When Everything Shifts: How to Stay Rooted in Yourself Through Menopause

The clocks went forward last weekend.

And the night before, I did something I do every year without really thinking about why. I left my kitchen clock on the old time.

Just as a quiet check. A way to know, when I woke up, whether the shift had happened while I slept.

And it had.

My phone had moved.

The world had moved.

But I stood in my kitchen holding both times in my head at once, where I'd been, where I am now, and it's take me a few days to feel fully settled since.

My body was still waking at the old hour. I kept re-calculating.

And I thought: isn't that the most perfect description of what menopause can feel like?

The Shift That Happens While You Sleep

Menopause doesn't always make a big entrance.

For many of us it's quieter than that.

One day you notice your sleep has changed.

Your emotions arrive differently.

Your patience is shorter or your intuition is louder.

Your body feels familiar but not quite the same.

And underneath all of it, often unspoken, is a question: who am I now?

Not in a crisis sense.

It can be really subtle.

I can show up as curiosity.

But most often (from my experience), it show up with a kind of tender bewilderment that can be hard to explain to anyone who hasn't felt it.

The Two Traps

When women hit perimenopause and menopause, there tend to be two pulls. Two very human ways of responding to the change.

The first is to cling.

To try to be who you were at 35, or 28.

To measure yourself against the version of you that existed before hormones shifted, and find yourself wanting.

To treat your past self as the gold standard the present self keeps failing to meet.

The second is to abandon.

To decide that who you were before doesn't belong in this new chapter. To reinvent so completely that there's no thread connecting back.

I understand both of those impulses. I've felt both of them.

But here's what I've come to believe: neither of them serves you. The woman you were at 30 got you here.

And the woman you're becoming is carrying all of that experience forward. You do yourself a disservice if you discount either of them.

The Taproot

What I invite instead is something more like a taproot.

A taproot is what keeps a tree in the ground during a storm.

The branches move.

The leaves change with every season.

The shape of the tree shifts over years. But the taproot holds.

Not with rigidity... it grows too, reaching deeper as the tree grows taller.

You're not here to stay the same. Movement is one of the many joys and challenges of life, but I do believe the invitation is to stay connected as we navigate it all.

That's what I mean when I talk about being rooted through menopause.

Not staying fixed. Not the statuesque unchanging figure of youth.

Just... tethered to yourself.

Knowing where your centre is, even when the surface is shifting.

What's Your Kitchen Clock?

So the question I've been sitting with, and the one I want to leave with you is this:

what is your kitchen clock?

What helps you hold both times at once? The woman you've been, and the woman you're becoming?

Maybe for you it's movement.

Strength training, walking, something that reminds us what our body can do.

Or perhaps it's a creative practice, or a conversation with someone who knew you before and knows you now.

For me, increasingly, it's the breath.

Not in a complicated way.

Just the simple, always-available fact of it.

There have been times (across more than one hard season) when I needed something to come back to.

Something that could meet me wherever I was, whatever was happening in my body, my mind, my life.

And the breath did that. It was (and still is) the one constant through every version of me.

I'm not going to suggest one particular Breathwork pattern here, there are so many to meet whatever state or circumstance you are meeting. But you might wish to visit my Youtube channel where I have a few helpful demonstrations.

Have a look here: Breathwork with Carly

I do, however, wish to name Breathwork as a tool.

If you've ever dismissed Breathwork as too airy-fairy, I genuinely understand that.

I was there once too.

But there's a lot of science behind it, and if you're looking for a way to come back to yourself during the shifts of midlife, it might be worth exploring.

Meeting Yourself With Compassion

The changes are real.

The symptoms are real.

The disorientation is real.

You are not imagining it and you are not failing at menopause.

You are navigating one of the most significant transitions a woman's body goes through... while also holding down a whole life.

That is a lot.

The invitation, the one I keep coming back to, is to meet all of that with compassion.

Not to have it all figured out.

Not to perform wellness.

Just to be rooted enough that when the clocks shift, you have something to come back to.

You don't have to stop the tide. You just have to know where the shore is.

Listen to episode 129 of Rooted in Presence wherever you get your podcasts.

And if you'd like to explore Breathwork as a rooting practice, come and find me at Still Space Hull I'd love to have that conversation.