The Innate Wisdom of Women’s Bodies in Perimenopause and Menopause with Tania Elfersy

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Our bodies are always talking to us. In this episode of the podcast, coach Tania Elfersy shares a very personal story about how she came to understand this in a deep way. Tania now works specifically with women experiencing perimenopause and menopause symptoms and helps them to turn their attention to the possibility that our churned up thinking can cause stress in our bodies. And how women can listen to that message in order to live more peacefully, and with fewer symptoms, in mid-life.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or watch the video here. Below are the show highlights and full transcript.

Show Notes

You can find Tania at TheWiserWoman.com

Transcript of Interview with Tania Elfersy

Alexandra: Hi everyone I’m Alexandra Amor from stopsufferingabout.com and I’m here today with Tania Elfersy. Hi Tania.

Tania: I’m happy to be here.

Alexandra: I’m so thrilled to have you here. So let me introduce you to our audience.

Tania Elfersy is an award-winning author and publisher who has spent several years researching what causes and cures the emotional and physical symptoms associated with perimenopause and menopause by weaving her knowledge of midlife women’s health with the principles of innate health. Tania successfully cured her own range of symptoms one hundred percent naturally.

Tania is committed to helping women learn more about their bodies at midlife through coaching teaching and writing. Tania guides women to the simple and natural cures for perimenopause and menopause symptoms which are available to all of us. You can find out more at the wiserwoman.com.

I’m really looking forward to chatting with you today, Tania, and about this this subject which is so huge and so important for women, and so why do you ease us in.

Tell us how you got interested in exploring this part of your life as it relates to the Three Principles.

Tania: Well of course it wasn’t planned. You know it came upon me.

At the age of about 43 I started experiencing symptoms and I now know that those were classic perimenopause symptoms. It started off for me with a crash of the immune system. I was getting sick all the time but I’ve had hair loss and I was getting acupuncture for that and that helped.

But then came migraines and really massive mood swings that made me feel less like myself. And then eczema and all kinds of skin rashes and all kinds of lovely symptoms that were just popping up one after the other multiplying.

And at the time I had no clue that I was going through perimenopause, so perhaps this is a good time also just to go right back to the basics and say well what’s the difference between perimenopause and menopause.

We know that menopause is a 51 something woman’s experience. The average age is 51. So we think oh that must happen in the early 50s and we all know there’s the hot flashes.

But what we don’t know often when we come into our 40s and I certainly didn’t know was that menopause takes time. It takes years and I, like so many women, had this idea that it was this short period of time that may have a few hot flashes and then it would be done.

But if you think about it, when we go through our teenage years, we don’t wake up with fully developed breasts and bodies and regular periods straight away. That also takes years.

So at the end of our reproductive years that also takes years and somehow society even 20 or 30 years ago understood menopause to be a 40 something 50 something woman’s experience. But for whatever reason we’ve pushed it to become this point in time. One year after a woman’s last period.

And that is now menopause. That point in time and everything leading up to it, which is actually when the most hormonal changes take place is now known as perimenopause. But as I did when I was in my 40s and so many women do, I had no idea that I was in perimenopause and so I couldn’t understand what was going on with me.

I just still I was falling apart and really didn’t know and I was also having my night sweats, which is sort of like the sister of the nut of the hot flash but less famous system. Many women also get them in their 40s and they’re like I feel like I’m dying at night and I don’t know what’s going on.

And then I heard a webinar by Dr. Christian Northrup who’s a leading light in women’s health and especially around menopause and she said lots of women in their 40s have what can be experienced and what can be described as PMs on steroids.

That really feels like me, because I feel like all the time I would be a mess because I also had very tender breasts and moodiness and everything. And that was the first time I’d heard about perimenopause and I’d already been with symptoms for a few years trying to deal with them running to different treatments and holistically and things like that.

And so that set me off on a journey because I was shocked that I had no clue about perimenopause. I went to my 40 something friends I was like did you know about perimenopause and that in our 40s we can be going through the change and they’re like No what are you talking about? Pretty much every woman who I spoke to was experiencing some symptoms but no one had the knowledge of what was actually going on.

Now perhaps more people are talking about perimenopause than five, six, seven years ago. But still there is a big knowledge gap for women who come into their 40s because we come into our 40s and we think, I don’t need to think about that. I don’t need to talk about that. That’s a decade away. When actually the body is already going through change and for some women it can even begin in the late 30s.

We don’t know when we start going through that change. Some of us may feel it more and some of us may feel it less and we don’t know when it’s going to finish but for some women they may feel it going on for three years and other women it’s for twelve years. But it’s years and the period of change is years.

So I started researching perimenopause and I was really determined to find a cure for me and to also bring this knowledge gap that seemed to exist amongst women that women didn’t have a framework for their symptoms. So many women were experiencing symptoms and no one knew what to do.

I made this promise to myself well if I find a cure. And I knew that I didn’t want to go down the  hormonal, fix yourself because that never sounded right to me. I thought if I find a cure I’m definitely going to share it.

In early 2015 I came across what we understand that what we call the Three Principles. The Three Principles of innate health and resilience. This all seem to make incredibly good sense. I read Michael O’Neill’s book The Inside Out Revolution.

And from that book I had an insight. And from that insight I was able to clear up all my physical and emotional symptoms. Within days.

It was so unbelievable because as I was reading, I had a clue that I didn’t want to be blaming my hormones. I didn’t want to be getting fixed. None of that really made sense to me. Why would I need to get fixed? Doesn’t my body know how to get through perimenopause and menopause.? Women have been going through this forever, ever since we can trace history and so why would I need to be fixed?

And then hearing about the principles and this idea that we have innate health and having this insight about the nature of thought and having all my symptoms go away, I was like Well this is just amazing.

So I started exploring that. Exploring the principles further and how I could share my experience and now what I do is is weave together my knowledge of midlife women’s health and the principles to help women have. A much more empowering and enjoyable experience of midlife change.

Alexandra: I love that. Let’s dive into the insight that you had and how that can affect physical symptoms.

But I just wanted to say a couple of things beforehand. The first was I’d always felt very similar to you about menopause and perimenopause in that when I was in my thirties was when I noticed older women who were in their 50s start to talk about hormone replacement therapy and those kinds of things.

At the time I remember thinking, well wait a second. We don’t medicate girls when we go through puberty and our moods can be all over the place and all the different things happening in our body and nobody says you should stop that by taking these hormone replacements. So that never made sense to me and so I’m so glad to be talking to you about this now.

And then the other thing I wanted to say was the first time I heard the word perimenopause was Dr. Christiane Northrup too. She was on the Oprah show and they were talking about women’s midlife health. She’s obviously the champion out there talking about these things.

OK so let’s talk about this the insight that you had. And I think for listeners what will be so helpful to know is how insight, something that happens in our thinking essentially or in our knowing, how that can affect our physical body.

So however you want to share about that would be great.

Tania: We can take a step back and look at the bigger picture and an understanding that that I see today that I didn’t see actually back then is that I understand that it’s pretty impossible for our bodies to only be wise sometimes. If we understand there’s an energy behind all things and that that energy is a divine energy or source or God or however your listeners would like to define it.

It’s impossible that that exists in us and then disappears from us because our body works all the time without us interfering. We don’t have to go in and pump the heart make the lungs work or digest our food. All of that happens without interference.

So going to the bigger picture I was beginning to see how does that make sense with what is happening? Maybe the body is trying to tell us something in terms of the symptoms.  Maybe the default would be to go through menopause more or less smoothly. But there’s something going on in our lives that doesn’t allow us to go through menopause smoothly.

The idea that we often share in the principles that none of us are born with anxiety for example or fear. There’s very few things that we can say we’re born with that kind of thinking right. We have a few instincts and that’s it. So if we’re not born with anxiety and our hormone levels, which I now know post menopause actually returned to the hormone levels of a prepubescent girl, then why would that be problematic for the body?

What is the what is going on with the symptoms and what I understand now is that the symptoms are either just the body doing what it needs to do with the conditions that it finds itself in. Using its wisdom to maneuver through those conditions.

Or symptoms are a sign to wake us up. And it could be a combination of those things or it could be that sometimes a symptom is one thing or sometimes a symptom is another thing.

So an example of a symptom: Lots of women come to come to midlife and they suddenly realize they can’t stomach wine anymore. Some women have found that they can drink organic wine or they can drink gin or something but like regular wine which seems to have sort of trace chemicals in it. A lot of women say they can’t they just can’t cope with it anymore. And I see that again and again.

Now the body, when it when a woman drinks that wine, the body is just going to react in the way that it has to react in order to detoxify. In the sensitive time during perimenopause and menopause that may have a certain effect that makes us feel a bit bad.

At the same time that the body’s doing that that’s also a signal to us if that happens often enough, if a woman has a glass of wine and that happens often enough, she’s going to learn something from her body experiencing that symptom.

So she could go down the path of my body’s broken and I used to be able to drink wine. And why can’t I drink wine anymore. And that life isn’t fun anymore. And she could go down that path or it could just be, oh I don’t think my body wants one right now, at this sensitive time.

What was my body trying to tell me, with the night sweats and the migraines the eczema and everything, was that I was taking my thinking seriously and the thinking that I was having at the time I was taking seriously was an idea that I was not enough.

And as background, I had had my kids and been a mom for six years and before that I had had a corporate career in marketing in technology companies. And then I left that and then I chose my return to work to write a self-published a book on motherhood.

The book won international awards and rave reviews but I couldn’t sell the book as I thought that I should be able to sell the book. And we invested a lot of money in the book. It’s a beautiful full-color, hardback. The kind of book that you shouldn’t ever self-publish if anyone is thinking of saying. But I’m saying think about it really seriously. I had you know stacks of books that I just couldn’t sell.

I began to feel just from that I failed because I thought going back to my big career things would just happen. I used to set goals and achieve them. I’d created this story about the kind of woman that I used to be.

I thought well how could that possibly be. That I set goals to sell the book and I’m not selling the book and I just felt like a failure because it was like this was my big return to work. And it just wasn’t going the way that I thought it would.

I thought that I was the kind of woman that when I set targets I reached them. And so it was impacting the way that I thought I could mother my kids because I was working late. And I felt I was not doing such a great job there and running on empty. In terms of my business with the book and all the time I kept feeling like I’m a failure. I’m a failure. And letting those thoughts define me.

And then I would get into a thought storm of well, I should really be grateful because I live in nice house and the kids are fine and my husband’s lovely. And no one else has called me a failure. And why can’t I be grateful. Maybe I should write a gratitude journal and maybe I should do some affirmations and maybe I should do this and then I wouldn’t do it and I feel even worse than even a bigger failure.

And so this was all piling up, piling up and then these thoughts would come along and they would create this feeling of feeling very constricted and feeling of failure. I don’t know how else to describe it. And I would think that’s real. That that must that must define something real about my life because it felt real right.

The feeling was a real feeling and I didn’t understand at the time that the feeling that I was having was just a reflection of my thought. My thinking in that moment. Nothing more.

And in fact, the feeling that becomes more sensitized and more extreme because the body is even more interesting that you wake up to the fact that your thinking is in a certain place that isn’t necessarily helpful and that you don’t actually have to take it seriously. So I had.

Quite soon after discovering the principles I had this insight. I don’t need to take my thoughts so seriously. They come and go and I think it’s going to be easier if I don’t.

And that was it. I say open to women I wish I could copy paste that for you and give it to you on a plate. But that was what I saw in that moment and I obviously saw it deep. It completely cleared up my symptoms but because it was like my body said Oh thank God. Right, now all the cells can work the way they’re supposed to work.

In medical understanding you cannot describe what I am describing. Because if you have eczema then you need to cut out certain substances, and of course that’s what I was doing. In a restaurant or something like that I would be really careful not to use their soap and have something in my bag and all these things and all of a sudden I didn’t have to do that anymore.

But I didn’t have to go around changing all the soaps. It all just came from one insight that allowed me to drop the stress that I was carrying around with me constantly. And that release allowed my body to be able to cope with soaps with toxic ingredients. I didn’t bring those ingredients into my house necessarily but it is just like my body could then cope. And my body could cope with a slight rise in temperature that we all a lot of us experience at midlife at a time of hormonal change just like teenage girls experience and boys actually you know feel hot hotter than they used to.

If listeners have teenagers you know remember like all of a sudden there comes an age around eleven or twelve where they’re always hot.

And pregnant women and postpartum women also feel hot. So at these times of hormonal change the body puts up the temperature a little bit and I understand it to be it’s sort of an on alert because they’re like Well we’re busy with the hormonal changes and looking after the baby if the woman’s pregnant or postpartum. Or the hormonal changes of a teenager and or menopausal woman.

The body’s busy with that and they have less energy or resources to fight bacteria and viruses et cetera and so they put the temperature up just a little bit because the body’s on just a little bit of alert to be ready. And then when that temperature rises a little bit the body can ride it to send us a message but that’s when I see hot flashes and night sweats to be like the body’s just riding that condition to try and send us a message. It’s not what the medical system says. The drop in estrogen does that. It doesn’t make any sense.

When we look further in this direction of the understanding we see that is the way our reality is always created through our thinking in the moment. And so our reality is open to change and how we experience symptoms also open to change.

I can tell you I don’t have eczema because I couldn’t see it but we can certainly experience a hot flash in many ways and we can certainly experience mood shifts and in many ways but it seems that the body at midlife is really keen to tell us.

Something really wants us to learn. What I say in my work is because we are moving to the ways a woman’s status right. It’s not like there will be no change. There will be change. It’s built into the design and it’s what’s supposed to happen. When we fear it or we hear negative things about it then it’s unlikely we’re going to have a good experience in it.

But when we can switch, we can say, what if my body is brilliant? What if that wisdom never stops? Then what is my body trying to tell me? What shifts can I make. What can I see that I haven’t seen before and the impact that can have is truly amazing.

Alexandra: So much great stuff in there. I just love it. Thank you so much for sharing all that. One thing that strikes me then is that this thinking that you were having about your symptoms was causing stress in your body.

And one of the things that that insight that you had did was is reduce the amount of stress that you’re feeling because you realized you didn’t need to be caught up in all that thinking.

Would you say that’s an accurate way to represent it?

Tania: There was something before the distress about the symptoms and that was the stress that I was having about my life. There’s the belief that I wasn’t enough. And so many women have this experience of feeling not enough and for different reasons. So women can also say to me, “Tania, this was just about a book.” But for me it was a lot more. It was about the woman I am. How is it that I can earn money? I used to be the breadwinner. What kind of feminist am I? What does that mean about me and my value?

And all of this. Does it mean that my best years are behind me? My career is over. And I’m not good at when I used to be good at it. So it was like a much bigger story that I was creating out of the fact.

I just couldn’t sell books and for other women. It might be well my mother never loved me. That’s what I am and there’s a story created around that and for other women they’ll say, no, but really my mom never loved me. I’m not saying that that’s comparable to not being up to sell books.

But the thing is, it’s how we experience that and it’s the story that we create around that. And it’s like where do we take things from the past and think that they define not only the present but everything that’s going to happen in the future. So that was that stress for me of like not feeling enough.

And then in the symptoms feeling like I was totally going crazy, when you have what I was actually experiencing was two weeks of PMS every month. So that was just no fun for anyone anywhere near me or me.

There was a double layer. It’s like the stress that was going on and then feeling crazy from all the symptoms. And being really like desperate to fix myself. Really looking outside all the time; is it going to be herbs, is it going to be a cream? Is it going to be the acupuncture or is it going to healing? It was trying at the time and spending a lot of time dealing with that.

Alexandra: When you begin to work with women about this and introduce them to the idea that we live in the feeling of our thinking, not in the not in the feeling of our experience. And that that alone can change their experience of something so physical like menopause and perimenopause.

Do you get pushback from women about connecting those things?

Tania: Absolutely because we in the west have these ideas about how our bodies function and about the way that we would like to outsource our health often.

Pointing to the principles is looking inside, that just sounds like too simplistic and it could sound like Oh you’re blaming me. What are you saying? That it’s all in my head?

I’m saying we have innocent misunderstandings because the whole of Western society is structured in a way that we think that our experience is created from the circumstances that present themselves rather than are thinking about the circumstances that present themselves. And so we’ve got it all backwards.

When we’re sitting in that misunderstanding then what I’m talking about seems impossible. And it seems like I blame them and it seems like I’m taking away their chance of being fixed because they wanted the doctor to fix them when the reality is that thousands, if not millions, of women are going to doctors and not being fixed because what medicine understands about perimenopause and menopause is based on these false ideas that it’s all about the drop in estrogen. And if we just replace the estrogen – whether we do it through estrogen and progesterone like however we want to do it – if we just replace those hormones then we’ll fix the woman.

And again, this comes from an idea which is an ancient idea going back to ancient Rome and Greece that the postmenopausal woman well woman is like normal minus. She’s not normal because man is normal. And then then the woman’s body is like out of control and bleeding and not normal right.

Not orderly. But at least when she’s in that reproductive stage she gets to be defined to be the mother role, the reproducer in that way. And then when she moves beyond that well, oh my God, then does she become like a man? Does she challenge male authority? Does she challenge that dominance? What is she?

Through thousands of years of history this suspicion of the postmenopausal women because what is she around to do right. We could have a very different experience of that. And actually, it took researchers to research orca whales to realize that what they called the grandmother effect, which if any woman is a mother and remembers being a mother of small children who were sick and then they had a grandmother come in to help with the search put.

That’s what we’re talking about the grandmother. Like this idea that oh isn’t it useful that you have older women in the community who have tons of experience and don’t have a baby attached to her breast. So that’s what evolution designed it for us.

Actually it’s brilliant. But for thousands of years women have been told no it’s minus or normal minus. It’s beyond the minus.

Medicine, in the way that it views women and the idea that she needs hormones to be replaced when her body is naturally depleting them. That all comes from the idea that there’s something that’s not right going on in menopause, rather than there’s something actually very right going on menopause does it. This is an awakening.

There’s a sort of a birth in your view a new life if you like. There’s an opportunity to embrace your passions and to really connect with what you love. There’s this this push to try and get us to lighten up and that’s all amazing.

But when we don’t understand what’s going on and we’re just experiencing symptoms we fall into that hole very easily of now my body’s malfunctioning and I need to outsource the fixing and I need the doctor to give me the pill the cream the patch that’s just going to make these symptoms go away.

Alexandra: Incredible. And you mentioned on your website at one point, I can’t remember if it was on a blog post or not, but you pointed out that we treat menopause like it’s a disease. Something to be fixed instead of something that’s completely natural, completely normal.

And not only that, but it has a tremendous amount of wisdom and perfection that comes with it.

Tania: Right. And that all comes from that idea from mid last century that it was actually started to be called a disease. That was a very famous influential book called Feminine Forever written by a Dr. Wilson Robert Wilson.

He was the first maybe to write it; menopause is a hormone deficiency disease. And he talked about a wonder pill that would cure everything from hot flashes to sagging breasts to give a woman an opportunity to keep wearing a tennis skirt for the rest of her life.

And literally these were the ideas that were out in the 1950s. He published the book in the 60s. But this this was the ideas that were promoted and back then. Women were lapping it up because they were like Well that sounds amazing right. No wrinkles, no saggy breasts, no symptoms. Give me that one the pill.

Women were going in droves to get hormone therapy and then they started realizing that there was problems with their with cervical cancer. And then there’s a whole history that goes in them and people can look up you know the side effects of it and obviously they’re often very undesirable side effects of taking hormone therapy.

I’m not saying that there is no place for hormone therapy and I’m not saying that every woman who takes hormone therapy is going to have these negative side effects.

But the whole medical approach to menopause for decades has been based on this idea that a menopausal woman is diseased and she needs to be fixed, she’s not normal. She needs to replace where her body is naturally fitting then that approach has got us into trouble and it’s not really surprising.

Alexandra: This is such a deep topic and I resonate with it so much that it’s just been brilliant talking to you Tania. Thank you so much.

I can tell there’s a big well you know of knowledge here with you and I really encourage people to seek out your Web site The Wiser Woman.

On that note, why don’t you let everyone know where they can find out more about you and your work.

Tania: They can go over to TheWiserWoman.com and there’s a lot there to read on the blog so they can keep on scrolling and finding different articles that may be attractive for them and bring some kind of interest.

Then they can contact me there as well. I work with women one on one and I have an online course as well.

And really trying to allow women to experience something very different about perimenopause and menopause because I know that when we’re in the trenches of the symptoms and the night sweats and the hot flushes and headaches and everything else and I’ve experienced that it seems so impossible that something so simple as an understanding of how our experience is created could possibly put an end to all those symptoms. But it really can.

Because there is this innate health that runs through all of us. And it doesn’t stop or start to malfunction or fly out the window. When we reach midlife it really doesn’t.

In fact it bubbles to the surface and tries to guide us even more than it did when we’re in our 20s and 30s. If we can be open to that we are going to discover some amazing things about ourselves and we’re going to be protected not only as we journey through menopause but for decades to come and I think that that’s one of the one of the purposes of this switch, this midlife change.

That’s part of our design, and as I’ve said, it’s supposed to happen. We are supposed to change we’re supposed to wake up. We’re supposed to move into a new role. We’re not going to be as we were in our 20s and 30s and that is a good thing because we need to change for ourselves and wake up. And society needs us too.

Alexandra: Well said. Thank you.

And we should say too there are some podcast episodes on your website as well.

Tania: Yes.

Alexandra: So if you’re listening to this show, you obviously like listening to podcasts so you can find those on TheWiserWoman.com as well. Well thank you so much Tanya it’s been so great chatting with you.

Tania: It’s my pleasure. Always happy to. Thank you. Take care.

[Daisy image courtesy Julian Rotert and Unsplash.]