I went to college, medical school, and served a residency for twelve years, and no one ever taught me how to keep my patients healthy. I was also never taught that menopause is a natural life transition, one that signals entry into a magnificent state of wisdom and power.

As a nurse in training in the sixties I was taught that doctors are gods and that we are to believe in their absolute authority. Through those years and the ones that followed when I was studying to become a doctor, I came to realize how disempowering that attitude was. It did not give room for the individual to rely on his/her own knowledge, understanding, and experience.

There is a lot right within the conventional medical community, and there is a lot wrong too. One has only to look at how we doctors are trained, and that should be enough to raise eyebrows about our ultimate wisdom. During our medical training and ensuing intern and resident years, we are deprived of the sleep required to adequately carry out our complex duties. And what does the medical establishment do about it? Nothing. It takes the legislature to pass a law requiring residents not to work over a certain number of hours without rest, so that the patients they serve will be protected from our mishaps, misdiagnoses and mistreatments.

We are taught nothing about healthy foods and subsist on empty nutrition, high caffeine and sugar diets that ultimately burn out our adrenal glands and lower our immune states. We go from those long hours in the trenches home to study and then to bed, so that we rarely exercise, relax, have fun or smell the roses. Then we are expected to be sensitive, loving and caring with our patients when we have taken no time at all to nurture ourselves. Who has all the wisdom?

I have finally seen the Light. And now I am shining it like a beacon to my soul sisters who need nurturing, healing and reminders that they are indeed magnificent.

I began some years ago giving monthly lectures called the Good News About Menopause, a seeming oxymoron for many women. But it is not. Menopause indeed is a spiritual renaissance, the beginning of the best time in life. But many women need to be helped through to that attitude, and it is my mission to remind women, and their significant others, of that fact. For seven years, in a monthly healing circle, known as A Menopausal Enrichment Circle for Women, a gathering co-facilitated by my dear friend, therapist Diana Johansson, we set the stage for a safe and sacred space where women could share their dreams, fears, and often-traumatic stories of their journey toward wholeness.

Our loving Creator provided us women with this special time in life to recognize the true essence of our being. It is no coincidence that as menopause approaches we experience dramatic bodily changes: hot flashes and night sweats, sexual dysfunction, hair loss or unwanted hair growth, constipation, weight gain, bleeding, depression and brain fog. God in His/Her incredible wisdom provided these gifts in order to nudge us into seeking help for our own needs. After all, think just how long we have been nurturing everyone else’s needs instead of our own.

I have sought not to “medicalize” the subject of menopause, where menopausal women become victims of the powerful medical-pharmaceutical complex. Rather, my approach is that menopause is a natural state, not a medical condition, and that it can, indeed must, be considered from a view of wholeness, connecting together the body, mind and spirit.

I have a recurrent dream where our powerful HMOs will one day give referrals first to the herbalist, the chiropractor, the naturopath, the homoeopathist, the massage therapist and the acupuncturist before sending patients to surgery or for chemotherapy. I daresay more of us conventionalists would rapidly learn the tenets of natural healing. Because I regularly go to a chiropractor and acupuncturist and receive the blessed healing touch of a therapeutic massage therapist, through whom I have experienced major improvement from a chronic low back ailment, and counseled monthly with Nils Johansson, III, a psychotherapist who helped me get in touch with my inner world, I am in a perfect place of knowing, at a deep level, how vital these healing modalities are, and how marvelously they interface with what I do as a gynecologist.

I have looked at the exciting role that I play in my patients’ lives, and I realize that it in no way resembles the conventional doctor-patient relationship. Many years ago as a budding nursing student, I was admonished never to address patients by their first names, and to respectfully stand by their bedside, not to sit, and “contaminate” the bed linen. Well, thank God, I never resonated to such prattling, because I have come to learn that it is the intimacy with which we share our stories that brings about healing. I have learned that healing, true healing, takes place not only on the physical level but also more importantly, leveling our emotional bodies and deep within the soul.

Now that I know beyond a doubt the power of the body-mind-spirit connection, I can teach my beautiful patients how to empower themselves to find the physician within themselves. We are indeed spiritual beings learning to be human, and the realization of our soul potential is the most exciting part of this magnificent journey.

So come along with me, my sisters, and see how we can make menopause a magnificent journey.