When Perimenopause hits it’s a reckoning; sleep, energy, mood, body, and boundaries all asking to be heard at the same time. She arrives in a season of life where you are in your prime, you’ve worked hard to get here - it feels like a joke!
I know this because I lived it. In the raw, disorienting season after giving birth and the early years of motherhood, I was navigating postpartum life while also moving into perimenopause and I did not understand what was happening to me. There were so many things happening at once: exhaustion, emotional intensity, a body that felt unfamiliar, trauma held in my nervous system, and PTSD layered over everything.
Then I needed knee surgery because let’s be honest looking after toddlers is immensely physical too.
I would not have believed then that I had any control over my perimenopause journey.
It was only later, as I returned to my own inner work and created tools shaped by my perimenopause story, that I could see the truth: a significant part of what I had been carrying was compounded by perimenopause.
I call this the perimenopause compound the way hormonal change, trauma, motherhood, depletion, and old patterns of self-abandonment can arrive together and make each other harder to name.
The reality is your body knows. The flush of heat, the broken sleep, the sudden intolerance for what once felt bearable these are not weaknesses to manage away. They are signals from a body that is no longer willing to abandon itself.
Perimenopause is a biologically active transition, lasting years, in which shifting hormones can affect sleep, mood, energy, and the cycle; it asks for care, rest, and honest attention rather than another round of pushing through.
When we understand the compound, we stop blaming ourselves for struggling and start listening to what our bodies have been trying to say all along.
You’ll learn, by listening to your own body, that the changes are not a betrayal; they are an invitation to come home. I know because I’ve lived through it and while I still have symptoms to navigate, I also see the gifts.
This is womb-based work because it begins in the body’s deepest knowing: the knowing that says, this is enough, I need rest, I deserve more, I will no longer abandon myself to stay loved, useful, or agreeable.
When you experience perimenopause as a Warrioress, you do more than navigating symptoms. You start breaking inherited patterns - generations of women who were taught to endure, appease, sacrifice, and disappear don’t just connect the dots - THEY FIND THEIR POWER SOURCE.
Midlife is not the dimming of a woman’s power; it is the moment her power changes language. As the cycles that once moved through us begin to shift, the womb becomes less a place of producing for others and more a place of remembering ourselves.
Your healing is generational healing.
Every boundary you speak, every pause you take, every time you refuse the hamster wheel and choose your own rhythm, you rewrite something for your daughters, nieces, sisters, and friends watching you become free.
And now, at 50, after all the inner work, I can see menopause as an advantage not from a place of masking, minimising, or performing wellness, but from a place of wisdom and power.
I no longer experience this chapter as a loss of who I was; I experience it as the arrival of who I truly am.
Menopause is reached after twelve months without a period, and post menopause is the long, expansive chapter that follows; my clients describe greater clarity, freedom, and fulfilment as they step out from under other people’s expectations.
This is feminine leadership in its truest form: leading not through self-erasure, but through self-trust. A woman who can say no without guilt, rest without apology, ask boldly for what she wants, and occupy her brilliance without shrinking is not becoming difficult. She is becoming whole. She is becoming the queen of her own world.
My new blog is taken from an extract in my new book (currently in development.) Please let me know your views and experiences too…
Copyright © 2026 by Karen Heras-Kelly. All rights reserved.