youth, but a different kind of flowering. A time when the energy once directed towards reproduction can be released into creativity, leadership, wisdom, and service.

When I first encountered the idea, something in me recognised it, as if a small fountain inside me were bubbling up again. Something very spring-like was arising. Instead of my constant preoccupation with death, which had sat with me throughout the menopause years (including one real dance with it), I was beginning to feel a stirring of new life.

Of course I didn’t suddenly feel younger; and it’s not about that. I love being a wannabe crone, and I do still need reading glasses, and my hips ache like crazy if I overdo it, but there is also truth to the fact that life has become easier. I feel more stable, more aligned and a lot more balanced, less reactive. Even though the outer circumstances of my life are still as full-on as ever and, actually, in 2024, with the move back from Australia - very stressful.

Second Spring gave me a term for something I had been sensing inwardly, and I began to wonder whether we are telling the full story about this stage of life.

Even now, much of the conversation around menopause remains focused on the descent part of the journey. It’s like we have forgotten that there is a transition from menopause into something different. It's a transition, albeit sometimes a long one, but still a transition, not a destination.

If menopause is not the end of the story, then what comes after? Where are the stories for what comes next? Maybe it’s the absence of the story that is part of the challenge. Because I don’t accept that it’s menopause and then death, with nothing of meaning in between.

Where are the stories that help us understand this season not as an ending, but as a becoming? When we don’t have a map, it can be easy to assume we have arrived, and, of course, without naming it, we struggle to recognise what is happening within us.

I think that, as a Second Spring woman (I hesitate, at this stage, to call myself an elder), we need to speak openly about this phase of life so that others are not left trying to navigate it alone.

When I speak to women in my circles in their fifties, sixties, and seventies, I hear something I perhaps didn’t expect: instead of the constant preoccupation with youth, there is a growing sense of clarity and a desire for truth-telling. But also and this is the part that is so important a real desire to continue to contribute meaningfully.

The energy that was once directed towards proving, striving and caring for others in particular ways begins to reorganise itself. It begins to ask “What am I here to give?”

And perhaps this is where the language of Second Spring becomes so useful. Because spring is not simply a season of growth, it is a season of emergence.

Things that have been hidden underground begin to show themselves. The bulbs do not become something new. They become more fully what they already are. And I wonder if that is what I am witnessing in the women around me. Not reinvention or a desperate attempt to reclaim youth. Not even a final push to prove themselves. Rather, a shedding of expectations and a willingness to drop the performance and begin genuinely inhabiting their own lives.

Our culture is obsessed with personal growth, and we are encouraged to optimise, heal, reinvent, and become the best version of ourselves. And whilst there is value in that, I find myself wondering whether the invitation of the Second Spring might be something different.

What if this season of life is not asking us to become more optimised but instead asking us to become more generative? Not in the biological sense but in the ecological sense. So the question changes from “What can I achieve?” to “What can I help to grow?” I don’t think it's any coincidence that many women of this age become gardeners.

I don’t yet have answers to these questions, but I do think that asking them matters. Because if menopause is a threshold and not a destination, then perhaps the task before us is not simply to survive the crossing, but also to discover what waits on the other side.

Humans are unique in that we are the only species that get to choose what we become. Strawberries do not manifest abundance; they are abundant, providing food for us, the slugs and the birds. The hawthorn tree does not compare its white blossom to the elder tree, and the apple tree is not trying harder or wanting to be a pear. Each is becoming according to its nature and according to the conditions surrounding it.

And that raises a question.

In a culture obsessed with self-improvement and hacks, have we forgotten to ask about conditions? Have we become so focused on changing ourselves that we have not asked the question? What environments allow transformation to occur?

One of the things ancient myths understood, which modern culture often forgets, is that transformation is rarely a solo act. There are witnesses and threshold keepers. The initiate is rarely really alone, although at times it may feel to them as if they are, because isn’t that rather the point? Even though it is their threshold journey, there are those who guide the way: midwives, priestesses, and companions, to name just a few.

Because the conditions for becoming include relationship.

In Inanna’s descent, she would not have returned had it not been for Ninshubur, who grieved for her and petitioned the gods on her behalf. Inanna was wise enough to create the conditions for her return by asking Ninshubur not to forget her. This is something myth understands that modern culture often forgets. Transformation for Inanna was not done solo; without Ninshubur, she would still be in the underworld.

These witnesses and threshold keepers hold a thread for us when we can no longer see our own way clearly. Their role is to prepare, witness and listen; to prepare the conditions in which something hidden can emerge; and to hold a thread so that we may return.

Whether that is a ceremony, a birth, a community, or a new aspect of self.

And perhaps this is where belonging enters the story. We often imagine belonging as something we find. Yet belonging may be less about finding the right place and more about being held within the right conditions. Conditions where we can grow without constantly proving ourselves, where we can experiment with who we are becoming, and where we can be witnessed in our uncertainty. Where those who hold the threshold can guide our return when we have lost our way.

Nature teaches us this lesson over and over again.

Before the tree can bear fruit, the soil must be right. Much of the activity that supports life happens beneath the surface. Fungi, bacteria, nematodes and mycelial networks work in relationship with one another. Not competing to become something else, but participating in a larger ecology of becoming.

Perhaps we are not so different.

We live in a time of enormous change. Many people, myself included, are exhausted from holding together identities and lives that no longer fully fit who we are becoming. Something new is emerging, both personally and collectively. This feels like a time of becoming for so many. And yet new growth is fragile. It needs protection, community and a sense of our belonging to something meaningful.

So instead of asking what I need to become, I find myself asking a different question.

What conditions would allow that becoming to occur, and who, in my life, is helping to prepare the soil?

As I finish writing this, I also find myself wondering:

Who has witnessed your becoming? Not encouraged it or advised it, but borne witness to it.

Who held the thread as you crossed a threshold?

I’d love to hear your reflections below.

Are you feeling comfortable? No me neither. For all of our so-called progress, here we find ourselves. Instead of being at the culmination of a just energy transition, we have war, famine to come, and an energy crisis that makes the 1970’s look like a blip.

Everyone blames Trump, and he should truly shoulder the blame, but what about all those enabling him? This is a disaster emanating from poor leadership. One born in how we relate, how we build systems, and how we make decisions. And it’s a disaster that has been decades in the making. And as a younger person, you may be asking why we are allowing “old” people to lead.

But the truth is, we are, in many ways, a culture that forgot how to mature.

The adolescence we never left

Bill Plotkin speaks to this with great clarity. I remember reading his books in the mid-2010s while I was studying for my MA in transpersonal psychology. His argument (and it’s a good one) is that much of Western society is developmentally arrested in early adolescence.

We have built structures that do not support or guide us towards initiation. We follow the path of performance, achievement and individualism, but very few of us have been guided through the deeper thresholds. We have no guidance as to our purpose, as to what we are here to serve, nor do we have any genuine relationships beyond human-to-human ones. We have never died to one part of ourselves to allow another more mature form to emerge.

Without these rites of passage, we learn to navigate the world but do not learn how to belong to it. And the symptoms of that lack of belonging are everywhere.

Why eldership matters

In intact cultures, elders are not simply older people. How many years you have on the clock is not the point. They are those who have been shaped by life, who have crossed thresholds, and who have metabolised experience into wisdom.

They are not reactive in the face of change; they do not rush to fix or control, but instead rely on pattern recognition, sit with complexity, and accompany others through transformation.

They witness the initiations of the younger people because they know that initiation is not something we do alone. It is a part of being a member of a community wider than yourself. When initiation is not witnessed, it is often not integrated.

The risk of bypassing the initiation

There is a temptation, particularly in spaces that speak of wisdom and leadership,
to claim the identity of “elder” too early. It is not something we step into because we have reached a certain age or completed training. To become an elder is an emergence, through the slow, often uncomfortable process of being reshaped.

If we bypass this, we do not become elders. We become older versions of the same patterns. We may have become more articulate, perhaps. And we may be genuinely
experienced in some parts of our lives, but often we are still driven by the same unmet needs for validation, control, or certainty.

I would like to call myself an elder, but I know that in reality, I am not.

Beginning where we are

And yet, there is something important to name here. We do not need to be fully initiated elders to begin to play a role in the healing of this gap. And this is where I currently sit, where can I begin? Because even at the threshold, something changes.

As a Second Spring women I know that I have the capacity to hold multiple perspectives, to feel into a deeper attunement to relational dynamics. And I sure as hell have developed increased sensitivity to what is true and what is not

I may not have completed the journey, but I’m not where I once was either. And this matters. Because younger generations are navigating profound thresholds in increasingly difficult times. Whether into adulthood, parenthood or just the uncertainty of it all, and many are doing so without a witness or a sense that what they are experiencing has meaning. So even standing at the edge of our own becoming,
we can offer to witness, even if we have no answers.

The discomfort we would rather not face

There is another layer to this conversation that is harder to name, and it’s one that does not sit as comfortably in language about wisdom, leadership, or even initiation.

It is the question of how we are actually living. And of course, this is personal, isn’t the political always personal, if we are genuinely honest with ourselves.

I have lived a comfortable life, one shaped by extraction and prioritising my own convenience. There has been a huge cost to the life I have led. For anyone in my age group, this is a reality we need to face, and even now, with all of the awareness I claim, there are parts of my life I don’t want to look too closely at. Because to really look would mean asking more of myself. It would mean questioning the structures that hold my life in place. The rhythms I have grown used to. The ease I have come to expect. I have been sustained by the very systems I question.

An admission. I haven’t been to the allotment. And it’s not because I don’t care about it, but because, if I am honest, it has started to feel like a task. Something else to keep on top of, asking for my time, my attention, my energy, when all feel in high demand. And so I’ve avoided it.

Which is its own kind of knowing. Because this is the very thing I say matters. Relationship with land, slowness, attention. Yet, rather than moving towards it,
I’ve found myself turning away. Choosing the convenience of the easier rhythm, one shaped by urgency and productivity. The one I already know how to live inside.

And that has stayed with me. That dissonance, between what I say I value,
and how I am actually living. And then, at the Sacred Birth Centre, I feel something else. A rightness that is harder to name, but unmistakable when it is there. Women gathering, holding each other in stories and the remembrance of what it would be like to live differently.

In that space, I can feel what becomes possible, when we are in right relationship. The contrast is sharp. Because I know, at the same time, how far most of our lives have drifted from this.

Including my own.

And this is the tension I find myself sitting in. Knowing what matters, building spaces that reflect it, but in the less visible parts of my life, finding the places where I am not yet living it.

And deeper still is an even more unsettling question. Which is how I would be if the comfort of my life disappeared, and now there is a looming reality that this question may soon move from being just a musing to a lived experience that will require my full engagement. So my question is:

Can eldership grow from disconnection?

If eldership is rooted in right relationship, and everything in my bones and blood tells me it is, then it is a connection with the land, with community, and with the more-than-human world. Is it possible to move into genuine eldership when, for many of us, our connection to all of this has been fragmented at best?

That doesn’t mean, of course, that we have not cared, but often the care has been abstract. Held in our values rather than our lived daily practice. Can I become the elder I feel called to be? It is not a judgment but an honest enquiry.

The initiation we cannot bypass

And it is in that question where the work needs to deepen further, because initiation is not only internal. It is not even mindset, identity or emotional maturity; it is about how we choose to live. What we wish to orient our lives towards. And ultimately, what we are prepared to give up.

Comfort and ease are seductive, and change asks something of us that convenience never will.

Beginning anyway

And so, like many of us, this is where I find myself, not fully aligned, and not fully initiated, but no longer able to pretend that it doesn’t matter.

This is what Second Spring is asking of me, not perfection, but honesty and a willingness to see where I am out of alignment, without collapsing into guilt and defensiveness.

I have to become willing to be changed and to begin to see what might emerge if I allow that to happen.

The return of the elder

We are living in a time that is asking for elders, Not as a concept, but as a lived reality.

And yet, we must be honest: in that we are, collectively, only just beginning to remember how this is done. Second Spring women are not the finished expression of this. But I wonder if we are willing and able to be a bridge. The ones willing to step into the initiation we were never given. The ones willing to sit in the discomfort of becoming, and the ones willing to begin, imperfectly, honestly, together.

Because eldership does not arrive fully formed, it is, I believe, a choice to come back into relationship and begin the work of witnessing the initiation of the generations below us, whilst recognising that it is they who will become the true elders.

Something curious happened to me in midlife, and I imagine it happened to a lot of you, too. There is a moment when you notice it. Something happens in a meeting that feels wrong, and you can’t quite explain why. Or you refuse to sign off on a policy that everyone else is nodding along to, even though it makes no sense whatsoever. Or there is a system that is only functioning because you know that someone in the room is smoothing over the cracks. Or more alarmingly, you suddenly recognise that you are the one who's been holding it all together, and actually, the system everyone is defending is beyond broken.

And it's your body that responds first before your mind does, for me, it's a tightening feeling, a contraction and a voice in my head that says No. Not in polite disagreement or because I’ve got a carefully reasoned argument, no, just a really clear physical no.

For a long time, we have been told that menopause is a decline. A winding down of energy and relevance. But emerging neuroscience suggests something much more interesting may be happening.

It turns out that the menopausal brain is not losing capacity, it’s reorganising.

Researchers studying the brain during menopause have found that neural networks shift. The brain becomes less focused on rapid information processing and more oriented toward integration and meaning-making. In simple terms, it has become much better at recognising patterns.

And pattern recognition may be one of the most important leadership capacities of our time.

A world drowning in information

We are living in a moment of extraordinary informational abundance. Artificial intelligence can analyse vast datasets in seconds. Algorithms recommend what we should read, buy, watch, and believe. And information streams move faster than any human mind can absorb. Yet despite all this information, many of us feel more uncertain about the future than ever before, and decision-making as a result is becoming harder, not easier.

The challenge of our time is no longer access to information, no its making sense of it.

At the same time, we are experiencing a raft of systems problems all emerging at once. Our climate is breaking down, and economic models built on endless growth are colliding with ecological limits. Meanwhile, our political and governance systems are descending into chaos.

We all know that these are not simple problems. They are complex systems problems. And complex systems require leaders who can step back from the noise and ask a deeper question:

What is the pattern here?

The invisible labour women have been doing

For decades, many women have performed a particular kind of labour in workplaces and communities. It rarely gets named. It is the labour of smoothing. We have transferred this emotional labour from the household into the labour market, where we often translate between departments, repair communication breakdowns, and ensure that systems continue to function even as they fail.

Many women know this role intimately; they keep fixing things so that the work can get done, and the system can continue, but then something shifts in midlife and the urge to smooth stops.

Not because we suddenly become difficult, but because the pattern becomes visible and we can begin to see how much energy it takes to keep broken systems appearing functional.

The same happens in marriages.

The felt yes and the felt no

One of the most striking changes many women describe in midlife is a deepening trust in bodily knowing.

When something aligns, you feel it, the warmth in the chest and the sense of expansion. The small vibration in your heart that brings excitement.

And when something is wrong, the body recoils, literally and there is an undeniable no. For years, as younger women, we are often taught to override these signals and to be agreeable and maintain the harmony.

The thing is, pattern recognition is not purely intellectual it is more likely to be embodied. Our brains integrate decades of lived experience and our bodies respond before we have time to articulate why. This is often called irrational but I like to think that it is an intelligence of a different kind.

Experience as a form of leadership

Psychologists sometimes refer to the cognitive shift that occurs later in life as a move toward “crystallised intelligence.” Younger minds are extraordinarily quick at learning new information. But with time, the brain accumulates something equally valuable: pattern libraries built from experience.

We begin to notice when things keep re-occuring and we are awake to the early warning signals of failing systems.

In evolutionary anthropology, there is even a theory known as the Grandmother Hypothesis. It suggests that humans evolved unusually long post-reproductive lifespans because older women played essential roles in early communities, helping raise children, sharing knowledge about food and land, and stabilising social networks.

In other words, this stage of life was never meant to be invisible. It was meant to carry responsibility.

A generation arriving at the same threshold

Now imagine a generation of women reaching this stage at the same time. This time, though, these women have watched the promises made by existing systems go unfulfilled. They have also built careers outside of the home, often while raising families or caring for older generations. These women have sat inside the institutions long enough to understand how they operate. And they know they are broken.

The patterns are obvious, and something is beginning to shift inside of them. No wonder “white middle-class women are now being outed as a problem group”.

Finally, there is a sense of clarity. Because we know that the leadership challenges of this century will not be solved through faster decision-making or more data.

They will require people capable of seeing patterns across time and across systems.

And midlife may be one of the moments in life when that capacity becomes most available.

And the leadership capabilities of midlife women may be exactly the kind of leadership this moment in history requires.

What happens to a woman who is rewarded for competence for forty years?

She becomes indispensable, efficient. She becomes the one who steadies the room when something fractures. The one that is trusted, relied upon, and respected.

And somewhere along the way, she becomes difficult to reach. It's a hard thing to admit, but I am not particularly likeable in the way that the world measures it. I am practical and useful. The person you call when you have a sticky question or a system that needs untangling. But the friend you ring for shopping or gossip? Not so much. Being the capable one has a gravity to it. Over time, capability becomes the dominant outline others see. Strength hardens into expectation. And expectation leaves very little room for visible need.

There is something about being the capable one, the strong one, that eventually becomes all people see, and, unfortunately, it also means they sometimes forget you have feelings, too. Being capable slowly becomes a costume stitched to the skin. At first, it is praise. You are dependable and solid. You are the one people turn to when the wheels come off.

But over time, the costume tightens. It becomes the only outline others recognise. No one asks whether you are tired or need help. They assume you are fine because you are functioning. They assume you are steady because you are solving. I cannot remember when I learned that competence was safer than need. But somewhere along the way, I became the woman who fixes, carries and absorbs. And once that role is set, it is very difficult to lay it down.

The cost is the absence of being asked, “How are you really?” And after decades of being the strong one, you begin to wonder whether anyone would recognise you if you were not.

Also, this is not a pity party; it is a signal.

As we age, we have the opportunity to grow beyond the personality structures that once kept us safe. To look at the armour and ask whether it still serves. To distinguish between being liked and being met.

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Connection is different from friendship. Friendship often carries history, expectation, and mutual tending. Connection requires something simpler yet also harder: attention. The willingness to arrive without performance.

Connection does not ask for capability, quickness, or emotional availability on cue. It only asks that I arrive. When I step outside into the natural world, something in me unclenches. The land does not require a version of me. The trees do not prefer me brighter or softer. The water does not need me to perform steadiness. I can stand there uncomposed, unremarkable, and of course unproductive. And still be met.

There is a particular quality of attention in the natural world. The way light settles on water and holds. The way wind moves through leaves or how the ground receives my weight without commentary. It is not sentimental and certainly not indulgent. It is simply reciprocal. I have stood by water, tears in my eyes, and felt no need to explain them. I have placed my hand against bark and felt the steadiness of something that does not evaluate my worth by output. The land does not mistake competence for wholeness. It meets what is present. And in that meeting, I am able to soften. The strong one can dissolve, the strategy can step aside. Until finally there is just breath, pulse, sky. I do not have to be the woman who knows or who fixes. I do not have to carry anyone’s future for a moment. I can be held by something older and unimpressed by human performance.

Nature does not “like” me, but it sure as hell recognises me. And in that recognition, it has been the most reliable form of being seen I have ever known. Connection also reaches far beyond the human world, allowing for a relationship with the non-human, even with those elements of the web that are unseen, our ancestors, and the spirits of the land.

Connection is not about being liked at all. It is about being present enough to be recognised. The bringing into presence of the now and truly inhabiting the moment. For my personality type, there is something deeply soothing about this, as it requires nothing from me other than that I surrender to that. In return for that surrender, I get seen. An acknowledgement that I am here, that my presence is acknowledged in return. There is no requirement for me to pretzel myself into a personality type that feels rehearsed or that demands from me something I am unable to deliver. I have discovered that as I age, being seen for who I am is vital. Nature sees me as I engage with it; nature engages back. As I age, I want to bring that kind of connection to all my relationships, human-to-human too.

What changes when we bring that quality of attention, the kind the land offers so effortlessly, back into our human relationships? What if we met each other without assessment, without quietly measuring usefulness, without demanding steadiness? The natural world does not rush to fix or improve what stands before it; it receives, and in receiving, it allows. When I learn to inhabit that same posture with another person, to witness rather than solve, to sit beside rather than rearrange, something softens between us. Connection becomes less about performance and more about presence. We stop asking each other to be impressive and begin allowing each other to be real. And perhaps that is the elder task: not withdrawing into solitude, but returning from it with a steadier way of seeing.

And still, as I begin my next revolution around the sun, there is another layer emerging. Vulnerability is required for intimacy. Asking for help is part of belonging. Even the capable woman needs to be witnessed, not for what she can hold together, but for who she is when she is not holding anything at all.

Perhaps the task now is not to become more likeable, but to become more available; to a connection that does not require pretence. To friendships sturdy enough to withstand depth. To a self that no longer needs to perform steadiness in order to be safe.

The land continues to meet me without adjustment. The friendships that endure are those that recognise both my solitude and my reach.

And as I prepare to enter my next decade, I am less interested in being admired for competence and more committed to being known in my fullness. And that feels, finally, like competence without armour.

People sometimes ask me why I write Moon letters, and that’s a fair question. Most know that my thinking is grounded in scientific reality. I understand that there is no robust evidence that planetary movements cause individual events. I do not believe Mars makes us angry or that Saturn dictates our fate, and I certainly do not outsource my agency to the sky. And yet, I continue to write.

Not because I believe the planets control us.
But because I believe in awe.

The Moon Is Different

The Moon does move the tides. That is not mystical. It is measurable. The Earth is mostly water. So are we. Beyond gravity, the Moon marks time. It shapes how we behave in darkness, and it changes the quality of the night. For all of time, humans have oriented to it, and it is one of the oldest clocks we share. What draws me to astrology, though, is not prediction. It is participation.

Participation in a Larger Field

Astrology, for me, is not about causality. It is about orientation. When I write with a New Moon or a Full Moon, I am not asking what it will do to me. I am stepping into a rhythm that is larger than my own biography. I am acknowledging that my life unfolds within wider cycles. That places me inside something expansive and unknowable, and that brings awe. I am reminded that I am not the centre of the story, but instead I am a
part of it. I find my relationality within the whole. It is a scale shift in which my perspective widens, and my attention recalibrates.

Awe and Gratitude

As someone who has studied transpersonal psychology, I am deeply interested in states of consciousness that widen identity without dissolving responsibility. Awe does this beautifully. Research shows that awe reduces self-preoccupation and increases prosocial behaviour. It expands time perception, increases generosity, and deepens ethical orientation. Gratitude roots what awe opens.

Awe says, This is bigger than me.
Gratitude says, And I am grateful to be here.

Together, they create humility without smallness and agency without domination.

In times such as these, that matters.

Myth as Mirror

Astrology to me is a mythic language written across the sky, offering archetypes, rhythms, and thresholds. It gives us a way to mark endings and beginnings together.

I do not see the sky as commanding us. I see it as reflecting us.

When Saturn and Neptune meet, I do not imagine invisible strings being pulled. I see a powerful symbolic convergence, one where structure and dream, reality and illusion, come together, mirroring the tensions alive in our culture. The sky becomes a mirror for the human field. And when enough of us look into that mirror at the same time, something collective shifts. Not because the planets demand it. But because we have chosen to orient our attention.

Why It Matters Now

Interest in astrology is booming, particularly with Millennials and Gen Z. It would be easy to say we are becoming less rational, less scientific, and less grounded in reality. But I am not convinced that is what is happening.

If anything, younger generations have grown up in an era saturated with information, data, metrics, and algorithmic precision. They are not short on rational frameworks. What they are short on is meaning. They have inherited economic instability, ecological crisis, political fragmentation, and digital hyper-stimulation. The old institutional myths have cracked. The promise that science and progress alone would deliver coherence has thinned. In that landscape, astrology may not represent a retreat from reason. It may represent a search for orientation.

It offers cyclical time in a culture obsessed with acceleration, an archetype in a world flattened by statistics. It values participation in something vast and patterned, rather than isolation inside individual productivity. We do not turn to the sky because we have abandoned logic. We turn to it because we are hungry for scale. For context. For belonging inside something older and wider than the news cycle.

Astrology for me is not a rejection of science, but a complement to it. Science tells us how the cosmos works. Astrology asks what it means to live inside it. And meaning is not irrational. It is human.

I like to weave threads of science, psyche, myth, and my own lived experience. That’s because the loom does not create the thread. It weaves what is already there into a pattern.

Astrology, at its best, is part of that patterning. It situates us in cyclical time rather than in endless linear urgency, inviting us to live in relationship with something greater than ourselves. Not to escape but to deepen our relationship.

I write Moon letters because they bring me into awe. And awe brings me to humility, drawing my attention to something much bigger than my own story. I think that's what astrology does: it brings us into a relationship with the cosmos and the wider, deeper story of who we are. It brings me into presence, and honestly, that’s a gift. One humbly shared here.

With gratitude for the cycles we share,
Louise
She Changes

I’d love to meet you out there in the real world, so if you are in Glastonbury come along to our Second Spring gathering.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, post-menopause is known as the Second Spring, the emergence of a new season of clarity, purpose, and inner authority. Across the world’s oldest cultures, this threshold was recognised as the moment a woman stepped into her deeper wisdom, trusted to hold the centre and guide others through uncertain times.

Holistic medicine reminds us that symptoms are not signs of decline but invitations to care for the body as it reorganises itself for a new season. What looks like an ending is, in truth, a beginning and a return to a woman’s inner knowing, her capacity to see patterns.

Join me (Louise), Shirley-Ann Millar and Dr Atul Bansal, as together, we explore Second Spring as more than a set of symptoms but as an initiation into a new season of life.

You’ll leave with:

• A richer understanding of the physical, emotional and spiritual landscape of post-menopause

• Ways to support your health, vitality and nervous system

• Insight into your emerging strengths and leadership capacities

• Connection with other women moving through similar transformations

• A renewed sense of possibility for the years ahead

The time has never been more urgent for women of the Second Spring to stand forward.

Get a ticket here

There is a reason we are talking about Second Spring now. Not in some abstract, personal-development sense, or as a wellness upgrade or a softer rebrand of menopause. But now, in this specific historical moment, as the ground shifts beneath us. And the rage inside many of us is growing daily.

The democratic norms we grew up with are eroding, and we are beginning to suspect that they weren’t there to begin with. Rights that once felt settled are being rolled back. Economic systems built on extraction and inequality are showing their limits. Climate breakdown is no longer a future threat but a daily reality. (I’m sorry if one more person tells me that the flooding we are experiencing in the UK is down to drains, I might just explode)

Alongside that, we are carrying a low-grade grief for the world we thought our children would inherit, alongside a simmering cognitive dissonance we are expected to manage quietly.

And into this moment steps a very particular cohort of women.

Gen X women. The first generation to be told we could have it all, but who have then been left to deal with the fallout largely on our own. Still, we know about being alone.

Raised in the long shadow of second-wave feminism, taught to be competent, adaptable, resilient, and to make our own dinner. We entered workplaces that were still structurally masculine, learning to survive by being “low maintenance,” emotionally fluent, and endlessly capable. I am so over being capable. Some of us had children young, like our parents, but many others delayed having children or didn’t have them at all. We have had to learn to speak the language of systems not designed for us, often at great personal cost.

Now, as we move through menopause and into Second Spring, something is breaking open. Because menopause is not just a hormonal shift. It is a neurological and psychological reckoning. The brain changes. Tolerance for bullshit drops. The instinct to placate weakens. What has been swallowed for decades begins to surface, and often as rage.

But I don’t see this rage as pathology. No, it is information.

For Gen X women, this rage carries historical weight. It holds the exhaustion of having held systems together while being told we were lucky to be included. It holds the anger of watching hard-won rights quietly erode. It holds the grief of recognising that the structures we bent ourselves to serve are failing the next generation entirely.

And crucially, it is landing at the same time as global systems are visibly unravelling.

That convergence matters.

In earlier eras, post-menopausal women slipped into the shadows. Their menopause was a private inconvenience. Leadership remained youthful, male, and performative.

Gen X women are hitting this erased threshold just as it becomes impossible to pretend that the old leadership stories are working. Tales of the heroic individual, the charismatic strongman or the endlessly productive, endlessly certain figure at the top. Turns out its bullshit.

We can feel in our bodies as much as in our politics that the old models are not just failing but that they have caused insurmountable damage.

This is why Second Spring matters now. It’s not about self-optimisation. But it is about social function and what happens when a generation of women, no longer hormonally or socially incentivised to accommodate, begin to see clearly and speak plainly.

Gen X women are uniquely positioned here. We are old enough to remember life before the internet, before constant surveillance, before performative activism. We are young enough to still be embedded in shaping the future. We have lived through multiple economic “once in a lifetime” crises, watched promises collapse, and learned to read between official narratives.

Menopause strips away the last layers of compliance. And that is why the rage feels so hot.

It matters politically because post-menopausal women are less easily manipulated by fear. Less susceptible to simple solutions and culture-war distractions. We have seen enough cycles to recognise when something is fundamentally misaligned. Rage, when integrated rather than suppressed, becomes discernment.

It matters socially too because Gen X women are often the connective tissue: holding families, organisations, and communities together while caring both up and down generations. When resourced and recognised, this becomes an extraordinary force for cultural coherence. When ignored, it becomes burnout, bitterness, and withdrawal.

And what really matters now is that what is being asked of us is not more endurance, but finally to bring a different quality of presence.

Second Spring is an invitation to metabolise the rage rather than numb it. To let it sharpen perception rather than scorch everything around us. To stop apologising for clarity, boundaries, and refusal. It’s not about becoming louder for the sake of it, but rather to become truer to ourselves, finally.

I don’t believe Gen X women arrived at this moment by accident. Our nervous systems, life experience, and hormonal landscape are aligning with a historical threshold. The question is not whether we feel the call, many of us do, viscerally. The question is whether we will accept it.

Second Spring asks us to step out of cultural invisibility and into relational authority. To name what we see without needing permission. To model leadership that is steady, honest, and capable of holding grief, complexity, and long-term horizons.

I like to think it's not too late and that rage, clarity, and courage have a place. I like to think we are made for these times.

Societal collapse is no longer a theory I can keep at a distance. In 2018, when I still believed in hope, and part of me thought XR was a bit extreme, and that planting trees would be enough, I read Jem Bendell’s Deep Adaptation, 1 and it sent me into a grief spiral, because it suddenly became really clear that we were f**ked. Yet at the same time, it was abstract; it was still an idea. The grief was real, but the reality less so. Now, collapse is no longer a future event. It is a presence that is moving through systems, relationships, weather patterns, and my body. I have always been good at pattern recognition. At times like these, I wish I weren’t.

What unsettles me most is not the collapse itself, but the cognitive dissonance it requires to keep living as though it is not happening. To book holidays, make five-year plans, speak casually about “later”, while knowing, in my bones, that the conditions that shaped our own lives are already dissolving. It is also so much bigger now than climate; it is everything all at once.

There is a stomach-churning grief in this. Which, unlike the dystopian novels and films we are all familiar with, is not dramatic or apocalyptically explosive, although for some already that, and likely to get so for all of us. But steady, cumulative.

It is the grief of realising that the life I imagined for my children, and their children, is not the one that is coming.

What Showing Up Looks Like Now

For me, showing up no longer looks like urgency or constant reaction. It looks almost disappointingly small.

It looks like consistency when drama would be easier. It looks like boundaries in a culture addicted to extraction, of time, energy, and, of course, my attention. And it looks like tending the unglamorous practices that build capacity over years, not moments.

For me, that’s walking the same paths, touching the same trees and returning, again and again, to the body.

Nature has become my primary nervous system regulator, not because it is romantic, but because it is real. The land doesn’t pretend things are fine.

It means that I am surrendering to what is, rather than what I wish were still true. Surrender has brought me more stability than any strategy ever did. Yet:

The Uneasy Truth of Privilege

And yet I cannot ignore this: I live in a small rural UK town, and it affords me a level of buffering. I am not yet on the front line. The shelves are still stocked, water comes out of my taps, and the violence is largely abstracted elsewhere.

But like so many others, I can’t shake the image of Renee Goods’ glovebox with the soft toys spilling out of it.

My stability, even now, rests on histories of extraction, particularly from the Global South. The so-called “normal life” I grew up expecting was never universal. It was subsidised by invisibility. To know this, and to live here anyway, is its own form of dissonance. I don’t think the answer is self-flagellation. But neither can it be denial.

The question becomes: what do we do with this knowledge?

When the Future Falls Away

There is a particular kind of dissonance that comes when the future you assumed would arrive… doesn’t. Not because of a single catastrophe, but because the conditions for continuity begin to disappear. What replaces it is not clarity, but a narrowing of the time horizon.

For me it has meant learning to ask different questions: What is worth tending now? What skills, relationships, and inner states increase resilience, not just survival, but meaning? And ultimately, how do I live well without the promise of permanence? And of course it was only ever a promise, never a reality.

How Do We Live in Collapse?

I am learning to believe that the way we live in collapse is the same way we live in grief: By telling the truth and slowing down. By choosing to go deeper with each other. To have conversations that matter.

We live in collapse by becoming more relational, not less, to the land, to each other, to what is unseen. We let go of the fantasy of control and instead cultivate response-ability. Refusing both despair and false optimism.

And perhaps most radically, by continuing to love, even when love no longer guarantees safety.

From the Loom

And of course, collapse is not only an ending. It is also an unweaving. And unweaving, while uncomfortable, creates loose threads. Threads that can be re-patterned, re-held, and of course re-imagined. We may not be able to give our children the world we expected. But we can offer them something else: Maybe, truth without cynicism. Our presence without paralysis. And a way of living that doesn’t depend on the denial of the cost. Maybe this, too, can be a form of inheritance. And perhaps, in the long, uncertain unravelling, it is quite enough to keep weaving anyway.

There is a strange arrogance in modernity, the belief that only now, with PET scans and neural tracers and peer-reviewed journals, are we finally discovering the truth of the menopausal mind. But if we listen beneath the noise of the present, we find an older knowing. A lineage that hums in the bones. A wisdom carried by Indigenous grandmothers, priestesses, midwives, shamans, and medicine women across continents and centuries.

A truth that science is only just beginning to re-articulate: That the years after menopause are not a diminishment, but an initiation. A second birth. A rise into sovereignty.

Our ancestors knew all of this — and they honoured it.

Womb wisdom: when the bleeding stops, a different power rises

The womb is not just an organ of reproduction.
It is and always has been a centre of spiritual intelligence.

Ancient traditions described the womb as:

• a portal between worlds

• a drum of time that beat the rhythm of moon and tide

• a cauldron of creation

• the seat of a woman’s intuitive and psychic perception

For most of our lives, the womb directs her power outward. She bleeds, releases, sheds.
She prepares for potential life each month, spending energy and blood in a rhythm of offering. But when the bleeding stops, the power does not disappear. Like a cauldron, the womb energy is contained and utilised. We find:

• intuition sharpened

• vision clarified

• insight amplified

• boundaries strengthened

• purpose uncompromising

Indigenous midwives describe this as the womb “sealing”, not closing, but containing.
Holding power that once flowed outward, now gathered at the centre like a sun. This is the spiritual underpinning of what neuroscience calls the “post-menopausal cognitive upgrade.”

Our ancestors already had language for it.

The Grandmother Archetype: keeper of law, lineage, and direction

Across Indigenous cultures, the post-menopausal woman holds a specific, revered role.

In Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) tradition:

Grandmothers were the clan mothers.
They held the power to:

• appoint the chiefs

• remove them

• decide whether a nation went to war

• oversee justice and diplomacy

Because the women who no longer bled were understood to be unclouded by hormonal tides and fully rooted in the well-being of future generations.

In many African, First Nations, and Aboriginal communities:

Elders in their Second Spring served as:

• dream-keepers

• water protectors

• ritual leaders

• mediators

• storytellers

• healers

• guardians of the land

Their authority came not from youth, but from embodied wisdom.

From my own tradition, Celtic and European folk traditions:

The Cailleach, the Crone, the Wise Woman was the one who:

• shaped the land

• controlled the winter storms

• governed sovereignty

• initiated younger women

• held the ancestral memory

She was feared because she could not be manipulated. She was revered because she saw the whole pattern.

Wherever you are in the world, this is the lineage you stand in.

Our ancestors understood the Second Spring as an initiation

For much of human history, menopause wasn’t treated as a decline; it was treated as a graduation.

Women passed through rites of:

• seclusion

• fasting

• dreaming

• teachings from grandmothers

• community acknowledgement

• ritual bathing

• drumming and chanting

• blessing of the womb

They emerged from these rites not as lesser women, but as a different type of woman.
A woman whose body no longer bled into the Earth, but whose wisdom began to flow into the community.

This was recognised as a shift in:

• perception

• intuition

• psychic sensitivity

• leadership capacity

• responsibility

Modern science calls this neuroplasticity, adrenal-hormone recalibration, and post-menopausal cognitive efficiency. Ancient cultures called it elderhood, vision-holding, inner council, grandmothering, or simply power.

The womb as oracle: how post-menopausal knowing works

Indigenous traditions describe the womb as a listening space, a bowl for intuition, and a vessel for deep knowing.

When the womb stops cycling, it becomes clearer, steadier and a receptive field for ancestral communication, dreamwork, high-level pattern reading, land-based messages and spiritual guidance. This aligns perfectly with neuroscience showing post-menopausal women often gain:

• improved executive functioning

• enhanced pattern recognition

• greater emotional regulation

• more stable dopamine and serotonin signalling

What we call intuition, science calls neural efficiency. What we call womb wisdom, science calls neurobiological recalibration. They are the same thing, spoken in different languages.

Why this matters now

Because the world is in collapse, and collapse is the time when elder women traditionally step forward.

This era, this precarious turning, requires:

• women who cannot be gaslit

• women who can read and understand the patterns of history and beyond.

• women with long vision, both back and forth to the seven generations behind and ahead.

• women unafraid to speak

• women rooted in lineage

• women who know the difference between noise and truth

In other words: post-menopausal women.

Our ancestors structured society so that this group held authority in moments of crisis. But we, in the modern West, have severed ourselves from that tradition, and we have done so at our peril.

It is time to re-member what they all knew:
The Second Spring is not a private event.
It is a societal resource.

Closing: the return of the Grandmothers

Perhaps the reason so many midlife women feel their power rising now is because the Earth is calling for it.
Because the land remembers the agreements we once held.
Because the ancestors are not silent.
Because the world needs grandmothers again, not as a sentimental idea, but as a structure of leadership.

The womb that no longer bleeds has become the womb that sees.
The woman who once held the future in her body now holds it in her mind.
And the culture that once dismissed her must now turn to her.

This is the Third Part of the story:
Not biology.
Not collapse.
But lineage.

The remembering of what we have always been.

We have been conditioned to think of menopause as a decline. A time of hormonal collapse, mental slowdown and emotional instability. But cutting-edge research is beginning to show something radically different:

The post-menopausal brain doesn’t wither. It rewires.
And in that rewiring lies a new kind of clarity, vitality, and cognitive power and what the research suggests is that many women are entering not cognitive decline, but cognitive upgrade.

Let’s explore why.

1. The rewired brain: what actually happens after menopause

For years, menopause research focused almost exclusively on symptoms and deficits.
But neuroscientists like Dr Lisa Mosconi, Roberta Brinton, and Nanette Santoro have shown that menopause isn’t simply hormone withdrawal it’s an adaptive reorganisation of the brain’s energy system.

The key findings:

• During perimenopause, the brain temporarily shows decreased glucose metabolism, also known as “brain fog.”

• After menopause, metabolism rebounds as the brain switches to alternate fuel pathways, including ketone utilisation.

• Mitochondria (the energy engines of cells) become more efficient.

• Neuroplasticity increases in certain regions — especially those responsible for strategic thinking and long-term planning.

• The brain becomes less hormonally dependent and more self-regulating.

In other words:

The brain is not shutting down, it’s upgrading its operating system.

This is why so many women describe feeling sharper, more focused, and more themselves after the transition completes.

Dopamine, serotonin, and the midlife “clarity surge”

Menopause isn’t only about oestrogen and progesterone. What truly changes is the neurochemical landscape, the deeper emotional and cognitive drivers.

Dopamine

Oestrogen modulates dopamine, so fluctuations in perimenopause disrupt focus and drive. But once hormones stabilise post-menopause, dopamine signalling stabilises too. Some women experience a return of sustained motivation, more akin to early adulthood.

Serotonin

Oestrogen boosts serotonin, so dips during transition can create mood volatility.
After menopause, serotonin pathways reset and become less reactive.

This often feels like:

• less emotional whiplash

• stronger boundaries

• a more even internal climate

Cortisol

Here’s the interesting part:

After menopause, cortisol regulation can improve, especially when adrenal health is supported. With no monthly cycle demanding metabolic recovery, the body can settle into a steadier stress rhythm.

This is why many women say:

“I feel calmer now. Less pulled around. More in my centre.”

These neurotransmitter shifts don’t point to decline; they point to equilibrium.

What about hormones? The truth behind “decline”

We know ovarian hormones drop, but this isn’t the whole story.

Adrenal androgens (DHEA, testosterone)

After menopause, the adrenal glands, provided they are well supported, take over a portion of sex hormone production.
DHEA and testosterone support:

• drive

• repair

• executive functioning

• libido

• muscle tone

Women with strong adrenal health often feel more motivated and cognitively alert.

Oestrone production

Fat tissue and peripheral conversion produce a new dominant oestrogen, oestrone, which is weaker but more consistent. Some scientists now believe oestrone was evolution’s adaptation to support women beyond childbearing; a long life after reproduction is no accident of biology.

The new balance

The post-menopausal hormonal picture is not:
low = worse

It is:
low, steady, efficient = stable

The turbulence is gone. And with stability comes clarity.

Supplements that support the post-menopausal brain

So how can we support this life transition?

Omega-3s (especially DHA)

Supports neuronal membrane fluidity and reduces neuroinflammation.

Creatine

Promising data suggest that creatine enhances cognitive performance in women, particularly under stress or low oestrogen.

Magnesium L-threonate

The only form shown to cross the blood–brain barrier effectively; supports memory and neuroplasticity.

Vitamin D (with K2)

Strong links to mood regulation, cognition, and immune modulation.

Ashwagandha

Supports cortisol regulation; beneficial for women experiencing stress-induced cognitive fatigue.

Lion’s Mane mushroom

Early human trials suggest improved mild cognitive impairment and neurotrophic support.

DHEA (low-dose, supervised)

Evidence suggests it may enhance mood, libido, and executive function in some women.

B-complex vitamins (especially B6, B9, B12)

Critical for dopamine and serotonin synthesis.

Of course, none of these replace good nutrition, adequate sleep, life purpose and spending time in nature. But they do support the brain’s new upgrade cycle.

Chinese Medicine: the Second Spring physiology

TCM has always held that menopause is not decline but redirection.

Two central ideas stand out:

1. Jing (Essence) and the Kidney system

As menstruation ceases, essence is no longer lost each month.
Jing can now:

• nourish the brain

• strengthen the bones

• stabilise the spirit

This aligns with mitochondrial and neuroplastic gains observed in recent research.

2. Blood and Qi rising to the Heart and Brain

Without the downward pull of the menstrual cycle, energy moves upward:

• sharper insight

• increased intuition

• clearer purpose

• stronger spiritual connection

In modern terms: improved executive functioning, emotional regulation, and meaning-making.

TCM understood thousands of years ago what neuroscience is only now discovering.

The cognitive advantages of the post-menopausal mind

Let’s name them clearly, without apology, as these are a developmental advantage:

• Greater long-range vision (prefrontal cortex stabilisation)

• Less emotional volatility (serotonin and cortisol recalibration)

• Improved pattern recognition (neural efficiency increases)

• Higher internal motivation (dopamine stability)

• Better stress tolerance (adrenal–cortisol rhythm)

• Sharper strategic thinking (glucose-to-ketone shift improves clarity)

Far from decline, this is a strategic awakening. Evolution didn’t design women to disappear after 50. It is intended for us to lead, to hold complexity, to guide the tribe when the stakes are highest. Post-menopause is not the end of anything.
It is the beginning of the stable brain, the sovereign nervous system, and the unapologetic self.

Science is finally catching up with what women and ancient traditions have always known:

When the bleeding stops, the power returns to the centre.
The Second Spring is not a metaphor.
It is physiology.
It is destiny.
And it is time.

Western medicine has long spoken of post menopause as loss: loss of fertility, loss of beauty, loss of relevance. A woman’s body becomes a site of “management,” her mind a problem to be medicated, her changing hormones an illness to be treated.
The message is clear: “better to fix her than to listen to her.”

But in the old ways, in Chinese medicine, in folk memory, in the language of cycles, this time was known as the Second Spring. Not a waning, but a re-turning. Not decline, but the re-gathering of creative power that was once spent outward in fertility and caretaking.

And many of us are discovering this truth in our own bones.
Post-menopause, far from faded, we are alert, alive, and sharper than ever.

The resilient power of stability

Yes, hormones drop, but they also stabilise. The monthly volatility that kept our bodies in constant flux finally subsides. Our brains recalibrate, energy metabolism resets, and a new equilibrium emerges.

We are told we are “deficient,” yet many of us feel clearer, calmer, and more productive than we have in decades. This is the paradox that patriarchal medicine rarely investigates: when the body no longer serves reproduction, its energy can finally serve revelation.

The politics of “sick old women”

There is a cultural stake in keeping women’s power tied to youth and fertility. A youthful woman is marketable, malleable, consumable; an older woman who cannot be seduced or sold to is dangerous. So the narrative of menopause as sickness persists, a profitable pathology that sells creams, clinics, and compliance.

During Peri-menopause and menopause, when we medicate the fog away without listening to what it asks of us, we risk silencing the very intelligence trying to be born through us. The system prefers we manage our symptoms rather than question the world that makes us ill, such as overwork, environmental collapse, and social disconnection. It is easier to call the woman unbalanced than to admit that society itself is out of balance.

The Second Spring in Chinese Medicine

In the Chinese medical tradition, menopause is a threshold at which the blood and qi that once flowed downward each month begin to rise, nourishing the heart and brain and enlivening spirit and creativity. If the Kidney Qi (life force) has been cared for, then the stage that follows brings renewed vitality, courage, and vision.

This is not a decline. It is a redirection.
A woman’s energy becomes less about bearing children and more about bearing truth.

Ancient Womb Wisdom

For decades, our wombs pulsed with the rhythm of giving, shedding, releasing, making space for the possibility of life. Each month, we offered blood back to the Earth, or birthed our children—an ancient reciprocity between woman and world. But when bleeding ceases, that current doesn’t end; instead, it changes direction. The womb becomes a cauldron of retained power, no longer pouring outward but distilling inward. What was once spent on fertility is now gathered as wisdom, intuition, and creative potency. The blood that once flowed to renew the body now nourishes vision, insight, and purpose. This is the alchemy of the Second Spring: the womb as energetic centre, no longer cyclical but sovereign, holding its own magnetic fiery core.

The leadership the world needs

Freed from hormonal turbulence and societal pleasing, post-menopausal women often move with a steadier fire, unbothered by approval, guided by vision. We become architects of the next culture, translators between endings and beginnings.
In a collapsing world, this is the leadership that matters: grounded, embodied, unapologetic.

A new story

Imagine if we measured not hot flushes but insight. If, alongside bone density, we cultivated courage. If instead of chasing youth that has passed, we chased purpose, truth, and contribution.

What if our cultures finally recognised that beyond the fertile years lies a strategic and spiritual fertility the world now desperately needs? A fertility of ideas, of vision, of fierce compassion. A potency honed by experience and clarified by loss.
Because as systems crumble and new ones struggle to be born, it is the women of the Second Spring who hold the map.

The Second Spring is not a medical problem; it is a potent evolutionary potential, a gift for our times. And this time, this collapsing, changing, awakening time, needs precisely the kind of wisdom we carry in our bones. We are not the end of the story.
We are the women who will rewrite it.

Did you know there was a time when the sacred was not separate? You probably won’t read about it in the his_story books. A time when the rhythms of the moon guided our days, bread was broken with gratitude, and water poured with prayer. The hearth was an altar, and women’s wisdom was honoured as part of the great cycle of life.

Over time, this way of being got slowly written out of history and exiled. Religion moved it into institutions, away from the kitchen, the field, and the body. The Industrial Revolution replaced the sun and the moon with the factory clock. And the feminine, cyclical, embodied, relational, was silenced, diminished, or turned into a commodity.

We live with the consequences now: a world of extraction instead of reciprocity, productivity without pause, systems that prize dominance over care. The erosion of the feminine has not only harmed women; it has damaged the earth, changed the way we relate with each other, and life.

The erosion of the feminine goes hand in hand with the erosion of the sacred

History is filled with examples of this disconnection. The witch hunts of Europe destroyed communities of midwives, herbalists, and women healers, cutting off generational lines of embodied knowledge. The enclosure of the commons in England privatised land that had once been held in common, breaking the communal bond between people and the earth. We then took this same playbook and used it to colonise and extract from indigenous people worldwide.

The shift to industrial capitalism severed time from its natural cycles. Work no longer followed the harvest or the daylight, but the relentless tick of the clock. And in the process, the sacred was squeezed out of daily life.

Women’s bodies carry the imprint of cyclical time, menstruation, pregnancy, birth, menopause, mirroring the waxing and waning of the moon, the turning of the seasons and the fertility and rest of the land. To honour these cycles is to remember that life itself is rhythmic, relational, and sacred. But when women’s bodies are controlled, shamed, or forced into linear productivity, we sever our connection to that truth. To divorce women from their cycles is to divorce all of us from the cycles of nature, and in doing so, we forget how to live in reciprocity with the sacred web of life.

We see this most clearly in how modern systems handle birth and menstruation. Menstrual cycles are suppressed with pharmaceuticals in the name of convenience, and childbirth is medicalised to the point that women’s agency is often stripped away. These interventions are not inherently wrong, but when they are driven by a culture that views the body as a machine to be managed rather than a living cycle to be honoured, something essential is lost. Just as industrial farming disregards the rhythms of soil and season in favour of yield, so too does the medical-industrial complex disregard women’s embodied wisdom in favour of control. Both result in depletion. Both reveal what happens when we abandon the sacred.

Contemporary Symptoms

We see the consequences everywhere.

• Nature stripped of sanctity: Rivers turned into dumping grounds, forests cleared for profit. When water is not treated as sacred, it is poisoned. When land is not seen as alive, it becomes disposable.

• Women’s sovereignty under threat: Around the world, reproductive rights are being rolled back. Women’s bodies are commodified, undervalued, and controlled.

• Spirituality turned into product: The “wellness” industry sells what was once lived as daily rhythm, rest, nourishment, ritual, back to us as expensive fixes.

The exploitation of women and the exploitation of nature are not separate stories. They are one.

Why We Need the Sacred Now

To bring the sacred back into everyday life is not about nostalgia. It is about survival.

The sacred is what holds relationship and meaning. The feminine is the somatic understanding of what it means to live with natural cycles. Without them, our systems collapse into dominance and despair. With them, we remember that life is relational and that our actions carry consequences for the wider whole.

And we are seeing glimmers of return, movements of food sovereignty and community-supported agriculture. Indigenous peoples fighting for water and land protection, often at enormous personal sacrifice. Women reclaiming the cyclical, midwifery, and sacred leadership. These are not marginal; they are signs of what happens when the sacred begins to re-root itself in ordinary lives.

Re-sacralising the Everyday

So where do we begin? Not with grand declarations, but with small daily acts.

• A pause before eating, acknowledging the life that sustains us.

• Walking the land with attention, treating it as kin.

• Listening to another person fully, as if their words were prayer.

• Allowing cycles of rest, grief, and renewal to be as honoured as productivity.

The sacred does not need a temple. It asks only for presence.

Closing

To bring the sacred back is to bring ourselves back. To honour the feminine is to remember that life itself is relational. And if we can live as if every act were sacred, from pouring a glass of water to tending a garden, then perhaps we might yet heal the fracture between body, earth, and spirit.

The invitation is not to escape daily life, but to inhabit it more deeply. To let the sacred return to the kitchen, the workplace, the forest, and the street. To re-member what has been dismembered.

No matter who holds office or writes the laws, the revolution that matters begins in us. The systems around us may demand productivity, extraction, or obedience, but we can resist by living differently. When we bless our food, honour our bodies, walk gently on the land, and listen deeply to one another, we are already fighting back. These are not small acts; they are revolutionary ones. To bring the sacred back into our everyday lives is to re-member what has been severed, and to refuse a world that treats life as disposable. This is how the feminine returns. This is how the sacred rises. This is the revolution we are here for.