I spent eight years waving a sword at my own body. This is what happened when I put it down.

I want to tell you about the woman I used to be.

She was a nurse. Twenty-four years of steady hands during other people's emergencies. She knew how to function in a crisis. She knew how to keep going. And somewhere in her mid-forties, she found that she was exhausted, confused, and fighting something she couldn't name. She realised she was waving a sword around in the way someone who wasn’t in control of her actions would.

The sword wasn't visible but she was wielding it every single day, against her symptoms, her body, and against the version of herself that was slowly and stubbornly refusing to cooperate with the life she was trying to maintain.

For eight years I fought perimenopause the only way I knew how. The way a person fights when they have been taught that strength means never going under. I managed it and pushed through. I held the performance of being fine with both hands and I did not let go.

I fought the exhaustion that sleep wouldn't touch and the anxiety that arrived without reason. The woman in the mirror who looked familiar but didn't feel like me and the grief I couldn't name for a life that hadn't ended but had irrevocably changed. The rage that came from nowhere and the shame that followed it.

The moment that changed everything was not what I expected. I was sitting on the edge of my bed one evening and it came to me, clear as daylight, that I had been fighting. Every symptom that presented itself, every change and version of myself I didn't recognise. In that moment I let it go and I felt a weight lift. I knew I wasn’t fixed, but recognised the gift I had been given. For me that moment was the beginning of a new way of being within perimenopause.

The next morning I began my quest for information. I instictively knew something must be out there. I found it in the work of an anthropologist called Arnold van Gennep, who in 1909 had documented something extraordinary: that every culture across the world, without exception, had always treated this transition as a rite of passage. There had always been a safe space, a community of women, an elder guide, a witnessing practice, a new and honoured status waiting on the other side. Five ancient elements. All of them had been stripped away by a culture that decided this was just biology and something to be managed quietly and alone.

What I found in the thinkers I turned to, van Gennep, Jung, Murdock, Singer, was not new information. Their work carried the words for what I had already lived and I knew it had the power to help other women too. And so The Nurtured Path, my signature coaching programme was born.

If you are waving your sword at your symptoms and the woman you used to be you don't have to keep fighting.

There is another way.