Our bodies are always talking to us. In this episode of the podcast, coach Tania Elfersy shares a very personal story about how she came to understand this in a deep way. Tania now works specifically with women experiencing perimenopause and menopause symptoms and helps them to turn their attention to the possibility that our churned up thinking can cause stress in our bodies. And how women can listen to that message in order to live more peacefully, and with fewer symptoms, in mid-life.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or watch the video here. Below are the show highlights and full transcript.

Show Notes

You can find Tania at TheWiserWoman.com

Transcript of Interview with Tania Elfersy

Alexandra: Hi

everyone I’m Alexandra Amor from stopsufferingabout.com and I’m here today withTania Elfersy. Hi Tania.

Tania: I’m happy to be here.

Alexandra: I’m so thrilled to have you

here. So let me introduce you to our audience.

Tania Elfersy is an award-winning author and publisher who has spent several years researching what causes and cures the emotional and physical symptoms associated with perimenopause and menopause by weaving her knowledge of midlife women’s health with the principles of innate health. Tania successfully cured her own range of symptoms one hundred percent naturally.

Tania is committed to helping women learn

more about their bodies at midlife through coaching teaching and writing. Taniaguides women to the simple and natural cures for perimenopause and menopausesymptoms which are available to all of us. You can find out more at thewiserwoman.com.

I’m really looking forward to chatting with

you today, Tania, and about this this subject which is so huge and so importantfor women, and so why do you ease us in.

Tell us how you got interested in exploring this part of your life as it relates to the Three Principles.

Tania: Well

of course it wasn’t planned. You know it came upon me.

At the age of about 43 I started

experiencing symptoms and I now know that those were classic perimenopausesymptoms. It started off for me with a crash of the immune system. I wasgetting sick all the time but I’ve had hair loss and I was getting acupuncturefor that and that helped.

But then came migraines and really massive

mood swings that made me feel less like myself. And then eczema and all kindsof skin rashes and all kinds of lovely symptoms that were just popping up oneafter the other multiplying.

And at the time I had no clue that I was

going through perimenopause, so perhaps this is a good time also just to goright back to the basics and say well what’s the difference betweenperimenopause and menopause.

We know that menopause is a 51 something

woman’s experience. The average age is 51. So we think oh that must happen inthe early 50s and we all know there’s the hot flashes.

But what we don’t know often when we come

into our 40s and I certainly didn’t know was that menopause takes time. Ittakes years and I, like so many women, had this idea that it was this shortperiod of time that may have a few hot flashes and then it would be done.

But if you think about it, when we go

through our teenage years, we don’t wake up with fully developed breasts andbodies and regular periods straight away. That also takes years.

So at the end of our reproductive years

that also takes years and somehow society even 20 or 30 years ago understoodmenopause to be a 40 something 50 something woman’s experience. But forwhatever reason we’ve pushed it to become this point in time. One year after awoman’s last period.

And that is now menopause. That point in

time and everything leading up to it, which is actually when the most hormonalchanges take place is now known as perimenopause. But as I did when I was in my40s and so many women do, I had no idea that I was in perimenopause and so Icouldn’t understand what was going on with me.

I just still I was falling apart and really

didn’t know and I was also having my night sweats, which is sort of like thesister of the nut of the hot flash but less famous system. Many women also getthem in their 40s and they’re like I feel like I’m dying at night and I don’tknow what’s going on.

And then I heard a webinar by Dr. Christian

Northrup who’s a leading light in women’s health and especially aroundmenopause and she said lots of women in their 40s have what can be experiencedand what can be described as PMs on steroids.

That really feels like me, because I feel

like all the time I would be a mess because I also had very tender breasts andmoodiness and everything. And that was the first time I’d heard aboutperimenopause and I’d already been with symptoms for a few years trying to dealwith them running to different treatments and holistically and things likethat.

And so that set me off on a journey because

I was shocked that I had no clue about perimenopause. I went to my 40 somethingfriends I was like did you know about perimenopause and that in our 40s we canbe going through the change and they’re like No what are you talking about? Prettymuch every woman who I spoke to was experiencing some symptoms but no one hadthe knowledge of what was actually going on.

Now perhaps more people are talking about

perimenopause than five, six, seven years ago. But still there is a bigknowledge gap for women who come into their 40s because we come into our 40s andwe think, I don’t need to think about that. I don’t need to talk about that.That’s a decade away. When actually the body is already going through changeand for some women it can even begin in the late 30s.

We don’t know when we start going through that

change. Some of us may feel it more and some of us may feel it less and wedon’t know when it’s going to finish but for some women they may feel it goingon for three years and other women it’s for twelve years. But it’s years andthe period of change is years.

So I started researching perimenopause and

I was really determined to find a cure for me and to also bring this knowledgegap that seemed to exist amongst women that women didn’t have a framework fortheir symptoms. So many women were experiencing symptoms and no one knew whatto do.

I made this promise to myself well if I

find a cure. And I knew that I didn’t want to go down the  hormonal, fix yourself because that neversounded right to me. I thought if I find a cure I’m definitely going to shareit.

In early 2015 I came across what we

understand that what we call the Three Principles. The Three Principles ofinnate health and resilience. This all seem to make incredibly good sense. Iread Michael O’Neill’s book The Inside Out Revolution.

And from that book

I had an insight. And from that insight I was able to clear up all myphysical and emotional symptoms. Within days.

It was so unbelievable because as I was

reading, I had a clue that I didn’t want to be blaming my hormones. I didn’twant to be getting fixed. None of that really made sense to me. Why would Ineed to get fixed? Doesn’t my body know how to get through perimenopause andmenopause.? Women have been going through this forever, ever since we can tracehistory and so why would I need to be fixed?

And then hearing about the principles and

this idea that we have innate health and having this insight about the natureof thought and having all my symptoms go away, I was like Well this is justamazing.

So I started exploring that. Exploring the principles

further and how I could share my experience and now what I do is is weavetogether my knowledge of midlife women’s health and the principles to helpwomen have. A much more empowering and enjoyable experience of midlife change.

Alexandra: I love that. Let’s dive into the

insight that you had and how that can affect physical symptoms.

But I just wanted to say a couple of things

beforehand. The first was I’d always felt very similar to you about menopauseand perimenopause in that when I was in my thirties was when I noticed olderwomen who were in their 50s start to talk about hormone replacement therapy andthose kinds of things.

At the time I remember thinking, well wait

a second. We don’t medicate girls when we go through puberty and our moods canbe all over the place and all the different things happening in our body andnobody says you should stop that by taking these hormone replacements. So thatnever made sense to me and so I’m so glad to be talking to you about this now.

And then the other thing I wanted to say

was the first time I heard the word perimenopause was Dr. Christiane Northruptoo. She was on the Oprah show and they were talking about women’s midlifehealth. She’s obviously the champion out there talking about these things.

OK so let’s talk about this the insight

that you had. And I think for listeners what will be so helpful to know is howinsight, something that happens in our thinking essentially or in our knowing,how that can affect our physical body.

So however you want to share about that

would be great.

Tania: We can take a step back and look at

the bigger picture and an understanding that that I see today that I didn’t seeactually back then is that I understand that it’s pretty impossible for ourbodies to only be wise sometimes. If we understand there’s an energy behind allthings and that that energy is a divine energy or source or God or however yourlisteners would like to define it.

It’s impossible that that exists in us and

then disappears from us because our body works all the time without usinterfering. We don’t have to go in and pump the heart make the lungs work ordigest our food. All of that happens without interference.

So going to the bigger picture I was

beginning to see how does that make sense with what is happening? Maybe thebody is trying to tell us something in terms of the symptoms.  Maybe the default would be to go throughmenopause more or less smoothly. But there’s something going on in our livesthat doesn’t allow us to go through menopause smoothly.

The idea that we often share in the

principles that none of us are born with anxiety for example or fear. There’svery few things that we can say we’re born with that kind of thinking right. Wehave a few instincts and that’s it. So if we’re not born with anxiety and ourhormone levels, which I now know post menopause actually returned to thehormone levels of a prepubescent girl, then why would that be problematic forthe body?

What is the what is going on with the

symptoms and what I understand now is that the symptoms are either just thebody doing what it needs to do with the conditions that it finds itself in.Using its wisdom to maneuver through those conditions.

Or symptoms are a sign to wake us up. And

it could be a combination of those things or it could be that sometimes asymptom is one thing or sometimes a symptom is another thing.

So an example of a symptom: Lots of women

come to come to midlife and they suddenly realize they can’t stomach wineanymore. Some women have found that they can drink organic wine or they candrink gin or something but like regular wine which seems to have sort of tracechemicals in it. A lot of women say they can’t they just can’t cope with itanymore. And I see that again and again.

Now the body, when it when a woman drinks

that wine, the body is just going to react in the way that it has to react inorder to detoxify. In the sensitive time during perimenopause and menopausethat may have a certain effect that makes us feel a bit bad.

At the same time that the body’s doing that

that’s also a signal to us if that happens often enough, if a woman has a glassof wine and that happens often enough, she’s going to learn something from herbody experiencing that symptom.

So she could go down the path of my body’s

broken and I used to be able to drink wine. And why can’t I drink wine anymore.And that life isn’t fun anymore. And she could go down that path or it couldjust be, oh I don’t think my body wants one right now, at this sensitive time.

What was my body trying to tell me, with

the night sweats and the migraines the eczema and everything, was that I wastaking my thinking seriously and the thinking that I was having at the time Iwas taking seriously was an idea that I was not enough.

And as background, I had had my kids and

been a mom for six years and before that I had had a corporate career inmarketing in technology companies. And then I left that and then I chose myreturn to work to write a self-published a book on motherhood.

The book won international awards and rave

reviews but I couldn’t sell the book as I thought that I should be able to sellthe book. And we invested a lot of money in the book. It’s a beautiful full-color,hardback. The kind of book that you shouldn’t ever self-publish if anyone isthinking of saying. But I’m saying think about it really seriously. I had youknow stacks of books that I just couldn’t sell.

I began to feel just from that I failed

because I thought going back to my big career things would just happen. I usedto set goals and achieve them. I’d created this story about the kind of womanthat I used to be.

I thought well how could that possibly be.

That I set goals to sell the book and I’m not selling the book and I just feltlike a failure because it was like this was my big return to work. And it justwasn’t going the way that I thought it would.

I thought that I was the kind of woman that

when I set targets I reached them. And so it was impacting the way that Ithought I could mother my kids because I was working late. And I felt I was notdoing such a great job there and running on empty. In terms of my business withthe book and all the time I kept feeling like I’m a failure. I’m a failure. Andletting those thoughts define me.

And then I would get into a thought storm

of well, I should really be grateful because I live in nice house and the kidsare fine and my husband’s lovely. And no one else has called me a failure. Andwhy can’t I be grateful. Maybe I should write a gratitude journal and maybe Ishould do some affirmations and maybe I should do this and then I wouldn’t doit and I feel even worse than even a bigger failure.

And so this was all piling up, piling up

and then these thoughts would come along and they would create this feeling offeeling very constricted and feeling of failure. I don’t know how else todescribe it. And I would think that’s real. That that must that must definesomething real about my life because it felt real right.

The feeling was a real feeling and I didn’t

understand at the time that the feeling that I was having was just a reflectionof my thought. My thinking in that moment. Nothing more.

And in fact, the feeling that becomes more

sensitized and more extreme because the body is even more interesting that youwake up to the fact that your thinking is in a certain place that isn’tnecessarily helpful and that you don’t actually have to take it seriously. So Ihad.

Quite soon after discovering the principles

I had this insight. I don’t need to take my thoughts so seriously. They comeand go and I think it’s going to be easier if I don’t.

And that was it. I say open to women I wish

I could copy paste that for you and give it to you on a plate. But that waswhat I saw in that moment and I obviously saw it deep. It completely cleared upmy symptoms but because it was like my body said Oh thank God. Right, now allthe cells can work the way they’re supposed to work.

In medical understanding you cannot

describe what I am describing. Because if you have eczema then you need to cutout certain substances, and of course that’s what I was doing. In a restaurantor something like that I would be really careful not to use their soap and havesomething in my bag and all these things and all of a sudden I didn’t have todo that anymore.

But I didn’t have to go around changing all

the soaps. It all just came from one insight that allowed me to drop the stressthat I was carrying around with me constantly. And that release allowed my bodyto be able to cope with soaps with toxic ingredients. I didn’t bring thoseingredients into my house necessarily but it is just like my body could thencope. And my body could cope with a slight rise in temperature that we all alot of us experience at midlife at a time of hormonal change just like teenagegirls experience and boys actually you know feel hot hotter than they used to.

If listeners have teenagers you know

remember like all of a sudden there comes an age around eleven or twelve wherethey’re always hot.

And pregnant women and postpartum women

also feel hot. So at these times of hormonal change the body puts up thetemperature a little bit and I understand it to be it’s sort of an on alertbecause they’re like Well we’re busy with the hormonal changes and lookingafter the baby if the woman’s pregnant or postpartum. Or the hormonal changesof a teenager and or menopausal woman.

The body’s busy with that and they have

less energy or resources to fight bacteria and viruses et cetera and so theyput the temperature up just a little bit because the body’s on just a littlebit of alert to be ready. And then when that temperature rises a little bit thebody can ride it to send us a message but that’s when I see hot flashes andnight sweats to be like the body’s just riding that condition to try and sendus a message. It’s not what the medical system says. The drop in estrogen doesthat. It doesn’t make any sense.

When we look further in this direction of

the understanding we see that is the way our reality is always created throughour thinking in the moment. And so our reality is open to change and how weexperience symptoms also open to change.

I can tell you I don’t have eczema because

I couldn’t see it but we can certainly experience a hot flash in many ways andwe can certainly experience mood shifts and in many ways but it seems that thebody at midlife is really keen to tell us.

Something really wants us to learn. What I

say in my work is because we are moving to the ways a woman’s status right.It’s not like there will be no change. There will be change. It’s built intothe design and it’s what’s supposed to happen. When we fear it or we hearnegative things about it then it’s unlikely we’re going to have a goodexperience in it.

But when we can switch, we can say, what if

my body is brilliant? What if that wisdom never stops? Then what is my bodytrying to tell me? What shifts can I make. What can I see that I haven’t seenbefore and the impact that can have is truly amazing.

Alexandra: So much great stuff in there. I

just love it. Thank you so much for sharing all that. One thing that strikes methen is that this thinking that you were having about your symptoms was causingstress in your body.

And one of the things that that insight

that you had did was is reduce the amount of stress that you’re feeling becauseyou realized you didn’t need to be caught up in all that thinking.

Would you say that’s an accurate way to

represent it?

Tania: There was something before the

distress about the symptoms and that was the stress that I was having about mylife. There’s the belief that I wasn’t enough. And so many women have thisexperience of feeling not enough and for different reasons. So women can alsosay to me, “Tania, this was just about a book.” But for me it was a lot more.It was about the woman I am. How is it that I can earn money? I used to be thebreadwinner. What kind of feminist am I? What does that mean about me and myvalue?

And all of this. Does it mean that my best

years are behind me? My career is over. AndI’m not good at when I used to be good at it. So it was like a much biggerstory that I was creating out of the fact.

I just couldn’t sell books and for other

women. It might be well my mother never loved me. That’s what I am and there’sa story created around that and for other women they’ll say, no, but really mymom never loved me. I’m not saying that that’s comparable to not being up tosell books.

But the thing is, it’s how we experience

that and it’s the story that we create around that. And it’s like where do wetake things from the past and think that they define not only the present but everythingthat’s going to happen in the future. So that was that stress for me of likenot feeling enough.

And then in the symptoms feeling like I was

totally going crazy, when you have what I was actually experiencing was twoweeks of PMS every month. So that was just no fun for anyone anywhere near meor me.

There was a double layer. It’s like the

stress that was going on and then feeling crazy from all the symptoms. Andbeing really like desperate to fix myself. Really looking outside all the time;is it going to be herbs, is it going to be a cream? Is it going to be theacupuncture or is it going to healing? It was trying at the time and spending alot of time dealing with that.

Alexandra: When you begin to work with

women about this and introduce them to the idea that we live in the feeling ofour thinking, not in the not in the feeling of our experience. And that thatalone can change their experience of something so physical like menopause andperimenopause.

Do you get pushback from women about connecting those things?

Tania: Absolutely because we in the west

have these ideas about how our bodies function and about the way that we wouldlike to outsource our health often.

Pointing to the principles is looking

inside, that just sounds like too simplistic and it could sound like Oh you’reblaming me. What are you saying? That it’s all in my head?

I’m saying we have innocent

misunderstandings because the whole of Western society is structured in a waythat we think that our experience is created from the circumstances thatpresent themselves rather than are thinking about the circumstances thatpresent themselves. And so we’ve got it all backwards.

When we’re sitting in that misunderstanding

then what I’m talking about seems impossible. And it seems like I blame themand it seems like I’m taking away their chance of being fixed because theywanted the doctor to fix them when the reality is that thousands, if notmillions, of women are going to doctors and not being fixed because whatmedicine understands about perimenopause and menopause is based on these falseideas that it’s all about the drop in estrogen. And if we just replace the estrogen– whether we do it through estrogen and progesterone like however we want to doit – if we just replace those hormones then we’ll fix the woman.

And again, this comes from an idea which is

an ancient idea going back to ancient Rome and Greece that the postmenopausal womanwell woman is like normal minus. She’s not normal because man is normal. Andthen then the woman’s body is like out of control and bleeding and not normalright.

Not orderly. But at least when she’s in

that reproductive stage she gets to be defined to be the mother role, thereproducer in that way. And then when she moves beyond that well, oh my God,then does she become like a man? Does she challenge male authority? Does shechallenge that dominance? What is she?

Through thousands of years of history this

suspicion of the postmenopausal women because what is she around to do right. Wecould have a very different experience of that. And actually, it tookresearchers to research orca whales to realize that what they called thegrandmother effect, which if any woman is a mother and remembers being a motherof small children who were sick and then they had a grandmother come in to helpwith the search put.

That’s what we’re talking about the

grandmother. Like this idea that oh isn’t it useful that you have older womenin the community who have tons of experience and don’t have a baby attached toher breast. So that’s what evolution designed it for us.

Actually it’s brilliant. But for thousands

of years women have been told no it’s minus or normal minus. It’s beyond theminus.

Medicine, in the way that it views women and

the idea that she needs hormones to be replaced when her body is naturallydepleting them. That all comes from the idea that there’s something that’s notright going on in menopause, rather than there’s something actually very rightgoing on menopause does it. This is an awakening.

There’s a sort of a birth in your view a

new life if you like. There’s an opportunity to embrace your passions and toreally connect with what you love. There’s this this push to try and get us tolighten up and that’s all amazing.

But when we don’t understand what’s going

on and we’re just experiencing symptoms we fall into that hole very easily ofnow my body’s malfunctioning and I need to outsource the fixing and I need thedoctor to give me the pill the cream the patch that’s just going to make thesesymptoms go away.

Alexandra: Incredible. And you mentioned on your website at one point, I can’t remember if it was on a blog post or not, but you pointed out that we treat menopause like it’s a disease. Something to be fixed instead of something that’s completely natural, completely normal.

And not only that, but it has a tremendous amount of wisdom and perfection that comes with it.

Tania: Right.

And that all comes from that idea from mid last century that it was actuallystarted to be called a disease. That was a very famous influential book called FeminineForever written by a Dr. Wilson Robert Wilson.

He was the first maybe to write it; menopause

is a hormone deficiency disease. And he talked about a wonder pill that wouldcure everything from hot flashes to sagging breasts to give a woman anopportunity to keep wearing a tennis skirt for the rest of her life.

And literally these were the ideas that

were out in the 1950s. He published the book in the 60s. But this this was theideas that were promoted and back then. Women were lapping it up because theywere like Well that sounds amazing right. No wrinkles, no saggy breasts, no symptoms.Give me that one the pill.

Women were going in droves to get hormone

therapy and then they started realizing that there was problems with their withcervical cancer. And then there’s a whole history that goes in them and peoplecan look up you know the side effects of it and obviously they’re often veryundesirable side effects of taking hormone therapy.

I’m not saying that there is no place for

hormone therapy and I’m not saying that every woman who takes hormone therapyis going to have these negative side effects.

But the whole medical approach to menopause

for decades has been based on this idea that a menopausal woman is diseased andshe needs to be fixed, she’s not normal. She needs to replace where her body isnaturally fitting then that approach has got us into trouble and it’s notreally surprising.

Alexandra: This is such a deep topic and I

resonate with it so much that it’s just been brilliant talking to you Tania.Thank you so much.

I can tell there’s a big well you know of

knowledge here with you and I really encourage people to seek out your Web siteThe Wiser Woman.

On that note, why don’t you let everyone

know where they can find out more about you and your work.

Tania: They can go over to TheWiserWoman.com and there’s a lot there to read on the blog so they can keep on scrolling and finding different articles that may be attractive for them and bring some kind of interest.

Then they can contact me there as well. I work

with women one on one and I have an online course as well.

And really trying to allow women to

experience something very different about perimenopause and menopause because Iknow that when we’re in the trenches of the symptoms and the night sweats andthe hot flushes and headaches and everything else and I’ve experienced that itseems so impossible that something so simple as an understanding of how ourexperience is created could possibly put an end to all those symptoms. But itreally can.

Because there is this innate health that

runs through all of us. And it doesn’t stop or start to malfunction or fly outthe window. When we reach midlife it really doesn’t.

In fact it bubbles to the surface and tries

to guide us even more than it did when we’re in our 20s and 30s. If we can beopen to that we are going to discover some amazing things about ourselves andwe’re going to be protected not only as we journey through menopause but fordecades to come and I think that that’s one of the one of the purposes of thisswitch, this midlife change.

That’s part of our design, and as I’ve said,

it’s supposed to happen. We are supposed to change we’re supposed to wake up.We’re supposed to move into a new role. We’re not going to be as we were in our20s and 30s and that is a good thing because we need to change for ourselvesand wake up. And society needs us too.

Alexandra: Well said. Thank you.

And we should say too there are some

podcast episodes on your website as well.

Tania: Yes.

Alexandra: So if you’re listening to this show, you obviously like listening to podcasts so you can find those on TheWiserWoman.com as well. Well thank you so much Tanya it’s been so great chatting with you.

Tania: It’s my pleasure. Always happy to.

Thank you. Take care.

[Daisy image courtesy Julian Rotert and Unsplash.]