For nearly a decade, a whisper had been circling: something wasn’t quite right. I’m not supposed to feel this depleted. Life isn’t meant to be a continuous river of chasing. By 2020, that gentle sound had grown to a volume I could no longer ignore.
That year changed all of us. For me, the chase became relentless. For three years I ran to keep up with what my business demanded, and it changed more than my days. It changed my body. I became a shell of myself, exhausted in a way I had never known.
By the summer of 2022, I was still running, still chasing my life. I was trying to be a fully present mother while balancing the needs of my business and the whims of a relationship that seemed to be sucking me dry.
My creativity had fallen off a cliff. My writing and course creation stopped, and the energy that used to surge through me was gone. It felt as though I’d lost desire for most of what had once brought me joy. After holding so much through the pandemic years, I felt broken. So I went dormant and found my way back to the simple things: cooking, tending to my daughter and my home, and a small group of friends. I began to realize more about what mattered to me, and about how I wanted to live, not what I wanted to achieve. At times I worried I was becoming insignificant, that I might never create the way I once had. In truth, I wouldn’t, and that metamorphosis was important. It taught me the truth of my own connection, and how I had spent my life hiding who I was for fear of being cast out. This resurrection of sorts is a new evolution of my life: not fearing my capacities, and allowing what moves through me to move. The years of hiding and holding back had created a habit of hiding and holding.
Through all of it, perimenopause was arriving, and no amount of pretending could hold it off. When the hot flashes hit, I thought I might not survive. The weight, the exhaustion, the loss of motivation: none of it would resolve. Eventually I understood that I wasn’t meant to solve it, at least not the way I’d been taught to be a woman.
At first, the research surfacing everywhere felt like a salve. I was grateful to belong to a generation where science and other women were finally asking what this time of life requires. But as quickly as the information flooded the airwaves, so did the people and companies ready to profit from my perceived weakness. Supplements, diets, protocols, workout regimes: all of it promised to retrieve a me who no longer existed. It was the same poison I’d been sold my whole life, the promise of a perfection that never arrives, now masked with the label of menopause. And here I was, chasing again.
I wasn’t willing to hand my life to a multi-billion-dollar industry in search of a saviour. I knew there was another way.
In the fall of 2023, I had a profound awakening. Some call it a kundalini awakening, others simply a waking up. Whatever the name, I woke up different one day. It was so intense that if I hadn’t had my new relationship as an anchor to this world, I might have ended up in a treatment centre. An awakening like that is such a shake-up that you need support, or at the very least someone to hold onto, while your world whirls undone from how you’ve known it. The relationship eventually came apart, once I realized I didn’t owe that person a lifetime commitment for standing beside me through such a life-altering experience. When I released myself from its grip, I got even quieter. I slowed my life down enough to experience space. I stopped filling every moment and started learning how to listen, in a way that has been deeply healing. I’ve learned how to be still in a world that demands too much of us.
In that stillness, something began to move through me: teachings that weren’t mine, knowledge arriving through me, as though I were a vessel. It felt like being washed in the ocean of consciousness, where the land and the ancestors wanted to share the knowledge I had been craving. The wisdom was beyond me, but for the first time I had a body capable of holding it, in a way that wasn’t available to me before menopause.
It showed me that my life’s study of traditional practices was never about collecting more answers. It was preparation to help other women find their way back to themselves: not outward, but inward, to a wisdom that lives in each of us. That wisdom is being shaken awake as we’re shaken loose from who we thought we were and how our bodies were supposed to be. We were programmed to believe our wisdom lived in the hands of others. It never did.
The awakening is happening through our bodies. Through suffering, we become more sensitive and porous, and that sensitivity is increasing for a reason. It isn’t so we can no longer engage with the world. It’s so that how we engage becomes part of the medicine our families, communities, and the world need right now.
The whisper never left. It was never telling me I was broken. It was asking me to stop long enough to listen, and to trust that what I heard was mine.
For those of you who feel this call, who know something is moving through you but aren’t sure what it is or how to engage with it: I’m running a weekend immersion to invoke those deep understandings in you and help you find your truth. This isn’t a solo journey. Modernity has taught us that we have to figure it all out on our own. We don’t. We’re meant to share our wisdom and emerge as a collective of wisdom holders who support others. We are not a generation of women who hold power over others. We are the ones who will help remind this world how to build together.
Love, Noelle
More details on the immersion HERE.