Susun Weed asks: "Will it matter to the Earth, Gaia, what choices I make in my menopause? What stories I tell myself? What I tell other women?"

For me it does, but more than anything, it matters to me what story I tell mself. Which is why I'm curious to paint and journal and dance around this changing time.

50 million women, she says, are reaching menopause right now. We are changing, and so is the earth changing. How are we re-story-ing ourselves, how

do we re-store the earth? It matters, the old story of being a microcosm of the macrocosm, and the only one we can change is ourselves.

So far I've been caught up in the discomfort of flushes and disturbed sleep, but only at times. Chinese herbs for a few months wereinvaluable; and now two homeopathic preparations keep me symptom free. But yes there are big changes in my body, my life, and I'd love to get a conversation going with other women. 

Here's Susun's website, which is takes a useful and brief look at the 3 menopausal stages: the premenopausal, menopausal climax and post-menopause climax years.

From: Dr Mercola

read full article

The HPV vaccine in brief. Read the story behind it, and the plan to vaccinate boys with it "because girls aren't getting vaccinated in the numbers doctors had expected."

• The HPV vaccine is NOT harmless as it has being promoted and has not been proven to actually prevent cervical cancer
• The HPV vaccine only protects against TWO strains of HPV associated with cancer but there are MORE THAN 100 different strains of HPV in all.
• Dr. Diane Harper, one of the lead researchers for Gardasil blew the whistle on the vaccine, saying the available data suggests the HPV vaccine's protective effects do not last beyond five years.
• The VAERS database continues to swell with reports of autoimmune disorders contracted after receiving the HPV vaccine. These side effects now include 137 reports of cervical dysplasia, and 41 reports of cervical cancer.

HPV infection clears up on its own within two years in 90 percent of all cases. It rarely leads to cervical cancer unless the infection becomes chronic and leads to cervical changes that remain untreated. Routine pap smear testing can identify chronic HPV infection and may provide greater protection against development of cervical cancer than reliance on an HPV vaccine that has not been adequately proven to be safe or effective.

"The Bitch is Back" by Sandra Tsing Loh is a good read. Her thesis is that yes, menopausal women are mad, bad and dengerous, but they're really just returning to normal. The years of nurturing and childbearing are a much shorter length of time in their lifespan than not...and once the hormones bow out, the real me returns. hence the Sunday roast which gets flung out the window...and other right-sizing  read here .

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A friend and I were talking about names for menopause, and she mentioned “the climacteric”.  Always seemed to me to be a medical term, and quite clinical. So I looked it up and this is what I found…

1. Physiology . a period of decrease of reproductive capacity in men and women, culminating, in women, in the menopause.

2. any critical period.

3. a year in which important changes in health, fortune, etc., are held by some theories to occur, as one’s sixty-third year (grand climacteric).

It was the origins of the word that interested me:

Dates back to 1595–1605;  Latin clīmactēricus “of a dangerous period in life” and the Greek klīmaktērikós the rung of a ladder, critical point in life. The stem is  klîmax as in climax.

So there we have it – a dangerous period, a critical period, the rung of a ladder.

It put me in mind of Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ CD set, The Dangerous Old Woman, her stories of ageing women, which I now have a copy of.  Something about “dangerous old women” appeals to me - she uses danger in a sense I've never heard - danger can mean protection, as in "you stand in my danger", you stand in my protection. 

And climacteric also relates to fruit: climacteric fruits are ones that are able to ripen after being picked, such as bananas, avocados etc. Maybe we only ripen properly and become fully delectable after the climacteric. I like to enetertain that possibility. 

I was reading a medical textbook from the early 1900s, and was surprised to find that not a word was said about menopause. There was plenty about being a mother and a good wife, which I won't go into here save to say it was real Stepford Wives stuff. I imagine that menopause was just not seen as a medical "problem", or that it wasn't spoken about by women; or, maybe women just didn't have many symptoms then (is that possible?) I know that most older women I've spoken to, the generation before mine, aren't that articulate; for the even older generation  menopause talk was taboo, it seems. 

A few weeks later  I came across this (in "Overdosed America", John Abramson, Harper Perennial, 2005), and it began to explainfor me the start of how, in just 50 years, menopause has been medicalised. Read it and weep:

"The transformation, within a few yeasr, of a formerly pleasant energetic woman into a dull-minded but sharp-tongued caricature of her former self is one of the saddest spectacles. The suffering is not hers alone - it involves her whole family, her business associates, her neighbourhood storekeepers, and all others with whom she comes into contact . Multiplied by millions, she is a focus of bitterness and discontent in the whole fabric of our civilisation."

That was written in 1962  in a medical journal by Dr Robert Wilson, a gynaecologist, on the 'tragedy' of menopause. Very dramatic, and based on his experience of his mother, it was the voice of the new way of seeing menopause as a medical condition. Wilson was at the time receiving big sums of money from drug companies, among them the one making Premarin, which had been approved by the FDA in 1942. He went on to author an article with his wife on Estrogen Maintenance which promised that estrogen produced 'beauty, the allure of which attracts the male' and 'breasts and genital organs will not shrivel'.

'Such women...will not become dull and unattractive.' Sadly, his wife (on estrogen, and in those days they were given high doses) developed breast cancer; the drug companies withdrew their support and he took his own life.

Much has followed since then, with the medical fraternity building on these ideas about menopause, setting the stage for the approach the medical system still holds today: women need HRT, and are given it at the slightest sign of a symtom.

However,  research shows that only a minority of women have menopausal symptoms severe enough to require medical therapy. One out of six have "really bothersome" hot flushes and fewer than one in 30 have "really bothersome" vaginal dryness.  Symptoms usually last no more than 2 to 5 years, and only one in 20 have  symptoms that persist long after the transition through menopause.  There IS a place for HRT, but it has well-documented dangers and should not be a first line treatment. And it doesn't prevent heart disease or osteoporosis, if you read the research, although that ideas was so well marketed that it has become common 'wisdom'.