This is your
call to adventure.
Something is changing in your body. The sweats, the sleeplessness, the rage that arrives without warning, the sudden refusal to keep pretending — this is not your body failing you.
This is your body in perimenopause, sounding the call to adventure.
And if you answer this call, something extraordinary becomes possible: the chance to finally let go of the stories you have been telling yourself for decades — about how small you should be, how productive you must remain, how little you deserve.
The Story of the Tender-Hearted Warrior gives you a structure for this moment — ancient, proven, shaped for women who are done performing and ready to live.
We walk through this journey together here.
And in that community conversation, you will find freedom.
We are made up of star stuff and stories.
We are humans. We are hard-wired to make stories. Stories are how we know the details of life. How we feel life.
Who would we be without all the stories we’ve come to love? I can’t imagine my life without Free to Be You and Me, the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, Harriet the Spy, every song by the Beatles, King Lear, Star Wars, the work of Joseph Campbell, and now the journey of the four incredible humans on the Artemis II mission around the moon.
Powerful storytelling can crack us open and connect us.
Deep within the temporal lobe of every human brain sits a tiny, almond-shaped cluster of neurons called the amygdala. Its one job is to detect danger. Loud sounds. Unfamiliar faces. Any whiff of threat. When it fires, your body responds: run, fight, or freeze.
Thank goodness for that. It’s how we survived.
The problem is that your amygdala cannot tell the difference between a predator and a text message. Between a genuine threat and an hour-by-hour bombardment of terrible news. Between real danger and the sinking feeling that you are not doing enough, being enough, or fitting into the right shape.
Add what the COVID years did to our nervous systems. Add the violent rhetoric of a political landscape actively trying to dehumanize us.
Your brain is screaming danger most of the day. And it is making stories to explain why.
Over time, those stories calcify. They stop feeling like stories. They start feeling like facts.
This is the place
for long thoughts.
This is the place for long thoughts, a time for reflection, a space for questions without ready answers. This isn't about hot takes or quick comments. Instead, we'll dive deep together and talk, thoughtfully.
Four Saturdays every month. Come to one. You might want to come to all of them after you've encountered this storytelling.
See all upcoming classes ↓
The stories that women — particularly women 40 and older — tell themselves about who they should be? They are nearly impenetrable. Built over decades. Reinforced by every culture we’ve ever moved through.
You may have stories hard-wired in you about what success looks like, what your pace of life should be, and how you have to show up in the world.
Here’s one: I need to be productive to be worthy.
That story isn’t yours. It came from the Puritans, got sanctified by capitalism, and landed in your nervous system like a stone. You rest. You get sick. You heal. You are human. This culture has never allowed that.
Here’s another: I need to become smaller to be loved.
Not true. Never was.
And if you’re a tender-hearted person — someone who feels life deeply, who has heightened sensitivity and pattern recognition, who has been told your whole life that you are too much —
That story isn’t true either.
The only way through this nearly impenetrable rock wall is curiosity and kindness. To question, thoughtfully, the stories we tell ourselves. And the stories we tell about others.
You can edit them. That’s the work.
Perimenopause is our great call to adventure.
It’s sweaty and exhausting, full of phantom pains and itchy ears. Your body is not betraying you. Your body is demanding to be heard.
We women have three loud calls to adventure in our bodies: being born, beginning puberty, and leaving the time when we can bring children into the world. This is the third one. We’re entering our crone era. And let me tell you — as a post-menopausal woman — there is deep relief and rest in that.
But right now, in the middle of it, life requires us to break out of the constricting boxes we’ve been led to believe we belong in. This is hard work. It’s a long journey. But it’s the only way through.
Why the Tender-Hearted Warrior?
Heroes and heroic — these words have been codified, over time, as male. Firefighters. Thor. AI illustrations of pathetic presidents with the muscles of Rambo.
True warriorship requires something different. It requires staying open during an inward journey. Leaning into the melancholy times. Pacing your life according to what you actually need. Allowing the bittersweet wisdom to accumulate.
Tender-hearted warriors have struggled, mightily. But they have learned, over time, to stay open to the present moment. They shed the hard-hearted armor built over decades. They feel more alive.
That is warriorship. And it is yours.
The structure that will hold you.
Luckily, there is an ancient narrative structure for people with enough courage to go on this long, hard journey.
At the heart of every powerful human story beats a universal, foundational narrative pattern — found in mythological and modern stories from across all times and most places. Joseph Campbell spent his life mapping it across the world’s mythologies. Carl Jung found it in the collective unconscious. This journey of letting go of old stories is at the heart of Buddhist practice. Modern neuroscience is writing the story of neuroplasticity in how we process change and trauma.
The Story of the Tender-Hearted Warrior Journey is shaped for women in perimenopause and beyond who are waking up to their own power.
When you’re living in the messy middle of your life, you may see only chaos and rupture, disappointment and darkness. It’s good to stay present to those moments.
It’s hard to be a person.
But when you learn this framework, you might find that your story echoes those of women before you. You are not alone. Every transformative journey shares the same structure — the ordinary world, the call, the approach to the innermost cave, the ordeal, the long road home, and finally — sharing the wisdom.
Even in the darkest time, you can make meaning from the chaos by trusting there will be bittersweet wisdom ahead.
“The journey is about the courage to seek the depths; the image of creative rebirth; the eternal cycle of change within us; the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know. The hero journey is a symbol that binds, in the original sense of the word, two distant ideas, the spiritual quest of the ancients with the modern search for identity, always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find.”
— Joseph Campbell
Here's how I'm teaching
this story.
A joyful, 90-minute, online workshop every Saturday of the month.
Every month.
Each workshop provides a diverse, flexible learning environment. Find the workshop that suits your brain best. Welcome.
Are you a passionate listener who loves a teacher who knows her subject deeply — and wants to ask questions and dig in at the end?
I teach the next step in the story structure, with examples and conversation.
Are you a film geek who learns best by watching a story unfold? You love to nerd out on the tiny details that crack you open?
I recommend a film in advance. We watch it, then walk through its structure together — slowly, carefully, the way great films deserve.
Do you think in words and images? Do you love language, reading, and maybe even writing your own stories?
I give you permission to write your own stories — from your body, not your head. No worrying if they're good enough.
Would you love to talk with like-minded women in a guided conversation that sometimes digresses to hilarious places?
We gather and talk — honestly, warmly, about that month's step in the story.
And we repeat this cycle, every month.
Do any of these appeal to you? All of them?
Come along — I'd love to meet you.
Check Out the Workshops →
Come as you are.
Start anywhere.
There’s no wrong entrance. Every class stands on its own. Try one and decide from there.
The First Saturday
Every month the first Saturday class is free. Come and hear the next step in the Story of the Tender-Hearted Warrior Journey. No commitment, no payment required. Donations are welcome if it moves you.
Come to One Workshop
Curious about the film discussion? The writing workshop? The circle? Drop into any single Saturday and see how it feels. Pay what you can — only you know the story of why you pay what you do. No questions asked.
Come Every Month
Found your way in? Come to the same Saturday every month and follow the story all the way through — step by step, one year, the full arc. Most women find they want all four.
Please ask any questions.
It's best to start at the beginning of the twelve-step journey — but life doesn't always cooperate. You can join at any point. The community will help you find your footing, and the path always makes sense no matter where you enter.
Then you missed a month. That's allowed. This is not school. There are no grades, no attendance records, no judgment. Come back when you can.
No. This is not therapy and I am not a therapist. This is a community of women using story, film, writing, and conversation to understand their lives more clearly. If something comes up that needs deeper support, I'll encourage you to seek it — and that's a good thing, not a failure.
Especially if you're not a writer. Your first thought is your best thought. You'll be amazed by what comes out.
Use a discount code. No questions asked — that's why they're there. And if you'd like to talk about a membership that works for your situation, write to me. No one is turned away for financial reasons.
The journey doesn't check your hormone levels at the door. Women of all ages find their way here. If you feel like the life you're living isn't quite yours — you belong.
Intentionally small. This is not a webinar. It's a circle — intimate enough to feel safe, large enough to feel like a community.
We are living through
a mythic moment.
When you study the structure of the Story of the Tender-Hearted Warrior Journey, you learn that other people have been through this chaos — many, many times in human history.
And while the chaos and destruction will always feel like heartbreak, studying the story structure gives you a wider perspective than panic in the moment.
You can look at what is unfolding and see it clearly.
That’s not catastrophe — that’s the middle of the story.
We need this now.
Doing this work alone is harder than you can imagine. Doing it in community will bring you the ease you are looking for. And in the end — you find freedom.
Studying the story — and how generations of women before you have walked it — will help you find your way through.
Join us.
No one is turned away for financial reasons. Offer what you can. Become part of the community.
Storytelling can restore us.
We must be willing to get rid of
the life we've planned, so as to have
the life that is waiting for us.
The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.— Joseph Campbell
© 2026 Shauna James Ahern · shaunajamesahern.com