Ep 160: Finding Your Life’s Purpose Through Menopause

Dr. Deb Butler: Welcome to Thinner Peace in Menopause and Beyond. This is Dr. Deb Butler, master life and weight coach, and as always, your coach. Today is episode number 160. Let’s talk about menopause. Stay tuned.

Hello, all my dear friends. How are you today? I am doing—well, let me tell you how I’m doing because it’s kind of interesting. This is not my first podcast on this episode. This is actually my second podcast on this episode. So I just wanted to say a few things about that because I actually did this podcast a few days ago. And once I sent it off to my producer to have him edit it and get it all ready for you, I remember, and he told me that I actually didn’t have the right microphone on and he tried to fix it, and then when I heard it, I go, “Oh, my gosh. I cannot give this to you. This is not acceptable. It sounded like I was underwater.” So here I am today, giving you the same message I tried to give you three days ago.

And this is what I’m thinking about it because I really like to always manage my mind because when I first thought, “Oh, my gosh, I have to do this over again,” I didn’t have really very happy thoughts about it. But this is what I’ve decided to think, and I think I’ve told you this before because this is not my first rodeo of redoing podcasts. But I was wanting to talk to you about a very particular thing because I just did a webinar, and I wanted to talk to you specifically about menopause and how I look at it. And I’m thinking that the podcast that I did three days ago was not really the complete message that I needed to give you. And the reason that I know that is because I’m not giving it to you—I’m doing another one.

So I think today, I have something for you that I didn’t get to convey to you three days ago, and now I get the opportunity to make sure you get this message. So this is what I want to say, about menopause. When I did a webinar, and I think some of you were on it, but I did it about a week and a half ago, and it was on the key to everything. And what I was talking about in that episode, in that webinar, was how your mind—the management of your mind—creates everything that you want, and I was talking a lot about how to use the model.

And, of course, the model is basically five components about how your mind works. Basically, there’s a circumstance that triggers a thought, and a thought that creates a feeling, and the feeling that creates an action, and an action that creates a result, and we call it the CTFAR model, or I call it the key to everything.

Anywho, when I was talking about this, and I was talking about myself, I always like to say a little bit about me and my story – what’s so interesting is when I was talking about my story in this webinar, I didn’t say anything about my weight. Usually, I like to tell you my weight story because most of you are coming to me because of your weight. But in this, what I talked about more, is I talked about why I became a life coach, and what menopause had to do with that.

And so in this episode, what I want to talk to you about is, yes, when I was going through menopause, there’s no doubt about it, that it was a wake up call to me that I had to get reconnected to my body, and I needed to learn how to manage weight because what I was doing basically is eating my emotions and then working with an external source to try to help me manage my weight instead of connecting to myself feelings and not eating them, in which case I would then manage my weight, which is, of course, what I ended up doing. But that’s not what I talked about in the webinar.

What I talked about in the webinar was that, as uncomfortable as I was in menopause both physically and emotionally, I was also the most open to different opportunities that I would never have been aware of before, if I had been so comfortable. And when I talk about discomfort, I talk about it from a very physical point of view because when I was going through menopause, I did have a lot of physical symptoms. One, I wasn’t sleeping, I was crabby, I was irritable, I was having hot flashes, and I was thinking, “This is it.” And you know, from an emotional standpoint, I wasn’t able to lose weight like I used to; I wasn’t able to use all my tricks. But the main thing that happened in menopause for me, which is what I usually talk about to you about is about the weight thing.

The actually most important thing that happened to me was that I actually found my own voice. And that’s what I want to offer you today is that, yes, menopause has so many opportunities for you based on discomfort, based on the physical discomfort of the body, but also based on the emotional discomfort of the body due to either imbalanced hormones, the body changing—there’s so many things that are going on. But I do believe it is a time in a woman’s life. And I think we have basically two times where we have this most amount of hormonal influx or de-flux—depending on how you look at it—is adolescence and the menopause.

In adolescence, of course, if you have teenage girls or you remember, it’s a very emotional time—physically, mentally—the whole thing. But look what happens, it’s like you watch people find their way in the world, they find out who they are kind of, we hope. Adolescence ends up into deciding what you’re going to do with the rest of your life from adolescence into your 20s. Menopause, I believe, is basically the same type of opportunity. However, there’s one big difference, and it’s called experience.

In menopause, you have years of experience—wisdom that you have figured out based on what works and what doesn’t work. And as your body goes through this change, emotionally and physically, you are also so much more aware of what you want and what you don’t want. And that’s the story that I ended up telling in my webinar about myself, is that in my career, especially where I was a chiropractor—I had my own practice, I worked with my husband, there were a lot of beautiful things about it—but there’s always something that I felt like I was missing something, that I wasn’t quite doing using my voice in the way that I wanted to.

And when I was in that type of thinking space, and I was going through menopause, which was making everything so much more uncomfortable, that is when I was watching Oprah one evening, and Oprah basically looked at me in the TV. I felt like she was looking and talking to me, and she said, “God has bigger plans than you have for yourself.” And I thought she was talking to me because right after that, somebody in her audience raises their hand and says something about Martha Beck, who was the first coach that I trained with, and she was also one of my very favorite authors on how the mind works and also just about life in general.

And so when I heard that she was giving a seminar, I was so excited because I didn’t know she did anything like that, and I felt that all of this was for me. And I think part of that was my huge discomfort of being where I was physically and mentally due to menopause, and then I was open to finding something different.

And so, I started looking online about her and about what she offered. And I am telling you that when I looked at everything, I didn’t quite realize that she was really teaching you how to become a life coach. I just wanted to go be with her, and I wanted her to tell me how to manage my own mind and how she does it and how she teaches people.

So it took me a while to actually sign up because it was really expensive. And I thought I could—I thought that was way too much money to invest in myself, and also, you know, I had all these things, probably like you, “Oh, my gosh. The time. I’ll have to leave. I’ll have to go away for a while.” I think it was a three or four-day seminar at the time, and I’m thinking, “Oh, my gosh. I can’t do that,” and “It’s so expensive,” and “What if this?” and “What if that?” and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, it would not go away—this message that I needed to go see her. And so finally, on my birthday, I paid the money and signed up to go and be with her.

And I will tell you what, I did it on my birthday because I think it’s the highest day of the year to put out what you want. But all of this happened during this time, right? I knew what I didn’t want. I had an idea of what I really did want, and there was a lot of fear, a lot of discomfort, but I finally decided to do it. And I will tell you what, from that moment that I did that, my life has never been the same.

And that is what I want to offer you, too, about what you’re going through because most of you who are listening are at some part of this “menopausal transformation,” as I like to call it. And I want you to use it, not only to connect to your body but also to connect to your spirit and your soul because everything lives in your body, which is the biggest thing that I learned when I started working with Martha Beck—is our emotions live in our body, and our signals and our signs live in our body through our emotions—and are we listening? So when I was there and found out that, actually, this was like a training for becoming a life coach—and I know, you’re thinking how could I not know that. You know what, it’s interesting about how you ended up doing the things that you do.

And I had no more desire to become a life coach. I just never thought about it. I just wanted to be with her. But by the time we were done, I knew that this was something I needed to pursue. And one of the things that she said, she says, “Now when you leave here today, I want you to think about a sign, once you leave here, that will make you know that this is what you’re supposed to be doing.”

And so what I decided to make that sign was like a butterfly landing on me because I have absolutely had a thing for butterflies. And once I left that, I was meeting my husband, and we were going to a bed and breakfast, and I want you to know that I signed—I was the one that made these reservations for the bed and breakfast. And when we actually drove up to this bed and breakfast, the name of it was called La Mariposa.

Now, I did the work on this, but I never thought about what La Mariposa meant and, of course it means butterfly. And from the moment that we went into these iron gates of this bed and breakfast, which was a butterfly— a sculpture of a butterfly, the iron gates, the people that greeted us, they said, “I hope you like butterflies.” This is how they greeted us because the gentleman that was bringing us in said, “My wife loves butterflies.” So I have to say our room had butterfly sheets, butterfly lamps, everything was painted with butterflies—there were butterflies everywhere. And that is what I walked into after I decided that I was going to do this.

And I want to tell you that life has a way of showing you if you’re open. And I do believe that we were all made as women, obviously, to go through menopause because we do. It’s like you don’t get a choice. We were made—as much as we were made to eat when we’re hungry and stop when we’re full—we were made for our bodies to go through the stage, and not just a physical stage, it is an emotional stage. It is a time of huge transformation. That’s what I want to offer you today, is that it is time for you to transition; it is time for you to transform, and I would like you to think of it as a butterfly.

And because the butterfly means so much to me, the program that I actually created that I use with all my clients is based on the metamorphosis of a butterfly. It’s so strange how all of this comes to pass because now this has been like maybe 15 years ago that this all happened to me. And I’m on the other side looking at it, talking to you. And all I can say to you is, “Oh my gosh. I cannot believe it,” that because of my discomfort, the beauty of where I’m at right now was due to that. I was pushed physically, emotionally, spiritually, and because of what was going on in my body, that happens to all of us.

What are you meant to become? Who are you? What do you really, really, really want? Now, maybe some of you don’t know for sure. But maybe you know that you really, really want something, or you really, really want to change, or you just want to be more connected to your body. Because wanting to be more connected to your body—the beauty of why I decided to use weight for this metamorphosis is because so much is tied into it. As you know, from all the women that you’ve heard on my podcast who I talk to, about my program, is they don’t talk to you about, “Oh, I lost a zillion pounds,” or whatever. You know they’re all losing weight—that’s not the emphasis that they talk about when I interview them.

They talk about how they’ve changed. They talk about their transformation. They talk about how they’re not the same woman because they have used this program to help transform themselves during this period of time, which is available to every single woman. It’s a wake-up call. It’s a wake-up call for the next half of your life.

So when I created this program, I created it in three stages, and I did it like in the stages of a butterfly. And this may sound corny to you, but when you see all these spiritual messages that I had and how I’ve created it from my mind from a spiritual message, that’s what’s in store for you too.

And so, when I created the program, I created it with the first stage of the first phase called “Rethink,” which I call it like the caterpillar stage. And the caterpillar stage is when you learn to look at your mind and first learn how to manage it. And that once you learn how to manage your mind, then I created the second phase of this program that’s called “Reset.” And reset is like the cocoon stage. And if you think about the cocoon, it’s kind of when the caterpillar kind of disintegrates, and this is what I call the second stage of reset, when we basically take flour and sugar out of our body, and we really start concentrating on what’s happening in our physical bodies and in our minds.

And from that, when we go from reset, we go to the third phase, which is called Reinvent,” which is when you turn into a butterfly—it’s the transformation of the butterfly. And it’s when you can combine the management of your mind and the physicality of your body to create the life that you want.

And I got to tell you, you listen to some of these transformations, of these interviews, that I’ve done on my podcast before, and it’s amazing because this is really, I feel like I see women that transform into these butterflies all the time. And this is what they get to do, and this is what they get to be, and I want to offer that to you too. You can do the same thing with or without me.

But if you would decide to work with me, you would work within these three stages in order to transform, in order to do—like I use the transformation from menopause, I use the metaphor for the metamorphosis of a butterfly. And I believe that’s what you’re all meant to do. And this is the stage that I want to help you make that transformation, and I believe I have the tools to help you.

So if this is making sense to you, and you’re in this stage of life, maybe you want help. All you need to do is you can have a 30-minute session with me, and I can tell you if my program will help. And if it will, I’ll tell you exactly how it’ll work; if it won’t, I promise you, you will leave with very valuable information.

So all you have to do is go to drdebbutler.com/workwithme, and you can set it up. Don’t wait, and don’t hesitate. Make this the time for you. Make this the time to invest in yourself, with your time, with your money, and with your 100% commitment. Your life is waiting for you. And you know, I’m not ending this podcast without telling you, and with whatever else you do, please, please, please be kind to yourself, and treat yourself as your most beloved because sweetheart, you are. See you next week. Bye-bye.

Dr. Michael Butler: I would like to invite you to correspond with Dr. Deborah. Go to iTunes, drdebbutler.com/itunes, and you can review the show, and you can even give some helpful suggestions on what you would like to talk about in the future to accomplish your mindfulness in your journey into mindfulness. Thank you.