The Alchemy of Menopause - “Live your own life and not the one projected on you.”

Earlier this year I interviewed Cathy Skipper about her work on the alchemy of menopause and when she opened the doors to her last ever live course I enrolled with my thoughts of sharing this journey with others. Little did I know how much I needed to embark on this journey of healing myself.

Working through stages feels like an important part of coming into elderhood, to reach maturity. I firmly believe that it is in perimenopause and menopause that each of us is given the chance in the form of a calling from the psyche to do this work.

An important thing to remember about the work of this stage is that it can be frightening to discover the unknown parts of yourself. It has certainly been for me but bringing light has freed up a lot of blocked energy that is strengthening and liberating once it’s released. Although I would say I am still on this journey, which is far from linear.

Central to Cathy’s work is what she refers to as clearing the motherline.To connect with your healthy ancestors, those who are waiting patiently for you to call upon them, to behold their presence. It’s a symptom of our ego-driven world that we are taught to see ourselves as separate from those who went before us. It’s a very ego-driven culture that cannot see that we exist in relation to the genealogic tree that we are born from. We wouldn’t be here without the resilience of our ancestors. We cannot fully heal and become whole without a recognition of what still needs to be healed ancestrally.

For me as a Chinese medicine practitioner, this has great resonance as Jing our essence or vital life force (pre-natal Qi) comes through our ancestors and cannot be increased only preserved.

The mother I knew and grew up with wasn’t on the same team as me a lot of the time. I’d love to have grown up with the wisdom of the earth and of the feminine passed down through generations from mother to daughter inside me.

Shame was like a dark cloak that women in the family couldn’t escape from. I was close to my maternal grandmother and this cloak shrouded my grandmother's relationship with those she loved. My grandmother betrayed her own siblings who didn’t pass like her into middle-class respectability. I discovered that she had in fact grown up in abject poverty and that her mother had been a prostitute before her marriage. An all too familiar story of destitution and desperation that many women have had and continue to endure in order to survive.

My grandmother even told me that her sister had died when I was a small child. In reality, Amanda worked in the local biscuit factory, married a fellow coworker and lived until 1983 when I was 23. I never met her and my only connection was a small enamel bracelet of cat’s heads in pink and purple that loved.

My grandmother betrayed her own daughter and granddaughters by lying about who we were and where we came from. She betrayed our relationship by hiding her true self. I no longer blame her. I recognize the pain of the shame she couldn’t release herself from.

Marion Woodman describes this as a ‘Death Mother.’ and has written about it extensively in her book ‘Addiction to Perfection.’

So, what is the Death Mother? The Death Mother is a powerful aspect of the mother archetype that is dominated by the conviction that her children exist to serve her. A mother can be possessed by the Death Mother archetype and like all possessions she is completely unconscious of it. She has so much deep, emotional control over the child that she can literally ‘turn her to stone’, like Medusa.

My own grandmother and mother were ‘Death Mothers’, and would give me ‘that look’ and I was paralyzed on the spot. My life force and motivation would instantly drain away and all I could do would be to retreat into myself.

My mother would give me ‘that look’ at moments when I was excited about something or doing something passionately that did not fit into her ideal or her opinion of who I should be and what I should be doing. The child gets the message that she is not loved for who she is. She is loved conditionally, that is only when she obeys and fits into the rigid ‘ideal’ the mother has for her.

Abandonment is a deep part of what is felt when you have a Death Mother. We are abandoned and replaced by a cardboard cut-out of what she wants us to be. The theme of abandonment often follows us into life. We have learnt not to trust love because the most important relationship of love was thwarted. I remember being terrified of doing anything that I really felt passion or love for. I would not be able to go for the activity I wanted to do, the job or course I loved.

In my thirties, I had the opportunity to manage a small healing centre in Heswall on the Wirral and pursue the work of TuiNa massage and Qigong but I was so paralyzed by the idea of being rejected and abandoned that I chose a corporate career and a man’s whose values were steeped in materialism and status quo.

The core of myself withered away and I had learned that others were more important than myself and I only existed in relation to them.

I performed as an adult striving for goals that are not really my own. Marion Woodman says that the problem with striving for goals that are not our real goals leads to frustration as these goals do not satisfy our souls. It was only as I began to more deeply embrace my Qigong work first with Peter Caughey and now with Daisy Lee that I am able to embrace again what I abandoned in the thirties.

My journey is helping me to understand many things. I am drawing on Aromatics and plant medicine as my allies along with visualisation, journaling and journeying. There is a lot to work through to start to heal the scars and negative beliefs installed by the death mother.

The work starts with a change of perspective – looking within rather than blaming others.

We have all in some way, depending on the story of our motherlines, similar experiences. How could we not after generations and generations of patriarchy? Patriarchy and colonization steal the natural energy of the feminine, of the mother that comes through the motherline, to perpetuate its dynamic of “power over.” We can’t carry on like this.

The feminine cannot be held down any longer. I see the growing conversation on menopause and older women as the ancient feminine aspect surging up from within us, through the generations. It’s time to listen to her calling. We are unconsciously responding to this call.

Can you relate? Have you embarked on work to heal your feminine self and to embrace the healthy masculine?

Thank you for reading this ramble of my current reality and if you feel inclined do subscribe and join this community.

Clarissa xxx