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Hello beautiful reader! As someone who has repeatedly faced their own mortality and lived for decades in a body that was significantly injured from illness, I can tell you it has led to an unquenchable thirst for the most epic healing modalities and knowledge available. Through necessity, I have ended up going DEEP into places and spaces few people, in the ordinary course of their health, are ever called to go. So I have a pretty intense amount of knowledge and experience in the ol’ health bank. Which is why I find it confusing when I hear so many women being influenced by the advice of celebrities and media endorsed doctors about their own health and vitality as they age.
To counterbalance some of the nonsense I have gathered below four of my most hard earned takes on the current obsession with “perimenopause” in the mainstream.
1. The wrong people have the microphones
When I look out at the loudest voices in the mainstream, endlessly pushing us to complain about and medicate away “perimenopause”, I see they are people who are plugged in to the textbooks and the establishment. And when you play by the book and stay in the system you limit yourself and cap the outcomes available to you.
So it can help to stop consuming all the noise for a second and ask a few piercing questions - are the people with the microphones the people I should truly trust and admire? Are they spreading a meaningful message that makes me feel more expansive and empowered or are they actually making me feel more complain-y and victimised? Are they original thinkers who have empowered themselves and now want to use their power and resources to serve others? Or are they people with unusually large platforms and the backing of sponsors, corporations, media machines and big pharma? Are they simply promoting themselves and/or a corporate product? If you feel in your own heart they might not have searched far and wide for true healing and possibly do not have your best interests front of mind… then I would say your heart is probably right.
The peeps who are hogging the mics and the airtime and flooding our algorithms are often in giant contracts with giant brands. And I get it – they've probably been living in survival emotions like scarcity and fear and haven’t done the inner healing work so are driven to take these deals to feel safe/important/worthy etc. But even if we are not privy to the exact contracts they are in, we can use our own discernment to join the dots on who we are willing to trust and seek advice from. And it is not profitable for celebs or the media or big corporations to encourage women to go inwards, find the root cause and do the inner work to heal all the emotional crap that has led to their health problems in the first place. The only person that profits from that, is you.
2. The strictly medical approach is not it
If you are in a life or death situation, yes, go to the ER. But if you have ever experienced a chronic or prolonged health issue – you already know you are not going to find all the answers you need to heal it at the doctor’s office. The modern medical system has been heavily influenced by the Rockefellers and the Flexner report which they funded. Money and influence were poured into chemical medicine to be promoted as the best model because they couldn’t own, control or profit from other ancient healing treatments like exercise, sleep, sunshine, a good diet or emotional balance. Meanwhile apparently the Rockefellers kept seeing their own homeopaths, nutritionists, trainers and gatekeeping powerful spiritual knowledge. Anyway today when we, as lowly, non-one percenters, chat to the doctors who have been through the system, the standard advice is to pop a bunch of pills and jab ourselves with a bunch of stuff. For years I was in this system and in the interests of saving my eyesight – I did everything they said I should. Until eventually after taking all their advice it led to having my left eye removed, hitting my biggest health rock bottom and finally seeking out a better way.
Turns out, our bodies are wired for healing. If we can just give them a chance to speak to us. You see, every single material and physical thing that exists (including symptoms) first begin as energy. That is - energy precedes matter. If we merely think about putting a slice of fresh lemon on our tongue (mental energy) our saliva glands start producing saliva (physical matter).
So taking that concept further, if we think about something that is stressful (mental energy) and we start to feel afraid (emotional energy) that also leads to a physical creation in the body like sweating, heart palpitations and a viscerally tight chest (physical matter). Therefore, if we have been thinking about and feeling things and stewing in certain types of stressful energy for decades, without ever shifting it back in to balance, there is going to be a lot of imbalanced physical matter showing up as we age that was created from years of the stressful energy. Smothering a tight chest with a bunch of synthetic pills will never address or reverse the energy underneath that created it. We can totally heal our physical symptoms, but it requires us to balance the original energy that created them.
3. Here is the solve – addressing the physical AND the energetic!!
You already know all the ways to physically treat physical symptoms. But let's now look at the energy that preceded them. Let’s tune out all the noise and stop thinking of “perimenopause” as a medical issue to medically treat… and instead think of it in terms of energy and matter.
Our bodies are always talking to us and trying to heal and if we do not listen, they will talk louder and eventually start to shout. So what is the language of “perimenopause”? Of course, the symptoms and physical matter that shows up in your life and your body will always be specific to you, your experiences and how they shaped your perceptions. But as a place to start here are some body translations I have seen in myself and my clients:
The physical symptom - Weight gain
The mental and emotional energy that precedes it - Our bodies often carry extra weight as a form of protection and a response to a harsh inner critic. It is a physical manifestation of us trying to literally protect the beat up that we give to ourselves all day. We also tend to overeat to soothe our dysregulated nervous system or because we lack pleasure in other areas of life. Can be remedied by ramping up our self-acceptance and shifting all the cravings, triggers and wounds driving us underneath.
The physical symptom – hormone imbalances
The mental and emotional energy that precedes it – often a result of being too much in our wounded masculine energy: trying to control, having a shield up, closing our hearts and not allowing ourselves to flow. Often also related to unprocessed anger towards men. Start healing by addressing the historical events that may have led to the genius but now outdated tight grip to loosen it, trust life and shift into the opposite energy. More on anger below.
The physical symptom - Anxiety
The mental and emotional energy that precedes it - Anxiety is simply a lack of preparedness, self-doubt and our intuition picking up on details we are ignoring. I had cray anxiety and panic when going through a divorce and losing my left eye. I completely healed it by repeatedly using one skill that is detailed in chapter 9 of The Laws of Life.
The physical symptom - Brain fog and memory issues
The mental and emotional energy that precedes it -Memory issues usually stem from two main root causes: shame or overwhelm. When we are deeply embarrassed or full of shame, our genius brains dim remembering as a coping mechanism. We also tend to have a lot going on in our 30s and 40s and it is natural to not be able to hold it all front of mind so things slip through. But there is no shameful event I ever met that can not be healed and writing things down to free up other parts of our mental capacity is a great start to stop hating ourselves for trying to hold too much.
The physical symptom – Anger and rage in our relationships
The mental and emotional energy that precedes it – ever noticed how all the people with the mics encourage us to throw all our anger onto men and never actually process it ourselves? They love division. But our anger is a completely necessary and beautiful emotion to heal. And if we have never expressed or resolved it healthily – yeah it's going to accumulate and spill out sideways by the time we are in our 30s and 40s. Anger needs to be brought in to balance. Instead of spraying it on everyone else, we can see where we are crossing our own boundaries by over giving, over functioning, not forgiving ourselves or cutting ourselves any slack. Anger can also be a cover for fear and a defensive posture to protect the scared or hurt part of us.
The physical symptom – “ADHD brain”
The mental and emotional energy that precedes it - A brilliant trauma response to distract us from overwhelming circumstances we may have experienced in the past without the capacity to hold them. It is also a way to seek dopamine to avoid being dragged under when focusing on past trauma without proper tools. So our focus is shattered as a way to cope. But now we DO have the capacity to process that trauma and handle whatever discomfort arises in life. Get started now with the myriad skills I used on my own trauma and have put out on the podcast and in The Laws Of Life.
The physical symptom - Sleep issues
The mental and emotional energy that precedes it - Sleep issues are a way for our body to tell us that there is an area of life in which we are not resting. It might be that we feel hypervigilant in finances or that we feel like if we rest in the career area of life, everything will slip away and we will end up as a bag lady on the streets. Our energy is subconsciously instructing our body that rest is not safe and the body is acting out how we feel in the stressful area so we need to address that to get any actual slumber. The 8 areas of life and how to shift reflections are also on the podcast.
The physical symptom – Heat and hot flushes
The mental and emotional energy that precedes it – See above – anger! Heat is literally anger expressing in the body. Fun fact – unexpressed anger is also the root cause underneath when our bodies get sunburn!
4. You got this!!!
I know this is a radically different way of thinking about physical symptoms. It took me a beat to unravel my old programmed belief in surface level treatments as the only way. And I also know that health issues can be tough – but I KNOW we are so much tougher! So try not to just listen to the docs in the system and the peeps with the mics… Heck, don’t even listen to me! Listen to yourself. F*ck around with your own self-healing and find out.
Because when you follow your own instincts and hear what your own body is trying to tell you about the energy you have been stewing in before the physical symptoms appeared… you will start to see the genius in it. You will start to see how facing and shifting your own emotional root causes shifts the physical matter too. You will witness for yourself how incredible you can feel in both your mood and your body. And you will experience just how truly powerful you are when you are willing to go inwards.
Love you so much,
Phoebe xox