For most women perimenopause & menopause is not something you prepare for, it is something that happens. A season of life that comes to claim you.

If we lived in a world where women’s wisdom was intact, and we lived in harmony with our bodies and the earth, we would enter perimenopause & menopause with all the inner wisdom that is acquired when we’ve  lived for decades in a relationship with the cyclic wisdom within our womanly bodies. 

We would arrive at the door of perimenopause & menopause as ripened women, who had worked deeply with our bodies, emotions, sexuality, and used every menstrual cycle to come home to ourselves.

Instead many women experience having to meet both motherhood and/or menopause without having awakened their own feminine wisdom to guide themselves through life’s great initiations, breakdowns and breakthroughs.

The best preparation for menopause, is working with your menstrual cycle first. Yes! Your menstrual cycle actually prepares you for facing life, and the initiations and seasons that lies ahead with inner trust, vitality, and feminine wisdom.

IF you know how to work with each phase of your monthly cycle, it will set you up for a more nourishing and transformational perimenopause & menopause.

Working with your menstrual cycle means:

  • Tracking your cycle + not using any hormonal birth control, so you can fully experience the 4 phases from pre-ovulation and ovulation, to your premenstrual phase + moontime in your body.
  • Tuning in daily to not only the physical signs of your menstrual cycle, but also  how each phase awakens you in different ways. Paying close attention will also reveal your body’s signals of health or hormone imbalances.
  • Honoring + nourishing each of the 4 phases (as outlined above) in your daily life.
  • Learning from the different expressions of your emotions, intuition, sexuality, spirituality, and desires throughout your monthly cycle.

What your premenstrual phase, moontime & the postpartum period has to do with menopause

If you’ve read my free ebook The Five Daily Questions – Transform Your Relationship With Your Cycle For More Pleasure & Feminine Flow, you’ll know that I include perimenopause and menopause along with our menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and early mothering under the umbrella of feminine cycles . They are all different phases of our cyclic feminine bodies, and they are much more connected than you might think.

Working with your premenstrual phase, moontime & the postpartum period can aid in physically preparing you for the “big change”.  As well as maturing  you to become emotional wise, and deeply connected to yourself, so you can enter perimenopause & menopause confident in supporting yourself from breakdown to breakthrough, and alert to your own inner guidance as you enter the unknown terrain of a new season of life.

The 3 Ways You Should Prepare For Perimenopause & Menopause:

1. Use Your Premenstrual Phase To Become Emotionally Wise:

Your premenstrual phase has an emotional and energetic depth that is similar to perimenopause. This is a phase where our intuition peaks, and our emotions may rise for healing. Learning how to become emotionally wise, and working with your inner depth prepares you for the emotional and energetic depth that often awaken women during the season of perimenopause.

And of course, a lot of early perimenopause symptoms feel a lot like PMS, as they are both often rooted in low progesterone, or an imbalance between progesterone and estrogen levels.

Balancing your hormones now, to ease of PMS is one of the best ways to set yourself up to face the hormonal changes throughout perimenopause with more ease.

2. Practice Deep Rest and Introspection During Your Bleeding Phase:

Your moontime or bleeding phase is an ideal time for practicing deep rest and introspection, which are important ingredients for perimenopause & menopause. Deep rest is vital for womb and adrenal vitality, which you need to function optimally as you go through the hormonal transition from perimenopause to menopause. And this pattern of cyclical rest is important to take with you even after you  stop bleeding.

Cultivating a strong practice of inner listening and introspection during your bleeding phase will help you create an unwavering connection to your own truth, needs, and a sense of the woman you came here to be. This is the key to turning the “breakdown” of perimenopause & menopause into a breakthrough into living life from your Inner Woman™.

3. Get The Postpartum Care You Need For Complete Recovery:

Optimal postpartum care sets you up for a lifetime with a strong connection to your pelvic bowl and feminine center. Many women today don’t allow their new postpartum bodies the resting time necessary for a complete recovery, and instead end up dealing with years of major or minor symptoms.

Some women may experience living for years with minor problems, or disconnection with their pelvic floor without tending to it. And when they move into the hormonal withdrawal of menopause the minor problems can then surface into major discomforts. We lay our foundation in our earlier years; how you are supported and nourished postpartum may set the stage for how you feel throughout perimenopause, menopause and beyond.

Keep this at heart even if you haven’t had children. After a lifetime of lifestyle habits that are less than ideal for your pelvic floor and feminine body – it isn’t only mothers that experience pelvic dysfunctions as they mature.

So where do you begin?

In my free ebook The Five Daily Questions – Transform Your Relationship With Your Cycle For More Pleasure & Feminine Flow, I share the simple practice that I use to create pleasurable cycles, and work with my cyclic wisdom. You can download it here

A final note: Some women enter menopause in a more abrupt way like, when cancer, a hysterectomy, or other causes force a woman’s body into a medically induced or early menopause. In these cases the experience is very different from the slower evolution from reproductive, through perimenopause, and into menopause and beyond. Yet years of nourishing a daily connection to your body, and deep nourishment will still be an ally in this more abrupt transition.