The way of going down, of letting go

A woman in the middle of her life may need to go through a down time, to journey into her depths; it may even look like a depression. She may need some time in isolation to find her own inner powers – connection to her body, her emotions and her sexuality, her intuition, her values, and her soul. She may feel as if she doesn’t know where she is going, what’s coming next. It’s a time of passage in-between – letting go of the old self, not sure of the new self yet. It may imply a change of job, or of roles (mother to grandmother), a divorce, grown kids leaving home, dying parents.

Menopause is a time of dying to the old way and opening up to a new way of being. Sometimes it is difficult to live this change, to accept the end of one thing and open our hearts and arms to a new self. It is not a linear journey.

It helps to look at this as a sacred journey. We do the careful work of an archeologist, excavating in the dark, in dreams and memory for the lost pieces of our selves.

“In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark woods, where the straight way was lost.” Dante, quoted in Broken Open by Elizabeth Lesser.

It takes a great amount of trust to surrender to a higher power, trust the life force, admit we feel lost and let God’s will be done. Sometimes the choice seems limited – either break down or break open, as Lesser puts it so well in her book.

Have you had dreams of feeding or birthing a baby who needs to be fed but has been neglected almost to the point of dying? This may represent an urgent need to reconnect with your own wisdom, your own knowing. And subsequently be reborn as a sensual being, cherishing and nourishing your female body, recognizing that you embody the sacred feminine.

Sumerian goddess Inanna’s story is an example of a dark night or initiation. In her descent to the underworld lies a story of a dying of the outer self and a rebirth. It is an archetypal story for soul growth, by one of the earliest writers in history on clay tablets, Princess Enheduanna of Akkad in Sumeria, 2300 BCE (translation from tables discovered in 1940’s).

The Descent of Inanna: (taken from Joan Borysenko's book)
“Inanna prepares to descend to hell to visit her sister Erishkegal, queen of the Underworld. She instructs her loyal friend and servant Ninshubur to wait for 3 days at the entrance to the Underworld and if she doesn’t come back to call upon the gods for help. Then she girds herself with all her powers, a crown on her head, a circle of lapis beads under her neck, to strands of gems over her heart, a wondrous breastplate, a gold ring for a bracelet, royal robes and a lapis measuring rode and line.

Seeing her coming, arrayed in all her glory, the Gatekeeper Beti calls his mistress Erishkegal – she instructs him to open each of the seven doors just a crack, so that in squeezing through Inanna will have to divest herself of one power at each gate and arrive bowed low and powerless before her.

At the first gate Beti removes the crown of Inanna’s intellect. At the second gate: her lapis necklace (power to defend herself through speech); At the third gate, he removes the double strand of beads over her heart, the twin flames of wisdom and compassion. At the fourth gate he removes the breastplate called ‘come, man, come’ through which she can summon the help of men through her charisma. At the fifth gate he removes the golden ring from her wrist, curtailing her power to strike back. At the sixth gate, the laps measuring rod and line are taken so that she cannot divine her bearings. At the seventh gate her royal robes are stripped away, her outer personality, her ego.

Inanna as naked and defenseless as a newborn is ushered into the throne room before Erishkegal. There, the seven fierce Annuna, judges of the Underworld, surround Inanna and pass judgment against her. Erishkegal fastened on her the eye of death, and spoke against her the word of wrath. She uttered against her the cry of guilt. She struck her. Inanna was turned into a corpse, a piece of rotting meat, and was hung from a hook on the wall.”

Meanwhile, the faithful Ninshubur has waited for three days and three nights for her mistress to return. She suspects foul play and begins a loud lament, accompanied by the beating of drums. She dons a simple mourning dress and hurries off to the gods to ask for help in saving the queen of heaven and earth. Father Enlil, god of air, refuses aid. She asked for it, but he grumbles. “Whoever receives the powers of the Underworld has to stay there.” Then she goes to Father Nanna, god of the moon, and begs him to save Inanna. He is as grumbly as Enlil and will not lift a finger for his daughter for she has chosen her destiny. Finally Ninsubur visits Enki, the god of wisdom who had gifted Inanna with the fourteen me, the blessings of power, to begin with. Enki is distraught, filled with love and concern for his beautiful daughter, the holy priestess of heaven.

Enki scrapes dirt from beneath his fingernails and fashions two odd and wonderful creatures, neither male nor female. To the kurgarra he gives the food of life, to the falatur the water of life. He instructs them to sneak into the underworld like flies through the cracks in the gates and gifts them with the secret of love’s true power.

Queen Erishkegal is in great pain, giving birth, writhing naked and uncovered. He tells the creatures to mirror her pain – oh my insides, oh my outsides. Oh my belly, and this they do. The queen is so touched at being acknowledged and seen, that she is willing to grant these two creatures whatever they want. They ask for Inanna’s corpse, hanging form the hook on the wall. As instructed, they sprinkle food of life and water of life, and Inanna rises up out of death.

The seven judges grab her and inform her she must replace herself with someone else or she can’t leave. The galla, demons from hell, go with her. They pick Ninshubur, but Inanna refuses to give up her loyal friend. Next they try to claim Shara, Inanna’s son, who is grieving his dead mother, dressed in sackcloth. Inanna, sees her husband Dumuzi, sitting on his throne, resplendent in garments of me, reveling to music, not in mourning at all – and she is infuriated, feels dishonoured, unloved. So she fastened the gaze of death on him, and the word of wrath, the cry of guilty (like Erishkegal). The galla clutch him, but he turns into a snake and slithers away. Dumuzi’s sister prays that she might be taken to hell instead of her brother, Innana agrees to a compromise, Dumuzi will stay in hell for 6 months of the year, his sister the other 6. (The alternation of light and dark prefigures many myths of agrarian cultures). A Woman’s Journey to God, Joan Borysenko

Inanna descended to meet her own shadow, death, and the judgments it held of her, so she could reclaim true power she had been gifted with (wisdom and love). Enki had gifted her with the mastery of truth and the art of lovemaking.

Exercise –

Dying to old Self: what time is it in my life?




What is it Time to let go of?




Draw a clock on a sheet of paper, and circle the time on it.

Is it 11:00? Near the end of a cycle?
Or 9 am, near the beginning?
Or noon, right in the middle?
.

Sacred Journey of peri-menopause

"When a woman stops doing she must learn how to simply be. Being is not a luxury; it is a discipline. The heroine must listen carefully to her true inner voice. That means silencing the other voices anxious to tell her what to do." The Heroine's Journey

When we decide to live differently, to listen to the voice within instead of the pressures without, when we decide to live authentically and be true to ourselves, there is bound to be friction, conflict, a feeling of being left behind. We fear letting other people down by not volunteering for every new project that comes our way, as if our commitment to Self was selfish. We feel lost, unsure, on a quest.

But the price we pay for not listening in, is too high , and often involves physical injury or chronic pain. In my case, it was a neck stiffness and shoulder ache that refused to leave in spite of osteopathy and physiotherapy treatments. Only when I made a difficult decision to stop 'doing too much' and let go of a major volunteer commitment did the neck pain ease up. I decided the major house renovation project (one year long) was taking up 50% of my time and energy and deserved my full attention (aside from writing, singing commitments, women's circle, household and teen management tasks).

A friend of mine was on a leave from work for burn-out, and was considering a career change during her time-off. At the end of the leave, she had a few ideas of what to do next, but nothing firm, and decided she still needed the income from her marketing position so she returned to work part-time. Not only was her employer not giving her key assignments, but her joie-de-vivre and pleasure in her former position was gone. A short while afterwards, she had a car accident on her hour-long drive to work and broke her collarbone. This put her back on sick-leave and allowed her to pursue her other options. She ended up taking a correspondance course in herbology, and is now finishing up. She seems much happier now that she's doing what she loves.

In the period it takes for us to 'transition', to discover where our joy is and what will truly allow us fulfillment in work or artistic endeavours, we may feel like we have lost our way. It may feel like the paths are criss-crossing in labyrinthine form, and often, our journey involves a descent or dark night of the soul where we question everything we are doing. It may feel like depression, or at the least, a time to be isolated, alone, leaving the upper world of external values to find our own ground, our own intuition, our own feminine values.

We need to remember the importance of this journey, this task, to find the lost pieces of our selves, to find our way to a place of knowing within.

Allow yourself the time you need to figure it out, to feel your way through, and pay attention to your inner urgings - it may not seem rational or logical, but you will save yourself some pain and suffering if you listen well.

nameste,
musemother

Menopause as a rebirth

Why am I writing about birth on my menopause blog? because once you've been down into the deep shadows, and spun your chrysalis/cocoon, and hibernated for a while, the ascent is like a new birth, a second life. And this involves a 'labour' phase.

There is not one day, or one moment that will demarcate the arrival but you feel the fragility of new wings, gossamer things, shiny in the sun. You feel the old self peeling away, the old attitudes, the old passions dying and the new ones being born.

If you are still in the 'bug soup' phase, where your will is hiding somewhere down around your ankles like pants without a belt, look up, and know that in the darkness wing buds have sprouted. A new you is on the way.

Your energy will return, you will be flying back into the light. Have patience.

A friend writes that her partner is in the 'throes' of miserable sleepless nights and overwhelmed with everything stressful (may I suggest homeopathy? it helps). I know it's a hard phase to go through, but it's just the labour pains. It's all about travelling into the labyrinth of the birth tunnel, and soon you will be up and out the other side.

It is a rite of passage. It is difficult. But it is worth hanging in there. Get the medical help you need, whether it be acupuncture or herbs or hormones. Read up, get knowledgeable, talk with other 'elders' who have been there.

Note that this is an important time, just like menarche and pregnancy/birth: it is a major phase of your initiation into your Self. It has been ignored, and women have been kept in the dark about it's momentous changes and the growth it brings. It is worthy of ritual.

The menstrual cycle in women is our stress barometer, according to Alexander Pope, a woman who writes wonderfully about this in The Wild Genie, and A woman's quest. So it is perfectly normal that during menopause, we start to notice what stresses us even more. We are finely tuned beings, built for ecstacy, joy, serenity and enjoyment. We cannot tolerate being out of balance anymore. Our bodies and our psyches seek balance.

Heed the messages for rest, and more rest. Slowing down is imperative. Don't wait for a major illness or accident to do it for you.

In the middle of transition during childbirth, it is not time to get up and run around, or pretend you don't know what is going on. Stay focused on the new woman being born. Stay with your center, with your new self arriving, stay in the present as much as possible.

God's little birthing machine is turning herself inside out and being reborn.

Maybe that's what Christmas is heralding this year, your own Hallelujah moment!

trust your inner tuning,
be well,
jenn

Stripping of a woman on the cusp of menopause

If only she could, she would pick up her arms
and give them to her children, her heart to her husband,
her womb to her daughter, but all her parts are ailing,
lying on the floor awaiting rejuvenation. She lies still,
receiving breath, broken down to basic particles.
What to do on the days when tears drop into her soup?
It’s ok to be sad and do nothing on the list, she thinks,
Except the simple tasks like laundry,
except read poetry. What better refuge…
Maybe that’s where poems come from, and for,
to remind us there is something else to do
than the ‘to do’ list –
the soul cries for meaning.

She reads “Trees lose parts of themselves inside a circle of fog” (*by Francis Ponge)
It sounds like the stripping of a woman at menopause,
in the years leading up to the full withholding of the monthly blood,
she has shed her leaves, lost muscle strength, put on weight,
absorbed moisture before the season of dryness,
felt as if she has water on the brain,
disconnected and disoriented by the shift in hormones
waking her up at night and putting other parts of her to sleep.

She is not out to pasture yet, but the young colts no longer bolt
from her body or frolic at her side. She is slowing down.
And if she doesn’t allow herself to rest, she is brought to her knees
in a wave of heat and tears, unable to juggle her roles,
nor exchange the chef’s hat for the sombrero,
Her feet fell heavy and her mind dull.
She tells herself, it is temporary, like fall and the cold.
Brisk winds will return her to spring’s green time,
but only after she has lain fallow, composting
her leafy spices, at the end of a cycle.

Oh the music she needs to comfort her,
and the long night she’ll travel through for years,
until the bright sunlight reclaims her.
Then her wisdom is as legion as the new yellow-green leaves
waving on the hill at dawn.

Human, faulty, imperfect, no more striving for anything,
except for compassion,
the need for self-love reverberating
like the hum she hears in Leonard Cohen’s voice,
claiming darkness as its source
it rings true, full of light.

@Jennifer Boire

Descent into Menopause

previously posted at musemother on Tuesday, September 11, 2007

For any of you interested in a Jungian approach to menopause, I recommend reading Descent to the Goddess, A way of Initiation for Women, by Sylvia Brinton Perera. She analyzes the myth of Inanna, (before Ishtar, middle-eastern) in psychological terms, and describes it as a story of modern woman's quest for wholeness.

Perera's theory is that we who are 'daughters of the father', well adapted to a masculine world, have repudiated or repressed our full feminine instincts and energies. And that in this 'stripping down' or descent to the underworld, we find healing.

The story of Inanna is a fascinating on its own, as it is the oldest written myth (on clay tablets) of a feminine divine power, known as Queen of Heaven and Earth in ancient Sumer (5,000 years ago.) I read this book through the worst year of my peri-menopausal descent, which I described to myself as the 'bug soup' stage, when the feeling of melt-down, loss of power and energy, mild depression, weeping, and general upside-downness, took over.

Here is a short excerpt from the book: "The basis of women's experience of childbearing and of all blood mysteries that create and maintain life is that Nothing changes or grows without the food of some other sacrifice. ....the myth of Inanna's descent and return is centered on this archetype of exchanging energy though sacrifice. ...She needs to sacrifice her dependence on the patriarchal gods to find her true home in the feminine ground of being.

"What I have seen in myself and other women who are successful daughters of the collective, often unmothered daughters of the animus and the patriarchy, is that we suffer a basic fault. We do not have an adequate sense of our own ground nor connection to our own embodied strength and needs adequate to provide is with a resilient feminine, balanced yin-yang processual ego....there is a deep split, maintained by loyalty to super-ego ideals that no longer function to enhance life, a loyalty that keeps the ego alienated from reality....thus we need to undergo a descent to the underworld levels of the dark goddess (Erishkigal), back to ourselves before we had the form we know, back to the magic and archaic levels of consciousness ...back to the body-mind and the preverbal tomb-womb states, searching back to the deep feminine, the 'dual mother' Jung writes about.

On the way down we shed the identifications with and the defences against the animus, introverting to initially humiliating and devastating but ultimately safe, primal levels. (awaiting rebirth). ...We feel as if the old meanings are loosened, as if we are suspended out of life, without energy.

What helps: "Creative improvisions, touching, holding, sounding and singing, silence, breathing, nonverbal actions like drawing, sandplay, building with clay or blocks, dancing, ... maternally nurturant and companioning behavior....the descent to the earth, the darkness is the yin way. Like Inanna, we must submit, going into the deep, to allow the transformative mystery to take place."

I know, this is heavy stuff, and written in Jungian jargon. However, read between the lines. Some of us have some deep healing to do, some of us can benefit from therapy, and some of us just need to loosen up and play more. Less book knowledge and more body knowledge. Less ego ideals and more feeling ideals. Less 'overarching boss of everything' mode, and more 'tend and befriend' mode.

This is just a hint of what the transformative process is like. It's not everybody's journey, but enough of the women I know have been through burn-out, depression, divorce and major health challenges in their mid-40's, for me to recognize the truth of this part of the journey. For me, it started just before my father died, and it's taken me from age 47 to 52 (about 5 years), to come up for air. But now, I feel the cocoon splitting open, and my damp wings are scintillating in the sun. My energy has returned, and I feel closer to the Queen of Heaven, than to the Queen of the Underworld.

have a compassionate self-care day
musemother