The Menstruality Podcast - 141. The Sacred Reckoning of Menopause (Elayne Kalila Doughty)

Episode Date: April 11, 2024

We’ve all been there at some point. A shocking challenge disrupts our lives - a loss, a health crisis, a great disappointment - and we become the caterpillar in the cocoon (ie: we turn to mush). But - as those of you who have been through it may well attest to (!) - nothing turns us into primordial goop like the initiation of menopause. Today I have the rare honour of speaking with a guest who is not only mid-menopause-initiation but has also been deeply involved in the menstrual movement for two decades, and can therefore share a transmission from the leading edge of this work. Psychotherapist, author, activist, and ordained Priestess, Elayne Kalila Doughty, has been negotiating the transition of menopause for a fifth of her life - the past ten years… today she shares the story of her menopause ‘reckoning’ - the core-wound truth she was forced to face when she was hospitalised in October last year, and began an intense inner and outer healing process. We explore:Why menopause is designed to slow us down, and how this is in service the the dismantling of the inner patriarchal structures within each of us.How Elayne’s menopause process began with her experience of baby loss at 46, and what she's learned from being an unmothered daughter about how to mother herself (and our planet).A hilarious moment - at around 35 minutes - where we meet Elayne’s brilliant East London cockney grandmother, Olive, and hear about her feisty menopause reckoning, when she was done being compliant. HOLY YES!---Receive our free Wise Power Retreat menopause conversation series:  www.redschool.net/wise-power-retreat---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [e-mail]---Social media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardyElayne Kalila Doughty: @elayne.kalila - https://www.instagram.com/elayne.kalila

Welcome to the Menstruality Podcast, where we share inspiring conversations about the power of menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause. This podcast is brought to you by Red School, where we're training the menstruality leaders of the future. I'm your host, Sophie Jane Hardy, and I'll be joined often by Red School's founders, Alexandra and Sharni, as well as an inspiring group of pioneers, activists, changemakers and creatives to explore how you can unashamedly claim the power of the menstrual cycle to activate your unique form of leadership for yourself, your community and the world. Hey, welcome back to the Menstruality Podcast. Today we're talking about reckonings and we've all been there at some point, haven't we? Some kind of shocking challenge disrupts our lives,

a loss, a health crisis, a big disappointment and we become like the caterpillar in the cocoon basically turned into mush. But as those of you listening who will have been through it may well attest to, nothing can turn us into this primordial goo like the initiation of menopause. And today I'm excited because I had the rare honor of speaking with a guest who's not only mid-menopause initiation and many of you have been asking us to share episodes with people who are in the middle of this, not reporting back from the other side, but she's also been deeply involved in the menstrual movement for over two decades, and so she's really sharing from the leading edge of this work. Psychotherapist, author, activist, and ordained priestess Elaine Khalila Doughty has been negotiating her transition

of menopause for a fifth of her life the past 10 years and today we're exploring the story of her menopause reckoning where she was forced to face a core wound truth when she was hospitalized in October last year and began this intense inner and outer healing process. So whether you're brand new to cycle awareness or living a deep intimacy with your cycles or navigating the quickening of perimenopause in your 40s or are inside the cauldron of menopause itself, I really hope that this conversation helps you to find a nugget of gold about how cycle awareness can hold you even in the darkest of times. And I also hope it makes you laugh out loud at least a few times because Elaine is a fantastic storyteller and she is as funny as she

is wise. And this conversation was just a delight for me. So I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Let's get started with Elaine Khalila Doughty and the sacred reckoning of menopause. Elaine Khalila, I'm delighted to be with you. Thank you so, so much for making the time for this today. It's my honour, my pleasure. Thank you for the invitation. We usually begin these conversations with a cycle check-in. And I was listening back to the conversation you had on your Red podcast with Alexander and Sharni. And you mentioned, so I

think that was June last year. And you said, so I hadn't had a bleed for six months because you've been in this many many years of menopause taking you for a ride and you said but just before you recorded the conversation with them you had a bleed and I was curious to hear how is your site how have your cycles been moving since then how are your cycles oh my gosh well for all of us who are in this process of the perimenopausal dance as i'm calling it you know this tremendous transitional time in our lives what's real and true is i'm bleeding right now as we're sitting here. And this is my first bleed in six months. So what we could say is, and we're recording this inside of an eclipse window,

and the last time that I bled was inside of the eclipse window. So can we ever doubt that there is such a strong connection between our moon blood and the moon right as the moon is going into her nodal eclipses um so right this moment i am um just completing a moon time um that had not happened since last october end of October, beginning of November. So that's what's real. And there's all kinds of pieces around that, that I'm sure we can deepen into. But yeah, so I'm coming to you from that place of forgetting and remembering the power of the blood. You know, because for six months not having it, and then to have it again, what I'm in

the recognition of in this moment is the release that happens when we bleed and the way in which the body gets to recalibrate and emotions and hormones and all the rest of it kind of gets to recalibrate. And I kind of felt like when I started to get my moon this week there was an out breath that happened where i was like oh thank goddess and um my beloved acupuncturist who i've been working with for many moons now on a healing crisis that we'll probably get into talking about um said to me you know she said in chinese medicine you know this this process of clearing the womb out is not just of your current life's experience it's also your ancestral line it's also all of the karma all of the how could we put it, lineage pieces that you're now working on.

And she said they understand this perimenopausal phase to be that reckoning. So it's not just your personal reckoning, but it's the reckoning with your mother line and with those who came before you and with anything that's been carried through into this lifetime that no longer will serve you on the journey forward. So, yeah, there's so much more I could say about that, but I just wanted to weave that piece in because I've been deep in that inquiry too. Yeah. I mean, I noticed myself feeling breathless as you're talking to feel the size of this transition, you know, the epic, epic nature, which I know has been going on for many years for you.

One of the things that I heard you say, in your conversation, I think it was with Alexandra and Sharni, because I've been listening to lots with you in preparation for this, and it's been wonderful, is you said that, you know, part of this many multiple year menopause process was a whole year of feeling premenstrual like there were wild horses like roaring through you and I was laughing as I listened to that because I'm on my day 24 here and I've that's what I've been with just this force of um rage power um connection fury all of it you know coming through me so I'm tuned into that wavelength personally before we start exploring your reckoning I think it would be great to hear a bit about how you began working with the blood mysteries you know when my mid-20s

I started to be really really deeply called to the the question of where is the feminine face of God where is the the face of God that's a woman that has, that I can relate to. And I went on a lot of different spiritual pilgrimages looking for that. And in the process of that, I really started to get in touch with some of the more shamanic roots, might we say, of early priestess culture, early goddess worshiping culture. And I really got in touch with the work of Judy Grahn, who is a pioneer in the work of reclaiming our blood mysteries. And what she wrote about in her book, Bread, Blood and Roses, it's called. I don't know when that book was published. It was a long, long time ago. She wrote about metaphor metaphoric theory and metaphoric theory is a theory that um the ancient women who were sitting underneath the moonlight

and watching the stars and the planets and all the shifts in the celestial sky began to make a connection between their moon blood and the cycle of the moon. And when they started to make that connection, they started to mark the awareness of that onto sticks and stones and bones. And with that, they began to see that there was a cycle of return. And that method of marking time, Judy Gran presupposes and says that her hypothesis is that is where time started. And that is where actually our idea of mathematics and counting started. Isn't that fascinating? So I was very enthralled with that idea and felt very connected and very like, wow, I can really feel myself as one of those ancient women bleeding on the earth and making that connection between my

blood and the cycle of the moon going from full to new. So I started to feel this awareness of this cyclical time, this kairos time that was so different to the linear time that we all are living in, right? The logos time. So that was permeating my consciousness. And then I was living in San Francisco, and I think this must be now at least 22 years ago. I can't really remember in time. Isn't that funny? But there was a conference that was put on that was a blood mysteries conference

at the Women's Center in the Mission in San Francisco. And I was like magnetized to this conference. And it was a three-day conference put on by a woman who is now one of my best friends in the world. Her name's Kelly Rose Mason. And she had gathered together all of these elders. Vicki Noble was there. Tamara St. Leighton, who was alive at the time, was there. And all these women, Laura Owens, all these women who'd been writing about reclaiming the blood mysteries.

But at that time, it was still incredibly taboo. Like, no one was talking about periods. There was no Spanx on the market. There was nothing. You know what I mean? It was still something that was considered weird and odd. And those women, what are they up to? Well, on this three-day conference, it was absolutely extraordinary. And I got talking to this woman, Kelly, that's now, you know, who was the founder of the

conference and another woman. And out of that conference, we set up a nonprofit organization called the Red Web Foundation. And we started to educate around the cycles. And just sort of, we made journals, and we started to track these different phases of the cycle. And, you know, the work that basically Alexandra and Janie had been doing so beautifully with their books and putting out into the world and really making much more mainstream. Well, we were kind of like at the very grassroots level of that. And one of the other women made cloth menstrual pads and she went to all the festivals and all the conferences. And so she would educate through that. And anyway, it was fascinating time. I then took that work and I was at the time a therapist and I was working with women in recovery from trauma and addiction issues. And I started to develop that work within that

population, really working with women, looking at the connection between their menstrual cycle, their ovulation and menstrual bleeding, and they're using addiction behaviors and how there was a definite connection point, right, between the spikes and changes in our hormones and the desire to use or relapse in their behaviors or to have panic attacks, all the different things. So, and so I developed a curriculum and I worked for 10 years in that, in that world called Recovering Womanhood. And it was really connecting women into the cycles of the moon, into what it was to be part of an unbroken lineage of women throughout time who had actually celebrated the power of their menstrual cycles. So I did of that wow I had no idea that you'd done all of

that well no because this is all ancient history at this point isn't it but thank you thank you because you know we all who are benefiting from it today you know you were laying the the foundational stones for this I'm so grateful yeah well and it was it was fascinating right so um so yeah so basically that curriculum still it still exists and still is running and i developed it and it's it was shared throughout a lot of different um um what can we say um women's recovery spaces so that led me by hook or by cro, into the work that I'm now currently doing, which is that I, you know, I bought all of that fascination with the divine feminine, fascination with the world of the cycles and how we go through the alchemy, what I would call the

alchemy of our menstruation into what I now do, which is training women as modern day priestesses and become ceremonialists and to really work with the notion of the cycle of the year, the cycle of the moon in their lives and in their work and to really, you know, to really fashion their lives with that wisdom and knowledge of living in a cyclical kairos life, as well as the linear, you know, the intersection of those two worlds. So that's what my history is. And it's kind of interesting to even talk about it, to be honest, because, you know, it's like, you know how we live many lives in one life, don't we? But we can see how we were always pretty much when I look at my life, like I was circling the same thing.

My fascination has always been with how do we transform? How do we grow through life? What are our different seasons, you know? And I think I was always looking for where are the rites of passage that are missing for us as women and where and how do we locate ourselves? Because those rites of passage are ones that really help us move between these different stages. a lot of the reason why we struggle in perimenopause. And I think I've had this conversation with so many women in my community, mainly because I've been traversing this for the last 10 years of my life, which is a significant amount of my life, right? It's the fifth of my life that I've been in this phase. So what I've discovered through those conversations is how alone women feel in this. And the question comes is, why did no one tell me? Why has no one talked to me about this? Why did no one let me know work that was going to need to happen? Or, you know, why did no one tell me that insomnia was a whole part of this journey? Why did no one tell me that night sweats are not just like a casual night sweat, but a thing that you feel like you're basically going to orbit out of your bed and smash against the window because you're

so hot? Like, why did no one tell me that this could be such a long journey and that it was such a profound journey? And I think that's what I've discovered through my questioning and my own experience. And so I've been talking about it a lot on my own podcast because every time I discover something new on this journey, I feel like it needs to be talked about because I know it's not, yes, it's being talked about more than it was, but it still needs to be really understood. This is a extremely profound transition in a woman's life. So when I think back to who I was at 46 and who I am at 56, oh my goodness, the last 10 years of my life have been absolutely amazing and incredibly intense. The transitions that have gone on and where I'm sitting with it all now is, you know, there's been some deep, deep, as we would use that word, reckoning that's been happening for me personally.

But I think what I became aware of, as I started talking to all the women in my communities, is every single one of them who was my age, between I would say 52 to 58, 59, 60, was going through some kind of version of a reckoning with their lives. And it was all very different how it was showing up. It was, of course, it looks very different. But there was some level of being faced off with a shadow pattern or a wounding that had been thought to have been dealt with long ago, that was resurfacing in its full glory to be faced with again, to look directly in the eye with again.

So I find that really extraordinary when I keep hearing that same story repeated throughout these many different women that I would be talking to. looking at okay so what is the deeper spiritual maturation part of this journey about yeah there was something that you said in your podcast about your reckoning which made me laugh out loud and I bet it made a lot of women laugh out loud which is she said I can hear the goddess laughing at me there was me, haven't I healed all of these core wounds already? But you have to think, don't you? I mean, like, at this point in my life, really? I mean, I've been in personal development, self growth, therapeutic work since I was 20. Do you know what I mean? It's like, it's not like like it's not like i'm newbie to this you know and i i i've worked as a therapist i trained as a therapist i'm now you know deep into the alchemical

work of of um you know spiritual development and and all the stuff and there's the humility right and i think that's part of the reckoning is there's a there's a there's a there's a splitting apart of who we think we are to a revelation and a humility to go yeah but you know what this core wound or this core conundrum in some ways I call it a riddle it's like a koan for our lives, right, is not meant to be solved in the way that our logical mind would like to solve it. This piece, and you all know what, you all will have a sense of what that is for you, even if you can't directly name it, you'll have a sense of what it is for you, that you have been kind of traveling this lifetime,ling it experiencing it in many different forms in many

different ways and so I think what's really extraordinary is is that in the last six months particularly I've been on a particularly deep journey that started with a hospitalization way back in October of last year, where I ended up hospitalized for a digestive issue that turned out to be also related to hormones and my perimenopause and endometrial issues. And anyway, blah, blah, blah, blah, all those physical parts I'm still working on. But what happened was it stopped me in my tracks. And it rendered me unable to distract myself away from dealing with the core fear that I had not yet dealt with in this life. And I know in that podcast, that core fear had been I came from a family with a mom who was very, very sick throughout my whole life. She had cancer before I was born.

She had various different cancers during my life. She was mentally and physically unwell, bless her. And she, as a result of that, was not able to parent or mother me so there's one of the wounds right the unmothered daughter how many of us i know i still speak to many many women and most of the women in my community have some kind of wound around the mother line right we there's so many of us who do so there was that wound but the wound that was sneakily hiding in the corner waiting to be revealed to me that I really had been running from you know and it's so much humility to say that right because it's like you we want to pride

ourselves on like well my ego is like well but but I've been looking at it and I've been dealing with it. I would say, no girl, you've been running. Let's be real. You've been running from that one. You know, you've been sublimating it and making it look all kinds of ways. Well, the wound was that I was terrified of becoming my mom. And even when I say it now it still makes me want to cry because this is the truth I was so terrified of becoming her that I did the opposite to what she did and you know how we get into a reaction of things and so I left the UK I ran and I came to live on the west coast of America, which is about as far away as I could get other than Australia. And I set about living my life, studying and looking at everything that I could to heal myself and to not never interface with the medical system to always be with the naturopaths the acupuncturists the you know ayurvedic practitioners you name it everything in that world and learned a

lot and herbalism all the things okay and you know and i lived a pretty healthy life and and have been pretty healthy that's the thing however when I was struck down ill last October, it was to the degree that I had an infection that needed to be dealt with in hospital and I had to interface with that system. And whilst I was doing that, it wasn't just the physical experience of what I was going through that I was in pain with,

and that was, you know, scary and all the rest of it. Out of the cavern of the underworld of my being roared this Ereshkigal character, you know, if you know the myth of Inanna and the descent of Inanna, it was like I was ripped down into the underworld very unceremoniously. I flew through all the gates of being disrobed and dismantled down to the bottom. And Ereshkigal was there screaming at me like a demon possessed, looking at me in the eye with this fear, not of death, although that's part of it that I think we all have to reckon with, right, is that we're going to die. It wasn't that I was going to die necessarily. It was that I was going to be incapacitated and I was going to be, like my mother, unable to live a full life.

And I was going to be in pain and suffering. And that's what I had been running from was the terror of that. And my shadow Ereshkigal wounded self was down there going and so as a result you have been running and pushing yourself and pushing yourself and you know working harder and doing more like in opposition to that fear which is what we do? Until the point where you were so exhausted and you were so battered down that you literally got this ill. And I'm not blaming myself or blaming my body or saying it should have happened.

It's not that. It's more that I created that. I did create that within myself. I didn't listen. I didn't slow down. And this is what I've learned about perimenopause at this point, is this is meant to slow us down. And I'm going to let that sit there for a moment.

This is meant to slow us down because we are meant to start to understand how to use our energy differently. The wisening for me has been that this is about refinement. It's about moving from a phase of being an uber generator to allowing there to be more spaciousness, to sit back in my seat, to allow others to do more, to begin the process of croning and wisening, which I believe is coming, but not here yet. We're in a different phase right now. I'm in what I call the empress phase or the queen phase or the maga phase. Like, you know, this is the phase where you've worked a lot to get to here, but there's a moment where it's about pausing and going, okay, what cannot come forward with me? What can I no longer bring forward with me that's a pattern that I've been enacting? And for me, because I've taken such great care of myself in one way,

I was completely oblivious to the price and the cost of running extraordinary amounts of stress through my body and saying, no, it's okay. I can do it. I can do it. I can do it. And I know that's a product of living in an overly masculinized patriarchal world. And there is some healing of some shame inside of me around, gosh, how is it that I could have been working all these years for the goddess and all these years championing, you yes we must rest during our moon phase you know all the things and yet here I am being brought to my knees to have to really look at how I'm out of balance and that's the essence of it is the reckoning is really about where are you out of balance in your life. And that cannot continue now, because guess what? I don't have the same energetic body. Literally, hormonally, I don't have the same amount. And what I do have is not stable. And that is incredibly

challenging. Because sometimes you have a lot of estrogen and sometimes you have none. Sometimes you have some testosterone and sometimes you have none. Sometimes you have the progesterone and sometimes you have none. And that yo-yoing process is one by which you really get to see that you cannot push your body. I'm going to pause the conversation with Elaine just for a moment to share a couple of invitations from us at Red School for going deeper with either your menstrual cycle awareness or conscious menopause practice. So if you still have a menstrual cycle, our Love Your Cycle free course will guide you to connect to the wisdom of your inner seasons and you can find it at redschool.net forward slash love. That's redschool.net forward slash love. It's a wonderful

companion to our Wild Power book. And if you're in menopause or are post menopause our wise power retreat conversation series which we launched alongside our wise power book is a treasure trove of menopause stories insights wisdoms reckonings and you can register to listen to all the conversations for free at redschool.net forward slash wise dash power dash retreat that's a bit of a mouthful so I'll drop the links into the show notes page at redschool.net forward slash podcast okay let's get back and I realized and I'm still realizing that the shedding of an internalized patriarchal oppression that I really was married to, and that's the truth, was that my body must do as I tell it.

I have all these things I want to do, and my body must cooperate. And I've got to make it, and whatever I need to do to fix it, to make sure that it can do the things that I want to do, because it's got to carry me from A to B, and it's the thing. I was living in my body. I didn't realize it, but I was living in my body from a very dominating perspective. And that's somewhat a bit of a revelation. And I believe I'm not alone in that.

I think we're taught to try to dominate our bodies. I mean, that's what all the pain medication is. A lot of people would say to me, why won't you take pain medication? I said, because I want to know what's going on in my body. I don't just want to medicate it away until, and I'm not against people taking pain medication, but for me, particularly in this last six months, I've been like, no, I get it. My body has things to tell me and I have not been listening. I have been abjectly over here going,

you know, with my fingers in my ears going, no, no, no, but I have things to do. How many of us do that? Overrided, caffeine, sugar, right? All the things that we're doing. And I think one of the reckonings that we're in, not just individually, but collectively, is the price of internalized patriarchal ideals of more, more, more, more, more, work harder, harder, harder, in order to achieve whatever it is that we think we're meant to be achieving. And I'm not saying that we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Of course, there's merit to, you know, applying ourselves in service to the visions that we

have to create. And there's a lot of creatrix energy that we run as women to manifest beautiful things in the world. And there's also a reckoning around how we're doing that and the cost on our bodies. You see it on a planetary level as well, don't we? Exactly. That's right. I mean, you know, we can go at the level of Mama Gaia with the fracking and all the things that we're doing to extract from her, to control her, to utilize her, to, you know, to monetize her, to, you know, you name it, right?

All of it. It's, you know, it's the macro and the micro. And so I think individual women's bodies, the reckoning for me has been really looking, you know, the dark sister of Inanna, in the eye. And for anyone who doesn't know that myth, it's the myth of Inanna. It's an ancient Sumerian myth from about 3,500 BC. So we're talking over 5,000 years ago.

And it's the first recorded story that we have. In other words, that it's the first recorded story that we have. In other words, that it was written down. And it charts many, many things, but one of them that's a very famous structure is the descent of the Queen of Heaven, Inanna, through seven gateways down to the underworld where she dies. She's killed by her dark sister she dies and lays on a meat hook for three days and then is resurrected and is risen again and it's the death rebirth story that we're all experiencing and perimenopause is a massive descent journey where who we have been is is literally stripped away i mean in a very figurative way like literally in your body you're not who you are but also you know these you know i think i heard alexandra talk about this but you know it's the difference. Like when you start to have your estrogen fall, estrogen is the hormone that governs us being kind of compliant.

It's the hormone that is about, you know, kind of attracting your mate. You know, you want to, you know, copulate and make babies with the estrogen. So it's about making us attractive. We worry about what people think of us more with the estrogen. So it's about making us attractive. We worry about what people think of us more with the estrogen in our bodies. And when that begins to decrease, and this is universal amongst every menopausal woman that I've ever spoken to, is you begin to not give a shit. You don't care anymore. And you find yourself saying things like, I'm not here for you to like me. I'm here to tell you something right now. it's not just lip service you actually freaking mean it

and I think I remember my grandmother going through menopause although it was never talked about because I was with my grandmother a lot when she was in her 50s so I have to imagine that's what I saw her going through and she was feisty, that woman was feisty

like you could not she was like 5 foot small five foot tall i should say and um she was from the east end of london and she was a cockney she's where my my my whole father's family's from so real cockney blood here mate and um and she she would get in a crowd of people like i'd be with her and i must have been i don't know eight nine something like that she'd get a crowd of people and she she would she would get her elbows out if you could see me she'd be poking her elbows like this because people would would ignore would not see her because she's five foot tall and then she would go she would yell and she'd go she'd she'd say oi oi I'm here watch

yourself and she'd say you, good things come in little packages and so does arsenic. I kid you not. Her name was Olive. She was one of my, she was one of really my mothers, you know, she mothered me greatly, Olive did. So she was a big part of my life. But now that I look back on it that was probably what i was witnessing was her feisty reckoning where she was done with being compliant and done with being you know um pleasant to people and she was just going to say speak it how it was um so i think there's something so vital here inside of this journey. And I, and you know, I would like to say that I am done with this journey because I was saying this to you before we started recording, you know,

out of all of my peers, 56 is pretty, pretty advanced to be still walking this journey. Most of my peers probably stopped, had their last bloods around 50-ish, you know. And I shared this on my own podcast episode. I've done a lot of reflecting about the journey because for me, the beginning of perimenopause or journey happened ironically at 46 and was prompted by me being pregnant. I fell pregnant at 46, which was the first time I had ever been knowingly pregnant in my life. And I had not thought I was going to have children at all. And then that pregnancy didn't end up going to term. I lost the baby at 14 weeks and it catalyzed a deep level of grief and reckoning then. That was the beginning of the reckoning of, wow, this is, you know, are these the choices that I've really made in my life? And

what does it mean? I really, did I really want to have a child and I didn't have a child and, you know, really that questioning. And it also started a huge shift in my hormones. And because, you know, your body gets flooded with hormones when you're pregnant, and then suddenly you're not pregnant, and then they all go away. And then that kind of signaled the beginning of a new phase and the miscarriage and the DNC and all the stuff, right? So I think the last 10-year journey, it threw me into this question of like, well, if I don't have a child, what have I really done with this life?

And I'm just saying this for all of us who, for whatever reason, weren't able to have children, didn't have children, because I had been in the illusion that I was in a choice. Now, I was. There was a part of me that chose to not have a child, and there was another part of me that avoided having a child. And that was what was really true, because I believed that I couldn't,

I had some beliefs in there that I didn't trust myself to be a mother because I'd been so unmothered. So there's the core of that wound. So can you feel, everybody, how it begins there, and then the nice dovetail to the story, you know, 10 years later is the hospitalization and the next level of the mother wound, right? So we could say for me, and my whole life has been dedicated to healing the mother wound, not the mother wound, just the personal mother wound,

but the collective mother wound that's on our planet you know the desperate loss of mother and that just still breaks my heart that we're still missing her so deeply that we're treating each other the way that we do and if the mother was present there's just no way that we would be and there's so you know there goes the point of my life right the point of my life has been to build a legacy birth a child birth a community birth a place for women to remember how to come into connection with that mother within the divine feminine and how to bring that to the world and you know it's incredible when we think about our personal journeys and then what we're called to offer out of that place. And for me, this last piece of the, the pie that I'm integrating in this journey

and who knows how many more cycles I have left in me. How many more times is he going to meet a rash kicker? Well, exactly. Well, and how many more times is my womb going to be needing to release this lineage wound? Because this is the thing is that, and then this goes back to what i originally said in the beginning and i want to introduce this idea to everybody is that you are i want you just to feel this for a moment there is a red thread that binds you to every woman that has ever been. There is a red thread that undulates from your womb to your mother's womb to your grandmother's womb to your great grandmother's womb and to every other woman in your lineage that weaves you back to the first woman that ever was. You are born from her womb.

We are born from each other's wombs. Your womb connects you to every other being in your lineage and all lineages because we all come in the same way. No one gets here without believing the first nine months of their consciousness inside the womb of their mother. And so our wombs, our blood mysteries are what connect us into all life. That's where the mystical part of it comes in. And our ability to birth all things into being, not just babies, but to birth and nurture visions and communities

and the earth herself lives in us. So it makes sense, right, when we're really going into the mystery of the blood, mystery, the mystery part, which is that this is the seed of all life. We don't understand really how. We don't, no one knows how a soul gets into the body. There's a mystery that happens that's beyond the biophysiology of what happens when a baby is born within you that's the cellular level of it that's the atomic level of it but what about this thing called the soul and what about the connection that we have into those who've been

part of our lineages who are our ancestors so when my belief is when we're really in these when you're in your menstrual cycle you're connected into the dream time in your ancestors and you are clearing not just for your own life but for all who've come before you and all who will come after you with what's being released every moon time which is why it's so important and powerful to have those practices around our blood as our ancestors always did in ancient times they knew the blood was holy it was the first sacrament the sangreal the royal blood and so for me now you know with this moon time that's just come through you better believe I've been bleeding on the land and praying and releasing any last grief I have about not carrying a child this lifetime and any last grief I

have around not being more compassionate to my mother and her suffering and any last grief I have around not being more compassionate to my mother and her suffering and any last piece of grief I have about not being more kind to her and more understanding and and and all the things that I have gotten to see differently because of this journey you know I'm kinder than I was six months ago. I'm more compassionate. I'm more humble. And I'm more in touch with the preciousness of this life. And I'm more in touch with the reckoning that nothing should be taken for granted. Don't ever take it for granted because it might not be here tomorrow. Something might happen and you might not be able to participate or to be in the world or be

in your life in the way that you are in this moment. And if you are struggling right now, if you're somebody who is struggling right now, my heart is with you, beloved. I want you to know that you're not alone. I'd reach my hand out through this podcast to you. Just put my hand on your heart and say, please know that I am here with you, that I get it, that I get what it is to be brought to your knees by something. And there's some beauty in that. You know, I think it's Marianne Woodman who said, it is a Marianne Woodman quote, and she talks about the goddess dances in every cell of your being. She makes herself known and she is dancing upon the flames of beauty and horror in all of life. For it is

in the beauty and the horror of all of it that we find ourselves. That's the reckoning. I talk a lot about what it means to become a divine human. I'm also someone who's devoted to the path of the Magdalene. And I've been working with the reclamation of the Mystery School of Early Marian Christianity or Rose Christianity for a long time now. And part of my deep spiritual work is this question of what it means to become a divine human. Or in their languaging, they would have called it anthropos, which actually means to become fully human and i think the reckoning is part of becoming more fully human to become a wise elder one must become more fully human which means actually being more here

being more here than you've ever been before which is an odd concept right because we think we're born and we're here but actually what i think is more true is we're born and then we spend our lifetime getting here only to reach the point where we're fully here at which point we then leave to the next place wherever that is whatever belief system you have right we're finally here and then it's like okay well i i got here and i'm finally here now it's time to go somewhere else so that's what i think perimenopause is and i think that it's um i don't know whether historically this phase of life existed because we didn't live as long I suspect that we're in a new evolution around it right I don't know but I mean you know we wouldn't have lived beyond 40 45 50 at most once we'd done childbearing, there wasn't really, you know, in childbearing,

let's face it, it started when we were 13 or 14. It wasn't like it's kind of... Yeah, most of us wouldn't have had that many cycles between being pregnant and breastfeeding. Yeah, this is a very unique time. We're having a lot more cycles and we're having a lot more life after menopause yeah exactly so we're in an evolution so there's uncharted territory here and i believe that you know and it's like i was laughing at this just the other day you know i remember you know when i was young looking at people in their 50s and thinking god they look old right and now we look at people in their 50s and their 60s and we're like well well, they're blooming.

You know, it's like they're having a second adolescence, which is kind of what we do. You're absolutely blooming. Oh, bless you. Thank you. Well, but it's kind of interesting, isn't it? You know, it's such a different take on it. So I have to imagine that as a species, we're evolving into this, whatever this is. And therefore, our journey, those of us who are in our 50s now, are having a very different experience than our mothers had, or our grandmothers had around this. Because as you said, we have a mindset that's a lot younger. We, you think, we are embracing all of these new technologies and new understandings about how to take care of ourselves, right?

And how to, you know, in amongst all of the madness of the world, there's also incredible discoveries being made every day. So we live in this beauty and horror filled world where both is true. And I think that there's so much as a rite of passage, this is about your power, your power in a very centered, well, you know, the way I would describe it is that you're sitting upon your throne. It's an enthronement of your own being. And whenever I say that, I can literally see all these women in a massive circle, all kind of sitting back into these gorgeous, ornate thrones and everyone is different every throne is a different color and they're made of different materials some are made of wood or some are made of beautiful gemstones others they look like they're made of clouds

some are built into you know the root of a tree like they're really vastly different, these thrones of embodied presence. And I see all these women sitting back and feeling their spines aligning and feeling the connection into the earth and the connection into the sky and becoming balanced conduits of this power that just is, that doesn't require anybody to validate it and that's probably one of the great movements through the reckoning is is that any part of you that has been seeking that validation or permission is stripped away and the deepening in your own trust with yourself is what's being born. And that's pretty beautiful close my eyes and I see these circles of these women, and I know many of them, thankfully, I have hope. I have hope for this world that seems so terribly difficult to navigate.

I do, because I think that there's something awakening in the return, you know, in Rose Christianity, we talk about the bride went into exile, you know, a few thousand years ago, the feminine was exiled. She was written out of the story. And the rise of the divine feminine, this Aquarian age, this return of the bride, the return of the divine feminine is coming through our acknowledgement of the power of being creatrixes generatrixes yeah so i've said a lot it's all been so beautiful. I'm really touched by that final image you painted there

and feeling how, of course, with the feminine longing to be rebirthed in the world, of course, there are more women living longer after menopause, having lived through this initiation and embodying this kindness this humility this compassion this presence this sovereignty this power like yes that's better to deliver the feminine into our world then wow wow yeah you know and the feistiness that comes with not giving a shit anymore like not and not and not in the best way, in the best way possible, you know, thatided. There's an inscription on that temple in Greek,

and the inscription says, Know thyself. I feel like the conscious menstrual movement, the menstruality movement, the blood mysteries for women is the mystery school of us knowing ourselves it is when we engage with it consciously when we travel through it consciously understanding how it shifts our brains our bodies our perceptions then we begin to remember who we are and I think the perimenopausal phase is kind of turbocharged.

Big school, Shani and Alexandra call it. Yeah, big school. And this is big girl panty school. This is where you put your big girl panties on and get on with it. And I think part of that is that everybody's looks different. Not everybody's looks like mine. And I don't, you know, and truthfully, I wouldn't wish it on you. I don't wish for you to be traveling my particular journey. Although I would not, of course, in this time, this moment, change it because I get that it's been perfect for me as my sole curriculum.

Not always easy at all. But I think that whatever your experience is, the message I would leave you with today is to really ask what is the thing that's been hidden, you've been avoiding, you've been shoving under the carpet that really needs to be looked at, that you do not wish to carry forward. See, that fear, that terror of being debilitated, of getting sick, of getting these illnesses was driving me toward them. And that's what fear does unwittingly and i didn't even tell you i mean i won't get into the details but of course goddess would

have the prescription pad because what i was hospitalized was one of the very things that my mother suffered with most deeply of course to add insult to injury of course it was you know and that was the that way she didn't was the, that was the, you didn't get the message. Exactly. Just in case you didn't get the message. First off, let me make it abundantly clear to you what you're dealing with. And I remember the moment that the doctor came in and told me, and I was lying there going, holy shit, are you for real? I mean, it was a part of me that was like oh my god you can't script this shit are you serious and you can't you see and but the thing is is that I would not have gotten the message otherwise not in the same way I wouldn't have faced into the terror I would have been able to

avoid it a bit longer but oh well at least it wasn't one of those things yeah do you know what i mean but it but no but no but no and so you know you can tell that i've moved on in my journey because you know i have the humor around it where i can laugh at that now that was not freaking funny in the moment that it happened there was no part of me that could laugh at that i was horrified, literally horrified. And the mark of healing is that we can play with it. Now I can play with the part of me that was lying there and we can have a good laugh about it at the goddess, with the goddess and go, oh, thanks so much for that. That was really, really awful. Thanks for the memo. And I do believe that that's part of the gift of our wisening is our we're also able to actually come into a a new state of consciousness around it and i think that that's what this is all about

we're birthing ourselves again into being you know that's what this phase of life is we're no longer mothering everybody else we're actually bringing the energy back inside to really, truly mother ourselves. And that's a beautiful thing. That's a beautiful place to close. Elaine Kalila, it's been such a pleasure to sit with you. Thank you. Thank you so much.

You know, Sophie, thank you so much for your invitation and for being such a loving and open space in which for me to speak. I really appreciate that. My total pleasure. Lots of love. Lots and lots of love to you all. And for everyone who's been listening, I just want to say to you all, imagine right now, before we close,

that you are walking with hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of women who are traversing this portal, this portal, this portal of reckoning with whatever it is that needs to be spiritually matured through, and that you are never alone, that there are so many women. And I encourage you to begin to talk to the women in your life about this

and ask them the question of what they've really had to deal with. And get underneath the surface with each other, because I guarantee you, every woman really wants to talk about it. And every woman wants to be asked about it. Hey, listeners, if you want to share your reckoning stories maybe if we share enough we can entice elaine kalila to come back and hear more from her i'd love that i'd love that yeah let's do that let's definitely do that um because this is the thing this is what's going to change it there's a recognition isn't that interesting reckoning and recognition there's a recognition that is incredibly healing and it's part of the rite of passage for us to recognize each other

grappling with the deepest places inside of ourselves in service to our own liberation yeah it really is so i see you and i'd be delighted to hear of your reckoning stories because your story is my story and together we are awakening something that's incredibly powerful so you matter and your story matters and what you're going through matters. I want you to know that. So with that said, I will be quiet and let you all go. See you soon. Lots of love. Many, many, many blessings. Bye bye.

Thank you so much for being with elaine and i for this conversation today for listening all the way through to the end i hope that this conversation was inspiring and uplifting and if you are currently in the middle of some kind of reckoning in your life that can it can go some way to accompany you through this experience i want to really warmly invite you to share this episode with any friends who are navigating their own reckoning times, whether they're in menopause or facing another of life's initiations. And I'll be with you again next week. And until then, keep living life according to your own brilliant rhythm.