Midlife, the autumn season of our life. A time to pause, reflect and let go.

We humans are cyclical beings although our modern world doesn’t care or cater much to our cyclical nature. For those of us in female bodies, we are in a constant state of cycling through our menstrual cycles and this brings with it for many people a way of orienting and being in the world that provides a sense of feeling anchored to our cyclical nature. Our life is seasons within seasons, within seasons. Although many of us don’t always feel good about this all the time and I wonder if we talked about our inherent connection with nature and the natural rhythms of the world more, this would provide a sense of meaning to us at a deeper level.

Our midlife season is Autumn. It is a time to take stock, pause, reflect and let go of what we no longer need in our life so we can birth new parts of ourselves. I find this metaphor to be true for all midlife people I work with regardless of gender. It is a process of death and rebirth that happens where we are moving toward a soul oriented life. With this for many comes expanded consciousness where you are stepping into an unknown way of being in the world; this in itself can be overwhelming for many especially if you do not have roadmap or mentors to guide your through. The rebirth is your initiation into your wise woman power that is your authentic self. You are probably familiar wit the archetypes of maiden, mother and crone. This archetypal stage is called Maga which is the stage before Crone. Maga is Portuguese for sorceress and is the feminine of Magus, which is the sorcerer. We are the first generation of woman going through this because we are living longer than the other women in our female lineage.

For Males the archetypal equivalent is the Magician or the Sorcerer and to move to this is a rite of passage, a man needs support and community of wise elders supporting him. The Magician archetype when integrated in a man has the ability to turn disappointing situations and setbacks into opportunities to learn, grow and become a better man.

For all of us when we come to midlife their is often a great deal of inner work to be done for Autumn is the seasons of letting go. In the Celtic tradition, Autumn signifies a time of abundance because harvests are at their peak but also the season where we prepare for austerity, the winter season to come. Autumn is the season that brings the double outer and inner movement, a transition. By midlife we are ready for this big transition. It is the right time for this as we have the wisdom and perspective to really differentiate what is going on for us. Many of us may have been judged as having mental health or personal development needs in the past when they are in fact dealing with cultural overlays that are maligning our life. With our deep life experience we begin to see everything happening in our life for what it is.

Midlife is about healing any trauma or wounding from the first half of your life. When we move through this process of letting go, we are going through a process of dying metaphorically speaking. All the ideas you had about yourself, who you are, who you thought you were becoming, where you thought your life would take you may not have eventuated. So of course there will be anger, grief, resentment and maybe sadness that comes with that. You will find that what used to motivate you no longer does. You will start to pull back into yourself in a way, rather than giving your energy away.

This is because, for women in particular, you are leaving the archetypal mother phase of your life. With that comes some very real deep emotion. I think for many women there is grief regarding fertility ending. This is especially true for women who have not had children regardless of the reasons why, because all of a sudden choice is removed. There will no longer be any choice anymore, no possibility. I have also seen women who have had children experience this even though they were quite adamant that they did not want more children. The nervous system loves choice and agency, so when we are faced with the removal of choice, it does not surprise me that the body experiences either strong fight or flight responses like anger, anxiety and resentment because lack of choice backs us into a corner. But you also experience grief. Grief you see is the emotion that is the secret ingredient that helps us move on. You cannot let go without grief.

For grief to flow it needs the support of the community. it strikes me that at midlife, many of us feel like we are losing our true inner compass we got from our regular cycles and we are trying hard to orient to something new that we have no road map for because there is so much shame and denial in our culture about ageing. I think for males they experience something similar but often later maybe in their fifties is what I have noticed with my clients. All of us are looking for our ‘north star’ to anchor to something.

So why are these big emotional experiences in midlife so hard?

I think it is because we live in a culture where there is collective denial about our emotional lives. Many of us grew up in families where we did not have that emotional life fostered by our parents or caregivers. There was a complete lack of attunement to our needs. This has contributed to a huge array of hurt, trouble and physical symptoms for many people. When we are disconnected from our emotional body we become frozen on the inside, our emotions gets stuck with no means of freeing them. Our nervous system is very clever it will create all manner of management strategies to stop us from feeling that which is painful to us. This is deep work that is required. Learning to befriend our vulnerability so we can feel into our emotions, the harder ones in particular, opens the way to feeling the full spectrum of emotions - Joy, Love, Anger, Amazement, Wonder and Delight. It broadens your emotional landscape.

In midlife, we need our community around us to support us through this transition. But you know what, we need community all the time. Humans are not wired do life on their own. Our interpersonal neurobiology is wired to connect with others for co-regulation. Co-regulation helps us feel like we don’t have to carry the burdens of life all on our own.

Image - Visions in Blue

As my teacher Francis Weller says in his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow “Private pain is a legacy of the creed of rugged individualism. In this narrow story, we find ourselves caught in the shadow of the heroic archetype. We are conditioned from birth to the image of the hero, the one who needs no one, the one who rises above his or her pain, the one who is always in control and never vulnerable. We are imprisoned by this image, forced into a fiction of false independence that severs our kinship with the earth, with sensuous reality and with the myriad wonders of the world”.

The hero archetype, which so many of our stores are centred around, disconnects us from nature, from our cyclical nature, from our natural rhythms and our inner seasons.

Is it any wonder that our rites of passage feel so hard and so overwhelming. They are super complex and we need a circle of support around us to get through and for many of us that is simply not there nor do we know how to put it together.

So how do we navigate midlife better? We face it together we build a circle of support around ourselves. Each life stage has a developmental task that is asked of us, and in midlife it is radical honestly with ourselves, discern our truth. To learn to be kind to ourselves and to stay present to our life. For many of us this might be the first time we have had to do this it re requires vulnerability and acceptance of ourselves for who we are right now. Once we can accept ourselves as we are we start to connect with our unique gifts and slowly we are ready to put them out into the world.

One the principles I really like that helps us frame this experience comes from Japanese aesthetics and it is the world view that is called Wabi Sabi. Wabi Sabi is centred on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. This aesthetic appreciates that beauty is impermanent, imperfect and incomplete. This can be seen in Japanese art.

I think it is a beautiful way of framing life because it helps us to appreciate that all of life is fluid and we are always learning growing, that there is no such thing as perfection. We are all perfectly imperfect.

There is no right way to do your midlife transition. There is your way because you are unique and your life experience are unique and whatever comes up for you, whilst it might have something in common with someone else, will be uniquely your experience to learn from.

The midlife reckoning and initiation

For women, the midlife journey is a time of reckoning and it is our menopausal journey that is often the catalyst for this for many women. It is not to say that midlife is not a time of reckoning for males but I think menopause really puts the jet thrusters on it for women in a way that men don’t experience. Sorry to talk in the binary, whatever you identify as on the gender spectrum, I think if you have ovaries and will go through menopause it puts the jet thrusters on it. Notwithstanding, I have had many male clients over the years go through their midlife reckoning in their own way.

I often talk about this process as being the Autumn season of our lives. A time where we review what works for us, work out what we need to let go of in our life and work through the process of doing that so that you can birth new parts of yourself. The rebirth is your initiation into your wise woman power that is your authentic self. This stage is called Maga which is the stage before Crone. We are the first generation of women going through this because we are living longer than the other women in our female lineage.

When we move through this process of letting go, we are going through a process of figuratively dying. All the ideas you had about yourself, who you are, who you thought you were becoming, where you thought your life would take you. So of course there will be grief that comes with that. You will find that what used to motivate you no longer does. You will start to pull back into yourself in a way, rather than giving your energy away.

This is because you are leaving the mother phase of your life. So whether you have been the mother of children or the mother of a business, or the creator and mother of something else in your life, all that energy you put into mothering is not going to be there anymore. This is what happens when our estrogen starts to decline. When I noticed it within myself I noticed I was really tired and I just couldn’t over-function in all the ways I used to and I was not really interested in lots of things I really used to get passionate about.

I have found this to be a hard habit to break but a necessary one. I noticed one day about two years ago, how liberated I felt and not being full of estrogen and what it used to drive within me. The overarching need to connect and make sure everyone is ok. One day I was I sitting at my desk and I felt down to my bones this freedom at not caring so much anymore. Not is a sociopathic way, but in a light and carefree way, I didn’t care what other people thought of me at all. I didn’t care if I put in a boundary and others didn’t like it, I needed to put me own needs first for my own wellbeing.

The reckoning and initiation hits us all in different ways. For some of us it is our physical health, some of this may be perimenopause symptoms but it can also be in poor health. This was me. Cancer came a knocking in a small way about 8 years ago, I got better and went on with my workaholic ways and then five years ago it was back in a big way and I had no choice but to stop. It was bad, stage 3 colon cancer, a big surgery that really knocked me around and lots of chemotherapy that went on for months. I barely functioned during that time and I could not work. “I am listening” I finally said and learned to feel safe to do nothing and sit with my own misery and distressing emotions. I didn’t do it on my own. I created a circle of support around me with different health practitioners and friends. This is often what we need in midlife, to be midwifed through the reckoning process and we can do this by creating a circle of support for ourselves to get us through. Whether it is a psychologist , a coach, your chiropractor, a nutritionist, friends you meet to talk with this about, you can create this circle of support to midwife you through this change.

My healing that I needed to do was nervous system related and deep inner child work to stop the over functioning. It was somatic work that supported me through this so I could find in my body where that small child part of me that had to solve all the problems and find all the answers lived. My excess of will power has served me well in my lifetime, it has got me through some really tough times and kept me going in jobs, relationships and challenging circumstances far longer than I needed to be. It stopped me from getting stuck and left behind often. But I could not will my way through my midlife transition I had to learn to face my shadow head on and be on the proverbial meat hook that Inanna went through in her heroines journey and have faith that I would come off it when it was time.

I think that we often think that menopause will bring us some hot flashes and night sweats and maybe other symptoms but it is so much more than that. You are faced with your own emotional reactivity, your stress levels bouncing around and it is like an out of control roller coaster. What you do not face in this transition will hang around in your life until you do face it. It is a humbling experience.

It can also be very humbling when you have already done a lot of work on yourself. I have been in a constant learning process full of self reflection for the last 20 years. I thought surely I had explored most of my inner territory. No there is always more to be explored. What I can tell you is that for me is that all the tools and knowledge I had, the ones that I work with my clients on, I used them every day and they got me through the really tough times.

What this journey takes us to is our authentic self. It strips away all the strategies our ego created when we are young to stay safe, you don’t need them and they won’t work for you going forward. To step into your wise woman power you need to address all the aspects of yourself that you have repressed. The emotional reactivity you might be experiencing? That is your body telling you to pay attention and connect with what is coming up. It is our menopausal muse showing herself. I love the saying ‘when the muse arrives let them in or they will burn the house down’. If we ignore what is coming up, if we persist in ignoring it, life gets harder.

Who is the muse?

“Your muse is the part of your that you have kept hidden away to belong or fit in. The Muse is the original essence of who we are. They reveals fears, taboos and expectations that need to be explored as this powerful transition unfolds. All those emotions repressed, feelings we have smoothed over, they want them released. As estrogen declines, a veil is lifted from our eyes. All the things we kept silent about we can longer ignore. We must speak up”.

Midlife and Menopause ebook, Kellie Stirling

Everyone goes through this journey in their own unique way. We often parse out challenging life experiences at this stage as something else, something tough that is unrelated and just bad luck. it is all part of the journey. it may not be your health that suffers. You may experience a relationship falling apart, or having to stop everything to take care of an ailing parent, maybe it is a teenager going off the rails or suffering and you need to stop everything to focus on them. Maybe you have a big career change and you know that you need something different and you don’t know where to start. Something will initiate you into this journey. It will mean you cannot go on the way you have been and you have to actually stop and learn to do life differently.

There is something for all of us in this transformation and it offers us an extraordinary opportunity to do it consciously. When you choose to pay attention to your experience and consciously focus on it, you are not only doing your own healing work, you are healing ancestral trauma, the trauma that has been carried down through family lines.

This is the time to learn to choose what you want in life. To move away from your reactive patterns, to learn to sit back, metaphorically and physically and observe. To be able to sit in your chair, in your back body, in a neutral position, back into the chair, feet on the ground, feeling the stability in your body and not lean forward and react. To learn to observe and watch as a wise elder would and then choose which course to take. You don’t have the high energy lots of of estrogen brings anymore, so taking care of your energy is so important. You don’t have to go in and react and clean up every mess. The lesson here is learning to put your needs first which means sitting back and watching. The thing is when we sit back and watch, we often have a clearer view of what is actually going on and we make better choices every time.

Once you move through this, you are naturally drawn to pursue more meaning and purpose in your life in everything that you do. Whether it is your work, your hobbies, the relationships in your life. This is because our purpose is to be our most authentic selves, lead from the our soul, and every aspect of our life wants to align with that. Because after going through the reckoning and initiation we can be nothing else but ourselves.

How emotional neglect and abandonment in childhood fosters a fawning response in us

If in childhood we experienced our caregivers not supporting our emotional lives, abandoning supporting us when we were feeling big feelings, it created a big and deep primal response of being isolated and separated. To a child this feels like death.

We will begin to seek any feeling that will block or override feeling that isolation, that feeling of death in our body.

We need our caregivers to co-regulate us when we are young because we don't have the capacity in our nervous system to regulate ourselves AND we don't have the emotional maturity to contextualise our experience. We just know we are overwhelmed and flooded with feelings.

We are hardwired for connection and being with others. It is in community that we most often feel safe and have a greater chance of survival. We enjoy that feeling of togetherness.

When we are in this pattern of avoiding our big emotions and feelings, of overriding feeling the isolation we experienced as little ones, we disconnect from from our bodies. This brings with it anxiety, auto immune issues and chronic illness.

Many of us also develop a nervous system strategy of fawn, also known as appeasement or people pleasing. We disconnect from our emotions because we are afraid that if we express them, we will be abandoned. That old story of death if we are abandoned is wired into our nervous system.
When we are under threat, the old story is playing out in the present all the time. Like a broken record that keeps returning to the scratch.

Healing happens in the presence of a compassionate witness that can hold space for you to connect with your body somatically.

Trauma happens in the absence of a compassionate witness or community so it makes sense that healing happens with a compassionate witness and within community.

image stockcake.com - mother embracing child, AI generated.

Getting over heartbreak

When we have our heart broken the pain can be so great that we feel it physically.
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Heart break is big because there are so many emotions mixed in there; despair, grief, shame, feeling worthless. We can also feel betrayal and anger depending on the circumstances. Our wounded heart is so hurt, there is such a rawness to the pain we experience. We can also feel great stress and may be disorientated and not surprisingly, really dysregulated in our nervous system.
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It is no wonder that people shutdown from their hearts in an act of self-protection. The raw pain can be more than our poor heart can bare because the intensity of our emotions, of the sensations we feel is so great.

Our heart feels shredded to bits sometimes.
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When we shutdown and disconnect from our heart this gets in the way of connecting with new people and finding new love. It stops us from being able to feel close to another person. It blocks us from feeling our emotions and feelings in our own heart space.

When we disconnect from one emotion we disconnect from all of them. Our bodymind is amazing but it is not clever enough to be selective from what it disconnects from when it comes to emotions and sensations.

Image, Tim Marshall

We can work with your body somatically to expand your capacity to feel, we can expand the container that lives within you so there is more space for your feelings to move around it and when we do this, we expand your capacity to feel and process emotions that are overwhelming.
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From there your heart can open again to new love that is coming your way.

How freeze physiology in our nervous system can impact our self-confidence

Freeze physiology in our nervous system can manifest in many different ways. Many of us walk around every day in a state of functional freeze. I did for a very long time. We often think of freeze as flat but that is often not the case. What we can see in freeze is a permanent state of contraction. Just like we see a snail or turtle moved into its protective shell when it feels threatened, the human body can move into a contracted posture when placed in a situation that evokes fear.

Freeze can be a stuck startle response or stuck fight and flight energy. Imagine all the times when you have been startled by something that you have seen and never got to discharge that energy. That response gets frozen in your system. It doesn't matter what the story of the situation is, it is something that overwhelmed us that was too much, too fast, too soon for our nervous system, or maybe too little for too long.

As the years go by, we absorb and adjust to this physiology so we can function well in life. However it can come at the expense of certain characteristics that we might like to develop. Like Self-Confidence. Why is this so hard? Well it has a little to do with the qualities of expansion and contraction.

Confidence is an expansive quality. It allows us to stand up for ourselves, speak more freely and take actions we might not take in other circumstances. However it is hard to expand when we have a contracted position stuck within. It needs the qualities of openness to emerge and stay available to us.

Sometimes we do a lot of mindset work to feel more confident. Sometimes a lot of exercise helps us to feel better in our body, more connected to it and more confident. However when we don't do the work on our nervous system, these benefits don't stick around. We wonder why, what is happening why is my confidence really up and down. Well it is normal to have up and down moments in life, but if we don't work on the functional freeze, the patterns of contraction in our nervous system keep pulling us back. Just like the turtle or the snail we contract back hard into our shell under a situation that stimulates the fear response. Sometimes this is why some of us cannot speak up in meetings or for something we care about when the stakes are high.

It can also impact us in our relationships, being able to speak up for what we desire most in life. In our dating life, it helps us so much to be able to ask for what we want in relationships. In our work life it helps us in so many ways move towards work that supports us and nourishes us, that allows us to feel confident to be our authentic selves.

Are you a highly sensitive person? I am, here is how I turned it into my superpower

Are you a highly sensitive person? I am too. For those of us who are highly sensitive people (HSP) we pick up on everything that goes on around us. This can be great, people think we have extra sensory powers. It always made me a very good judge of character and I often felt I was able to feel what the other person was feeling. Turns out, I could, my body resonance is very good and I learned all of this through years of somatic coaching and somatic experiencing practitioner training. It helped me enormously when I worked in the corporate world in executive development roles because I was really good at spotting people’s talents and working through with them how they can continue to grow and learn and what work and life experiences would help them to do that.

So I am really good with my sensory experiences, very attuned to environments and very nuanced changes in them, I pick up minute details in people especially emotional and energetic changes. I am super aware of light, dark, electricity, climatic change.

Where does it become hard for HSPs?

I found the big differences for myself and for other HSPs I have worked with is whether the nervous system is regulated or not. That is, our ability to move into the different autonomic responses (fight, flight, freeze and fawn) and then soothe ourselves and come back to our window of tolerance where we feel curious, connected and safe. Sensitivity is a gift when you are well regulated, it is your superpower. When you are aware of everything around you and don’t perceive it as danger, you can have a very deep connection with the world you live in.

Where is becomes a problem is when your nervous system is dysregulated. We can be stuck in survival mode. When you are stuck in survival and you are an HSP, you can find it really difficult to stay present and grounded. Everything in your environment can feel like a threat, you can become constantly anxious, overwhelmed, have panic attacks. It is not fun.

So how do we become an HSP?

It starts when we are young. Even as early as when we are in utero, yes inside Mum’s tummy. When babies are born they don’t have the capacity to regulate and self soothe. We do that as parents, mostly through touch. We soothe babies through touch, rocking, our voice. Brand new babies are super sensitive to the new world and they will startle and cry over any sound or cause of confusion to them. New babies are sensitive to new sensory experiences and to their parents. It is our job as parents to co-regulate their nervous system and this continues for the rest of their childhood. If a baby has had healthy co-regulation from an adult who can self regulate, at about 11 months old they will start being able to soothe themselves a little. The first three years of our little lives are super pivotal in the development of this capacity. What can cause us to become dysregulated is early trauma, it can start at conception.

We can experience stress in utero if our mother is stressed. My parents were in a motor vehicle accident when my mother was five months pregnant with me and one of the earliest experiences I had in my somatic healing was, we think, (me and my therapist) this experience that came up in a somatic experiencing session. It is hard to put to words because we have no explicit memory the first 3 years but we remember sensation in our body.

Stress in utero can prime a baby to be living in high stress when they come out into the world. Other experiences we might have that cause us to be in this state is if we grew up in a family where mum and dad fought a lot. We become masters at anticipating what our parents are feeling in order to defend ourselves. We become hyper-vigilant to the mood of the adults in the house. We become attuned to energy, emotions, physiology of others and in these survival states this may drive behaviour where we are very introverted or shy or just feeling like we can’t be ourselves. I also think some kids can experience this at school either with a teacher or other kids and become in this hyper aware state.

Also medical experiences or sickness we experience as a little person. If we had to have surgery or spend a longer period of time in hospital our little nervous system can become super overwhelmed and can struggle to understand what is safe and what is not safe. Over time if we have a few of these experiences we can shutdown to our feelings and emotions. This is our nervous systems way of coping.

The impact of experiencing all of this dysregulation over time, is that our nervous system can go into shutdown, this is the dorsal vagal state of the parasympathetic nervous system. When untreated this can lower our metabolism, energy and immune function. There is a lot of evidence that early and developmental trauma has a significant impact on health outcomes as an adult. Look up the ACEs study if you are curious, this has all the info in it.

Other kids might not shutdown they just might become hyper-attuned to their environment, these are our highly sensitive people. Their system is revving on high and they perceive everything as a threat, they don’t ever really feel safe.

Experiencing that co-regulation from caregivers when we are young is super key in teaching children to self-soothe and bring themselves back into presence and calm. If their caregivers were dysregulated because their nervous system never learned this, we end up with early developmental trauma.

A little passage from rumi or hafiz

If you identify as sensitive, whether you are introverted, extroverted or somewhere else in between, your sensitivity is a foundation.

Sensitivity is so wonderful, yet so fragile and misunderstood. We spend so much of our lives resenting it, fighting it, trying to smother it down, instead of nourishing it.

Sensitivity is often labeled as a weakness but in reality it cultivates a strength most people don't ever experience.

Sensitive people used to feel more so they can often simply handle more, when push comes to the shove.

The good news is that we can work with this. There are many somatic modalities, like somatic experiencing, neuro affective touch, neuro affective relational model, sensory motor psychotherapy which all support nervous system healing. It is never too late to learn, to heal your nervous system. When you do this nervous system healing work, your HSP gifts turn into your super power because you use them from a more grounded place. You are aware of your environment and you can witness your own experience on the inside and be with both at the same time. You can experience the world in technicolor and bring yourself back to calm, centred and grounded.

Come talk to me if you would like to explore healing your nervous sytem.

Ten things I wish I had known before I started my midlife transition

I ran into an old friend a few weeks back and we were talking about our work. We cross over on the trauma resolution and nervous system work. This friend is in her thirties and we were talking about midlife and menopause and supporting women in this transition and how important it is because it is such a time of overall transition AND it is a gateway to ageing. It is an important transition and we really need to review our life and all aspects of it so that she can set herself up to live well in her second half of life.

I went home and thought what would be the top 10 things I wish I had known before I started midlife? If we had a crystal ball we could stare into that would helps us, what would be the most helpful tips. So here you go.

1.We go through two transitions midlife and menopause at this time in our lives if we live in female bodies. Menopause is the end of our fertility with that comes not just physical change but psychological growth and healing. The developmental challenge at midlife is being radically honest and truthful with yourself about where you are at right now and who you are.

2. Learning about hormone health is absolutely key at this time in life, if you can learn earlier go do it. It is not just your sex hormones that change, they affect all our other hormones, like thyroid, insulin, our stomach hormones and stress hormones because of the change.

3. You cannot push your way through these transitions. The way through is going inward, slowing down and learning to rest.

4. You will get restless, question everything and intuitively feel like you need change in your life. Don't project this all out, explore your inner world.

5. Your body is the home that you live in. Take very good care of it. The overarching question that covers these transitions is "How can I set myself up to live well in the second half of life?". Use that as your guide and refer back to it constantly.

6. Old trauma will come up for resolution at this time and the hormone changes often impact the nervous system to cause that to happen. Remember our body is wise, intelligent and has an innate capacity and orientation to healing.

7. Get the support and help you need. You are the CEO of your body, it is OK to work with different professionals to get the support you need. (I count my chiropractor, shiatsu practitioner, GP, oncologist, massage therapist and somatic experiencing teachers just to name a few in that group)

8. Estrogen is a hormone that fosters connection with others and bonding AND it gives us rose coloured glasses. All of a sudden you will start to see the world differently when it declines. This is normal, you will get mad and annoyed. All of this is OK, you cannot 'unsee' things now, this will help promote your passion and purpose as you move through menopause.

9. You will come face to face with your cultural conditioning around ageing, sexuality and sensuality. Face into it, don't let it hold you back from growing and be radically honest with yourself.

10. Pelvic health is critical at this time in our life. The Pelvis is a incredibly important part of our body that connects the top and bottom of our body. Within it are our reproductive organs and and our organs that get rid of waste. We hold so much old emotional stress and tension in our pelvic floor and this impacts us physically, emotionally and sexually. It is ok to get obsessed about pelvic floor health in my opinion. Do pelvic floor exercises, pilates, jade egg exercises, whatever you need, find people who really know what they are doing.

And one more just because...... you are letting go of parts of yourself you don't need anymore and birthing a new part of yourself, your inner wise women is on the way!

Pleasure: how it nourishes us, resources us and helps us to grow

Pleasure is your birthright. When I say that, when you read it, what do you notice in your body?

Pleasure is certainly a word that sets a lot of us off and that is because of the stigma of cultural shame that we hold in our body around it first and foremost. Our body has orientations toward pleasure and pain. Pleasure is opening and expansion and pain is constriction and a move away from energy. Pain tells us when something is not safe and our nervous system moves us into action to take us away from it. Maybe we’ve also had personal experiences of when we overdosed on something we felt was pleasurable and things haven’t turned out well. That is one way to stop our nervous system from letting us feel free to fell it.

Humans are incredibly sensuous beings and our senses are how we experience the world through our five senses of smell, taste, smell, sight and touch/feeling. We experience pleasure through these sensory experiences. When we are consciously doing this we are building new neural pathways for our body to feel this expansive energy. We need to do this in small doses, like microdoses, otherwise that nervous system kicks in, says I’m not enjoying this, or this is too much and that shame reaction comes back.

Let’s just talk about shame for a minute. There is a relational component to shame. It’s usually something like this, “That person made me feel ashamed by saying/doing……. “. People definitely use shame as a weapon, and shame definitely been used to stop us feeling and embracing our bodies need to feel pleasure. It’s been used to take away autonomy and choice without a doubt.

But shame occurs when there is a part of us that agrees with the other. There is some part of you and me that agrees with the shaming idea/assertion/concept and then we feel shamed. The shame that is living there in the unconscious, actually agrees with what the other is saying or their perception and ideas of you. The person might be actually saying the thing that we have always feared is actually wrong with us and now it must be true because they’ve said it.

What this shame tells us is that we are seeking external validation to tell us we are ‘good person’ and that there is a part of us thinking what they are thinking. It wouldn’t bother us if that part wasn’t there feeling the shame.

When we realise this it is liberating because we know that anyone can say anything to us and we don’t have to feel shame.

When we are children we don’t really have the life experience and inquiry skills to look at it this way. To do the self inquiry and perspective seeking work. We rely on our parents and caregivers to support our nervous system through co-regulation and to give us information about ourselves, our behaviour. What is ok and not ok, help us with our boundaries.

When we don’t get that support as kids, we tend to continue to look for external validation from others into our adult life. It would be silly of us to expect children and traumatised nervous systems to not feel shame.

So back to pleasure. That cultural conditioning that said you are a bad person if you feel pleasure, well a lot of it comes from religion and came in times of austerity when the cultural austerity came in to curb the excess of hedonism. The pendulum of culturally acceptable behaviour swang really hared the other way. Those Romans they were hedonists. The French revolution came about after years of hedonism and sensually gratuitous behaviour by the French Royal court. Kind of makes sense, but the pendulum swang too far and here we are a couple of hundred years later disconnected from our bodies because we don’t feel safe to feel pleasure.

This is why sensual pleasure is a good start and starting small is a good way because that small dose of it will feel safe in your nervous system, and that part of you that feels shame, it won’t go into overwhelm. Our sensory experiences help us connect to our bodies, they are the language of the nervous system. So by starting small we build and strengthen the nervous system. Our autonomic nervous system is beautiful and it is always working really hard to keep us safe and to regulate us. Small doses, titrate it for us. We have to practice. It takes devotion too. We have to commit to letting ourselves feel pleasure every day and the best way to do it is by starting off your day with pleasure. Our body will fight us, there will be resistance. “I’m too busy, I have work to do'“. Flight response. “I feel like I don’t deserve to feel pleasure it feels terrible putting myself first’. Flight and freeze working together. “I’m too tired to do it”, that is collapse.

Pleasure is the counter vortex. It builds that alternative neural pathway to the vortex of trauma. This is how it resources us.

So what are some pleasurable activities that are healthy choices.

• Singing, Chanting or Dancing

• Using our breath; doing breathwork or breathing exercises

• Movement, exercise, walking in nature.

• Eating nutrious food and really being present to the taste of it

• Surfing, skiing, rollerblading - they take a lot of concentration and ask of us to be truly present in the moment with our body.

• Going to an art gallery and admiring the art

• Listening to music or creating music

• Sexual self-pleasure is very nourishing and supportive

This helps us in everyday life and it helps us in the bedroom. When we know what we like we can talk to our partner about it. We can ask for what we want.

What about the pleasure we might feel from coffee, drinking alcohol and taking recreational drugs?

Well you might feel good but actually we take them to avoid, to not feel and to soothe most of the time. So coffee is great but it stimulates adrenaline in our body which creates that fight and flight energy. So if we are taking it because we are tired and need more energy, we are ignoring our bodies boundary and its message that we you need to stop and rest. Alcohol is a downer and generally distracts us from feeling. Or for some people they can only express themselves and find a voice when they are drunk which is still avoidance. Recreational drugs, the stimulus response depends on the drug, but they are a tool of avoidance from being present in the moment, to wanting to feel.

Addicted to the pleasure of shopping, that high from buying stuff? This is a little hit of external validation that elevates us to help us feeling a sense of belonging but its a super quick hit and we often feel empty afterward. Don’t get me wrong there is nothing wrong with shopping per say and personally I love a good spot of window shopping and looking at clothes, but when you use it as a distraction to make yourself feel good, to not feel the ‘difficult’ emotions, or can’t stop your online shopping, that is a problem.

Finally, pleasure, how does it help us grow?

Well when we build up our capacity to receive it in our nervous system, we build up our capacity to feel more expansive energy. This is an open and vulnerable energy, we can only grow from this position. We cannot grow from constriction and shutdown, from invulnerability. We are not open to other perspectives in this state, we rarely inquire, we cannot listen to another person’s point of view and we certainly find it hard to let ourselves feel bigger emotions. We are in disconnect.

As always if you like this post, feel free to share it with someone for whom you feel it might be valuable.

Slow down to speed up

I write a lot about slowing down. It has been one of the big learnings for me in my life but overall, if I think of all the people I’ve coached over the years I think on of the biggest issues most of us face is the disconnection from our bodies. This is pretty serious, it is causing lots of health issues, combined with the crazy pace that most people are expected to work at now, it is causing lots of dysregulated nervous systems. This causes some pretty poor decision making and poor behaviour to emerge.

When we slow down we are able to be more present with our life, with what is happening right now. That is where life is happening.

I think one of the most important skills we can learn is to recognise our stress responses and what our habitual patterns are when it comes to reacting to stress. Fight, flight, freeze or fawn? What do you do? Do you get angry, do you want to move, can you not stop talking, do you go into people pleasing mode, do you words escape you and your feel overcome with brain fog? These are all typical signs of a stress response. I generally want to argue or walk away. Sometimes I please, although this is a very atypical for me and the times I have done I’ve been able to observe myself in the moment and thought why are you acting like this?

When we are in overdrive we are making decisions and choices that often are not well thought through, may come from a child part of us, or we spray our emotional response all over people and that takes time to clean up. Or some of us just collapse and withdraw and this is not a great place to be stuck in your nervous system.

When you can start to be aware of your stress response in action this is when you can start to take put practices in place that help you regulate yourself back to a place in your autonomic nervous system that is a bit more grounded and calmer. Practices that help you soothe yourself in the moment. One of the best ways to do this is by learning how to listen to your body and identify the sensations that you are feeling right in the moment of the trigger.

When we slow down and check in with our bodies, take the time to ourselves each day for time out, we are actually able to access so much more information than we would guess. Do you know our body takes in 90% more data than our brains. In truth our body and brain are one but our body is reading our environment all the time. 90% is quite unbelievable isn’t it? When we don’t check in with ourselves we miss all of this.

This becomes super important when we are going through big life transitions because they are generally times of great change so we can easily get overwhelmed. Slowing down has a tremendously positive impact on our quality of life because we start to be aware of what is going on around us all the time. All those parts of life happening that we were missing, we start to notice. We start to build a bit more capacity to regulate ourselves in our nervous system when we practice slowing down techniques like using our breath, or body check ins and that brings us into presence. It is a good place to be.

What I notice in people I coach who are in midlife is that when they start to slow down, their health and wellbeing improves, their perimenopause physical symptoms often dissipate and this gives them more time and confidence to explore the existential questions that they find themselves facing. It gives you more time to reflect on how you can set yourself up to live well in your second half of life. It gives you more time to think and feel into what feels meaningful and purposeful to you.

This is why we can speed up when we slow down, we have more clarity, we are more conscious and deliberate and can take in more perspective.

What would happen if you gave yourself permission to have thirty minutes each day of slow time?

The developmental challenges for our rites of passage

As we go through life there are different rites of passage we go through. In days gone by, we used to celebrate these transitions and create community support around our friends and loved ones who go through these passageways. This is not something we’ve paid a lot of attention to culturally from many years and I can’t help but wonder how that impacts on the shape of how we grow?

For each stage has a developmental challenge that we must address. If we do not, it hangs around at the next stage of life. For some people it retards their growth, particularly into adulthood or into their second adulthood. This is one of the biggest challenges for most people going through these transitions and it is why many people can get stuck. Particularly when the haven't explored themselves in their teenage years or their early adult years.

The rites of passage we go through are our teenage years, our early adulthood where many of us become parents and put our creative energies into the world, our midlife and our elderhood. Another way some people write about these passages are Rite to Birthright, Rite to Adulthood, Rite to Marriage, Rite to Eldership and Rite to Ancestorship. The latter being the rite of passage that is death.

When we go through a passage, which can take a number of years, we go through a separation phase, then a liminal phase, then an integration or incorporation phase. For most of the people I work with in coaching, the liminal phase is often the hardest because our foundations are shaky due to our changing identity. It is in the presence of community that we are able to transition with greater ease through these phases as it offers support and our space being held by others.

For females, we sometimes refer to these stages as Maiden, Mother, Maga or Queen and Crone. The third stage, the Maga/Queen is relatively newer, really only having been talked about a lot in the last 15 years. It has come about because women are living longer and we can clearly see there is a stage that they go through in Midlife where they are really expressing their gifts to the world in a big way and being their most authentic self.

The developmental challenge for each rite is:

Maiden/Teenager - to explore the world and ourselves whilst being held in the container of the community.

Mother - to express our spirit in the world through our creativity to the world. Whether that be in the form of creating a family, creating our vocational gifts through our work and to receive recognition for that. To say yes to life with all of our energy and vitality behind us.

Maga/Queen - To discern your truth within you and to be radically honest with yourself, to stay present and to learn to be kind to ourselves.

Crone - to let go, rest, receive and trust.

When we don’t express these challenges or explore them they show up in the next phase. So the young woman who perhaps lives in a family where there is high control and she is not able to explore her sexuality in her teenage years, will do that in her twenties, in her next phase. For women in mother phase, many women are focused on looking after young children and don’t get to explore their life’s work at this phase. This can also happen to all of us. For many people in the late teenage years they explore areas of study that have been pushed onto them by their parents; it is not really what they are passionate about. So it is not surprising for many women and men, once they hit midlife to explore alternate career choices and hobbies that might be aligned to what they loved to do in their teens. This is very common now days. It requires some discernment on our part, as we squish a lot of stuff into our life at midlife and we can easily become tired and burned out.

At midlife, where radical honesty with ourselves is the challenge, it is not surprising that many people are faced with working through old trauma, slowing down because their body tells them through physical health issues or pain and learning to create a more grounded relationship with their emotions and how they express them. Come back to the truth of who you are is what our psyche whispers to us.

Finally in our crone years, as we wind down and really enjoy life it is hard for many of us to trust and receive when we have been in a constant spin of productivity for years. These are great years when we can offer mentorship to others and enjoy the flow of life.

So if your teenager is driving you crazy think back to your years and know that they are here to explore themselves in this stage in every way. Let them go, to a point. Our role is to keep them safe as parents but that doesn’t mean locking them up. When it comes to our midlife selves, it’s OK to reconnect to passions you had as a kid, explore it, it is normal. What is important is to acknowledge what is going on and speak about it openly.

Emotional Starvation

The midlife crisis is not really a crisis. It is a slow wake up call from your bodymind asking you for big changes. Come back to who you are, come back to the body. So much of our culture does not support people thriving and being able to be their real selves. Instead it encourages the ego, those survival strategies you built as a kid to get by, to run the show. It traumatises us time and again. So many people I have worked with push themselves outside their window of tolerance time and again, just so they can function in the workplace.

Midlife is the time when you have a chance to set yourself up to thrive in the second half of life. It asks you to take a deep inward look and really commit to sorting out what needs to be healed, whether it is physical, emotional, social or cultural. Lets undo these survival strategies you have going, that are stored in your unconscious so you can come back to the truth of who you really are.

There is nothing wrong with most of us, it is the system that is broken. The culture telling us how we should be, often this is far from our own reality and lived experience.

Your body has an innate intelligence around healing. You don’t have to tell your body to do anything when you cut your finger, it knows what to do. However our brain can override many of the actions that bring us back to homeostasis. This impacts us significantly when it comes to our emotions and the feelings associated with them. We’ve been trained to ignore the bad stuff like the feeling of anger or sadness or grief in our body, so we override it using our powerful brains and coping strategies to numb ourselves.

The common survival patterns I see that are distracting us from this are: I work too hard, I eat too much, I don’t eat enough, I exercise too much, I diet too much, I drink too much, I shop too much, I give too much. And there is a still a sense of hunger within all of us that cannot be touched because really what we want is to feel.

Emotional Starvation I call it. We starve ourselves of feeling these tough emotions so that we can feel safe, fit in and belong and receive love.

We are doing all the “too much” just to keep up in a culture that numbs us to the sensations and emotions we feel in our bodies. We ignore our own need for pleasure. We ignore the warning systems of our nervous system and over ride our own boundaries to fit in and please.

Our ability to be honest with ourselves, intimate with ourselves, comfortable in our own skin become so confined and limited. We go to all the ‘too much’ activities to avoid looking inside, to avoid noticing the basic sensations, messages our body is trying to give us. When we cannot be honest with ourselves, honour our own feelings, emotions and needs it makes intimacy with another really hard.

How can we connect with ourselves? Through connecting with our pleasure. Feeling the sensations is the important guide. We experience the world through our five senses, they are what tells us if something is pleasurable or painful. When we consciously choose pleasure, and bring attention to the sensations of that, we start to recalibrate our system.

Feeling tells us what is safe and what is not, it connects us to what we really want in our life - our desires, and it puts us in touch with our nervous system, teaching us how to listen to it. Pleasure comes from inside of us, we can create it for ourselves.

Next time you feel like doing one of the “too much activities’, see if you can stop yourself in the moment and choose something that is pleasurable to your senses. Create a sensual experience that brings pleasure to you, that allows you to focus on that feeling of it inside of you.

It’s not too hard, start small, walk in the park, consciously eating nutritious food, dance to music your love. Start small, small steps are more sustainable than grand gestures. That is how change happens.

Choose you.

How Stress experienced as a child can impact our midlife journey

Stress is not our friend in our midlife journey.

Did you know that the stress you experienced in utero can impact on your perimenopause transition?

When we experience stress hormones from our mothers, our little body gets the message that when we arrive earthside, we need to have a pretty quick off the mark stress response because the world is not safe. Fast forward to the baby becoming a woman and what this means is that her body will go into a stress response more easily.

Amazing thought. The science of epigenetics is showing us that our cells actually store memory in their DNA and that it is possible for non genetic information to be passed down mother to baby. So it's possible for your mother's trauma as well as your own affecting your body.

When our adrenal glands (which make stress hormones) are tired, our body will literally steal the sex hormones we have and turn them into stress hormones. Guess what we will become deficient in? You guessed it sex hormones. This can translate into PMS in our menstruating years, and more physical symptoms of perimenopause, like hot flashes, anxiety, depression, in our menopause transition.

We are made to survive. Our body will prioritise our safety first every time. Let's think of all the ways this impacts on our relationships in our life.

A woman who is sensitised to high stress (which given they way we work now is most women) as a developing baby or young child, will tend to perceive her environment as unsafe or stressful where others may not. This pattern continues throughout life and by the time we arrive at perimenopause we are burned out and might have adrenal fatigue.

In our second half of life, our adrenal glands and fat cells take over our sex hormone production from our ovaries when they wind down at menopause. If the adrenals are tired when we start this journey and our body is giving them another new job, to produce not only stress hormones but also now sex hormones, they are not going to cope too well are they.

Remember it is all connected.

Learning to work with our emotions and feel safe to experience the emotions we have been told are 'bad' all our lives is so critical at this time in our lives. When we have been repressing an emotion for years and then all of a sudden we start experience it at midlife because our body can't keep the lid on the repression anymore, it is going to make us feel unsafe. Most of us will shut it down, this takes up even more energy or it will come in an outburst. This has a negative impact on our relationships also.

What is the best way to deal with this?

It is not a thinking exercise, you can't think your way out of trauma. It is learning to feel sensation and create safety in your body that that feeling is OK and may be even pleasurable. So we call that feeling approach a somatic approach.

Learning to feel the sensations in your body somatically and connect with them will bring you into a deeper level of emotional intimacy with yourself. It will create more capacity in your nervous system to feel. When you start to learn and practice this skill, you get more comfortable with the sensations and feelings and you get better at talking about it to others.

In my experience coaching women to do this, it has an unbelievably positive experience on all their relationships but most often it is their primary intimate relationship that benefits the most. This is because they are able to have a deeper level of communication with their partner about what is going on in their inner world. This deepens intimacy in the relationship; the crux of intimacy is communication. When we can talk about our inner world with honesty, it is appreciated so much by our partners, they learn from it too and can mirror us, and in my observation this is what leads to better sex.

As I say to everyone I coach, intimacy means 'into me you see'.

So when you are looking at your physical symptoms in your midlife journey remember everything is connected. It is not just about physical changes alone or dietary changes. Learning to actually be in your body and feel the sensations, to make your emotions your allies, is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself.

I currently have space to coach two new people. So whether you would like to reclaim your emotions, enhance your leadership skills, create more ease in your life with a big transition, you can contact me to book a clarity call to see if we are a good fit to work together.

How do you deal with big changes in your life?

How do you deal with big changes in your life and how do you learn? The way we enter into, navigate and exit transitions really matters because it sets us up for the next stage of our lives.

We all go through a midlife transition, regardless of gender. I think the unfortunate thing for menopause is that a lot the transition volatility of midlife gets blamed on menopause. They are two separate, but often parallel transitions.

One of the reasons I chose to pursue further study around relationship and sexuality coaching was because, at one time, I had so many executive coaching clients blowing up their lives, in particular their relationships in their midlife transition and I thought I need to learn to support these people better. Whilst I had studied adult development intensively and really understood, the shape of the stages of adult development I was unsure as to what the other factors were, that were getting in the way.

Here is what I know about our midlife transition. It is a HUGE opportunity.

Many people come to this time in life and they feel stuck. Maybe in relationships, in jobs they don't really like. They often reach this stage and don't like where they are, they don't know how to express how they feel about it and don't know how to get it out of it. Many people don't know where to go to find answers and they can often make really big changes and life altering decisions to get away from the pain of what they are feeling. They can't actually see that with everything they are feeling what they are actually crying out for is a transformation in their life.

A lot of pain from our childhood resurfaces to be healed. Many people at this inflexion point in their lives do a bit of an audit. There are hidden gifts within your wounds. Some of us are forced to address childhood trauma, wounding from early relationships in our teens and twenties. When you can face your wounding with compassion, from a different perspective, face the consequences of decisions in the past, when you can give your wounding space, you can come to terms with who you have become.

Old pain that resurfaces, needs time for you to release any grief that is accompanying it. This might mean letting go of long held hopes and dreams. This transition gives you an opportunity to really review you life, the road behind you and the road in front of you and align with your purpose. That is what this transition is really all about, moving from an ego driven early adulthood to a second adulthood driven by purpose and meaning.

It can get derailed really easily can't it?

Especially when you look for answers outside of yourself. Because you see, this transition asks you to dive deep inside of you.

The more you heal and release now, the more you make way for spaciousness, new beginnings and new opportunities in your life. Change does get hard as we get older because we do get a bit stuck in our ways. So midlife is the time to deal with it so we can live well in the second half of life.

If you don't deal with pain, unresolved trauma and wounding now, you step further into victimhood and continue to project this wounding outward and that is when a lot of relationship issues, conflict and unhappiness can occur in the long term. In this time in our lives we have more power to accept ourselves fully and take accountability for our healing. We did not have this power when we were younger but we do have it now.

We can rewrite our transition story at midlife. We can rewrite how we deal with this stage and approach it with acceptance and grace but it takes some inner work. When we can accept all the different parts of ourselves fully, we come home to the truth of who we really are. Don’t cling to the past, that is when you get stuck, heal the wounds from the past, accept where you are now. That creates space for the future.

As Carl Jung said, ‘when we look outside we are dreaming, when we look inside we awaken’.

Dancing with Grief

I’ve been thinking about grief a lot this week, well actually I’ve been thinking and feeling it. My husband’s grandfather passed away earlier in the week. He had turned 98 on Sunday and then died on Tuesday. We knew it was coming. He lives quite far from us and we all said goodbye to him in July which was the last time we saw him. He was sharp, funny and a true gentle man. He play online Bridge with my husband and kids and anyone else who turned up online up until about ten days ago.

Grief is a funny emotion. Most of the others pass through if we let them in a matter of minutes but grief seems to come through in bursts and can stick around for quite a while. What I notice, is when I am quiet and still that is when it comes. In surrender.

Even then it comes in bursts, and can keep coming for quite some time. When our Grief last longer than six months, it is now pathologised as depression. To me this seems like a total misunderstanding of grief.

A colleague said to me a few years ago, grief is love not able to be expressed.

I loved this insight and to me this seems true because we always grieve love we have lost, over time it fades but does it ever really go away?

For grief doesn’t just occur when a beloved passes. When relationships end we grieve. When we have acute illness we grieve. When our youngest or only child passes milestones we grieve because we know that we will never see or experience that stage again as a parent.

As our bodies age and we move into a new rite of passage, stage of life, we grieve for what we leave behind and for all the dreams and aspirations that we had that we were not able to experience. We grieve for the choices we made that allowed us to walk through a door way and miss another. We think of what may have been.

When we grieve in the present we often tap into a reservoir of unresolved grief from the past. Grief that wasn’t finished, that still lives in our bodies. It is never too late to heal unresolved grief. Healing is always an option and your body will tell you someway and somehow. Our darker emotions are rooted in alchemy, they always take us some place else. When we open to the wisdom of the darker emotions, particularly grief, there is always another emotions waiting for us. Grief often gives us gratitude.

“The gift that grief offers us is the capacity to see deeply into the way things are. Life is limited. We are here for only a short time. Grief asks us to know this, not only in a disembodied, cerebral way, but in the marrow or our bones - to look into the reality of death and loss with our usual egoic blinders on”

— Miriam Greenspan - 'Healing through the dark emotions'

Unexpressed grief holds a lot of hurt. Culturally we don’t express death well. We don’t acknowledge that the journey of life is a series of death and rebirths all the time as we grow and journey into different stages of our lives. Unexpressed grief gets passed down through generations in individuals and societies and comes out culturally in often unrecognisable forms; forms that are sometimes violent and highly destructive. The lack of acknowledgement of our grief is bringing about the destruction of the planet. The symptoms; increasing busyness and consumption, increasing depression, loneliness, anxiety, boredom and apathy.

I don’t think there has been a more important time to learn the gifts of listening to our body, to be with our darker emotions and learn the transformational power that they bring.

If this post resonates with you feel free to pass it onto a friend.

Your purpose - following the path home to you

When we go through our midlife transition, many people start to question everything about their life. This is perfectly normal and common. Our midlife transition is very much about moving from our first adulthood which has been driven very much by our ego; establishing our career wanting to achieve, meeting a partner and starting a family for some, maybe buying a house. The common theme of doing. Our second adulthood about discovering purpose, passion and meaning in our life. We ask ourselves the questions, Why am I here? How can I be more of the real me? What brings me love, joy, calm, happiness in my life.

Our midlife can be a time of great rupture. Some times this is good, sometimes it is not. What it asks of us is to go inward. A journey into our innerworld. Here is where many people, in my opinion, get stuck, using a first adulthood model when it comes to the bigger questions in this transition. Our purpose is not what we do in the world - it is who you are (be). Other people experience your purpose through your sense of ‘beingness’ or being human. It’s not about making things happen, although to be fair, just being yourself and doing work that lights you up, can allow you to really show the world unapologetically who you are.

We expect our purpose to come to us in an aha! moment. Your purpose blossoms moment to moment as you go into your inner world and explore your cultural conditioning, your ego survival strategies, your childhood wounding. It is more a gentle unfolding. It is how you show up moment to moment in life. Who you are, with friends, with your kids, with your partner, talking to your neighbours, doing the dishes, when you are on the train or the bus. It is you in life, in the day to day moments.

We tend to overthink purpose and turn the finding of it into an achievement of great magnitude. When we do that, we become like Dorothy from ‘The Wizard of Oz’ following the yellow brick road, looking for something outside our ourselves. It is not outside of you, it is in you. Nobody is going to give you a gold medal at the end of your life for finding your purpose. It is the essence of you, the authentic you behind the ego wounding, the persona’s you have created to belong. Who you are to strangers, to animals, in the garden with the earth. It is your strengths, your wounding, who you are in partnership and who you are in friendship. It is who you are with yourself.

We expect our purpose to come to us in an aha! moment. Your purpose blossoms within you. Is is a gentle unfolding, moment to moment.

Midlife is the right time to start this journey for a lot of people because we have the life skills, experience, knowledge and understanding to discern what is really going on for us and in some way our psyche knows this. For women, I often wonder whether the shifts of our hormones starts this quest, this journey of coming home to you, the essence of who you are. You can’t use logic and reason to find your purpose, all you have to do is start to make friends with your emotions, look through the lens’ of conditioning that have imposed views of how you should ‘be’.

When we push on our edges, beyond what is comfortable, when we make mistakes, when we let ourselves slow down, in our moments of stillness; we learn to be with ourselves. Your purpose is your journey of life, in some ways I think our learning journey is a constant state of learning who we are. Who we are in a bigger picture of collective humanity. Of a collective state of being.

For some people it can take their whole lifetime to get to this state, for others they find it sooner. There is no rush, go slowly and gently. My motto in life, SLOW is MORE.

The Good Girl

You know there is something that happens to women in midlife. They develop a burning passion and desire to step into their power. It is the journey toward becoming a crone, the wise woman, for sure. But it is something more. It is a strong desire to pull off that ‘coat’ of good girl conditioning. That part of us that we pull over like a coat to stay safe. On the opposite side of that is absolute fear of what will we happen if we do throw it all away. The polarity within is so strong for most women I’ve coached. On one side the desperate longing to be your true self and on the other side the absolute fear of judgement, hatred and rejection by the tribe.

We get demeaned when the urges come through. When our emotions are bursting at the seams to come through in our perimenopausal journey, when your bodymind is telling you ‘something has to change, enough, you cannot do this anymore’. You get called the angry menopausal woman. That is one of the great things about our hormones changing at this time. Estrogen which is the hormone of accommodation and progesterone, which is a calming hormone start to decline from out late 30s. All of a sudden a vale is lifted and we start to see the world with the lens we had when we were very young, about 10 to 12 years. When we started to see the injustice. Well yes, it is back but we are wiser, more experienced in the ways of the world, and frankly, pissed off and needing some space and change in our lives.

The fear of not belonging is so strong. We adapt and twist ourselves so much that many of us forget who we really are. I’ve seen it in work cultures, social cultures; I see it on social media every day. I know this deeply, I’ve found myself in roles when I worked in large organisations where I was the person who would speak up and ask the hard questions. One of my lovely male colleagues said to me one day, ‘you are the voice of reason in this group’. Let me tell you sometimes it’s hard being that person. Fortunately for me I learned early on to march to the beat of my own drum if I wanted to stretch toward my desires, but honestly it is hard being that person sometimes. I also know this feeling because many clients tell me that trapped in fear to speak out, to create, to desire. The good girl conditioning is so strong that we learn to live inside an invisible box and a limited range of acceptable behaviours and actions. The good girl learns to distrust her inner knowing that the answer must be outside of her. She disconnects from the deep knowing of her body because the masculine view which favours logic, rational and data, tells her that her inner knowing is wrong.

The desire to live, to be accepted and to belong, keeps most of us in our places. And so we spend our lives running from the darkness, trying to our hardest to be good and work hard and keep others happy.

Lucy Pearce

I’ve noticed in the last three years a trend of women getting sick of misogynistic social media posts, bitchy competitive behaviour amongst women, women exhausting themselves trying to be the perfect mother, wife, sister and friend. The assumption that we are on call for our employers 24/7. This is one of the reasons I do this work because I know that women have been subjugated for so long, pushed down to a narrow version of themselves, that they need a lot of support to help their nervous system feel safe enough to be the real version of themselves. The process of unlearning and rediscovering those lost parts of ourselves is slow and gentle. To be able to speak your desires and to listen to yourself deeply takes time and patience and tenderness.

We live in a culture where the masculine view is the norm and all genders of people have suppressed their feminine (the toxic masculine version of it) to survive and belong, to feel safe and loved. She squishes herself into a version of the good girl to feel safe, to please. She has shut down her feelings because an angry or sad or frustrated girl is not easy to handle. She has disconnected from her body and sexuality and when her body calls to her to listen, she soothes and numbs herself through overeating, drinking, overexercising or workaholism. Women are treated like little men in every facet of their life.

So how to we find the fierceness inside of us? Well it starts with connecting with our body and learning to listen to her. We connect with our pussy, the centre of our creativity and listen to her whispers. We start to connect with our pleasure and train our nervous system to accept and receive pleasure. We connect with nature and the cycles of the moon. We are cyclical beings and our menstrual cycles and rhythms of our life line up with the moon. We learn to connect with our dark feminine, our fear, anger, sadness, grief, frustration, we welcome them in for that is the journey for the heroine. We do this because we know that living in a female body, but living like little men is unbelievable unhealthy for us. We are not little men we are women. Ours is the journey of the heroine, spiralling in and out, up and down, into the underworld and back up again. We move inwards through our own dark terrain to find the essence of who we are, before we had to put the good girl coat on. When we find our inner flame, our muse, we realise that the guide we have been looking for is here.

It is all here inside of us. That is why I do this work to take you deep to that place inside of you so you can find your muse, your guide. It is all inside of you, you don’t need to look outside anymore.

My course Magnificient Midlife start on September 7th, pleasure click here if you would like to join the journey of taking the good girl coat off.

The verbs that support our relationships

When it comes to the relationships in our lives, there are some very important verbs that are actually skills we need to learn to thrive in our relationships. It can be challenging to learn how to do these skills because we don’t have many good role models of healthy relationships in our lives. Well some of us do, but many of us haven’t had good role modelling. This is because many of our parents, grandparents and great grandparents are of the generations of people who have been in survival mode for a long time. In the past two centuries we have had the industrial revolution, a couple of world wars, mass migration of displaced people all over the world. Just to name a few traumatising incidents. So learning how to thrive in their relationships was not top of their priorities; they were just trying to stay alive.

I feel like we are at a very good point in time where we can start to thrive in society. There is a lot of damage to marginalised groups that has caused a lot of harm, that is going to take a long time to repair. I feel like we are at the stage where we can really start to focus on learning to have better relationships with ourselves and with others.

So what are these verbs? Well I am just going to go through and explain each one. I want to say to you though that each verb, that is a skill, is really essential to your relationship with yourself and is a key foundation of healthy adult relationships with other humans. With everything around you really.

So here we go…

To want. What do you really want? I think this is one of the most important verbs. When you get clear on your desires, boundaries become easier, purpose and the big questions in life become clearer. Here is the kicker. Culturally we have been brainwashed to believe that to want anything is a terrible thing. If you put your own needs before others you are not a good person. I think that so many women in particular do not know what they want and it is affecting their relationships, their sexuality and their erotic life. Desire is sacred. It is a good place to start when it comes to your relationship skills and getting your needs met. You have to practice this though. Start by writing a list, what do you want? Do it every day for a week and see what comes out.

To Ask. Once you know what you want you can ask for it. Sounds easy enough. So many people struggle to know how to ask for what they need. Your partner is not a mind reader they will not know unless you tell them.

To Receive. This is a hard one. I have had to practice this a lot because I am a very independent person. Being able to receive is a key to abundance. I am talking about material and non-material things. Learning how to receive help from others. In your intimate relationship if you cannot receive, surrender is really difficult. Surrender is important when it comes to orgasm. If you cannot and relax and surrender, if the nervous system does not feel safe to surrender and receive, orgasm can be challenging.

To Take. Don’t be afraid to reach out for what you want. Many of us have been culturally conditioned that to take is selfish, that we are not a good person. Learning to take what you want when it comes before you is definitely a skill. Many of us have developed protective strategies to protect us from doing this. We dim our inner radiance so that we are not offered opportunities, we reject new friendships or intimate relationships so we don’t get hurt. It is OK you can reach out and take what you want.

To Share. Sharing parts of ourselves, being vulnerable can be really scary. I understand why because maybe when we were younger we did this and our confidence wasn’t kept. Maybe we have grown up in environments or worked in places where it has not been safe to share our innermost thoughts, to be really open to how we are feeling. Try with a friend or partner. Then think about the actual experiences you have shared wth others. Whether it has been a friend, a lover, your kids. Something that really lit you up inside, write down how you felt. Sharing life with others and co-creating experiences with others is one of the foundations of being a human. We are not meant to do it alone. Our nervous systems are wired for connection. That ventral vagral part of our nervous system which susses people out when we meet them; that’s the part that is curious and wants to connect to others.

To Refuse. This is challenging when you want to please people all the time, or if your nervous system response is fawning. To refuse is also really dependant on understanding desire. When you know what you really want and what you don’t want, refusal becomes easier. Refusal is also important when it comes to boundaries and enforcing them.

To Play. Why do we stop playing? Play is such a huge part of our learning process, of bonding with other humans. We are so good at it as children, it is how we learn as children. As teenagers we are great at playing but sometimes we stop because we don’t want to lose face. Foreplay is play. It is a really important part of arousal, of your intimate life. Playfulness is a beautiful part of being human. It allows us to try make mistakes, try again, refine, try again. To live is to play. To learn is to play. To have a thriving erotic life with another is to play. To have friendships we like to play. The spirit of play brings us into presence, when we play we are being human.

To Imagine. Maybe this should have been before play? Our imagination drives our creativity. Do you know the sacral area in your body is where you creative energy and your sexual energy come from. Yep same place. Our imagination is fuel for play. Our imagination is fuel for what is possible in life. When you share the imaginations of your inner world with your partner, anything is possible. But that can be a little scary some times can’t it? Try it. Practice sharing one thing a day. Start with something small and easy the each day, just push the boundary a little. Titration - drip by drip, baby steps. We don’t want to freak out your nervous system. Act out your imagination when it comes to your creativity. Draw, make, bake do something with those creative energies coming from your inner world.

I am sure there are far more verbs that are helpful for us in our relationships but I feel like these are a good start. It can be hard to start when you haven’t been doing these and for those of you with trauma it might be harder to partake in some of these skills. Baby steps, start with the one that feels the most comfortable and see how you go.

If you want some support and to explore these skills, you can work through these in coaching. One on One coaching offers deep exploration into many different parts of us that might be getting in the way or protecting us from branching out into these new skill areas. If you would like to explore coaching with me, head on over and book a clarity call with me to explore further.

As always pass this onto a friend if you feel it might be helpful to them.

Emotional Alchemy

Sometimes I feel like I have the anger of 1000 women inside of me. It's fleeting now. It was stronger when I was younger. Then I decided to so something about it.

I was angry about the way women are treated in the workplace. I was angry about women's health and how little focus it got. I was angry about how women were marginalised from financial resources. I was angry about how humans were destroying the earth. I was angry that people were so emotionally stunted and disconnected from their humanity.

I realised that we don't get angry about stuff we don't care about. On the other side of Anger is great passion. I am a passionate woman. How could I alchemise that anger into passion and focus it on something that was so much bigger than me. Something that would help others, help people thrive in their life. How could I set my anger into motion, alchemise it into passion?

That's the thing about emotions. We have to let them move, be in motion. One thing I have learned from Tantra is we can alchemise our emotions. They are signposts for us but we’ve have been culturally numbed from listening to them. Look at the messaging we get. “take the high road”, “keep calm and carry on’. No thanks. When you listen and feel them there is something there. On the other side of Anger is Passion. Of Grief, there is Gratitude and Love, Despair there is Faith, the other side of Fear is Joy. Frustration is telling us something could be so much better, there is growth on the other side of that.

I realised that actually we were all so emotionally disconnected and that had such a really big impact on relationships. What would happen if we learned to let our emotions be in motion? What would happen if we learned to better talk about what we need in relationships? What would happen if we could better at listening to each other?

We don’t really learn how to do relationships when we are younger do we. When I do couples coaching so many men say to me they wish they had learned all of this in their twenties. it would have made their life so much easier, would have made their relationships more joyful.

Women have to internalise so much of their emotional life. It's not ok to be angry, frustrated, sad. Who wants to be the angry bitch? So we numb ourselves to it, we put ourselves to sleep. Then we wonder why when we reach perimenopause our body is screaming at us to wakeup from that sleep. Our numbed emotions are seeping out us, sometimes in small spurts, sometimes in explosions.

Six years ago I walked out of an Executive Coaching session with a female senior executive who was working in investment banking and basically having to hide a huge part of herself in plain sight just to fit in and be safe. She was having to dim her radiant light big time just to fit into the masculine culture.

I thought fuck this, the only way women can step into their power is if they learn how to be in their bodies, to reclaim them, to learn how to express their emotions and actually be ok with that how felt. Not to numb themselves out and repress them. Because that was what I was seeing time and again. All these numb women.

A radiant empowered women loves her emotions, claims her erotic self, she glows from the inside out. I wanted to help women stop having to hide so much of themselves. God I wanted it for myself too. My intuition was telling me embodiment was the key. Sexuality was key it is so foundational to who we are. It doesn’t exist exclusively of our relationships; with ourselves and others.

So I followed my intuition and went off off studied sexuality, relationship coaching. Breathwork, embodiment work, it was life changing. it's a bit of a life long journey I think there is so much to learn. It was like opening up a big chest of gold and having a rainbow pop out of it.

I found that place in myself, learned how it felt. You cannot coach and teach something like embodiment if you haven't experienced it yourself.

Best decision I ever made. It was transformational. This work is transformational. I also met some unbelievably awesome women on my journey.

I want this for all women. I want to unwind all that conditioning. It's thousands of years of conditioning that we are unwinding here. I want women to stop feeling numb and start feeling alive. I want them to reclaim their anger. To speak up for issues that are unjust. To stand in there power and defend their boundaries. To say No I am not OK with what is going on here.

Because I know of you if heal womens relationships with their bodies it will help men. It will help the planet.

Every time I see a woman go through six months of coaching, I'm always amazed by the difference and the person I meet at the end. They glow from the inside. It improves their relationships - all of them. I love my clients, I love working with woman because they try so bloody hard.

The Dalai Lama is famously quoted as saying “The world will be saved by the Western Woman”. Based on what I've seen in the last five years I believe it down to my bones.

One of the best ways you can start to wake up to your emotions is through Dance. Dance out those emotions. I made up a little Emotional Alchemy playlist for you on spotify.

If you want to dive deep and learn how to alchemise your emotions, I have some spots open for coaching right now. Drop me a line if you want to talk about it or you can book a free Clarity Call.

Growing all the parts of us

In every system on earth, one pattern you see is the pattern of contraction an expansion. It is the natural ebb and flow of any system. When they are growing in complexity they expand out, and then they contract back in, before they find their new rhythm.

What does that look like in a human? Well I am glad that you asked. Ever shared a really vulnerable comment in a group or online and then wanted to go and hide in a cupboard in the dark? Yes that is when you have really pushed on your edges. Whilst it may feel incredibly uncomfortable you should celebrate yourself because you have just stretched yourself a little bit. Doing it in little titrated bursts is a good thing for your nervous system too. Then the expansion doesn’t feel so overwhelming.

We often see this other systems too. Our natural environment has swings and natural patterns and rhythms to it. Fire, flood, drought, cyclones they are all natural occurrences that some might say are over corrections. However when I look at indigenous Australians and the way the work the land, the use of fire in a controlled way is a natural part of the healthy growth of the natural environment.

One thing that I find super disturbing is the increase in mental health issues in society. It seems a big swing out don’t you think? At the moment, in the pandemic context it is understandable because it is hard to be isolated from our friends and family. Our nervous systems co-regulate each other. The ventral vagal part of our nervous system which is predominantly in our face and upper chest and shoulders and neck is all about connection. Being curious. When we are in our ventral vagal state we are curious and connected. Wearing masks at the moment is necessary, but that can be challenging because when we look at people, at their faces, it’s the ventral vagal part of our nervous system that is sussing that person out. Feeling into their system and asking, can I trust them, are they safe? Combine that with not being able to be around each other too much, so missing out on that co-regulation, it makes sense that people are suffering. In particular, women like to be around each other and tell stories, that is soothing to us. I think men like it too, the like to tell yarns and have a laugh with each other.

Current context aside, the mental health issues have been around for a while. I think one of the reasons is we have been encouraged for a really long time to disconnect from our bodies as a source of wisdom and intuition in favour of rational and logical thought. The part of our brain that controls the logic and rational stuff is the neo cortex. From an evolutionary perspective this is a newer part. We have two other parts that we are really not hanging out with so much, the primal part of our brain and the limbic part. The latter runs our nervous system and the limbic, emotions, feelings, orientation toward pleasure and pain, reward. There is so much benefit from inhabiting those other two parts. When we ignore them we are cutting ourselves off from the message from our emotions and the intelligence of the nervous system.

To access these parts of your self, your inner world, you need to practice focusing in on them, feeling sensations in your body and describing them. There is so much to be gained from doing this. This is our unconscious, it is very clever. Steph Biddulph in his new book Fully Human describes it so well. “When you listen to your insides, they inform you how to change, where the answer might lie. And when you have really ‘got the message, even just wordlessly, making space for it, it very often shifts. You feel a change in your body that is positive, releasing, enlivening, and you know that something has moved and you are different now”.

“If you don’t practice going inside yourself, pretty soon you forget you even have an inside. And this is a problem”

Steph Biddulph, “Fully Human”

I use tools in my coaching to bring people into these parts of their brain and this is what I find; when people focus on their inner world, their unconscious, they realise that they have a wealth of information in there that can help them find the answers they are seeking. This improves their sense of self-confidence and efficacy. They feel a sense. of coming home to themselves. They learn to love their emotions and to be with them and listen to their messages, they stop pushing them away. They stop getting stuck in stories about what happened to them in their lives to explain the way they are. They are able to move on from them and are able to step into their personal power. They learn to trust their bodies as a source of wisdom. They start listening to their body, talking to it and giving it love and attention. They realise that their mind and body are not separated but one. They realise they are multi-dimensional beings with different parts and stop being at war with themselves. They learn to love all the different parts of themselves. When we love and accept ourselves, we start to accept and love others for being just the way they are.

I want everyone to have these skills, so people stop suffering so much. I want people to thrive because given the level of comfort we live in we should be. I want adults to have adult conversations with each other, that are rich, rewarding and vulnerable. I want adults to step into their leadership roles and be able to make tough decisions. I want children to have hope. I want children to be able to be children and have fun and play. I want humans to stop looking outside of themselves for answers, giving their power away to materialism and consumerism and realise they have the answers within. I want the planet to thrive. I want to deal with climate change. My desires are big but I think achievable.

What do you think?

The plight of the over-achiever

I coach many women who are high achievers. I consider myself a reformed over achiever, so it makes sense they connect with me. I have walked a similar path. Often what we find through coaching is that a lot of their excessive productivity, their overachieving, their excessive exercising, their busyness, is a response to trauma. A way of soothing their nervous system. I was reminded of this last week when a friend of mine ,who is a somatic experiencing therapist, put up a post about it. I thought hmm I have to write a blog post about this because I see it all the time. Hell I lived it for 30 years.

The thing that is most challenging about this disposition is that we live in a culture that values and promotes it. Productivity and On 24/7. Many organisational cultures are supported by capability models and values that reward behaviours such as team player, reliable, staying power - which is styled as resilience, focused and determined. Behaviours that simply reinforce this behaviour and often backed up by financial bonuses that reward it. Productivity is valued over rest and periods of quiet. We learn to push up against our window of tolerance in our nervous system and feel ok in a constant state of hyper-arousal. This often leads to burn out physically and in some cases some pretty ‘crazy’ behaviour. I put crazy in inverted commas because it is often perceived as crazy by others and may cause some distress, but is just a sign of a person not coping.

““So much that we do is not logical on the surface. Walking on beaches, growing flowers, lavishing attention on a dog. But it’s actually the very heart of what makes life work”

”

— Steve Biddulph, Fully Human - a new way of using your mindQuote Source

So where does this over-achieving drive come from? My husband and I met in one of the large global consulting firms and we always laughed and said the place was full of insecure over-achievers. It is true that that is the behavioural model of what they recruited. Often this comes from a strong need to please emanating from an individual’s inner child. From deeply unconscious feelings of unworthiness, or that they do not deserve what they are receiving in life and are constantly seeking to prove that they do. It often begins as a way to be noticed and rewarded by a parent, but over longer periods of time, becomes a way of coping, feeling loved and acquiring a sense of belonging. Stressed out over a conversation; sit at the desk and work. The part of ourselves that needs love, safety or belonging receives that by ‘doing’ stuff and ticking off boxes. The race against the clock to get stuff done.

So how do we stop this pattern? Well the first place is recognising that maybe you have it. I think for me in my twenties I used to work super hard for a couple of years and then take off for a few months and go travelling. Well you can only do this for so long. I got to the point where I realised that the way I worked was not sustainable and that I needed to take on less work, I found this challenging because I have “big shoulders’ and what I mean by that is I can carry a lot mentally and emotionally when it comes to load. I find this quality to be also there in my coaching clients. Also most over achievers are pretty smart, they can talk themselves in or out of most things in life. They talk themselves out of listening to their body, its calls for help whether it be pain for illness and learn to just push through.

For women, I think getting back to the natural rhythms of your menstrual cycle can be a huge help because for one week, give or take, every month, you have a period, it is a time of winter, a time to rest. It will not matter if you do not go to the gym much that week. Your body needs to rest and rejuvenate. I have found this form of relating to my body, beneficial on so many levels. In my experience taking this rest time every month is playing the longer game. It is looking after your energy levels long term. It gives your body recovery time. Acknowledging and accepting that the feminine body is a cyclical one and our energy levels go up and down and are meant to change is a huge step. Choosing to live this way in line with your natural rhythms is truly a blessing. If you no longer have periods you will probably find if you explore, that your energy levels line up with the cycles of the Moon. Check out when the full moon is around, you are often full of energy, when it is a new moon, it is time to rest.

Acknowledging that your energy is not there forever is very important. According to Taoist Tantric theory we are only born with a certain amount of energy - or Qi as the Taoists call it. We have to learn to nourish and replenish it. Mindfulness practices are great but they are not focused on the body. For women in particular, our body facilitates our growth through rites of passage, we are movement. Gentle body based practices that forge a mindful connection with the body are very beneficial. Such practices would include Qi Gong, a Jade Egg Practice, Sensual movement, restorative forms of Yoga, some aspects of Pilates.

Learning to listen to your body and really listen to what a YES and NO feels like inside of your is exceptionally important. It is important for boundaries and it is important for your health and wellbeing.

Ultimately it is also about exploring practices and choosing relationships that nourish and lift us up. Practices that allow the body to recover, so we shift out of that constant state of hyper-arousal, survival mode of fight and flight, and into a state of regulation. Relationships that foster this are vital. When you look at the circle of relationships in your life: immediate family, broader family, close friends, community friends, work friends, what are those that sustain and support you, that allow you to be in that place of nervous system regulation? Review your work culture; is it supportive of your longer term growth away from these survivalist patterns?

Choosing practices that stimulate your five sense and bring pleasure to your life, that bring you back to a place of awe and wonder at the beauty of the world, and to celebrate that you are alive, are incredibly nourishing and offer an incredible doorway to calibration of your system.

My personal tip, when I feel my ego kick in and I get in a frenzy to get something done, I just slow it down and take a rest or go for a walk. The drive for me now comes from creativity and I am a very creative person. So when it feels in flow I do it. When it feels tiring or like I am pushing through, I stop.

It is never to early to choose you. To say a big YES to you. Your pleasure belongs to you, never forget that.

Please pass this onto anyone you feel may benefit from reading this. Drop me a line if you you have any thoughts. I have 2 spots open for coaching . If you are interested, we can have a chat on a free clarity call to see if we are a fit to work together.