Conversation with Barbara Marx Hubbard
Barbara: Now, what I want to do is go into the Regenopause. And then I’d like to just hold a question for me is: When the woman is completely vocationally aroused, what is the effect on the man?
Barnet: It’s very threatening.
Barbara: It’s very threatening. Let me just go through Regenopause. This desire to express, to create, can happen to a woman now at any age since we’re enormously privileged, this generation of women. Now, and you think in this culture, even when I got married in the 1950s, as I’ve said many times, it didn’t matter how educated you were, it didn’t matter what you wanted to do: get married, have as many babies as possible, and take care of your husband. And you know what? It was a cultural imprint, until it wasn’t. And it wasn’t, in the 60s, and 70s, and 80s.
Now, here’s the discovery of Regenopause. If we’re actually shifting from self-reproduction to self-evolution, if the same capability that can create a baby is now being expressed in the feminine to create a new form of self. You know, we talk a lot about the feminine even in the idealized feminine. I think there’s an evolving feminine here – and masculine – that we haven’t seen before.
Now, what I experienced – now, this when you go postmenopausal – the awakening of the desire to express and create; vocational arousal can happen at any age to a woman or a man. But the unusual thing is that when a woman turns 50, there is a bio-evolutionary change. Her body is no longer creating eggs. And ordinarily, in the past generations, that meant to the feminine that she was in decline, she was getting older, and her most important function was no longer there.
I have found the exact opposite of that. As long as my body was producing eggs and I was producing babies [Laughs], it was very difficult for me to be giving birth to the authentic feminine self. In fact, I couldn’t do it.
When I started to do that and I turned 50, there were a couple of interesting experiences I had. I was cleaning out my basement in Washington, D.C., and I heard a little inner voice. And it said, “Would you like to die?” And I wasn’t at all stressed or suicidal. And I said, “No,” and then it said, “Would you like to get Cancer or would you like to rejuvenate?”
Cancer is the body’s panicked effort to grow without a plan. And rejuvenation is when you get the deeper plan, and you begin to actualize it. Later on, I called it rejuvenation through guided creativity. That is to say, deep patterning of who you are. I was 50, and I said, “No I don’t want to get cancer. I want to rejuvenate.” And I didn’t even notice menopause. I was so busy. And I ran for Vice President, just at that time.
So I didn’t notice it, until about actually in my early 70s, that I got some illnesses. I had a suddenly ruptured appendix; I was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, which is a kind of a slow motion leukemia which isn’t fatal, but actually it’s a proliferation of the white blood cells. And I thought, “What does this mean?” And I went to a healer in Maui. And this is the experience that I want to share here, and then open it up to Barnet.
She asked me to go back in my life and detox, detoxify every single thought that I could remember that was negative, hurt, wounded, failure – if I could go all the way back. And when you detox the thought, you had to recode it to a statement of what was your choice. And I went back to 72, 70, all the way so that I could remember into my mother’s womb and back out. And I found myself in the Elysian Fields. Just with the Greek masters beyond me. And I was with a group of people sitting on a ledge. And we were all going to jump off together. [laughs] And we were to find each other exactly during the period of the planetary birth.
Barnet: Cliff-jumpers.
Barbara: In other words, I jumped off while being in this chrysalis. And I have a memory – I think I loved the Greek philosophers, and the Jewish scribes, and Jesus. Those are my real favorites. So, then what I realized is that – as I had detoxed all of this – and I realized that whatever the memory was of that introduction into current reality, that whatever I was was not – I’d died already. I had continuity with something in there, and I began to feel lighter and lighter. And I asked the universe, “Is there a word to describe how I’m feeling?” And it came right like that. The word is Regenopause.
When a woman passes 50, and she starts approaching what would be really an aging process, if she is vocationally deeply impelled by the impulse of creation, this impulse within her is – there’s a pause in the body, because the body has a tendency to degenerate and go. But the spirit, vitality, creativity is going the other way. It’s coming up. And if you could understand, you’re an older woman – that feeling of depression, or I’m not going to get to do anything more, but if you actually cultivate the creative impulse inside you – I think of this going down, this coming up, what you will find, you pause, “You know, oh, I’m not degenerating or dying, I’m regenerating and evolving.”
Now, when you say that to yourself as a woman in her 70s, and now I’m 80, I’m still saying it big time – is that the cells begin to recognize that there’s more to do. And if you can at that time deepen your sense of the design of your expression within the world – if your vocation or life purpose clarifies for you – and if you can feel more or less on the mark with the compass of joy – this is my experience, that the cells want to give you more energy.
The consciousness of the feminine co-creator is activating at the very deepest level of the cells. And you know, Bruce Lipton and others in this whole epigenetics, whether they say it’s not the DNA that is running the show, it’s the membrane and the consciousness feeding into the membrane.
Barnet: Yup, the Meta.
Barbara: Meta – that is activating the script in DNA according to the membrane filtering in this consciousness.
So I began to filter in, “I am in Regenopause.” [Laughs] “I am a co-creator. My time has barely come, because I’m born for the time of the planetary birth, and it’s barely happening. So if I were to die now it’d be a big waste of [Laughs] evolutionary time.”
And I became aware that there was a new energy. This is not just, “I was doing better at something.” And I began to ask other women, “Have you felt a new kind of energy, where it could be slightly different than even any energy you had at any stage of your life?” And I’ve been surprised, Barnet, the number of women, post-menopause, who feel a new energy that they haven’t fully defined before.
And I’ve wondered whether, when I say, “missing link in the evolution of the species,” since we know that we are going to have greater longevity, if we don’t destroy our civilization altogether, we know that we’re going to have – we are having extended intelligence. We know that we’re in the living noösphere, connected heart with heart and center with center, right on this offering that we’re doing. We know that we’re going through a crisis of birth, and if we can find our way through this through response-ability –
Barnet: Uh-huh.
