205 Why I’m Speaking Differently about Menopause & Mindset Now

What if menopause isn’t something to manage…
What if it’s something to participate in?

In this deeply reflective solo episode, I return after time away with a radical reframe of what “mindset” actually means in menopause, and why the phrase has become so triggering, misunderstood, and frankly, unhelpful.

Fresh from turning 50 and beginning my Clinical Hypnotherapy diploma, I share what it’s like to be in the middle of a personal and professional unlearning. Long-held beliefs are being questioned. Identities are softening. Certainty is giving way to curiosity.

This isn’t a how-to episode.
It’s a fireside conversation for women who feel something deeper is happening beneath the surface.

In this episode, I explore:

🧠 Why “just change your mindset” can feel dismissive and where that conversation breaks down
🔍 What mindset actually means (and why it’s not positive thinking)
🫀 How perception, nervous system safety, and hormones are in constant dialogue
🌡️ Why you can’t think your way into more estrogen — but can influence how symptoms land in the body
🔥 The biology behind hot flushes, stress, adrenaline, and the feedback loops that intensify symptoms
🌀 What hypnotherapy really is (and no, it’s not stage hypnosis or mind control)
🪞 Why menopause is a transition of identity, not just hormones
🧳 How stress can exist even when life looks “fine” on paper
🧩 Why perfectionism is often a trauma response — and why menopause dismantles it
🌱 Menopause as compost: decay and renewal happening at the same time
🤝 Why this stage of life asks for collaboration, not control

This episode is for you if:

😮‍💨 You’re tired of oversimplified menopause advice
😬 You bristle at mindset talk but still feel drawn to something deeper
🐢 You sense menopause is asking you to slow down, not push harder
🤍 You want compassion, nuance, and honesty — not fixes
🧬 You’re curious about the mind–body relationship without bypassing biology

A quiet announcement

I introduce Becoming, a new membership space I’m creating, not to fix or optimize women in menopause, but to offer somewhere to be while identity, nervous system, and meaning are reorganizing.

This is not a course.
This is not a program.
It’s a space for women who feel the shift and don’t want to rush through it.

The waitlist is now open. No urgency. No pressure. Just an invitation.

👉 Join the Becoming waitlist:
https://www.sallygarozzo.com/becoming

If this episode felt like relief rather than effort… if something in your body quietly said yes… trust that.

Menopause isn’t a problem to solve.
It’s a process you’re allowed to be in.

You’re not broken.
You’re becoming.

*************************************************************************************

📲 Connect with Sally:

Email: info@sallygarozzo.com 

[On-Demand Masterclass] How To Heal The Trauma Underlying Your Menopause Symptom Severity [£17]: https://www.sallygarozzo.com/healingtrauma 

[Online Practitioners Diploma - Self Paced] Menopause Wellbeing Practitioner [£127]: https://www.sallygarozzo.com/meno

[One to One] Bespoke Transformational Hypnotherapy & Coaching: https://www.sallygarozzo.com/rapid-tran

Transcript

You know those seasons in life where it feels as though the ground beneath you is shifting, where everything you thought you knew about yourself, your work, your craft, suddenly starts to wobble? Well, that's where I've been recently, right in the middle of a complete mental rewrite. Right now as I speak is the 2nd of January, 2026. So we're in fresh starts and new beginnings.

A month ago, the end of November, I turned 50 and in October, I started my new clinical hypnotherapy diploma. And honestly, it's shaking everything up that I thought I understood about the mind, the body, the subconscious, even the ethics of how we help people change. It's both exhilarating and disorientating at the same time. There are moments in class where I find myself thinking,

wow, have I been doing this wrong all along? And it's a really uncomfortable question to be faced with when you've been doing this work a certain way for many, years. Now the truth is I don't mind being wrong because being wrong means growth. It means that curiosity and creativity are alive within you.

And if you know me, I hope you do, you'll know that I would rather be stretched than stagnant. Stagnant feels like death to me. So yes, I'm in this space of mental unraveling, bringing this unraveling and I'm picking to you in real time. I'm sitting with the discomfort, the unlearning, the relearning, and letting the old uncertainties fall apart. I'll give you a little case in point. So,

There's been a few heated debates floating around the professional world of hypnotherapy lately, discussions about regression work, about what's ethical, about what's safe, about what might be outdated. Of course, I'm not going to name any names, but one particular exchange online on my feed got stuck in my energy field. And

It made me realise how easy it is to build a whole identity around a particular method, around a particular paradigm and how brave it is actually to question the method itself. Because when we question the tools that we've built our confidence on, we're really questioning who we are as practitioners and that can be a little destabilising.

but it's that energy today that I want to bring into this episode, this curiosity, this humility, and maybe a bit of courage too, because I haven't done a solo episode for a long time. So in the spirit of those things, I decided to do something that most people would never dream of doing, something slightly masochistic, if I'm honest. I thought to myself,

Let's see if anyone's written anything negative about me online. Now I've been doing this long enough now to have built up a little bit of an online presence. It's not huge, but you know, having a podcast, people talk, right? And of course that's why I'm here doing this because I want people to talk. I want the conversation.

And I was curious to see what had been written about me online. So as you can imagine, as I'm putting my name into ChatGPT, a little bit of adrenaline spiked within me. And it was a bit like kind of peeking through your fingers when you're trying to watch a horror film. You kind of want to know, but you also really don't want to know.

So we get a thread on Reddit that pops up, somebody questioning this whole idea that mindset can affect menopause symptoms. They are essentially questioning the menopause mindset, the idea that I've built my whole podcast on. Now, just to be clear, they weren't attacking me personally, although my name did get mentioned.

but they were clearly frustrated. They'd seen videos and posts from various specialists, probably including me, saying things like, shift your mindset and you'll sleep better. Shift your mindset and you'll stress less. Shift your mindset and your hot flushes will calm down. And this person was basically saying, come on, really? My hormones are the problem, not my mindset.

How can thinking differently make more estrogen? How can thinking differently make more progesterone or help me clear out my estrogen better? How can mindset stop a hot flush? These things are hormonal, they're physiological. And I get it, I absolutely get it, I really, really do. That reaction makes perfect sense.

Of course it does, you know, if you're sleep deprived, exhausted and doing all the right things, yoga, supplements, early nights, and someone tells you it's all in your mindset, well that's maddening, right? It can feel dismissive, it can feel shaming. So I'm a human, right? And I'm not gonna say that reading that post didn't make me feel frustrated because I wanted to be able to explain where I was coming from.

But actually what it did bring out in me was a somewhat more reflective mode because I realized this is where the conversation is breaking down in reality. We're the same word. We're both using the word mindset, but we're not talking about the same thing. We've got very different definitions of the word mindset, much like the regression.

debates in the hypnotherapy world that I was talking about earlier, we have very different definitions of what regression actually is. And so I thought maybe this episode, this is the episode that I need to talk about today. This is my comeback episode, my comeback solo episode. Maybe we need to just slow it all down and say clearly what we're not saying when we talk about

mindset at menopause and what we are saying when we talk about mindset at menopause. So that's what we're going to do today. And I just want to plant this little seed too at this stage because right now I am in the early stages of shaping something very new, very precious, very timely and very beautiful and it feels like the perfect time for this

thing to emerge, this thing being a new offer to emerge as we enter into 2026. I'm 50 with my new 50 style post-menopausal wisdom. I'm not going to explain what this offer is fully yet because I don't want to rush into it. That's the old Sally energy, the one who used to operate from

a kind of flight trauma response, oversharing, operating with urgency and flood lighting with too much information. So I'm just going to sit back on it for a moment. Just plant that seed in your mind and from this space of slow transition, I just wanted to let you know that I'll be announcing something at the end of this episode. And I do hope that you'll stay with me on this because I think it really suits the vibe of what we're talking about today. So,

Today, I want to think about the phrase mind over matter. And I want to think about translating what that phrase is actually trying to point towards. How the mind, body and nervous system work together and why understanding that interrelatedness on a deeper level can ease some of the suffering that goes alongside with hormonal change.

So when you strip away the Instagram quotes and the oversimplified sound bites, mindset work isn't about pretending symptoms don't exist. It's about changing the internal conditions that influence how your body responds to symptoms. And that can be a really important factor, especially around breaking this

feedback loop, this negative feedback loop that we can get stuck in, especially when it comes to pain, stress, anxiety, depression and all manner of physical symptoms and ailments.

Essentially, we know that symptoms and pain get worse the more we focus on them. And there are plenty of scientific studies and randomized control trials that support this hypothesis. So it's about the dialogue between the brain, the hormones and the perception of safety in amongst the changes that we're experiencing as people going through this potentially

destabilizing time of menopause. Yeah, it's the dialogue. It's the relatedness between all the systems. That's what mindset is. And that's what I want to unpack today. I'm not trying to convince anyone to think their way out of menopause, but I want to show you how deeply the nervous system and the patterns in the mind are involved in how we experience menopause.

So grab a cup of tea, maybe a hot water bottle, because I'm recording this on the 2nd of January in the middle of a really cold snap. And let's get cozy. I'd like you to think about this in a way as a kind of fireside conversation, not a lecture, not a debate, just me in this moment of unlearning and relearning, just sharing what I've discovered about the very misunderstood relationship between the mind and menopause.

So let's start with why the mindset gets people's backs up in the first place because interpretation of words really do matter. And this one mindset has been both overused and oversimplified to the point of where I think is really lost its nuance. You see somewhere along the line, the word mindset became a kind of self-help slogan. Yeah. It got flattened.

into this idea that if you just think positive, everything will magically fall into place. And that idea is so outdated and truthfully belongs in the 1980s when pop psychology started to enter the culture. And actually that version of mindset really does deserve a bit of a backlash, if I'm honest, because telling a woman who is up at 3 a.m. with heart palpitations and night sweats,

that she simply needs a better attitude is not only unhelpful, it's actually cruel, I think, because it implies blame, where there should be compassion, there should be understanding. And now interestingly, mindset wasn't originally a self-help idea. It was a psychology term, originating in Germany in the early 1900s, describing how our perception

gets set how our perceptions form. And it was our lovely new self-help industry that we're into today that kind of turned it into a personal responsibility story that became overly moralised. So the deeper therapeutic meaning of mindset isn't about thinking happy thoughts. It's actually about perception.

It's about the filter through which your brain interprets what is happening in your body. It's about the dialogue between your beliefs, those covert angles of perception that get formed in childhood, your nervous system and your physiology. So think of perception like the lens of a camera. If that lens gets smudged, every image looks distorted and we think

that distortion is reality but it's not it's just the lens. If we clean the lens suddenly the scene that we're looking at is clearer it's in higher definition we can see the subtleties we're not forcing the picture to change on the outside we're changing our point of view behind the picture yeah the reality aka the picture is just neutral. How we perceive it

is how we make meaning of it. And meaning is everything, everything. And this is essentially the work I do in hypnotherapy and coaching. I help people to change their perspective, to change their perception so that their meaning about something can change. So when we say mindset affects menopause symptoms, what we really mean is this, perception does.

Your brain and body are in constant feedback. They're in constant conversation. Hormones send messages through the bloodstream. Yes, of course. But your thoughts and emotions send messages too through your vagus nerve, through your cortisol levels, through muscle tension, through your rate of breathing, through your heart rate, through your heart rate variability.

So no, you can't mindset your way into higher estrogen because menopause is a natural evolutionary shift, but you can influence how your nervous system and that part of you looking behind the camera, that perception, responds to the drop in estrogen. And that in turn changes your lived experience of symptoms. ⁓ So let's ground that in biology for a second.

When estrogen declines, the hypothalamus, your body's thermostat, becomes more sensitive. It starts to misread internal signals of heat and cold. Add stress to the mix, and stress here doesn't just mean being busy, it actually means any cue of unsafety, and that's a whole other subject unto itself. And adrenaline starts to flood the system.

adrenaline amplifies vasodilation which can instigate a hot flush yeah now imagine that your brain is scanning for danger if you interpret that flash as catastrophic no not again i can't cope this means i'm broken this is tragic this is awful like this i'm gonna faint i'm gonna pass out your amygdala activity spikes

cortisol rises, adrenaline rises even more and the heat lasts longer. If on the other hand you meet it with a calm inner voice, okay body, you're recalibrating, I know what this is, I'm safe, this will pass, ride the wave, woohoo, ride the wave like surfing.

You actually reduce the adrenaline surge, the cortisol, you improve the heart rate variability, you lower your heart rate, your vagus nerve gets tonified and the episode resolves faster. That's mindset work in action. That's not denial. It's nervous system regulation through chosen perception, a perception that we choose.

And I'm not talking about wishful thinking here either, because there's some really good research on this. CBT for hot flushes, for instance, doesn't change hormone levels. It changes how the brain interprets bodily sensations like I've just described. And it's the same with hypnosis too. Studies show ⁓ reductions in frequency and the intensity of hot flushes when women practice

guided imagery, example, mindfulness or different types of suggestions. And again, this isn't because the ovaries are suddenly rebooting, but because the stress cycle breaks. And there's a lot of power in breaking those stress loops. And honestly, that is the work of menopause. But maybe that's for another episode.

So when practitioners like me talk about mindset, what we're really talking about is neurobiology, about helping the mind and body find energetic coherence again. We're suggesting that a shift in perspective actually creates a physiological soothing.

take a breath. And let me put it another way to you. The body is always asking one main question and that question is, am I safe? When the answer is yes, your hormones, your digestion, your immunity, your brain function, everything operates in harmony as it should. When the answer is no,

Even subconsciously your body tightens, your breathing shallows, your chemistry changes. And mindset work when it's done really well, especially without emotional bypassing, really helps your inner narrator send that message of safety through your body much more consistently. And that's where hypnotherapy becomes such a powerful ally because the subconscious mind

also known as your inner patterns, they don't really respond to logic. They respond to language, to imagery, to felt sense, to meaning. And when we use hypnotherapy to create an embodied experience of calm by changing perceptions, there's that word again, we're effectively training the nervous system to recognise safety as

familiar as something that we can embrace, something that is here and now and that is mindset work at the cellular level. It's the difference between saying I'm fine, I'm fine through gritted teeth, I'm fine and actually feeling fine in the body because your whole system has learned what feeling fine actually feels like, what feeling calm actually feels like.

So yes, hormones are real. They are biological. They are measurable. And mindset isn't a magic wand, but the state of your nervous system does determine how those hormones land in your body. That's what we're saying. We're not saying it's all in your head. We're saying your head is in your body and everything you think, feel or believe is part of that beautiful.

fascinating, amazing, incredible ecosystem. It's not separate. How can it be?

Okay, let's breathe, take a breath with me.

Because I want to talk for a moment about stress, because that's another very misunderstood word in this conversation. People often tell me, but Sally, I'm not stressed. I don't even have a job or kids anymore. I've got a great life. I shouldn't be stressed, but I am. And of course I believe them. They're not consciously stressed.

but the body can carry a kind of invisible tension, an inherited hypervigilance that has nothing to do with today's to-do list or today's little nuisances or lack of them. And here is where we get into something that I find incredibly fascinating, and that is hidden stress. Hidden stress that lurks behind closed doors, that lurks in the corners of those unconscious patterns.

play out without us really knowing.

Maybe you grew up in a home where you had to anticipate other people's moods. Maybe your nervous system learned that your parents moods could change on a dime. Maybe you were told that you're too sensitive. And so now even decades later, your baseline is slightly alert or overly responsible or over-functioning. And of course, none of this is anyone's fault. It's just conditioning.

and it really affects menopause symptoms. And this is where mindset and trauma really intersect. When you shift the internal narrative from what's wrong with me to what happened to me and how can I help my body feel safe again? You are already regulating your physiology without even doing anything. So the cure is in the question.

because the nervous system goes, finally you are asking the right questions and you'll feel it in your body.

you're moving from self-criticism and self-blame to true self-care. And true self-care is actually self-inquiry. That's actually mindset work. And that's what we're really saying here.

Okay, so we've covered the misunderstanding and we've grounded it in science. And in the next section, I want to zoom in on what mindset means specifically within hypnotherapy, because I think you'll find it fascinating, especially around how suggestion, imagery and landscape, sorry, landscape language reshape.

Actually, yeah, landscape, our internal landscape reshape our perception and help the body to relearn a sense of inner safety from the inside out. Because once you understand how patterns, especially the codes that are placed in us in childhood, start to affect our experiences, you start to see why mindset is not surface level at all. It's deep, deep, deep programming.

fascinating. So let's zoom the lens in a little closer. So when people hear the words hypnotherapy, they often imagine a pendulum swinging or someone barking like a dog on stage, right? And if I had a penny for every time someone interpreted hypnosis or hypnotherapy that way, like I'd be a millionaire right now. But the kind of hypnosis or hypnotherapy actually that I'm talking about

is focused neuroplasticity. And even if you're not interested in hypnotherapy as a treatment, it's really helpful to be interested in the hypnotic state because each and every one of us can get into a hypnotic state. We can practice self-hypnosis and that's another podcast episode that I'll do. But this is why I wanted to bring up

hypnosis, the hypnotic state and hypnotherapy here, because even if you're not interested in it as a therapy, the concepts behind it are incredibly fascinating if you're a human. So neuroplasticity, focused neuroplasticity is the art and science of communicating with the parts of the mind that logic can't reach.

We have to go deeper beyond logic. And this is why I think sometimes hypnotherapy can work better than CBT because CBT, my interpretation of it is very, very logic based. And when we go deeper into the felt sense, we can access those more emotive, special, juicier parts of ourselves. And this is needed in menopause. So you know,

How?

So you know how you know something is irrational, like there's no actual danger in shopping in this supermarket, but your body feels like, ⁓ switched on, there's danger. You're still flooded with adrenaline, even though you know logically, I'm just in a supermarket, there is no danger here. What's going on is an old, primal, protective, subconscious pattern at work.

It's holding an emotional implicit memory. It's holding a learned association. It's holding a protective reflex that words alone can't shift. So mindset in hypnotherapy terms and the way I work is about reteaching the body what safety feels like so that new beliefs can take root organically, naturally, just as nature intended.

When we use language under hypnosis phrases like your body knows how to rest, relax and trust that it's okay to let go now. We're not tricking the mind. We are inviting the nervous system to update its internal programming because it hasn't quite realized that you are safe now, that you don't need to be overly responsible for everyone else.

Like what limitations are you enabling when you are overly responsible for others? Again, I digress, that's another episode. But think of it like this, the conscious mind speaks in words and the subconscious mind speaks in experience. And the hypnotic state is the translator between the two. When someone says, change your mindset, what I hear as a hypnotherapist is,

Let's help your subconscious understand that you are safe now. Let's help your subconscious understand that we can turn everything down. And if you don't like the word subconscious, just replace that with the word body. Let's help your body understand that you are safe now. Let's help your body understand that we can turn everything down now. Because once the body believes it, everything else downstream changes.

from sleep cycles to emotional regulation to the way a hot flush feels as it moves through. And yes, even to hot flush reoccurrence regularity, your energy also feels better. You have way more of it. Your brain has so much more clarity as well. And that's what my current clinical training is deepening for me. We're not just studying suggestions, we're studying

lots and lots of different things around it. We're studying ethics, neuromechanics, we're studying why imagery matters, why pacing and tone matters, why choice matters. Because contrary to popular belief, hypnosis isn't about me controlling or fixing you. It's a collaborative process that you engage in because you feel ready. There's something inside of you that feels ready. You're curious.

You want to go deeper. And this I think is where the profession is evolving. We're moving away from I'll fix you to let's retrain your system altogether. It's a move away from authority to partnership. It's a collaboration. And that relational approach, that shift is exactly what menopause calls for too.

And as I said before, I'm going to make an announcement at the end of this podcast about this, but I really think this is so important to just pause here and reflect on. It's that relational approach, that shift.

is that relational approach, that shift that is exactly what menopause is calling for too. Because menopause in many ways is the body's demand for collaboration, isn't it? It's the end of pushing through, it's the end of override. The hormones that once kept us ⁓ running on other people's timelines and their schedules, they're stepping back and they're saying,

It's your turn now, your turn to get your needs met. And mindset work in the truest sense is about listening to that call. Many people think that mindset is about domination over thoughts, but nothing could be further from the truth. In my view, it's an open dialogue for collaboration. It's an opportunity to open the door for that two-way dialogue between our mind and body.

And I think it's what our felt sense has been longing for. It's what menopause has been longing for. And this really does bring me to the more philosophical layer of the podcast. And this is the part I think really that fascinates me the most. When we talk about menopause mindset, we're not just talking about managing symptoms. We're talking about the process of change itself, the actual movement, the actual journey, how we relate to impermanence.

how we meet endings and beginnings, how we relate to uncertainty. And that's why I think we get a lot of anxiety at menopause, because there's a lot of uncertainty.

And it's the psyche, the psyche being both the mind and the body and the energy, the energy field, our magnetic field that moves through these seasonal shifts. It's not just the body, it's everything. We've got the summer of our lives, the striving. We've got the harvest of our achievement, know, late summer, and then inevitably the autumn of letting go.

And perimenopause really is that autumn. And with it comes a sense of sadness of the inevitable winter, that dormancy that is menopause itself. And as we enter the winter of menopause, we're composting everything that no longer fits. And compost, if you think about it, it's both decay and renewal at the same time. It looks messy.

It's not the most pleasant thing to experience, but it's the richest, most nutrient dense soil that there is. It's potential for growth right there. That's mindset. We're not denying decay. We're understanding that this decay actually feeds potential. It feeds growth. It nurtures the seedling. So when I say mindset, I'm really talking about perception and our relationship to

our reality, our own personal reality as we shift through menopause? Do we meet it with resistance or do we meet it with curiosity? Do we label every change as a catastrophe or can we wonder what new pattern is trying to emerge? How are we deliberately choosing to perceive our symptoms and how are we choosing to respond to them?

Ultimately, there is no right or wrong. It all unfolds beautifully anyway. Menopause just invites conscious and deliberate participation and observation. Are we operating through fear or fascination? Or both? Are we operating through shame or self-trust? Or a bit of both?

All of it has the capacity to alter our chemistry, especially as we lean into the both and. That's psycho neuroimmunology and psycho neuroendocrinology in action. The body listens to every thought you think. Every sentence is a chemical signal. And that's why when we live our life in alignment with our values,

We improve our health markers, like our heart rate variability.

So perhaps we could reimagine menopause as a kind of spiritual lab. Every day your body runs experiments on release and surrender.

And some of these experiments fail spectacularly. We have tears, we have heat, we have frustration, we lash out, we don't know what the fuck we're doing. But some of these experiments reveal new data. Deeper intuition, sharper boundaries, an unshakable calm perhaps, or an unshakable unfuck with ability.

that wasn't there before and that's the wonderful payoff of mindset work, mindful presence. We're not aiming to do menopause perfectly, in fact perfection is just a trauma response, I should know, hands up here, I know that one really well. What we're doing actually is learning to stay in relationship with all the imperfections.

even when the system is rebooting. And so that is the real invitation of this stage of life. To stop outsourcing authority to experts and start sensing your own data again. To notice what your body is actually saying. To ask, what do I believe about this process? And is that belief helping me? Is it hurting me? What do I want to choose now?

Because belief is biology, isn't it? We know that. Belief changes our breathing. Belief changes our posture. Belief changes even which genes get expressed under stress. So no, mindset doesn't mean cheer up. It means wake up. Wake up to the conversation that's happening inside your cells.

Wake up to the messages your symptoms are carrying. Wake up to the possibility that your body is wiser than the narrative we've possibly been fed. And when you do, menopause stops being an enemy and it starts being a beautiful transformational initiation and sometimes a cruel one as well. And I love this, you know, it stops being

the end of youth and starts being the beginning of truth. I love that. The end of youth and the beginning of truth.

Okay, let's take a nice breath because in the final part of this conversation, I do want to make a special announcement.

This episode hasn't been about giving you techniques to manage your menopause better. I've done all of that in previous episodes. That was me back then.

Things are different now because the deeper layer of truth at play here when you really get it is that menopause actually doesn't need managing. It has an intelligence all of its own and as such it really needs witnessing. Your nervous system already knows how to regulate. Your body already knows how to recalibrate.

What often gets in the way is the pressure to do menopause properly. So rather than asking yourself, what should I be doing when this happens? You might experiment with a different type of question, maybe a gentler, a more subtle, ⁓ quieter type of question. What is my body already doing that I can stay with?

what is my body already doing that I can stay with even if it's uncomfortable and that's the shift we're shifting from intervention to relationship and that's a perspective shift we can still intervene if we need to but it's quieter it's subtler than that we go into relationship with the body

relationship with the mind. We're shifting from fixing and solving to deep listening. We're shifting from control and cajole to collaboration, quietness. And so from this point of view we are participating in menopause. We're not trying to problem solve it, we're not trying to wrestle it, even though at first

In our perimenopausal journey, that can be what it feels like we're doing.

And something that might be a different way of thinking about it is this idea that participation doesn't require you getting anything perfect, as I've said before. It doesn't even require calm or even understanding half the time. What it does require though is presence. The deeper, quieter presence. And some nights that presence might look like curiosity.

Other nights presence might look like grief or sadness or exhaustion or just letting go. It all counts, it's all true. Especially if you're witnessing it with curiosity. So having a menopause mindset isn't always about choosing the right thoughts. It's much deeper than that actually. It's about staying

relationship with yourself while the system is reorganizing itself and this is actually where I want to start naming something new now.

And this is actually where I want to name something now that I've been quietly building in the background as I've been having all of these.

new thoughts, new insights as I've been reorganising my own internal world.

A lot of women don't need more information about menopause. They need somewhere to be while all of this is happening.

Many women don't need a course that tells them what to do. They don't need a program designed to optimize them or fix them. What they really need is a space that honors the fact that this is a transition of identity, that this is a nervous system transition.

that this is a nervous system transition. It's not just about hormones. It's actually a transition of meaning as well. And that's what my new membership, Becoming, is all about. Yes, it's called Becoming.

And it's called becoming because it's one of those words that implies an idea that something is happening perfectly all by itself. We don't force a baby to grow inside the womb. It happens all by itself because nature knows what she's doing. And so in this space, it's this space that I'm creating.

And so this new space that I'm creating isn't about managing menopause or offering solutions. And of course there is a time and a place for that. Absolutely. I'm not denying any of the need for that, but this is deeper. It's about giving yourself permission to inhabit, to really inhabit and live inside all of those changes that you're going through to really allow yourself to be

with them to slow it all down to experience your body differently to really notice what is dismantling and what is quietly reassembling in its place. This is a space for women who sense that something deeper is happening beneath the surface.

This is for people who don't want to be rushed to the other side. Becoming is a space for women who are looking for some kind of reorientation process. They're looking for a space.

Becoming is a space for women who are looking for orientation, for reflection, a sense of belonging to this process, to this process of menopause. And I can't really explain it in any more detail at the moment because more detail wouldn't make sense right now. And that's because becoming isn't something that you understand intellectually. It's something that you

recognise. But I will say this, if you've been listening to this today and you have felt a resonance, quiet yes in your body, maybe some goosebumps, maybe time just flew by as you listen to this, if this way of thinking about menopause feels like relief rather than effort, then becoming

my membership becoming might be a place that you want to explore. And the wait list is open now. There's no pressure, there's no urgency, just an invitation to stay connected with me as it takes shape. And I'll share more, of course, when it's ready. But in the meantime, consider this as your permission slip. You don't have to do menopause a certain way.

but you get an opportunity to be with it, to be with the process. And if you want to join the wait list to get the founding members price, just head on over to sallygarozzo.com forward slash becoming. And I'll put that link in the show notes. So if you leave this episode with anything, let it be permission.

permission to stop asking what's wrong with me and to start wondering what's changing? Who am I becoming in this process? Who is emerging? Who will she be? And that question alone is enough to soften the edges, to soften the system, to improve your vagal tone actually, because it removes the friction.

It removes the fight. And when we remove that, get nature to work its magic. And sometimes that's all the nervous system has been waiting for.

So thank you for being here with me today ⁓ during this first solo episode. Thank you for thinking deeply with me. Thank you for staying curious and for allowing menopause to be not a problem, for allowing it to actually be a process. You are my people.

So thank you for being here with me. Thank you for thinking deeply with me. Thank you for staying curious and for understanding that menopause isn't a problem to be solved. It's a process that we get to journey through in a beautiful reorientating way. You are my people. I'll see you next time.