Embrace your perimenopause rather than be hit by it. Living happily the changes occurring in your body during perimenopause is definitely a matter of MINDSET and working WITH mother nature rather than against it.

Although I’ve been dissecting physiological functioning for quite a time, this subject hadn’t been on my radar. I thought it would happen in a faraway future.

Hormones going bonkers

Perimenopause, then menopause, hit me in my mid 40s. One severe symptom was hair loss, as if I was undergoing chemotherapy. This one totally freaked me out. It’s amazing how infinitesimal hormonal changes can have such huge and various effects. I went from GP to dermatologist and back to GP trying all sorts of treatments. I am an advocate of natural therapy, but at this moment I would have taken almost anything to make this shedding stop. Later these wonderful adolescent painful spots appeared on my face, self-inflicted hammams, brain fog and the full court of other joyous symptoms. I just wanted to hide in a cave and never come out.

At some point I was finally sent to the gynecologist and then the endocrinologist to get the sentence that my hormones were going bonkers. A year later, post-menopause was confirmed. The only suggested solution was HRT (hormonal therapy) with the recurring speech from everyone: “Women’s hormones are a complicated matter, and we don’t know much about it. Take HRT and all your symptoms will disappear.” Basically meaning, take the magic pill and silence your body.

This was a physical crisis as much as a mental crisis

Seeing my appearance and capacities thrown into the abyss, my first reflex was to battle crazily against what was happening to me, trying to eradicate the collateral damage and go back to what I was before. Meaning, I was not accepting one bit of what was happening. As most women, I had only vaguely heard about the subject, which left me with this general perception of a disagreeable process that women go through after 50. I was, at that time, totally uneducated and unprepared for such a thing.

100 % of women go through perimenopause and menopause

What leaves absolutely me speechlessness is how little knowledge, consideration and support there is out there on this particular matter. Especially knowing that perimenopause is a process that generally takes years and that 100 % of women go through it! This means that as you are reading this article, billions of women on the planet are experiencing perimenopause and menopause. So, this is it? Women, suffer in silence, lock yourselves into your bedroom and wait for it to pass? Or take HRT.

The taboo around hormones

A few interesting intertwined points come to mind. The first one is how menopause is still pretty taboo in our society. Well, let’s be honest – anything around women’s hormones is taboo. I see it like a well-kept, conditioned veil of ignorance, generating suffering, shame and ostracization. Yet it is a process that is natural, part of life and our fundamental physiology since the dawn of humanity.

The next point is the understanding that empowering women with knowledge about their bodies would literally withdraw billions of profit from the industry. Let alone empowering women, this has been worked against throughout history and is a matter I won’t develop further here to avoid your reading taking hours.

Finally, there is the conditioning to keep the myth of the dark night of the body during this time. A magnificent priming of our minds to this upcoming so told terrible experience. Conditioning each cell of the body to behave that way when it happens. Fearing and rejecting the body’s changes rather than welcoming and supporting its transition.

Cut a long story short

To return to the story, one certainty was that I wouldn’t take HRT for benefit-risk reasons, on top of only postponing what had to happen at some stage anyway. I was thoroughly determined to find natural protocols to get my hormones back to their headquarters.

So there I went, buying books, surfing the internet and contacting natural therapists. Therapists that didn’t have a clue on how to deal with what was at play. But, they could at least help with what I had read about. I deeply know that nature provides all the necessary means for women to handle all of this smoothly. Even though I believe that a lot of ancient knowledge about it, amongst many other subjects, has unfortunately been lost on the way.

I became my own rat lab with all sorts of supplements. After a while, my symptoms disappeared, and I was back up and running. Surprisingly enough, tests showed that menopause had disappeared from the radar. Hormone levels were back to normal as if nothing had happened.

All went well during the next three years. Then the same symptoms started again. Nonetheless, this time turned out to be a very different and smooth story. I don’t say it was painted with fairies and unicorns. However, I knew what was happening for having experienced it before. This allowed a very different approach, mindset, handling and therefore, experience. It took a couple of months for the symptoms to fade away. To date, except for my hormones that display a menopaused status, I’m back up and running happily.