The Empress Phase
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A book and course by Ariele Myers, L.Ac.
The Empress
Phase
Discovering the Sacred Yes of Your Midlife Initiation
What happens when the roles that have defined you no longer fit?
I started asking myself that question as I approached 40, watching the women around me reach for fillers and Botox, grasping at youth as if it was slipping through their fingers.
I saw these women as beautiful, as magical, as dynamic, and I’ll admit I felt sad when I saw their lips balloon, or heard about their feelings of “decline” or “failure” around aging.
And yet, I recognized myself in them. I felt the same subtle panic, a resistance to letting go.
I knew logically that aging in women being equated with failing was deeply untrue. And yet I still felt defeated to notice myself aging. I felt the same pull to remain desirable, to freeze time, suddenly attached to a version of youth and beauty that had never been quite good enough anyway.
My body was clearly changing. I was wide awake every morning at 3am. My conversations with friends had shifted to anxiety and insomnia, emotional upheaval, thinning hair, weight gain. I knew I didn't want to spend the next 20 years fighting my body or talking about grams of protein and the physical management of menopause.
I wanted to understand the opportunity in this time. I wanted to feel the beauty in it. The magic. I wanted to understand what was shifting with the physical. Beneath the physical.
In my exploration, I discovered the Empress.
The Book
The season between
Mother and Crone
There is a phase of a woman's life that our culture has no map for. It begins when something that used to fit no longer does — the roles, the pace, the way of being in the world, sometimes even the life we so intentionally created for ourselves. And the world tells us to eat more cottage cheese, wear a weighted vest, and get our hormones checked.
Drawing on Chinese Medicine, the Five Elements, and Jungian archetypes, The Empress Phase names what so many of us are feeling but can't yet articulate. The season of the Empress is Autumn. The season of distillation. Of unraveling. Of refining by release, the way trees let go of their leaves. Her element is Metal. Her nature is descent.
Our culture has a word for this time in a woman's life.
They call it decline.
I see this phase, instead, as a time of powerful internal descent. This is what the book calls the unbecoming.
It is not comfortable. It does not come with clear instructions. It asks you to trust the descent itself — to allow yourself to unravel, and to believe that what's being distilled in the dark is worth waiting for.
I don't believe I'm just writing the Empress into being. I believe she's writing herself through me.
This book is for
The woman who senses something is completing but doesn't yet have words for it.
The woman carrying grief she can't name alongside a longing she can't quite explain.
The woman who knows, in her body, that there is something more here than hormones and hot flashes.
The woman who is aware of herself shifting and doesn't want to spend the next twenty years fighting it.
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