🌕 Where nervous system wisdom rewrites the menopause playbook—part of The Reckoning Years series.
Mary, 57, knew exactly where every heating pad in her house lived.
Four years without a period. Four years of being told the pain should be gone by now. Yet her pelvis still ambushed her — cramps that came from nowhere, hips that seized in cold weather, a gut that never quite found rhythm. Some nights she woke sweaty, not from estrogen waves but from something older. Something inflammatory.
She’d been bounced between GI, rheumatology, pain clinic. Everything looked “normal.”
Normal rarely means regulated.
By the time she came to me, she wasn’t looking for another specialist to tell her the labs were fine. She was looking for someone to believe the body she lived in.
Near the end of our first session, almost as an afterthought, she said:
“I had a partial hysterectomy in my thirties because of the endo. They said that would fix it.”
That sentence mattered more than any imaging.
The Reframe
This wasn’t residual disease or phantom pain or “just getting older.”
This was neuroimmune memory — decades of inflammatory signaling that had trained her nervous system to expect threat, paired with fascial tension patterns that never got the memo that surgery happened. The tissue was gone. The wiring remained.
Pain can outlive its original source when the system learns it too well.
🌟 How Mary’s System Reorganized (Through the Vital Clarity Code Lens)
🌱 Regulate
The first shift wasn’t a supplement protocol — it was permission to stop bracing.
Mary had spent thirty years preparing for pain. Her breathing was shallow, her pelvic floor perpetually guarded, her nervous system scanning for the next flare. We started with breath cadence work — long exhales, not to “relax” but to signal safety. Gentle fascia movement that didn’t ask anything of her pelvis except to exist without vigilance.
Within three weeks, the baseline tension she’d forgotten she was carrying began to soften. She stopped waking at 3am expecting fire.
🌀 Rewire
Once the constant threat-scanning quieted, her body could receive input differently.
We added craniosacral work focused on pelvic decompression — not forcing release, but inviting it. Her gut, which had been reactive for years, started responding to the polyphenol-rich foods and bitters we’d introduced. The bloating that tracked with her old cycle timing began to fade.
Her system was learning a new default. Not “healed” — recalibrated.
🔥 Reclaim
Mary stopped apologizing for having a body that remembered.
She’d spent decades explaining herself to doctors who couldn’t find anything wrong. Now she understood: her nervous system had been doing exactly what it was designed to do — protect her from a threat it had learned too well. That wasn’t weakness. That was biology.
She started saying no to activities that left her wrung out. She stopped performing wellness for anyone else’s comfort.
✨ Resonate
Six months later, the change was quieter but more important.
Mary still had occasional flares — cold weather, high stress, the body remembers. But they were visitors now, not residents. She knew what to do when they arrived. She trusted her pelvis to tell her what it needed without catastrophizing what it meant.
Not because the pain vanished, but because she and her body were finally on the same side.
🪶 Micropractice: Pelvic Unbracing
Lie on your back, knees bent, feet flat.
Place one hand low on your belly, below the navel.
Breathe into that hand — not up into your chest. Let your exhale be longer than your inhale.
On each exhale, imagine your pelvic floor softening downward. Not pushing. Releasing.
This isn’t about “fixing” your pelvis.
It’s about reminding it that the war is over.
Mary’s pain wasn’t mysterious or imaginary.
It was memory — held in tissue and wiring.
We taught her system it was safe to let go.
Ready to decode your own patterns?
Curious what your body might be holding?
Start with a Vital Signal Check →
This case story is part of the Women’s Health Hub, where we explore how the pelvic terrain shifts across the midlife transition — and what actually helps.