A powerful look at the real midlife transformation and how to reclaim your voice, vitality, and joy.
What Is a Menomorphosis?
If you’re like most women, you probably weren’t taught to look forward to midlife. And if menopause came up at all, it likely carried whispers of decline, discomfort, and maybe even dread. But here’s the truth: this chapter isn’t about fading away - it’s about becoming fully YOU.
At CLEA Midlife, we call this powerful transformation a Menomorphosis.
Redefining the Menopause Journey
A Menomorphosis is the profound transformation that takes place in a woman’s life as she moves through the menopause journey - a bio-psycho-social-spiritual evolution that calls us to wake up, shed what no longer serves, and come home to ourselves.
Our symptoms? They’re not nuisances to ignore, outrun, or settle for. They’re messengers. Wake-up calls that something must change. That we must change.
From Self-Sacrifice to Self-Reclamation
After years - decades - of making ourselves small, pleasing others, keeping the peace, and contorting to fit into versions of ourselves shaped by cultural expectations, we begin to feel the stirrings of something deeper. A longing to reclaim our clarity. Our voice. Our purpose. Our joy.
And the symptoms that accompany this journey - hot flashes, brain fog, night sweats, joint pain, mood swings, dry skin, anxiety (just to name a few) - can begin as early as our mid-thirties. They are not here to break us. They are here to awaken us. To reconnect us to our bodies, which so many of us have spent a lifetime treating like the enemy.
Unlearning Cultural Conditioning
We were taught to believe that our value depended on our ability to stay small, quiet, and beautiful - beauty, of course, defined by an impossible and ever-changing standard. From the time we were little girls, we were told we had to look a certain way, weigh a certain amount, eat less, move more, and sacrifice constantly to be desirable.
But midlife offers a different message. Our body calls us into relationship with it. It begins to ask for reverence, not restriction.
Listening to the Body’s Call
A Menomorphosis is a chance to begin a new kind of conversation with your body - the kind where she becomes your ally, not your tormentor. Where you ask: What do you need? How can I support you? How can I listen better?
And yes, there is struggle. Just like the butterfly must struggle to free itself from the chrysalis - because that struggle strengthens its wings - we, too, need the challenge. Research shows that if the butterfly is helped out of the cocoon prematurely, its wings do not develop the strength to fly.⁽¹⁾ The struggle is essential. And so it is with us.
The Shift in Focus
As our sex hormones decline, our focus shifts. Where we once poured energy into everyone else, we are now called to pour it back into ourselves - not from selfishness, but from self-honoring. After decades of shaping ourselves to be who we thought the world needed, we begin to hear the voice of who we truly are - calling us home.
This is Menomorphosis.
It is a transformation that is happening for us, even when it feels like it’s happening to us. And when we understand it for what it is a natural, powerful, sacred shift - we can choose to meet it with curiosity instead of fear, with reverence instead of resistance.
What a Bio-Psycho-Social-Spiritual Transition Really Means
The Biological
This is the hormonal shift most of us hear about - estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone fluctuations that affect everything from sleep and cognition to skin, bones, joints, and metabolism. Your body is not betraying you - it’s recalibrating.
The Psychological
Our mental and emotional landscapes shift, too. Mood swings, anxiety, identity questions, grief. We start asking deeper questions about who we are - and what we’re no longer willing to tolerate.
The Social
Our relationships change. Boundaries become necessary. Roles evolve. We may shift how we parent, partner, work, or show up in community. We start speaking up. Saying no. Claiming space.
The Spiritual
This is the invitation to reconnect with your deepest self. To hear the whisper - or the roar - of your inner voice. To redefine purpose. To honor your intuition. To remember the power you’ve had all along.
Coming Home to Ourselves
When we stop resisting and start listening, something extraordinary happens. We begin to feel possibility again. Joy. Vitality. Creativity. Clarity. We reclaim the girl we left behind at twelve - before we started molding ourselves into what we thought we had to be. And we bring her forward into a future that is truly our own.
My Menomorphosis
This is what happened for me. Just a couple of years before founding CLEA Midlife at 54, I found myself in the thick of my own Menomorphosis. I was exhausted, foggy, and completely unmotivated - feelings that were totally foreign to me. I remember thinking, with a deep sense of apathy, "I guess this is just it." It felt like an alien had taken over my body, and that my creativity, vitality, and clarity were slipping away. But once I committed to understanding what the hell was going on with my body - and frankly, my entire being - I began searching for answers. What I discovered changed everything.
A combination of HRT, plant medicine, strength training, and nutrition tailored to my midlife body helped me reconnect with myself. As soon as I began engaging with my symptoms rather than lamenting or ignoring them, everything shifted. I started to feel energized, peaceful, joyful, clear, and creatively alive - maybe more than I ever had before. That shift, that return to myself, is what inspired me to create CLEA Midlife. I wanted to offer other women the possibility of that same transformation - on their own terms.
An Invitation to Begin
CLEA is here as one supportive option among many - waiting patiently for the moment when you're ready to turn inward, listen deeply, and tend to your symptoms with compassion and curiosity. Our plant-based formulations are designed to support you on this journey, but what matters most is that you begin. That you recognize this transition not as something to fear or fix, but as an opportunity to reconnect with your body, reclaim your power, and make informed choices that align with what feels right for you. Whether that support comes from CLEA or elsewhere, what’s most important is that it comes from a place of self-awareness and self-honoring. You get to choose.
Because this isn’t the end.
It’s the beginning of your Menomorphosis.
Citation:
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DeSalle, R., & Perkins, S. L. (2009). Welcome to the Genome: A User's Guide to the Genetic Past, Present, and Future. Yale University Press.
