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.