"The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door."

Clarissa Pinkola Estés

How It All Began

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

But something had started to shift. Quietly. Long before I had words for it.

At 45, I was laid off due to an impending merger.

Perimenopause had already begun. The systems I’d navigated for years had started to feel misaligned. Something in me was no longer willing to override discomfort.

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.

I didn’t plan to become a midlife doula.

The title found me through lived experience. Through symptoms, silence, and the slow work of embodied listening.

This is the story of how I reclaimed relationship with my body, encountered Focusing, and began exploring and defining how I want to show up as a spiritual companion.

I stepped into midlife not as crisis, but as initiation.

When The Map No Longer Works

After decades of high-impact leadership, the certainty I once carried began to dissolve. The old rules, goals, routines and frameworks no longer fit.

I kept hearing the line from Joyce Rupp's poem Old Maps No Longer Work: "It is time for the pilgrim in me to travel in the dark, to learn to read the stars that shine in my soul."

Something had to shift—but the path ahead was still unmarked.

Listening For What Comes Next

At Ghost Ranch, surrounded by earth's history and high desert silence, I started courting mystery.

I began asking questions with no immediate answers. That’s where my spiritual seeking deepened: not toward doctrine, but toward spaciousness. A quiet prayer stirred—one that didn’t need a name.

The Body Becomes The Teacher

llness and perimenopause ushered in a reckoning. The body I had outrun through ambition now demanded reverence. Frozen shoulder. Food intolerances. Weight gain. I had to cut out nightshades, dairy, spices—entire textures of comfort. Hormone therapy wasn’t an option. Health risks made that clear. So I rode out the hot flashes, the sleep disruptions, the slow unraveling—without shortcuts.

Pain, fatigue, and hormonal upheaval unmasked layers I hadn’t dared to feel. Disconnection became my teacher. I learned what it meant to be in a body I could no longer override.

Learning To Stay Present

And then Covid turned into Long Covid. The fatigue, the brain fog, the unpredictability. All of it layered on top of late perimenopause, tipping into menopause. I felt like a stranger in my own body.

Focusing met me in that disoriented terrain. It taught me how to stay with what was—not fix it, solve it, or spiritualize it away. I began dialoguing with the parts of me I’d exiled. Felt-sensing became a new kind of compass. Through it, I wasn’t just regulating—I was relating.

Prayer Without Name

What began as body-based emotional regulation unfolded into something deeper. Focusing became prayer, and prayer became presence. I started soul companioning not as a practitioner with answers, but as a witness to mystery. Faith softened into relational awareness. Spacious. Curious. Real.

Holding Others Through Transition

Clients arrived in their own liminal spaces—career changes, grief, menopause, burnout. Together, we learned to listen without rushing, label without pathologizing, and navigate with both honesty and grace. I became a kind of midwife for internal transition: gentle, attuned, precise.

Menopause As Initiation

No longer a medical inconvenience or cultural punchline, menopause emerged as a rite of passage. Through Focusing and IFS, I reframed it as a threshold of power, clarity, and individuation.

This reframing didn’t come easily. It came through symptoms, silence, and the slow work of listening.

The stories changed: from endurance to emergence. From silence to symbol.

Toward Wise Womanhood

I now walk with others through the terrain of midlife. My work blends emotional depth with plainspoken compassion—bridging the practical and the poetic. IFS, Focusing, embodied listening. It’s not about arriving—it’s about relating. With our parts, our stories, our unfolding selves.

What I Offer Now

Guided sessions and attuned presence—for women in perimenopause, menopause, and post-menopause.
For those in the second half of life navigating transition, disruption, or quiet longing.
For leaders who ache for presence.
For humans who want to meet themselves with kindness, no matter what shows up.

Midlife. Menopause. Mystery.
Not crises—initiations.

About Me

Curious how this work feels in real life?
I shared my own midlife journey with Focusing and spiritual companionship in this published piece for Presence, the journal of Spiritual Directors International (SDI).

Read the published piece on SDI’s site (members only)
View a plain-text copy (PDF)

SDI_Presence_Publication.pdf