My Midlife Story

For years, I solved outer mysteries — as a scientist, educator, and global project leader. I knew how to hold complexity, lead teams, and translate vision into action. I knew how to perform alignment.

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But something had begun to shift, quietly, long before I had language for it.

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At 45, I was laid off during a merger. Perimenopause had already begun. The systems I’d navigated for decades suddenly felt misaligned. Something in me was no longer willing to override discomfort.

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The rupture wasn’t just professional. It was physical, emotional, existential. My body became the teacher. Focusing and spiritual companioning became the compass. And slowly, a new role emerged — not strategic, not performative, but deeply attuned.

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I didn’t plan to work with midlife thresholds.

The work found me through lived experience.

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Illness, perimenopause, and later Long Covid stripped away the strategies that had carried me for years. Frozen shoulder. Food intolerances. Sleep disruption. Brain fog. Fatigue. I could no longer outrun my body. I had to learn how to stay with what was happening instead of pushing through it.

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Focusing met me in that disoriented terrain. It taught me how to listen without fixing, how to stay present without collapsing, how to relate to the parts of me I had exiled. What began as body‑based emotional regulation unfolded into something deeper — a kind of prayer without a name, a quiet relational awareness.

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As I found my footing, clients began arriving in their own liminal spaces — menopause, burnout, grief, career shifts, identity unraveling. Together, we learned to listen without rushing, label without pathologizing, and navigate with honesty and grace.

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Menopause stopped being a medical inconvenience or cultural punchline. It became a rite of passage — a threshold of clarity, power, and individuation. Not easy, but meaningful.

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This is the terrain I walk with others now: the in‑between places where the old map no longer works, and a new one hasn’t formed yet.

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​A version of my midlife story was published in Presence, the journal of Spiritual Directors International (SDI). Read the SDI publication (PDF):

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