The Divine Feminine Reclamation: The Womb, Menopause & the Woman You're Becoming

Have you ever wondered if our womb was meant to represent something more than just our ability to bring children into the world? Think about it. For much of our lives, the womb is understood through its physical, biological purpose—conception, pregnancy, birth, and the extraordinary ability to create another human being. But what happens when our biology changes and that chapter comes to a close? Does our creative life force simply shut down and retire along with our reproductive years?

I find myself questioning that idea. What if the womb represents something much larger—an expansive creative force that can express itself in ways we may not fully understand until we move through the later seasons of womanhood? What if menopause isn't the closing of that creative energy, but an energetic transformation into something more expansive, more personal, and perhaps even more deeply spiritual? I believe we've been looking at the whole thing from the wrong end of the story.

The Womb Beyond the Womb

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, particularly as I've come to understand my own relationship with womanhood, sensuality, and the energetic body. Perhaps the physical chapter of our childbearing years is closing, but another kind of creation is beginning. And what if we've been so busy focusing on the dreaded changes and mourning what the womb can no longer do that we've overlooked what it might still inspire us to become?

I don't mean that the physical womb literally transforms into an energetic organ. I'm speaking about the symbolic and spiritual meaning of creation, and how our relationship with that creative force might evolve as we move through the different seasons of womanhood. This is where my own exploration of the energetic body comes into the conversation and mix.

Within the Balancing The Body Electric chakra framework I work with, there are seven energy center systems that follow seven-year cycles. Around age 49, those energy centers reach a peek threshold, recalibrating you to experience the beginning of each of those energy centers with a different level of awareness— Starting with the Root Chakra and moving upward again every 7 years.

Having just turned 57 last week, I am now living in the second year cycle of my Sacral Chakra, and I find myself becoming increasingly reconnected to its sacred energy center—sensuality, pleasure, creativity, desire, and the experience of being fully alive again— in a different expression. And interestingly enough, this shift was already showing up in my life years earlier when I really think about it.

Around 49, I started thinking about what I wanted the next chapter of my career to look like. So at 50, I went back to school, spent a year and a half earning my life coaching certifications and credentials, and by 53 I had retired from my previous career and started over as a Life Coach at a counseling center. By 54, I began creating and building my own private practice, Michigan Life Coaching and I can't help but wonder if this was another kind of birth in motion taking place.

What's interesting is that I feel more desirable and sensual now than I did in earlier chapters of my life—even if the source of that feeling has changed. It isn't rooted in being physically desired or needing someone else to reflect my desirability back to me. It comes from something much deeper, something I experience as spiritual, energetic, and difficult to measure or put into conventional language. Perhaps the womb was never just about what we could bring into the world physically. Yet perhaps it is also a reminder of our innate capacity to create life in all its glorious, masterful forms.

The Passage We Were Never Taught to Honor

How did menopause become so heavily associated with loss, decline, discomfort, and the dreaded hot flash? Who decided it was the expiration date on our femininity? Thankfully, more women, researchers, and healthcare professionals are opening up the conversation, challenging outdated assumptions, and giving this extraordinary biological transition the attention it deserves. But I still think we're missing a much bigger conversation.

We spend so much time preparing girls for puberty, educating women about reproduction, and celebrating motherhood, yet there is remarkably little cultural recognition of the passage beyond our reproductive years. Where is the meaningful acknowledgment of this transition? Where is the space to talk about what it means to move into another chapter of womanhood—not simply about what happens to our hormones, but what this passage might mean to us?

Being adopted added another layer to my own experience. I didn't have a biological mother, sister, or aunt at the time to call and ask, " Hey..Is this normal? Did this happen to you? What should I expect?" I didn't have those familiar female connections or family stories to help me understand what my body was going through. And this transition started much earlier than I realized.

I began experiencing something of this transition with night sweats after the birth of my first daughter at 26. By the ago of 50, my periods had stopped completely and in between those years were filled with monthly cycles of intense bleeding, hormonal acne, the unpredictability of its heaviness and cramping, and repeated nights sweats that could leave me feeling like I hadn't slept at all. Some periods were so extraordinarily heavy that I could’t leave the bathroom and some times the bed could end up looking like a crime scene. Not exactly the kind of thing anyone puts in a menopause brochure.

For a long time, it was a very embarrassing isolating emotional experience. I didn't have a space to talk openly about what was happening or someone with a shared biological history to help me make sense of it. That began to change when I married my husband, an acupuncturist and Chinese medicine practitioner. He started asking questions, opening conversations, and helping me explore ways to support my body through the transition. I received acupuncture for years, and his presence became an enormous source of relief and support. He wasn't just hearing about what I was experiencing; he was seeing the day-to-day reality of it.

Looking back, I realize how much that mattered. Sometimes what we need isn't another person telling us what menopause is supposed to look like. We need someone willing to listen, make room for the conversation, and remind us that we don't have to navigate it alone. But now that I've moved through this transition, I find myself looking at it through a very different lens. And no, I'm not suggesting it's all roses, goddess energy, and beautifully timed spiritual awakenings. Those hot flashes, hormones and periods can make you question your entire relationship with humanity. Still, I don't look back on menopause as the beginning of the end of anything. I see it as an initiation into a different expression of myself.

The Fire Within: What If We've Mistaken a Calling for a Curse?

There were certainly years when I felt like my body had enrolled me in some sort of burning woman ritual. Night after night, day after day, those hot flashes would arrive, and I could practically feel then fire from the heat radiating from the inside out. If nothing else, I became very familiar with the art of layering my clothing, and staging my nightly routine for what my internal inferno had in store for me next.

But looking back now, there's something almost poetic about that experience. Not because the physical discomfort was some sort of beautiful spiritual awakening. Trust me, there were plenty of moments when I would have happily opted out of the ceremony. But I sometimes wonder whether there's a meaningful metaphor in all that fire. What if we've been looking at this whole experience as a curse instead of a calling?

What if menopause is more than a biological transition to get through? What if it can also be understood as an initiation, a doorway into a different level of awareness, self-understanding, and feminine wisdom that modern society has largely forgotten how to recognize? Across some cultures and traditions, older women held roles as elders, keepers of knowledge, healers, and guides. Their virtue and value wasn't necessarily tied to their reproductive years or their youth. There was a privileged wisdom in having lived, experienced, endured, and learned.

And perhaps there's something worth reclaiming in that. We know the physiological reasons for menopause, but is there room to explore what this passage might mean to us beyond the biology? I like to think there is. Fire has always carried powerful symbolism. It can consume, illuminate, purify, and transform. And while hot flashes are the result of physiological changes, perhaps we can also use that experience as a metaphor for the transformation happening within us.

Maybe we're not simply burning through something. What if we're being invited to emerge from within — With a different relationship to our creativity, our desires, our wisdom, and the life still waiting to be lived. It's not for nothing that we feel that fire and internally burn.

The Beauty We Were Sold

Somewhere along the way, our culture developed a very interesting relationship with the idea or notion of beauty. We've been taught to celebrate youth while treating the natural signs of aging as something to correct, conceal, or reverse. And I think women have been particularly vulnerable to this message during a time when our bodies are already changing.

We're told to embrace ourselves, but don't look older. Love your body, but smooth out the cellulite. Celebrate womanhood, but whatever you do, try to preserve the appearance of the woman you were twenty years ago. And listen, I'm not here to judge what another woman chooses to do with her body—those are personal decisions. What I question is when the pursuit of looking younger becomes so relentless that we lose sight of the benefits of what aging has to offer us.

Im at the gym every single morning training for my aging life. I am very intentional about what I put into my body, how I move, and the environments and people I allow into my life. Yes— I have good genetics, but don't dismiss the work behind it as luck. It takes consistency, discipline, and choices made every single day, over and over again and that doesn't happen by accident. I'm fully aware we do not have all the control over how our bodies age, or that good habits guarantee aging gracefully. Genetics, circumstances, and biology all play their part, however we do have 100% responsibility to participate in our own health and well-being.

The Divine Feminine: Is It Given or Awakened?

Here's where I find myself asking an even bigger question. Is the divine feminine something we're simply born with, something we automatically arrive at through age, or something we gradually awaken to through the experiences of our lives? I don't believe every woman reaches a certain birthday and suddenly unlocks some mystical level of feminine wisdom.

Age gives us experience, but experience alone doesn't necessarily give us wisdom. We can move through decades without ever really examining what those decades have taught us. Perhaps the passages of womanhood offer us opportunities, but what we do with those passages becomes part of the unfolding. The experiences, the losses, the joys, the mistakes, the things we survive, and the things we finally become willing to understand all contribute to that awakening.

Maybe there is some kind of inner soul code we unconsciously learn and gain along the way. A secret passcode, if you will, that isn't just handed to us yet gradually revealed through the experience of living. And I think we need to expand our understanding of what the divine feminine actually looks like. It isn't always soft, gentle, nurturing, graceful, or agreeable. Those are beautiful expressions, but they aren't the whole picture.

What about the feminine that is fierce, sensual, intuitive, creative, wild, and unapologetically alive? The feminine that knows when something must end, when something must be protected, and when something new must be born? She doesn't have to be pretty, accommodating, or perpetually nurturing to be powerful. And this isn't about becoming a better or more enlightened woman than someone else.

Every woman has her own expression, her own experiences, and her own relationship with this part of herself. There is no spiritual checklist to complete. But I do wonder whether we've spent so much time trying to preserve the appearance of youth that we've overlooked the deeper beauty of what can emerge when a woman begins to inhabit her own unique wisdom. Perhaps the passcode isn't hidden somewhere outside of us. What if life has been rewarding us with pieces of it all along the way.

The Phoenix: Becoming What You Were Meant to Become

I keep coming back to the phoenix, that mythical creature that burns, dissolves, and rises again. We often use it as a symbol of resilience, of coming back stronger after difficult times. But I wonder if we're missing another part of the story. The phoenix doesn't simply return to its former life. It emerges in another expression of itself. And perhaps there's a beautiful parallel in the transition through menopause.

We've spent much of our lives creating, nurturing, producing, building, loving, losing, beginning again, and carrying more than we sometimes realize. Our bodies have brought forth life, but they've also carried us through the experiences that have shaped the women we've become. Then comes a passage that asks us to reconsider what creation means. Maybe the fire isn't here to take our femininity away. Maybe it's a burning woman ritual to remove an old understanding of what femininity was supposed to look like.

Our bodies aren't failing us. They're moving through another season of becoming. Nature has always shown us that there are seasons of growth, fullness, letting go, and renewal. Sometimes one expression must come to an end before another can take shape. What if we could extend that same understanding to ourselves?

The women who emerges from menopause aren’t supposed to be a younger version of themself. They are discovering a different expression of feminine consciousness, one that doesn't need to be measured against who she was before. The younger woman may be discovering what she can create. The woman further along in life may begin discovering what she wants those creations to mean. And the phoenix isn't rising to reclaim her youth. She's rebirthing to inhabit a differnt form of power she couldn't have understood before.

The Woman Who Rise

I don't believe menopause is easy, that every woman experiences it as a spiritual awakening, or that we should dismiss the very real physical, mental, and emotional challenges that can come with it. There is room for all of it. The frustration, the grief, the unexpected freedom, the uncertainty, and the discoveries we never saw coming. Every woman's passage is her own. But I do wonder whether we've underestimated what this chapter of womanhood has to offer.

We've become so accustomed to measuring feminine value through youth, beauty, reproduction, and the roles we play in other people's lives that perhaps we've overlooked a different kind of power waiting to be recognized. And I think we've done something similar with the divine feminine. We've packaged it, marketed it, and made it sound like something we can simply awaken through a practice, a ritual, or a weekend retreat. But can we really learn to embody something that life itself is still teaching us?

You can study the language of the divine feminine, but you cannot shortcut the living of a life. The depth comes through experience.— Through loving, losing, creating, beginning again, discovering what no longer fits, and finding the courage to become someone you may not have imagined when you were younger.

Menopause gives us a different vantage point from which to see all of that. Not because age automatically makes us wise, or because every woman arrives at the same spiritual destination—Yet because there is something remarkable about reaching a point in life where we can begin to see ourselves beyond the expectations that once defined us.

For me, this passage has become an initiation. I look at my body, my sensuality, my purpose, and my relationship with myself differently than I once did. I don't feel as though something has been taken away. I actually feel as though something else has been set free. And maybe that's the part of the story we haven't told nearly enough.

The womb may have completed one extraordinary chapter of creation, but it doesn't mean the woman and her womb has finished creating. Maybe the fire that once represented the physical changes of menopause can also remind us that transformation doesn't have to mean loss. Sometimes it means making room for a version of ourselves we haven't met yet.

So instead of asking what happens to a woman when her reproductive years come to an end— we should start asking what becomes possible when she finally begins to see herself beyond them. It was never just about what we could give birth to. It was always about the sacred powerful life force within us. And maybe now, after everything we've lived, it's finally time to discover what else it can create.