[Elephant Journal] When Menopause Meets Mindfulness

There are two things I dislike in life. Feeling disempowered and being uneducated about essential issues. COVID times were the perfect setting to explore both, yet I was thrown an entirely different curve ball in 2021. Menopause. A brand new thing I knew next to nothing about. I was as unprepared and uneducated about menopause as we all were about COVID when it began. The only thing I had working for me was a solid meditation practice to fall back on when the anxiety and panic rolled in around grocery store trips, hand sanitizer, and the EDD.

Abandonment issues, anyone? I never knew I had any until my OBGYN decided to retire. As it turns out, I have a few. In late 2019, when things seemed less complicated, I struggled with entrusting my reproductive health to anyone else but my physician for over the past ten years. She was brilliant, sensitive, and always direct yet cool, much like Arthur Fonzerelli. Somehow, I always feel like I’m sharing a list of positive qualifiers for a date with me when I describe the qualities I love most about her, but I was devastated knowing I’d need to find a new doctor and had no good leads on a replacement.

Fast forward a few months, and COVID has come to town. In early 2020, just in time for my birthday, I lost my job and was anxious. Having attended Naropa and having worked at a Buddhist meditation center right up to COVID, Vipassana practice was typically a big part of my life. Until now, I meditated every day, twice a day, sometimes more. But during COVID, I avoided meditation. On any day of the week, I might share a story about “why” I avoided it, but aversion is natural, and I was busy avoiding doing the one thing that might help me feel less anxious.

Slowly, over the following months, I abandoned my meditation practice completely, except for the hours required to complete my certification for facilitator training. (I know. I know.) As a long-time practitioner and teacher, I had significant impostor syndrome. I wondered how I could call myself a teacher and not sit regularly. The truth was, my aversion to sitting was a big part of the anxiety. Mainly because it meant I would get quiet and be forced to deal with fears about the uncertainties in life up to that point. Instead, I was doing Ryan Heffington’s dance cardio workouts in my living room, baking, buying vitamins, and trying to start a new business while having regular panic attacks.

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