by Adrienne Ryan, BEd, Brisbane, Australia
At a recent presentation by Serge Benhayon of Universal Medicine, I came to a deeper understanding of the beauty and power of menopause.
This is the stage I am coming to next in my life cycle, where my body will say: the time of bearing and raising children, of ‘bringing life into the world’, has completed and now it is time to nurture and care for others in a different way to:
Support them to take responsibility for the quality of life they are building, knowing that this quality is what they will take with them into their next life.
It is very beautiful to be reminded that women bring life into the world and later support life to leave the world too. I don’t have children but nonetheless children have always been and still are around me in my day-to-day life. Mothering is a quality I have expressed with children and others – it is a part of how my body impulses me to relate to the world as a woman.
EVERYTHING HAS ITS STAGE IN LIFE’S CYCLES
While Menopause is not yet a cycle I am in, as a 46 year old woman it is where I am headed. To extend a stage beyond its time or to hold back from moving onto the next stage, feels like staying in a bath after the water has turned cold. It goes against what my body is tuned into when I stubbornly resist all the signs and feelings that say, “It’s time to pull the plug and move on”.
MENOPAUSE IS NOT THE END OF LIFE AS I KNOW IT
It is great to clearly see that – I’m not old, dried up and past my prime – but at a stage of my normal, beautiful, ready-or-not life cycle, where it is time to relinquish a role (mothering) that my body (menopause) will clearly tell me is complete. The thing with cycles is that, like the moon, one stage wanes as another waxes: Mothering wanes as Elder Energy waxes. For men the deepening into Elder Energy comes in a different way, when they choose to acknowledge and let go of the inner child that has continued, deep down, to run them throughout their adult life.
MENOPAUSE, LIKE ALL STAGES IN LIFE, PRESENTS A CHANGE OF GEAR
When it comes to mothering and nurturing others, this change is about shifting from ‘doing’ for them, to firmly, lovingly supporting them to take responsibility and ‘do’ for themselves – as they are designed, equipped and naturally impulsed to do when they allow themselves to be the capable and richly expressive beings they are.
ELDER ENERGY
It is this very sacred ‘Elder Energy’ that says not “Let me take care of you” but, “Come on, you can take care of yourself now… it’s time to step up into a new level of responsibility and expression on offer for you now”. We get comfortable in a stage, but Elder Energy knows that comfort gets in the way of life, limiting the fullness of expression we are here to bring – comfort feeds a bonsai where an oak could be.
I realize there are many times that I have been held in Elder Energy: when someone has shown me where I have been holding back – not in a way that diminishes me, or makes me wrong, silly or out of line, but in a way that holds me as more than I have been allowing myself to be and invites me to step up and be my fully responsible self, instead of letting the ways, needs and demands of the (stubborn), self centred, reactive and needy child within me, rule.
This Elder Energy I’ve felt expressed from another, was very freeing to receive – it came with a great undeniable love that nudged or sometimes pushed, prodded even lovingly kicked me to wake up out of my comfortableness and step into taking responsibility for the quality of life I was creating – not because I should, but because I matter and my choices matter and they have wide reaching affects on everyone and everything. And because when I am all of me, not just comfortable me, there is so much joy, vitality and wisdom I feel connected to that flows into everything I bring to the world.
Elder Energy lovingly cuts the comfort I let myself fall asleep in and calls me to wake up, get up and responsibly, joyfully, live the fullness of my true quality in life, knowing that the quality I ‘make’ – like I make my bed each day – is the quality I return to… and it has an effect on everyone.
It is easy to see that without Elder Energy we are all left less, in the mess of a world where women remain mothers to children and others (including husbands) who choose to remain a child well past the age of childhood. This ‘energetic umbilical cord’ chokes us all with the ‘less-ness’ it feeds.
Elder Energy is like a big, beautiful pair of scissors ready to unreservedly snip me free from the umbilical cord, back to the self nourishing truth of who I am: a responsible being whose vitality and quality of expression flourishes when I claim responsibility in full and allow the deeply beautiful and powerful essence within to flow through all aspects of my daily life with all others.