Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

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Menopause is not the death of all that is powerful within a woman, we are not just here to birth children and service the needs of others until we end up in a old folks home.

I was very excited for this book and this was so sensationally offputting that I’m still thinking about it months later.How can we find inspiration from archetypal women in our old myths and fairy tales to help us navigate this transition? A key turning point in my own personal journey had been the onset of grief and helplessness once I’d figured just how messed up the world we’d made was. The material is extensive, and so I recommend that you work with it over the course of a year, just as we did in the live program on which this self-study version is based. Become a member of The Hearth for live online retreats with me, and other resources to deepen your work with story and the mythic imagination. But even during the writing of her book, it was knowledge easily found that it’s actually NOT that simple.

Maybe I’m the wrong age, maybe the author and I are too many generations separated, maybe our realities and understanding of the universe is too different, but this book did not work for me.

She has worked as a medical doctor for most of her life, and in various medical disciplines, including at the medical centre of the University of Nijmegen, where she developed trainings in mindfulness. Perhaps once all readers have evolved in that fashion, the complaints about the content that so many other reviewers couldn't respect will disappear, like corpses through the hole in the side of houses of old.

This will be published by Virago Press in October 2024 as Wise Women: Myths and Folklore in Celebration of Older Women.Does not know how to pronounce some fairly basic college-level words/terms (the 'e' at the end of dilettante is silent, etc. She is the founder of ‘Bridging the Worlds’, which trains therapeutic professionals in shamanic approaches and co-founder of ‘Women Weaving Change’, a training school for modern Medicine Women which focuses on exploring, embodying and empowering the feminine, enabling women to bring their gifts to the fore and into the world. I run online courses and residential retreats working with myth and storytelling to help people along their individual paths of transformation.

In a way, it was helped by having distinct threads in every chapter – the stories, the interviews, the personal narrative – but weaving them all together into a coherent whole could be challenging at times! Her books have been translated into several languages, and she has been interviewed by the BBC, US public radio and other broadcasters on her areas of expertise.After studying psychology, I spent several years as an academic neuroscientist/ psychologist specialising in the field of anxiety and panic, and working at the Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris and the Institute of Neurology in London. As a young woman dance was crucial in her journey of surviving and integrating lessons from drug addiction, anxiety, depression and loss. My first novel The Long Delirious Burning Blue was described by The Independent on Sunday as ‘Hugely potent. In the oldest known cosmology of my native lands, it wasn't a sky-bound old man with a beard who made and shaped this world. As we slowly begin to burn away old identities and outdated structures, we enter a state of conscious incubation in which a new life can be dreamed into being.