We are transitory creatures who live our lives in stages. The most obvious transitions are birth, puberty, menopause, and the biggie—death. And there is proper preparation for each.

Few of us felt prepared as children to become adults, but when puberty hit, bam, there we were. We made it through that transition, albeit not very gracefully; one day we were carefree children, and all of a sudden we were under the influence of exploding hormones, expanding bodies, and emotional extremes. Fewer yet embrace the transitions of menopause and andropause because our society so values youth over aging and digs its heels in with bio-identical hormones and biohacking. Industries are built around anti-aging, remedies for sagging, wrinkly skin, and ways to pretend we are younger than we are. We resist being defined as seniors, dishonoring the natural seasons of life. Yet there is a dawning revival to re-enliven the reverence for elderhood that most all indigenous cultures once honored.

As a whole, our society hasn’t been exposed to models that initiate us through these important rites of passage that take us from one season of life to the next. We slide from the spring of adolescence to adulthood to middle age without noticing the transitions that mark where we’ve been or where we’re going. This lack of acknowledgement has left its mark on how we arrive kicking and screaming at our final winter, having never honored the fall that preceded it. Albert Camus tells us in Return to Tipasa: “In the midst of winter, I found there was within me an invincible summer.” Albert had to do some real soul-searching to reach this realization. He took notice of humanity’s absurd and meaningless routines. Only when they began to question the very reason for their existence would they be able to look squarely in the face of how to rectify this business of dying.

Yet during the ongoing vicissitudes of life, ripe occasions arise where we are asked to face these matters head-on. Every time we are confronted with the inevitable loss of a previous way of being, we lose ground and have to feel our way into its next expression. These transitional passages beg for grace and dignity as we maneuver through the loss of our youth, our fertility, a spouse, or a terminal diagnosis. Depending on how we handle it, what comes next may just reveal our own invincible summer.

If you are moving from one phase of life to another and are experiencing uncomfortable symptoms, there is likely some level of resistance, consciously or unconsciously. And Chinese medicine is poised to help us lighten our load around these transitions and to embrace what’s coming next.

Randine Anderson Lewis, PhD, LAc, author of The Infertility Cure, The Way of the Fertile Soul, The Spirit of the Blood, Birthing the Tao, Pharmaceutical Energetics, and Daoist Death Medicine, has been a leading expert in the field of integrative Chinese medicine. After studying both Western and Eastern medicine, Dr. Lewis founded numerous clinics and educational programs; she lectures internationally, and conducts intensive retreats and educational workshops for patients and practitioners utilizing ancient healing approaches that hail from Taoist and East Asian philosophy. She is on faculty at Daoist Traditions College of Chinese Medical Arts, where she has helped develop curriculum that she teaches in their integrative medicine doctoral program.

The processes she has developed for fertility, menopause, and end-of-life care help facilitate dying to our limitations in order to awaken our souls to the eternal recognition of our own sacred incarnation.