Perimenopause calls us evermore deeply into an intimate connection and relationship with fire. Fire is an active element that requires tending, feeding, grounding, and directing.

The heat can help the frozen grief to begin to thaw.

The heat of the fire can open up the nectar, the honey, the life-force, the mana.

The heat may contain the energy of anger — and this buried energy can be worked with to uncover suppressed passion, enthusiasm and creativity.

The word “enthusiasm” originates from the word “enthusiasmos”, which meant “to be possessed by God/Goddess” or “divinely inspired”.

Group sharing and connection within well-held containers is a space where the fires of communal alchemy can occur and where we can ground that fire into the earth. We work to explore our relationship with fire and how to approach it with slowness, curiosity, and respect in our six weeks together during Perimenopause As Portal.

We work with the waters of our grief as well, knowing that this transitional time is an opening that beckons us to learn how to direct the gentleness and the compassion towards ourselves, for the times in our lives when we did not have access to this. Our regular grief tending allows us to unravel from the burdens of the past and reconnects us to the clarity of our hearts. There will be rituals for this grief as we shed our skins and make offerings to the earth with them.

I long to witness more of the vitality that we see radiating from the elder woman who has traversed the darkest deepest inner wilds of her soul, psyche, soma, and womb — and made it through this alchemical process, that is has likely been a messy and mysteriously alchemical endevour. 

She who no longer exiles parts of herself at the expense of being accepted by all. She who refuses to shrink in shame or to sever herself from her life-force. She who consistently claims what she desires.

She who only offers what she truly has the capacity for, as she shares her gifts with her community. She who embodies her fullest expression of her sexual and her creative self. She who rests when she needs rest.

She who grieves what longs to be grieved. She who has been humbled and alchemically changed forever, because she has been willing to orient herself and her heart towards which will bring her closer to the embodiment of the truth, as a doorway to true aliveness and radiance from within. In service to her community and the Earth.

She who has become an entirely different being, perhaps even to herself. She who is learning to walk in the world as a truly embodied elder.

She radiates a different kind of vitality
and power and beauty — that we, as a culture, are not familiar with.
It originates from within. 
She did not go out THERE to find it.
She went INSIDE to ignite it.

There are obvious reasons why this particular rite of perimenopause into menopause is the least talked about, researched, or communally explored.

Because — IT HOLDS POWER.