A Space Between: Holistic Wellness for Menopause and Beyond

By Marla Privitera

Have you put on weight and the things you typically do to take it off no longer work? Do you feel like you don't know what to eat anymore and are becoming resentful of everyone on social media telling you to just eat like they do? Or maybe you're not really sure why you are reading this book description, but know deep down there is a better way to live? If you said "yes" to any one of those questions, A Space Between will be a light on your path.

A Space Between: Holistic Wellness for Menopause and Beyond is a reckoning. This captivating self-help debut, written in the tradition of storytelling, is both an inspiration and a guide through the transition of menopause. Whether you find yourself beginning to question your estrogen levels, waking up in the night soaked in sweat, noticing you've gained some unwanted belly fat, or perhaps have been postmenopausal for years, A Space Between has something for you. 

Through six reflective chapters, readers will learn to break up with their old ways, write a new story, and cultivate a life of health and purpose. Marla is a certified holistic wellness coach, founder of INDIGO for menopausal women, a certified yoga instructor, and a Reiki practitioner. More importantly, she navigated the mapless journey of menopause alone and lived to tell her story. While she's still on her path, she eagerly invites you to join her, and learn to cultivate your best life.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marla Privitera
• Release date: Mar 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215628119

Book preview

A Space Between

HOLISTIC WELLNESS FOR MENOPAUSE AND BEYOND

Marla Privitera

Copyright © 2023 by Marla Privitera

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This book is a memoir. It reflects the author’s present recollections of experiences over time. Some names and characteristics have been changed, some events have been compressed, and some dialogue has been recreated.

This book is dedicated to every woman who wants more from life.

Contents

About This Book

My Journey’s Timeline

My Journey

2011–2014: Washington, D.C.

2008–2010: Belize

1966–1984: Fredonia, New York

2000–2002: Peace Corps Service, El Salvador

September 2003: San Salvador, El Salvador

Holistic Wellness Quiz:

Chapter 1

Exercise

Chapter 2

Exercise

Chapter 3

Exercise

Chapter 4

Exercise

Summer of 2018: Chicago, Illinois, and Van Buren Point on Lake Erie, New York

Chapter 5

Exercise

Sleep

Supplements

Exercise

Chapter 6

2003–2005: Washington, D.C.

Exercise

Autumn 2011: Washington, D.C.

Exercise

Chapter 7

Summary

Typical Daily Routine

Acknowledgments

Appendix

About the Author

About This Book

ASpace Between: Holistic Wellness for Menopause and Beyond is a reckoning. This captivating self-help debut, written in the tradition of storytelling, is both an inspiration and a guide through the transition of menopause. Whether you find yourself beginning to question your estrogen levels, waking up in the night soaked in sweat, noticing you’ve gained some unwanted belly fat, or perhaps have been postmenopausal for years, A Space Between has something for you. Through six reflective chapters, readers will learn to break up with their old ways, write a new story, and cultivate a life of health and purpose. Marla’s journey toward physical, emotional, and spiritual wellness was neither linear nor well lit. And while she’s still on her path, she eagerly invites you to join her. 

Marla tells her story not chronologically, but rather as a narrative that puts you in her shoes at pivotal points of growth and insight throughout her life. She’s included some stories (indicated by italics) within the self-help narrative to highlight the principles and insights she wishes to impart to you. A timeline of where and when is offered here to help you place events chronologically if you wish, or in case you get lost in the jungle and wonder if you’re in Costa Rica, Belize, or El Salvador! Just don’t be surprised to find the beginning at the end, because, as Marla has learned, life is beautifully cyclical and forgiving in nature. 

My Journey’s Timeline

My Journey

2011–2014: Washington, D.C.

Ican’t finish pulling up my pants."

It was both a question and a statement of panic.

"I can’t finish pulling up my pants?" I said again, out loud, though I was the only one in the room. 

I’ll never forget that moment. It was August 2012. I’d just celebrated my forty-sixth birthday, and I was flying high with a new sense of self—a self I’d lost a long time ago.  

I’d spent most of the summer in yoga pants, walking all over the city to teach yoga classes. That morning, I was dressing to head back to my professional life as an administrator at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. I’d chosen to wear my favorite pair of blue trousers from the back of my closet. I’d worn them on my last day of work before summer vacation, not two months earlier, and here I stood, unable to yank them over my thighs, not to mention my glutes.

There was no transition between Do these pants make my butt look big? to Whose ass is THAT? 

That summer, I was newly divorced after twenty-two years of marriage and had been so caught up in my newfound freedom that I failed to register the fact that I was actually perimenopausal. Never mind the hot flashes and erratic periods—I was still eating the same foods with the same mindless gusto. But I’d put on fifteen pounds.

That moment, staring at myself in the mirror with my pants bunched around my thighs, became a moment of shame and what felt like a cosmic slap in the face of who I was trying to become.  

For too many years I’d been living under the illusion that my marriage was to blame for everything I didn’t like about myself and my life. I’d deluded myself that once I was divorced, I would finally become the person I was meant to be. Ending my marriage would finally allow me to live out my dreams instead of blindly, resentfully following my husband’s. That first summer after leaving my husband, I thought I was on my way and figuring it out on my own. The reality was I hadn’t spent any time trying to sort through the damage done to my heart and my sense of self. I had no idea just how fragile I was until I saw her reflection in the mirror. It seemed as though the universe was laughing at me for thinking I knew who I was and what I needed. 

Look at you, it said with a smirk. You can’t even pull up your pants!  

Along with those pants, I threw away any desire I had to become the person I longed for, and instead persisted for four more years, living out what seemed to be my destiny: an unfulfilled, inauthentic, lesser version of who God intended. During those years, I gave into a small-thinking mind; all of my old, limiting beliefs; and four more wasted years entangled in another toxic relationship even worse than my marriage.

I put on more weight and comforted myself with the deeply rooted view from generations of women who made similar excuses for the choices in their lives: The view that my age and menopause were the universal signal to exit stage left. The view that menopause isn’t a beginning, certainly not a time for creation or re-creation, and definitely not a time to lose some weight. 

No. Menopause meant it was time for me to take the back seat on the bus of life because, don’t you know, You’ll never lose that belly fat now. And Who’s going to hire a woman pushing fifty? And It’s too late to make any real changes. Your fate is sealed. 

In the Hindu tradition, there’s a deity named Shiva, the God of destruction. Lord Shiva destroys the impurities of the mind in order to ready the body for a state of