Why Women Grow Spiritual in Midlife

What the Research Says About the Midlife Turn Inward

Type “why do women get spiritual in midlife” into a search bar and you join a very large, very quiet company. The women asking are not, for the most part, joining anything or announcing anything. Something has simply started to turn. For a long time this turn was waved off as a phase, or read as a symptom. The research tells a steadier story.

Across adulthood the inner life tends to grow rather than shrink. In an accelerated longitudinal study published in Innovation in Aging in 2023, researchers at the University of Notre Dame followed 768 adults between the ages of 45 and 80 and tracked six facets of religiousness and spirituality over time. Their careful conclusion was that these do not all move in one simple line — people engage their faith in different ways as they age — but the broad, widely accepted pattern held: the spiritual dimension of life becomes more present, not less, in the second half.

The gerontologist Lars Tornstam gave this drift a name decades ago — gerotranscendence: a gradual shift from a materialistic, achievement-centered way of seeing toward a wider and more connected one. It is not resignation. It is reordering. What mattered urgently at thirty quietly stops mattering, and something older and larger moves to the center of the frame.

For women that reordering often arrives with a specific escort: menopause. A grounded-theory study published in PLOS One in 2022, following eighteen women through the menopausal transition, mapped the passage in seven stages — from the “sunset of youth,” through a period the researchers named “weaving a cocoon,” and out the far side into what the women themselves called a “feeling of transcendence.” The image rewards a pause. From the outside a cocoon looks like a shutting-down. It is the exact opposite.

Nor is the pattern confined to one culture. A 2025 study in the Journal of Religion and Health interviewed seventeen women between 40 and 65 about their inner lives during menopause, and heard the years described again and again as a time of spiritual reflection and re-evaluation — a settling of accounts with what a life is actually for. Something in the biography of a woman’s fifties opens a door her twenties kept shut. The real question is what to do once you find yourself standing in it.

What Perukua Says About the Passage

Perukua — the Australian singer and facilitator who has led women’s practices in 63 countries — has spent much of three decades in rooms full of women at exactly this threshold. She names the wound the culture inflicts first. “When we come out of the cycle, when we pass through menopause, we meet complete denial — being cancelled,” she reports. “What I mean is, you are no longer needed by society, except maybe as a grandmother. Last week I was working with women on my course, and one of them asked me: well, what is left for me now? I’m sixty-five.” (translated from Russian)

Her answer is not consolation but a reframe. Where the modern world sees an ending, she points to an initiation the culture simply forgot how to hold. “One of the most taboo subjects in the world is menstruation,” she says. “Nobody will discuss it — or menopause. It is just not done to speak of it out loud. I once wrote a song celebrating my own bleeding, proud to be a woman.” (translated from Russian) The instinct behind that song — to mark a passage rather than hide it — is, in her teaching, most of the medicine.

And she is exact about what maturity really asks. It is not serenity, and it is not the absence of grief. “You can walk through the initiation and accept the gift,” she reports, “or you can decide you are a victim and blame everyone around you. Real maturity, I think, is being able to make the right choice.” (translated from Russian) For Perukua the spiritual turn of midlife is less a mood that descends on a woman than a choice she is finally free enough to make.

Why the Body Leads the Way In

It is tempting to picture a spiritual awakening as an event in the mind — a new belief, a book that lands, a weekend away. Perukua’s work runs the other direction, and it is the direction the menopause research quietly supports. The passage is registered first in the body: in sleep that breaks, in a heat that rises, in a sensitivity that will not be argued with. The turn inward begins as a turn toward the body, not away from it.

This is why she distrusts a spirituality that lives only in the head. “For me, spirituality is about accepting every part of yourself, and expanding your sense of ‘I’ to hold even more,” she reports. “The key is acceptance and relaxation — embracing each part of yourself.” (translated from Russian) In her framing a woman at midlife is not becoming someone new so much as being handed the quiet to know who she has been all along — what she calls “an incredible mosaic,” resting on the old instruction to know thyself. (translated from Russian)

The tools she reaches for are deliberately plain: the breath, and the voice. Sound gives the inward turn something to do — a way to feel the shift in the chest and the throat rather than only think about it. None of this treats a medical symptom, and a woman whose menopausal changes are disruptive should take those to her doctor. But the meaning of the passage — what it is for — is not a medical question, and it is the one most women are actually asking.

A Small Rite for the Threshold

This is adapted from the kind of practice Perukua leads, pared down to five minutes you can do alone. It is not a performance, and it does not require you to sing.

First, name where you are standing. Sit, close your eyes, and say to yourself — silently or aloud — one plain sentence: “I am in the middle of a change.” No fixing, no plan. Just the acknowledgment a threshold deserves.

Second, breathe it down into the body. Rest one hand low on the belly and one over the heart. Breathe in slowly through the nose; on the out-breath, let a low, quiet hum rise from the chest, long and unforced. Stay with it a minute or two. The hum is the oldest self-soothing sound there is, and it draws attention out of the racing head and into the sounding body.

Third, ask the older question. With the hum settled, ask silently: “What is asking to be left behind, and what is asking to begin?” Do not chase an answer. Let the question rest in a body that is, for once, quiet enough to hear it.

Fourth, close by marking it. Open your eyes and, if it feels right, say a single word for what you want to carry into the second half of your life — one word, out loud, said once. Marking a passage is the whole point. The culture stopped doing it. The body never did.

In Closing

For most of a woman’s first fifty years the culture asks her to face outward — to build, to tend, to be seen and useful. Menopause quietly ends that assignment, and the silence that follows can feel, at first, like disappearance. The research, the old traditions, and the women who have already walked through keep insisting on a different reading: that the door swings inward, and that what waits on the other side is not less life but a deeper draught of it. You do not have to believe anything to step through. You only have to get quiet enough to notice you are standing at the threshold — and to say, out loud if you can, that you have arrived.

References & Quote Sources

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