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    Menopause: Has Your Moon Paused?

    After years of biking regularly, my period failed to come. I was traveling overseas, while my husband was at home, so I knew I was not pregnant. It dawned on me that this was the Gateway to Menopause, the first indication of my physical clock winding down. Finally, after 40 days, my uterus flowed again. Relief and sadness intermingled in my own.

    What is happening?

    The grief grew from realizing that my stream is preparing to stop. Are you still cycling? Are you in the middle of menopause? What’s your connection with any of those flowing stages you are in, or with the lack there of? Following my adolescence and early womanhood of cursing my menstruation, and seeing it as a hassle and a nuisance, I’ve spent years familiarizing myself with my stream. I learned to embrace it and draw strength from it. I began enjoying its gifts of intuition, and its invitation to take some time for resting, dreaming, creating, delving into my heart, and simply Being.

    Part of the journey for me was reclaiming different names for the menstrual cycle. MoonTime, Moon Flow, or just my Flow, are words I use in honor of this link between our cycles as girls, and the cycles of the moon (both 28.5 days long). If my bicycle is a Moon Flow, than its quitting is best called Moon Pause! Since most of us weren’t welcomed into womanhood once we came of age, we all have a chance to meet up with the ending of our biking years with as much consciousness as we could muster.

      What's Menopause?

    But how?

    How would you honor your transition, as it comes? Or if your Moon has paused, how do you honor the years you spent cycling? When my Moon pauses, I will create a necklace, where I would like to dangle charms that reflect my gratitude to the energy of our bloodstream to give life, and to open the veil to the thickness of the Great Mystery. I’m collecting these charms, separately, along my paths, in prep for my Moon Pause.

    The beginning of my first period was an unconscious action, barely seen, and certainly not honored. The journey of saying farewell to my biking years is emerging as the exact opposite: a conscious journey of acknowledgment and reverence into the sacredness of my MoonTime. As I write this, I cycle regularly. Birthing took place within my body’s own good time, not mine. And so is the winding down of my cyclical clock, being carried out by its own great rhythm. Teaching me patience and humbling me, yet again, into its own miracle.

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