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Let me set the scene:
It’s 3:17 a.m. I’m drenched in sweat, wearing what looks like the shroud of a woman who hasn’t slept in a week.
My Goldendoodle is snoring like he pays rent, my teenager is thriving on chaos and TikTok soundbites, and I’m thinking it is just stress and anxiety. And I need to go back to therapy.
Menopause wasn’t on my mind as a “thing.” I just thought I was pissed off and hot.
Hot flashes? Check. Mood swings? Check. Existential identity crisis paired with random weeping during car commercials? Oh yes. I genuinely believed I was spiraling into a second adolescence—except with worse skin and zero social stamina.
For someone with a Ph.D. in Mind-Body Medicine and more than 20 years in mental health care, you’d think I’d have a detailed map through this terrain. Spoiler alert: I did not.
None of my training prepared me for the hormonal hurricane that is menopause. I was so steeped in internalized patriarchy that I dismissed menopause as something that happened to “older women,” as if I could somehow opt out. I feared becoming her—the Crone. You know the one: hunched over, cackling, luring Hansel and Gretel into a gingerbread death trap. I was terrified of becoming irrelevant, unsexy, unhinged. And at my lowest? Let’s say I briefly understood the urge to eat my young. (Kidding. Mostly.)
Turns out, menopause and mental health have more in common than we like to admit. Estrogen is like the project manager of the female body, regulating mood, memory, sleep, and cognition. When estrogen levels dip, as they do in perimenopause and menopause, so too can serotonin and dopamine (Freeman et al., 2014). Translation: Your brain’s internal DJ starts playing “Losing My Religion” by R.E.M. on repeat.
I wasn’t having a breakdown. I was having a biochemical reality check.
It was during this hormonal haze that I stumbled—quite literally—into psychedelic-assisted therapy.
But First, What Even Is Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy?
Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy (PAT) is the guided use of psychoactive substances like psilocybin (magic mushrooms), MDMA, or ketamine in a clinical or ceremonial setting, led by trained professionals. The goal? To explore consciousness, process trauma, and stir the spiritual soup of self-discovery.
It’s not recreational. It’s intentional. Think less rave, more radical healing.
Clinical studies are catching up to what Indigenous traditions have known for centuries: psychedelics can promote emotional breakthroughs, reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression, and even help people redefine identity in transitional life phases (Carhart-Harris et al., 2021).
And the legality? Well, we’re getting there. Oregon has led the charge, opening legal psilocybin service centers in 2023. Colorado is launching its regulatory framework for licensed Natural Medicine centers in 2025. And New Mexico, bless her fiery spirit (and my beloved home state), is set to begin its licensing process in 2026.
The Journey Within
I embarked on my first psilocybin session in a carefully held, underground setting—not in a forest with a tambourine, though I’m not ruling that out for the future. My guides? A pair of rebels cloaked in radical compassion.
The first: a beloved psychiatrist who had quietly broken ranks with the medical model he once upheld. After decades of diagnosing and medicating, he’d found more truth—and more healing—in fungi than in his prescription pad. He was gentle but exacting, with a gaze that felt like it could see through your excuses and into your soul.
The second: an herbalist so luminous she practically glowed. Think Madonna (the Virgin, not the Vogue) crossed with your warmest childhood memory. She brewed teas that tasted like lullabies and whispered prayers into the air, as if they were part of the treatment plan.
This was therapy, but not the kind with a clipboard and a waiting room fern. There was prep work, consent forms, and a clear safety protocol. But more than that, there was reverence. Ceremony. Witnessing.
And then, something happened.
In that altered state, I met myself—not the mom, not the clinician, not the woman juggling 17 roles while quietly wondering where her joy went. I met the raw, ancient version of me. The wild one. The wise one. The one who didn’t need to prove anything to anyone.
She didn’t care about crow’s feet or stretch marks. She carried a torch in one hand and a coyote grin in the other. And she was fine. Like, cosmically fine.
The hot flashes? They weren’t betraying me—they were stoking a sacred fire. The mood swings? Grief and rebirth locked in a sacred tango. The tears, the snot, the gut-wrenching vulnerability were the messy exorcism I didn’t know I needed.
Of course, it wasn’t all blissed-out visions and spiritual downloads. Some moments felt like psychological surgery with no anesthesia. There was fear, doubt, and shame slithering up from the depths. But with those two facilitators anchoring the space, I didn’t run. I stayed. I molted.
And on the other side? Power. Not performative power. Not professional power. Something older. Earthier. Like I had passed through a gate and found the crone sitting on the other side, waiting for me all along.
Science Says I’m Not (Totally) Nuts
Psilocybin doesn’t just open your mind—it helps you see yourself differently. In the context of menopause, that shift can be profound. As hormones fluctuate, many of us face brain fog, mood swings, sleep disruptions, and a deep questioning of who we are. It’s not just physical, it’s personal, emotional, and often invisible to those around us.
Psilocybin-assisted therapy gave me a way to pause the mental noise and tune into something more profound. The process helped me reframe the experience of menopause—not as a breakdown or loss of identity, but as a natural and meaningful transition. What once felt like chaos started to make more sense. The hot flashes, the restlessness, the grief over my younger self weren’t signs of failure. They were signals that something new was trying to emerge.
And I’m not alone. Recent studies from 2023 and 2024 suggest that psilocybin may support emotional regulation, cognitive flexibility, and self-awareness during transitional life stages, such as menopause. When used with proper support, it’s not just about symptom relief—it’s about finding clarity and connection during a time that can otherwise feel disorienting and isolating.
In short, it helped me stop fighting my experience and start listening to it.
From Breakdown to Breakthrough
So no, I wasn’t losing my mind.
I was melting into the mystery, shedding the stories that no longer served me. The ones that told me aging was something to fight, that menopause was a clinical problem to be fixed, that my worth was tied to youth, productivity, or how much I could endure without complaint.
In the quiet after the journey, something inside me clicked. This wasn’t just healing, it was initiation.
That psilocybin journey didn’t just help me through menopause; it opened the door to a whole new chapter. A new career path began to unfold—one rooted in psychedelic support, women’s health, and the power of transformation. I realized that my story wasn’t unique, and that maybe, just maybe, I could help other women stop pathologizing their menopause and start honoring it instead.
And as for the Crone?
She’s not the villain we’ve been warned about. She doesn’t always eat youth—sometimes, she teaches it. She listens more than she lectures. She holds boundaries like sacred fire. She’s emotionally fluent, spiritually grounded, and uninterested in shrinking herself for anyone’s comfort.
Society has reduced her to a trope: the bitter hag, the “nasty woman,” the one shoved to the sidelines once her reproductive years end. But I met her. And she’s fierce. And she’s safe. She’s the part of us that survives, that knows, that refuses to disappear quietly. She is wisdom wrapped in wrinkles and joy that doesn’t ask permission.
So if you ever find yourself at 3:17 a.m., wondering if you’re going mad, consider this:
Maybe you’re not breaking down.
Maybe you’re just beginning.
Maybe you’re meeting her.
And maybe, like me, you’ll realize she was never here to destroy you—
She was here to walk you home.
~
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