Honoring Menopause as a Life Stage with Marelda Rodrigues

Honoring menopause as a life stage, not just a phase to get through acknowledges the weight of this transition. We live in a society that hasn’t given much room to understanding women’s bodies. While there is more information now than before, there are still large gaps in support for the physical, mental, and emotional experience of menopause. Too often, women don’t even begin to ask for information until we are already experiencing the challenges of shifting hormones. We turn to managing symptoms instead of caring for this pivotal transition. 

 In this episode of Mindset Unlimited, I invited Marelda Rodrigues to join me in a conversation about honoring menopause as a life stage and yourself as deserving of care.

Some of what we talk about in this episode includes:

• Experiencing grief in physical transitions
• Societal norms, gaps in information, and becoming an advocate for yourself
• Health and self-care look different in different phases of life
• Slowing down and making room to learn your new body

LINKS TO REFERENCES MADE IN THIS EPISODE:

NPR – Doctors Urge FDA to Remove Warning On Hormone Therapy for Menopause

Last Week Tonight – Make America Healthy Again

Collaborative Leadership from Boardroom to Patient-Centered Caregiving episode

CONNECT WITH MARELDA

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Instagram – Decide to Heal

Instagram – Sovereign Becoming 

Menopause Guide

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This podcast was produced by Valerie Friedlander Coaching

Proud member of the Feminist Podcasters Collective 

Transcript

Valerie Friedlander: 0:00

Hello, my friends and welcome to another episode of Mindset Unlimited. Mindset tips, tools and inspiration for women in a time of change. I'm your host, Valerie Friedlander, ICF certified coach, sociologist, intersectional feminist artist, mom and nerd. Today we are talking about honoring menopause as a life stage. No, it's not just a phase to get through. It is a stage of life that we are entering when we hit, you know, mid 40s, maybe even earlier. But because it's something new, it's a new phase of life, we want to give it some room and actually know about it. So we are talking about this, and I think it's particularly important to note it just a couple things before we dive in. And that is that the medical establishment, while we have more information, we know more about menopause, it is still really new, and it is not integrated into our general knowledge. It's not something that doctors are often deeply trained in. The dots that need to be connected about all the different ways that we experience this transition are not given the weight and support that we need, it's not all covered or supported by health insurance. There's so many issues, and one of the things that this has caused is it's led to distrust of the medical establishment, which makes sense. A lot of the pushes within that field have to do with health insurance, and what the health insurance industry dictates as covered and not covered, what is valued, as far as studies go, what money goes into, basically, and what is valued in our society, and frankly, Once women pass the baby producing stage. We're not valued, so money's not put there, so there isn't a lot of support and information. And this has led to things like the MaHA movement, which has taken things quite off the rails. Maha, if you don't know, stands for Make America healthy again. And John Oliver did a really great episode recently on The Last Week Tonight Show on Maha so I encourage you to check that out, because he really gets into some of these nuances of, well, yes, but also this is a problem, this approach or this direction where we don't trust science anymore, not just the medical industry, and we're pushing these things that aren't actually backed by anything and even harmful to people. So anyway, go check out that episode. It's linked in the show notes. And the other aspect is that stress plays a large role in our experience of this shift in our bodies, and so the people who experience the greatest amount of stress due to systemic oppression experience the most challenge when it comes to this shift in our bodies, and so it's really important that we advocate. Heather Mauer, who is the CEO of the National Association of nurse practitioners in women's health, joined me in a conversation a while back on advancing collaborative leadership from boardroom to patient centered caregiving, and she talks about that advocacy for herself, but also the dynamics of privilege within that and so I recommend checking that out, because I think the more privileges we have within the system, the more important We push using whatever we have access to to expand understanding, to advocate for the dots that need to be connected, being connected, for the coverage to be there, for the support to be there, because that does have a ripple effect. When we say we need this information and this needs to be valued. That is part of the reason why we have the information that we have now, for example, another thing that I linked in the show notes is an article from NPR where doctors are urging the FDA to remove warnings on the hormone therapy for menopause, which is something that Heather talks about in our interview. So, and that was before that had actually happened, but it was, it was that advocacy. So these are things that we really need to give room for, and so recognizing there is a ripple effect from when we give ourselves. Else, space to recognize, no, this isn't just a phase, and this is something that deserves attention. We deserve care, and that starts to push into more care, right? We deserve care when you give care to yourself and you recognize that is valuable. You are valuable at all the phases and stages of your life, and so are other women and other human beings, right? It ripples outward. So I thought it was really important that we take a look at honoring menopause as a life stage. And to do that, I invited marelda Rodriguez to join me in this conversation. Some of the things that we talk about in this episode are experiencing grief, in physical transitions, societal norms, gaps in information, becoming an advocate for yourself. Health and self care look different in different phases of life and slowing down and making room to learn your new body. I know that you're going to love this conversation. I'm so excited to share it with you. If you have questions or you have comments or you have stories you would like to share, I invite you to reach out. There are a number of different ways to do that. They are all linked in the show notes. So please, I would love to hear from you if you are looking for support in navigating transitions, more elders, information is linked in the show notes, as is mine. So please reach out. You deserve care and you deserve support. And now, without further ado, let's get started. Welcome Marelda. I'm so excited to have you. Thank you so much for joining me.

Marelda Rodrigues: 6:58

Thank you so much, Valerie.

Valerie Friedlander: 7:00

All right, so let's start with if you could just introduce yourself a little bit to everybody listening.

Marelda Rodrigues: 7:09

Sure. I will start by saying that the impetus for wellness for women has taken a very sharp turn for immediate so if anybody is sitting by the wayside, sitting on the outside looking in today's conversation, my hope is that it'll change that. And where I'm coming from is combining my years and wellness as what started out as massage therapist becoming a functional medicine health coach, becoming a sleep science coach, and now becoming a specialist in menopause and really understanding the gravity of the things we do not have in place that need to be in place immediately.

Valerie Friedlander: 7:55

Yeah, I'm so excited to talk about this, because I know so many people who listen, who are going through or heading towards that transition. So I think this is this will probably launch us into that, what is something that you once took for granted that you have since unlearned?

Marelda Rodrigues: 8:17

Wow. So I will start by saying that, because I come from a family of that has a lot of chronic disease like diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and all of these chronic conditions. When I was in my 30s and I was just embarking on this wellness professional journey I just did. I I would say to myself, I do not want to be like the people in my family. I don't care what they say about genetics, but I'm going to not be like them, because I saw the progression of these chronic diseases, so when they were in the elderly stage, how it really ravaged the body. And I was like, Nope, no, thank you. And so I thought I was doing really well. And I thought, hey, I don't, you know, I eat for my microbio. I I'm really particular about my gut health. Now, did I have some setbacks? Yes, but they weren't that difficult to correct along the way, and then I hit menopause, and I just, like a lot of women, just thought, hey, you know what? It's the end of periods. Let me celebrate. I actually gave away multiple packets of sanitary napkins to a friend of mine. I said, Here you go. I don't need this anymore, and I'm going to celebrate, right? And that's where I thought it ended side by side. I had all these new aches and pains and things happening along the way, and I thought, as a massage therapist, I can't even explain where these are coming from. So these are. Strange. So it just, you know, was strange, but what I learned going forward and this year has been a real challenge. Mind you, I'm about to turn 58 and menopause for me was 51 So seven years of craziness that I finally figured out this year were all attributed to menopause. And one of the biggest things was, while I prided myself as never being diabetic, one of the first symptoms I had was not diabetes, but what's actually called insulin resistance, and slightly different than diabetes, where the body doesn't receive glucose like it's supposed to, as opposed to diabetes, where you're just not producing the hormone that can deal with it. Here, it's just a little different. You have the hormone, but it's just not working correctly, and that's because there's a certain amount of disruption in the reproductive hormones that are creating this new confusion in the body. That's what I had to unlearn, is that I can be the bestest at my nutrition and my microbiome and all these fabulous things, but to suddenly come across the but you don't have estrogen. So what are you going to do, and then to fall into the very bucket I was happily coasting along going, I don't have that was, I would say, by far the biggest. Well, what are you talking about? Well, but what do you mean? Yeah, but I, but I, but I, and I couldn't come up with an explanation.

Valerie Friedlander: 11:40

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's, it's so interesting. We I'm really grateful that this has become much more of a topic. Now there is more information. People are finally studying women's bodies and trying to understand stuff and that, I think that's great. And what I tend to hear when people are talking about menopause, it is kind of along the lines of what what you said about like, I don't understand. This is strange. This is strange. This is strange. And while, okay, now there's a little bit more information, but it's it, we still seem to be caught up in like, either you know, this is strange, complaining about it, making jokes about it, or, you know, striving to find information which is is at least helpful. What I don't hear people talking much about, and we chatted a little bit about this before we were recording, is the embodied experience of it, like being with it, and it's uncomfortable, like I get, you know, talk all the time about like, being with the uncomfortable emotions, like being with those parts that we otherwise, we just kind of try and shove away, and we try and go, Okay, good. And we're like, focused on getting through I just want to get through it. I want to get to the other side. Just numb me out till I can get to the other side of it, like I just want to get through. And one of the things that you talked about with the the embodied experience is also the This isn't something you get through. You never get to post menopause. That's not That's not a thing. And I'd love for you to share a little bit more about that embodied and being with experience as well as the this isn't something to get through.

Marelda Rodrigues: 13:29

And let me start with a couple of facts that have added or initiated these problems. The first thing is that right until 1993 women were not even considered as subjects in studies. And so imagine not even being included because you were considered problematic. You had a period, then we had to worry about your mood, and we didn't know if you could be in the study and all this was going on. So they would study men, who they considered more stable participants. Really, it wasn't a whole lot of data on women to the point where even something as common as a heart attack in a woman was not even identified correctly, because the data we had was pain in the left arm, whereas women tend to have more pain in the back. And this is what happened the day my mom died, and I want to make a real impact statement here, because she went to my dad and asked him to massage her back. She was like, okay, and she didn't have much time, the heart attack took over, took her by the end of the day. So you know, a lot of my journey in menopause has been revisiting all the symptoms that she had and how we did not have data, and how she was also made to. Feel bad, maybe unintentionally, by the men around her, whether it was my dad not knowing how to help her, the doctors not knowing anything. Doesn't matter, like which country you're in. And then what exacerbated the whole thing is there was a study that was misinterpreted providing women with hormonal support. I believe that was in 2002 where then everybody shut down because it was associated with giving women breast cancer and so much was not right study. And this left a whole generation of women, if you think, from 2002 onwards, they stopped the conversation. And now you have women, I'm talking to women in their late 60s or 70s that are asking me questions that perimenopausal women are asking me because they didn't have it. And they're going, what this is, this is menopause, really. But what's making it confusing to them is they're thinking, Oh, it's just high blood pressure, oh, it's just incontinence, oh, I'm aging. And there is so much that can be done in the perimenopausal stage. And so it's, you know, it's one of those things. When do you start start learning about menopause in your 30s. When is the next best time to start, if you're past that, is today. Yeah. And so you talked a little bit about embodiment and women really embracing this. And you know, the whole medical model we have in place is a pill for an ill and this was coined by Dr Jeffrey bland, who is considered the godfather of functional medicine. And the pill for an ill concept is very much how chronic diseases are treated. Oh, you got high blood pressure, here's a pill you got incontinence, here's a pill you've got high cholesterol, here's a pill, you've got anything, here's a pill or here's a procedure. And what we've had to go back to is even understanding what is the root cause. Why are you feeling this way? When are you feeling this way? Is it consistent? Is it sometimes? And as a massage therapist, I have people coming in saying, I want deep tissue because that's their pill for the ill. Yeah, I don't even know what's going on in your body. Like, what if deep tissue is not the thing? So tell me what's going on so I can use my expertise instead of you coming and saying, Give me the painkiller. And I'm like, but it's the wrong painkiller. I have something better for you. And one of the things that I find with women is that they feel that asking for help or receiving help is a ding against them. You know, they're capable moms. They're career women. They're, you know, used to managing multiple projects, and they don't need help. They can figure it out menopause is actually a better experience as a communal experience, is what I have found, and it is also a experience that requires you to pause and have a real sit down meeting with Mother Nature. It is not about what you're capable of. It is not about whether you want to receive, whether you know. Do you can you find it on Google. Can you find it on chat? GPT? Can you create an AI model to solve your problems? You know, it is not about that. It is not about intelligence, or, I should say, intellectual intelligence. It's about body intelligence. Yeah, and if you have never operated, if you have operated, as I call it, above the neck, suddenly learning to tap into body intelligence is not going to come easily, and it has absolutely nothing to do with your capabilities. How many degrees you have, how many children you have, how many what size of responsibility you have anywhere it's all about. Do you know how to manage your inner self from an in you know, I talk about the five bodies, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually and energetically? Yeah, that's the embodiment. Because none of it, you know, even when I say mentally, I'm I'm looking at not just your thoughts, but also, is your actual brain organ working correctly?

Valerie Friedlander: 19:55

Yeah, well, and I love that you brought up the community component. Because, you know, I. Think about these, these major transitions that women's bodies go through. Now we move into fertility, get our period and our body develops in a particular way, right for that, and then we move out of fertility as you know, we could put it in, you know, we have the the child woman, crone phases of our life. And I think, I guess I wonder. I haven't, I haven't explored this a whole lot, but I do wonder if people engage this phase, this similar to like that this transition, similar to the way they experienced an earlier transition. And I know that a lot of people while at least when I was growing up, there was a little bit more conversation. I've had conversations with other parents who have female children whose friends never got still aren't getting talked to about getting their period. They're still not getting those conversations. And I know with my mother, she made a point of trying to, trying to build a level of ritual into when I got my first period of like this, like honoring this, this transition, or allowing some room for that shift in my life, in my in my body. Now, you know, I mean, this was like, not, not something that was super familiar, so I wouldn't say that there was a lot of like attention to what's happening in my body, like there was still a lot of disconnect. I am one of those people who only relatively recently, maybe the past decade or so, has started like paying more attention to coming down from the head into the rest of the body and going, what's happening here? But I do, I wonder, because that's our experience. Well, you just get through it. You just, you hide it, you you try not to. You know, don't let anybody know you're on your period. Like, Oh, it's embarrassing. Oh, you know, blood, you know it's treated in this way. And then here we have menopause, while more people are talking about it, there's still not a how do we experience it? How do we honor this shift? Because I know change, there's always a piece of grief in change, in transition. I'm curious what you have noticed in that facet in your work. It seems like a natural transition to go from that that grief massage and that embodied experience, you know what is happening in your body, asking those questions and knowing the grief process into this period and the grief that goes into a transition.

Marelda Rodrigues: 22:47

I'll address that by first of all, taking, like, maybe a few steps back. I'm pretty sure I'm really new to many of your listeners. I was working more actively in the grief space, starting in 2019 as massage therapist, and had a situation with a client that led me down the path of creating grief massage, my version of it still a relatively unknown modality, and I realized early on that I could Only massage so many people. So I knew that educating other massage therapists was going to be important. Now, while I was in that space, I also created wellness plans for people that are grieving because your appetite Takes a Dip, your stress goes up, your sleep goes out the window. You're not moving your body, all these pieces come unglued, and it makes for suffering to go up, so helping Grievers bring suffering under control by implementing wellness plans was where I was focused. Until this year when I attended a menopause event, and the term menopause grief came up, and I it just hit me like another ton of breaks, like it did back in 2019 just grief massage hit me like a ton of breaks. And what I realized is there are a couple different terms, and I've learned them in different arenas, in my daily learning activities and exploring other topics around grief as well. One is body grief. And body grief is when you have any diagnosis, whether it's an autoimmune condition, whether it is cancer, whether it is a skin condition that is going to be chronic, whatever the diagnosis is, and the grief comes from one, losing health, and two, feeling like you're losing control of your body and. So just like I was saying, I tried to keep my health under control, and here I am with insulin resistance that is menopause related. Totally I can't control the estrogen, right? It is. It is what it is. And so did I feel just confused and bewildered. We'll use those terms. When the doctor was like, Yeah, you know, I'm just going to confirm what you were thinking in insulin resistance. And I was like, Oh, well, how does this happen? Right? So there's a body grief, because you're feeling out of control with the things you're already doing, and the spaghetti is not sticking on the wall, whereas it used to before, and then you have what's called menopause, grief, which is fraught with so many life changes. Now you're in the stage of your life where you're a caregiver to your parents. You are an empty nester. You are maybe shifting in your relationship with your spouse or significant other. You may be shifting in your career and going, I don't want to do this anymore. I work too many hours and I'm exhausted and I don't want it. I just don't want it. And also, you're like, I'm so tired, or I'm not in the mood, or I'm screaming at everyone, and I don't even scream, and I don't know how to explain this thing in my body. So that comes with a another loss of control. So once again, we're speaking loss, not bereavement, loss, but loss of control, loss of the freedom with the beautiful health you may have had that was on point, because it matched everything you put into it, right? I I did my cardio, I did my this, I did my that. I would say some of the menopause grief is also or even body grief can come out of like heart disease, which goes up when estrogen declines. So it's, how do you get educated? How do you accept that this is your path until you leave the planet? And you know, also addressing this what I call the other ring, and the other ring is saying, Oh, I passed menopause a long time ago. And what women are referring to is what I call the textbook definition. Like, when you haven't had a period for 12 months, you're 365 days without a period, and on the 366 day in just one day, you're menopausal, you're in menopause, and then you're considered post menopause, but it's still menopause. We don't just walk around saying, I'm cured. You're now going to deal with mostly silent things that come undone, whether it's like for me, I had hip pain that I was walking around going, what is this hip pain from? And I didn't even know how to address it, because no one could tell me what the origin is, and if we're just going to physically, you know, do physical therapy, what are we exactly working on? Because I want to know where it came from. Is it going to stick around? Is my effort for path A, or is my effort for path B? So I want to know and just othering by saying I'm not this, I'm that. And I'm hearing this now from even women in what we call pre menopause, which is before perimenopause, who are in their 30s, and saying, I'm not there yet and I'm like, you don't have to be there, but you do have to be educated, because some of these perimenopausal symptoms happen four to 10 years before they're silent for the most part, or nobody's talking about them. I remember in my 40s, when I was perimenopausal, all I could think of because I'm so in tune with my body in terms of the sensations and the feelings. And I I remember saying to some of my friends, oh my gosh, like in my 40s, I have no idea why every single period was worse than the month before. And you would think I've experienced in this. I've had a period since I was 11. I mean, I'm experienced in this. Why can I not handle a period in my 40s? What is going on? Do you know, even when I hit 50, and to this day, three doctors that I've been to while they're considered good doctors in women's health, not one of them has had a menopause conversation. Connected any of my symptoms to menopause or told me how to go forward. And I do not believe, as a health coach that we should be uneducated. I have spent years educating people as massage therapists as to why they have dysfunction and pain patterns. Their body. I am just shifting these why is it happening? Where is the origin? Let's connect the dots, and let's create a plan, and let's create a framework before you need it. So that way, all you have to do is practice in your new body and execute what you know. And I believe that putting women on this path is going to create less confusion, less talk about symptoms, more talk about empowered execution. What do I do? Okay, I felt the hot flash. Here's what I gotta do, or ahead of the hot flash, or the night sweats or the disrupted sleep, or the hip pain or the frozen shoulder. I have massage therapists who have no idea. Neither did I. I had frozen shoulder in both shoulders. And as a massage therapist, I just thought it was because I had moved incorrectly, because I'm going okay, the origin is an improper movement, and the muscle got mad, only to now be closer to 58 and find out when I go back and look at how old I was, I was perimenopausal. And so now, when women come in to see me, I ask them actively, how old are you? Have you had any other symptoms? Are you seeing anything else? Are any other joints hurting? Are you having any other difficulties in moving, or, you know, stuff like that, so they can get ahead of these things.

Valerie Friedlander: 31:33

Yeah, that idea of learning how to listen to your new body and engage this shift in your body as you were, as you were saying the word menopause. I was like, how appropriate that the second part of that word is pause. Okay, it's time to pause. And instead of just attacking the symptoms, let's look at what's the underlying facets here so that we can care for those. And I often will talk about, okay, we get really stressed that it's stress increases, the suffering increases when we're trying to control things that we don't have control over. And what does it look like if we stop trying to control it and start trying to care for it, like now we need to nurture and care for this new body. And in thinking about if I could go back in time and care for myself as I headed into womanhood, as you know, like understanding my body's ability to reproduce and like the things I needed to do to take care of myself and protect myself and keep myself well in this new body that had shifted, what would I want for myself, then that I could give to myself now in this transition as An adult person who has more ability to do things and make choices and ask for stuff as an adult person who who can advocate for myself asking those questions that you were saying about just Okay, so what is this tied to? What? What is this additional to? And it seems so. It does seem so confusing, though, like, well, if I, if I broke my leg, that would that's just a thing, but maybe it's like, Why did I get off balance? What were the corresponding things to that experience? That's like, an isolated thing, but it's not because if I broke my leg, I'm going to walk differently. And if I'm walking differently, that's going to change other muscles and how they're compensating, and that's going to shift these other things, and, oh, I might not be moving my body as much because I can't walk on that leg for a time. And what does that do for how I need to eat, and what other things I could do to make sure that I'm getting the physical engagement and activity and not falling out of the things that are nurturing for me just while this other part of me is healing it so it makes me think like we can't just take any of those in isolation, they're always either the root is somewhere else or and, or the impact has more, a more holistic spread to it than just that one thing, just that frozen shoulder, just that not Having a period anymore, just that, you know, like whatever, whatever that is, is what comes to mind for me, I wonder when it comes to those things, like you mentioned a few times, the idea of having kind of a plan for yourself. What does that look like?

Marelda Rodrigues: 34:59

The first piece is really understanding the journey. Like, if you were to visit a destination, like, let's say we were going to go to Alaska, we would look at how to get there. What's on the ground? Who's our tour guide? Where are the hotels? What is this? What is that? How much is it? Is it within the budget? Could we squeeze in a little excursion here? You know, what other do we experience food differently? Will we be walking a lot? What are we going to be doing? So we spend more time on planning this vacation to Alaska than even getting to know what menopause is. So just start there with, okay, the destination is menopause. This is the destination you will be. This is the country you will be for the rest of your life. Once you hit it, once you once your plane lands, it's like Hotel California. You can you can never leave. Okay, that's the best way I can say it. You will never leave. So you might as well learn how you're going to lay down your roots. Like, can you lay down your roots? Do you go to the left side? Do you go to the right side? Do you just spin around three times? What is the general pathway? Now, a lot of it is not exactly talked about, so it's still coming out of the shadows, if you will. Right now, doctors aren't even trained in menopause. They get about maybe six hours of menopause training for one of the most important phases for a woman's life. And I'm talking about GYN. I'm not talking about like your GP or your cardiologist. I'm talking about the actual people involved in women's reproductive health aren't trained. They're trained ad nauseam, for getting on the pill, dealing with pregnancies, reach pregnancies, Cesareans, postpartum, Nah, you know, I don't know how much postpartum as well, but there's a certain amount of knowledge there menopause, not some alchemy. And then if you shut down the conversations after 2002 and you are only now reopening them, imagine how much you have to scrape through. Say this is garbage. And then this is what actually happens. Now we're finding more data, details, protocols can be made around this new information. And so this is why I said earlier, the women in their 30s who say to me, Oh, I'm not there yet, or the women who just come into 40 going, give me a minute. I just got here. I'm like, You're already late. You are already late, being on time is actually between 35 to 40, or even 32 to 35 the education of it. And I know that this is kind of going to come with the pushback of, why are you hurrying the experience of menopause onto people? I'm really not. I'm sounding the fact that we are already late, and I'm creating an opportunity for the women that are coming up in their 30s to not have to be in their symptoms or the especially the silent ones, like osteoporosis, high blood cholesterol, the creep up of blood pressure, random pains, the precursors of Alzheimer's or dementia. These are the things that happen silently and there is a lot to be done to stay in a space that gives you more health freedom. That gives you what we call health span. Like, it doesn't matter if you're 105 and that's your lifespan, why would you want to be 105 and miserable or in terrible health? Right? So we want to speak in health span.

Valerie Friedlander: 38:58

Yeah, I tend to be, tend to be resistant to the idea of being late. And I hear what you're saying there, though, because we we think I don't want to have to deal with this until I get there. But one, it's not like a today I'm in it and tomorrow, you know, or today I'm not in it tomorrow. It's a gradual thing that we don't always see, and we are so busy, like there's so many societal factors that are constantly pulling our attention that we tend to get caught up in what feels urgent. So placing a certain amount of urgency behind this makes sense to me, because that's what we are conditioned to pay attention to, only if it's urgent, and it's like no, this is urgent. Your well being, your health, is urgent. It deserves care. It's worthy of attention. It's worthy of care. And I think that is a place where a lot of women. Our goal of they focus on everybody else and not on their own care. But how do you care for others? If you know the whole oxygen mask thing, right? But it's very cliche. But the other thing is that it's really important to note, like you were saying about the doctors and stuff, we are not considered societally valuable once we can't produce children, there's a fundamental narrative around that that to resist it means prioritizing our health, putting urgency behind our care and behind this transition that we've been taught to kind of demonize. You know, to complain about, to be upset about, to to suffer with instead of going, No, this is part of my life. I'm still valuable once I hit that point. And I'm going to treat it like it's value. I'm going to treat it like it's my vacation. I love that you framed it that way, because, like, I'm heading to go on this vacation, and it's going to be this journey, this epic journey of this phase of my life. And I'm going to plan accordingly, because I'm worth planning for this, because my health and my well being are worth it. I want to shout that out to everybody who's listening. We have to put certain amounts of urgency behind these things, because otherwise we just don't pay attention to them. And you are worth that attention. You are worth treating urgently, even if the rest of the society is not going to treat us urgently, you are worth treating urgently. So I really appreciate that. How can people get more from you? Because you mentioned the whole community thing, I know that's something that is in process for you, because we need that space to uplift the fact that we deserve the care, because in our own heads, it's so easy to get sucked back into what we've been conditioned with. So where can people find you? Tell us a little bit about what's coming for you that we can connect with and learn more so we're more prepared.

Marelda Rodrigues: 42:09

A lot of my spaces are still in where people would find me for grief, which isn't a bad thing, necessarily, but I have new resources coming that are by the time, depending on when people are listening to this podcast, are either in the initial stage or going to be in the full of information stage. But people can find me through my new iteration, which is called Sovereign becoming, where I teach women how to become self governing and come out of that hiding and thinking they're not worthy, and thinking they should not be asking for help, thinking that health is to be overridden because they don't come first. Sovereign becoming is my handle pretty much everywhere. So right now, I would say Instagram, and I also have an online community, and I can certainly share the link with you where I am taking women through different aspects of not just the physical pieces of menopause. So I'm talking about sleep and I'm talking about other changes in the body, but I'm also talking about the griefs that I mentioned earlier. I'm also talking about where they are tolerating things they should not be tolerating, and how to overcome these and still feel whole and worthy. So if people just want to know what I'm about, they can go to my Instagram, sovereign becoming handle, and if they want to be the person that says I need the help, or I'm the person that wants to plan my whole journey and have most on my side, then the online community is also available.

Valerie Friedlander: 44:06

Awesome. Thank you so much for that, and I'm excited to share it just a note for everyone. It will be in the show notes, as always all the links, so definitely check those out. And as we wrap up, I like to ask two questions. One is, what does it mean to you to be unlimited?

Marelda Rodrigues: 44:25

For me, unlimited is where I do not have to pay any attention to my resources, how I feel or how I move in the world, to me that's unlimited. That is expansive. It feels expansive to almost the soul level.

Valerie Friedlander: 44:52

Yeah, yeah. And when you want to tap into that expansive feeling, what song do you listen to?

Marelda Rodrigues: 45:00

The song that has inspired me ever since I heard it. For years. Now I don't even know how old both the song is, probably at least a decade and a half. So is the song unwritten by Natasha Bedingfield.

Valerie Friedlander: 45:13

Awesome. Well, I will have that added to the unlimited podcast playlist so everybody can check that out. Thank you so much for joining me. Marelda, I really appreciate you.

Marelda Rodrigues: 45:26

Thank you so much. Valerie, this was so wonderful. Thank you again.

Valerie Friedlander: 45:30

Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate you being here, and I hope you got something out of this episode. If you did, I would love it. If you would share it with a friend, give it a like a review. Certain platforms are easier to do that on others, but it really does help me be more findable to other folks. So please take a moment to do that, if you would. And if you have questions, some topic that you'd like me to cover, or a comment about the episode or the show in general, I'd love to hear from you. There are links in the show notes to reach out, and I will talk to you all next time.