Books to Empower Your Journey through Menopause in 2024.
Are you a reader?
I love reading however I don’t always have or make the time.
When life is too busy to read I love to listen. Whether I am out for a walk or catching up on household chores I feel this is a good way to always be learning and developing.
I am often asked what is the best menopause book so I thought I would share some of the books I have read which have helped me to celebrate menopause and supported me in understanding my core beliefs and values, how I want to live my life through menopause and beyond and how I want to support the women I work with going forward.
The links included will guide you to second-hand bookstores where possible but they are available in other mainstream bookstores and via the Audible app which I highly recommend.
Let’s dive in!
Book 1; If Women Rose Rooted by Sharon Blackie
If Women Rose Rooted Summary: A life-changing journey from the wasteland of modern society to a place of nourishment and connection. `This is the core of our task: to respect and revere ourselves, and so bring about a world in which women are respected and revered, recognised once again as holding the life-giving power of the earth itself.’
I loved the way this book made me question the stories we are told from early childhood. There are many stories fiction and fact that highlight the strength of men saving women. However, there are many stories in history of strong women who led armies and inspired nations.
These are the stories we need to be told from childhood and these are the stories we need to be sharing with the next generation of females to empower them to understand women do not need rescuing, we already have the knowledge and strength inside of us.
Book 2; Wise Power by Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo-Wurlitzer
Wise Power Summary: A trailblazing guide to menopause, filled with nourishing wisdom and practical advice to help you thrive as your empowered, confident self.
It’s time to redefine menopause. This pivotal time of life is often mistakenly viewed as a health crisis that is ‘suffered from’ or ‘coped with’, and misinformation and myths around menopause can leave you feeling ignored and misunderstood.
Wise Power is the radical new story of menopause – illuminating its power and potential. Pioneers of the menstruality revolution and the founders of Red School, Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer explain how to embrace menopause as a sacred rite of passage, an initiation that grows your authority, steeps you in purpose and awakens you to great power and wisdom. They show you how to:
- prepare for menopause through each life stage, from menarche to your final menstrual cycles
- make sense of what you’re experiencing during perimenopause
- recognise and accept when you enter menopause, and trust that a meaningful process is at work
- navigate the five phases of menopause and receive their unique gifts
- embrace the rhythms of your postmenopause life, unlock your true potential and step onto your path of power and leadership
Written with humour, fierce tenderness and practicality, Wise Power restores the dignity of menopause, guiding you home to yourself – to a sense of belonging.
I listened to this book first and then I had to buy it just so I could read the words to truly cement what I was learning. Since then I have bought this book as a gift for friends.
This book breaks menopause into many sections which enables you to dip in and out as needed.
This book makes you feel that menopause is a true right of passage. It not only embraces the menopause transition going forward but encourages healing in all parts of your life already experienced so that you can embrace the next part of your life.
Book 3; WITCH by Lisa Lister
WITCH Summary: A witch is a wise woman, a healer. Yet for so long the word witch has had negative connotations. In this book, third-generation hereditary witch Lisa Lister explains the history behind witchcraft, why identifying as a healer in past centuries led women to be burned at the stake, and why the witch is reawakening in women across the world today.
All women are witches, and when they connect to Source, trust their intuition, and use their magic, they can make medicine to heal themselves and the world. This book is a re-telling of Herstory, an overview of the different schools of witchcraft and the core principles and practices within them.
Discover ancient wisdom made relevant for modern witches:
- The Wheel of the Year,
- the sabbats,
- the cycles of the moon.
- Tools to enhance your intuition, including Oracle cards
- Understanding the ancient use of the word medicine
- How to work with herbs, crystals
- How to build and use a home altar to focus your intentions and align you with seasonal cycles, the moon cycles, and your intentions for growth.
- Cleanse, purify, and create sacred space.
- Work with the elements to achieve a deep connection with the world around you.
In addition, Lisa teaches personal, hands-on rituals and spells from her family lineage of gypsy witch magic to help you heal, manifest, and rediscover your powers. Above all, Lisa shows that we really are the granddaughters of the witches that they couldn’t burn
This is another book you can dip in and out of. It is perfect if you want to align your life with the seasons and tune into the natural rhythms of the world around you by creating seasonal rituals and working closer with nature. You can read more about this in my blog post How Menopause Connected Me to Mother Nature.
Lisa goes into the history of Witches and what she calls the ‘Witch Wound’ whereby women today are still affected in a DNA-deep way by the persecution that befell many women not only from the patriarchy but by other women in their lives who were encouraged to betray each other for their own safety or lack of understanding.
It reminded me of how women can sometimes be each other’s worst enemy and how we can all be more kind and less judgemental towards each other.
Book 4; Self Source-ery by Lisa Lister
Self Source-ery Summary: Come to Your Senses. Trust Your Instincts. Remember Your Magic.
An empowering guide to help readers connect to Source, containing inspiring prompts, tools, and techniques to help them find self-trust, courage, and limitless confidence.
An invitation to discover your feminine power, trust your instincts and remember your real and innate magic.
Lisa Lister, the bestselling author of Witch, invites you to meet your inner Source-ress – with a heavy emphasis on the word ‘source’ – and join her on a quest through personal and collective mythos to return to the rhythmic and cyclic intelligence of your body, Mother Nature and the cosmos.
Self Source-ery is a recognition that self-love is coming into relationship with the truth of who you are – your inner landscape, your body and your connectivity to nature and the world around you. It will help you to develop body awareness; take responsibility for your own physical, mental, emotional and spiritual needs; and access your energy, creativity and unique-to-you frequency and magic so that you are nourished, satiated and able to show up for yourself and others in times of chaos, uncertainty and transition.
Full of insight, stories, prompts for reflection, practices and supportive maps, Self Source-ery shares how to:
- connect to source in a way that feels real and true to you
- enter into a loving relationship with your body
- access your sensorial nature, the act of pleasure and oracular wisdom
- cultivate space for growth, healing, discernment and possibility
- create your own Self Source-ery map and practice
Self Source-ery is your guide to being fully sourced, by source, orientated towards life (while knowing death intimately) and trusting your senses, wisdom and the ever-unfolding revealment of living your rhythm.You will see a theme now with the author
If you are struggling with what is a negative body image then this book is for you!
I love the simple exercises the author uses to help you heal negativity about your body that many women experience throughout their lives especially as they experience body composition changes during the menopause transition.
Book 5; Love Your Lady Landscape:
Love Your Lady Landscape Summary: Trust Your Gut, Care for ‘Down There’ and Reclaim Your Fierce and Feminine SHE Power.
There was a time, roughly 5000 years ago when SHE Power reigned and lady landscapes were revered. A time when the space between a woman’s thighs was considered a power portal with a direct hook-up to Source. But for the last 2000 years, the potent powers of our wombs, our cyclic nature and our menstrual cycles have been disregarded. In modern times, this disconnect from the feminine cyclic experience is causing an epidemic of stress, emotional depletion and frustration, infertility and ‘down there’ pain and disease.
In Love Your Lady Landscape, Lisa Lister takes us on a revelatory journey through the terrain of what it is to be a woman. Packed with tools and practices to reconnect women to their feminine wisdom, this book will help you to: – release guilt and shame from the past – explore self-pleasure and sensuality – learn about your menstrual cycle and its connection with the rhythms of nature – discover the sacred art of receiving – unleash your creativity – find your voice to communicate your needs, wants and desires This book will move you into a fiercely loving and healing relationship with your body, and teach you how to use its cycles and signs to create a life of vitality and fulfilment.
One of the biggest learning curves for me during my menopause journey has been learning about the cyclical nature of my own body!!!
It is scary how little we do know about the female body, the hormones involved in our optimal health and well-being, not just our sex hormones estrogen, progesterone and testosterone.
This book supports you along the journey of reconnecting with your body and releasing any shame or discomfort you may feel about getting to know you body more intimately.
Book 6; Green Lights by Matthew McConaughey
Greenlights Summary: Raucous stories and outlaw wisdom from the Academy Award-winning actor
From the Academy Award (R)-winning actor, an unconventional memoir filled with raucous stories, outlaw wisdom, and lessons learned the hard way about living with greater satisfaction.
I’ve been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me.
Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life’s challenges – how to get relative with the inevitable – you can enjoy a state of success I call ‘catching greenlights.’
So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. This is fifty years of my sights and scenes, felts and figured-outs, cools and shameful. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. Getting away with, getting caught, and getting wet while trying to dance between the raindrops.
Hopefully, it’s medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot’s license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears.
It’s a love letter. To life.
It’s also a guide to catching more green lights and to realising that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too. Good luck.
On a sunbed in my happy place (Gran Canaria) I listened to this book.
It is read by the man himself and packed with inspiring stories and thought-provoking outlooks on life. It left me feeling like my bucket had been filled.
Get In Touch
I would love to hear from you if you do end up reading or have read any of these books or if you have any recommendations for me.
Every moon cycle in my monthly membership The Menopause Nutrition Hub Inner Circle I share a book which we can read and discuss.
My monthly membership is my passion project, I love building on the resources available in the membership every moon cycle and embracing my more woo-curious side of cyclical living and Body Astrology.
Why not come and join us for a month, it’s $14.99 Pay as you Go, no contract or save £60 and join for a year 😃 I would love to welcome you. Learn more and join HERE.
