My Hot Flash Was Actually a Kundalini Awakening (It Wasn't)

I woke up at 3:17 AM absolutely certain my body had decided to exit the mortal plane via internal fire.

My first thought was, This is it. Spontaneous combustion. I always knew I'd go out dramatically.

My second thought was, Wait, I'm still alive. And freezing. And now sweating again. What fresh hell—

My third thought was, ...oh.

Here's what nobody tells you about perimenopause. It feels exactly like every description of spiritual awakening you've ever read.

Sudden heat rising through the body could be kundalini energy ascending, or it could be your ovaries throwing a retirement party without consulting you.

Interrupted sleep and vivid dreams could be ancestral messages coming through, or they could be your hormones playing Jenga with your REM cycles.

Feeling like your entire identity is dissolving could be ego death and spiritual rebirth, or it could be your body announcing that the first half of your life is officially over and nobody asked your opinion.

I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to make my symptoms mean something.

Surely the fact that I woke up burning at 3 AM (the witching hour!) was significant. Surely my sudden inability to remember why I walked into rooms was my third eye opening so wide it crowded out mundane memory. Surely the rage that bubbled up when my husband asked what was for dinner was righteous feminine fury, and not just regular fury at being asked that question for the 8,000th time.

My therapist, bless her, let me talk about it for twenty minutes before gently asking if I'd seen my doctor.

My doctor, less gently, handed me a pamphlet titled "Menopause: What to Expect."

Oh, I thought, looking at the bullet points. So it's not a spiritual emergency. It's just my body.

Just my body, I told myself. But here's the thing I've come to believe. It's never just your body. Your body is where you live. It's the altar you carry everywhere. When it changes, you change. And when it changes dramatically, without your permission, in ways you can't control, that is a kind of initiation.

This is the hard kind of initiation, where you have to let go of who you were because that person literally doesn't exist in this body anymore. There are no candles or cloaks, and nobody hands you a certificate at the end.

I'm not saying my hot flashes are sacred. I'm saying that I refuse to believe this transition is meaningless just because it's biological, and that dismissing it as "just hormones" is the same bullshit energy that dismisses women's pain as hysteria and women's intuition as delusion.

My body is changing dramatically, without asking my permission, and I get to decide what that means.

Tonight, at 3:17 AM, if I wake up burning again, I'm going to try something different. I'm going to sit up, light a candle, and say, Okay. I'm listening. What are you trying to tell me?

And then I'm going to drink a large glass of cold water, because I'm also dehydrated.

Both things can be true.