ACTIVE SHAKTI

In February 2023, I recorded a video for my boss explaining why I couldn't come in that day. I sent it. I waited. She didn't reply. And eventually I went back into the chat and deleted it — because I had exposed myself completely, and the silence on the other end felt worse than if I'd said nothing at all.

Perimenopause does not arrive as one thing. It arrives as many things at once — anxiety that seems to come from nowhere, unexplained weight changes, sleep disruptions, a sudden intolerance for stimulation that you used to absorb without blinking. And for women who have built their lives around high output and high capacity, it can feel like the ground has shifted.

Somatics is a word that appears increasingly in wellness and coaching spaces, often without much precision about what it actually means. Korina Tsipoura, a somatic and energy coach who works under the name Amorphous Being, offers a definition that I find both useful and grounding: somatics is the technology already built into the body for communicating, storing, and releasing. It is not something applied from the outside.

Delphine has worked for over 25 years as a VP of product management in global technology. She runs teams across time zones — engineers, data scientists, product managers — and does it as a single mother of two. She is precisely the kind of woman who appears to be managing everything. And several years ago, her nervous system stopped cooperating entirely.

You cannot build sustainable performance on top of a chronically activated nervous system. Recovery isn't optional. It's the work.