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.

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.

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.

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.

Midlife Crisis

What is a Midlife Crisis all about and why is it so destructive in so many people’s lives?

The Middle passage is a time of transition in adulthood that can happen anytime from 30s through to our 70s. Most of us are familiar with it happening in our 40s and it is commonly known by the term ‘Midlife Crisis’. It is a time of internal upheaval that some handle well by going inside to explore their inner world. Others not so well when they project it outside. Outside projection shows up as trying to fight ageing, affairs, the new sports car, working out vigorously at the gym, recurrent changing of jobs, the list is long. Without a doubt there is an increased awareness of our mortality as our bodies start to show signs of age, not quite doing what they used to. For many women Peri Menopause is whacked on top of this and it can prove to be a really challenging time in life for them. It is also a time in life where health issues start to show up for many people. It is a time of absolutely huge transition and upheaval in our life that our society as a whole does very little to support.

James Hollis, the Jungian analyst, describes it as the time where we transition to our second adulthood. Our first, which he believes is from about twelve years to forty, has been driven by ego. We don’t really know who we are and how to ‘adult’ so we just copy. Our sense of self comes via external validation. We copy our parents, external role models at work; it is a time that we are focused on establishing ourselves. At work by climbing the hierarchy of the organisation, buying property, cars, having children. Driven by the ego we constantly project outwards our unconscious parts of self we have not integrated, the parts of ourselves we split off from to survive. Our original essence that was squashed down to fit in with the demands of parents, family, culture, the world around us. Our childhood patterns created in times of overwhelm or potential abandonment to survive. There is no doubt that the cultural contexts that surround us, with their constant worship of youth, do little to support or encourage us to move toward this transition and see it as the step to emotional freedom that it is for most people.

Our second adulthood according to Hollis is about finding our purpose and realisation of who we really are. It starts when our projections start to dissolve and in search for an answer to the question, “Who am I?”. How do you know when this happens? My observation of coaching many people in this transition over the last 10 years is they start to question everything in their life. Their rose colored glasses have come off and they start to see life as it really is. They start to see through the politics and machiavellian behaviour in the workplace. They start to see side of their partner they haven’t taken notice of before. They actually start to recognise that their partner is human. They get a bit rebellious really. They yearn for change. Some people get depressed because they yearn for change but are so bogged down by the constraints of their current lifecycle they can see no way that they possibly can make changes to their life.

“‘After the Middle Passage, no one can say where the journey will take us. We only know that we must accept responsibility for ourselves, that the path taken by others is not necessarily for us, and that what we are ultimately seeking lies within, not out there’.
”

— James Hollis

The turbulence is they psyche's way of pointing us towards integration of self and wholeness. Our bodies are strong and wise, they seek wholeness and healing always. They are constantly sending us messages to point us toward this. Our psyche is saying to us you know those childhood parts of yourself you split off, it is time to go bring them back. Those emotions you were told were unacceptable, go find them and learn to experience them. That nervous system of yours, it needs rewiring so you really know what safety, love and belonging feel like in your body. I describe my body as the home I live in. The home of my soul. Do you know psyche is the greek word for soul? Our soul wants to have a good second half of life, it is telling us ok it is time for you to sort this out.

I’ve spent years studying adult development through a development psychology perspective. If I look at it through a developmental lens it is a time where we grow the shape of our thinking and change the pair of glasses that we see the world through. We move from seeing it as shades of grey to a colorful kaleidoscope of colors that move constantly in and out of each other. Do you remember Kaleidoscopes we had when we were children? I loved them. We are now starting to see the complexity of life in all its color and it is hard to learn the skills we need to thrive because it requires some big changes in our life.

The turbulence is normal and it is ok. It is perfectly normal to start to question. The answers are not outside of you, they are within. Midlife asks of us not to look outside of ourselves but within. Into our inner world. The answers will not be found outside of us. Not in a new relationship with another, not in a new car, not in a new face or new clothes. They reside within us. We are multi-dimensional beings, it is about learning to love all the parts of ourselves and accepting them. The middle passage is a journey to our 'home' and finding the divine within it. It will be hard and challenging, you will lose some friendships along the way because you will simply outgrow people. That is OK, walk away gracefully.

What are some of the ways you can partake in this inner journey? Well there is coaching of course, this is a journey I guide people through. Some people need therapy because they have a lot of trauma in their body that needs to be worked with slowly and carefully so the nervous system can be rewired ( in particular those who suffer from C-PTSD and PTSD). Somatic Experiencing and EMDR are two modalities that work specifically with trauma in a slow way. Talk therapy like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy can be useful for some people. Embodied movement particularly for women, that brings them into connection with their Yoni, all their reproductive organs and connects them with their adult feminine power is an excellent practice. Feldenkrais, pilates and ecstatic dance are different practices that bring us back into our body. Breathwork is an excellent practice to work with trauma and unwind old habits and patterns. Mindfulness practices are excellent to start us on our journey to lead us on the journey inward. Traditional meditation where one sits very still are great, they are very masculine by nature. There are more dynamic forms of meditative practice like using a jade egg or kundalini yoga that uses movement, mantra and breath to expand conscious and create capacity in the nervous system.

Finally it is helpful to do this work in groups if you can. I know that sisterhood is a powerful container for healing and growth. There are womens and mens circles that exist everywhere. You can start one up. We move through rites of passage in a more supported and grounded way when we are supported by community.

The list is long. You can find something that works for you and it maybe that you work with a couple of modalities at once. The most important thing is that when you feel the turbulence, you start doing something to set yourself up well for your transition to your second half of life.

Please forward this onto a friend who may be interested. If you are interested in being coached through this transition please contact me for a free consultation call. I will be launching a course this year on Midlife transition for Women that supports transition through Midlife and Menopause. If you are interested sign up to my mail list so you receive information about it.

Coming Home to ourselves

This year has been testing for all of us. Being locked down is not an enjoyable process but there is always a silver lining for many. Spending more time with your family, appreciating how much you enjoy your work and working with others, valuing your friendships. For some people they have realised that they really enjoy working from home and spending more time with their family; participating in helping in the home with cooking or gardening. We’ve also been illuminated about many issues that our western lifestyle allows us to live in ignorance of. Corona Virus is bad but every year thousands of children in developing economies die from diarrhoea. The environment, womens rights, racism, child abuse, domestic violence. It is all there every day, how is it that we seem to lived oblivious to it. Some people are finding this really overwhelming to have all of this in plain sight, how do you ground yourself?

Come back home, to your body. I always think my body is the house that I live in. So often we look outside or ourselves to find joy and pleasure. That big holiday somewhere exotic, new clothes, you get the picture. How do we find pleasure and joy in the ordinary and within our home? Find what is alive within you. Find the joy within you, find the support within you.

It is hard to take the perspective that values the ordinary, the boring and the everyday in our life. How do we learn to appreciate it, value it and find the joy within it?

I’ve created a little body meditation for you to ground yourself when you are feeling overwhelmed and sick of the ordinary, the boring, the everyday.

Rites of Passage, the world needs wise women

I was talking to a coach friend of mine this week who also works with people through life transitions. She has been doing training to be a Death Doula. That is, a person who supports an individual and their family when the individual is dying. We were talking about how we as a society have become fearful of death as we outsourced to funeral homes. I recalled a story my grandmother told me some years ago. When she was a teen, the young child living next door passed away and his body was in the front room of the house and they went in to see him before the funeral. She said he looked so beautiful and angelic and that it was a very special experience to see a human like this. She felt we had lost connection with death as a natural part of the life cycle. A passage of life.

Why did we lose the ritual aspect of rites of passage in our lives? We move from childhood to become teenagers, then to become adults. We become parents, then we go through midlife and we become older members of society before we pass away. We used to celebrate these transitions supported by community around us. We used to relish in becoming wiser and older. Why did this change? Some cultures still hold rituals around some transitions like becoming a teenager, but on the whole it seems rarer.

I’ve worked in transition for most of my career in various shapes and forms, I studied adult development for many years. The question that has always been on my mind is ‘Why do some people keep growing and developing through adulthood and some get stuck?’ There are so many reasons for this. One perspective I’ve come to is this. Many people become stuck in the adolescent to adult transition. It shows up as very black and white thinking, limited ability to cope with ones own emotions, let along the emotions of others and there are many more observable blocks. When we stopped supporting each other in these transitions, we stopped having rituals and celebrations to pass these milestones. We stopped acknowledgement and acceptance of the different stages of life. Rituals create gateways for transition.

The container of a community supporting us through transition, supports and encourages us to shed parts of self we don’t need any longer and step into and embrace the new aspects of ourselves to navigate this new stage of life. It creates safety in a time of internal turbulence. We live with a context of a cultural narrative that celebrates and worships youth, is it any wonder that individuals will do anything to avoid ageing. That so many people struggle through parenthood and midlife transition. The whole cosmetics industry is built around avoiding ageing. I have heard many young mothers I have coached over the years say I just want to get back to work and be my old self. Guess what, she is gone, you have created a whole new part of yourself now; your inner mother, an expanded version of you. Embrace her.

There is not much support culturally nor is there community support to embrace transitions. We rarely acknowledge the changes in others. These transitions are turbulent, if it does not feel safe, if we don’t understand it or feel understood, why would we embrace it?

The world needs its wise women right now. Now more than ever we need community to thrive and grow. I want to rewrite what it means to age and come into feminine wisdom and creativity. What does it means to be a 50, 60 or 70 year old woman to come into the full feminine expression of who you are. As wise women how can we come together to show our compassion, leadership, knowledge creativity and wisdom. How can we create a loving and better world? What are the roles we need to take up?

Instead of making older women invisible, which is the common experience many women talk about, what if we actually reimagined the role of older women in society? What if their role was to lead community based projects? What if their role was to ensure that younger generations thrived? What if their role was to create these community containers to support younger generations to embrace the different life stages and feel safe to keep growing, learning and evolving?

My work is about supporting women through motherhood and midlife transitions. I focus on helping women transition to become wise women. As I see turning 50 knocking on my door I love where I am in life. I appreciate every day that I am still here, that I can swim in the sea, hug a tree and laugh and cry with my family and friends. Ageing kind of rocks I think.

If you like this blog, reply back and tell me or forward it onto a friend.

Midlife - what is it really all about?

I felt compelled to write this blog post because I’ve noticed a few people around me lately who are experiencing early signs of midlife transition and not really realising this is what is going on for them. Midlife is an extraordinary portal and rite of passage that both men and women experience that can start anytime from around 40 years of age through to mid 50s.

It is a time in life when we start to ask many questions, a time of refinement and reflection when our psyche gives us a nudge to look back and look forward at the same time. To ask ourselves, what aspects of ourselves do we need to let go of. What aspects of ourselves that have kept us functioning in the world up until now, no longer serve us going forward. Brene Brown calls it the great unraveling.

It’s your psyche giving you a chance to heal childhood wounding, heal pain around old losses and layers of pain around early relationships. We are also faced with our own mortality as we see our parents ageing or dying, friends becoming ill or dying.

It is a liminal time that may feel groundless to many people. One of the points of midlife is to learn to tolerate discomfort of the unknown until the path forward becomes clearer and known.

Many women have menopause to cope with as well that also brings up lots of questions and discomfort with changes in our body. But here is the thing about that. It is only your fertility ending. In our western culture where the narrative around menopause is death, we seem to assume the woman has died also. Many women comment that they suddenly feel invisible. In all actuality, it is a massively transformative time for women because many of them feel they are just getting started when it comes to their bigger purpose in life. Just because your fertility is ending doesn’t mean you stop being a sexual being. For many women they feel closer to their sexuality than they ever had before and their feminine life force energy is awakened.

When you don’t understand the discomfort of life transitions and rites of passage, it can be easy to jump onto the first external source of relief that might make you feel better. Obsessive exercise and worrying about your figure. Don’t get me wrong exercise is great but actually, this is time time in your life when you need to be really intentional in your exercise because you musculoskeletal system is undergoing a shift. A new car, a new partner, cosmetic work on your face, spending lots of money on clothes and jewellery. All classic relief escape hatches. You know what? All the answers are inside of you.

When you can sit with the unknown and grieve habits and patterns that don’t serve you any longer, you start to birth a new version of yourself. Embedded in the darkness are the seeds of the new adornments or parts of yourself, you need to create to go back out into the world and bloom. New habits, interests, ways of being. Many women in particular find themselves reconnecting with visions and purpose from their youth that were put to the side.

Our second half of life is about meaning and purpose. When you can learn to resource the grief of the old with self-compassion and approach the unnavigated path forward with great curiosity, you will discover your true reason for being here. The path is different for men and women. The heroines journey is different to the hero’s. But ultimately this rite of passage is about the same discovery.

If this post resonated with you pass it onto a friend who might benefit from it. I coach women and couples to navigate this journey. If you are interested in talking to me about coaching head over to my website and book yourself in for a complimentary call to see if coaching will help you navigate midlife.

Healing our Inner Child

One of the biggest challenges we face in our growth and development as adults is healing our childhood wounding.  That is, the traumatic impact of both emotional and psychological wounds we incur in childhood.  

This wounding is most often the result of our needs not being met by our parents.  Everyone that I work with has experienced this, as I have too. It is not because our parents were terrible parents, although some people’s parents were horrible.  It is that many of our parents are not perfect, they are people who were trying to work, raise children and have a life. They cannot focus all their attention on us 100% of the time.  They also had their own inner child wounds and at times they were parenting from that part of themselves, not their adult parts. The trauma I am talking about that we experienced as a result of this ranges from being criticised for not getting a great test score on a test at school, to being ignored, to in some cases, emotional, physical and sexual abuse.

Trauma expert, Dr Bessel van der Kolk, whom I have had the pleasure of being taught by, says in his book “The Body Keeps the Score”, ‘Trauma causes people to remain stuck in interpreting the present in light of an unchanging past’.

We develop strategies, habits and patterns of behaviour, that are often very reactive and they become our dominant approaches to cope and live our life.  Thus often repeated patterns of feedback are given, repeated incidences of relationships dynamics occurring are often a sign that you are operating from your inner child self.  Anything that gets you a bit fired up or ‘triggered’ is often a good sign that old programs maybe of shame, inadequacy, abandonment, betrayal or feeling unsafe are operating. These programs always have stories attached to them that allow us to feel in control of what is actually going on.  So much so, that we attract the same situations and act them out on a daily basis.

When we are unaware of these child parts of ourselves running our life we are actually walking around projecting a shadow part of ourselves onto others. Our inner narrative might be ‘the bad person who did that to me’, ‘the bad luck responsible for our suffering’.  In some cases we get feedback in the workplace, giving us a sign of how others are experiencing this shadow part of ourselves - that we don’t see - and how it impacts on them. However, it can, when left unattended for a long period of time turn into symptoms, illness or disease; often in the case of repressed emotions that were not accepted as part of us as children.  For example, many people have an unhealthy relationship with their own anger and struggle to express it in a grounded way as it was deemed unacceptable when they were a small child. How many toddlers having a tantrum at two years old are sent to the ‘naughty corner’? What they are actually doing when they shake their body on the floor is trying to discharge the energetic charge of anger running through them.

Why do we need to do this inner child work?  I hear you ask. Well, often we don’t get a choice because we hit rock bottom.  Either in terms of poor health or relationship rupture. Often in midlife, our psyche gives us a chance to heal this wounding and face our pain to prepare ourselves for a vibrant ‘third act’ after we turn 50.  In her famous essay on Midlife, Brene Brown says it like this. ‘Midlife is when the Universe puts its hands on your shoulders and says “I’m not screwing around. All of this pretending and performing – these coping mechanisms that you’ve developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt – has to go. Your armour is preventing you from growing into your gifts. I understand that you needed these protections when you were small. I understand that you believed your armour could help you secure all of the things you needed to feel worthy and loveable, but you’re still searching and you’re more lost than ever. Time is growing short....”

“Facing childhood wounding and working with relationships that will help you heal your relationship with your inner child might be some of the most challenging personal development work that you do but it will also be the most freeing and empowering.  ”

To heal your inner child, you need to bring that part of yourself to consciousness.  You do this by witnessing your inner world. That is, be able to observe when you are acting out one of your habits or patterns of behaviour.  Once you can do that, you work out what that behaviour is trying to gain for you; often love, safety and belonging. The next step is being able to parent yourself. This enables individuation and clear separation from the sensitive child part of you within you.  The third step is learning to put some strategies in place for self care so you can regulate your nervous system and then develop new strategies to cope and thrive in the world.

This work is freeing both to you and your family system.  It breaks cycles of family patterning that you have been carrying.  It creates the capacity for you to witness and observe your emotions and understand in an embodied way that you are not your emotions - you are just the experiencer of them.  It makes baring your emotions so much easier and gives you the ability to listen to them when they arise.

Doing the inner child work is tough.  You want to do it supported by a coach or therapist and with the support of those you love around you.  It will improve the quality of your relationships. It will open you up to different types of relationships and experiences in your life as you stop reacting and start creating the outcomes you want.  It will allow you to have a close relationship with your body and really learn to listen to it and the innate wisdom it has within it, by listening to your emotions and learning to be with them. You will learn to appreciate your shadow and move towards self-love and self- acceptance as you learn to love all the different parts of you, good and not so good.  Hopefully you learn to listen to your nervous system and really learn the meaning of ‘take care of yourself’; how to give yourself permission to rest, how to regulate yourself at a pace that is supportive of your need to recover. But most importantly, you will learn to love all the different child and adult parts of you that you discover and that you are a glorious, multi-dimensional being who is capable of living their best life and thriving in the world. 

I do inner child work in my coaching - if this is something would like to explore, come have a chat with me.