Media Kit

Susan Willson, CNM

Author of Making Sense of Menopause: Harnessing the Power and Potency of Your Wisdom Years

Helping women journey forward into a vibrant second half of life.

Short Biography

Susan Willson, CNM is a Yale-educated cross-cultural midwife and has worked among the Navajo, in Africa, with Alaskan natives and Pacific Rim cultures.  She has always been interested in what connects us as human beings, what birth traditions teach us about a culture, and the different spice that each culture brings to humanity's basic recipe.  Her last two decades have been spent working with women during the menopausal transition.

Her book Making Sense of Menopause: Harnessing the Power and Potency of Your Wisdom Years, published by Sounds True, is a positive re-framing of the menopausal transition. It fits menopause within the biological arc of a woman's life, building on what came before, and shows how our earliest experiences shape our menopause, not just our genetics or physical health.  The book includes a process that a woman can use to look at her own life and how her identity as a woman was formed, tease out whose voices went into creating that, and find what is authentic to her now, allowing her to bring that forward into this next arc of her life.

 

Long Biography

Susan Willson, CNM is a cross-cultural midwife.  She has always seen the body as intelligent and capable, and has spent her career helping to support and empower women to trust their bodies and work with the plan Nature intended.  Her original degree was in Psychology and English at Emory University.  Once she understood how much of our trajectory is influenced in the womb and at birth, she began her study of midwifery and returned to Emory for a nursing degree and for a Master’s degree at Yale University.

She has had a life-long interest in other cultures and what birth traditions tell us about them.  She has worked among the Navajo, in Africa, with Alaskan natives and Pacific Rim cultures.  She is always looking across a broad spectrum for what connects us as human beings, as well as the differences in each culture that add spice to the basic recipe.   Her last two decades have been spent working with women during the menopausal transition.

Listening to women’s stories and challenges led her to want to describe the continuum of our biological lives as a framework that is both purposeful and positive.  She has generated a reframing of menopause as it fits within this continuum, building on what came before, and showing how our earliest experiences shape our menopause, not just our genetics or physical health. 

Willson lectures domestically and internationally on Women’s Health at Midlife, Breast Health, Re-framing breast cancer, Hormone balance, and Recognizing signs of Sex Trafficking in one’s Clinical Practice.  She has taught at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies and is a frequent lecturer at the annual meetings of the American College of Nurse Midwives.  She conducts workshops on the Emotional Work of Menopause.

High-Resolution Headshots

The Book

Making Sense of Menopause:
Harnessing the Power and Potency of Your Wisdom Years

The generation of women currently reaching midlife is the first to really speak openly about menopause, yet the messages of our medical community and popular culture are ones of loss and diminishment.   Menopause is isolated from the rest of the arc of a woman’s experience and the focus is on treating hot flashes and clinging to the appearance of youthfulness, rather than embracing this very powerful phase of a woman’s life. “Menopause is not a problem to be fixed.” says Susan Willson.  “In fact, it can be the most powerful time of a woman’s life.”

In Making Sense of Menopause, this well-loved women’s health practitioner helps us reframe this experience, beginning with an eye-opening examination of the falsehoods we have absorbed about ourselves as women, and offering a fascinating look into the deep sea change happening at menopause in our biology, our creativity and our authenticity. She shows how our bodies and brains powerfully prepare us to enter this next rich phase of our lives.

With Making Sense of Menopause, this compelling author offers a much-needed guide for women making the physical, emotional and spiritual transition to the Wisdom years. “Think what a world this would be if we, as ‘women of a certain age’, were living our full potential, standing in our power and giving our gifts.  It is the world I want to live in.”

 
 

Press Features

“Mastering Menopause: Caring for Ourselves at Midlife“
Published in Spirituality and Health on February 15th, 2022

 
 

“The Writing Life” Member Spotlight: Susan Willson
Published on The Author’s Guild on February 22nd, 2022

 
 
 
 

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