Reclaiming the Rite: Michelle Wollaston's Conversation with Jane Hardwicke Collings

As part of International Menopause Month this October, I sat down with Jane Hardwicke Collings — grandmother, former home-birth midwife of thirty years, teacher, writer, and founder of the School of Shamanic Womancraft, an international women’s mystery school guiding thousands back to the sacred intelligence of their bodies.

Jane’s work weaves the physiology of womanhood with the forgotten spiritual dimensions of our cycles. For decades, she has taught menstrual, childbirth, and menopause education, helping women remember what was once instinctively known: these life stages are not medical conditions to solve but rites of passage to honour.

Our conversation unfolded less as an interview, and more as an initiation into remembering.

The Forgotten Midwife

When I asked what drew her from midwifery into this deeper work, Jane smiled and reminded me that midwife simply means “to facilitate transformation.” “In truth,” she said, “I never left midwifery. I just returned it to what it always was — guidance from womb to tomb.”

It was only later that she realised she had founded her mystery school at the start of her own perimenopausal journey. “What I thought was a career shift was actually my initiation,” she reflected. “I moved from attending births to teaching transformation — and it began right on time.”

Menopause as Sacred Architecture

Central to Jane’s teaching is the reframing of menopause — from problem to process.
“We’ve been taught to view menopause through a medical lens, as something to correct or suppress. But it’s not a disease,” she said. “It’s a physiological and energetic shift — the next expression of the same cyclical wisdom that guides menstruation and birth.”

She explained that as progesterone begins to fall, often years before the final bleed, something remarkable happens. “Progesterone is a mild sedative. For about forty years we’ve been gently numbed by it, buffered against the noise of our lives. When it declines, that sedation wears off — and suddenly everything we’ve tolerated or ignored becomes impossible to overlook.”

It’s not that women become angry or irrational — they become awake. “The body can no longer suppress what’s been numbed. Old grief, unmet longings, unspoken truths — they rise to be witnessed.”

These sacred symptoms — hot flushes, insomnia, surges of clarity — are not flaws but signals. They are the inner alchemy reshaping a woman from nurturer to elder, from caretaker to truth-teller.

The Noise and the Dark Goddess

We spoke of that unmistakable noise in midlife — the restlessness, the irritability, the insistence that something must change. Jane calls this the voice of the Dark Goddess: the inner force demanding transformation.

“The noise isn’t random,” she said. “It’s your deeper self calling for alignment — the part of you refusing to keep doing what no longer serves.”

I suggested that many women don’t ignore this voice deliberately — they simply don’t recognise it. Jane nodded.
“That’s because our culture hasn’t taught us how to listen. But when we trust it, that voice carries us across the threshold — from the wounded path to the healed one.”

Becoming Sage

To reframe this passage, Jane offers new language. Instead of pre- and post-menopause, she speaks of Sagescence — the third great stage of a woman’s life, after adolescence and motherhood.
“It’s not the beginning of the end,” she said. “It’s the beginning of your power.”

She then shared the story biologists tell of grandmother whales — the only other mammals known to experience menopause. When their fertility ends, they lead the pod. Without them, the group falters. “That’s our blueprint too,” Jane said.

“Menopause is where we step into leadership, carrying the wisdom of everything we’ve lived.”

Cycles as Compass

Cycles surfaced throughout our conversation — lunar cycles, life cycles, the rhythm of nature itself. “There’s only one cycle,” Jane said. “Birth, growth, full bloom, harvest, decay, death, rebirth. Everything moves through it.”

When we understand this, menopause no longer feels like an ending but part of a greater seasonal intelligence. “It’s the autumn of our lives — a time to harvest experience, release what’s complete, and prepare the ground for what’s next.”

Re-membering Ourselves

As we closed, Jane returned to something simple yet profound:
“We don’t visit nature — we are nature. And nothing in nature keeps growing forever and stays healthy. Change is how we stay alive.”

Her words stayed with me. Menopause, like every transition, is not something to endure but something to be initiated through. In honouring the body’s intelligence, in listening to the dark goddess within, we do not lose ourselves — we return to the woman we were meant to become.

You can find Jane Hardwicke Collings at:
www.janehardwickecollings.com
https://schoolofshamanicwomancraft.com