The Art of Healing

Reframing Menopause: Intuition, Boundaries, And Healing

• Charlyce Davis MD Reiki Practitioner

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The mood swings, fog, and sudden intolerance for nonsense might feel like chaos—but what if they’re clarity knocking? 

We take a fresh look at perimenopause and menopause as sacred transitions where intuition sharpens, boundaries grow bolder, and your inner compass comes back online. Instead of chalking everything up to hormones, we unpack the emotional and spiritual layers that medicine can’t measure yet deeply shape how you feel day to day.

Download the eBook; Awaken in Midlife to take this journey deeper:

Awaken in Midlife


Together, we name the hard-to-pin grief of midlife: the body you once had, the energy you miss, the dreams you delayed while caring for others. We reframe “going crazy” as receiving information from your nervous system, and we talk about why irritability can signal safety needs rather than failure. You’ll learn how to recognize intuition in your body—gentle nudges, gut flutters, the breath you hold when you resist your knowing—and how discernment helps you sense what’s true at work, at home, and within. 

We also dive into practical tools: a two-to-five-minute breath ritual to reset your system, a simple “The truth is I feel…” journaling practice to honor what’s real, and approachable ways to partner with your body through nourishment and movement that match your energy.

We offer grounded practices that avoid spiritual bypassing and help you live more truthfully—one small ritual at a time. 

Grab the free ebook Awakening in Midlife from the show notes and join the waitlist for the Hormone Harmony Summit, February 19–22, 2026. If this episode resonates, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review to help more women find the support they deserve.

Welcome to the Art of Healing Podcast community.  This podcast is devoted to helping you find what works on your journey to health and wellness.  This podcast is devoted to providing information on many healing modalities.  Learn more about:

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and more!

Learn more about Dr. Charlyce here. 

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SPEAKER_00:

If menopause or perimenopause has made you feel sensitive, angry, foggy, and you just don't recognize yourself, I am here to tell you that you're not broken. You may be in a sacred transition that medicine explains with hormones, with labs, and with tests. But your soul experiences something entirely different. Today, we're talking about the emotional and spiritual side of midlife and how this season can become an awakening. Welcome to the Art of Healing Podcast. If we have met before, it is good to see you again. If we have not met before, I'm Dr. Charlise. I'm an internal medicine physician, functional medicine practitioner, and a Reiki healer. And today I would like to talk to you about menopause and perimenopause beyond just the physical symptoms. I want us to talk about the emotional and the spiritual dimensions of the sacred time in your life. Today's episode is for the woman who's doing all the right things but still feels off, not just physically, emotionally, spiritually, and even existentially. I created something to support you during this time. My ebook, Awakening in Midlife, is a gentle guide through the stages of menopause, but also gives you a deeper experience of the things that women aren't warned about during this period in their lives. If you are listening to the podcast, you should see in your show notes a way that you can connect to the link, and that will take you to the resource where you can download a copy of your book. And I invite you to read it, to explore it, maybe even grab your journal and keep your own notes and reflect on if this experience speaks to you. Also, the book, and at the end of this podcast, we'll talk about an upcoming live event at the end of February. There's a kind of grief that comes in midlife that's hard to name. It may be grief for the body that you used to live in, the energy that you used to have, the version of yourself who tolerated too much, or the dreams you delayed while taking care of everyone else. Then the hormone shifts come and they don't just create these feelings, they often turn the volume up on these feelings, just basically amplifying something that was already there. If you're viewing the video and you see these slides, you can ask yourself if any of this speaks to you. Is some of this grief over the body you used to have? Y'all look at those pictures of ourselves in the 90s, age myself, early 2000s. Or just anything, missed opportunities. But this period in life will definitely wake up those feelings. Makes it so hard to ignore what you believe what could have been and what should have been. One of the most healing and therapeutic things we can do for ourselves is to stop calling it going crazy. And maybe let's reframe that conversation. Maybe it's information. Maybe these strong feelings are telling us about things our body wants us to listen to. Our soul having the chance to speak when it's not being crowded out with everything else. Maybe it's an initiation, a passage into a new way of being. Maybe it's a recalibration, aligning with your deepest wisdom, things that you know to be true, but in other times in your life you simply didn't have the bandwidth to explore or to even look and recognize. Those of us that are at this stage might have a version of this that we frequently feel or we say it's come out in places that maybe didn't come out before is I don't have the same tolerance for nonsense. A lot of women notice this in midlife. And here's what I want you to know: that's not you becoming difficult. So it's just you being honest. What if being impatient with toxicity is actually your intuition getting louder? It's uncomfortable, isn't it? Definitely experiences myself that these feelings that 10 or 20 years ago I'd never permit myself. It's basically a boundary being set up, and it's like, oh my goodness, that I don't like this situation. I don't think I want to do this situation. I don't want to be in this conversation or whatever this is. Menopause often pushes boundary lessons to the surface. People pleasing. It gets exhausting. Negative feelings, resentments, they get louder. It just gets harder to ignore. You just can't bury them anymore. Overgiving just feels painful. All of this is your nervous system asking for safety instead of performance. So if you felt more irritable or more blunt, I want you to consider what if it's not just you, but it's your inner self coming back online. So it's not just you not doing the right things or being too much, but it's a part of you that you've just simply lost touch with. Now she's asking for a Zoom meeting. I would like to explore right now the idea of perimenopause and menopause simply is not being times in our life that we go through physical changes, we lose the ability to be reproductive, we shift physically into a different stage in life. What if perimenopause and menopause is actually a portal? A portal that the energy shift, things that were boundaries or barriers loosen up, weaken up, open up, and suddenly you are able to return to yourself and experience yourself in a different way. One of these is your intuition, belief that all of us experience a heightening of our intuition. The thing with intuition is it's not comfortable. Because when your intuition becomes available to you and you sense it, it's going to bring things to light that maybe at another point in your life you weren't ready to see, sense, feel, experience, be aware of. When I'm working with my own patients, and especially with my Reiki clients, sometimes we test the waters of what her intuition feels like. Because a lot of my patients, my functional medicine patients and my clients, they often sense this, but it feels uncomfortable. And even right now, I would ask you, what does your intuition feel like to you? And if you can't answer that, that is completely okay. It's absolutely okay because working with your intuition, which energetically is working with your third eye and your solar plexus chakra, it takes practice. It takes practice quieting the mind. It takes practice to listening to the subtle energies and the subtle cues. So if you don't know what it feels like in your journal and reflecting over the several days, maybe just play around with the idea of what you think your intuition might feel like. For me, for instance, what my intuition feels like, it is a gentle voice that doesn't really come from my it's a signal that I have interpreted, I convert it to a voice so that I can understand it. It's often a gentle nudge. Sometimes it's a physical sensation in my stomach. If it is me, the challenge I've had recently, as I am absolutely in this perimenopausal stage, so I'm right there with you, sister. We're all together, is that I am engaging into my my intuition and noticing when I get resistance, how it feels in my own body, in my chest, in my shoulders, in my neck, and how also when I'm resisting my intuition, my tendency to hold my breath. So that's what it feels like to me. I would invite you to explore what it feels like to you because yours may feel totally differently. Discment. So, along with that, heightened awareness is discernment and the ability to sense what's true. Powerful technique, it's a powerful skill. It can create safety and wealth and everything for you and your loved ones, but also can be uncomfortable because it may open up to things that you just weren't ready to see, sense, feel, experience. A desire for meaning. So this definitely crops up in your career, your chosen vocation that you start to seek more, you want more. We'll get that. And then, of course, spiritual sensitivity, a deeper connection to your spiritual side, deeper connection to God, wanting to deepen your connection with your church or join a church or connect with loved ones that have passed. So all of these things are very common themes in midlife. What if this isn't random? Some women feel called to meditate, engage in energy healing, prayer, nature, journaling, solitude. But what if it's not anything that's random? Midlife, perimenopause and menopause is a way of your body and your soul and your spirit saying, enough surviving, let's start living truthfully. So let's explore what that looks like with real support and not just spiritual bypassing. So there are a few practical things that you can work with this part in of yourself during this phase of your life. Nervous system rituals. So two to five minutes a day, placing a hand on your heart and a hand on your belly, inhaling to the count of four, and exhaling to the count of six. And doing this and asking yourself, what do I need today? So we can even practice that together to now. So hand on your heart, one hand on your belly, either one is fine. Inhale to the count of one, two, three, four, exhale, six, five, four, three, two, one. And so if you inhale to the count of four, you can ask, what do I need today? And exhale to the count of six. And inhaling to the count of four. You might even feel some warmth beneath your hands as you ask yourself, what do I need today? Is it a nap? Is it to leave work early? Is it to get to the grocery store? Is it maybe to not answer those emails tonight? And exhale. So a few minutes a day, reset the nervous system. Easy peasy. Another simple practice. You can journal if you like to write, or if you like to dictate. And you know, honestly, I haven't tried this, but you know, if you're using one of the AIs, is one of your assistants, a truth practice, and you can work with your AI doing this, which is writing the sentence, the truth is I feel. I just I reached out to a good friend today to check in on her because she'd been through some things medically. I know she's been having some stress at work and like, hey, how you doing? And you know, I was feeling bad. I hadn't checked on her nearly enough for what she'd been going through. And her first text is, I'm great, I'm fine. And then later on, she says, I lied. I am not great. I am not fine. I am and I was so happy she admitted the truth. My goodness, yes, that's why I was checking on you. Of course, that's why I'm checking on you. So, yes, truth is so just really being honest with how you feel. And when you do this, you're not trying to fix or judge or anything like that, just acknowledging how you feel. Giving yourself permission to grieve. This is such a common thing I discuss with my clients and my patients. Although I'm speaking mostly to us female gendered individuals, grief permission is something that I frequently have to bring up with men. So you just you don't need to justify if you're having grief. If you know there are things you are grieving, and in this stage of life, because loss, the chances of loss is you know starting to match the chances of gain. We've lived longer, we've been on the planet longer, the chances of big shifts and things that we weren't necessarily looking forward to or did not want to happen can happen more often. So allowing yourself time to grieve. And the way that I advise is in a moment of quiet, just sit with yourself, maybe allow some privacy if you feel like you need to, because you may not feel safe to share your grief with others or know if it's you know necessarily permissible. Okay, then that's fine. And give yourself a few minutes to just get into the feeling you're avoiding and feel it. And it may come out with tears, it may come out with laughter, it may come out with reminiscing, but allow yourself a few minutes to indulge in that feeling. You don't have to run from it. And if you give that feeling some space, it will give back to you. It'll give you back energy, it'll give you back release, relief. It's really a good thing. And then finally, partnering with your body. So food that nourishes you, getting some leafy greens in if you maybe hadn't been, healthy movement. Sometimes at this stage, we just don't feel like doing the gym. We may not feel like doing the heavy lifting. They're good for us. We need them, but maybe it'll look like just a walk today, or maybe it'll look like some yoga, or even just some breath work. But however that feels, just listen to your body and partner with your body. It's there to talk to you and protect you. These small rituals can create big shifts. So start with just one of these practices. We'll be back next week. So maybe for the next week, even play around with testing out one and then the next. But I would definitely invite you to try these small practices, especially during this time of life, can be much easier to get your mind around. If this episode is hitting home, then I want you to have all the support that you need and support you can return to. My ebook, Awakening in Midlife. The links are in the show notes. It's totally free. And when you sign up, it'll also be my opportunity to share with you the event we have coming up, which is the Hormone Harmony Summit. It is coming February 19th to February 22nd, 2026. And when you sign up to get your ebook, it's also your chance to be on the wait list and be the first to be notified. Where we are going to approach perimenopause and menopause in a truly holistic mind, body, and spirit. We're going to talk about what happens with our body and the hormones. We're going to talk about what happens with us spiritually and how we can get spiritually strong and expanded during this period of time. We're going to talk about what happens emotionally. So, in your show notes, sign up for the ebook so that you can learn more. I'd like to close the show with a few pieces of just some mantras. You're not failing, you are becoming. Please like, please share with the women in your life. This is one of many of a series that are coming up about this important phase in our lives. Thanks so much.

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Dr. Charlyce

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