Turning Heat Into Energy: A Hot Flash Meditation

As you become aware of your temperature rising, give it your full attention. Breathe into the heat, breathe with it. Watch yourself heating up like a steam engine, like a volcano. Feel the heat rising up your torso, out every pore, exuding energy. Pretend you're Pele, but don't let yourself explode. [1]

Gather the heat as fuel. Gather it into your aura. Expand your aura as you get hotter and hotter. Store the heat as if your body is a receptor, a solar panel.

Store the heat to energize your creativity.

Store the heat to fuel your will.

Store the heat to power you up.

Vision the triangle of femaleness that once pointed down into your body, sending your creative energies into childbirth, nurturing, mothering. See now how the triangle has reversed. It points upward into mind and spirit. Direct your gathered energy towards the point of the triangle, transforming your fire into endurance, patience, compassion, love, whatever qualities you need in your life-as-crone.

Let the heat--pure energy--help you transform. Help you overcome the sadness or barriers of age. Help you become who you are.

My hot flash meditation was born gradually during the nightly sweat ritual. When tossing the covers off didn't work, when breathing deeply didn't work, when walking in the chill night air didn't work, and I lay in the darkness alternately sweat-covered and chilled, sweat-covered and chilled, I began to try to use the heat instead of fight it.

It's a piece of my efforts to transform an experience filled with loss, mood swings, and uncomfortable feelings into one of empowerment. Women in many other cultures don't experience hot flashes at all (diet appears to make a huge difference, as does attitude);those of us stuck with them might as well put them to good use.

Every time I do the meditation I feel less disempowered. It helps me shift my subtle energies: even when I've been particularly sleepless and frustrated, the following day I shrug my shoulders rather than feeling sorry for myself; I enter the new day with hope.

First printed in SageWoman, Autumn 2000. Appeared in Down There Magazine, Imbolc 2005.