Painted Lady © lynette sheppard
Drumroll please. I am so excited to welcome Ashley to our virtual menopause community. As a menopause coach and holistic health practitioner with a focus on women’s hormonal issues (and one who has journeyed this transition herself), she is uniquely qualified to take over the Menopause area of the blog. I’ll let her introduce herself to you in this first of many blog posts. (BTW, Ashley is available to help in person and also virtually via Skype – details at the end of the post!)
Hello everyone!
by Ashley Jeanne Ross
I am so thrilled to be joining the inimitable Lynette Sheppard and the Menopause Goddess Blog community as it changes and transforms just as we all do. Menopause is after all The Ultimate Change. And MGB is about to become a fuller and more collaborative mouthpiece for Gracious Transitions and What Awaits beyond. What an honor!
Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Ashley Jeanne Ross – holistic women’s health practitioner, counselor and coach, mother and lover of relevant and inspiring perspectives on this crazy and fabulous ride called life.
Here’s what I’m passionate about: I’m on a mission to eradicating the the obstacles that keep us from feeling at home in our bodies. With so many forces coming at us from when we were little girls until we arrive at our full womanhood – to turn away from or even against our women’s bodies – it becomes the Task of Menopause for many of us to ‘find our way back home’.
When I began working with women 20 years ago – balancing menstrual cycles, managing PMS, counseling mood swings, teaching natural birth control – women in menopause would implore me to help them, please! There was a tiny voice (you know that one, right?) that said to me: “Wait until you’ve gone through it – that’s when you’ll be able to really help them.” So I would refer them to other practitioners and waited for my turn.
It arrived almost 8 years ago, that day I began to feel The Change coming on … a story for another blog.
Since then, I’ve sat with hundreds of women in all kinds of settings and we’ve mulled over this crazy, confusing and ill-treated time in a woman’s life – to see if there might be another way to understand what’s happening to us. We’ve toyed with the idea of Change, and what it means to change. Our needs are changing, certainly our bodies are changing, our sexuality’s changing, our focus is changing. Apparently we’re changing!
A very surprising question emerged – what if we changed intentionally, consciously? What if we claimed this transition, this change of life and went through a Conscious Menopause?
Here’s a taster of how that might look:
instead of feeling at the mercy of your symptoms, you can learn to decipher what they’re trying to tell you
instead of being afraid of The Change, you might use it to revamp outdated beliefs and habits that have overstayed their welcome
instead of biding your time to ‘just get through it’, you can make adjustments that will pay off down the road
instead of feeling alone in your misery, you can turn to your sisters for support and fabulous stories
So much to explore together. It’s such an honor to be here. Thank you Lynette for inviting me to the party. I am truly delighted to join the wonderful Menopause Goddesses, to share what inspires me and to be inspired as we claim this “one wild and precious life”.
BIOGRAPHY
Ashley Jeanne Ross seems to have a insatiable lifelong fascination with the rich terrain where our hormones and emotions meet. When she’s not immersed in studying the female experience, she’s an author, teacher, counselor and speaker, as well as a loving mother of burgeoning adult triplets, two girls and a boy. Her ‘day job’ is as a holistic reproductive health practitioner, professional fertility awareness educator and somatic counselor in private practice in California, and thanks to the 21st century, also online. Place her in a circle of women to observe her in her natural habitat.
Ashley offers Conscious Menopause coaching in San Rafael and via Skype. You can read more on her website ashleyjeanneross.com
