Perimenopause as a Sacred Passage: Embodiment, Energy Work & Hormones

What if your symptoms aren't the problem? What if they're a message?

Harmony Slater and Russell Case welcome Allison Lorne, a certified nurse midwife with 25 years in women's health who guides women through perimenopause and menopause as a sacred passage rather than a set of symptoms to silence. Allison is also a spinal energetics practitioner, so the conversation moves between the clinical and the energetic: what hormones are doing, what the body is asking for, and how to come home to it.

Allison explains why she calls perimenopause "adolescence in reverse," how the history of hormone therapy shaped what women were told for two decades, and why emotional symptoms like anxiety, irritability, and sleeplessness often arrive first. She shares her own first symptom, why it took her years to recognize perimenopause, and how a lifetime of intuitive healing work led her from hospital nursing to private practice. Along the way: the grandmother hypothesis, a coven on California's Central Coast, dandelions, and a simple practice for tuning in to your inner wise woman.

In this episode

Why perimenopause can feel like adolescence in reverse, and what the big feelings are asking you to look at

How hormone therapy went from widely prescribed to widely feared, and what Allison says the reanalysis of the Women's Health Initiative data showed

Why Allison describes hormone therapy as comparable to insulin or thyroid medication, and why she says the decision is case by case

The emotional symptoms that often come first: anxiety, irritability, sleeplessness, a sense of doom, rising feminine rage

Allison's own first symptom, and why she did not recognize perimenopause for about ten years

How relationships change when children leave home, and why communication and intimacy matter in midlife

The grandmother hypothesis, orcas, and why menopause may be about purpose rather than decline

How spinal energetics keeps a client alert and engaged, and why that matters for lasting change