YINtentions

We were handed one word = menopause = and asked to make sense of a decade or more with it. That word arrives wrapped in very limited stories. That we should be celebrating. That something has gone wrong. That we are no longer useful or seen.

Most women I know are living somewhere between those scripts, without a name for where they actually are.

This episode names the terrain.

In this episode: the three distinct stages collapsed into one word and why it matters · the nine-stage framework Christine Marie Mason draws in The Nine Lives of Woman · the two cultural stories that abandon women in different ways · and the frontier no one is mapping yet > late motherhood and perimenopause, simultaneously.

Welcome. Come as you are.

Resources mentioned:

Christine Marie Mason's book : The Nine Lives of Woman: Sensual, Sexual and Reproductive Stages from Birth to 100

(0:00) Welcome (1:47) The story and the map (6:44) The long runway : perimenopause (10:12) Metamorphosis: menopause (11:25) The rest of our life: postmenopause (13:25) The stories that abandon women (18:15) What's emerging (23:36) Closing

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Anna Teresa is an anthropologist, experience designer, somatic trauma-informed facilitator, and storykeeper based in Geneva, Switzerland. She works with women leaders navigating the midlife crunch — supporting them back into the intelligence of their bodies, their cycles, and their stories. YINtentions is where those stories are held.

About this work + offers: https://www.yinrhythms.com/

What happens when a thirteen-year-old girl receives a purity ring from her father and learns that her body belongs to everyone except herself?

Jenny McGrath opens doors into the places where purity culture, sexual trauma, and religious shame live in women's bodies. In this conversation, we move through modesty checks and closets of shame. Through sexual assault and the confusion of pleasure and pain. Through years as a missionary in Uganda, treating her body like a machine until Acholi dancing gave her body back. Through the psoas muscle as an archive of intergenerational fear.

Content Note: This episode includes discussion of childhood corporal punishment, sexual assault, and religious trauma. Listen when your body is ready.

Storykeeper: Jenny McGrath is a mental health counselor, Somatic Experiencing® practitioner, and researcher. Her work reveals how missionary work became a way for white women to feel their own pain through the pain of others.

Connect with Jenny:

https://www.indwellmovement.com/

https://www.instagram.com/indwell_movement/

Resources mentioned:

• adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism
• Liz Koch, The Psoas Book
• Angela Chen on consent
• Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score

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Anna Teresa is an anthropologist, experience designer, somatic trauma-informed facilitator, and storykeeper based in Geneva, Switzerland. She works with women leaders navigating the midlife crunch - supporting them back into the intelligence of their bodies, their cycles, and their stories. YINtentions is where those stories are held.

About this work + offers: https://www.yinrhythms.com/

We travel the world fascinated by landscapes and terrains covered by sand, by forests, by history and stories that came before us.

But there is a landscape we rarely discover.

Not because it isn't remarkable, precious and filled with gifts. Quite the opposite. We don't discover it because we've been told to stay away from it. No one said - this territory exists, and it belongs to you, and you are allowed to go there.

This is an invitation to that landscape. Your body.

In this first episode, I share what YINtentions is about the facets of the landscape that is our body's intelligence, and the invitation to traverse the stories women carry within them. We tell the stories we were told not to tell. We explore what becomes possible when a woman finally says the thing she was never supposed to say and trusts her body.

Welcome. Come as you are.

~~~

Anna Teresa is an anthropologist, experience designer, somatic trauma-informed facilitator, and storykeeper based in Geneva, Switzerland. She works with women leaders navigating the midlife crunch - supporting them back into the intelligence of their bodies, their cycles, and their stories. YINtentions is where those stories are held.

About this work and offers : https://www.yinrhythms.com/

Stories women were told not to tell. Unresolved. Unpolished. True.

We don't fix anything here. We simply are with.

Hosted by Anna Teresa. New episodes biweekly from Spring Equinox 2026.