Welcome to day seven.
Day seven of the series of the second spring or the sacred unraveling.
Today we bring you the unraveled woman.
Welcome,
Dear sister.
You made it.
All seven days.
Through the arriving and the fire.
The dark hours,
The emotional tides,
And the threshold of identity.
And the long embrace of the grandmothers.
Yet through all of it,
You kept coming back.
To this breath.
To this stillness.
To yourself.
Feel the weight of that for a moment before we go anywhere at all today.
Seven days of choosing.
In the midst of everything else your life demands.
To come home to yourself.
In a culture that profits from your disconnection.
From your body.
From your wisdom.
From your own deep knowing.
That choosing is a radical act.
A revolutionary radical act.
And today,
We're not going to add anything new.
Today we're going to gather the threads,
Everything that has moved through you.
Everything that has loosened and released and surfaced and been met and we hold it all together.
Not to tie it back into the shape it was before.
To see clearly and with wonder the new pattern that has been emerging all along.
So find your place of rest.
Let your body settle completely.
No holding,
No bracing,
No managing.
Close your eyes.
Take your threshold breaths.
The ones that have carried you across seven days of your inner landscape.
In slowly,
Full and deep.
Out slowly,
Long and complete.
Like greeting an old beloved friend because you are,
You are greeting yourself.
Before we step into the clearing of this final day.
I want to walk back through the week with you.
I want you to honor it.
To let the full shape of what you've done become visible.
On day one,
You arrived.
You placed your awareness in your body.
Perhaps the first time in a long time without an agenda,
Without judgment,
And you said,
I am here.
You began the practice of homecoming.
On day two,
You met the fire.
You turn towards the heat with curiosity.
You learned that your body is transforming and not malfunctioning.
And you took your first breath as a woman who tends her own flame.
Rather than apologizing for it.
On day three,
You sat with the dark.
You found in the sleepless hours.
That kind of felt like punishment,
An ancient and fertile threshold,
The watch,
The in-between,
The place where the unconscious speaks.
You let the night be a teacher.
On day four,
You entered the water.
You let the emotional tide rise without fighting it.
You learn the difference between falling apart.
And falling open.
You stood on the shore of your own feeling life and recognize that you are both the ocean and the shore.
Containing all of it.
And lost in none of it.
On day five,
You stood at the threshold.
You look back at the woman you've been with love and with gratitude.
You reached into the doorway and took the hand of the shadow.
The disowned,
The too much,
The not enough.
And you brought her into the light beside you.
On day six,
You went home.
You walked into the circle of grandmothers and felt in your bones.
That you have never been alone.
You received the gift.
They've been carrying for you across centuries.
You released what was never yours to carry.
You are the living answer to the prayers of women who loved you before they even knew your name.
And today.
Today,
All of those threads become one.
The clearing at the end of this path.
So let's imagine yourself back in the ancient forest from day five.
Those enormous trees.
The light above,
The path beneath your feet.
That your body knew even when your mind did not.
But today something is different.
You're not walking toward the threshold.
You've already passed through it.
And the clearing that opens before you.
Is even wider now.
More luminous and its entirety is yours.
Walk into it.
Feel the light on your face.
Direct and the kind that just simply illuminates you.
Feel the ground beneath your bare feet.
Warm from the sun.
Solid and ancient and absolutely reliable.
Feel the air moving gently carrying the scent of something blooming that you can't quite name.
But smells unmistakably like beginning.
Now stop,
Stand completely still and look at yourself.
Not through the eyes of anyone who has ever told you who to be.
How much space to take up.
What you should look like at this age,
In this body,
In this season.
Look at yourself through your own eyes.
The only eyes that have ever seen you completely.
Who's standing in this clearing.
A woman that's been through something.
You can see it in her.
Not as damage,
But as depth.
The way an old tree shows its weather in its rings.
In the shape of its growth,
In the places where it bent and did not break.
She has that quality.
Something tested yet still standing.
Something that's moved through fire and water and darkness.
And came out the other side clarified.
She's carrying something new.
That she was not carrying a week ago.
It doesn't weigh her down.
It actually grounds her.
It's the accumulated weight of everything she has met.
And integrated.
And release.
And received over these past seven days the gift of the grandmother's love.
The shadow welcomed home,
The fire being tended,
The dark hours honored,
The emotional tide finally settled.
Finally allowed to move through her without apology.
She is the unraveled woman and she is magnificent.
I want to name what this season gives,
Dear sister.
Our culture.
Is very practiced at telling women what menopause costs.
Today we name what it gives.
It gives you your voice back.
The voice that learned early to soften itself,
To make room.
To wait to be asked.
Many women find in the years after menopause that they speak more directly,
More honestly.
More fearlessly than they ever have before.
The tolerance for inauthenticity,
Yours and everyone else's.
Simply falls away.
It gives you your body back.
Not the body of your 20s.
Something more interesting.
A body you know.
A body you have sat with in its fire and its sleeplessness and its emotional aliveness.
A body you have stopped fighting and started listening to.
A body that has been trying to tell you something important.
For a very,
Very long time.
And can finally be heard.
It gives you your time back.
The energy that's been flowing outward in cycles of reproduction and caregiving.
And relentless productivity begins slowly to turn inward.
Available now for the things that have been waiting patiently at the edges of your life.
The creative work.
The inner life.
The relationships that feed you.
The long,
Unhurried mornings,
The questions without quick answers.
And it gives you your seasonality.
In Ayurveda.
And in the seasonal traditions of ancient cultures.
This phase corresponds to autumn moving towards winter.
The tree drawing its energy down from the bright performance of the canopy.
And returning to its roots.
The deep,
Essential,
Invisible work that makes the next spring possible.
You're in your autumn.
The most honest,
Most colorful,
Most breathtaking season of all.
The five elements that are whole in the tradition of Chinese medicine,
The five elements are never separate.
They are a cycle.
Each one feeding the next.
Each one containing the seeds of all the others.
And this week.
Without maybe realizing it,
You've moved through all of them.
The wood of day one.
The rooted flexibility of arriving in your body and trusting its intelligence.
The fire of day two.
The transforming,
Illuminating,
Purifying heat of your becoming.
The water of days three and four,
The depths of the night,
The tides of emotion,
The wisdom that lives below the surface.
The medal of day five,
Which is the clarity and the release of the threshold,
The letting go of what no longer belongs.
The earth of day six.
The ancestral ground,
The grandmother circle.
The ancient and unshakable belonging that holds you.
All of you.
All of this season held in one complete and beautiful cycle.
So as we move towards the close of this journey,
I want to offer you something to carry forward.
Not an instruction or an expectation.
A love letter from every thread of this sacred unraveling.
Gathered into one voice,
Speaking directly to you.
Dear sister,
You are allowed to take up space.
All of it.
The full,
Glorious,
Inconvenient,
Surprising,
Complicated space of who you actually are.
The whole one,
Not the edited version.
You are allowed to not know yet.
To be mid unraveling and stand in the clearing without a plan.
Simply feeling the light on your face.
Trusting that this right here is enough for now.
Because it is.
You are allowed to feel everything.
The grief and the fire and the joy and the rage and the tenderness and the strange.
Unbidden laughter.
That arrives.
At the craziest of times.
All of it.
Moving through you without explanation or any apology.
You are the ocean.
Remember that.
And the shore.
You contain it all.
You are allowed to receive.
The gift from the grandmothers.
The love that travels with you from the circle.
The irreplaceable wisdom.
That only comes from having lived the exact life you have lived.
Every difficult and luminous and ordinary moment of it.
And you are allowed.
Maybe for the first time.
To be entirely.
Unapologetically.
Magnificently yourself.
Not as a destination.
Not as something to achieve or to prove.
Simply as the natural,
Inevitable,
Long overdue result of all of this unraveling.
The thread has been following its own intelligence all along.
And look what it has made.
So let's affirm.
I have arrived.
I am home in this body,
In this breath,
In this season of my life.
I tend my fire with wisdom and I let it illuminate.
I've made peace with the dark hours.
They are among my most faithful teachers.
I move with the emotional tide.
I am the ocean and I am the shore.
I stand at the threshold of my becoming with open hands and an undefended heart.
I am held by a line of grandmothers whose love is older than time.
And stronger than any story.
I've told myself about my limitations.
I am the unraveled woman.
Whole,
Free,
Rooted,
Luminous,
Entirely my own.
And I'm just beginning.
Stay here as long as you need to.
That clearing is not going anywhere.
The light is not going anywhere.
And you aren't either.
So when you're ready,
Take one final deep breath in through the nose.
Drawing all of this week into your body,
Into your cells,
Into the marrow of your beautiful and faithful bones.
And exhale slowly,
Fully,
And completely.
Feeling the space that remains something clean and open and entirely available for whatever comes next.
Bring breath back to your fingers and toes.
Bring the sounds of the room around you.
The weight of your body held by the earth as it has always been.
And when you open your eyes,
Open them slowly.
As if seeing the room for the very first time.
Because in some way you are.
The woman who opened her eyes at the beginning of day one.
And the woman who opens them now are the same woman.
And they're not the same woman at all.
And that is the miracle of the unraveling.
Come back to any of these meditations whenever you need them.
The fire is always there.
The grandmothers are always gathered.
The clearing is always lit.
Allow yourself to go freely as yourself.
The world needs the unraveled woman.
It's been waiting for her for a very,
Very long time.
