Where the Womb Enters Winter
- The heART of Ritual
- Nov 1, 2025
- 5 min read
Menopause is most often framed as loss – of fertility, rhythm, relevance, ease. It is medicalised, managed, and softened, yet rarely understood in terms of season. What is absent from much of modern societal language is a more fundamental recognition: the womb, like the land, has a winter.
Nothing that lives is organised for perpetual outward motion. Growth withdraws. Energy consolidates. Life turns inward in order to endure. In indigenous cultures shaped by land and season, winter is not regarded as a failure of vitality but as its necessary reorganisation – a phase of containment, memory, and depth. The womb follows this same law.
For much of a woman’s life, the womb is oriented outward. It cycles, releases, responds. It is shaped by fertility, desire, expectation, and function. Whether or not it bears children, it bleeds in dialogue with the world. It is available. It adapts. It gives of itself rhythmically. When bleeding ends, that outward orientation ceases. This is the winter of the womb. The womb does not disappear, nor does it become inert. It withdraws. The energy that once moved outward in regular cycles gathers and settles. This is why menopause is so often experienced as weight rather than relief, density rather than emptiness. Winter does not feel light. It feels concentrated.
Here, precision matters. A human life moves through archetypal seasons in a broad, linear sense – beginning, growth, fullness, decline. At the same time, the body continues to live within the cyclical seasons of earth, sun, and moon. These rhythms do not replace one another. They operate simultaneously. Menopause does not place the whole being into winter. It brings winter into dominance within the womb.
Spring still arrives. Summer still burns. Autumn still gathers. The wider cycles continue. What changes is the womb’s orientation. It is no longer organised around outward release. It becomes a place of containment rather than exchange. This is not passivity. Winter is not dormancy. The absence of bleeding is not the absence of life. The womb remains responsive, relational, alive. What has changed is not vitality, but direction.
This inward turn sits uneasily within modern society, which is organised around uninterrupted productivity, visibility, and availability. Menstruation is frequently treated as an inconvenience to be managed or suppressed. Menopausal changes are framed as symptoms to be postponed or overridden wherever possible. This is not a judgement on individual choices, nor a denial of the necessity of medical intervention in many cases. It is an observation of a broader societal reflex. What is at work here is a colonising logic.
Colonisation imposes external authority over organic systems. It overrides indigenous rhythms in favour of uniform output. It treats land – and bodies – as territory to be regulated, optimised, and extracted from, rather than lived with. Within this logic, seasonal withdrawal becomes a problem, and winter becomes something to be resisted.
Indigenous cultures did not understand winter in this way. They understood that withdrawal was not failure, but fidelity to life’s deeper order. The body retains this understanding, even when society does not.
As the womb enters winter, perception alters. Many women notice a sharp change in tolerance – for noise, for dishonesty, for lives built on accommodation and compromise. What was once endured becomes untenable. This is often dismissed as irritability, instability, or loss of patience. It is more accurately understood as winter discernment.
In winter, the land no longer accommodates excess. It does not soften itself for convenience. What remains must be essential. The body follows the same economy. The womb, no longer divided between inner life and external demand, stops buffering the self from truth. The body is no longer willing to lie.
This does not confer wisdom automatically. Winter reveals, but it does not redeem. Turning inward creates the conditions for depth, not a guarantee of it. Authority is not bestowed by age, hormones, or biology. It is shaped by what one is willing to face once distraction and dispersal are no longer available. And much is gathered.
Grief deferred because there was no time to tend it.
Truths swallowed to survive.
Lives shaped by necessity rather than choice.
Nothing is expelled now. Everything is retained – not as burden, but as substance.
This is why older women were once regarded with seriousness rather than sentimentality. Not because wisdom was assumed, but because weight was evident. A wintered womb carries consequence. It lends gravity. Not the authority of certainty or performance, but the authority that comes from having lived with the results of one’s choices.
Menopause was never meant to make a woman smaller. Winter does not make the land smaller. It reveals structure – bone, pattern, foundation. It returns life to itself.
Seen this way, menopause is not a malfunction, nor a decline to be corrected. It is a seasonal truth. The womb’s winter. The phase in which outward adaptation gives way to inward coherence.
Nothing has ended. The body has merely turned homeward.
© 2025 Niamh Criostail and Heartlands Publishing. All rights reserved.
For those who wish to remain in seasonal conversation with this work, the seasonal newsletter is where the full-length writings are shared and where exclusive invitations to view each seasonal collection are quietly extended. This is where Irish cosmology, the Celtic Wheel of the Year, elemental philosophy, archetypal psychology, mythology and folklore, land-based practice, and traditional ways of making are carried in depth throughout the year.
It is not a mailing list, but a steady correspondence – written for those who value continuity, craft, and a slower, more faithful relationship with the seasons. This is where the work is received in full, and where each collection is revealed.
Sign up at theheartofritual.com/seasonalnewsletter
For those who feel drawn to explore more, the following programme is currently available via my Online Hedge School:
Womb Rhythms™ is a self-paced online offering, a layered exploration of cyclical embodiment through the elemental lens of Earth, Sun, and Moon.
Rooted in Irish cosmology, myth, the menstrual cycle, and the subtle anatomy, Womb Rhythms™ invites you to walk an ancient path in a contemporary way – gently, thoroughly, and in rhythm with your own unfolding.
It is a gathering space for remembering: of what the land teaches, what the womb remembers, and what lives just beneath the surface of our modern forgetting. In the Irish tradition, this is the path of the triple spiral – a journey that honours the physical/collective womb, the planetary womb, and the cosmic womb. These are the three cauldrons of creation that hold the story of our bodies, our species, and our place in the universe.
We tend not only to our own inner cauldron – the anatomical womb, whether present or energetically sensed – but also to the collective womb of humankind, and the great cosmic womb from which all life emerges. This is a path of layered remembrance and deep responsibility, where we honour the sacred in all its forms: biological, ecological, and celestial.
Womb Rhythms is a full-length legacy offering of nearly 95,000 words – an initiatory journey through the Fourfold Womb woven with Irish cosmology, elemental ritual, and ancestral remembering. It remains a single, cohesive body of work to honour its spiral structure and depth.
