While the cycle runs, a woman counts as a participant in life. The cycle ends and the participation is quietly withdrawn, leaving one official role she is still welcome in. Advertising, films, conversations at work and jokes about age repeat it for years, and one day a woman agrees with it herself. What actually opens up at that age is explained by Peruquois, a leading World Music performer in Australia, musician, composer, and the author and facilitator of personal development trainings for women.
Why it feels like being cancelled
A woman's energy changes every single day because of the shifting hormonal background and the phase of the cycle, and she lives with that for her entire adult life. Admitting it is not done: being emotional is considered unprofessional, saying anything about your state out loud is awkward, and it is easier to take a pill and keep working.
Then this happens. “And when we come out of that cycle, go through menopause, we meet total denial, cancellation. I mean that you are no longer needed by society, except perhaps in the role of a grandmother,” says Peruquois.
The cancellation is never announced anywhere. It is simply felt on the skin. And almost every woman at some point stops arguing and accepts the role she has been offered.
The question a student asked
In one of her online courses Peruquois was working with a group of women, and one of them asked it straight: “Well, what is left for me? I am sixty five. What is left for me?”
That question comes up in nearly every group that has women past menopause in it. Behind it stands an honest conclusion: my time as a woman is over.
The answer
“What is left for you is to wake the beauty inside you. Start giving yourself the love you have given to everyone else your whole life,” Peruquois answered.
The second half of that sentence matters more than the first. By sixty five a woman has handed out an enormous quantity of love: to children, a husband, parents, grandchildren, work. She loves professionally, it is her principal skill, sharpened over forty years. And the one person systematically excluded from the distribution has been herself.
This is not about starting life over. It is about pointing at yourself the thing you already do superbly.
What it looks like in practice
Peruquois describes it physically: let love shine through the skin, light up the eyes, light up the awareness.
The consequences are entirely ordinary. Posture changes. Interest in how you are dressed comes back, and not for anyone else's eyes. Plans appear that have nothing to do with anyone in the family. Things start being interesting that you forgot about thirty years ago.
Then comes back the right to change what has been arranged by inertia for years, and to move out of the position of a person with no place of her own in life. “Become a bright, noticeable woman,” says Peruquois. And she adds that afterwards, out of that state, you also get an excellent grandmother, one the grandchildren find interesting, and a relationship with grown children that they are glad of. The order here is the reverse of the usual: first a woman gets herself back, and everything else follows from that.
The age when time finally appears
The end of the cycle is usually described as a loss. In practice it works differently.
“I am no longer in the cycle, but I now have more time to focus on myself and bring more beauty into my world,” says Peruquois. The hormonal swing that set the rhythm of every month for thirty five years has ended. The children have grown. The career has either happened or stopped being the main question.
For the first time in her adult life a woman has an even background and free time. The only question is what it goes to. Most often it goes to servicing other people's lives, because nobody offered her any other option.
Development does not end at any stage
A woman can keep developing at every stage of life, and the fork is the same everywhere. A twenty year old after a hard experience can close down and stay a broken girl, or she can admit: yes, all of that happened, and it can be healed, and I can become a woman. A sixty five year old stands at the same fork, only with more material.
“It is simply a decision to live anew,” says Peruquois. Accept this part of your feminine nature, see that there is more time for yourself now, and bring more beauty into your world.
That is what returns to a woman the sensual, real feminine flow, in her life and in her body. And it happens not because of the number of years behind her, but because of how much attention and love she points in her own direction.
If you feel that life has to be assembled again and you want to understand what to build it on now, Peruquois has a course called How to hear and follow the voice of your calling. You will find it on her website under Courses.
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