Welcome to the Initiatory Gate.
A meditation on the menopause transition.
For women.
In their second spring.
Welcome,
Dear sister.
Please find your position of comfort.
Let your body be held completely.
Let go of effort.
Let go of holding on.
Close your eyes and take three slow,
Full breaths.
In through the nose.
Out through the mouth.
Each one carrying you a little further from the surface.
Of the day that you've been going through and a little deeper into the truth of this moment.
You are here.
And what we are about to do matters deeply.
Long before medicine gave menopause a clinical name.
Every culture on earth marked this transition as something new.
Sacred.
In indigenous traditions across Africa.
The Americas,
Asia,
And the Pacific.
The woman who crossed this threshold.
Was not mourned.
She was initiated.
She was honored.
She was recognized as having passed through one of the great gates of a woman's life.
Leaving behind one version of herself.
And emerging.
Changed into another.
The word initiation comes from the Latin,
Initiare,
Which means to begin.
Every true initiation involves three stages.
A leaving behind.
A crossing through.
And then arrival into something totally new.
And you are in the middle of yours.
And initiation.
One that women have been moving through since the very beginning of human life.
On this earth.
Each one finding her way to the gate.
Each one crossing in her own time.
Each one emerging on the other side,
Carrying something she didn't have before.
Today,
Dear sister,
We walk.
To the gate.
Together.
Imagine yourself on a path at dusk.
The light is warm and long and slightly amber.
The gold of late afternoon moving towards the evening.
The kind of light that makes the ordinary world.
Almost look consecrated.
The path moves through open land,
Tall grasses on either side.
Now moving gently in a wind.
That you can feel on your skin.
It's so cool,
It's clean,
It's crisp,
It's carrying the scent of earth.
And something wild.
You've been walking this path for a while.
Years,
Perhaps.
Decades.
And you know,
With the kind of knowing.
That lives in the body rather than the mind that you're approaching something.
A change in the landscape.
A shift in the air.
Something ahead that you've been moving towards without quite knowing it yet.
Walk now.
Feel the ground beneath your feet.
It's solid,
It's ancient,
And it's trustworthy.
Feel the movement of your own body through space.
The familiar weight of you.
The rhythm of your own stride.
This body has carried you a very long way.
Notice that.
Honor it.
And as you begin to walk,
Begin to feel what you're carrying.
In the set of your jaw,
The tension maybe across your shoulders.
The weight you've been holding in your chest.
For longer than you can imagine.
Or remember.
The roles,
The expectations.
The carefully maintained version of yourself.
That's been presented to the world for so long.
You've sometimes mistaken it.
For the whole of who you are.
Feel the weight of it.
Simply with honest acknowledgement.
You've carried this faithfully.
It served its purpose.
And you're approaching the place.
Where some of it must be laid down.
The path opens now into a clearing.
And at the far edge of the clearing you see it.
A gate.
Ancient stone.
Worn smooth by centuries of weather.
By the hands of every woman who've passed through it before you.
It's never been locked.
It stands open.
The way all true initiatory gates stand open.
Making passage possible.
Waiting for the woman who's ready.
To walk through of her own choosing.
Stand before it now.
Feel its age.
Feel the weight of everything it has witnessed.
The countless women across countless generations.
Who have stood exactly where you are standing.
Feeling.
Exactly what you're feeling.
The mixture of grief.
And relief.
The strange combination of loss and anticipation.
The knowledge that crossing means leaving something behind.
And the not yet knowing.
Of what waits on the other side.
This is leaving behind.
In your hands,
Imagine you are holding everything that belongs to the life.
Before the gate.
The identity built around you,
You and your fertility and your cycles,
The roles that have defined you from the outside in.
The beliefs about what a woman your age.
Is supposed to want.
Supposed to look like.
Supposed to be becoming.
The apologies you have been carrying for your body's changes.
The grief.
For a younger self who deserves to be honored.
And then gently.
Released.
Hold all of it.
Feel the full weight of it in your open palms.
And now place it at the foot of the gate.
Simply laying it down with love and with gratitude.
The way you might lay flowers at a threshold.
These things brought you here.
They deserve that acknowledgement.
And they belong to the life before the crossing.
Take a breath.
Feel your hands empty.
Feel your shoulders drop.
Feel something in your chest loosen.
Slightly,
Just enough as you stand at the gate.
Unburdened.
Maybe for the first time in a really long time.
And now become aware of who is with you.
On the other side of the gate.
Stretching back along the path behind you.
Feel their presence.
The grandmothers.
The women of your lineage.
Women from every culture and every era who walked the same path and stood at the same gate.
And laid down their own burdens at its foot.
And cross through into the life waiting on the other side.
They're witnessing.
With the love that only comes.
From having walked the same path.
The love that says.
I know this.
I've been here.
You're going to be more than alright.
Feel their presence at your back.
Warm.
Steady,
And ancient.
A cloud of witnesses who've been with you longer than you knew.
Closer than you realized.
Waiting for this moment.
When you'd be still enough to feel them there.
You've never been alone in this,
Dear sister.
You were simply moving too fast to notice.
Now a figure steps forward from all of the witnesses.
An elder woman.
She's not young and she's not old.
The diminished sense our culture has twisted that word into.
She's luminous.
Settled in herself in a way that has nothing to do with age.
Everything.
To do with having crossed through her own gate and arrived here.
Fully on the other side.
She knows you.
The deep version of you.
The one who's been waiting beneath all of that performing and managing and holding it all together for exactly this season to begin.
She holds out her hand.
And you take it.
Together you walk through the gates.
Feel the crossing,
Feel the air change as you pass through.
Cooler.
On the other side.
Cleaner.
Carrying a stillness that's entirely new.
Feel the ground beneath your feet.
On this side.
The same earth,
And somehow it's entirely different.
As if it knows you've arrived.
As if it's been waiting.
The elder woman turns to you.
Without words,
Because this knowing does not need words.
She places her hand over your heart.
A blessing.
A recognition.
An acknowledgement of everything you left at the foot of the gate.
And everything you are stepping into on this side of it.
And then she steps back into the circle of witnesses.
And you are standing alone in this new landscape.
The gate behind you.
The path ahead.
Open and uncharted and entirely yours.
Stand here for a moment.
In the stillness of the other side.
Feel who you are now.
You're beginning.
Feel the quality of this beginning.
The lightness of having laid something down.
The aliveness of standing at the start of a chapter that belongs entirely to you.
Not to your rolls.
Or your history.
Or anyone else's idea of what this season should look like for you.
The initiatory traditions understood something our modern world didn't.
Has forgotten.
That the woman who's crossed this gate.
Carries a power.
That wasn't available to her before.
The power of the elder,
The seer,
The one whose energy,
Freed from its outward cycles,
Turns inward.
And becomes consecrated.
A visionary.
Available for the work that only this season makes possible.
Arrival.
That's what's waiting for you on this side of the gate.
I have crossed the threshold.
I lay down with love what belongs to the life before the gate.
I carry forward what has always been essentially irreducibly mine.
I am witnessed by every woman who has walked this path before me.
I am guided by the wisdom that lives on the other side of my own unraveling.
I have been initiated.
And I am just beginning.
So please begin now to draw your awareness gently back.
Feel the breath in your body,
The weight of your physical self held by the earth.
Let the room return around you.
Sounds.
The light.
The ordinary and sacred details of your life.
Carry the gate with you,
Dear sister.
You've crossed it.
And nothing that waits for you on this side of it.
Is as unfamiliar as it may seem.
Because you've been walking toward it your whole life.
Go gently.
Go freely.
Go as the woman you are becoming.
She is magnificent.
Namaste.
