We believe menopause is not a malfunction. It is not a crisis to manage, a decline to slow, or a phase to survive with grace and silence. It is not something to apologize for, medicate away, or whisper about in careful company.

It is a threshold. A burning away.

A crowning.

And it is long overdue its rightful place in the story of a woman’s life.

We believe this generation is waking up mid-fire. Our mothers didn’t talk about this. Our grandmothers endured it alone, unnamed. A medical system that has historically gaslit women’s bodies continues to dismiss more than a hundred hormonal and metabolic symptoms as hysteria, weakness, or whining. The information is conflicting. The cultural narrative is invisibility. And too many women are sitting alone in the wreckage of a transition nobody prepared them for, wondering what is wrong with them.

Nothing is wrong with them.

We believe the menopausal passage is a developmental threshold as real and sacred as any rite of passage a woman has ever walked before (or missed). It is a time to inherit everything her life has taught her.

We believe no woman should walk this threshold alone. Not because she isn’t strong enough ... she is ferociously strong. But because women have always done their deepest becoming in circle. In the company of other women who recognize themselves in each other’s unraveling. Who will witness without fixing. Who will normalize without minimizing. Who will straighten each other’s crowns without making it weird.

We believe biology is power. History is wisdom. Desire is directive.

We believe the body is not betraying you, it is initiating you.

We believe the wounds you’ve carried were never proof of your brokenness.

They were the curriculum. And you have passed every single test.

We believe the woman you are becoming has been waiting patiently your entire life for this exact moment ... when you finally stop looking backward for something to fix, and turn fully toward the horizon of everything you are still becoming.

The Pausal Passage Society is a diverse collective of women dedicated to restoring the menopausal transition as a developmental threshold of purpose, power, and wisdom.

A community for women who are done disappearing.

A program for women ready to reclaim every part of themselves they left behind.

A series of retreats for women who want to feel gloriously, unapologetically alive again.

This is not the end of your story, sister.

This is where it gets good.

Welcome to your passage. Welcome to your throne. Welcome home.

Ten Things Every Peri/Menopausal Woman Should Know

  • You’re Not Dying, You’re Shedding a Skin

It can feel like a death, because it is - a death of former identities, cycles, and the illusions of endless fertility. But what emerges is not a diminished self; it’s a raw, unmasked version that can’t go back.

  • The Body Will Break Its Own Rules

Everything you thought you “knew” about your body may turn upside down - weight, sleep, sexuality, temperature, memory. This is not personal failure; it’s biological metamorphosis. The trick is to become curious about the new animal you’re becoming.

  • Rage is Not a Symptom, It’s a Signal

The anger, irritability, or even outright rage isn’t a flaw in your chemistry. It’s your body’s way of surfacing old boundaries, suppressed needs, and a lifetime of swallowing “no.” What if hot flashes are your inner fire, not a malfunction?

  • There is Grief, Don’t Rush It

You will grieve what’s lost: youth, possibility, the mother-role, the sense of being “needed” in the old ways. Let yourself mourn. Unfelt grief will ferment into bitterness or numbness.

  • You Are the Oracle Now

This is the age when your intuition sharpens, your tolerance for bullshit evaporates, and you start saying the unsayable. The “crone” or elder isn’t a witch to be exiled; she’s the village’s last truth-teller.

  • Your Value Has Never Been in Your Reproductive Function

Society will try to convince you that your value peaks with youth and fertility. Refuse this narrative. Your deepest power is only now awakening - one that is less about producing, and more about seeing, naming, and transmitting.

  • Sexuality Can Be Reborn, But Only If You Stop Faking

You might lose interest in performative sex. Good. Real pleasure now comes from being fully present, fully honest, fully embodied. The era of “pleasing” is over. Now it’s about savoring, discovering, and choosing your pleasure first.

  • You Can Break the Family Spell

This is the time to examine and unravel inherited patterns, scripts, and generational wounds. You are both ancestor and descendant. What you heal now radiates both backward and forward.

  • The Culture’s Silence is Violence

Menopause is still a taboo, a punchline, or at best an afterthought in medicine and media. Refuse to be invisible. Speak what is unspoken, especially to younger women. Name the unnamed.

  • You Are Becoming the Future Ancestor

How you live now - the courage, the letting go, the wisdom you embody - sets the psychic table for those who come after. Your words, your art, your choices: they echo. Live with the awareness that you are already myth in the making.

I Know this Passage Because i'm Walking it

One day in 2022, three years after a hysterectomy, obvious symptoms of the menopause transition engulfed me in flames. A sudden onslaught of hourly hot flushes and sleep demolished as I drowned in puddles, shattered the secure, happy nervous system I had worked hard to attain. The change was so drastic and sudden, I questioned if I was going insane.

The thrust into this portal was brutal, but through this refracturing I also received deeper truths about attachment wounds, narcissistic trauma, and spiritual abuse that I had been trying to heal for 25 years after leaving a fundamentalist doomsday cult I was raised in six generations deep, losing my entire family in the process, and starting over as a Maiden with nothing but courage and the stubborn belief that wholeness was possible.

In my menopausal unraveling - because of it, really - I was handed the final pieces of my becoming.

A few years into this passage, during my Chiron Return at 50, my wise, old soul told my ego it would no longer be ruled by the wounds of the Girl. Mothering myself back into wholeness was complete. The Elder in me was ready to arrive. Settled in my knowing, embodied in self-possesion. Even more, I was evolving into the Future Ancestor, who's life, just as it is, is an inspiring tale for generations to come.

Weeks later I learned my estranged father had terminal cancer. During the next three months until his death, I furiously penned my memoir.

That's when EVERYTHING. FINALLY. CONVERGED.

My story isn't a tragedy to recover from. It's a legend I've been living all along. Looking back at everything in my life, I no longer see damage. I see divine destiny, purpose, and wisdom.

My nervous system has settled into a different frequency of inner peace that comes from simply being. New boundaries and choices to protect that peace are my mission now. I know who the fuck I am.

The Pausal Passage Society is a sanctuary where all midlife women can make sense of this sacred passage into Crone and Sage. Nothing has gone wrong and you are not losing yourself now.

You are arriving. Sovereign, clear, and at home with every part of you.

We've entered the era of owning all that we are and desire. We don't care anymore, unless it sets us free.

Welcome to your passage, sister. I’ll see you inside.

🤎 Shauna

Wisdom Forged Through the Passage

2009-2017 - Trained Birth Doula with Natural Resources, San Francisco, CA

2011 - Certified Lactation Educator Counselor by UCSD

2013 - Trained Life Coach + Soul Doula with TAOBC

2014 - First group program, Free to Love, with 125 participants

2017 - Certified Tantric Facilitator by Tao Tantric Arts

2019-2023 - The world's first Intimacy Surrogate

2021 - Led Sacred Song Retreat, Playa del Carmen, Mexico

2021 - One year Shamanic Training with Rita Hraiz

2022 - Led Sacred Wild Retreat, Bacalar, Mexico

2022 - Relational Skills Trauma Certificate Program with Dr. Albert Wong, Somatopia

2024 - Internal Family Systems Trauma Treatment Program with Frank Anderson

Through the archetypes of feminine evolution, we gather what we left behind.

We return not to heal,

but to restore lost parts of us.

Remediation of your childhood is complete. Innocence is recaptured through curiosity, joy, and experimentation ... free from performance and self-consciousness.

It’s safe to be you.

Reclaim your birthright to play with life

Desire is self-referenced now and shame dissolves into unapologetic sexual expression. Pleasure is rewired through erotic truth and arousal requires emotional and energetic safety. It’s safe to want.

Reclaim agency of your body + pleasure

No more depletion, martyrdom, people pleasing, and carrying ALL loads in the family system. Release outdated roles and identities, and enact boundaries that put you first. It’s safe to receive.

Reclaim fierce devotion to self + boundaries

Discernment is your sword, intuition is your knowing, and truth is your compass.

No justifications, explanations, approval, or belonging needed. Peace is non-negotiable now. It’s safe to give no more fucks.

Reclaim inner authority + hard-won wisdom

You see your entire life through context now. Nothing has been out of place. Every experience has converged to author a legendary myth. It’s safe to meet death complete in the purpose of this life.

Reclaim trust in the mystery + accept it all

Late, on Purpose.

You're Not Finished!

A postscript is what you add when you remember something after the letter is "done."

A post-postscript is what arrives when you realize the entire letter was a draft.

Not an add-on. Not a correction.

The moment you realize the story you were living was provisional.

Pausal Passage Society (PPS) = the place for what comes after the life you thought was the main text.