The Passage No One Named for You

What the Research Actually Shows

Start with the honest objection, because it is a fair one. When someone says menopause has a 'spiritual meaning,' it can sound like a pretty story draped over a hard biological fact, a way of making the best of a loss. So set the poetry aside for a moment and look at the biology, because the biology is stranger and more meaningful than the wellness slogans. Menopause is genuinely rare in nature. Almost every other animal reproduces until close to the end of its life. Human females do not: they live long, vital decades after fertility ends, a pattern shared with only a handful of species. The leading explanation, known as the grandmother hypothesis, is that this long second half of life was selected for precisely because older women were so valuable to their kin, raising the survival of grandchildren and freeing their daughters to do more (Hawkes et al., 1998). Read that slowly. The decades after menopause are not an accident of modern medicine or a leftover the body forgot to switch off. They are part of the human design, a life stage that mattered enough to be built in. The change is a threshold into something, not a slow fade out of everything.

The second finding is where meaning stops being abstract and starts showing up in the body. Researchers who compared menopause across cultures found that the experience is not the same everywhere, and the differences are large. In one careful review, hot flashes were reported by around 62% of women in Europe and 59% in the United States, but by only about 29% of women in Japan (Melby, Lock & Kaufert, 2005). The authors call this 'local biologies': the idea that culture, diet, language, expectation and the status a society gives its older women all weave into the physical experience of the change, so that the same transition is lived differently depending on the meaning around it. This is not a claim that symptoms are imaginary. It is a stronger and stranger claim: that the frame a culture puts around this passage becomes part of how the body itself moves through it. Where age is met with respect rather than dread, women tend to report an easier time of it.

The third finding brings it home to you personally, and it needs care, because it is easy to twist into something cruel. A systematic review of the research found that women who hold more negative attitudes toward menopause tend to report heavier symptoms and lower mood, while those who meet it with a more positive or meaningful frame tend to have an easier experience (Ayers, Forshaw & Hunter, 2010). Read honestly, this does not mean the symptoms are in your head, and it does not mean you can think a hot flash away or that a hard menopause is your own fault for not being positive enough. The influence runs both ways, since heavy symptoms understandably sour anyone's attitude. What it does mean is that the story you hold about the change is one real, movable factor sitting among all the biological ones. Meaning is not only poetry. It is physiology you have some say in.

Put the three together and the objection answers itself. 'Spiritual meaning' is not a fantasy pasted over a deficiency. Menopause is a real, distinctive, evolutionarily meaningful threshold; the meaning a culture gives it changes the lived experience; and the meaning you give it changes yours. Choosing to meet the change as a passage with meaning is therefore not wishful thinking. It is the most evidence-consistent thing you can do. What the modern West lost was never the meaning. It was the ritual that once named it, the ceremony that told a woman she was not disappearing but crossing into a valued stage of life. The meaning is still there, waiting under the medical language. It just needs naming again, and that is where a teacher like Perukua comes in.

What Perukua Says About the Change

Perukua has spent more than thirty years bringing women back into their bodies and into wholeness, and she meets the change from that ground. First the plain facts: she is a vocalist and women's facilitator whose work has reached women in more than 63 countries, and she is not a doctor. Nothing here is medical advice, and the biology of menopause deserves real medical care. What she offers is the meaning the medicine leaves out. And she is blunt about where the real wound is. It is not the change itself, she teaches, but the shame our culture wraps around it. 'We are taught that it is somehow shameful to grow older,' she says. 'But this is exactly what our bodies are made for.' She refuses to treat the passage as a malfunction. The body is doing precisely what it was built to do, and there is nothing to apologize for in that.

What the change opens, in her teaching, is a turn inward, and this is where her language and the evolutionary research quietly agree. For decades a woman's energy runs outward: producing, providing, pleasing, holding a family and a world together. Menopause ends that chapter and opens another. 'Our essence is not in the constant striving to increase, to accumulate, to crave more,' she teaches. 'Ours is a principle of peaceful stewardship of what we bring into the world through the feminine body. This is the meaning of inner wisdom. We are not here to create more and more.' The passage is not a demotion from the productive years. It is the door into the wisdom years, the very stage that may be the reason the long second half of human life exists at all.

She also names a third road where the culture offers only two. The world tells a woman at midlife that she has two options: fight to look younger, or quietly disappear. Perukua takes neither. 'For me it is important to keep evolving in my feminine power,' she says, speaking in her mid-fifties. Not to preserve who she was, not to vanish, but to keep deepening. This is the heart of the reframe. The change is not the end of becoming. It is an invitation to become more fully yourself than the busy, outward-facing first half ever left room for. Her course How to Hear and Follow the Voice of Your Calling is built around exactly this, hearing the truer self and the calling that the change makes audible, and following it into the second half.

None of this asks you to pretend the passage is easy. Perukua teaches change as a re-centering, not a smooth ascent. In her work on navigating life's transitions she asks a woman to stand, in effect, at the center of her own circle of life and actually feel it, letting the new energy of this stage rebalance every area around her. That can feel, at first, like the ground moving. But the movement is not you falling apart. It is you returning to the center of a life that, for a long time, has been organized around everyone else. The change is not taking your self away. Slowly, and if you let it have meaning, it is handing your self back.

Why a Nameless Passage Is So Hard

It is worth understanding why a passage with no name is so disorienting, because the disorientation is not weakness, it is a predictable result. Human beings are meaning-making animals, and we cross the big thresholds of life best when they are marked. Traditional cultures knew this. Birth, coming of age, marriage, death and, in many places, the change of life were surrounded by ritual, so that the person crossing knew what was ending, what was beginning, and that the community saw them step into a new and valued role. The modern West did something unusual: it took one of the largest thresholds in a woman's life and stripped the meaning out, reframing it as a medical deficiency and then hiding it. So women arrive at a genuine passage with no map and a single message, that they are declining. Of course that feels like coming apart. A real threshold with the meaning torn out will always feel that way.

This is also why giving the change meaning is not denial but medicine of a different kind. Framing the passage as a threshold rather than a decline is not putting a brave face on a loss; it changes the lived experience, because expectation and meaning feed into the nervous system and into how symptoms are perceived (Melby, Lock & Kaufert, 2005; Ayers, Forshaw & Hunter, 2010). Naming the crossing, marking it, turning toward what it opens rather than only mourning what it closes, all of this is real work with real effects. Hold one honest line as you do it, though: meaning is a complement, not a cure. It sits alongside good medical care, never instead of it.

So two boundaries belong here plainly. First, the symptoms of menopause are real and often treatable, and meaning does not replace medicine. Hot flashes, sleepless nights, mood changes, pain and the rest deserve real care; if they disrupt your life, talk to your doctor about your options, including hormone therapy, and never start or stop any treatment on your own. Second, the natural grief and disorientation of this passage are not the same as clinical depression. The unsettledness of transition comes in waves, and between them you can still be reached by a friend, a walk, a moment of beauty. If instead the mood goes flat and total, if it covers most of the day for two weeks or more, if interest drains out of everything, or if you have thoughts of not wanting to be alive, that is a matter for a doctor, and in the United States you can reach a crisis line at 988 right now. Perukua is an artist and facilitator, not a doctor, and the meaning she offers is meant to walk beside good care, not to stand in for it.

A Practice: Naming Your Own Passage

If you sense there is meaning in the change and want a way to meet it from the inside, here is a gentle practice, drawn from what the research shows and what Perukua teaches. The aim is not to feel wonderful about menopause overnight. It is to stop meeting a real passage as a mere decline, and to give it back the meaning the modern world misplaced.

First, name it as a threshold, not a decline. Say it to yourself plainly: this is a passage, not a breakdown, and my body is doing exactly what it was built to do. This is not pretending. The research shows the frame you hold becomes part of the experience (Ayers, Forshaw & Hunter, 2010), so choosing the more accurate story, that you are crossing into a stage of life rather than falling out of one, is both truer and kinder to your body.

Second, mark the crossing. Cultures that lived this passage well gave it a ritual. Make a small one of your own. Walk to a place that means something to you, light a candle, or write down two short lists: what this chapter of your life is closing, and what it might be opening. A threshold you mark is a threshold you can feel yourself actually cross, rather than one you simply endure.

Third, turn your attention inward, where the wisdom is. The change turns the body from outward production toward inner life, so meet it there. Once a day, take a single minute: one hand on your heart, one on your belly, a long slow breath out, and one honest question, what do I want the second half of my life to be about? Do not answer from the to-do list. Let the answer rise from the body, which, as Perukua teaches, is where a woman's knowing actually lives.

Fourth, give the turn a voice. This is Perukua's signature, and it is more than metaphor. Alone somewhere private, let a low hum become a sigh, let the sigh become a sound, let your throat open and carry whatever wants to move. The self that the change is surfacing wants to be heard, not silenced. Her course How to Hear and Follow the Voice of Your Calling is devoted to exactly this, letting your own voice become the way you hear and follow the calling of this next stage.

Fifth, tend the body with respect, and get real care. Meaning is not a substitute for medicine. Sleep as well as you can, move gently and daily, eat in a way that steadies you, and take your symptoms seriously. If they disrupt your life, bring them to your doctor and ask about your options, including hormone therapy. Honor the passage and care for the body making it. These are not opposites. They are two halves of meeting the change whole.

In Closing

If you have sensed that menopause must mean something, trust that instinct. The meaning is real and old: a distinctive human threshold, honored across cultures as a passage into wisdom, and shaped in the living by the story you hold. What the modern world took from you was not the meaning but the ritual that named it, and you can name it again. Meet the change as a passage rather than a decline; mark the crossing; turn toward the inner life it is opening; and care well for the body making the journey. The woman on the other side of this passage is not a lesser version of the one before. She is the one the whole first half of your life was quietly preparing.

This piece is general information about wellbeing, not medical advice, and Perukua is an artist and facilitator, not a doctor. The symptoms of menopause are real and often treatable: talk to your doctor about your options, including hormone therapy, and never start or stop any treatment on your own. The natural grief of a life transition is not the same as depression; if your mood goes flat and total for two weeks or more, if nothing reaches you, or if you have thoughts of not wanting to be alive, please talk to a doctor now, or contact a crisis line such as 988 in the United States.

References & Quote Sources

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