Perimenopause and Spiritual Awakening: Why So Many Women Experience a Shift

Something Else Is Happening Here

You are navigating the physical symptoms. You are managing the sleep disruption and the brain fog and the changing body. But underneath all of it, something else is also happening. Something that is harder to name and that almost nobody warned you about.

You are becoming less interested in things that used to consume you. Your tolerance for situations that feel wrong has shortened dramatically. Things you used to worry about intensely feel less urgent now, while other things, things you hadn't named as priorities before, are pressing for attention with unexpected force. You feel, in some unarticulate way, that you are in the middle of a transformation that goes beyond your hormones.

You are not imagining this. Many women describe perimenopause as the most significant identity and values shift of their adult lives. And across cultures, across history, across traditions as different as Japanese, Indigenous American, and European folk practice, the transition through menopause has been recognized as a threshold. Something genuinely changes here.

What the Anthropological Record Shows

In many traditional cultures, the cessation of menstruation has been understood as a transition into a new social and spiritual role, not a decline or a loss. Elder women, grandmothers, wise women, the healers and decision-makers, these roles were typically held by postmenopausal women.

This is not nostalgia for pre-modern life. It's an observation that cultures which lived close to biological reality often recognized what modern medicine has medicalized: the menopause transition carries a psychological and social shift alongside the physical one. The body is not alone in changing.

Anthropologist Margaret Morganroth Gullette and others who study midlife transitions document that women across cultures report increased decisiveness, decreased social anxiety, and greater clarity about their values in the years around menopause. The term "postmenopausal zest," coined by anthropologist Margaret Mead, pointed to something real that she observed across cultures and that subsequent researchers have continued to find.

Identity Dissolution as Spiritual Territory

Perimenopause often brings a period of identity instability that can feel alarming before it is understood. The self that worked so hard to establish itself, the professional identity, the maternal identity, the physical identity built on a body that felt reliable, all of these can feel suddenly less solid.

Identities built primarily on function, on being productive, needed, attractive, or in control, tend to wobble hardest during this transition. The body is less controllable than it was. The cognitive sharpness that felt like a core trait is unreliable. The emotional regulation that made you someone who could handle everything without complaint has become, suddenly, more difficult.

In many contemplative and spiritual traditions, this kind of dissolution, the falling away of a constructed self, is not pathology. It is a beginning. The Buddhist concept of non-self, the Christian mystics' writings on the dissolution of the ego in preparation for deeper encounter, the Jungian idea of the second half of life as a journey inward: all of these frame the loss of a rigid self-concept not as something to be recovered from but as something to be moved through, toward something more essential.

The Jungian Second-Half-of-Life Framework

Carl Jung wrote extensively about what he called the second half of life, the developmental task that begins roughly in midlife and is concerned with individuation: becoming more fully and authentically oneself rather than continuing to build the persona constructed for external function.

The first half of life, in his framework, is largely about adaptation: building skills, relationships, a social role, an identity that can operate in the world. The second half is about something else. It asks different questions. Not "What can I achieve?" but "What is actually true for me?" Not "How do I succeed in the eyes of others?" but "What do I value when I am not performing?"

Perimenopause, with its neurological and hormonal disruption of the status quo, has a way of accelerating this turn. The things that no longer work, the coping mechanisms, the social performances, the tolerated misalignments, become impossible to sustain. Women often describe feeling as though they can no longer pretend. The social masks that fitted comfortably for decades have become uncomfortable in a way that makes continuing to wear them feel wrong.

This is not a crisis to be resolved. It is a developmental process to be supported.

What Women Actually Report: The Inner Shift

Women who reflect on what changed during perimenopause often describe a strikingly consistent set of inner shifts, even across different backgrounds, cultures, and life circumstances.

Values clarity. Things that used to feel equally important become stratified. Relationships that are genuine feel more precious and more urgently worth protecting. Relationships that are primarily performative become harder to maintain. Many women describe ending friendships during this period, not from cruelty but from an inability to keep investing in connections that don't reflect who they actually are.

Decreased tolerance for situations that feel wrong. The capacity to override internal discomfort in service of social harmony or external expectation shrinks. This is sometimes labeled as irritability or rage in the clinical literature. It is also reasonably described as an increased fidelity to one's own sense of what is true and right. The line between symptom and evolution is not always clear.

Priority reorientation. Work that consumed enormous energy suddenly feels less central. Creative pursuits, spiritual inquiry, connection, nature, and rest move up the list. Some women describe starting something entirely new in the years around menopause, a creative practice, a new direction, a life structure that didn't exist before. The capacity to pursue what actually matters, once the old motivators quiet down, can be remarkable.

Practices That Support the Spiritual Dimension

Supporting the spiritual dimension of perimenopause is not about adopting a religion or following a specific tradition. It is about creating conditions for inner life to be attended to, which is something modern life systematically undermines.

Contemplative practices that support this work include: meditation in any form that creates stillness and self-observation; time in nature, which reliably reduces rumination and creates a sense of perspective that is difficult to access indoors; journaling with depth-oriented questions, not symptom logging but genuine inquiry into what you value, what you are letting go of, and what you are moving toward; creative practice of any kind, which accesses ways of knowing that analytical thinking cannot reach.

Some women find body-centered practices particularly useful during this transition: yoga, somatic therapy, dance, breathwork. The body is undergoing real transformation. Working with it consciously, rather than only managing its symptoms, supports the integration of that transformation.

Community with other women going through the same transition matters. Not just for practical support, though that is real, but for the witnessing that happens when people share genuinely significant experiences with each other. Find the women who are willing to speak honestly about what this is actually like.

Letting Go of Who You Were

One of the harder tasks of perimenopause is releasing the version of yourself that worked so well in earlier decades. She was capable and reliable. She managed things. She ran on caffeine and determination and rarely asked what she actually needed. She was very good at performing competence.

She is becoming less available. The systems that sustained her, the sleep deprivation she tolerated, the emotional suppression she had mastered, the willpower that overrode physical signals, are becoming less reliable. This can feel like loss. It is also, from another angle, an invitation.

The self that emerges on the other side of this transition tends to have different qualities: more direct, more selective, more willing to disappoint people in the service of integrity, less interested in approval, more in contact with genuine desire and genuine aversion. She is a more accurate version of you.

Most traditions that recognize menopause as a threshold frame what is released as what was never really you to begin with. The social role, the performance, the accumulated obligations, the pretending. What remains, or what becomes visible once those fall away, is something closer to the essential self.

This is not guaranteed, and it doesn't happen automatically. It requires attention and support and the willingness to not fill the space left by what is leaving. But it is available to you.

This content is for informational purposes only and does not replace medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider about your specific situation.