You Are Meant To Pause – The Bio-Energetics Of Meno(pause)

Introduction to Menopause and Bioenergetics 0:00

For. Real. Welcome back, everybody, to the bioenergetics summit. I am your host, Doctor Greg Eckel. And today I have Doctor Sharon Stills. Our natural path medical doctor who helps perimenopausal and menopausal women to pause and evaluate life so they can live the second act of their story stronger, healthier, and sexier while aging backwards. Using her 20 plus years of experience and extensive training and background in European biological medicine, anti-aging therapies, and bioidentical hormone replacement, she has successfully helped thousands of women transition gently through the different stages of their lives with all natural methods.

Welcome aboard, doctor stills. Well, thank you, thank you. It's very nice to be here. I love our topic. Here you are meant to pause the bioenergetics of menopause. And will you talk to us, like right out of the gate? What does menopause cause have to do with bioenergetics? Everything. Because everything has to do with bioenergetics. And so I love that you invited me on. I love that we're going to get to have this conversation. And because I just, as you know, finished doing a huge menopause summit, and part of why I did it was just for this reason so that we can really expand and the conversation, our understanding and our experience of going through this transition, that if you were a woman, you were going to go through it.

Is it is not a disease. It is a natural transition in life. And to me, I always say it's not necessarily what you're doing, but it's who you're being and how you're experiencing what you're doing and going through. And so our energy has everything to do with how we experience any experience, experience in our life. You know, it's like so we think about menopause. And the first thing that comes to our mind is hormones. Do I need hormones? Is it safe for me to take hormones? And mid we think about all these things that are like all in the head.

And don't get me wrong, huge fan of bioidentical hormone replacement. Have myself on it. Have all my patients on it. I always say when I die, I'm going to bring my hormones with me and put them in the casket just in case I wake up. They're the one thing I don't want to be without. So I'm not saying that that is not important, but what's really important is who we're being when we're taking those hormones. And if we're so in the mind and we don't get into the energy, we miss such a huge and important piece of being human and having this human experience.

Menopause as a Natural Transition 2:53

So if we are stressed about what hormones do I take and or my hormones are taken, are they being measured properly? Which are all important things? But if we're not relaxed and we're not really opening up to what exactly is menopause and why is pausing so important? I thought in this life we get like the little Girl Scout patches used to get for like weaving or cooking. And I think in this life we think, oh, we get patches and we get the gold stars for working late hours, for getting everything done, for having a huge to do list, for getting 17 degrees or whatever it is.

And I am all about no, no, no. Remember the old saying, we're human beings, not human doing. And so it's really this opportunity when we are going through this hormonal transition, often our body is screaming at us. So we have hot flashes, we have sleepless nights, we have muffin tops that appear. We have depression, anxiety, not feeling like ourselves. And when the body talks to us and symptoms that are really disturbing, we tend to listen. And I want this time not only to be about suppressing symptoms, which I like to get rid of symptoms.

It's not it's nice to feel good in the physical vessel, but I want this to be about actually causing, inhaling, exhaling and really taking a look at where are you at in life? Where have you been, where are you presently and where do you want to go? And so I feel like it's this grand opportunity to say, okay, if I'm having symptoms, I'm now focused on my body, but let's really pause, let's inhale, let's exhale and let's pause and let's think about our lives at this time. Because often we forget about what really lights us up, what we're passionate about.

So we can look at where have we been, what have we desired? Have we lived into an experience? Those desires? Where are we now and where do we want to go? Because we can live two thirds of our lives in menopause. And so this is a an amazing time. So these symptoms that you're having, I call them the sacred messengers of your body, they're like, hello, it's time to wake up. Time to think about some other things. And so it's a way of getting our attention. And then what are we going to do? What are we going to create when we are not losing our our blood to the earth?

We are retaining wisdom. And so this is such a creative, sexy, fun time in our lives. Often, if we had chosen to have children, our children are older, so we get more attention back on our selves. Maybe we are looking to retire from a job, or change jobs, or start a new hobby, or start a new relationship. There's so many options and we're we're wiser now at 54, I would even go back to being 20 or 30 if you paid me. And I'm not saying I didn't love that time of my life because I did. But there's just this wisdom that really comes with living and growing older that you can't buy in a bottle.

You have. It's just something you weren't. You know, this is, a very different way of viewing what has become an almost pathology. Right. So in the Western cultures, we've made this natural transition that should be celebrated and exalted into this medical, occurrence. So I love your approach of talking about it in the bio energetic space of, you know, it is a pause. It's a time for reflection and and reframing that the way that it actually is meant, right for the wisdom of that component. So in the bioenergetics, a little bit more, I want to pull that out of you because you this is really your, you know, your sweet spot of what you're what you're sharing with the world.

What other ways do you view that on the energetic level? Like we've got it on the physical plane and that that component of your, you know, not menstruating anymore and you're not spilling blood back to the Earth. This component of I mean, you said it, two thirds of your life may be in menopause, right? So the energetics to me, I mean, there's I think we can talk about the energetics in your body, and we can also talk about the energetics of just being a soul and being on a journey. And so I'll do that first.

So as being a soul and being on a journey, often we forget why we're here.

Mindfulness, Breath, and Present-Moment Healing 7:34

We get so wrapped up in the physicality, we forget that we are just energy and that we have a purpose here and that there's a higher purpose and it doesn't matter what religion you are, but that we are here to to give a gift, to learn, to experience. And often we forget because there's bills to be paid, there's kids to be picked up, there's headaches going on, there's distractions. There's relationships that don't serve us. And we forget about really focusing on the energy of love and the energy of joy and what we're going to do to make that happen.

And so I often have patients and I'll I'll talk about that. Now, do, do an exercise that often sounds a little morbid, but I have them right there. Eulogy. And I think reverse engineering, what you want to be remembered for is a really important exercise to do. Now when you're alive, because, say, you want to be remembered for being philanthropic and giving back, but then you look at your life now and you're like, well, I don't have time to volunteer. I haven't been volunteering. Then it's like a good option to energetically say, what are you filling your time with and what are you feeling your space with?

And how can you make room so you can put in the things that are important to you? And I think energetically we forget to think about these things. We we typically wake up, maybe we hit snooze if we didn't get enough sleep or we we already have the to do list running through our head. We're checking our phones and we get pulled out of our purpose within a minute of waking up, rather than waking up and saying, what is the day going to hold in store for me? What miracles am I going to attract today?

What beauty am I going to offer to the world? How am I going to experience this blessing of the day? And how grateful am I that I have another day to be alive? And so just shifting energetically what we rise with, what we ask, what we expect of our days can change everything. It's really the foundation of how we heal. You know how you walk in a room and there's bad energy or there's good energy? Well, we have a self-responsibility and that's why I like to really pull this out in menopause, because it is a time when women tend to be a little more focused because they've got some symptoms going on, but we have a responsibility of self-responsibility.

I can't expect you, Doctor Gregg, to be responsible for my journey or my energy, or even your partner, or your parents or your children. We are the stars of our show, and we owe it to ourselves, to self-actualize and have the experience that we want to have so well put. So coupled with that, why is mindfulness the best medicine? Because it is because mindfulness puts you in your moment so you can't be energetically aware or on your journey if you're not actually present to it, otherwise you're missing it.

If you're always thinking about what happened, how I could have done that better, or how that's, driven, how that was great, or what's going to happen in the future. Tripping. I call worrying a waste of the imagination because so often what we worry about in the future is never even really what gets us. It's like the car that comes out of nowhere and smashes into us. I'm like, oh my God, I wasn't even expecting that. That throws us off. And so the present and being mindful and learning to harness the power of your breath as medicine, because it is and it's free and it's with us and it's what brings us into the Earth plane, and it's what escorts us out of the Earth plane is really has to be, in my opinion, at the foundation of all that you do.

So, for example, if you are, if you are taking your progesterone because you want to get a good night's sleep and you're in menopause and you're taking it and you're just stressed and you're not thinking about it, that's a very different energetic experience. Then I am so grateful that I found the right doctor who prescribed me the right thing, and that this really helps support me. It's going to help me to sleep. It's like nature's Xanax. It's going to chill me the heck out and I'm going to take this.

I'm going to drink some water. I'm going to allow it to embrace my body, penetrate my cells. And then you're like in tune with your medicine. That is a very different experience. I don't got a put my progesterone. Oh my God, I got to do this. I got to do that. Like the energy of not being mindful, not being present is what takes us away from healing every single time. I want to bring that back around because you said you you're going to start with the energetics. And then what is the energetics in the body as well.

In the body, our hormone production is slowing down.

Emotional Trauma, Scars, and Energetic Clearing 12:40

And energetically that is the time where we are moving from being able to birth a child to not being able to birth a child. So I think energetically one we really have to take a look at it and I see you, I feel you, I hear you. If you are one of those women who has struggled where you wanted to have children and it physiologically didn't happen for you, or you didn't have the right partner or just wasn't the right timing, or you have lost a child. I mean, these are all really deep, intense issues, and I hold you for that.

And I don't expect you to have healing from just listening to this one talk. But it's an invitation to really look and see if that is something you need to do some work on, because that is it. That is a trauma. That's a capital T trauma. This is not a little thing. This is a big thing. And energetically I have seen that because I do a lot of work with patients dealing with oncology diagnoses. I've seen that show up is ovarian cancer, where if we didn't have children or we had a problem there, a loss, it can energetically manifest in the ovaries.

And so in this pausing moment, I really invite you to pause and think about how and if you have children, how are your relationships with those children? How was your birth? Do you still hold trauma? Are you how did you have a C-section? And are you holding trauma and that scar? That's one of the things I see a lot where we have a C-section. It wasn't planned. Our birthing plans rarely go as planned, and we had to have emergency surgery. And now we have a scar. And scars hold a lot of energy. They block energy flow.

They block the meridians, they block the nervous system. And often they hold emotions. And so finding someone who does neural therapy near you and you can go in and inject the scar. I use protein and I use different homeopathic remedies to open it up. But someone who can support you in that can be a really big help. But energetically you have to go back and you have to look, I, I had a personal experience around this and I did somatic meditations, the Om meditation, which is awareness and understanding meditation.

And this is something that Osho taught, and I thought I was fine from a loss of a child. And what I learned by going through this process of screaming and crying and laughing was that I wasn't fine, I was crying hysterically over it. And I had to do this process about three times until I finally had really moved it out of my energetic being, out of my cells. And so I went to Amsterdam, then north to, where was I? Just north of Amsterdam. Holland. We'll just say Holland and I got trained in how to lead people through this process, because it hit me so hard that a lot of times we're walking around and we we think we're okay, but our body is energetically still holding it.

And so from a physiological perspective, it's really important to kind of start looking at these things as your hormone production is decreasing. Because now and if once you've cleared all that out now that your hormone production is decreasing, and again, as I said in the beginning, I do recommend replacing with properly administered bioidentical hormones because not only do we want to get rid of symptoms, but we also because we are living so much longer than our ancestors in menopause, we want to make sure that the hormones are supporting our brain and preventing Alzheimer's and supporting our bones and preventing osteoporosis, and supporting our hearts, and preventing cardiovascular disease and supporting our breasts and preventing breast cancer.

And on and on. There's so many, preventative reasons for using hormones, but so once we've got that handle, now we get to think about what are we going to birth if we're no longer in the season of our lives to birth children, what are we going to birth? And this is where it gets real exciting, where you really get to go, wow, this is about me as women. I almost want to say ten out of ten women energetically are givers. We're people pleasers. We're taking care of everyone else. We are not putting on our own oxygen masks before others.

We are pouring and watering people from a canister that is empty. And so this is really this time to go. You know what? It's about me. It only took 50 years to get here, but I'm here and I got at least 50 more. I think biologically we can easily live to one 2130 if we are. That's what we're designed to do. And if we are doing the right things to take care of ourselves. And again, we can't just think about what we're eating and what we're taking. We have to think about our emotions and our energetic field.

I truly believe that disease starts out here. You can't see my hands, but it starts out here in the energetic fields. And if we don't listen, it just keeps coming in until it manifests physically. So yes, eating organic is good to reduce your glyphosate load and taking the right supplements is important, and getting enough sleep is important. But if we don't address our energetic bodies, if we don't address our emotions, then we can't truly shield. So you might take some vitamin D and your immune system gets a little stronger.

Or maybe you don't get sick as much, but something else is going to brew if you haven't really gotten to the root of it, which is always in the energetics that, component is, that really resonates with me. And also I find it as a truth. And so thank you for sharing that. I'm wondering, so, you know, a lot of folks in your case and point is a great example of that, of, you know, feeling like, you know, I felt like I dealt with it. I did, you know, all kinds of therapeutics and, you know, did my work.

And then you have this experience and you realize, you know, there's still some left in the, in the field in my bioenergetics or cellular memories. And what do you suggest for people that maybe are hearing this for the first time and or feel like they've done their work? Is there any way to have assurances like, hey, we've cleared it once and for all here, doctor ship? Yeah, that's a that's a good question. Well, first of all I would want to say is don't beat yourself up that whether you feel like you've cleared it or not, cleared it or done your work, we're all just masterpieces in progress.

We're all works of art, and we're all just moving forward and so I would say that it's really important to have a piece that includes energy. So say you went through a bad divorce and you went to a talk therapist and you talked it out and you feel like you're better, maybe go look for some kind of somatic work and have someone really work on your energy field to see. Does anything arise? And remember that we are we are in seasons.

Tools for Energy Work and Ancestral Healing 19:38

And so sometimes it's peeling an onion, sometimes things are up and sometimes they are not. And I think most importantly, as we said, mindfulness, you know, you have the answers. Silence will scream loudly at you if you allow it to. And so when you get quiet and you can learn to calm the mind and that doesn't happen overnight. So it's a practice. Just like going to the gym is a practice. Learning to breathe and stay in the present moment is a practice. I've been doing this for over 25 years and I still have to practice.

We it's a practice. And so when you allow yourself to do that, you can really feel, am I really done with that relationship? Do I still have anger? When I think of him, I still annoyed. Do I really feel open hearted that I hope he goes forward and finds the love of his life? Like you can check in with yourself and if you allow yourself to be honest and be still, the answers will start to arise to you. And you will. You will know I have an ex. That was a very painful breakup and and we are at a place now where we are each other's dating coaches and I, I was just on the phone with him before this interview, and he's got a date tonight and I'm like helping him go and and like, so I know that I have healed and it's truly healed.

Whereas a couple of years ago, I don't think I would have been wanting to be in his dating coach and Ra Ra as he was going out on a date, hoping he truly finds love. And so we have to be kind. We have to be gentle with ourselves. We have to be patient with ourselves. One of the tools that I use and like you, I've been around the block numerous times and in this field for a long, long time. And I use color puncture and color puncture is, comes from Germany. It's the channeled brainchild of Peter Mandel, who is phenomenal, and it's using different colored crystals, and into different zones, acupuncture points, meridians on the body.

And I call it we go to the chiropractor to get a spine adjustment. I call this an adjustment for the soul, and it utilizes the energy field and it talks to the body through bio photons, because that is ultimately the foundation of how the body communicates. We think about, biochemistry, but this is beneath this is the foundation. Energy is always the foundation. And so this allows through color for the cells to communicate to each other. And it helps to open up the field. And it helps to open up the trauma and the confusion that is part of the human experience.

And so I look at it as like I see trouble or stumbling blocks as an opportunity to learn more about myself, to learn more about the universe I live in and to grow. And so again, it's this, this energetic mind shift. And so if you're lucky enough to have someone who does color puncture in your area, highly recommend it. It will start to shift things for you, but there are so many different tools you can use to really, you know, could be eMDR, it can be somatic bodywork, it could be using plant medicine.

There's so many ways to really start looking energetically at what's going on with you, the color puncture and the energetics surrounding the body. That sounds so fascinating. And using. So that was a that's a channeled work that comes through. How long have you been utilizing that in your practice? Oh my gosh. Well I've been in practice just over 20 years, and I learned about it while I was in clinic. So as soon as I graduated I went and started doing the training, sending time. And it's utilizing certain crystals for the chakras or for the different energetic bodies.

How is that just some background on that for the chakras, for the zones. So there are all the acupuncture meridians. But he has created zones. He has channeled different zones where you are blocked or not blocked. And so it there's treatments that go back from that you do on the foot, where the foot kind of can show you each week of, of gestation while pregnant. So you can do prenatal treatments. Because we have to remember we're talking energy here. A lot of what we're carrying may not be ours.

It may be something we brought in from a past life. So for those of you that think I'm getting to woo woo, just stay with me. But it could be from a past life. It can be from ancestors and certainly can carry unresolved trauma that isn't even ours. And so one of the things I love for that is Hellinger work. Also from from Germany. I study a lot in, in Germany and Switzerland because I feel like you're a far ahead of us, and so that can really help. Doing a family constellation can really help energetically to put the pieces back together.

I kind of always describe it as a spiderweb. And so if you have ancestors who were a black sheep or a child who didn't survive either a miscarriage or an abortion, these can be tugging or some there was trauma, could be abuse. And if it wasn't worked out, it kind of trickles down through the web and can end up in you. So I think it's really important to be like,

Action Steps and Reframing the Menopause Journey 24:58

I can be the the trauma breaker from my family lineage. And that that's a really powerful thing to, to take on. I think so as well. And it seems like it is of essence. I'm hearing that conversation around ancestral trauma and laying down the family burden and, taking the inspiration and, energy of the, of the lineage. But lending or laying down the trauma. So I think it is time for that. So thank you for sharing that. You know, coming into the close, what would you suggest to put somebody into action on around this?

I like to give an actionable item here at the end. Well, I would say certainly journaling or writing your eulogy. So you can just kind of check in and see where you are, where you've been, where you want to go. Maybe you had a dream of being a dancer and it kind of got lost. And you can go call the local dance studio and start dancing and start finding your passion again. I would say exploring different, energetic, whether it be color, puncture or family constellation work or or even acupuncture.

A good five element acupuncture tourist can really help move the energy and move the emotions. And shifting the thought process. So if you are a woman who is menopausal, menopausal, perimenopausal menopause is far, far away in your thought process just starting to shift what it means to be going through these natural transitions and starting to say, you know what? What society says that I'm going to be fat and frigid and out to pasture like that doesn't have to be my experience. So I'll tell you just a quick for my menopausal transition.

I climbed Kilimanjaro and I did that and I'm not saying you all need to do that, but I did that because as I stood there, I was saying energetically to the universe, to myself that this is my sacred second act and I can do anything. This is not slowing me down. I'm standing on top of the largest freestanding mountain like I am just beginning. I am just getting started and so I would say to all of you, no matter where you are on your menopausal journey, and if you're a guy watching, we didn't talk about the men go through and your pores and men have hormones too, and you get to be a part of this also.

But just ask yourself, what is your Kilimanjaro? What is it you want to say to the world and yourself to say, this is my journey and I'm going to do it my way and I can flip the script. I don't have to buy into what society is telling me because honestly, it's just not true. Doctor Sharon Stills thank you so much. You're so welcome. Thank you for having me. And thank you for for doing this summit for really, it's such a passion of mine that we really learn that the energy is leading the show. And so I love that you're doing this and making it more, more awareness in the world. And the.