Five Things That International Women and Menopause Have in Common
Updated: Mar 9
Cameron Tukapua coaches people to heal and transform their lives and relationships through conscious Self-care. Her offerings are based on four decades of clinical and teaching experience. Cameron is the author of 'Heartfelt Living - How to Navigate Change and Healing: Your Ancient Wisdom Guide'.
Only women bleed, and that is our superpower! Throughout the ages, we have bled into the earth, binding ourselves to the wisdom of our primal Mama. International women share access to a bone-deep code of belonging, which fuels natural behaviors of bonding, empathy, and connection.
In Chinese medicine, menopause is recognized as "the second spring." At this time of life, if we support ourselves well, with rest, lifestyle, and dietary adjustments, we can rebirth and renew our lives and energy. Menopause is a time for the flowering of our feminine potential. As the physical body’s functions slow down, the Heart spirit rises to help reveal our authentic self.
Our hearts are the home of truth, goodness, and beauty. They are our individual portal to the divine in ourselves and each other. The heart is the communal home of our higher awareness. When we speak from the heart, we make the truth of our experience visible to others. Sharing our truth helps us connect at deeper levels and orient around what is important. This is a healthy woman’s natural way of being.
1. The power of Yin
Yin power is a feminine power associated with the moon, earth, and water elements. Women, by nature, are cyclical, adaptable, and harmony-seeking. Our strength, like our sex organs, can be hidden and contracted. A woman’s power is found deep within. Like a well, when we dig deep, we are highly resourceful. Like the moon, women are changeable and moody. A woman’s power is magnetic and attractive. It is a receptive, welcoming energy. Women are intuitive, attuned to the "not knowing" and the truth of life as a mystery. When we feel safe, we can trust life by stepping into it. This feminine style of leadership is more about flow than control.
Women are naturally inclined to nurture. When we feel secure, we collaborate rather than compete for power. The Yin way of being asks us to soften and open, to yield when required, and to be gentle. This more cooperative focus is abundance-based and counterbalances the scarcity paradigm, which is hierarchical, built around the idea, "If you win, I lose, so I want to win!"
When women come together, we share our stories and gather wisdom from our life experiences. Our sharing ignites the ancient knowing of the harmony and order that exists in the background of life. This program to search for balance is wired into every cell of our being. Learning, sharing, and connecting reawakens that intuitive knowing and helps create neural highways of connection to what is true.
At menopause, we find our voice and gradually grow trust in ourselves. The more we practice trusting ourselves, the more confident we feel about our choices. As Dr. Joe Dispenza says, "Every time you trust yourself and your success, your brain receives a cocktail of neurotransmitters and feel-good hormones." This creates a state of coherence, a harmony between the head's need for understanding and the heart's way of intuitive knowing.
2. The change of life
At menopause, women experience "a change of life." Our earthly body, made up of organs, blood, skin, flesh, muscles, tendons, and bones, begins changing. Organ functions diminish, the blood and body tissues dry up, and menstruation ceases. At this peak of change, the body loses its power to reproduce, and the creative energy of life moves elsewhere.
Menopause usually occurs around age 48-55. Once we stop bleeding for 6-12 months, that is typically the end of menstruation years. The presentation of menopause varies widely and depends mainly on how we care for our energy. Factors that influence menopause include lifelong dietary habits, working and resting patterns, emotional stress levels, and our baseline constitutional strength.
During menopause, many of us want to take a pause from it. As one friend put it, “I’m more interested in a cup of tea than having sex.” The creative power and drive for life shift inside as the body adjusts. Emotionally, we become more honest about what we feel and less tolerant of our unmet needs.
If our lives have been busy and outward-focused, going inside can be challenging! Yin power is slower than yang. It requires softening, an opening, and the allowing of our depths to speak and be heard. If we have led a busy urban life with not much quiet time and a 'thinking-mind dominance,' the shift will be away from the head and towards the heart. Accessing our heart-mind, we become attuned to present-time awareness.
At menopause, if we have been moving too fast, nature will insist that we slow down. Give yourself permission to rest more and know that the low energy won’t last forever! After menopause, in our ‘second spring,’ we have renewed energy. Used well, this season opens us to the full flowering of our feminine power and wisdom.
3. Reservoirs to manage
In Chinese medicine, the three ‘life gates’ of puberty, pregnancy, and menopause are the most important times for influencing a woman’s health. To transform your life and health, choose to tend to these transitions mindfully. Big changes in physiology, hormone balance, self-expression, and the heart-kidney relationship support long-lasting, bone-deep change. At these gateways, we can literally rebirth ourselves by healing and transforming our lives.
In the Chinese medical approach to menopause, the role of constitutional strength is an important consideration. In this tradition, we learn how, at conception, we inherit a baseline strength that informs how our body is shaped, matures, and develops. A financial inheritance provides extra security for life, similarly, a reservoir of inherited life essences gives us a strong constitution. This manifests as vitality and overall strength in the body and mind.
The store of life essence lives in the kidneys and informs fertility, growth, development, maturity, and aging. It is the foundation for blood production, bone development, menarche, pregnancy, and menopause. If our essences are weak, our baseline power is weak, and we may be prone to slow recovery from illness, low energy, infertility, developmental problems, premature aging, and/or a lack of drive and willpower.
How we experience menopause is related to our mothers and grandmothers. Ask questions about what happened to them during this transition. Even if we have transplanted ourselves into new lives in other countries, how we bleed will be reflected in our family patterns. At the same time, when we support our constitution and adjust our lifestyles, we can change anything. Evolving beyond the family patterns takes work and is a choice.
Considering ancestral strengths and lifestyles is important for lifelong well-being. If we have a family history of working in the fields, hiking up mountains to gather food, and eating a diet based on meat and a few root vegetables, our bodies may be fit, lean, and hard. By contrast, if we have been raised in stressful urban environments or live in big cities and work indoors, our bodies will be less resilient.
Many of us are overstimulated mentally, and this uses up a lot of life essence. We may be online all day, with coffee in the morning and wine at night. Our sensory nervous systems are constantly overstimulated. This leads to feeling "tired but wired," indicating dysregulation of the nervous system. This is like having the car's accelerator and brake on at the same time, wheels spinning, going nowhere. In this state, with high adrenaline and cortisol levels, we become numb to our situation and frozen in the pattern.
4. The moon rules them
Women's energy, like the ocean tides, is influenced by the mysterious power of the lunar cycle. All across the world, women cycle, or menstruate, with the moon. For some, it is as regular as a clock, for others, less so. Women feel, sense, and go loony at times, it is part of who we are. Some of us require darkness to shine.
Moon power is magnetic, receptive, and reflective. By nature, it is a soft-edged energy.
Menstruation, a woman’s ‘moon cycle’, has very distinct phases. In the first half of the menstrual cycle, we begin to bleed. The first few days are a shedding of the endometrium, the lining of the uterus. From around days 7-12, the endometrium begins to thicken again, and the cervix starts to produce mucus. The first half of the cycle is the Yin phase.
At mid-cycle, around days 12-14, the energy of Yin reaches its maximum building phase, and Yang energies take over. At this mid-point of the cycle, the Yang energy of activation and warming dominates, an egg is released, and the body temperature rises. During this phase, we can feel more energized and sexually aroused.
From approximately days 16-24, the egg makes its way down the fallopian tubes, and the endometrium restarts its secretion cycle. If a fertilized egg is implanted, it begins the pregnancy journey. If it doesn’t implant, the endometrium begins breaking down, leading to the next menstruation. Leading up to menstruation, if the flows are not rhythmic and strong, we can experience signs of pre-menstrual tension, such as tender breasts, irritability, depression, anxiety, bloating, and low energy.
At menopause, the monthly overflow of menses slows down. The body’s juices begin to dry up, the blood flow becomes lighter, the flow becomes inconsistent, and eventually stops. This slowing down of blood flow may start happening at any time from the age of thirty-five. The lack of blood and body fluids causes dryness in the system, commonly leading to a dry vagina and skin.
The relative lack of fluids at menopause fails to manage the cooling systems of the body, which upsets the fire and water balance. With insufficient water, the body overheats, which can cause hot flushes and heat in the heart, manifesting as anxiety, insomnia, and mental restlessness.
If the heat becomes fire, symptoms of physical and mental distress become more intense. Fire can cause uncontrolled emotions of anger and rage. The surges of heat are felt in the face and upper regions of the body. The overheating may cause sweating, the body's attempt to put the fire out. These symptoms, all caused by Yin deficiency, are often worse at night as this is the Yin phase of the daily cycle.
5. They are undervalued and awakening
International women come in all colors, shapes, and sizes. The ways we behave, our cultures, daily life activities, and options are wide and varied. Historically, women have been undervalued, repressed, underrepresented, and treated unfairly. The relatively Yin nature of women inclines us to be less loud and pushy than the male species.
What all women and menopause have in common is a strength that runs deep, a direct connection to generations of mothers and grandmothers, the quiet, powerful, wise seers of the world. Women have the capacity to take the long view and weave up the wounded parts of life and people, to create something more whole and beautiful. Healing is a way of being and is closely related to reclaiming our power.
Women have felt the pain of bleeding and birthing, which makes us more willing to open up discussions about hard things. We are more willing to be vulnerable, which is part of being authentic. At menopause, there is a shift from external validation to internal. We care less about what others think of us and become more real. Used well, it can be an empowering time, our second spring.
At this time in our collective history, we are in a major ‘change of life’. The dark shadows of humanity are showing up to be seen. Things and people that were untrue are being exposed publicly. It is encouraging an awakening to what is real about our lives, what is working, and what is not. The hierarchical power structures of the patriarchy are fast falling. This is a gateway into a new phase of life, an opportunity to wake up to our inner authority and reclaim the power to rule our lives.
Tending to ourselves, our families, friends, and communities is a grassroots change movement sweeping across the globe. People helping people is a horizontal power structure. When social organization is based on choice, everyone feels powerful. When we feel safe, we find our voice. Being seen and heard validates what we know to be true, and aligning with our truth is the direct path to an authentic life. Healing ourselves is a powerful contribution to healing the whole.
Read more from Cameron Tukapua
Cameron Tukapua, Heartfelt Living Coach, Chinese Medicine Practitioner
Cameron Tukapua is a wellbeing coach who shares ancient wisdom teachings from Chinese Medicine, along with Qigong, Yoga, and Meditation practices. She helps people align the head and heart. Cameron has written a book called ‘Heartfelt Living,’ and her work has been featured in Thrive Global. She offers Individual coaching, online study pathways, and face-to-face wellbeing retreats.
