Janice Turner Salmon

Author: medicinalmeadows

  • A dreamtime of post menopausal life …

    In my 49 life I am searching for a role model, a wise elder in the form of a Hag, in the best, fullest intention of the woman at the edge, the embodiment of the Hag. One who has pushed through the patriarchy and societies fair games into the undiluted vessel of a …… as my friend Kimberley quoted, a Queenager.

    I don’t have a need for a knowledgeable teacher or well-read wordsmith. I have a desire, that’s it, a desire to be nurtured into this role-over into the 50somethings, with a storyteller and folklorist.

    Today I was remembering the “Mothers” that I have had. By that I mean those who have mothered me, I have no qualms or crisis with my biological Mother, I had a childhood within a village, and this village expanded in my teens to include may women who shaped me….I met some strong, ferocious women, who taught me strong boundaries and determination, to never let a passion die, just because. I have been blessed by nurturing mothers who assisted in the framing of my emotions and how to gentle be with the children, the animals, the silent nuances of the caretaker. I also met with a friend’s unpredictable Mother who skilled me in to how to read the atmospheric dust storm gathering around them. Where their own boundaries were being flick into incitement, a valuable lesson in listening to my friend and when to just exit.

    What I now just crave for is that wise elder to gather my attention, as my head is starting to spill, and leak to be honest, and to help me navigate this transformation with their wisdom after all they have been in my shoes and seen others do this before me, they are the experienced helper in this ageing ritual. I wish for help to expand my imagination, enliven me in my wearisome state and to give me a glimpse of the other side of this menopausal transition. I thirst for the folklorist to enchant me over to the otherly. To make my heart swell with the stories of becoming the white-haired women, to fairy-tale along the paths in the woods and weave the strands of consciousness together into a new realmdom of balance and non-linear living.  To sing me the songs of transformed worlds of patriarchy and burning the need for a PhD just to be heard. I thirst for the elders to come bravely out of the fog filled woodlands and along the misty beaches shaking their rattles and sounding the drums to gather us around a fire. This is where I will be completely engaged with the storytellers, the well-keepers and the seeding earth dwellers who will gather and our days will be spent listening to the Earth Elders. Our chastised endeavours will no longer sit within us as unmaterialised, for we will learn of our inner sovereignty as “within us all along” as the Fairy Godmother always says at the end of a good tale. Our transformations will be in the form of inner knowings, remembrances, experience and oral traditions and seasons once more. Our new career trajectory will be based on heart compassing passions and journeying rather than a well executed bibliography. I have instead a thirst for juicy language and taking a seat within a circle where every seat is equal. I have a thirst for the magical over intellectual pursuits and for scrumptious chronicles than research papers. I desire the heady heights of the upper ridges of the mountain tops and pinnacle of the story than the offices of hierarchy. For non-essential processes to be burned away, as some things are just not necessary at the fire keepers hearth. This is my maturing into womanhood, cronehood, at the threshold of 50.

  • Burning Times

    When you burned, I burned with you

    When you buried, I burned for you

    In passion in flame in Holy name

    I am Forest Father

    The nature’s Pater

    I burned for you

    From ground to up above

    Our essence of vapour and resin through the sky

    To all sea, bird, creature and pebble nearby

    As you changed to spirit on air

    With wind and rain

    I held our our branches to hold you again

    On the arm of Grandfather Oak

    Passed down to Mother Doe

    To pine to ground

    Gathered your spirit around

    By branch and heather

    In ash and soil in Gods own power to mycelium medicine

    Within those resting hours

    We hold you in woodland, nature’s roots

    We carried you there to earth’s repair

    We carried you over through the mighty air

    Now sheltered with a canopy

    Embedded to sacred ground

    To oak, ash, yew and birch

    Of Kin and Kith

    Dwelling in arms of bark, heart of trunk

    Of deer foot and bird above

    Held by ivy

    Entwined

    With earth beneath you

    Water to greet you

    Wind to change you

    Light to recreate you

    Ancestors of root of seed and bud

    Growing earthly

    Living on

    Forest of my blood, evergreen

    Forest of Fatherhood

  • Sacral Centre, My Sweet Abode

    Today I am sitting within my 2nd house, my sacral chakra and it feels good to be connecting here at this point in my 49 life. I am reminded of my time, this time and of course, no time. When we put a structure on our time, doesn’t it soon feel restricted? Soon I will be in my 50th year, my 5th decade, a miracle in my ancient ancestry and a mile stone in my modern life. As I contemplate what this means to me, I am contemplating within my “own sweet abode”, the Svadhisthana, the sacral. Known in many traditions as the Dan Tien, the life force energy centre, the womb space, the void, the bowl, the ruler of water, the feminine aspect, the Empress archetype, the emotional and the creatrix centre.

    As I sit within my sacral home it feels ripe and energetic. In the past when I have experienced a sense of fullness it was bloatedness, uncomfortable trousers and a reoccupation of the period about to come. I have a sensation of full bloom than boom! And it feels powerful. As I prepared to menstruate in my younger years I was conflicted with prementrual stress. I had a sense of urgency to prepare myself for some time with less and in the process I created greater stress to the point of manic cleaning house, arranging a just-so for others in my care. In the days leading to menstruation instead of winding down I got wound up! Over this last year my cycles have been slowing down, I bleed less, I miss some, and now I sometimes miss having the cycles, the pattern. Is that crazy to you? that I miss them? Now I have a sense of what I want to do, of where my focus is heading. I can see how far I wish to be filled to my edge, my boundary, rather than how far I can push to my limit!

    The sacral is the centre of pleasure, of feeling nourished and fulfilled. It encompasses my need for creation and desires. Not just in the sexual sense, as it is most commonly portrayed, but as a desire to create all manner of things. It is where my personal desires feel connected in health, in abundance, to my heart desires. This is where creativity meets focus, in service to others as a Doula, or spiritual health with Reiki to reading of the women of sacral energies, the ancient texts.

    The shadow side of the sacral energy is martyrdom. It is the feeling of deprivation, lack of joy, lack of creativity and ultimately lack of time. Time I create and time I can allow. Sometimes in this 49 life timing seems to be my main issue. Time is a luxury. It is no coincidence that sacrifice, to surrender, dates back to the Latin word, sacer, Holy. So just for today I will remain in gratitude and give thanks for this day of surrender and into the “sweet abode” of holy creativity. I will honour this fullness as a feeling for as long as I can.

    Bless’d be the sacral bowl of life energy that I find today.

  • Solar heat at 49

    In my 49 life I am I am experiencing anxiety. This anxiety and me have a history coupled with PTSD. Recently I don’t always know what my physical body is telling me. A mix of anxiety, grief, overwhelm and menopause. This is my story from this week.

    I was setting off in the car to visit a relative in hospital. I got into the car, the temperature read 38 degrees, I felt sick, hot, was it just heat? was it a hot flush? or was it anxiety! My thoughts jumped from one to the other, the truth of it ( which came later) was that my body had remembered something.

    I needed to get out of the car and feeling like a failure and disappointed at letting others down I had to just stop and “Get out of the car”! Soon after as I cooled down I realised that I know this feeling, this reaction, it is when the body remembers. It is remembering a date, a past situation or a trauma. My body was not only messaging me to take a break but signalling patterns into my awareness. The body remembers dates, places, and the places can reignite triggers and the triggers can “fire up” to remind us that something from the past needs attention. Just like a fire starting in the shadows of our internal cave growing stronger so we go back, look, witness that situation again. The “issue” is that it comes up uninvited, unawares but the body has this internal storage that seems to just remember without the mind being involved.

    As I uncoiled just enough for me to remember and figure this all out. I can give myself a break.  At this time of 49 I am considering that these “anxious” remembrances or triggers are relating to the menopausal symptom called hot flushes. They are literally fired up in my face. The date of my “heatwave anxiety” corresponded to a past trauma that my mind had not acknowledged. My mind hadn’t connected to the date and place but the body did.

    So what is a hot flush? At the time of a surge, are we actually in the spiritual sense going through a fiery upgrade?  Are we actually re-membering ourselves? By that I do mean collecting our bones, our divided parts, which have been lost over time. Are we pulling ourselves back together in a newly fashioned way, a mature way?

    To me this was a good reminder that my mind may think it is taking the lead with the logical stuff but my body is attuned to all that has been and will continue to message me from spiritual to physical body as I go forwards. In the wise words of Caroline Myss, the greatest power we have within us is the position we energetically hold as our power station, the solar plexus. This is the intuitive energy centre that messages us from “gut instinct”, or intuitiveness. We all have the ability to connect to the gut instinct and sometimes this power centre messages us in stronger ways. Is the menopause really a firing up of the solar plexus, our solar energy? Is the gut instinct being attuned? This chakra centre as it is known is after all the centre of our personal power, the seat of our inner compass. If I am actually having a solar upgrade then surely this is a positive thing for my mature years ahead!

    Maybe, just maybe what is occurring in my menopause years is a gathering of my inner ability to discern all around me to assert my personal power. If this is the metaphysical change to the wise elder, then baptism by heat to burn away the old and transition into a new relationship with selfhood is what is occurring. The soul lesson is forging our life force, literally by forge or force, or both, a consolidating of past and present as our personal identity in full acceptance. Maybe I need to remember that it is my shadow and my light that make Gold.

  • Personal Power

    Today’s word was Integrity. The message is about the power of our solar plexus. When we see a situation or challenge through to its completion we create wholeness. Not just a beginning and end to the scenario but an energetic alignment occurs. We build self worth through these earthly experiences. These challenges exercise our internal warrior and the end point is where we value the journey. So the questions for the solar plexus alignment are;
    What achievements have brought you individuality?
    What creations have brought you a sense of personal power?
    What freedoms have you created?

  • The Sensitive Gardeners

    To walk in a room, even a familiar space is difficult sometimes with illness, emotional pain and anxieties looming in the ether. Walking into a new place a new space is challenging. There are unpredictable energies spilling into the space, free floating unregulated matters of people we may not even know.

    The issue for Sensitives is that they walk into a space and identify with the energies. A new environment has a collection of thoughts, feelings and needs of others. To the Sensitive this is like a room full of passive energy emitters. The Sensitive sits within this uncomfortable space, muted and bearing up, it is a necessary part of living. You may think why do they go there? Well they have to. Whether it be a training course or a waiting area, they work hard, they need to maintain their own energy but still appear sociable. They have arrived are constantly regulating their own energy systems, including the nervous system and so many other levels in between. To them this world can be exhausting!

    The Energy Changes

    These days I am calling the energetic personal field the energy garden, this is the internal landscape, because Sensitives are good cultivators of their gardens too. They do the weeding and tend to their spaces daily. The energy garden was once an unseen field, but now, in the current climate it is a well known plot. The change has arrived. Gone are the days of a mysterious energy as a collection of past experience, past lives and traumas. The Sensitives right now are aware of what is in their garden. They tend to it. The old ways of trying to connect to the akashic records, the auric debris or find blocks in the energy bodies is over. This is new upgraded, intelligent design. And the ones who arrive in our future generations are more advanced that this. Maybe they arrive with a greater capacity for their gardens and wouldn’t that be just the treasure humanity needs on this planet?!

    For now, my statement here is this, care and support the Sensitives around you. I invite you to consciously be aware of thoughts, feelings and emotions of the Sensitives around you. They are adjusting to a new wave of consciousness that is asking them to step up to a new challenge, to new practices, to work collectively in some way in the future. 

    If you could be a good neighbour and help those Gardeners a little more. And if you need some assistance with your garden, please ask for some help from a Sensitive Gardener who as willing to cultivate with you.

    You won’t be sorry, your garden will blossom.

  • Internal Gardener

    The gentle garden is a message that we are the creators of our reality. Recent months have been teaching me focus and deliberate direction. In order to create my world I need to be in the mind of the deliberate gardener, the Internal Gardener.

    I am learning to bring my attention into intention. My garden can not thrive without care, nurturance and planning. I am now aware that weeding is necessary, cleaning out and trimming back is a requirement to allow the Light to shine on areas that I want to have growth. I am even daring to dream in my garden of next year. In order to do that I need to make space, clear an area and select what I wish to grow. Including the research around direction, season, and climate.

    The gentle gardener is a new alignment for me, I am the Internal Gardener.


    #guidance #intuitive #spiritualcoaching #theenchantedmaporaclecards #colettebaronreid #cottagegardens #spiritualgardener #spiritualgardening #internalgardener

  • Mature 49

    49 is not what I expected. I started my working life as a medical professional then turned holistic and spiritual practitioner and so far this week my practice has been my saving grace.  I have navigated my own selfcare treatments from Reiki to calm my nervous system to Reflexology to regulate the endocrine. It is a rollercoaster of a role to witness our elder’s needs from lightbulb changes, medication dosette boxes, emergency calls and missing wheelchairs.

    I have called upon my spiritual allies to help in many varying degrees from negotiating contracts and holding space for my Mother as she feels she is losing her friends to dementia. Then there’s my Fathers loss of mobility and fragility. My faith in the wise and well ancestors have been my allies in the subtle realms only too willing to be called upon.

    I lean to the ancestors, after all I am them, my bones and facial features are theirs, from them I am born. The role of the carer is a difficult one to navigate. It arrives at a time when I myself am changing. I go through a multitude of transitions being a 49 year old woman, self employed spiritual business practitioner, a wife, a friend, a listener and a menopausal shifter.

    Whilst navigating the elder’s care needs in an ever-shifting NHS and social care system I am trying to figure out the menopausal fatigue and wonder if my symptoms are from too much or too little evening primrose right now. I am pulled to “clean house” of the unfinished business I have stacked up. The courses, submissions, assessments and the continuing professional development that is a feature of all our professional pursuits these days. I am always reading 4 books and far too tired to complete any. Then there is the cleaning out of the emotional and energetic baggage of old worn out perspective and my inner archetypes all shouting for some deep witnessing.

    This thing they call menopause is a maturing of the old ways, the inner pathways, a realisation of what has worked well and what has not. Call it menopause, call it a life review if you dare! It is the wise one willing me to tune inwards and not be so outwards when the world is wanting me to be all things. This crone inside is trying to be birthed into a new way of navigating the here and now. So while we nurture those around us, the message deep within is “Who is nurturing you?” Birthing is painful and changeful. It can’t be pushed down or ignored. So no wonder I am feeling the fatigue of this gestation from menstruation.

    It is the big gardening of mature life. Call it weeding for now, it is asking what am I keeping up and what do I need to let go? What is right for me and what is right now for me? 49 is full of loose ends, never-ends and the inevitable end. Right now the weeding is all important as I take this time to nurture the garden within.  As the elders take an afternoon nap, the cat does too and the 49 year olds are discerning, weeding and regulating their nervous system with left-right eye movements in the mid-day sun. One day I will be through the change, transformed and the ancestor of my family tree.

    The red tent to women like me in the middle of life, becomes a life tent. It is the anchor that sits you down and holds you in.  It is a place remembered for birth and death, but it is also for the mid shifters,  for transformation. It is the place to go to in pain, in need, knee deep with the earth and discerning cries, “help me transform, shift through it all”. If you have never been inside a red tent, create one, create if just for yourself! It is the resting place and the place to let it all flow.

    Here in the middle we are asked to change, do work differently,  parenting and elder care differently. Our loved ones change, societies views and expectations change, my hair colour has changed….and everyday the needs of those and ourselves change.  My own requirements move and new boundaries need to be created, what once was ok is now far from acceptable. They call this growth in the spiritual community, with grow there can also be pain. So the message for now is take it slowly, even when there are urgent moments, walk the earth with every step at a slower pace because everything is changing.

  • What is Energy?


    How can I see my emotions as energy? What we see on the surface is not what it looks like underneath. Seeing Emotions as Energy is to dive deep underground. The surface level is just that, the top layer. Deep within is a vast environment of essential nature, truth, libraries of stories we carry and galleries of images we have cataloged and kept. There are great algorithms that weave backwards and propel forwards. And these networks of energy I describe are just through the lense of my own enquiry. I am also connected to others, their networks and hives of energy, my ancestral stories and the generations ahead. What deep webs we weave of emotions….we are all connected…
    #guidance #intuitive #spiritualcoaching #enchantedmap #colletebaronreid #chrysocolla

  • Ancestral Journeys

    Ancestral journeys take us deep into the raw emotions of lineage, of health and trauma of the family. Today I honoured my maternal bloodline with a journey for the menstrual cycle from menses, to motherhood to menopause. Throughout my preparation and journey the aspects of the three kept coming through in a pattern. Maiden, Mother, Matriarch needed honouring in youthfulness, in pain, in suffering, in shame and held with compassion. These times are of deep witnessing, deep love and deeply rooted in my bones. I am my ancestors after all, we are them, we have the capacity to hold a container for them and to witness our own lives as vessels of their wisdom and a releasing of their pain through our allowing.
    Thank you Ancestors for all that now Is.
    #guidance #intuitive #spiritualcoaching #ancestraljourneys #honouring #bloodline #redtent #redtentdoulas #redtentcollective #roots #bones #circles #mothers