I’m 45 and currently navigating perimenopause. I first began noticing changes around 40, so the past five years have been a journey of getting to know my changing body. Some days are definitely harder than others, and I by no means have everything figured out. But I’ve learned to listen more closely to what my body needs, and investing time in my own health and wellbeing has become a fundamental part of understanding and supporting myself through this stage of life.

Where are you based?

Ipswich, Suffolk.

Tell us your Sattva Story.

I turned 40 during COVID, and that was when I first started noticing changes in myself. At the time, I didn’t think for a million years that they could be connected to perimenopause.

I was becoming more irritable. I started gaining a little weight around my tummy that hadn’t been there before — although, being in lockdown, I genuinely wondered whether all the banana bread might have had something to do with it! I also began struggling to retain information. I could read something five times and still be unable to tell you what I’d just read.

I knew something wasn’t quite right, so I started doing my own research.

And that’s really where the seed for Nourish Her was planted.

I remember thinking: Where are the answers? Where are the other women having these conversations? Where is the practical help I’m so desperately searching for?

There was clinical information available, but I wanted to know what I could actually do. What tools could I use to support myself? How could nutrition help? How could I manage the stress and anxiety I was experiencing? And where were the communities where I could meet other women going through the same thing and simply hear, “Me too”?

Like many women desperately looking for answers, I also fell into the trap of buying things that promised to “fix” my menopause symptoms. I tried the lotions, the potions, and the pills! At one point, I remember looking at a supplement I was taking three times a day that claimed to help with sleep, bloating, and weight management and thinking, “Hang on... really?”

That was a turning point for me.

I realised I needed to stop looking for something that promised to fix me and start understanding what was actually happening to me.

And if I wanted to help other women, I knew I needed to educate myself properly too. With my background in nutrition, my instinct was already to strip everything back to basics — no complicated plans and no ingredients or nutrients you need a science degree to pronounce! But I wanted a deeper understanding of menopause itself, so I trained with Menopause Experts Group and continued developing my menopause knowledge.

I was also looking for ways to support the stress and anxiety I was experiencing personally, which led me to EFT. I began using it myself, felt the benefits of having a practical tool to help me manage how I was feeling, and eventually decided to qualify in EFT too. I also studied menopause further because I wanted to better understand the reasons behind so many of the changes I had been experiencing.

Over time, all of those pieces came together and helped shape what Nourish Her is today: education, nutrition, nervous system regulation, and community.

But perhaps the most important thing is that I don’t stand outside the woman I’m trying to help.

I am my own client. I am the woman I’m trying to help not feel so alone.

I’m 45 now and still navigating perimenopause myself. I don’t have everything figured out, and I don’t pretend to. But every day I become more convinced of how needed these conversations are.

Menopause doesn’t care where you come from, what your background is, whether you’ve had children, or what your life looks like. Women across every community can find themselves reaching this stage wondering, “What is happening to me?”

That’s why education is so important to me. When we understand what’s happening in our bodies, we are in a much stronger position to make informed choices about how we support ourselves.

I want another woman who is searching for the answers I was searching for at 40 to find knowledge, practical tools, community, and somebody willing to say, “I get it. Me too.”

Because sometimes knowing you’re not the only one is where everything begins.

Is there one thing you wish someone had told you earlier about midlife?

I can put my hand on my heart and say that at 40, I knew virtually nothing about perimenopause or menopause. I knew that at some point, probably in my 50s, my periods would stop — and honestly, that was about it.

I had no idea about the transition that could come before that. I didn’t know about the range of symptoms women could experience or how deeply some of those symptoms could affect your confidence, relationships, family life, and ability to function day to day.

So if there is one thing I wish someone had told me earlier, it would simply be: understand menopause before you find yourself in the middle of it.

And actually, I don’t think that education should only be for women.

Imagine how different this stage of life could feel if husbands and partners understood what she was experiencing. If children understood why Mum might not quite feel like herself some days. If workplaces understood that a woman forgetting a word halfway through a sentence doesn’t suddenly erase the years of knowledge, experience and dedication she brings to her role.

Women can reach midlife having spent decades building careers, raising children, doing school runs, running homes, caring for parents and looking after everybody around them. Then they can find themselves experiencing changes they don’t understand, perhaps struggling at work or losing confidence and wondering where the woman they used to know has gone.

That’s why understanding matters.

Menopause may happen in a woman’s body, but its impact doesn’t necessarily stop with her. It can touch relationships, families, workplaces, and communities.

I wish I’d understood that at 40. But even more than that, I wish we lived in a world where understanding menopause was simply part of growing up — for women and for the people who will live, love, and work alongside them.

Because imagine how much less alone a woman might feel if the people around her understood too.

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Midlife reinvention and coming home to myself. Empty nest approaching, post-menopause, and discovering that this season is less about proving and more about living with presence, creativity, and purpose.

Where are you based?

Los Angeles, CA

Tell us your Sattva Story.

For much of my life, I was known as the capable one. I grew up in a South Asian family where meditation, yoga, and service were woven into everyday life, but like many women, I spent decades caring, achieving, creating, and quietly putting myself somewhere near the bottom of the list.

Midlife arrived less like a crisis and more like a series of invitations. My body changed. My priorities changed. Relationships changed. I began noticing that the things I had spent years building externally no longer mattered as much as the quality of my inner life.

As a single mother, I devoted much of my energy to raising my son, building a career, and showing up for others. Somewhere along the way, I realised that many women of my generation had become experts at holding everything together while quietly carrying exhaustion, grief, and expectations that no one could see.

Menopause was not something anyone really talked about. There was little language around it and even less understanding. What surprised me most was that this chapter was asking me not only to let go. It was asking me to become more honest. I stopped measuring my worth by productivity and started paying attention to presence. I returned to creativity, breath, silence, and practices that reminded me who I was underneath the roles I had been playing.

Today, I see midlife not as a decline, but as a homecoming. It has softened some things and strengthened others. It has taught me that wisdom often arrives quietly. That rest is not laziness. That boundaries are acts of love. And that we do not have to earn the right to take up space. What midlife has taken from me are some old identities and expectations.

What it has given back is something far more valuable: a deeper relationship with myself. At fifty, with my son entering his own next chapter, I feel less interested in performing and more interested in living truthfully. I have learned that creativity is not a luxury. Presence is not selfish. And perhaps the greatest gift of this season is realising that we do not have to become someone new. We can simply return to who we have always been.

Is there one thing you wish someone had told you earlier about midlife?

I wish someone had told me that midlife is not the beginning of disappearing. It is the beginning of returning. No one prepared me for the fact that some relationships, roles, and identities would naturally fall away, and that this wasn’t failure. It was space being created for something more authentic. I also wish someone had told me that rest is productive, that hormones affect far more than we realise, and that we do not have to navigate this chapter in silence.

I was not supposed to end up here. Not in the UK. Not building organisations. Not writing about midlife and menopause and the particular, layered complexity of being a South Asian woman navigating the second half of her life. Not sitting across from women, virtually, in community spaces, in quiet corners of the internet, and saying the thing that most of us were never told: you are allowed to want more than this.

But life has a way of taking you exactly where you need to go, even when the route looks nothing like you planned.

I was born and raised in Norway, the daughter of Indian parents who carried their culture, their faith, and their expectations across continents and into a Scandinavian life. I grew up between worlds, Punjabi at home, Norwegian everywhere else, navigating the particular identity tension that so many of us in the diaspora know. Not quite belonging fully to either. Translating yourself constantly. Learning early that certain things were simply not discussed.

Bodies. Health. The internal life of women. The cost of caregiving. The truth of what a marriage actually feels like from the inside.

Not discussed.

In my early twenties, I entered an arranged marriage that ended quickly. I became a single mother. I cared for my mother through ovarian cancer, sat with her, held her, watched the illness take pieces of her that never came back, and then I grieved her. I carried all of it the way South Asian women are taught to carry things. Quietly. Competently. Without burdening anyone.

And then, in 2008, I moved to the UK with my daughter. We arrived with little more than hope, determination, and a deep inner knowing that something needed to begin again.

It did not begin easily.

The recession hit. Work fell through. There was debt, isolation, and the particular exhaustion of rebuilding a life from the ground up in a country that didn’t yet feel like home. I studied, trained, worked, wrote, and survived. There were more setbacks than I had space to process. More reinventions than I had planned for.

But I kept going. Because that is what South Asian women do. We keep going. We cope. We hold it all together. We do not make a fuss. And for a long time, that capacity for endurance felt like strength.

It was only later, in my forties, when my body began to change, and my identity began to shift and the life I had built started to feel, quietly and unmistakably, like it no longer quite fit, that I began to question whether endurance alone was enough. Whether surviving was the same as living. Whether the strength I had spent decades building was protecting me, or simply preventing me from ever asking what I actually needed.

Midlife asked me a different question. Not “How do I get through this?” but “How do I want to live now?“

That question changed everything. It led me to myself. To the work I was always meant to do. To Midlife by Design: a platform, a philosophy, a space for women who are ready to stop living by default and start designing something more honest, more nourishing, more aligned.

And it led me to found The Sattva Collective CIC, the UK’s first community-led initiative dedicated to supporting South Asian women through midlife and menopause.

I founded it because I knew from my own experience what it costs a South Asian woman to navigate this transition without a space that truly understands her. Without language for what she is going through. Without a community that reflects her specific cultural reality back at her.

I founded it with my daughter Khushi as Co-Director because, to me, legacy means building something that outlasts you. Something you pass between hands.

I am in my midlife now. Still in it. Still navigating it. My body has changed. My sense of myself has shifted. There are days when I feel more like myself than I ever have, and days when the grief and the complexity of this season press in close.

But I no longer carry it alone, and I no longer carry it in silence. That is the whole point.

Sattva: the Sanskrit word at the heart of everything I have built, speaks to clarity, purity, and balanced energy. The quiet centre that remains available beneath the noise of any season of life. I spent decades not knowing that the centre was mine to return to.

This organisation, this community, exists so that fewer South Asian women have to wait as long as I did to find their way back to it.

This is my Sattva Story. What is yours?

If you would like to share your story, we would be honoured to hear it. Drop me an email at hello@thesattvacollective.org, with the subject line: My Sattva Story #MySattvaStory

Kiran Singh is a multi-award-winning entrepreneur, Midlife Lifestyle & Menopause Wellness Coach, and the author of From “What Now?” to “Watch Me!”: Midlife by Design, Not by Default. She’s the host of the Midlife by Design Podcast, the creator of Midlife by Design and the Founder & Director of The Sattva Collective CIC.

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