Twenty years of working with women. A lifetime of learning how we heal.
Twenty years of working with women. A lifetime of learning how we heal.
I am Tamara Lopes — integrative therapist, educator, and founder of MyOmPause. I have spent over two decades studying the complexity of women's health, the intelligence of the body, and the intersection of science and ancestral wisdom. And I have navigated this transition myself, from the inside
This work didn't begin with perimenopause. It began long before.
I came to this work the way many therapists do — not by choosing it, but by being called to it. Long before I understood what that meant, I was already drawn to the complexity of the human mind, the language of the body, and the particular depth of what women carry.
I trained as a Jungian Art Therapist in Brazil, and for years I worked in the field of mental health — in clinical settings, in therapeutic groups, in the quiet and demanding work of sitting with people in their most vulnerable places. That time shaped everything. It taught me to listen beneath the surface, to hold complexity without rushing to resolve it, and to trust that the body always knows more than the mind is ready to admit.
Ayurveda arrived early — in Brazil, through a personal experience that opened everything — and it never left. For nearly twenty years it has been a constant thread in my practice and my life: studied in Brazil, India, and the USA, lived immersively during three years in India learning and practicing with great masters and institutes, and deepened continuously ever since. It is not something I completed. It is something I keep returning to, refining, and living. The same is true of meditation — not as a wellness practice but as a discipline, rooted in Vedic tradition, that has shaped how I understand the body, the mind, and the nature of transition.
I also studied gut health, nutrition, hormonal health, and the nervous system. In 2013 I completed my Health Coach training at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, followed by specialized certifications in perimenopause and menopause through the Integrative Women's Health Institute. Over more than two decades, I built a body of knowledge that lives at the intersection of the clinical and the ancestral, the scientific and the deeply human — and I have never stopped building it.
I thought I understood transition. I had guided hundreds of women through theirs.
And then perimenopause arrived. And I had no map.
I was leading programs, creating, building — fully alive in my work and my purpose. I had spent years studying the body, the nervous system, the mind. I knew about hormonal health. I had worked with women navigating their most difficult seasons.
And still — when perimenopause arrived, it dismantled things I didn't expect.
The fog that settled over my mind like something I couldn't lift. The exhaustion that sleep didn't fix. The anxiety that arrived without invitation or reason. The mornings when everything I had built — my work, my clarity, my sense of direction — felt suddenly, completely out of reach.
I didn't recognize myself. And that — for a woman who had spent her career helping others find themselves — was perhaps the most disorienting part of all. I also knew, with the part of me that was still clear, that what I was living was not weakness, not failure, not the beginning of a permanent decline. It was a profound biological transition — systemic, real, and entirely underserved by the education and resources available to women.
So I did what I had always done. I went deeper.
I returned to the research — not as a professional this time, but as a woman who needed answers. I studied the neuroendocrinology of perimenopause. The estrogen-brain connection. The gut-hormone axis. The nervous system's relationship with declining progesterone. The role of inflammation, sleep architecture, metabolic shifts, and the profound neurological changes that accompany this transition. I brought together everything I had studied over two decades — Ayurveda's understanding of biological rhythm and seasonal transition, the nervous system regulation practices I had taught for years, the nutritional intelligence I had gathered through integrative study — and I began to apply it all with a new lens. Not as a practitioner. As a woman in the middle of her own reorganization. I also deepened my specific training. I completed the Perimenopause and Menopause Certificate Programs through the Integrative Women's Health Institute — two of the most rigorous and comprehensive programs available in this field — and became a member of their professional community. Slowly, with patience and without force, I found my way back. Not to who I was before — but to a clearer, more grounded, more informed version of myself. A woman who understood her own biology. Who had rebuilt trust with her body. Who had a map.
I didn't find my way out of this transition. I found my way through it. That distinction matters.
MyOmPause was not built from theory. It was built from necessity.
What I encountered during my own crossing was not just a hormonal transition. It was a profound gap — between what women experience and what they are given to understand and navigate it with.
Women were being dismissed by medicine, overwhelmed by conflicting wellness advice, left to piece together answers from podcasts and internet searches at 3am. Intelligent, accomplished, deeply self-aware women — women who had done years of inner work — suddenly unable to recognize themselves. And finding almost no one who could speak to the full complexity of what they were going through.
I had the training, the experience, the tools, and the lived knowledge to change that. To offer something real — not a symptom-management protocol, not a single-solution program, not fear dressed up as empowerment — but genuine, integrative education. A true map.
MyOmPause exists because that map should have existed long before I needed it. And because every woman navigating this transition deserves to do so with clarity, agency, and a body she understands.
My approach brings together two things that are too rarely combined: the rigour of contemporary science and the depth of ancestral wisdom. Not as opposites. Not as alternatives. As allies.
I work from the understanding that the nervous system is the foundation — that regulation must come before optimization, and that a woman cannot think, create, or heal from a place of chronic dysregulation. I integrate hormonal literacy, gut health education, nutritional intelligence, Ayurvedic principles of rhythm and constitution, meditation and breathwork as regulation tools, and creative expression as a form of integration and medicine.
I also hold a clear position on hormonal support: bioidentical HRT, when appropriate and not contraindicated, is a valid, evidence-supported option — and I actively support women in understanding it and accessing qualified prescribers. It is one intelligent tool within a broader approach, not the only answer and never the enemy.
What I offer is not a protocol. It is an education — the kind that restores a woman's trust in her own body and gives her the language, the tools, and the understanding to navigate this transition with genuine agency.
Integrative. Evidence-informed. Deeply respectful of your intelligence
Twenty years of study across three continents.
Brought together in service of this one transition.
● Perimenopause & Menopause Certificate Program — Integrative Women's Health Institute
● Perimenopause & Menopause Confidence in Complexity — Integrative Women's Health Institute
● Hormonal Health Institute for Integrative Nutrition
● Gut Health Institute for Integrative Nutrition
● Integrative Health Coaching Institute for Integrative Nutrition (2013)
● Ayurvedic Therapy Trained in Brazil, India & USA — since 2007
● Art Therapy Jungian approach — Brazil
● Meditation Vedic tradition — India
● Certified Holistic Health Practitioner AADP
● SoulCollage® Certified Facilitator
● Professional Member of The Integrative Women's Health Institute
If you are in this transition — I am glad you found your way here.
This work is personal for me in a way that most professional work never is. I built MyOmPause because I lived the gap it is designed to fill. Because I know how disorienting it feels to lose the thread of yourself and not have the language or the map to find it again.
Whatever brought you here — curiosity, confusion, or the quiet recognition that something has shifted — you are exactly where you need to be. There is a place for you here.