The journey through perimenopause is unique for every woman, yet the unsolicited and contrary advice remains universal. 

This was the inspiration for my latest poem, which is part of a book of poetry in which I’m documenting the entire perimenopause journey from beginning to end.

What makes perimenopause so challenging isn’t just the physical symptoms – the hormonal fluctuations, the muscle mass changes – but the barrage of contradictory advice from people who often have no personal experience with it. 

From well-meaning friends suggesting I drink my own piss, to fitness bros blindly prescribing calorie deficits and skipping meals, the poem highlights the absurdity of simplistic solutions to this multi-faceted physiological transition.

The journey through perimenopause, like other significant life transitions, ultimately belongs to the person experiencing it, and external perspectives – however well-intentioned – need to be filtered through our intuition.

Ugh, where do I start….?
The flurry of advice
From uninformed folk
Who all have their price

Estrogen is dropping
Your bones will crumble!
Drink loads of milk
Or take a tumble

Ingest creatine now
Or lose all your muscle
You should intermittent fast!
There’s no end to this hustle

Eat chunks of protein
At every single meal
Eventually, it’ll kill you
All that dairy, tofu and veal

“Hey” someone whispers
“You should drink your own piss“
So I squat over a glass
*Gulp*
Alright then, come give us a kiss!

But my all-time favourite
Is from the 30-something bro
You wanna lose weight?
His face starts to glow

Ah, he squints,
Like he’s about to shit gold
You just need to be in a calorie deficit!
Seriously, this never gets old?

Oh! I exclaim
Why didn’t I think of that?!
Thank you so much bruh
You dumb little twat

He no longer exists
That poor, sweet boy
Who made the mistake
Of thinking I was old & coy

But seriously though
This is not about bro’s
It’s the not-so-miracle advice
That you can stick it up your……nose

To give you a vague idea
Of what it’s like to be in peri
Put a blindfold on
And navigate the contrary

The vitamins, the supplements
The creams and the sprays
Can all just f**k off
I don’t care what anyone says

My body is my body
My age is my age
My intuition rules
And THAT’S my primary gauge

BY MELANIE SWAN

Send us a text

Support the show

Melanie is an experienced Soul & Shadow Worker, Womb Medicine Woman, podcast host, writer and trainer.

For over 20 years, she has supported individuals and healing professionals to restore connection with the body, repair attachment and separation wounds, and embody primordial wisdom rooted in the womb, heart and soul.

Melanie's approach blends somatic womb healing, shadow integration, shamanic healing and soul-level repatterning - offering a deep and lasting pathway back to the true self.

She hosts The Sacred Womb Podcast, leads The Unification Of The Divine Masculine & Feminine Training and is currently writing her first book: The Sacred Womb - a handbook for coming home to our true nature, along with Poems For Peri-Menopause.

Today is my 49th birthday, and peri-menopause is in full swing. My last period lasted 26 hours. As my blood started to flow, I felt love and bliss emanating from my womb.

I lay on my bed for 4 hours, riding the waves of energy that flowed through the fibres of my body.

The last time I wrote a poem about my stage of womanhood was January 2021, at that point I was standing at the edge of the lake >

This poem captures the nothingness and everythingness of my current state of being.

The boat has set sail
I’m on the lake
Most of the tether has frayed

I hear…
Leave that world behind
It’s done

The fog starts to settle
Let them enjoy it
It’s no longer for you
You’re no longer for it

I know there’s land the other side
I don’t know what’s there
I know what’s there

It feels more like home
A familiar welcome signals me
It feels like a return

I have questions that don’t need an answer
Questions that aren’t really questions
I don’t have questions
There are no answers

There’s only a strand of rope left
Leave her behind
Make peace with her 
It’s noise fades, I can hear the water

Nothing matters
Everything matters
Nothing exists
Everything exists

I am the boat
I am the lake and the land
I am here
I am everything

The final strand tenses
It stretches
I pause
Watching the strand
Wondering if my heart will break.

By Melanie Swan

Send us a text

Support the show

Melanie is an experienced Soul & Shadow Worker, Womb Medicine Woman, podcast host, writer and trainer.

For over 20 years, she has supported individuals and healing professionals to restore connection with the body, repair attachment and separation wounds, and embody primordial wisdom rooted in the womb, heart and soul.

Melanie's approach blends somatic womb healing, shadow integration, shamanic healing and soul-level repatterning - offering a deep and lasting pathway back to the true self.

She hosts The Sacred Womb Podcast, leads The Unification Of The Divine Masculine & Feminine Training and is currently writing her first book: The Sacred Womb - a handbook for coming home to our true nature, along with Poems For Peri-Menopause.

Have you noticed the huge rise in the diagnosis of ADHD?

It’s everywhere — in adults, in children, on social media, in therapy rooms. And while it’s often discussed through the lens of ‘neurodiversity’ or executive dysfunction, there’s something deeper going on that rarely gets named.

The Root Cause of ADHD
ADHD stands for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, but in many cases, what’s really going on is the result of unresolved, early attachment trauma, and for the majority of people, it’s more accurate to describe it as:

ATTACHMENT DEFICIT

In a very small nutshell:

• The psyche developed without a secure attachment figure — someone who could consistently regulate, attune, and protect.
• There were multiple sustained periods of intolerable pain or stress, so the system fragmented in order to survive.
• These fragmented parts became hyper-vigilant, and being still or at rest felt unsafe.
• By adulthood, this becomes a way of life — fast-paced, scattered, always ‘on’.

As a culture, we like to give palatable names to things we don’t want to face — and mental health diagnoses have become a socially acceptable way of masking deeper truths.

Even ‘neurodiversity,’ while helpful in some contexts, can sometimes act as a palatable blanket for what is, at its core, profound and unresolved attachment trauma.

Real Healing Is Possible

Therapies that address the root — not just the symptoms — can support us to come back into the body, out of self-preservation, and into the present moment. Modalities like:

• IFS (Internal Family Systems)
• CRM (Comprehensive Resource Model)
• DBR (Deep Brain Reorienting)
• SE (Somatic Experiencing)

It does take time. But the nervous system is designed to heal.

A great resource is Gabor Mate’s Book: – Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

You’re Not Broken — You Adapted

I invite you to pause, take a deep breath, and notice what part of you is speaking if you say, ‘It’s my ADHD,’ as if that defines the whole of who you are.

Part of what’s affecting attention, focus, and emotional regulation is physiological

Send us a text

Support the show

Melanie is an experienced Soul & Shadow Worker, Womb Medicine Woman, podcast host, writer and trainer.

For over 20 years, she has supported individuals and healing professionals to restore connection with the body, repair attachment and separation wounds, and embody primordial wisdom rooted in the womb, heart and soul.

Melanie's approach blends somatic womb healing, shadow integration, shamanic healing and soul-level repatterning - offering a deep and lasting pathway back to the true self.

She hosts The Sacred Womb Podcast, leads The Unification Of The Divine Masculine & Feminine Training and is currently writing her first book: The Sacred Womb - a handbook for coming home to our true nature, along with Poems For Peri-Menopause.

In our conversation, Anthony shares the essence of Singing in the Wild, his five-day retreat that I've been on twice (17 years ago and more recently just a few weeks ago).

I had such a transformative time that I invited Anthony onto the podcast to share the genuine magic of this work!

Many of us were told, somewhere along the way, that we couldn’t sing. Maybe we were asked to stay quiet, to lip-sync or not to make too much noise; these moments can go deep and restrict us - that is, until we decide we want to go beyond those limits.

This retreat gently meets that wounding, offering a space where each person's natural, unique voice is welcomed, just as it is.

It’s not about performance or hitting the right notes. It’s about remembering what it means to express rather than perform, and reconnecting with the sacredness that lives in sound, loving presence, and connection.

What emerges is nothing short of magical. 

When we step beyond judgment and self-consciousness into pure expression, something shifts fundamentally in our nervous system. 

'The voice is not just a musical instrument,' Anthony explains, 'it actually IS the person.'

Through practices he calls 'radical relating', participants learn to be fully present with each other without fixing, advising, or turning away - creating moments of profound connection where the boundaries between self and other begin to dissolve.

This conversation vibrates with the truth that transformation happens not through technical improvement, but through authentic connection. 

Whether you've been silenced or simply yearn for deeper relationships with yourself and others, this work offers a pathway home to our most natural and authentic expression.

CONNECT WITH ANTHONY

Find out more about Singing in the Wild Retreat or learn more about Anthony's overall work, Real Voice >

Send us a text

Support the show

Melanie is an experienced Soul & Shadow Worker, Womb Medicine Woman, podcast host, writer and trainer.

For over 20 years, she has supported individuals and healing professionals to restore connection with the body, repair attachment and separation wounds, and embody primordial wisdom rooted in the womb, heart and soul.

Melanie's approach blends somatic womb healing, shadow integration, shamanic healing and soul-level repatterning - offering a deep and lasting pathway back to the true self.

She hosts The Sacred Womb Podcast, leads The Unification Of The Divine Masculine & Feminine Training and is currently writing her first book: The Sacred Womb - a handbook for coming home to our true nature, along with Poems For Peri-Menopause.

have you ever tried to ‘let go’ of behaviors that no longer serve you, only to find yourself repeating the same patterns? 

You're not alone. 

The popular advice to ‘release what no longer serves us’ or burning our troubles away on the full moon simply doesn't work—and there's a profound psychological reason why.

What we're actually doing when we try to ‘let go’ is pushing away parts of ourselves that have been working diligently to protect us. These patterns began as vital coping strategies during times when our emotions felt overwhelming. By trying to reject these aspects of ourselves, we create further internal fragmentation and erode trust within our own psyche.

The healing begins with a simple but powerful shift: instead of pushing away, try welcoming these parts with curiosity and gratitude. 

By locating where we feel these patterns in your body and extending compassion to these aspects of yourself, you create an internal atmosphere of acceptance. When we ask these parts how they've been trying to help us and what fears they hold, something remarkable happens—they begin to feel recognized, valued, and integrated rather than isolated and rejected.

This internal shift doesn't just heal fragmentation; it creates a ripple effect that extends to your external relationships. As you generate more self-acceptance, you naturally begin to vibrate at a frequency that attracts more authentic connections. When we stop seeking validation externally and instead create that environment within, others feel drawn to our genuine presence. It's the ultimate paradox—by fully welcoming ourselves, we create the connection we've been seeking all along.

Ready to experience this transformation? I've created a guided practice available in the Sacred Womb shop for just £3 to help you to dissolve old patterns with love 

Send us a text

Support the show

Melanie is an experienced Soul & Shadow Worker, Womb Medicine Woman, podcast host, writer and trainer.

For over 20 years, she has supported individuals and healing professionals to restore connection with the body, repair attachment and separation wounds, and embody primordial wisdom rooted in the womb, heart and soul.

Melanie's approach blends somatic womb healing, shadow integration, shamanic healing and soul-level repatterning - offering a deep and lasting pathway back to the true self.

She hosts The Sacred Womb Podcast, leads The Unification Of The Divine Masculine & Feminine Training and is currently writing her first book: The Sacred Womb - a handbook for coming home to our true nature, along with Poems For Peri-Menopause.

This guided practice serves as both a foundational womb healing technique to energise your whole womb center and a diagnostic tool to understand your current relationship to your womb.

You’ll learn to direct energy to each part of your womb system – the ovaries, tubes, the womb itself, cervix, and yoni (sacred space). 

As you breathe into each area, you’ll discover not just where energy may be blocked or flowing freely, but you’ll actively begin the process of re-energisation.

You can practice it indoors while sitting in a chair, though sitting directly on the earth can deepen your experience significantly. 

Whether you’re exploring womb healing for the first time or are a seasoned practitioner, this foundational practice serves as the cornerstone for reconnection with your seat of power.

This practice:

• Works to energise the entire womb system, including the ovaries, tubes, womb, cervix and yoni 
• Is designed as a standalone practice and is part of a 21-day womb healing journey
• Incorporates somatic resourcing through connecting to the earth and your energetic tap root
• Can be done anywhere, though sitting on earth, the beach, a tree stump or a stone enhances the energetic 
• Will energise your menstrual cycle
• Acts as a diagnostic tool to discover areas of resistance, old protection, stored emotions or disconnection.

If you enjoyed this practice and want to go deeper, you can download the complete 21-day womb healing journey here >

***********

IMPORTANT NOTE:

You may feel slightly faint or dizzy if you do too much deep breathing too soon. Don’t push yourself. Do what you can. Dynamic breathing gets your chi moving. If you feel dizzy, simply pause the practice, open your eyes and breathe gently, returning to the practice once the dizziness has passed.

***********

If you have comments or questions, leave a review on Apple or Spotify, or contact me on Instagram @the_sacred_womb

Send us a text

Support the show

Melanie is an experienced Soul & Shadow Worker, Womb Medicine Woman, podcast host, writer and trainer.

For over 20 years, she has supported individuals and healing professionals to restore connection with the body, repair attachment and separation wounds, and embody primordial wisdom rooted in the womb, heart and soul.

Melanie's approach blends somatic womb healing, shadow integration, shamanic healing and soul-level repatterning - offering a deep and lasting pathway back to the true self.

She hosts The Sacred Womb Podcast, leads The Unification Of The Divine Masculine & Feminine Training and is currently writing her first book: The Sacred Womb - a handbook for coming home to our true nature, along with Poems For Peri-Menopause.

The phrase 'holding space' is immensely popular with those in therapeutic, healing, coaching, wellness, and women's circles, but what's really happening?

I've investigated this over the last few years with those I've worked with and colleagues, and it turns out to be mainly trauma-driven.

Holding is the opposite of what we're trying to be as we heal and become more present. The opposite of holding in this relaxed, engaged and present. 

We don't want to be holding anything! It creates tension, deflects from our presence, and has our energy too focused on the other person, which either consciously or unconsciously creates a reaction in them, of either infantilisation or resistance. Neither is going to help the process of becoming more present.

So it's really useful to question what's driving it, as ALL healing arts professionals have a trauma history, which is why our personal work is essential to facilitating the process of coming home to our true selves and meeting the world from a base of increasing love.

A big caveat to this is that there is no 'healed' point. All of the markers I talk about are on a sliding scale from a more fear-based, adapted way of being to embodying more and more love, and connecting with others from a sense of security and safety within ourselves.

In this episode, I talk through the following:

WHAT TRAUMA-DRIVE SPACE HOLDING LOOKS AND FEELS LIKE

• a sense of 'holding' in our body
• perpetually pushing our own needs to one side to take care of others, have a sense of self-sacrifice and hoping to be seen a certain way in return for our 'holding'
• viewing others as less than or feeling sorry for them
• trying to hold the whole group field or person with our energy
• feeling perpetually exhausted after 'holding space'
• attached to the outcome of other people's state of being
• finding it difficult to be vulnerable with people, either 1:1 or in groups in daily life
• can't feel our own body or emotions whilst 'holding space'
• feel unappreciated for all our efforts

WHAT'S DRIVING TRAUMA-BASED 'HOLDING SPACE'?

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE ON THE RECEIVING END OF TRAUMA-DRIVEN SPACE HOLDERS

WHAT WE CAN DO IF SPACE HOLDING IS TRAUMA-DRIVEN

A Guided Practice To Reclaim Your Energy & Come Home To Your Body >

Send us a text

Support the show

Melanie is an experienced Soul & Shadow Worker, Womb Medicine Woman, podcast host, writer and trainer.

For over 20 years, she has supported individuals and healing professionals to restore connection with the body, repair attachment and separation wounds, and embody primordial wisdom rooted in the womb, heart and soul.

Melanie's approach blends somatic womb healing, shadow integration, shamanic healing and soul-level repatterning - offering a deep and lasting pathway back to the true self.

She hosts The Sacred Womb Podcast, leads The Unification Of The Divine Masculine & Feminine Training and is currently writing her first book: The Sacred Womb - a handbook for coming home to our true nature, along with Poems For Peri-Menopause.

In this episode I explore the concept of becoming a genuine adult, 
what it means to develop emotional maturity and a grounded sense of self, what that looks like and feels like, and how we can do it in a way that increases our range of experience and expression.

Often, we equate adulthood with age, assuming that reaching a certain number automatically means we have attained emotional maturity. However, the reality is much more nuanced. 

Many of us find that despite our chronological age, we may still operate from various younger emotional states—those triggered by past experiences, traumas, or disruptions during our formative years. To truly embody a genuine adult self, we must address these emotional fragments and develop our capacity to respond to the present moment with intention and clarity.

What is an Adult Self?

An adult self can be summarised as the energy within us that has little to no emotional charge from the past, and so, therefore, can be present.

This energy, or 'amount' of our consciousness that is present is available to experience situations more as they are now, and make choices as to how to respond.

What are the features of an Adult Self?

Here are some of the main features here, however, they aren't exhaustive, there are so many possibilities! This list is an example.

As a genuine Adult, we're able to:

• Be in the present moment
• Make clear choices taking into account intuition and cognition. 
• Identify when triggered (distressing charge/memories are activated)
• Self-regulate
• Implement consistent self-care
• Take responsibility for our actions, behaviours, thoughts - whole self and impact on others.
• Identify and communicate our own needs
• Play! (play is to opposite of, and antidote to trauma)
• Access, embody and express a range of states of being
• Identify and implement clear boundaries
• Willing to be in love-based, mutual relationships with others

I also explore what 'Leading our System' from our Adult Self means, the relief that comes from un-fusing parts of ourselves that have been mistaken for our personality and reclaiming those qualities that were once buried beneath coping mechanisms. 

Send us a text

Support the show

Melanie is an experienced Soul & Shadow Worker, Womb Medicine Woman, podcast host, writer and trainer.

For over 20 years, she has supported individuals and healing professionals to restore connection with the body, repair attachment and separation wounds, and embody primordial wisdom rooted in the womb, heart and soul.

Melanie's approach blends somatic womb healing, shadow integration, shamanic healing and soul-level repatterning - offering a deep and lasting pathway back to the true self.

She hosts The Sacred Womb Podcast, leads The Unification Of The Divine Masculine & Feminine Training and is currently writing her first book: The Sacred Womb - a handbook for coming home to our true nature, along with Poems For Peri-Menopause.

Our attachment template primarily determines how we relate to ourselves, others, and the world, and to recalibrate it, we need to work where it was formed: from incarnation, conception, in our Mother’s womb, to birth and our first year. 

Our attachment template is formed by the time we get to about 1. Key events, memories, and ways of relating usually compound that template, meaning that patterns of relating keep repeating over time.

This leads to the development of what we might think is personality when it’s actually adaptive traits that keep repeating because they are trying to protect us from further pain. And because they were formed so early, these traits often feel like ‘that’s just who I am’.

When we identify these themes and patterns in our lives, we can also trace them into our Soul’s Journey and work with the whole root system of our consciousness. This all needs attending to to recalibrate our attachment template.

Whilst most of us won’t have a conscious memory of this very early and primal time in our lives, it is accessible once we are tuned in enough to our body and internal world. Everyone I have worked with can access this, we don’t need to be ‘spiritual’ – whatever that means! 

This is also not a solely cognitive process. Deep remembering comes from the body, the mind, and the soul, which can all be accessed through the body, our six senses, and by slightly altering our state of consciousness, which we all can do. 

I also find that doing this helps us to realise that babies aren’t born pure and open. By the time we are born, our sense of self has been developing for 9 months, the attachment template is formed, and we are bringing in themes from our Soul to resolve and reconcile.

My last caveat is I don’t channel anything for anyone when work – this is really important, as we do need a direct and embodied connection with what we remember, otherwise it doesn’t truly ‘land’ in our system and thus doesn’t actually recalibrate our state of being.

During the episode, I talk through the potential of remembering and recalibrating at the following key stages of coming into this life:

• Incarnation
• Conception
• Gestation
• Birth
• First Year

I want to remind and inspire those who are listening that it is possible to process pain that felt previously unbearable, once we are resourced and stable enough, we can remember, and we can unwind the adaptions in our system and come home to ourselves.

SOUL WORK TRAINING

Check out The Soul Work Training to integrate gestational healing into your practice.

Send us a text

Support the show

Melanie is an experienced Soul & Shadow Worker, Womb Medicine Woman, podcast host, writer and trainer.

For over 20 years, she has supported individuals and healing professionals to restore connection with the body, repair attachment and separation wounds, and embody primordial wisdom rooted in the womb, heart and soul.

Melanie's approach blends somatic womb healing, shadow integration, shamanic healing and soul-level repatterning - offering a deep and lasting pathway back to the true self.

She hosts The Sacred Womb Podcast, leads The Unification Of The Divine Masculine & Feminine Training and is currently writing her first book: The Sacred Womb - a handbook for coming home to our true nature, along with Poems For Peri-Menopause.

Salena Walker; Herbalist, Naturapath and Nutritionist joins us to talk about what’s going on during menopause and how we can support ourselves with what we drink, eat, think and excrete!

She talks us through what’s going on with our hormones, what we need to consider to take care of ourselves, plus herbs and supplements to support the transformation.

ABOUT SALENA

Salena has over twenty years of teaching experience and offers many of her courses both in person in her woodland classroom in West Wales and online. Her course ‘Hormones and Menopause’ is now available online.

Website

Send us a text

Support the show

Melanie is an experienced Soul & Shadow Worker, Womb Medicine Woman, podcast host, writer and trainer.

For over 20 years, she has supported individuals and healing professionals to restore connection with the body, repair attachment and separation wounds, and embody primordial wisdom rooted in the womb, heart and soul.

Melanie's approach blends somatic womb healing, shadow integration, shamanic healing and soul-level repatterning - offering a deep and lasting pathway back to the true self.

She hosts The Sacred Womb Podcast, leads The Unification Of The Divine Masculine & Feminine Training and is currently writing her first book: The Sacred Womb - a handbook for coming home to our true nature, along with Poems For Peri-Menopause.