The Menstruality Podcast - 169. How we Become a Force of Nature in Menopause (Dr Danielle Arabena)

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

Menopause, and the years running up to it, can be a time of real challenge and transformation. Without wise guidance and a framework to understand what’s happening, we can be left feeling lost, alone and crazy. Luckily, there are those who can serve as guides, like our guest today, Dr Danielle Arabena, who brings her extensive experience as a medical doctor and a shamanic healer to stand at what she calls the “crossroads and altars we stand before as women” including menstruation, birth, menopause, death, and our topics for today: perimenopause. Dr Danielle is a descendant of the Meriam Mer peoples in the Torres Strait. She is a GP and healer whose nurturing approach integrates evidence-based medical care with the profound wisdom of 'women's business' as seen through her Indigenous Knowledge lens.We explore:How Danielle was guided as a young girl to give her blood back to the earth (which back then looked like soaking tampons in a bucket and pouring it onto her suburban garden). How women who have had ACES (adverse childhood experiences) have a more challenging experience of menopause and how to ride the deep initiations to meet our shadow selves. Perimenopause and menopause as a reorganising process where we are clarifying our legacy for future generations; whether that’s making the world a better and safer place, tending to our relationships with our kin, or doing quieter, more intimate, inner work. ---Join us for our Menopause: The Great Awakener course - www.redschool.net/menopause---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.hardyDr Danielle Arabena: @drdaniellearabena - https://www.instagram.com/drdaniellearabena/

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 podcast. So menopause and the years running up to it can be a time of real challenge and real transformation in preparation for the great initiation that is menopause. Without wise guidance and a framework to understand what's happening many are left feeling

lost alone and crazy luckily there are those who can serve as guides like our guest today Dr Danielle Arabina who brings her extensive experience as a medical doctor and a shamanic healer to stand at what she calls the crossroads and altars we stand before as women including menstruation, birth, menopause, including menstruation, birth and our topic for today menopause and the years running up to it. Dr Danielle is a descendant of the Meriam-Mur peoples in the Torres Strait. She's a GP and a healer whose nurturing approach integrates evidence-based medical care with the profound wisdom of women's business as seen through her indigenous knowledge lens. I want to share a trigger warning before we start. We do

explore the topic of rape in this conversation so please take care of yourself around that if you need to. Another thing is there is a lot of wildness present in this conversation. Danielle really is a force of nature and I was personally in this world in between the worlds interviewing Danielle just as my period was starting at 6am in the morning so I was very liminal and as you'll hear Danielle was on the other side of her day at dusk and was surrounded by noisy dogs and kookaburra birds and all the animal life around her home so pour yourself a cup of something lovely and settle in for this amazing conversation about becoming a force of nature in menopause with Dr. Danielle Arabina. Dr. Danielle, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. It's just, I can already feel how wonderful it's going to be to be with you by

looking at the background of your Zoom, which I'm going to describe for our listeners is like this incredible cosmic landscape full of stars and a beautiful symbol behind you um what is that symbol dania um that's a bit of a symbol that i associate with my business and it's the moon which is held upwards like the cauldron um and the the sort of it's it's the alchemy um and the stars represent the connection to my ancestors um and you know the knowledge that we have in the song lines and that we have in the stars that help us navigate our way through life. Wow I mean I can't wait to hear about your story of training as a doctor and then allowing this medicine of your calling to come through and infuse with that.

I can't wait to hear. But just before we do, we always start the podcast with a cycle check in. Where are we both at cyclically and how is that influencing us? And I was just sharing with you, I am literally starting my bleed right now as we speak. It's very early in the morning. And so I'm feeling cosmic. Yes. I'm feeling like the background of your zoom right now and it's yeah it's it feels like a real blessing to be with you in this in this hour I'm so grateful how about you um I'm with the moon so my uh menstrual cycle I think my last one was a bit like a puff of dust puff of blood-tinged dust like uh so that was that was my uh bleed and i haven't graduated into menopause yet so we talk about uh graduating when we have had one year

of no um period so mine is you think it's done i got rid of all my period pants and you know folded everything up and i was like, surprise, surprise, surprise. And you're like, okay. So how is it to be with the moon now? How is that process going with you of like tracking with the moon instead of with your menstrual cycle? Yeah, it's very interesting. I think that I've always connected with the moon because I'm very blessed to live out on acreage out on

land and I've got a beautiful series of mountains behind me and I will get up at three o'clock in the morning when the moon calls me and I can watch her set and the most fantastic thing for me is when the moon comes and lands on the ridge like a coin and it looks like it can roll away that's it that's the gold you get up and go yes um but every every night when i let the hounds out for their nightly uh whizzes before they go to bed um i always look up and check the moon so it's it's very interesting that we start to embody the seasons, and I think, you know, as we change, as we go through these changes, there's a lot of, there's a lot more flow and a lot more acceptance

about what our bleeding can look like because there's no surprise, really. I mean, there's still a little bit of perimenopausal surprise, but there's no big surprise. But can I just draw us back before we launch in deep to the conversation? So for the listeners there, I would like to do the sort of introduction that I like to do culturally, so just to acknowledge the lands

that we all belong to. So I like to say my name is Dr. Danielle Arabina. Hello. I'm a descendant of the Miriam Merr clan groups in the Torres Strait. And the Torres Strait Islanders are a smaller Indigenous group that belong to Australia. So we have the Aboriginal Australians or the Australian Aboriginals and the Torres Strait Islanders. And so my family and my people are of the sea and the land. So we have great connection to saltwater medicine and those landways and we navigated by the stars. That's how we were able to transverse.

There's something like 270 islands um that make up the torus strait and and my family would transverse across there and our magic was very the magic of our medicine men or people or nunkari they're sometimes called in australia um they were their healing came from the earth and the seasons and the winds were really important as well for our people. So I just like to acknowledge, and I like to acknowledge the elders and our ancestors. So the ancestors of my land, the ancestors from your land,

and I found out through ancestry DNA that I have a great connection to the Celtic lands. So when I saw somebody put a photograph of and I talk a lot about land because I think land is so important to our bleed, to the way that we menstruate and the way that we move through the crossroads of all the altars that we stand before as women. So I saw a photograph of the Cliffs altars that we stand before as women so i saw a photo photograph of the cliffs of my hair my hair in ireland and i had a visceral reaction i had goosebumps i had the hair standing up on the on my arms and then like the day after my sister rings me and says kiss me i'm irish i said what do you what that was unknown So, you know, when I journeyed with my menstrual cycle as a young girl, and I'm 52 now, so when I was journeying there,

I was just an isolated girl living in suburbia. That spirit came and said, put your blood on the earth. That was very important. So it was back in the day where we used tampons, you know, without even really thinking about the impacts of bleach in our most sacred, divine parts. But I would be soaking all my tampons in a bucket in the laundry, desensitising my husband. He was so good about it. And then I'd be sneaking out in the backyard in suburbia under the moonlight, pouring my blood onto my garden.

And, yeah, so I think that the way that our connection to land is deeply entwined with blood. Beautiful. Thank you for bringing that piece in. I love the thought of you sneaking out with your witch's cauldron of blood and pouring it onto your land in honouring. That's so gorgeous. And thank you for naming the connection between the land

and our blood, and hopefully that's a theme we can unfold a bit through this conversation. I feel very called to that too. I just visited some of my ancestral lands. I live in England, but some of my ancestry goes back to Wales. And I felt very called to Anglesey, which is often called like the Holy Island. You can see in Roman literature that it was the last part of these islands that was conquered by the Romans. And I found a burial chamber that was 6,000 years old and I went inside it and got to be sort of in the belly of of mama and be with these ancestors and it's it's just I feel like it's so vital or

maybe it becomes vital for all of us on this journey to kind of unearth the wisdom of our bodies we need to go into the belly of the mama to somehow connect there, don't we? Absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, I talk about the ancestors' wisdom is, you know, I talk to the women when I go in to help them with birthing, is that the ancestors are holding the bones, holding the pelvis, holding that sacred cauldron for us.

And everything is embedded within. We know through the work we do with the pelvis that it holds trauma, but it also holds celebration. And if I can, I'll share a story that I like to talk about because one of the things I do in my life, so I'm a general practitioner as well and I work with women in what I call crossroads medicine. So, you know, birth, breastfeeding, postpartum, and now we're moving more into menopause medicine and magic and death. And I had a really interesting experience

with death and linking it to my blood, which was really interesting. But one of the stories I talk about, sorry, I'm also a senior cultural educator, so I like to teach doctors about the importance of understanding the impact of colonisation and the way that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and all Indigenous people around the world had systems of health that helped them thrive. So in Australia, we were thriving for the last 65,000 years, unfettered. We were not disconnected from the things that kept us well and healthy, which was the land, which was our great mother. She took care of us. That was something that was inherently ours. And then when the colonisers came, they ripped us out of the arms of our mother.

And then that trauma came into the children. And this is not unique to Australia. Anywhere that colonisers came, even, you know, you're talking about the Romans and in Wales, they have a playbook. And part of the playbook is they come in, they pretend the people there are less than. In Australia, they refer to them as the missing link they were less than they weren't even seen as animals we weren't even seen as as human until 1967 so we were less than even though we had 65,000 years of evidence and that's the discord that I had when I started coming into medicine because I was always a healer

so I'm going to share two stories with you now I'm going to go back in time because I'm feeling I'm just letting spirit come through and tell me what we need to share so I'm going to share with everybody when I was about 17 I didn't write it down so I don't know the date for sure, but I feel like I'm 16, between 16 and 18, I feel like I was 17. And spirit came to me in a dream. Three Torres Strait Islander women came and they pricked my left ring finger and a drop of blood came out and they said, it's time for you to wake up. And I started vibrating in my body. I left my body and I shapeshifted into a different animal, into an animal. And I was running across the plains and I sat up and I observed a scene of humans on the earth. And then I came back and they said, what animal were you?

And I said, I actually turned into a wolf. And they said, well, you need to go with this person. But in the background, there was a man, a Torres Strait Islander man, but he was right, right back in the shadows. But it was at that time, at the very drop of blood, that my magic initiated, at that very drop of blood. And for me, there's such a connection to blood and the way that women do magic and for

me I started receiving a lot of information about how the healing I could do would operate in this realm I had a lot of dreams where I was taught how to do healing and I was able to travel into people's bodies and um see what could what was happening inside their bodies this is before i had knowledge of medicine as as a way this was just me as a young girl having rapid rapid dreams a lot of dreams and then spirit said to me one day you're going to work with women and children so i read that as i was going to um you know be a midwife so i got into university i've got three degrees my first degree i did was in communications i had this vision when i was a young lass in high school because i was good at talking to people that i was going to run a male model agency in la uh because i read a lot of j Collins novels. Like my dad would have them laying around, I'd read them.

So I was heavily influenced by that and wanted to get in. I just love how the calling works. I know. It's such a mystery, right? Got into public relations, film and television for whatever reason, finished all of that and then, you know, just really stepped into that daniel as a healer um and a lot of it i became pregnant with my first daughter as i was finishing my my communications

degree and again all that magic like the initial like when you become mother when you step into that you you step into another dimension you learn a new layer of yourself so in the background i had all this um healing that i was being taught but I realized I needed that piece of paper but for me that piece of paper was important for me to operate in the world because what I can do is very you know airy-fairy and and you know it's connected to 65,000 years of medicine but not the last 220 years of medicine that we have here so i needed i knew that spirit wanted me to operate in both realms so i got into nursing in view of becoming a midwife didn't really love it wanted to be a doctor spirit told me i was going to be a doctor um i was concerned i was going to be a

doctor because i knew it was a lot of hard work and my father became very unwell so anyway long story short i end up becoming getting into med school first day of med school danielle's a witch danielle's walking in as a nurse because i got through my nursing degree and would be working in the hospital and um sensing spirit around me all the time in the hospital so you can imagine sometimes that was quite concerning but i'd always you know i had that sort of intuition. And I really led with my intuition in the way that I dealt with our patients. And then when I got into med school, they said, if you believe in homeopathy, you might as well leave. And I was like, well, here I am as a as a woman who is a healer, a cultural healer, and I can travel into people's

bodies, and I can shapeshift, and I can move between dimensions and realms. So where does that leave me? Who am I in this world? And I had to shut it. I shut it down. I shut it down, and I hid it, and I had to do that to survive. But this is where menopause comes into it. And menopause is a great reclaimer. It's such a galvanizing thing when you stand in the power of your blood, and then you start reconnecting to the earth, because it's such a galvanizing thing when you stand in the power of your blood and then you start reconnecting to the earth because it's double. It's like the double magic that you have. And I got through medicine, but along the way I met these Nunkuri, these traditional healers, Aboriginal men who lived out in the central desert,

and they recognized in me that i was similar to them but they'd gone through initiation and ceremony whereas i just you know again living in suburbia having dreams and understanding what i could do so i never called myself a nankari i call myself a healer because i haven't gone through a ceremony. But those men were really important in my life and, again, taught me things about healing. And when one of them passed, they transferred some of their power to me, which I'm forever humbled by, forever humbled by. It's such a gift to receive that mandibar,

that power from one of these powerful Nunkuri men. And it just made me cry because he came to me and it transferred to me yeah and I'll get emotional talking about it because I just loved him so very much and I know I can still feel him with me sometimes through the other realms and I know that you know they never leave us but yeah it was it's such a it's such a beautiful thing so i'm going to pause that story there i'm going to go to part two part part 1a whatever i was up to so danielle's along on her journey danielle had to hide i literally tied my shamanic drum up under my bed uh pretended i wasn't magical at all um getting through my junior doctor years in the hospital.

You know, it was difficult. But at that time, you know, both my parents became unwell. My mother's cancer had flared up and my father, being a Torres Strait Islander man, had a lot of conditions that were part of intergenerational trauma, like part of that inherent stuff that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Indigenous people all around the world hold and carry. And so affected by diabetes, had a lower leg amputation, had a heart attack and passed away. And so that journey was quite long and difficult, having both parents who were unwell but along the way

through the work i did i met a aboriginal artist called delving cockatoo collins who lives at a place a stradbroke island which is just off queensland coast down near brisbane called madura bar that's the traditional name and i work a lot with the elders over in Majuraba and Delving Cockatoo Collins has she's an amazing artist um but one of the artworks we're having a yarn one day and one of the artworks she showed me and it really struck with me really struck with me she'd gone down to do a writer's course at the gold coast um and they were looking at advertisements from the gold coast and like from the 1950s and it was like pristine land up for sale untouched look at these beaches up for this you know like all this stuff and she really powerful piece because for us the land holds records of life death our ceremonies

our placentas our menstrual blood like it holds and records all of this stuff for us like this beautiful record keeping and we do have these sites in australia called mitten sites and mitten sites are that that sort of and like where you can see layers of shell um evidence of feasts are layered in the soil and you can actually so on madura bar they did some um testing and and found out it was about 10 000000 years old, like these sites, between 5 and 10,000 years old. And so they said there's nothing there. So she painted this artwork that showed the complexities of the land and they said there's nothing there.

And then I started thinking about, because I do a lot of work in like working with the realignment of the pelvic bowl energy um you know all of that sort of stuff but then i started thinking about that's what they said about us and our womb they said there's nothing there they said there's nothing there they've suburbanized and modernized our place of birthing, our place of rebirthing, the very seat and cauldron of our magic. And I can see this is giving you the feels with your bleed right now, but that's what they said. That's the lies that we were told and sold by the patriarchy,

by the colonizers. They said there's nothing there. And that's such a lie. And what I really love about this generation of women coming forward is that there's such a powerful reclamation of that magic, such a powerful reclamation of who we are. And it's led by some of the grandmothers in this space some of those women who stand up and go fuck you no thanks and it's difficult to be there and to stand in that power

and to tip the tables and you get just get called an angry old woman or in here they go you're an angry black woman if you stand up but how can we not this is they don't have the right to modernize suburbanize our magic and even if they can't the fences that they put up they're not temporary they're sorry they're temporary they're not permanent the earth will always survive therefore the magic within us the sacredness within us will always be there will always survive and that's why it's so imperative that women reconnect to the earth and then inherently we will reconnect to ourselves and that magic. When you bring in the 65,000 years of wisdom and intelligence and compare that to the 220 years of medicine, of course, there is beauty in the medical system. I actually wouldn't be alive without it.

I had an appendectomy when I was 25 and was very close to to death I mean who knows what would have happened if would if I've been in touch with traditional medicines of of the lands but yeah there's beauty there but yes to um to feel your lived connection to this 65,000 years and to witness how it is streaming through you, you know, so powerfully, so unfiltered. It makes me think of a teacher of mine who, she describes women these days as like uprooted root vegetables. So we have these roots and it really is often through our wombs and our blood that we can root in and but we've been pulled pulled up our roots are kind of dangling in midair and this is Jules Wingfield one of my teachers and she yeah she describes it as a process of we just we need to reroute ourselves back into yeah back into the earth and she's as you've been beautifully describing she has so much

medicine for us but I feel like I feel like she is calling us back so even even you know when we're doom scrolling on our phones and we're trying to disassociate because life is so stressful and busy and all of that stuff um is that we feel like there's a big, like plants, indoor plants, people are putting plants around them and stuff like that. Even in the concrete jungle, you know, we might, I often marvel at the little weeds that come up through the cracks. She always reaches and strives to tell us that she survives. And is there not something about the menopause initiatory process that catalyzes this and activates this? This is what I see in the women that I speak to. And while in the conversation that's happening in the world, it's like something's wanting to burst through these cracks.

And like you've been saying, reclaim, like rewild this land yeah absolutely yeah i think um perimenopause is such a a wild and very individual journey we we know that some women just sail through through um menopause and go oh stop bleeding i must oh okay no no problems and other people are like raging on the back of dragons and flying over cities and wanting to burn everything fucking down and it and it takes you and you know i think it has a lot to do with and I actually had a bit of a vibe about it. And I did a research and found a couple of articles, actually. So women who have experienced adverse childhood events, and we know that that plays a big role in menstrual pain, you know, pelvic pain, menstrual pain, the way that we sort of are rewired and become very hypervigilant to different sort of ways that our nervous system react.

And the women who do have adverse childhood events do have a greater experience of perimenopause and menopause. But it's really an altar that we stand before. And I think sometimes when you stand at the altar, like I witness it when I stand with women at birth, to get the medicine, you have to go to the underworld. You have to delve in deep and go to those places and meet your shadow self to meet yourself in the ugly the raw the powerful ways that's not modernized and suburbanized

that's not this fake thing or we're sold you're never more truthful when you're roaring your baby into the world. And it's the same. Perimenopause, though, is slightly different because it's a long altar that you stand before. Yes. And it's because you can stand before it for up to 10 years. It's the place where you can burn everything. I see.

It's our last stop before we transition out of this world, before we return to the realm of the ancestors, the dreaming. And it's an opportunity for you to heal yourself, but also heal the bloodline going backwards and then going forwards. It's a place where you can be a powerful role model for your children and your grandchildren. So I was going through perimenopause when I was in medicine. So, you know, when I went through through medicine it was a bit later and so

you know as i said i'm 52 so if you take me back to 42 um you know i was in that sort of hospital system but i also had adenomyosis um likely endo but i also had rape trauma so that I held in my body from when I was 18 and it's such a barometer a kookaburra started singing now out my window bringing some joy into a discussion that can be a little bit you know painful but truthful so the way i experienced pelvic pain um throughout my teens was almost like a barometer we talk about our blood being a barometer of our internal health it's it's it's one of our vital signs we know the blood the blood can whisper secrets to us and if we listen to it carefully it can provide such wisdom for us about, you know, our social and emotional wellbeing. If we talk about,

um, when we stand, sorry, hang on, let me just recollect. So when we talk about, um, trauma that gets held in our body and pelvic pain. I used to get my right-sided down near where my ovary was pelvic pain when I was really stressed, really busy and not tuning in. Because what we do, and I do see this when I work with women and their pelvis, is that we disassociate from things that cause us pain. And so if women have had pain stored in their pelvis, in their magic cauldron, then they're going to disassociate from it because we're great. We're meant to survive. Our brains and our bodies are so fantastic in helping us survive. We've got this biological

system that courses through our body that tells us to get the fuck out when things are scary leave run away it's not okay so i'm going to pause my conversation with danielle just for a couple of minutes to invite you to join alexandra and shani for their upcoming course, Menopause, The Great Awakener. It's for you if you sense there's more to menopause than the collective story dictates and you're feeling called to reclaim the power of the menopause initiation. It's for you if you're in your early to mid 40s or older,

if you sense menopause on the horizon, if you're currently going through menopause or if you're post-menopause and you're welcome whatever you're experiencing as alexander and sharni share they invite you to bring the fullness of who you are and the fullness of your experience however messy complicated confusing uncertain and unknown it might be. All of your experiences hold at their heart a deeper story of power. And speaking of a new story of power, I'd like to share a story from a brilliant woman and a dear friend, Claire Dubois, the founder of Tree Sisters, about her experience of coming home to her menopause power during the Menopause The Great Awakener course, and then we'll get back to our conversation with Danielle.

My name is Claire Dubois. I did the Great Awakener in 2022. I did it because I had never got to grips with the menstrual years in terms of the mystery teachings and how I could live with the ebbs and flows of my cycle. And as such, I had radically overrun, overridden and burnt myself out. And I was fast moving into menopause, not understanding really anything about it, recognizing a spiritual crisis that was upon me and realizing that I needed stabilizers I needed a framework I needed to understand what was going on so that I could enter it consciously understand the territory and not freak out not make terrible decisions you know actually do it well, or even just consciously, because I'd been so unconscious about how to work within my body to that point. And the course was a game changer. It was a life changer. I would recommend it to every woman, even those that are already through menopause, but certainly those that haven't entered it yet. The greatest thing that it gave me was an understanding of why I was feeling the way

I was feeling and why I had suddenly become somebody that was saying no to everything, that it was natural that this internal imperative had taken over, that my own system had taken over. And oh my God, what a game changer. I'm actually so incredibly grateful for menopause and I'm so incredibly grateful for Alexandra and Shani and the wisdom and the map that they give that allows those of us who go in blindfold to take off the blindfold, look around and go, oh, okay, this is why this feels this way. And Alexandra and Shani do it with reverence and respect and humour and irreverence and the blessing of being a community with other women that are all going through it and de-shaming it all for each other and celebrating it all for each other,

I think is just the only way to do this, frankly. Together, not alone together so when you stand before the altar of perimenopause and menopause there's so many opportunities for you to learn grow realize what is not okay in your life if we talk about the wheel of our menstruation we talk about the the last quarter so where you were last week is stand in your true authority and this is what when you come into perimenopause and menopause it's about where we want to how we want to leave legacy in the world what is the thing that I'm leaving my grandchildren? As an Indigenous woman, I have responsibilities to look after my lineage.

So what is it that we're doing? We can do big-scale things and we can make the world a better place. We can make it a safer place for our women and children and we can reclaim the sacredness of our blood. We can reconnect to the earth. we can care take for the earth we can sit in good relationship and kin relationships with our family with beings in the other world we can do all of these things we can do all of these things or we can do things that are little but equally as important. We can delve into our womb and fossick around and go,

oh, yes, I remember this little trauma. I remember that. I dissolve you. I let you go. Because we energetically have passed that on to our children, as we know, you know, with the way that epigenetics works and at the very point of conception, the mother and the baby are communicating as the little zygote is hurtling down, you know with the way that epigenetics works and at the very point of conception the mother and the baby are communicating as the little zygote is hurtling down you know the cosmos the great fallopian tube into the womb into the unknown they start receiving

chemical messes messages from the mother about what their world is going to be and we can do that as at the altar of perimenopause too we have the opportunity to go back and heal that little girl we go back and heal i can go back and heal the trauma that i experienced when i was raped and what i did with my mother when she was dying and I was having such a profound perimenopausal bleed now this is the bleed that rages out of you it's like Pele herself had walked out of the volcano and she's standing at the outlet of my vulva and just letting that lava flow out but with that lava we're creating new spaces we're creating land we're letting lava flow to create islands and stuff opportunity but she was standing with me and I was releasing clots and it was heavy and I knew that my mother was dying my mother became septic she had cancer she got an infection and her poor little body her

white blood cell count her white blood cell count was through her boots and her body was just overwhelmed and in that dark dark of night that that when the veil shifts around two or three o'clock in the morning when most people or a lot of people will transition out of their bodies. I was holding her hand and bleeding. And I took her pain, her trauma that she had around her sexual molestation and her pain at her mother not supporting her and not helping her i transmuted that into the cauldron of my pelvis transmuted it let it come in and then i released it for her so that she was able i helped her heal her red thread so that when she transitioned when she

left her mortal realm the mortal realm and became an ancestor is that she did it with a bit less baggage there's the hounds again hounds thank you for bringing your mother into the conversation and my body's responding very powerfully to the poetry that's coming through you as you describe that incredibly profound moment for your lineage and for your like that's such a powerful example of how our blood and our perimenopause and menopause experience can work to heal the lines of the past so that the lines moving forward have have a different that they're coming from a different place wow um i'm curious what you'd say to a woman a person listening who is reconciling this in their own bodies and wombs at red school

alexandra and sharni refer to it as the quickening a time when you know often five to ten years when when our soul our deep self is is waking up stirring shouting howling and um oh yeah I'm curious what you'd say to begin this process gently if they're feeling traumas arising that are looking to be healed and tended what yeah what medicine would you bring for them or what would you share i moved a lot to free bleeding um and i became really uh careful around the time when i was menstruating because i recognized that the portal um that linked myself and the cosmos was the cosmos it was it was opening up and i was very vulnerable because the veils shift we there's a thin veil between this realm and the other and I became very protective of me when I started

menstruating I would say no to things I would down tools I would rest and I because my my bleeding and pain was intense and um but I in for some reason and this is interesting I've sat with myself a lot for this that I endured it I endured it I endured the pain and I breathed you know I did the breath through it and would lay with heat packs and all of that sort of stuff and it's really interesting in retrospect about why i did that why i could have taken a pill and taken the pain away which i had to do sometimes but most the time i would just and i i would be drained and the pain was, you know, very intense, but I sort of endured that. And whether that was part of me, again, transmuting that trauma and letting it pass out of me because once the heaviness of the bleeding was over, then, you know, life was a little bit better but i think the first the first piece i would say

to women is look at what you're bleeding into in your life what's taking your energy that it doesn't need such a good question wow what are you bleeding into but also what are you bleeding into are you using pads are you using tampons are you using cups um i i moved to um i changed to the period pants and then when i had the opportunity i and was able to sit home i would free bleed i would you know put down the big blanket um and and put my blood there but any opportunity i had is i started reclaiming the magic of my blood and again the beauty of the cup or the the undies that you're able to soak them and rinse that blood out and capture the blood and then i would transmute it I would use my energy and transmute it into magic dissipate the trauma that it held and then I went and poured it all around my property

and I'd make an energetic barrier particularly at the top of my rooms where I do my magic work and you know group space work and it's something that I can reflect on and i can go and i can activate the blood blood will tell you know the story it's like us you know the witches of old who'd put the circle of salt around to create the magic container we literally can do that um with our blood and i you know you whisper things to your blood but as i was saying before i think the importance of our blood is when we listen to what she's trying to tell us because when we ignore her she's going to get louder and louder and louder because she's here to teach us the medicine if we don't slow down if we don't notice what we're bleeding into, then we are going to be, she's going to get louder.

She's going to tell us. So back to busy Dr. Danielle going through junior doctor years, pretending there's nothing magical about her. Her shamanic drum is tied up under a bed. There's nothing magical to see here, guys. I've shut it all down. We don't have time or capacity for healing, Danielle. That's not what we need right now but still the medicine calls you it was like these little

tendrils that are reaching out going hey danielle be like no no no i'm a busy doctor i can't speak to you right now sorry just you know put a pause on it um the other person who'd bring me out of it was the uncle um the nuncary because i would see him um at conferences uh and stuff like that and you know he would always remind me that there was another aspect of myself so when you um i remember once being in an emergency in the like ED and going to see a patient and I was grinning and bearing through the pain I was filling pads every you know half an hour to an hour massive clots the size of half my palm coming out but I still couldn't be because I didn't want to let people down I turn up to a shift because the hospital's busy and, you know, people were sick and I couldn't, you know, let people down

because I was a good girl. I was a good team player. I put everyone else's needs before myself because, again, this is what women are conditioned to do. We learn this from the youth just through the very part that we're born into this world as women, where the patriarchy rule, where the colonizers stole our magic and disassociated us from our, for our inherent ancestral magic that we deserve to have. So because of those things, I was trying to be

very helpful and I was just putting myself behind and I almost collapsed. I was walking and out the back where all the ambulance was ramping you know life is hectic works hectic and I stood down and I just turned to one of the nurses and I went I think I have to go home like I am so so so in so much pain and the male consultant came and saw me and I just went I'm just bleeding so bad I need to go and he was like dude yep go don't talk about blood like yep go women's business go but it was really interesting there was no there was no thing like can we help you take a tablet because I was so pig-headed that I wouldn't help myself.

So coming back to the question for your women who are experiencing this is how can you be kind to yourself? How can you sit with the medicine of your blood? What is she trying to tell you in those when she changes and she becomes more demanding? What is she telling you? What do you need to change in your life and and i see this a lot with women my patients as well and i have seen it ever since i was a doctor that this is the the awakener the galvanizer where you realize stuff that's working in your life and stuff that's not and you become

very unapologetic in who you turn into be and for your partners that can be quite scary because they're like hang on you're not the nice little bride that i married 20 odd years ago who are you and you turn around and you're like almost channeling carly the the goddess of destruction and death and you're like this is I am. This is the truth of who I am. You better fucking get on board or fuck off, you know. I love it. I love it. I am here. I am here for that idea of us rolling with the dark goddess.

And when I talk about rolling, we're driving in a convertible car. Our arms are hanging out down the side and bitches be rolling. We've got some tunes pumping up and we don't give a fuck we don't care and this is the other beauty as you get older and you go through that journey we uncouple from the the male gaze i'm not interested in the things that i learned as a girl and this is a girl who's been raped and a girl who's experienced trauma in her childhood about how to keep myself safe I've always been told all through school that you're too much you're too loud you're too this you're too that you're too

smart you're too you know this you're too confident let's take you down a couple of pegs all right that's just the way it is when you're a strong woman now take that trauma take that um uncharacteristic uh constriction and watch her explode watch her explode and then people understand the people who love you the people who cheerlead for you that your true female friends they're they're going get it, fuck yeah, I'm here with you, I'm cheerleading with you. But other women who are still not at that place of honouring you on your journey and advocating for you on your journey,

they, you know, it's almost like the glass ceiling where they sort of that horizontal lateral violence that you get that women are nasty to each other and will try to tear them each other down or they body shame or they do all those things because look society's taught us women that no one's worse than us than beating ourselves up i can can look at myself in the mirror like teenage Danielle, young adult Danielle, young mother adult Danielle, used to think she was big and, you know, not beautiful and all of those things. And this is when you become uncoupled from the male gaze.

You can do whatever the fuck you want. I go to a gym. I lift weights. And one day I remember going, I haven't got matching socks. I went, no one's looking at me. Who cares? Who cares?

Off you go. You know? And I feel for the women who are young and in that gaze and have to, you know, use that in a way to make themselves feel okay and not to feel okay but to feel unthreatened in the world or to feel safe in the world because it is good when you have someone, when you're on the side of goodness or people who can protect you, that's great, but it's when you're isolated and you're by yourself and you're trying to make, you're becoming the side of goodness or people who can protect you that's great but it's when you're

isolated and you're by yourself and you're trying to make you're becoming a change maker that's when it's scary and it's been really scary as a doctor to reclaim the sort of medicine that I do because there's not many people like me and I'm really blessed that i have been acknowledged through my cultural lineage as a healer because i do get lots of people off to doctors on the down low who message me and go but i'm a healer as well and we are some of us are called to medicine because we are healers in our ancestral lineage we all hung out at the temples and the goddess has put us in here she's seated us in here now for us to all have this great awakening where we're helping the earth shake the fleas off her back and be reborn into something new i saw a video of you working

it's at vera wellness right with um dr peter right who we interviewed about pelvic pain on the podcast that's how i found you so grateful to her but to see the space that you work in there with the women and it was a video of a workshop around perimenopause and menopause and you had something red and you were marking the wrist the inside of the wrists of the women and to see themselves looking at this and seeing their the power of the initiation they were going through being shown visibly on the outside and you were with your drum and you were all on the land together and the caption was something like imagine if this is what we were seeing in the media around what what it is to go through perimenopause and menopause. I thought, hell yes.

Like this is. It's such a beautiful place to work and I always feel very humbled when I drive there because I can literally see it from, it's not far from where I live, which is lovely and it's all on this land and this land was really powerful and there were really beautiful women's spaces as well. We have a creek that's not far from here. And when I go there, I've taken my pregnant ladies there

and we connect with the baby in that space next to the water. And we have like that spirit, like it's just that time before she is about to give birth, that little sort of dreamy space in between, and we go there and we connect to country. And when I took her down there and we were doing a bit of drumming and I was doing a healing on her and, you know, just talking to the baby and connecting it all up,

in my mind's eye I saw that Aboriginal women coming forward and coming out of the ether and they were like you know this was women's business again the way that i do medicine is this reclamation of women's business i like to look at it as a decolonizing lens in the women's business space and it's so important and the the practice at vera is part of that dreaming a part of that the the part of the process of decolonization because it's it's the way medicine should be and we're able to act and we're able to act as doctors but we're also holding space for women it's very difficult when you're a doctor in in general practice or family physician or whatever

you call it wherever you're listening to around the world when you see a patient for 15 minutes you get an energetic load you you feel them energetically about what's going on for them and i want to have those deep yarns that's that's what i and i want to practice that deep listening to them and listen to what is being said in the physical realm and the spiritual realm I tune in and I and I want to have that time because women deserve it for too for too long we're being pushed outdoors or we're being we're being shut down or we're being told it's not important when Peter wrote her book on pelvic pain, I spent about the first week crying, crying, because the journey I had with my pelvic pain and that it was investigated and you try to do the right thing and you try to go through the medicinal thing and you think there's something wrong with my head, like what's going on? And one doctor said to me, you have what we call a headache in your pelvis.

It's not to say there's nothing wrong, but we can't really see what's wrong. And that destroyed me. And then I started realizing that on an energetic level, my body was holding pain there. And it was responding as tightness in my, you know, the pelvis so it's a dream that women we can we know we know that things like birthing bleeding and cessation of bleeding and dying needs to be done differently and that's I do a thing with little children um and little girls particularly called little witch school and particularly during um covid i did it internationally and so i had all these like little girls dressed up as witches but what i want to do you know i just i just died i just couldn't even cope with how cute it was um it gave me all the feels but is this part this is part of my legacy work is that, you know,

at the age of seven little children start losing their connection to magic. If you look at little children, I have this innate sense of feeling, sensing, you know, it's something, you know, I see a dragon or I see, you know, grandma's coming to talk to me or something and we quite often go, oh, no, darling, darling there's nothing there they're told there's nothing there it comes back to that artwork at the beginning they said there was nothing there and this is just a lie that we're sold and our little children these are the children who are going to you know be connected to the earth and help us transition it's almost like um you know the earth heating up and i was talking to one of the doctors

um thea at um vera the other day and we talked about it's almost like the earth is being pushed into perimenopause herself with the heat yes and and the the things that are being done to her body the violence that's being shown the care that's not being taken of her children as a mother as a mother that must be so imagine that like we i talk about it with my doctors when i talk about the stuff the truth telling that happened in australia and again it's with every indigenous place where they come and they separate mother and child. They take the children away and they tell you you're not allowed to practise your culture, you're not allowed to do your ceremony, you're not allowed to do that.

You're disconnected from something that has kept you well. But the earth, she holds all of that for us. Yeah. And I think that that's we can't be perimenopausal women without recognising our connection to the earth. Yeah. I'm thinking back to that moment where there was the huge Gulf oil spill, they called it.

And do you know Eve Ensler who wrote the vagina monologues? Yes. She was speaking about it as like a wound, you know, a wound of the mother. When this blood, when this, I call it blood, when this oil pelvic bowl and that blood, that oil pouring through the crack in her body. it's um we we can't separate the two and perhaps by coming back to this root of our body there is healing that is being done for the earth like you say she's she's okay she's going to survive but this perimenopause that we're that we as a human culture are pushing her into we women who bleed have a role in in healing that we haven't been kind to our mother we haven't been kind to our mother and we haven't been kind to our kin and i talk about our kin as in in my culture

we our kin relations are with the plants the animals they're our totems they're the way that we navigate the world when i went to Canada last year I went to a conference and we were really blessed to have the the native people of Canada and Vancouver the Squamish people come and speak with us but I was really taken by a ring and it's the ring of an orca so and I wear it all the time and this is my symbol of menopause and perimenopause is the orca because we know that the orca like humans um is very powerful the perimenopausal the menopausal woman is the the whale the orca is very powerful she helps keep her tribe keep her children safe um through the grandmother hypothesis you know why do we exist why why aren't we dying off what what's our reason here

is perimenopausal women if we're just meant to be biologically just breeding children and stuff what's the use of a perimenopausal woman is that they are the ones who hold the knowledge they're the knowledge wisdom keepers for their family and for their tribe but a lot of us are reclaiming it because it was forcibly stolen from us so it takes a while and for the women who are just starting their perimenopausal journey is about spending time on the earth and laying with your back on the earth and letting her hold you and letting yourself whisper to her and let your tears fall on the earth because I think that that is where the healing begins

and acknowledging the harm that has been done to her and to us and to our ancestors and to the women. Light the candle for your ancestors. Build that ancestral altar. Learn to cook, learn to cook the way of your ancestors. Make a traditional meal. Honour those women who went before you because we're much more empowered now because we're allowed.

We're allowed to get an education. We're allowed to own property. My grandmother, when my grandfather was electrocuted on a wharf in Cairns in North Queensland, because she was a Torres Strait Islander woman. She wasn't allowed to own property. So, again, this is a woman who was going through perimenopause and her whole livelihood and her six boys were going to be homeless because of the colour of her skin skin because of her indigeneity

um so my dad had to leave school at 16 and say that he was cutting cane to support his family and he had the same name as his father so he had to say the house was his so it that's in my time so we have this great thing the world has this great thing that we think things happened such a long time ago you know the the impacts of the victorian era in england um has such a great impact on us we're or angels that's all we are um yeah so it's a great, it's an exciting time to be alive, I think. And it's an exciting time to be reclaiming us, our magic. No wonder that we're raging. Like when we've got this streaming through us from our heritage,

there is a lot to rage at. And something that's happening for me in this conversation is you're making sense of how long this takes, know because like you said it's a long altar and I'm thinking of the the four-year long altar of infertility that I journeyed through it was a long dark night four fucking years you know and the rage the grief that was pouring through me and it was I knew well I simultaneously knew that it was so much bigger than this longing I had to meet my child but also it was as big as this longing I have which is oceanic and universal and now he's here and I'm so bloody grateful so bloody grateful but um it takes so much time and I feel like women like you who can

contextualize that for us we don't feel so mad with all of this deep huge emotion that's pouring through us because it makes sense you are you are telling us why why we feel so angry why we feel so much grief you know thank you you. You're very welcome. And it's, well, I'm just getting all goosebumps there too. I think there's a lot of energy magic working right now. Yeah, I feel it. I don't want to be rude, but my nipples are standing up. Sorry.

That's next level when that happens. Yeah. Wow. Thank you, Danielle. that's that's next level when that uh happens yeah yeah wow thank you daniel i mean i could talk to you for hours and days and weeks and years clearly it's been so i mean very healing for me personally to sit with you and i can only imagine how our listeners are feeling as we wrap up this conversation. And I wonder, you know, if you could come back and we can talk again another time, because I feel like there's so much more to say. But yeah, is there anything you'd like to share in closing today? I just would urge your listeners to understand what they've been told and sold to themselves, to understand that process of they said

there's nothing there, the modernising and suburbanising of our magic and how it's been built, you know, built upon. That magic is still there underneath and I urge you all to go excavate it go find it reclaim it stake your land call her back to you sit with the earth um and don't believe it because you're inherently magical and that's that's the medicine that we hold as women yes and all people have that magic when we can connect back to our great mother yes we need to do skin to skin with her like i tell my mums and babies oh yes i just thought of that that's what we need to do we need to skin to skin with our great mother and when you think about free

bleeding directly onto the earth that's so that's in that skin to skin mode isn't it if if people are loving what you're hearing and i'm sure they are how can they connect with you and your work and what you're up to in the world yeah i'm i'm in the process of building my 13 moons medicine um website which you'll be i think i'll be doing lots of course courses on there um through my dr danielle arabita website um i'm planning on doing a couple of workshops and one dropped in last week around the dragon mother which is about our initiation in menopause um so i think that there'll be in person and online stuff that you can do with me um and you know sometimes i bring in my other world kin with us um i sometimes like to hang out with dragons and uh hashtag celtic

islander as my sister likes to say um so you know there's all sorts of magic i'm on instagram under those two handles and um yeah so you should reach out. And you can contact me through my Dr. Danielle website, which is up and working. Thank you so much, Danielle. Thank you. Thank you to all of the beings who have spoken to you and are moving through you and, yeah,

to all the beings and your ancestors of your lambs oh what a morning what a way to start the day enjoy your bleed enjoy the rest of your day what a way to start my bleed yeah yeah yeah thank you so much so much love to you thank you so much for being with us today. I loved this conversation with Dr. Danielle, as I'm sure you could tell. If you're interested in Alexandra and Shani's course, Menopause, The Great Awakener, you can find out more at redschoolmenopause.com. And that's it for this week. I'll be with you again next week. And until then, keep living life according to your own brilliant rhythm.