The Midlife Temple

The Erotic Hot Flash: Why Your Pleasure Deserves Protecting

What if a hot flash could feel erotic? For close to two years in late perimenopause, Tanya Leake woke to a flush across her chest and breasts that felt close to orgasmic, and she began to look forward to it. Tanya, author of HOT FLASH! on Substack and a board-certified health and wellness coach, joins Luce Beaulieu in the Erotic Sagescence Series to talk about desire, the nervous system and pleasure in perimenopause, menopause and beyond.

In this episode, we explore:

• Tanya's erotic hot flashes, and why she kept them secret for so long

• Feeling a hot flash as sensation instead of threat, and the menopause mindset

• Libido, empowerment and why being informed helps us feel better

• Desire as an ecosystem, and the research on couple pause and double pause

• Ripple pause and multi pause, Tanya's own terms for how our changes reach our families and communities

• Sex beyond intercourse, and why so many gray divorces are initiated by women

• How to protect your pleasure by continuing to explore it

Embers Collective is Luce's five-month immersion for women in perimenopause, menopause and beyond, beginning December 3: https://themidlifetemple.com/embers-collective

Watch the replay of Stoke Your Inner Fire, Luce's free 90-minute workshop: https://themidlifetemple.com/stokeyourinnerfire

Find Tanya at https://embodywell.com and on Substack at https://changingwiththechange.substack.com.

The Midlife Temple is written by me, Luce Beaulieu. I’m a certified Somatic Educator for Women and Erotic Sagescence guide, for women in perimenopause, menopause and beyond who are ready to reclaim their life force energy. On Thursday, October 29 at 10 am ET, I’m teaching Stoke Your Inner Fire, a free 90-minute workshop for women who want to reclaim their desire and rise as the matriarchs this world needs: save your seat here.

What if the way you were taught to reach orgasm is the very thing holding your pleasure back? Pelvic health and somatic sexuality specialist Tamara Doering joins Luce Beaulieu to talk about softening, slowing down and tending the tissues of a changing body.

For years, Tamara Doering clenched to climax. Her body went rigid, her mind went into fantasy, and orgasm felt like something she had to work very hard to reach. Then a guided practice invited her to relax her tissues and surrender into sensation, and everything she believed about her body changed.

In this episode of the Erotic Sagescence Series, Luce Beaulieu sits down with Tamara, who works in integrative pelvic health and somatic sexuality, for a candid conversation about pleasure in perimenopause, menopause and beyond. They talk about why a changing body needs more time and more slowness, why so many women push through sex they no longer want, and what becomes possible when we stop overriding our bodies and start listening to them. Tamara also shares what she sees on her table every week, from thinning tissues and numbness to women who sleep through the night without getting up to pee after just a couple of sessions.

In this episode, we explore:

How Tamara moved from clenching to climax to orgasms that can last 45 minutes to an hour

Why it can take a good 45 minutes for a woman’s body to become truly receptive, and why there is zero shame in needing lubrication

Why touch has to be even slower than we think as we age, and how heightened sensitivity can make rushed touch feel like sandpaper

Labial massage with coconut and castor oil, jade egg practice, and why tending your own tissues matters so much

Why around half of women do Kegels incorrectly, why they belong on the exhale, and why a pelvic floor that feels loose is often too tight

The mirror between your jaw, your voice and your pelvic floor

Saying “I feel complete,” stopping without guilt, and why pushing through out of obligation is a trespass against your own body

The after-sex debrief, and how naming sensation out loud deepens pleasure for both partners

Why the nervous system and decades of depletion have to be met before eros can rise again

Moments to listen for:

“Oh my gosh, I don’t have to clench to climax. I can reach that by actually feeling, by noticing sensation.” (Tamara)

“If you have tension in your jaw, you’re going to have tension in your pelvic floor.” (Tamara)

“A lot of women have never experienced touch that is just for the sake of receiving.” (Tamara)

“Anything that is not respectful of that rhythm just ends up feeling like sandpaper.” (Luce)

Mentioned in this episode:

• VITA guided pleasure practices• Jade egg practice• Coconut oil and castor oil for labial and tissue massage

Luis Mojica, whose work spans nutrition, herbalism, somatic experiencing and trauma recovery

Go deeper with Embers Collective. Embers Collective is Luce’s five-month immersion for midlife women who want to be pleasure-drenched and in their full power. Tamara joins as guest teacher for Month 3, Striking the Spark, devoted to yoni vitality. The immersion begins December 3, and doors close November 22: https://themidlifetemple.com/embers-collective

About Tamara Doering. Tamara works in integrative pelvic health and somatic sexuality, supporting women of all ages through incontinence, prolapse, heaviness and painful sex, and guiding them back to their pleasure in new ways. Find her at https://tamaradoering.com and on Instagram at @tamara.doering.

About Luce Beaulieu. Luce is a certified Somatic Educator for Women and Erotic Sagescence guide, and the founder of The Midlife Temple. She supports women in perimenopause, menopause and beyond to reclaim their life force energy. Read and subscribe at The Midlife Temple on Substack.

This episode contains unedited conversation about sexuality and the body. It is shared for education and inspiration and is not a substitute for medical care. If you are living with pain, incontinence or prolapse, please seek support from a qualified practitioner.

The Midlife Temple is written by me, Luce Beaulieu. I’m a certified Somatic Educator for Women and Erotic Sagescence guide, for women in perimenopause, menopause and beyond who are ready to reclaim their life force. If this conversation stirs something in you, join me on Thursday, October 29 at 10 am ET for Stoke Your Inner Fire, my free workshop for women who want their libido back without adding more to their routine.

Some sentences land in my body before my mind has caught up with them. When my friend and fellow priestess Alana McClure said, almost in passing, that wisdom plus Eros equals bliss and reclamation, I felt it travel down my spine and settle somewhere warm in my belly, because she had just named the two strands I have been weaving my whole life’s work around.

The Midlife Temple is a labor of love ad desire. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Erotic Sagescence is the sensual and powerful ripening of women as we age, the moment when our Eros, meaning our desire, our pleasure and our creative life force, finally joins the wisdom of the sage we have earned through decades of living. Alana’s equation holds both strands in a single breath, and in this conversation we followed them wherever they wanted to take us.

A circle that feeds itself

When Alana looks back at her youth, she remembers Eros without wisdom as frenetic and grasping, and she believed back then that pleasure was something that came over her from the outside. Bliss, as she lives it now, is a state that rises from inside her own body, and reclamation is what happens once she understands that direction. Her equation is a circle, she told me, and I felt the same truth in my own body. This is what I mean by Erotic Sagescence: when we allow wisdom and Eros to meet, each one keeps amplifying the other, and the ripening deepens with every turn of the spiral.

The sage and the lioness

I shared something I keep observing in the women around me, which is that we often age along one of two roads. Some of us become the wise elder, luminous and ethereal and a little dry, while others become all Eros, with bright colours and dancing and their wisdom tucked somewhere out of sight. Alana named them as archetypes: the sage our modern folklore has stripped of any whisper of sexuality, and the lioness, a word she much prefers to cougar. The danger, she said, lies in letting either archetype harden into an identity, because each one then denounces what the other carries. The sage comes to believe her fire must burn out for her wisdom to be credible, and the lioness fears that too much wisdom will cost her the spark she fought so hard to recover. Both are shaped by a youth culture that has taught so many of us we are broken, when in truth we are in the middle of a life transformation and our bodies are asking to be met in a completely new way. Erotic Sagescence is the braid between the sage and the lioness, woven differently in every woman.

Tending the Eros strand

As I age, my Eros no longer arrives on tap, in the same way that easy genital orgasms no longer arrive on tap, and I have had to become deliberate about tending it. I carve out time for pleasure the way I carve out time for anything I truly love, and right now that means sitting in sisterhood inside Alana’s yoni egg circle and returning to my altar each day. I stopped using the word discipline years ago because it carried an old judgment of never being enough, and devotion changed everything for me, since I am always devoted to something and I get to choose what it is. When a woman spends decades overgiving and living in survival mode, her life force goes underground and her desire goes with it, which is why this devotion matters so much and why it sits at the heart of what I’ll share on October 29. The wisdom strand has its own shadow, which is the temptation to become rigid and certain, the elder who tells younger women they will understand one day. Its light, for me, is a deepening of intuition and spiritual awakening, and I have found that the more devotedly I tend my erotic life force, the more my feminine wisdom opens.

The strawberry at the buffet

So what happens to Eros when it runs without wisdom? Alana answered with an image I can still taste. Picture yourself walking up to a buffet, where Eros without wisdom grabs at everything at once. Eros woven with wisdom lets the mouth water, drinks in the colours and flavours, listens inward and chooses the strawberry, then eats it with full presence, knowing it was her own choice among many. Wisdom, she said, has little to do with knowledge or intelligence and everything to do with discernment, presence and sensuality, and the word that rose in me as she spoke was savour. To me, savouring is erotic wisdom in its purest form, because it is the body knowing exactly what it wants and taking the time to receive it fully.

Her buffet carried me straight back to Florida when I was a little girl, where my father loved to take us to all-you-can-eat buffets. I always started with chocolate pudding, then chicken wings, then chocolate pudding again, and after a while my worried parents simply let me be. I still remember the triumph of it, and I believe children know instinctively how to lace pleasure through everything. Alana then shared that her own mother, as a schoolgirl, would hide in a corner to eat her dessert before the teachers could see, then return to her sandwich like a good girl. Between our two stories sits the whole question of conditioning, and of the brakes that quietly dim a woman’s fire over a lifetime, most of which have nothing to do with sex.

When wisdom loses its Eros

The other side of the equation asks what happens to wisdom when the Eros has gone out of it. For me, it turns dry, brittle and rigid, until it feels almost lifeless. Alana felt chills as I said this, and she spoke about delight, which we tend to reserve for children, along with surprise, levity and laughter. A woman can be deeply wise and still laugh until she cries, and braiding Eros into her wisdom is what keeps that delight alive. I believe the path of Erotic Sagescence asks us to explore the nuances between the poles, asking first how our own erotic wisdom feels from the inside, then how it looks, and only last how others perceive it.

Desire as compass and arrow

We landed on desire, which had been present beneath every word. I think of desire as a compass that shows the direction and as an arrow whose tip pierces through time and space toward what we long for. Alana feels it leading from her heart, and she follows its pull without attaching herself to the outcome, because sometimes the desire itself is the gift, and sometimes the path leads somewhere far more interesting than the destination we imagined. She also spoke about approving of your own desire, exactly as it is, in this very moment.

For me, desire is the clearest expression of our life force and the living heart of Erotic Sagescence. I work with desire, arousal, pleasure and orgasm as four expressions of the same inner fire, and desire is the one that tells us most about how alive that fire still is, in our sexuality and far beyond it. Whatever has gone quiet in a woman’s body, her desire is still glowing underneath, and when she braids it with the wisdom she has earned, she begins to ripen into the most sensual and powerful version of herself, which is exactly the woman this world needs her to become.

When Alana named her equation, I knew right away that it was the energy foundation of everything I’m offering this season, beginning on Thursday, October 29 with my free workshop, Stoke Your Inner Fire. If you’ve ever thought “I just want to want again,” these ninety minutes are for you. We’ll look at why the herbs, gels, supplements and even hormones haven’t brought your desire back, name the brakes that have been dimming your fire, and move through a gentle, fully clothed practice where you feel in your own body what it’s like to give to yourself first. You’ll leave knowing your fire is still there, waiting for you to become the one it burns for.

If Thursday morning is already full for you, register anyway, since everyone who signs up receives the replay and two gifts from me, whether they join live or not.

For the women who feel called to keep tending that fire after the workshop, Stoke Your Inner Fire is also the threshold into Embers Collective, my five-month immersion to become your most pleasure-drenched and powerful self, which begins in late November.

If you’re a woman in your fifties or beyond who has felt her Eros come back with more wisdom than it had before, I’d love for you to leave a few words in the comments for the women reading after you.

Find Alana on Substack or on her website. Her next Yoni Egg Medicine Circle opens a new 16-week portal at the new moon following January 6.

TW: identity death, suicidal ideation....Menopause is an embodied initiation. That's a hill I'll die on.

I came to this realization through my own experience with menopause, an experience I did not have words for while I was in it.

More recently, through a rite of passage in late June, I was able to start mapping out the initiatory elements of menopause.

A rite of passage is happening to you whether or not you agree to it

A rite of passage is a ritual where a human being changes status and is asked to start embodying a new identity, which usually aligns with a new season of life. A girl begins to bleed. A woman becomes a mother. A woman finishes bleeding and enters her mature years.

Indigenous societies marked all three, but we live in a society that pathologizes, shames or in the best of cases, stays silent.

One of my mentors, Jane Hardwicke Collings, said something that has stayed with me: Whatever happens around your rite of passage IS your rite of passage.

Menopause is not optional. It is not a decision you make. It is happening in your body, on its own schedule, with or without your consent, with or without a ceremony. What is optional is whether anyone helps you understand what is happening to you, and whether a community celebrates you for crossing the threshold.

I understood none of this during my own crossing, sleep deprived, anxious, alone and feeling like I was going crazy.

If I had had even an inkling of what an initiation truly is, I would have understood that I needed support, and not just a prescription and a list of supplements to take.

Because being initiated is about being in relationship.

With your community, the elements, the ancestors, with the land, and with the unseen forces that shape us and our world.

It’s bounded in time and space, so that inside it the ordinary world stops. It’s held by a group that is guided by a communal intention. Gifts are offered, prayers are made, and at the end, the community says: Your experience happened, and we see who you have become.

Almost no woman receives that.

And I really do believe that if we did, there would be so much more freedom and empowerment on the other side of menopause.

An embodied female initiation is not the hero’s journey

Female initiations have a rhythm, texture and an alchemical process that is not that of the hero’s journey. It is not riding out to battle dragons and coming home with a new found way of seeing the world, to marry the girl and live happily ever after.

It’s a process where we have to go deep down into our Underworld by way of descending, being stripped and humbled, dying, resurrecting and ascending as a different being.

The myth that describes this the best is that of Inanna, and I found her after I completed my menopause, when I was trying to make sense of what had happened to me.

Reading it, allowing it to permeate my consciousness, and feeling its truth in my embodied experience changed everything.

The way the story goes, Inanna descends into the Underworld, and at each gate she is progressively asked to surrender her crown, her jewels, her breastplate, her robe, until she arrives at the bottom stripped of everything, including her voice, her memory and her life force energy. There, she meets her sister Ereshkigal, she is killed, and she is hung on a meat hook for three days before resurrecting (sound familiar?). And only after this is she able to ascend.

Descent. Death. Resurrection. Ascent.

She came out a different person because she went through all four stages.

And this is the whole problem with how we consider menopause right now.

Almost everything I have seen written or said about menopause does one of two things: 1) it prepares a woman for the Descent, and it tells her not to be afraid of the dark; and 2) it celebrates what waits on the other side of the initiation (i.e.: the wisdom and the freedom) and the woman who finally stops asking for permission to live her one precious life.

Both of them are true. But without death, they are incomplete and, frankly, dishonest.

The Midlife Temple is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The meat hook

The actual death part, where you don’t know who you are anymore, and you have no idea who you are becoming, but you know that you are not who you used to be, THAT is the true crossing.

You have been stripped of youth, beauty, status, role, of everything you could hide behind or hold up as a mask, a protection, or a tool. Some of it was taken, and some of it you took off yourself on the way down.

And now you are in a state, identity death, that feels permanent.

That is the mystery, the agony and the magic of it.When I went through the death portal, it started with fleeting thoughts, that it would be so much easier if a bus would just take me out. Or if I would just not wake up. And it scared me, because what is pathologically called “suicidal ideation” is frightening when there is no explanation for it.

But our death must come before our Second Spring. And this death portal is not something that very many people want to map out, let alone experience. It is comprised of many stages, one of them being the Dark Night of the Soul, which usually comes just before the breaking of dawn.And in the middle of my darkest night, really thick in it, I was convinced that I was going to be taken to an asylum, that I was going to lose my house, my son, and that my life was basically over.

It was one of the most genuinely terrorizing things I have ever gone through. I came through by asking for support; the initiation does not require you to do this part by yourself. Please tell someone you trust today. This part of the initiation was never meant to be done alone.

That feeling that I was dying, and that maybe, I was somehow already dead. And it makes so much sense, because the colonized Western mind cannot conceive of anything on the other side of death.

But this is also the part where a woman finally lets herself feel that something is over.

And she has to feel it to accept it, and to transition to something else.

Because if there’s no death, there can be no resurrection.

Plenty of programs will help you skip it. Down and back up, no death, no meat hook for three days. And of course, no resurrection.

It ends up being another performance, to avoid the discomfort of aging in an ageist society where older women are considered irrelevant.

The necessity of wintering

Spring always comes after winter; there is no other option.

But the only way spring comes is by allowing the full, unmanaged, mysterious duration of winter.

Because in winter, the seeds go dormant. Many traditional indigenous cultures speak about the dreaming of the seeds, the liminal space where their potential is forming. But as soon as warmth returns and the ground thaws, the seeds can start their growth cycle. Inevitably.

Exactly like women when they start their inner Second Spring.

The golden eggs

I first came across this concept in a short book called Experiencing Menopause with Empowerment and Joy: A Shamanic Approach. There wasn’t much there, only two or three paragraphs.

But when I read about these golden eggs, a lightning bolt went through my bodymind.

Over the last few years, with much research, meditation, receiving transmissions and remembering, I came to believe that every woman carries a distinct legacy inside her.

Something only she can bring into the world.

Many women create extraordinary things before menopause: children, organizations, innovations, etc.

And… there are seeds that only mature after we stop producing human eggs. Until then, they lay dormant.

They are what has been, or still is, dreaming in your winter.

And if a woman never fully crosses, if she skips the death part, or is shamed out of the fullness of her Descent, or is handed a list of symptoms to manage and vitamins to take to hasten her Ascent, those seeds can simply never awaken. The potential for this woman’s legacy is lost to the world.

And …

I made this episode very spontaneously at the cottage, and I want to share a little bit about where I actually was, emotionally, when I hit record.

We are three weeks into my first group immersion, Portals of Liberation, and two weeks ago I completed a rite of passage into wise woman and grandmother of my spiritual community. I am also in the middle of a huge life transition and grief portal.

My 16-year-old son is slowly separating himself from me, which is normal, and my 90 year old mother is in the last months or years of her life, from a deteriorating condition that started a few decades ago and that is irreversible.

Some days, all of this feels like being tumbled under crashing waves and dragged repeatedly on sharp rocks. Other days, it feels more like I’m silently drowning in sadness. And through all of it, I keep coming back to the same word for what this is: crucible.

I have only ever felt something comparable to this once before, when I went through my menopause initiation. But this time is different. Because this time, I am conscious inside of it and I am less weighed down by unresolved trauma, and not overwhelmed by the sheer physiological revolution that menopause put my body through.

I also now understand the actual shape and stages of female initiation, which does not make any of this easier, but it does make it far less dramatic. It supercharges what wants to be generative in it, instead of letting me collapse into what feels only like loss.

All of this is the ground of this week’s topic: ageing and ageism. And specifically, gendered ageism.

We want so badly to believe we live in an inclusive society. But gendered ageism is still deeply entrenched underneath that belief, deciding who gets to stay visible and who gets pushed into irrelevance.

In this episode, I go into that fully.

I start with what has to come first, which is naming clearly that BIPOC women and femmes carry a heavier version of this entire passage than white women do. From there I bring in Susan Sontag’s 1972 truth that ageing enhances a man’s status and destroys a woman’s, and how every time we lie about our age we become an accomplice in our own diminishment.

I talk about the veil of invisibility, and the two main nervous system patterns I see constantly in myself and in my clients. And I talk about something I have never told anyone before, about when I became a secret expert on Botox and fillers in my late forties.

And then I bring us into erotic sagescence, the language I use for what actually becomes possible on the other side of naming all of this.

Sometime this weekend I am also going live on this exact topic inside The Midlife Temple, my beloved Facebook community. And I would love for you to be there.

If you have a listen, I would love to know where this episode lands in your body.

With love, Luce 💖

The Midlife Temple is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

NotesNotes

Sagescence is a term coined by Jane Hardwick Collings, describing menopause as the wisdom-keeper bookend to adolescence, with matrescence as motherhood’s counterpart in between. My erotic sagescence builds on her original framing.

Erotic individuation, and the broader teaching of erotic sagescence as a reclamation of desire, pleasure, and sovereignty in midlife, is my own synthesis, developed through The Midlife Temple and Portals of Liberation.

The veil of invisibility is a phrase used in feminist scholarship on ageing women’s experience of social erasure, most notably in Michelle Meagher’s writing on invisibility and midlife women.

The observation that ageing enhances a man’s status while diminishing a woman’s, and that concealment makes a woman complicit in her own diminishment, comes from Susan Sontag’s 1972 essay “The Double Standard of Aging.”

The framing of age as a vector for stigmatization and domination, parallel to gender and race, draws on the work of French scholar Juliette Rennes.

Four years ago, I descended into the Underworld.

That’s what my menopause initiation felt like. I was totally, totally lost in pain and I didn’t know if there was any meaning to it. And to be very honest, I didn’t know if I was going to survive it. It took a profound toll on my health, and especially on my mental health.

But it was in the acceptance of that crucible, in finally stopping fighting the Descent, that something extraordinary happened. I reconnected with who I am at the very deepest level of my core essence. And in that place, even while I was still in the throes of the ego death on the meat hook and everything that comes with it, I reconnected with what I call The Goddess. That deeper, wider knowing that connects us all—but women and female bodies in particular. We have a specific aptitude for this. A capacity to receive from a body of wisdom as ancient as the universe itself.

And it was through that reconnection, through uploads and downloads, through synchronicities and heightened states of intuition and clarity I had never experienced before, that I received a vision.

This is the vision I want to share with you today.

I saw us as an army.

Women of all ages, but definitely over 45. All body shapes, all skin colors, all types of hair. Dressed in the most beautiful, extravagant, vibrant clothing you can imagine. Draped in jewelry, fully alive, fully radiant, totally fierce.

I’m smiling right now just remembering it!

Because in this vision, we were anchored. As deep into the earth as we were connected to the cosmic forces of the universe. Able to walk and to act and to make decisions and to say: “Nope, not this! This is over my dead f*****g body and I will die on that hill.” Or: “YES, this. This is the thing! This is what I’m amplifying with everything I have!”

And we were connected to what I call our golden eggs.

After menopause, we can no longer have human babies in physical form. But we have these golden eggs, these spiritual, energetic seeds of creation that we can only access after menopause.

This, my friends, is the real secret.

The one nobody tells us. Because we can only access them when we are in our full vibrant aliveness, totally plugged in, generating our own energy through our deepest, most sovereign source of power. Which lives in our pelvic bowl. In our yoni, our womb, our pleasure and in all of the life force energy we can create and circulate to heal ourselves, to regenerate our bodies, to open our minds and our third eye, and to amplify our gifts and our legacy work.

This is my vision.

And it’s what has been sustaining me—and my clients—for the last four years.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand about why this vision feels so radical.

It’s because everything pertaining to the Feminine, in this society, has been inverted.

I want to say some things here that might challenge you, depending on your values, your beliefs, your relationship with religion. And I’m going to say them anyway, because this is exactly the kind of thing I need to name.

Everything in our culture that has to do with women, with the Feminine, with true feminine leadership—not a woman in a boss role, but Feminine leadership in its purest organic form—has been completely and totally inverted, subverted and sent underground.

When you step outside of religious conditioning and look clearly at the miracle of life, at how life begins in a woman’s body, at the sheer magic of what we carry, it makes no sense at all that the female body would be considered dirty, gross, and as something to be pathologized, managed, hidden or shamed. It makes no sense that there wouldn’t be a single woman in any of the great spiritual leadership traditions. No women prophets. No women priests. And God only known as a man.

It’s an inversion.

And it’s the same with aging.

Instead of moving into irrelevance, of disappearing into the void as we get older, elder women were the leaders. It was our role and our service to bring our wisdom to the stewardship of communities. To guide and to see what others couldn’t yet see.

That’s been inverted too. And women’s aging, the taboo and shame around it, is the last bastion. We’ve made real headway around menstruation, birthing, around our rights to work and build and own money and property.

But where we have made almost no progress—until now, until this movement that is underway as we speak—is aging as power.

And it starts early, in our 30s. The first gray hair someone comments on. The belly that’s changing shape. The inner critic that gets louder and louder, fed by patriarchal values we absorbed before we had any language for them. Because it’s the water we swim in and the air we breathe.

But in the Aging as Power movement, there is no more editing ourselves. No more managing, fixing, shrinking.

No more.

I want us to turn things around.

I have found, tested, lived, refined through hundreds of one-on-one sessions over these four years, powerful ways to re-pattern that inner critic. To heal and reconnect the inner parts of us that have been abandoned. To rewire the neural pathways until it becomes inevitable that we feel fully empowered within the seat of our aging, wise bodies. Proud of how these bodies are aging. Proud of their aliveness, their maturity, their seasoned wisdom.

Because the decisions we make from that place of full mature embodiment, from the depth of lived experience, those are decisions aligned with the greater good. Not just ego or just short-term gain. But with Life, with a capital L. With the world our children and grandchildren will inhabit. As visionary stewards.

That is something to be proud of. Not something to hide.

So I created Portals of Liberation.

You could call it a program, a class, something you sign up for. But really, it’s a container for a larger movement. A temple where your bodymind and your spirit can mature and transform, safely and with pleasure. Within this pendulation, this dual movement between fire that burns and honey that nourishes, within the spiraled, layered shape of feminine transformation.

I spent four years in one-on-one work first because I needed to know. Not theorize. Know. I needed to listen deeply, to women’s bodies, to their psyches, to their desire and their flesh and their bones and their wounds. To track the patterns. The places where we get stuck. Where we lose ourselves. Where we give our power away, or where we want to be saved. And any other version of that.

When something finally clicked—not just in my mind but in my body—I knew it was time to open the container.

And I’m calling in 20 women for this foundational cohort.

From the very beginning of this vision, I saw 20 faces on a screen.

Already three extraordinary, courageous beings have crossed the threshold and said yes. If you look closely at this image above, you’ll see 20 candles, three of them are lit.

I’m calling in 17 more leaders who are ready to do the deep, real work of embodied sovereignty and leadership.

Before I step down from my soapbox: one contemplation.

When you think about how you are moving through your aging process (perimenopause, menopause, postmenopause), or simply the maturation of your body and your power—how does it feel?

Are you feeling optimistic? Healthy? Relevant?

Or invisible?

When you see the new gray hairs, does that bring anxiety, or pride? When you look in the mirror, do you recognize yourself? Do you see the face you have now and feel: Yes, this is me? Or is the younger version the only one that counts, and until you get her back, you’ll never feel like yourself again?

How does this transformational, shamanic process of aging inside a female body feel, right now, honestly?

If it feels like s**t, if there’s anxiety, shame, exhaustion, 3am wake-ups drenched in sweat, if you’ve tried therapy, HRT, supplements, every modality you can name, and nothing reaches all the way down to where the aliveness is buried—I want you to consider Portals of Liberation.

And I want you to consider starting with one small step: come to my free soma…

Something happened today that I needed to share with you, because it is exactly the kind of embodied knowledge that can shift perspectives.

I was doing a simple exercise of pushing against my teacher’s hand. There was nothing threatening, no exchange of words and no emotional trigger.

And yet… I felt anger.

Pure, clean, sourceless rage.

After class, I went to see my teacher and her response was: “That is such healthy aggression! The kind we actually need, especially as women.”

And as I processed my somatic sensations with her, what emerged was that I wasn’t feeling wasn’t anger: it was my fight response. My nervous system doing exactly what a healthy, flexible nervous system does when it perceives a threat to freedom of movement.

And that realization opened up a deeper reflection in me.

Because during my menopause initiation —when I was a boiling volcano, when the hot flashes were triggered by flashes of rage, when I thought about my narcissist ex-boss or the breakup that created trauma and I would just combust— I didn’t have the tools to understand what was actually happening in my body.

I thought was losing my mind, but it was my nervous system stuck in sympathetic, swimming in unbalanced hormones and PTSD symptoms, with nowhere for the fight to go.

How does your anger show up? Can you feel the difference between a healthy fight response and an emotional trigger? I would love to know.

In this first mini-episode I talk a little bit about the nine months that brought me to my knees with 30 hot flashes a day, hair falling out and the post-traumatic symptoms I experienced from a breakup that cracked open the childhood developmental trauma I didn’t know was still living in my body. The dark night of the soul where I was convinced I was losing everything: my mind, my son, my house, my life.

And the moment I stopped trying to clawing my way back up and I let myself sink all the way to the bottom, this is when everything started to change.

Because that’s where the bottom was, and the bottom is what you push off from.

I also talk about a photo shoot I did a few weeks ago with a photographer I had never met, who somehow saw me completely.

And the fact that some years ago, 30 to 40 pounds lighter, I would never have been able to go with it!

The menopause initiation changes how you’re willing to be seen, and that’s what this mini-episode is really about.If something landed for you, I’d love to know!

The Midlife Temple is a space for the unpolished truth of the second half. If this landed somewhere in your body, leave a comment or share it with a woman who needs to hear it.