When Roles Fall Away: The Inner Alchemy of Menopause and Midlife

What happens when the roles we’ve spent a lifetime perfecting—mother, partner, caregiver, professional—begin to fall away? What’s left behind when the world stops telling us who to be?

In this soulful and honest conversation, Dr. Mary Louder, DO sits down with writer and transformation guide Keri Mangis to explore the powerful initiatory journey of menopause and midlife. More than hormones or hot flashes, these years invite a deeper kind of alchemy—one that asks us to shed, surrender, and remake ourselves from the inside out.

Together, they unpack:

• Why menopause is not an ending, but an emergence
• The grief of losing identities we once clung to
• How crisis can be an unexpected teacher
• What it means to live from soul rather than role

This is not just a health talk—it’s a call to awaken.
 Tune in and remember: your becoming is not behind you, it’s still unfolding.

Learn more about Keri’s upcoming book at https://kerimangis.com, or purchase it at https://theessentialingredientbook.com.

Transcript

Mary Louder, DO - 00:01
Hello and welcome to the Dr. Mary Louder podcast show.
I'm your host, Dr. Mary Louder.
My guest today is Keri Mangis.
She's an author, a speaker, a wholeness advocate, and a cultural critic.
She'll be speaking on midlife crisis, the transformation, cultural conditioning, liminal spaces, and the sacred power of personal breakdowns and the rebirth.
Together, we will be in conversation about all of this and how she challenges the self-help's industry obsession with linear growth and instead offers a cyclical, soul-centered approach to change, one that honors the messy middle and helps us shed the invisible weight of who we were told to be.
So welcome to our conversation.

Mary Louder, DO - 00:48
Well, welcome Keri to the Dr. Mary Louder podcast show.
We're so glad that you are here as a guest.

Keri Mangis - 00:56
I am so glad to be here.
Thank you for having me.

Mary Louder, DO - 00:59
Yeah, and just to note, you never know when these air, this will air in the winter, but we're in the winter here in the upper Midwest having a great time.
You in Minnesota, me in Michigan, so here we are, sisters in the winter.

Keri Mangis - 01:13
Yes, huddling in.

Mary Louder, DO - 01:15
Exactly, exactly.
So I think this conversation will warm people's heart.
I think it's an interesting conversation about the power and the opportunity of pausing at menopause.
And I often do emphasize that pause.
But sometimes in that space, the roles change significantly for women.

Keri Mangis - 01:38
Yes.

Mary Louder, DO - 01:39
And it's not just clinically.
It's not just the hormone levels.
It's not just that estrogen drops.
It really is a lot of things drop away and they become not only metaphorical, but they also can become very literal.
Can't this?
So as we go into this, I would like to hear about your recent, not, correct, not recent, but personal approach and personal story about how you came into talking about the subject.
how you, what your experience was with some personal challenges in these areas perhaps, and what led you to become really a voice in this space.

Keri Mangis - 02:25
Thank you for that question.
So
I have been a, well, it was a yoga teacher and alternative health practitioner for many years.
And yeah, I think in my 20s and 30s, becoming something was very important to me.
I mean, ever since the time we were little, we've been asked, what are you going to be when you grow up?
And we internalize that.
And it becomes sort of a driving force in our lives.

Keri Mangis - 02:52
And, you know, I've had a lot of shifts and changes, but everything's always kind of connected, right?
There's one thing leads to the other, leads to the other, and there's always been some kind of understanding.
And I think I came into this time of life.
And all of a sudden a lot of my responsibilities began to fall away.
You know, the kids move away.
There's just, there's more space.
And I gave up some of my practices in terms of caring for other people.

Keri Mangis - 03:25
And I stepped into something that felt like a brand new space.
It felt like, you know, I think what I'd like to do is be more of an elder.
And this is a term that isn't very, isn't used very often in the West.
You know, plenty of indigenous cultures use it and have their elders and their cultural elders.
But I started looking into this idea of what is an elder?
And it was inviting to me.
And I felt it calling to me.

Keri Mangis - 03:59
But then I thought, yes, but at the same time in the West, what we're dealing with in our 50s is this thing called invisibility syndrome.

Mary Louder, DO - 04:07
Oh, okay.

Keri Mangis - 04:09
Right?
Where women over 50 say that they increasingly feel more and more invisible.
Well, if you're invisible, it's going to be really hard for you to play the role of the elder.

Mary Louder, DO - 04:21
Yes.

Keri Mangis - 04:23
And I wonder, you know, okay, so all of these questions start coming up for me.
And what is the role of patriarchy in all of this?
What has our culture taught us about what women are supposed to do as we get older?
And I thought, well, it tells us we're supposed to get quieter.
It tells us we're supposed to be less problematic.
We're supposed to just age gracefully, right?
And I don't want anything to do with that idea, right?

Keri Mangis - 05:00
I want to age into something that feels powerful, age into something that is more connected with other people and less focused on my own personal roles and titles and accomplishments and all of those things, Mary, just don't matter to me as much anymore.
the accolades, the praise, the acceptance.
All I want to do is use my voice and share what I have learned over the years and guide us into some new ways of being and seeing one another and caring for one another.
And whether or not the menopause has actually done that.
And I suspect it has.
In fact, I suspect that that's the purpose of menopause.

Mary Louder, DO - 05:52
Oh, interesting.
Yeah.
Well, you know, there is a physician who wrote about a number of years ago and talked about the arc of our female health from menarche into menopause.
And then if you take that and extrapolate that, You look at that entire time frame, and it's as if you were to put that into a month cycle.
And all of a sudden, when I started teaching from that perspective to my patients, their month-to-month cycle, and then the perimenopause into menopause, and then what we may even label as postmenopause, started to make sense.
Patterns lined up of maybe PMS, premenstrual syndrome, premenstrual dysphoric and depression, heavy menses, irregular menses.
Then as they hit perimenopause, that also began.

Mary Louder, DO - 06:52
They had more problems up and down.
They thought they should be able to sail through.
There was more discontent.
There was more... internal critic.
And so then I began asking him, well, what happened every 28 days with you?
How was that cycle?
Oh, this is like the same thing but on steroids or under a microscope.

Mary Louder, DO - 07:11
I go, exactly.

Keri Mangis - 07:13
Yes.

Mary Louder, DO - 07:14
I said, what if that becomes kind of our paradigm of, you know, we learn from that arc.

Keri Mangis - 07:22
Yes.
Well, we women, we're cyclical beings.
We're not linear.

Mary Louder, DO - 07:27
Yeah.

Keri Mangis - 07:28
But we're trying to operate in a linear hierarchical world.

Mary Louder, DO - 07:33
Yes.

Keri Mangis - 07:35
And so-- yes.
You know, and so, and when you talk about that discontent, boy, yeah, I, you know, I think that discontent is one of the most valuable things that can happen for us in our lives.

Mary Louder, DO - 07:50
See about that, because that's an uncomfortable spot.

Keri Mangis - 07:53
Well, it is, and we're taught to avoid it.
Right?
I mean, we are taught to chase contentment.
We're taught to chase comfort.
And yet, why would we move?
Why would we change?
Why would we reflect?

Keri Mangis - 08:07
Why would we reevaluate our lives if we're always comfortable and contented.
Discontent to me, and the fact that we women get it more often, tells me that we women are supposed to be transitioning, transforming like a snake shedding its skin on a very regular basis.

Mary Louder, DO - 08:27
That makes sense.
That makes-- and we do shed our skin in some levels at, you know, every 28 days, right?

Keri Mangis - 08:35
Yes.

Mary Louder, DO - 08:36
And that whole cycle of, you know, growing or releasing an egg and then whether or not it's fertilized and implanted and, you know, pregnancy takes hold or not, that's in another every 28 days a death and rebirth cycle.

Keri Mangis - 08:52
Well, and Dr. Mary, don't they say, too, that every seven years, our entire cell structures.

Mary Louder, DO - 08:57
They do.

Keri Mangis - 08:58
Regenerate.
So we are built for transformation.
We're not built for stasis, for, you know, just to settle.
Yeah.
And so I think this menopause time, as the symptoms increase, it's the knocking on the door.

Mary Louder, DO - 09:14
Mm-hmm.
It really is.
And so interesting, so leaning a little bit further into the discontent, because what arises frequently in that is  anxiety.
And I use anxiety as a pointer to what's going on?
What does a person need to know?
What do I need to know when I feel anxious?
What do I need to know to feel safe?

Mary Louder, DO - 09:38
and hopefully something's over.
Now, it might not be over, but how do I feel safe in it?
And that's really what I'm seeking is safety.
Now, you can be safe and be in a very unsafe place, but no, you're safe.
Or you can be safe and be in a safe place and still feel unsafe.
And so it's a matter of what, how do we find that perspective and how do we attach to what anxiety could be as a teacher, as a pointer, as a helper, versus a diagnosis or something we have to squelch with a tablet or prescription or even a... you know, an app, so to
speak.

Keri Mangis - 10:22
Sure.
Well, I don't know if we've had a chance to talk about my first book, but my first book, so my first book is called Embodying Soul, A Return to Wholeness.

Mary Louder, DO - 10:32
Okay.

Keri Mangis - 10:33
And it is a journey of me learning how to come into my body and to come into dialogue with all of my emotions, particularly my more troubling ones, such as anxiety and depression.
And so what I did in this book, it was kind of fun.
I personified my emotions.
I gave them voice, I gave them language.
And I interact with them in the book.
In doing so, I did learn a lot about my emotion called anxiety.
I did learn to have compassion for this emotion because, yes, it wants to keep me safe.

Keri Mangis - 11:17
And so I learned to come into dialogue and say, okay, I see you.
I see what you're wanting.
I'm asking you now to trust me.
And me, as in my soul, trust me on this path of the unknown.
Trust me on this path of intuition.
And trust that we will be okay.
I'm not saying that this has prevented or stopped my anxiety.

Keri Mangis - 11:50
What it has done is allowed me to accept it, to embody it, and to partner it with other emotions such as joy, such as contentment, and to just, that's the whole point of this book is, this is, it's all embodied in me now, it all gets to be there, it all gets to have it say, but at the end of the
day, I make the decisions.

Mary Louder, DO - 12:18
And you're, sound as, if you're making that from a position of grounded confidence, being centered in and connected to who you are.

Keri Mangis - 12:28
Yes.

Mary Louder, DO - 12:29
which I use the mantra, that's the safest place to be connected to yourself, because from there you can go anywhere.
And so, because you got it all together, because it's there and you're just connected.

Keri Mangis - 12:44
Yes.

Mary Louder, DO - 12:46
And so, you know, that speaks, too, of a lot of resiliency.
and a lot of strength and emotional maturity so that even could be in those places of pause that we stop and think what we want the next part to unfold as for us Yes.
And, you know, there's not a lot of answers.
Well, I say this, there are answers, but not a lot of the answers are good for women in middle age.
It's pharmaceutical-based. It's--
So, it's either pharmaceutical-based and there's something wrong with you.
or you need to be on the wellness trend and hit the gym so hard that you are buffed and drinking green juice to turn green, your hands turn orange from carrots, or you age gracefully, whatever that means, or you give up. And there's this weird space in there that I think we need to put in totally

Mary Louder, DO - 13:55
personalized approaches for people.
What are your goals?
What are your things you would like to do?
What is your family history you need to know, emotionally, medically, socially, spiritually.
So you can navigate that next half of your life in a way that you really can co-create.
Because as you say, when you were younger, you were like, I want to do this, I want to earn that, I want to be known for that.
It is labels, it is goals, it is very concrete things that becoming.

Mary Louder, DO - 14:33
And I think it's an important stage to have, because that gives you the ground... you know the grounding and gives you the experience for that next phase of now what, when the ground comes out from underneath you, who am I really what lessons stuck what things don't I want what things do I want what
now is really important? Does that make sense?

Keri Mangis - 14:58
 oh my gosh. I mean menopause is finally this opportunity to stop just trudging forward,  right and it does open up a liminal space, a space in between this who I was and who I will be.
And when you talk about this individualized support, yes, the only way we can understand what that's going to look like for us is if we take this pause.
If we just keep trudging forward day in, day out, well, we're not going to be able to know what's best for us.
We don't spend a lot of time in reflection in this culture, in looking back hindsight, exploring what has worked for us the past, what do I really need.
And what I see in this space is I see an opportunity for initiation.
Initiation into a new way of being.
I mean, we have initiations for birthdays, we have them for graduations, we have ceremonies and initiations for weddings and other changes of identity and shifts in lifestyle.

Keri Mangis - 16:08
Menopause comes along and we're just expected to kind of quietly endure it.

Mary Louder, DO - 16:13
Yeah.

Keri Mangis - 16:15
You know, and we do.
Women are.

Mary Louder, DO - 16:17
And hopefully not get arrested.
Seriously.

Keri Mangis - 16:24
Isn't that the truth?

Mary Louder, DO - 16:25
exactly.

Keri Mangis - 16:26
But, you know, what would it look like to have an initiation?
Some kind of, and this is what I talk about, is this idea of a pause day in menopause, where we take a day and we say, or we take a month, or we take a year, or we take whatever.
And we say, who I was and who do I want to be, this initiation, this opportunity to say, what would it look like to become an elder?
Because that, again, that's what we're called to do.
That's what women are called to do, I think.
That's the whole menopause, the whole point of the transition is to bring us into a place of being the wise
woman.

Mary Louder, DO - 17:09
Would elder also be like a
crone?

Keri Mangis - 17:12
Yes.
Well, you know, it's interesting that you asked that because I just spoke with another woman who said she wants to see another archetype in between there.

Mary Louder, DO - 17:21
Oh, interesting.
Okay.

Keri Mangis - 17:23
Yeah, so something like a menopausal woman and then an alchemist and then the crone.

Mary Louder, DO - 17:28
Okay.

Keri Mangis - 17:30
So I think it's in shift, I think it's in flux, and I think we still get to create it.

Mary Louder, DO - 17:35
Yeah, that's interesting because, and the other thing is, an elder, what if the elder began earlier, let's say 38, 35, because of when often perimenopause actually truly begins?
I mean, there's so much we don't know clinically.
And then the question is, too, what do we know historically as to what records we have from, you know, menstrual and menarche histories of women for, you know, hundreds of years.
I don't know that they even exist.
But if you were to look at that time frame of what the length of... a woman's fertility years would be to see how they've changed and shifted through the culture and, you know, you would have to say environmental exposures and all those types of things that, you know, we encounter on the planet,
right?
It'd be interesting.

Keri Mangis - 18:29
Well, and it would be very helpful for the culture.
I mean,
it's certainly something that we're lacking in Western culture is elders.
I mean, instead we come up with this idea of the hero.
And, you know, we look for someone to save us.
We don't look for people to guide us.
And it's very different things.

Mary Louder, DO - 18:50
It is.
So not even they couldn't, so what about like being the hero of their own journey?
You know, how Joseph Campbell talks about that with the hero's journey.

Keri Mangis - 19:00
It's interesting because when you talk to Joseph Campbell and in his interviews, he will actually say that this structure is from a man's point of view.

Mary Louder, DO - 19:10
It is.
That's right.

Keri Mangis - 19:13
And so there is this movement now to move into a heroine's journey, which is more about a descent down into the underworld.
And so that's different for women, I think.

Mary Louder, DO - 19:25
That is
truly different.
All right.
So how would we do the descent into the underworld?
What do you recommend?

Keri Mangis - 19:35
Well, I think sometimes life just brings us there.

Mary Louder, DO - 19:38
Okay.

Keri Mangis - 19:39
Through breakdown, through crisis, through undoing, through unraveling.
And it's just that we're always called to overcome, right?
That's our self-help world.
Overcome, get over it.
You know, don't stay down too long.
The quicker you get up, the better.

Mary Louder, DO - 19:55
Mm-hmm.

Keri Mangis - 19:57
And I want to say, no, let's start a movie where, let's start a movement where we say, let's stay down for a minute.
Let's just see what happens.
Let's not seek enlightenment for a moment.
Let's seek the endarkenment.
Let's see what happens if we just stop.
You know, there are these quotes by self-help gurus like Tony Robbins that say, if you're not growing, you're dying.
And I say, no, no.

Keri Mangis - 20:24
Sometimes when we're not growing, we're deepening.
We're
enriching our roots.
We're connecting to one another.
We're embodying our wisdom.
We're claiming it.
That's what a descent to the underworld looks like.

Keri Mangis - 20:46
It means for a little while we're not going to worry about all of these things out here.
We're not going to listen to the self-help gurus telling us, you know, pick yourself back up by the bootstraps.
We're going to say no.
I'm going to be here.
I'm going to let myself undo.
I'm going to let myself unravel because when we do that, We are closer to the imaginal world where anything is possible, where we can rebuild our lives and our society than we ever are at any other point in time in our life.

Mary Louder, DO - 21:16
It actually sounds a lot like a wayfinder, and it sounds very shamanic in nature.

Keri Mangis - 21:23
Yes.

Mary Louder, DO - 21:24
You know, I would.
Yeah, does that...

Keri Mangis - 21:26
I would agree.

Mary Louder, DO - 21:27
Yeah.
And so, and in that framework, it's actually then a practice that becomes one of-- It's very deepening, but it's also the reflecting and asking for help and the honoring of the help provided for you on that plane of understanding, which is a much different pace and a much different presence than going
for it all the time, than vibrating at the highest frequency.
than getting as bright as shiny as you can.
And so, and it's a, it's a, it's a, it's slower, but it's, but sometimes, you know, you have to slow down to go faster.
Because you need to, you need that grounding.
I don't know, this is interesting because I just feel like I'm just sitting here processing this right out loud about how different the approach to speaking to women now in middle age can be.

Keri Mangis - 22:48
Yes.

Mary Louder, DO - 22:50
Because, and I'm having these little epiphanies just sitting here.
You know about the hormonal change.
And we know that you're sandwiched between taking care of people older than you and people younger than you yet.
But yet you've got this identity emerging in here that is very different.
where people question things.
They have honest questions.
Am I in the right relationship?

Mary Louder, DO - 23:18
Am I living in the right place?
Am I working at the right place?
Have I been and even dared to become the person that I think I'm supposed to be, you know, or want to be?
And none of those are fast answers.

Keri Mangis - 23:34
No, but they're sacred questions.

Mary Louder, DO - 23:36
Yes.

Keri Mangis - 23:39
And what a time to be asking them and to not have judgment over the answers.
Because just because you might ask yourself those questions and decide the answer is no, it's not the right relationship.
No, it's not the right job.
It doesn't mean that you made wrong decisions.

Mary Louder, DO - 23:56
Correct.

Keri Mangis - 23:58
There are stages in life, there are chapters in life, and everything was right for you at the time.

Mary Louder, DO - 24:05
That's correct.

Keri Mangis - 24:06
So this journey requires a lot of grace and a lot of self-compassion.

Mary Louder, DO - 24:11
Yes.

Keri Mangis - 24:12
And a tribe and community of other women that understand what this is like.
Because what we're talking about here, to do this alone is tricky because all of what we're conditioned kind of runs against it.

Mary Louder, DO - 24:26
Mm-hmm.

Keri Mangis - 24:27
So it's really easy to be in this space of undoing and think that you're doing it wrong, that it's taking too long.
So finding people, finding resources, you know, examining concepts like the dark night of the soul, and realizing that humans have gone through times like this since the beginning.

Mary Louder, DO - 24:47
Right.
Well, I think that's a super good point because speaking from the 80s language, a super good point.
Because our culture is very fast.
The resources are very fast.
I mean, every 90 days our medical knowledge in the entire world doubles.
That is not what happened 100 years ago.
Every 90 days.

Keri Mangis - 25:17
It's extraordinary.

Mary Louder, DO - 25:18
Yeah, I know.
And so it's really hard to keep up.
And people are mad when physicians don't keep up. But if we understand this concept that maybe we're not meant to, that we're maybe meant to, and I don't mean be out of step with what's safe and all that.
I mean we need to take into our resources and responsibility.
how we want to direct those stages, this next stage in our life, in the stage that's impending and looming right there.
And I think that, you know, the things that feel shiny, new, round, and flat, you know, are probably not the shiny objects we need to be going towards.
that there isn't a quick fix for this.

Mary Louder, DO - 26:07
Even when we try to take hormones back to when you're 20 or 30 to say that's going to protect your bones or heart, we don't know the answers to that scientifically.
We don't know the answers that clinically.
We don't really know what levels they need to be at.
And I keep picking on hormones because that's now the focus.
in menopause, not only literature, but the culture.
And I'm doing this because I'm balancing out what is that transition meant to look like versus what is actually being influenced and marketed and talked about.
And I think that that's really important because there's so many approaches to that.

Mary Louder, DO - 26:51
It's a wide, varied topic.
And often at this time is the first time that women really take a serious look at their health.
Because the years between 20s and their 30s, they're child rearing.
So they have an OBGYN, they're having babies or not.
And that's usually the type of care.
And then as things begin to change, it's like it turns into what's wrong with me.

Keri Mangis - 27:22
Yes.
And the focus is always on maintaining, you know, our sexual libido, maintaining our hair, maintaining this.
And, you know, I don't have an opinion one way or the other about people taking hormones.
I think everyone needs to... do what's right for them, but it is undergirded by the idea that we need to stay sexually active.
We need to stay youthful in our skin and hair and everything for as long as possible.
I'm just trying to stretch that runway out instead of coming back to this idea of it's a cycle.

Mary Louder, DO - 28:06
Yeah, you know, anti- aging, I was never, you know, for that because I just, and then, I just wasn't, and it, because it doesn't make sense.
It never made sense to, you know, drive things back to your youth because the recovery or recapturing is not what we're trying to do.

Keri Mangis - 28:28
Oh, and I don't want those years back.

Mary Louder, DO - 28:30
Yeah, I'm with you there.
There's some things I would do differently, you know, sure.
But, you know, and now where I'm at in, you know, as being 63 years old, I actually really like it.

Keri Mangis - 28:44
I mean, that's what you always hear, right?
I mean, yeah, I'm 53, so I'm right behind you and everything you hear is, yes, it just gets better and better.

Mary Louder, DO - 28:55
Yeah, and it's, you know, there's a, you know, there's something about it when I say, gosh, I've been practicing as a physician for 33 years and people look at me like, I'm only 27 years old. You know, and it's like, yeah, and so you weren't even born yet when that, you know, and so there's
something now that feels different for me.
And there's a platform that I've taken now, you know, in the culture and social media and things like that from this same perspective.
But what I'm really appreciating is the depth of the story, the depth of really the pause, and the depth of the sacredness of this, that it's not something to solve for a woman.

Keri Mangis - 29:44
Amen.
I
mean, that's it right there.
It's not a problem to fix.
It's not something to solve.
I think that's perfect.

Mary Louder, DO - 29:52
Yeah.

Keri Mangis - 29:54
It's a
stage to embody.
I think that's what we might say.

Mary Louder, DO - 29:59
Yeah.
And so I'm actually, you know, kind of keen about what's around the corner for all the things I'm doing that had I not done all the things I have done already, I wouldn't be able to be in this space now.

Keri Mangis - 30:15
See, and that gratitude, that's something that you get when you're older.
That beautiful gratitude.
And the word that has come so often for me in my own conversations with people is the word sovereign.
Yes.
Oh, what a beautiful word.

Mary Louder, DO - 30:32
Yes.
So explain that for people because it's not a religious word exactly.

Keri Mangis - 30:38
No, and to be honest, I feel like I'm still learning it myself because it wasn't all that long ago that someone said it to me and I just said, tell me more about that.
It is this embodiment of our wholeness.
That's how I see it.
It's authenticity, it's self-love, self-compassion, but it's also this place of really understanding how interconnected we are.
And so it's both and.

Mary Louder, DO - 31:07
Yeah, nice.
Nice.
And that would bring about an improved or increased self-awareness.
An increase ability to stand with grit and grace and to even see the rough places dissolved with grace.
Because we're just standing and being.

Keri Mangis - 31:25
And
I just think women, we're just so set up to come into our sovereign selves during our, and maybe earlier, as you suggest, coming into this space as women and guiding our society from a place of wisdom.
Rather than, you know, sort of just this knee-jerk, feel-good, quick fix thing that's gotten so much attention.

Mary Louder, DO - 31:54
Yes.
So sovereign beings, not broken, able to go deeper, going slower to experience the beingness of what the next phase is.

Keri Mangis - 32:12
all the while
guiding others, groups, families, toward that wholeness for themselves.

Mary Louder, DO - 32:22
I think that just summarizes it beautifully between the two of us.
That was really a very harmonious statement there.
Yes, it was.
Yeah.
Jump to the practice for just a minute.
You've done a TED talk.
You've got some books out.

Mary Louder, DO - 32:36
Bring us and share with us, bring to us and share with us where can we find all this information to dig deeper and to learn more?

Keri Mangis - 32:44
Oh,
thank you.
So first I would love to share that I do have a TED Talk that was released this summer.
Nice.
And it's on everything that we're talking about here.
It's on elderhood.
It's on menopause as a time to pause.

Keri Mangis - 32:58
It's on the importance of initiations and ceremonies in all stages of life.
So this is not just a talk for women in menopause.
It was very important to me that I made this idea.
bigger than just menopause, right?
Because we're missing ritual, we're missing ceremony in all kinds of life stages.

Mary Louder, DO - 33:18
Nice.
Got it.

Keri Mangis - 33:20
So that's pretty easy to find,
which is my
name in TED Talk.
And then I'm also really excited to announce that I've got a new book coming out March 31st, 2026.
It is called The Essential Ingredient Remaking Ourselves in Times of Crisis.

Mary Louder, DO - 33:38
Wonderful.

Keri Mangis - 33:39
And it is an exploration both on the breakdown liminal stages that we're talking about on personal levels and on societal levels.

Mary Louder, DO - 33:50
Okay.
We've got both of those right now.
We've got that all happening as I see.
It's a show out there.
And sometimes a show in here too.

Keri Mangis - 34:01
It is.
And I wanted to write something, you know, I just received an endorsement the other day, and she said that the book reads like a survival guide for our times.

Mary Louder, DO - 34:10
Wonderful.

Keri Mangis - 34:10
And so I think for people out there that are like, how do I walk through these times?
Which, like you say, you know, not only is medical knowledge increasing every, did you say every 90 days?

Mary Louder, DO - 34:23
Yeah.

Keri Mangis - 34:24
But, you know, all kinds of knowledge are just we're exponential.
And we are just human.
And so how do we navigate these kinds of times?
And so if this book can be a help in that, I'm
glad.

Mary Louder, DO - 34:38
That's great.
And we will put the resources on the notes for the show so people will be able to find it.
And they'll be able to find your TED Talk as well.
And then your current book that you have.
So that's wonderful.
Well, Keri, I'd like to thank you for taking your time to visit with us today and to be in conversation about this really, I think, best way to approach change and best way to approach being a female of our time and best way to approach, you know, all the things that are constant and change being
one of the most important things.

Mary Louder, DO - 35:16
So thank you
very much.

Keri Mangis - 35:17
So glad to have been in conversation with you.
Thank you.

Mary Louder, DO - 35:21
Yeah, you're very welcome.
All right, folks, we're so glad that you were here with us and we want you to rate and review this podcast because that always helps us get better visibility and share it with your loved ones, share it with your girlfriends, share it with the book club, share it with your friends, get out there and
spread this around because this isn't a very important message.
You're not broken, you don't need to be fixed, and there's a lot of gold and richness inside of you to explore.
So I would say dig at it.
See you next time.