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.

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”

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— 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.

Pleasure as a pathway to step into your personal power

There is a saying out there that when a woman begins menstruation she enters into her power, in her menstruating years she practices her power, at menopause she becomes her power. It is a long journey, undoing years of cultural conditioning to reclaim and step into our power.

Many of us have become disconnected from our inherent power by living our lives in high summer mode all the time. That is, ON mode 24/7. Womens bodies are cyclical they are meant to have high times and quiet times, creative times and down times. What is valued in our society is production and achievement; it is at odds with the natural rhythms of a female body.

I look around me and I see many women my age who are exhausted and burned out and unwell. They are trying to work, look after young children and teenagers, some are looking after elderly parents. When I ask many women what they do for their self care practices they often look at me like I am speaking a foreign language. The common answer I hear is “I have no time for that’. If you have time for a glass of wine, you have time for pleasure practices, you only need 5 minutes each day. The question I ask them is “What is getting in the way of you giving yourself permission to pleasure?”

I know a lot of this is cultural conditioning. Women have been heavily conditioned to feel shame around their sexuality and sensuality. The word pleasure has become so coupled with sexuality and sensuality that just the mere mention of it evokes contraction in some peoples bodies. Pleasure can be sexual and sensual but it can also just be something that is pleasurable to us. It has become so coupled with those two words that it has disconnected us from our own bodies. It started thousands of years ago. I have been reading quite a bit lately around Aphrodite/Venus, the Goddess of Love. They are the same person. The Greeks called her Aphrodite as did many others and when the Romans came along they called her Venus.

The Roman Empire is known by some as the Empire without limits. In her book, Venus and Aphrodite, ‘History of a Goddess’, Bettany Hughes quotes the Roman writer Cicero. He states that the name Venus is derived from the Roman word Venire (which is the Italian verb for come). He says ‘Venus was so named by our countrymen as the goddess who ‘comes’ (venire) to all things; her name is not derived from the word Venustas (Latin word for beauty) but rather Venustas from it”. Venus is the goddess of love that is present in all things, that comes to all things, and beauty is derived from that presence of love in all things. It is from this, desire emanates. It makes sense really, don’t we all desire to feel loved. Don’t we want to experience it and see it in others? We all admire beauty when we see it, we desire what is beautiful to us.

The Goddess is simply an embodiment of an archetypal feminine energy that exists within all of us.

Jalaja Bonheim, Aphrodites Daughter.

In understanding these ancient texts, I’m beginning to understand where some of these negative connotations around desire, pleasure, womens bodies and sexuality come from. In the culture of no limits, those Romans in their pursuit of love, pleasure, beauty and desire, became a tad excessive in their life pursuits and it lead to many wars. They basically ruled the world at one point. A similar thing happened in the Renaissance and in the court of Louis XIV the Sun King. The pendulum swings hard sometimes when change is forged. From no limits to austerity. So a whole lot of coupling of concepts happened and before we know it, womens bodies are evil, pleasure is evil, desire is evil and leads to the downfall of empires.

Have you ever seen the painting the Birth of Venus in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence? For me it is one of the most mesmerising paintings around.

OK so back to us and current life. Pleasure is one of the best tools for self healing; it helps you reclaim your body and your life. Pleasure can start small with enjoying stimulating your 5 senses. Walking in nature, a soothing cup of tea. a gentle yin yoga practice. When it comes to sexual pleasure and healing we also start small with simple practices to bring awareness to and into your body. Using tools like breath, focus, intention, movement and sounding we create new pathways. Pleasure is healing because it creates new positive neural pathways in your nervous system. These pathways are reparative. When you build these pathways you develop a strong connection to your body and you are building and honing your capacity to listen to your body. You start to learn to like and love your body. You start to get comfortable in your own skin. You start to become more discerning about your choices of where to spend your time and attention. You learn to your honour your boundaries as your listening skills are enhanced.

The woman you knows her body, who is comfortable in her own skin, who is discerning in her choices, who honours her boundaries; she is powerful.

Mamagena has this great saying “The party starts with you’. Your healing, your growth, your sexuality, your radical self love, starts with you giving yourself permission to explore it. To shaking off that patriarchal conditioning that tells you you don’t deserve it and choosing yourself.

If you would like to bust off your patriarchal conditioning, come join me on my 6 week introductory program ReConnect. The enrolment closes tomorrow, May 11th. We start on the 12th. It’s slow and gentle paced because that is what nervous systems like. Come shake off some of that conditioning and learn some simple tools to pleasure so you can step into your personal power.

Pass this onto anyone you think might enjoy the read.

Maiden to Mother Transition

When a young girl goes through Menarche, she is asked to let go of her childish ways so as to accept her maturing as a menstruating woman. In many indigenous cultures she is welcomed through ceremony and accepted into a circle of adult women in her tribe. This has been largely forgotten in western culture. Menstruation is still shrouded in mystery, shame and secrecy. Cultural norms mean women have to hide what is a massive part of their life.

During pregnancy and childbirth a new mother is asked to let go of egoic behaviour that will prevent her from giving selflessly, gently and open heartedly to her new baby. She is forced to face her shadow or perceived negative attributes that she has buried deep underground. This requires us to get extremely vulnerable. It can be a long and painfull transition. Through this transition you birth your own Inner Mother.

It requires us to get familiar with all the different parts of us - those we like and those parts we don't. It takes a lot of conscious exertion of energy to keep those parts we don't like in our unconscious. This plays out in our conscious life. These are child parts of us that were not loved or acknowledged when we were children, so we fragmented them off into our unconscious to stay safe. To survive we adopted behaviours used as strategies to make our way in the world many of them focused at keeping us in control. When we can really embrace those dark parts and learn to love them we emerge from this transition more whole.

Finding these underworld parts asks something different of us. We cannot access our unconscious through our rational and logical part of our brain. We need to go into our primal and limbic parts of our brain to feel for them in our body. So this work requires us to learn to be in our body; to experience all of our emotions in a grounded way. When we learn to love and accept our dark parts we stop projecting them onto other women. We start to heal our sisterhood wounds which in turn, helps us naturally support other women. We can see and own the messy side of ourselves and not get sabotaged by it.

Why is this transition so important? When we don't accept our dark parts we project them onto others. When we can't be with our own emotions in a grounded way and learn to self-soothe, we cannot soothe the new baby in our arms who comes into this world with an unregulated nervous system. For the development of healthy attachment patterns with our babies, we have to co-regulate their nervous systems to help them learn and grow. We teach them slowly how to self soothe and provide that sense of safety in their nervous system through our attunement to them, when they cry from hunger, tiredness or needing a nappy change. Learning to feel safe to be vulnerable aids in our personal development because we start to ask questions and seek to understand what is going on. When we heal our sisterhood wounds we learn to support other women in community and be able to hold space for them. When we heal our sisterhood wounds we open the door for our sexual empowerment.

Our journey through rites of passage is different to that of men. Women go into a dark place, the underworld. The vulnerability they experience in their descent is challenging and in the stripping back of parts of themselves they don’t need anymore, they plant the seeds for their new expanded self to grow. It is like a tree that sparks from a seed and first it grows roots down in the dark of the earth so that when it grows taller and its branches spread wider, it has a good base to support its growth. Every time we go through a transition in life we go to this place, the time it takes to transition and the degree of transformation is different every time.

When many women go back to work after parental leave many feel quite disconnected because they know they have changed, yet very few workplaces acknowledge that change or provide transition support for them to go back. Often many women experience a huge degree of cognitive dissonance because of this; they have to pretend they don’t have children at work. It can be a very confusing time for many women, they cannot just turn off the mother part of themselves. Why should they?

There is so little support for women post partum to work on all of this. Most of the support is physical and maybe looking for signs of depression. When we support our mothers in society we foster a healthy community and society. Our children are our future.

Well good news. Dr Nic Pawley and I will be launching our online course next year to help you create your inner mother. This course will focus on the bio/psycho/social aspects of your personal development. You will learn embodied practices to develop a healthy grounded relationship with your emotions; you will learn about post-partum health from a TCM perspective; the changing rythms of womens sexuality throughout their life; how to work on your unconscious childhood patterning that may be holding you back and how to create your inner mother.

If you are interested let us know. If you know someone who may be interested forward this email onto them.

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.

How culture can shape our narrative around transition

I’ve been watching Grace and Frankie on Netflix. If you haven’t seen it I can recommend it, it is very funny. The common complaint by the two female lead characters, played by Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, is that as women age they become invisible. Their needs do not matter.

When it comes to transitions and life stages, what is valued by a culture tells you a lot about how they think about it. What is said or not said, gives you implicit clues about how to behave during that transition. So in a culture like ours where no one talks about menopause, what clues are given to women about how to behave? Pretend that it is not happening, try to avoid it at all costs. Be quiet, stay invisible and try to ride it out. Would women’s experiences be different if we talked about it openly and embraced the transition supporting each other in community with each other? I think it would.

What about a mother returning to work from parental leave. When her Boss says I am so glad you are back, I have so much for you to do. With no acknowledgement of the monumental transition she is in the middle of, learning to be a mother, implying just be your old self. Well this is very challenging for many women because that old self does not exist anymore. She is a more expanded version of herself. Is the message yes lets just ignore the fact you have children and never talk about it? Many parents complain about the frowns they get as they rush out the door at 5pm to pick up children from childcare or after school care. Is it any wonder that so many women leave large organisations to join the world of small business working for themselves. Not only is this about flexibility but they can actually be themselves, care for their children and not pretend they do not have any.

What has a rite of passage you have experienced taught you about how to behave and how our culture values it?

What archetype of a woman is the most valued in our society? It is certainly not the wise woman, who is ignored and marginalised. I don’t think many mothers feel their whole self is acknowledged either. What is valued is the fertile 25 year old female. This is reflected in media, advertising, fashion, range of cosmetics and the list goes on.

Each transition women have builds upon the previous one. Motherhood goes for a long time and crosses over the midlife transition through Perimenopause which can go on for many years. The Perimenopause journey is an opportunity for rebirth and reconnection. The average age of menopause is currently 50-51 but it can occur earlier or later than this. There we enter the second half of our life, known as Maga time. This is a time of immense productivity and creativity for many women. The Crone phase which used to follow mother in the days when women only lived to 45, is now acknowledged to occur when women reach 70, this is the time for slowing down.

The Maga time is when many women really ‘hit their straps’ in terms of creating new businesses, birthing new passion products and for many finding their voice and using it. So let us start embracing this phase, enjoying our greying hair and the changes to our body and acknowledging the transformational benefits of this stage. Lets start supporting each other, transitions are easier when supported in the container of community

Women have another option. They can aspire to be wise, not merely nice; to be competent, not merely helpful; to be strong, not merely graceful; to be ambitious for themselves, not merely for themselves in relation to men and children. They can let themselves age naturally and without embarrassment, actively protesting and disobeying the conventions that stem from this society's double standard about ageing. Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible, who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women, they can become women much earlier - and remain active adults, enjoying the long, erotic career of which women are capable, far longer. Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth.

Susan Sontag (1972)

If you like this post forward it onto a friend. I’ve also published a new Resources page that you might like. I’ve listed books, podcasts and websites of different topics of interest. I am going to continue building on this website some keep checking in.

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.