There are two things I dislike in life. Feeling disempowered and being uneducated about essential issues. COVID times were the perfect setting to explore both, yet I was thrown an entirely different curve ball in 2021. Menopause. A brand new thing I knew next to nothing about. I was as unprepared and uneducated about menopause as we all were about COVID when it began. The only thing I had working for me was a solid meditation practice to fall back on when the anxiety and panic rolled in around grocery store trips, hand sanitizer, and the EDD.

Abandonment issues, anyone? I never knew I had any until my OBGYN decided to retire. As it turns out, I have a few. In late 2019, when things seemed less complicated, I struggled with entrusting my reproductive health to anyone else but my physician for over the past ten years. She was brilliant, sensitive, and always direct yet cool, much like Arthur Fonzerelli. Somehow, I always feel like I’m sharing a list of positive qualifiers for a date with me when I describe the qualities I love most about her, but I was devastated knowing I’d need to find a new doctor and had no good leads on a replacement.

Fast forward a few months, and COVID has come to town. In early 2020, just in time for my birthday, I lost my job and was anxious. Having attended Naropa and having worked at a Buddhist meditation center right up to COVID, Vipassana practice was typically a big part of my life. Until now, I meditated every day, twice a day, sometimes more. But during COVID, I avoided meditation. On any day of the week, I might share a story about “why” I avoided it, but aversion is natural, and I was busy avoiding doing the one thing that might help me feel less anxious.

Slowly, over the following months, I abandoned my meditation practice completely, except for the hours required to complete my certification for facilitator training. (I know. I know.) As a long-time practitioner and teacher, I had significant impostor syndrome. I wondered how I could call myself a teacher and not sit regularly. The truth was, my aversion to sitting was a big part of the anxiety. Mainly because it meant I would get quiet and be forced to deal with fears about the uncertainties in life up to that point. Instead, I was doing Ryan Heffington’s dance cardio workouts in my living room, baking, buying vitamins, and trying to start a new business while having regular panic attacks.

As days turned to months, I began having heart palpitations, joint pain, insomnia, odd weight gain (okay, maybe some of it was banana bread), and utterly unfamiliar anxiety. I told myself it was COVID anxiety or worse–COVID. I made excuses left and right, but I honestly had no idea what was happening to my body.

As a woman who identifies as a lesbian, I’d always felt very comforted by having a gay OBGYN. It wasn’t until Marki retired that I realized how much I’d taken that for granted—no awkward conversations about sexuality, sex, or my auto-immune disease. No pitying. No homophobic remarks. The time had come for an annual exam, so I went to a nurse practitioner to see if she could end some of my anxiety and help explain why I felt the way I did.

Aside from her astounding lack of knowledge about same-sex intimacy, she told me I should be proactive about my vaginal health because “you don’t want to have a broken vagina.” Horrified, she continued, “your insides can grow back together at your age if you’re not doing “it.” Afterward, I called my sister. I told my friends and anyone who would listen to my news. With every breath of the story, I grew more and more anxious. I regularly began having tightness in my chest, and worse, I had gaslit myself into thinking my other symptoms were all in my head.

With zero meditation practice to help temper the anxiety and no Xanax nor any clue as to what was wrong with me except a “broken vagina,” I started to freak out. Here’s the thing: I come from a long line of hypochondriacs, so everyone had their take on what my problems were: too much kombucha, exhaustion, covid paranoia, some other auto-immune problem, not enough fresh air, you need therapy, or maybe it’s sulfites in the wine? These are loving and yet, entirely unhelpful suggestions. Over the coming months (and thousands of dollars in doctor bills), I saw an internist, a cardiologist, a rheumatologist, my IBD specialist, and an endocrinologist, and for fun, I went to the periodontist, too. I was suffering. But from what?

One afternoon, a good friend asked me, “Well, have you been meditating? “My answer, of course, was a resounding “no.” As the words came out of my mouth, I felt so much shame and regret. She said, “Well, fucking meditate then! Hello!? Why wouldn’t you start there, Ang?” It wasn’t the most gentle response I could’ve received, but I knew she was right. My aversion was creating more suffering. I’d try to revisit my practice. I told myself that I was always doing things “mindfully,” but that doesn’t take the place of actually sitting.

While I was reticent to let anyone else address my reproductive issues, it became more apparent that I needed to do something about my symptoms as all my tests and appointments with other doctors returned with the same verdict: NORMAL.

After countless hours of scrolling in an attempt to address my real issues, I ran into a telehealth company for menopause called Winona, and that changed everything. I started getting some questions answered. Suddenly, I had a clear picture of what I was dealing with. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: perimenopause. I had absolutely no idea. Up to now, my entire understanding of menopause was that it involved old ladies and sweating. That was the visual. In my mind, if you were menopausal, you were probably old and probably having hot flashes and looking more like your grandma than your sexy, intellectual neighbor with a Ph.D. I mean, I’m a Gen-X’er. My mother didn’t talk about menopause; honestly, I was embarrassed to admit I had no clue about anything related to menopause beyond marketing stereotypes.

The good news? A physician was available to me 24/7. I was falling in love with telehealth. I didn’t have to explain questions about my sex life or educate hetero-cis nurses. I had to answer many questions about my health and medical history, and I could finally address my issues without feeling like I was crazy! I had a menopause support group, and my RX was being delivered to my door without some pharmacist shouting out to the room that I needed controlled substances or vaginal creme on the loudspeaker at RiteAid. The bigger newsflash? Meditation helps your menopause symptoms. It’s all about the tools, and this was a big one! So, I continued my Saturday sits at the beach with two of my besties. Knowing I wasn’t alone in this felt important. But I also felt a bit of shame around my blatant unawareness about menopause and, quite frankly, a bit silly that I never considered this something to consider at 45.

For over two years, I’d made up this story that my mental health wasn’t connected to my physical health, and what’s crazy is they were most certainly connected in all rational parts of my brain, in my training as a meditation teacher, and in my day-to-day life. I only refused to see the connection when it applied to me. One of the things you learn as a meditation practitioner is to detach from the story. We all tell them —to ourselves when we meditate (the ego-mind loves to be chatty) and in our regular, waking life when we fear the unknown. During these insanely stressful months and years, I was busy doing lots of storytelling and zero listening. And what’s so fascinating about this is that listening–getting quiet- will help you make space for the emotions that feel out of control in your body and your environment if you let it. And yet, it was the one thing I avoided daily for so long.

You’ll always be able to find a doctor to prescribe you Xanax or give you something to help you sleep. Still, the truth is meditation can be of benefit in menopause, COVID, and during significant career changes with a little willingness. So, even if you find yourself abandoned by your favorite gyno when she retires, you won’t have to loop the lyrics from Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares to You” or gaslight yourself into thinking you’re crazy. Instead, you can invite panic and despair to pull up a chair at the table when they arrive, knowing it may be a while before anything changes. And that’s perfectly okay. You’re just taking it one breath at a time.