Menopause has landed on my doorstep. It is not yet official, as I have not gone one full year without a period. Yet, I don’t need a calendar to tell me that that my time has come. My last year of peri-menpause was complete with daily migraines and a back injury that has still not healed after six months. Hello!

I really enjoyed reading The Red Tent, Tenth Anniversary Edition: A Novel by Anita Diamant. The Red Tent, Diamant’s fictional account set during biblical times, refers to the tent that women in the village went into during menstruation.

Women would enter the tent at the new moon, when they were all said to have begun bleeding together, and would stay together for three days. Women’s time in the red tent gave them the space to rest during their menses, and a much needed respite from the men folk and their normal household chores. The book is full of accounts of the women singing together, sharing together and pampering each other with massages with sweet smelling potions.

Just reading this account made me realize just how little time we take, as women, to honor our natural cycles. Prior to menopause, we have our monthly cycle as nature’s reminder to rest for a few precious days around the time of our bleeding. As long as we honor this time, some of us slow down a bit and rest more at menstruation.

But what of the menopausal woman who may no longer even have a menstrual cycle to mark the passage of time, and needs to take things a bit more slowly for a few days each month. To top it off, she is likely to be even more exhausted from dealing with her changing menopausal body. Yet, if she is like most of us, she keeps on keeping on throughout the whole month. No wonder most of us are so stressed and exhausted at this time in our lives!

It took a year of chronic migraines and a back injury for me to realize that I needed to set up some kind of monthly calendar to remind myself to slow down and really check in with my energy level prior to taking on more and more commitments, no matter how much I enjoyed everything. If you are stressed and exhausted and have no natural calendar reminders to pause and reflect and rest, here are my personally tested (over the last six months), tried and true suggestions:

• Use the lunar calendar to provide the 28-day structure that we women have been following for thousands of years, throughout history, and for at least 30 of our own years for our menstruation.
• Just prior to the new moon take at least one day to rest and reflect on what is most important to you and set a meaningful personal goal for yourself. This new moon falls on Sunday, March 18.
• Begin new personal projects during the week of the new moon. For March it will be the week of March 18. No surprise that the first day of spring falls on that Tuesday the 20th.
• Complete personal projects, or at least finalize first steps, on larger projects by the full moon of each month. For the next cycle, that would be the week of April 2. Take some time to celebrate your accomplishments. If you can go outside and see the full moon it really can trigger a sense of completion and abundance.

Since structuring this new way of time, I have even designed my coaching practice so that I coach for three weeks of the month, and then my clients and I take a break from goal setting in tandem with the full moon. We celebrate our accomplishments, rest, and begin again refreshed with each new moon.

Try it out; I guarantee that you will begin to tap into the menopausal zest that we 50+ women need to live the vibrant passionate lives that are our birthrights!