Mindset is Key to Mastering Menopausal Transition

Welcome and Summit Introduction 0:00

Hi, ladies. Welcome to Mastering the Menopause Transition Summit. I'm your host, doctor Sharon Stills and I am just genuinely humbled, honored and ecstatic to be here with you all. I'll be teaching a class at the start of every day, just so you can learn more about me and how I work with patients, and how I. My views and philosophy on menopause and medicine. And just to get to know why I actually spend all this time and energy to bring this summit to you. So let's get started. I am a natural Catholic medical doctor.

I've been in practice for over 20 years and I didn't go into practice to specialize in menopause. I went into practice to be a pediatrician, but as the universe had different plans for me so early on when I had just opened my clinic, a patient came into my office. She had Suzanne Somers book, I think it was called The Sexy Years. It was her first of many books. And the patient said, Doctor Stills, I want, I want what she's having.

How Menopause Became My Specialty 1:18

I want these bioidentical hormones and I have to admit, my first response was, isn't that Christie, the dinghy blond from Three's Company that I grew up watching on TV? And why is she giving medical advice? But I have a very open mind, as you will learn, and I love learning from my patients. You guys live in your bodies 24 over seven. I just get the honor of checking in with you once in a while. So I said, look, give me the book, let me read it. I read the book and I thought, this makes a gazillion amount of sense.

And with my knowledge, not only is a natural ethic physician, but as a doctor who has specialized in bio regulatory medicine and spent years and years and still does studying over in Europe and Germany to learn the best of what they're doing, I thought with all of that knowledge, I can make it even better. And so I prescribed her bioidentical hormones and her life changed. Her husband sent me flowers. She told to friends who tell to friends who tell to friends. And before I knew it, I had a very big practice practicing helping women go through menopause.

And now, at the time, I was in my early 30s and had a gazillion hormone problems. I had the worst PMS possible. I felt good, maybe a week out of the month I would bleed, I would feel good for a few days, and then I would just bam, get bloated, get cravings, get mood swings, couldn't sleep, get constipated. And this is how I was existing was, which was not very fun. And so I thought, okay, one of the principles of natural medicine is dosage, which means teacher, which means I will learn and teach you.

And so I thought I got to get my own hormones in balance, because now I'm helping all these women go through menopause and they're changing in front of my eyes. They're getting younger looking. They're getting skinnier. Their hair's looking amazing. Their skin. They're having sex. I mean, just fascinating that this is happening. And I'm sitting there struggling. So I implemented bioidentical hormone replacement for myself

Balancing Hormones and Healing Myself 3:40

and I worked on my gut and my emotions and my limbs and my toxicity. All the things we're going to talk about my liver and I got better and I felt great. And so when I went through menopause, I'm now 54. In case you're wondering, grandma of two and I went through menopause. I was 48, a little on the earlier side, but totally fine. And I never had a hot flash. And I credit that to pre gaming, to having balanced my hormone so much earlier on. Thanks to all these wonderful patients of mine who were seeking help for their menopausal transition.

And so menopause became this beautiful transition for me and has been for my thousands of patients. And that is what I want for all of you. I am on a mission to change the conversation, to change the thought processes, to change our beliefs, to change our expression for audiences, and for you to realize and embrace and really embody that menopause is this time. It's this sacred. As I called the sacred second act of your life. And it is a time to be ecstatic about not oh my God, menopause is coming.

No, no, no. Instead, like menopause, I'm coming for you. So I'm going to teach every day. We'll start the day with me teaching. And today I just wanted to kind of get you to know me and kind of give you a little bit about my philosophy, because my philosophy is truly the foundation. It's truly what I believe has to happen medically. We've got to have our head and our thoughts in the right place. It's really important. And I've learned this after over 20 years in practice, and if over 54 years as a human, that who we are is so much more important than what we are, so who we are being over what we are doing.

And so that is why I say menopause and you'll see it. I write it with the parentheses because I am all about the paws.

Menopause as a Sacred Second Act 6:00

And so parsing is this underrated activity that we don't put any credence into, that we don't honor in the way I believe we need to. And so we we're human beings, not human doings. Right? But we're human doings, especially as women. And I know I've been there. I sit here equal to you, not sitting up here. I raised two children on my own. I put myself through medical school. I ran a very busy practice. I still run a busy practice. It's just more, telemedicine now than in person. And so I understand what it's like to have a full life.

I have family, people depending on me and counting on me and so on and so forth. And so it's easy to not cause it's easy to just kind of get into life and get on the, the cycle and just wake up and go and work and eat and sleep and maybe watch some Netflix in there and just kind of. And the next thing you know, ten years has gone by or 20 years has gone by. And so I feel like menopause, it has the word in there. And I know they're talking about your period pausing and it is and that's important.

But I think it's like, oh, let's just use this opportunity to pause, to actually pause and think about our lives. I'll tell you a quick story. I had a clinic on the East Coast, a very successful brick and mortar clinic, and after ten years, I walked away from it and people thought I was nutso. They're like, why are you walking away from this clinic? You're helping so many people. You're very successful. It's a fine oiled machine. You've been doing it so long, it's hard to start a business. And what I said to them was, you know, I think of my life as a book.

And at the end of my life, I want it to be an interesting story. I don't want it to just be. Sharon was born, Sharon went to med school. Sharon ran a clinic. Sharon went home. Goodbye. I want it to be different. And I had this real desire. Maybe it was because I had kids young and I raised them on my own, and I didn't get to have as much freedom as I desired. But I wanted more freedom than what a brick and mortar clinic was offering me at the time, and I wanted my story to read with the things that were important to me.

The Power of Pausing and Reassessing Life 8:40

Traveling and throwing out my alarm clock, hot yoga, tea with a friend, making meditation a priority. And I wanted to create a life where my desires were at the forefront. And so I wanted a book that read, you know, Sharon did this, and now Sharon's going to do this, and now Sharon's going to do this. So lucky for you, you're attaching me at the the beginning of the next chapter of because it's been ten years since I closed my clinic, and now I'm in a new chapter of sharing and teaching and learning and growing and creating community and helping as many women as I can rock this time and this period in your lives.

So, so that's good. But so that's when I paused and really thought about things. And I don't think that we do that enough. And so this is your invitation. You are here. You want to learn. And maybe you're here because you're having horrible night sweats and you want to learn how to get rid of them. And we got you covered. Maybe you're here because you are ten, 20, 30, 40 pounds heavier than you want to be, and you want some new strategies for how you're eating. We got you covered. We got you covered on sleep.

We got you covered on meditation. We got you covered on exercise. We got you covered. All of these things are important. I wanted to bring the conversation around menopause because the menopausal transition is so much more than just getting rid of your hot flashes. But now I want you to pause and just allow yourself to have this moment for you. How's life been going? Where have you been? Are you living out the dreams or the goals or the desires you had for yourself? Are you really content in your relationships, in your health, in your hobbies, in your community, in how you give back, in how you feel, in what your work is and what your passions are in everything, and how your day to day is.

And if you are, I want to know what you're doing because you are like. You are like no being. I've met before because we all tend to have areas where we're like, I'm not really hitting my desires there, or I could do it a little differently here. And so this is not a time to beat ourselves up. There is no beating ourselves up around here. This is a time to just pause and think about. So, for example, I'll share something for me. One of my favorite things, one of the things you'll hear me say all the time is dance is medicine.

I love to dance, and I just paused in my own life because dose I practice what I preach and I thought, you know what? I love to dance. Why am I not taking a dance class? So up on my screen, which you cannot see, but I've got a, little windows open of dance classes I'm going to call and see, whereas one that works with my schedule and is convenient, and I'm going to get myself in a dance class. And if I didn't pause and I didn't

Eulogy Exercise and Living Without Regret 12:00

think about this, my best friend's not going to do it for me. My kids are not going to do it for me. My assistant's not going to do it for me. No one's going to do it for me. I need to really be in charge of what do I want out of my life. And so I often in this pausing process that I do with patients and there's an a, U, S and E to it. But right now we're just talking about the key in pause in this process I often do a eulogy exercise like, oh, doctor stills, get morbid here. No, just listen for a moment.

So what do you want to be remembered for? Who do you want to be remembered as? For me, it's important to give back. So if I want to be remembered of giving back, am I volunteering? Where am I? Where am I donating my time, energy, resources? And if I'm not, well, then more windows get opened on the computer and I start researching and think where I can volunteer and all of that kind of thing. And so this eulogy exercise gives you an opportunity to reverse engineer, because you know what they say the top regrets of the dying are.

Typically they didn't do what they love. They didn't spend enough time with the people who are important for them. And so I one of the other principles of natural medicine, there's sex. So we talked about does surgery. Another one is prevention. And so I am really big. You'll hear me talking about prevention pre gaming. And so to me the eulogy exercise is a way to prevent ending ending up in your life at the end of your life and having regrets or not feeling like you really lived the life that I am telling you you deserve.

And so it's really important to me that we start thinking about these things, that we start thinking in this way, that we get excited. Menopause is a time, yes, we no longer are having menstrual cycles, so we no longer can birth a child, a baby from our womb. But we can birth creativity. We can birth new experiences, we can birth compassion for ourselves and for others. We can birth new lifestyle habits. We can birth so much at this time, and I am just thrilled that you are here along for this journey with me.

So I, I just I love you all so much already just for the fact that you're here. You have an open mind. You want to learn, you want to grow. And together we are going to become this community of menopausal magical beings. And I can't wait to experience that with you all. So enjoy today's talks. I cultivated them especially for you. I know you're going to enjoy them and I will see you later.