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.

Finding your inner light

I was going for a walk last week with my husband. In front of us was a man with his young son who would have been about four years old. As they held hands and walked along the little boy danced, kicked his legs out wiggled his arms. He was full of energy, he literally could not stop moving. It reminded me of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, albeit a more clumsy version, in those 1950s movies where they would sing and dance down the street. I said to my husband, remember when our boys were like that at the same age. He said yes and then it gets bashed out of them, they are told that they have to walk ‘normally’ and sit and be quiet. They literally have so much energy they are jumping out of their skin. Then they get to school and they have to sit still and be quiet.

Why do we do this to children? Why do we take them out of their bodies, insist they ignore their natural impulses to move and run. Disconnect from pleasure. Ignore their natural impulses to explore the natural environment and the wonder and awe you can find in nature if you really pay attention.

As adults we can get so caught up in own suffering, we can spend an eternity searching outside of ourselves when our suffering seems unbearable and obstacles seem insurmountable. We bypass and self soothe with shopping, alcohol and any myriad of other available avenues to bypass dealing with our own emotions and to be present and vulnerable.

I tell you something simple yet quite profound I learned from one of my coaching teachers Layla Martin. You have everything you need right inside of you.

So how to you find your own inner light within?

You pursue your pleasure. I am not necessarily talking about sexual pleasure even though that is definitely one avenue of pleasure to pursue. I am talking about what is pleasurable to you that nourishes and sustains you. Walking in nature, dancing, mindfulness practices that involve movement and breath; these are great practices to connect you with sources of nourishment. How do you connect and listen to your body? How do you learn to be with your emotions and pay attention to what your feelings are trying to tell you.

None of us have been taught to do this. It is almost as if we have been implicitly told that pleasure is a no go zone.

Where do you start?

A good place to start is working out what is it that you really want. A simple desires practice, spend 5 minutes writing down your desires, start every sentence with ‘I want….’. If you don’t know what you want, it is hard to connect with what brings you pleasure.

One of my favourite pleasure practices is just to sit out in nature. Maybe you could try to sit out in nature and lye down on the grass and just breath and imagine all the energy from the earth. moving up from the earth, up your legs into your core. Notice your breath moving in and out of your nose. See what that feels like. Dancing is another practice that we seem to stop doing in early adulthood. Why? Our bodies are made to move. Try dancing for 10 minutes a day. Swimming is one of my favourites particularly in the sea, just floating in the water.

We have so many resources available to us within and at our fingertips. Next time you zone out on your phone and start online shopping, stop yourself and go for a walk outside instead. Breathe in the fresh air.

Grounding through body meditation

A Body Meditation for Wise Women

These past two weeks have been really intense energetically. The protesting in the USA has been felt all around the world. This is a really important time for black people, who have been oppressed for hundreds of years, to be able to express their voice. It is also important for all of us to self-reflect and challenge our own thinking and biases. There are some great resources around that I will include at the end of the email. It’s not the job of BIPOC people to educate us, we have to do the work ourselves.

In this time, many people are feeling very ungrounded. There is so much change going on. In Australia we had bushfires, then CoVid and now social upheaval. So many structures and systems are crumbling or being dismantled. These are old systems and structures that stifle change and preserve patriarchal control. It’s important to stay grounded, in our bodies so we can navigate this turbulence. There are many ways you can do this.

Sometimes I find walking in bare feet on the earth really helpful, sometimes just laying on the grass can be really helpful. One of the most helpful practices I use is this pelvic bowl meditation for women. I made this up on the spur of the moment in a coaching session and I’ve continued to use it again and again because it has been so helpful to so many of my clients.

Our pelvic bowel connects the top and bottom parts of our body. It contains all of our reproductive organs. For women, our womb, cervix and ovaries are particularly strong energy centres and if we can tune into them they become a great source of wisdom. I also find the more we connect with them we build these strong neural networks in our brain and it increases our sense of agency in the world. Now is the time we can work on growing our personal agency. The world needs its wise women right now.

The best way to do this practice is lying down. So set yourself up on your bed or maybe build a nest of pillows. You might want to light a candle or burn some incense. Create a space that provides you whatever you need to feel safe and comfortable, where you can practice in silence without interruption.

Resources that you might find helpful

There is a really great book by Layla Saad called Me and White Supremacy. I personally have found this very helpful to explore my own biases. The second book I can recommend is Growing up Aboriginal in Australia by Anita Heiss. The third resource I encourage you to explore is the work of Rachel Cargle, she is an African American academic, writer and whose work explores the intersection of race and womanhood. She has many great resources on her website and youtube. Finally the Victorian Women’s Trust has some great anti-racism resources for you to explore. These are primarily Australian references on their website but they also recommend some USA based resources to explore.

Being with our Emotions

The last 3 months have been really trying emotionally for so many people. We humans are wired for social connection, the social engagement part of our nervous system which is in our face, neck and the back of our neck is designed that way. We are designed to attune to each other through our facial expressions.

Now we find ourselves in a time where we can see few of our loved ones close up. I don’t know about you but I am really missing hugs. The Corona Virus also makes us face our own mortality. The whole situation has brought so much fear up for so many people. Fear is a very difficult emotion for many people to process, we tend to push it away and try ignore it. Yet it sill runs in the background when we do this.

How can we be with our Emotions?

We let ourselves feel the emotion, we let it run. This can be hard when we have repressed them for years.

One of the best exercises I have found to let ourselves be with them is to access them via the Felt Sense. The Felt Sense is somatic language that we can use to describe the sensations we are feeling inside our bodymind. I say bodymind because they are one thing, we aren’t walking heads.

So I have prepared a practice for you to use that you can find below that you can use to scan your body and practice tuning into your felt sense and the sensations and emotions. You can download it. Also there is a felt sense dictionary which comes from Peter Levine who is one of the founders of somatic experiencing.

How do you use it?

Firstly, review the felt sense dictionary so you can get a sense of the felt sense words you use to describe the sensations in your body. It will probably resonate with you because when you ask a child how they feel inside they often use these words. Itchy, wiry, purple, cloudy. They seem silly and culturally, the english language is not really geared to this terminology, to describe emotions and feelings. Many latin based languages that are typically more emotive, are better in these descriptions.

Then lay in a comfortable spot, put the audio on and follow the instructions. As you scan your body from top to bottom or vice versa, pay attention to what you notice, tension, stiffness, discomfort and really hone in on in and how it actually feels.

What you may notice as you pay attention to these sensations is your body may start to relax or it may bring up the emotion underneath the sensation. So if you feel like you need to cry, thats OK. Let it out. If you notice anger come up bash the pillow next to you. If you feel Fear and then need to move, go for a run or a walk. Whatever comes up is OK.

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.

Maga Season

You have probably heard of the feminine archetypes of maiden, mother and crone but have you heard of the Maga? Maiden, Mother and Crone were created many years ago when women had babies at 15 and died at 45, so many never reached Menopause. Now that we live longer it has been understood that there is another major rite of passage that women go through in midlife, that is the Maga. This is the transition through midlife, through menopause to our crone years.

Maga is our Autumn season, our harvest season. Maiden is Spring, Mother is Summer and Crone is Winter. When you think about the seasons of our life and what we are doing in those years, that makes a lot of sense. In Autumn we reap the rewards of spring and summer growth, harvest crops to wind down for the winter. Trees in Autumn drop their leaves, they don’t need them anymore and they prepare to hibernate for winter before spring comes and they grow new leaves again. This is a good way to think about our midlife journey through midlife and perimenopause. In their book The Womens Wheel of Life, Elizabeth Davis and Carole Leonard break down archetypes into 12 sub types. The Maga season is represented Amazon, Matriarch and Sorcerous.

In Portuguese Maga means Sorcerous. She who practices Alchemy. Alchemy is transformation and Maga time is a very transformative time for most women. Think of the alchemy and energy that is required by the earth to create gemstones, the chaos that ensures when a star is being created in the universe. Think of the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly. Maga season is a time that may have all of these qualities. Where a woman learns to love all the parts of herself, dark and light. Where she can blossom into the full feminine expression of herself. Jane Hardwicke Collinges has introduced us to the concept of Maga which she learned from her teacher Dr. Cedar Barstow.

It is a time for review and reflection in our life. To review where we have over abundance in our life. Maybe there are aspects of ourselves, patterns of behaviour that were developed in childhood years as a strategy for protection or survival that are not going to serve us well going forward.

Many women birth and create businesses or new work in this time period. They feel a strong yearning to do work that has greater meaning and purpose for them, work that has a broader community impact. The great thing is they have the energy to do this. As their menstrual cycle starts to wane and finish, all the energy that went into that every month and was lost during menstruation or went into creating babies, is now available to use. It is not surprising that we see so many Maga Women who have an enhanced sense of vitality about themselves. It is time to harvest your knowledge and work experience gained so far, to create something for yourself in the second part of your life.

It is time to review and reflect your choices in how you exercise and care for your body. As you grow and shape your life through this time, your body may be giving you some strong signals in the form of pain and discomfort. Soothing emotional distress with wine and chocolate is not going to help in the long term. That just gives your nervous system a quick hit. We need to keep moving our body but we don’t have the energy we had in our twenties or thirties. As our hormones decrease, collagen production does too. You see the impact on your skin. Your joints, muscles, tendons, ligaments they need collagen to help repair at night. They also need good quality sleep. This means you need to choose wisely, exercise that honours where your body is now.

How long does Maga season take? It will take however long it needs to take. We can’t predict the onset of menstruation, it happens slowly over time; we cannot predict how long labor will take in birth and the same goes for menopause arriving. There is no magic pill to fix us in this time. You have to take a big picture view.

The little nudges that you are being given by your body. When we ignore them, say like hanging onto our youth, things start to happen that feel uncomfortable. This is difficult when we live in a culture, particularly in the western world, that is obsessed with youth. Where age is not respected and seemingly older women become invisible. You can change this by choosing to embrace it and choosing pleasure in your life. What brings you pleasure?

Where can I start my review? If you took a systemic view of your life and came from the bigger picture, looking at the whole and parts of it you might start to see some patterns. Look from multiple perspectives; emotional, physical, mental, sexual. What can you see? Look at the tapestry of your life.

Often this is a time when women want to spend a lot of reflective time on their own reviewing their life and being supported by other women in sisterhood. These are both vitally important. The alone time creates a space for us to really get to know ourselves and have a relationship with ourselves. The sisterhood is important because humans are social creates who need the connections with others. We all need connection and community, where we feel understood and appreciated. We need other wise women, the crones in our life, to help us through this path, through story telling. To help us understand how we can embody our wisdom to understand our passions and purpose. To help us understand how we can serve our communities.

If you would like to explore Archetypes further, I can recommend reading the Womens Wheel of Life. If you are interested in reading more about perimenopause transition, I can highly recommend “The Wisdom of Menopause” by Christiane Northup and “New Menopausal Years the wise woman way” by Susan Weed. Both offer a multi- perspective view of this transition.

If you are interested in the hormone and collagen relationship you can click on the menu above to go to my podcasts. Episode 2 with Sarah Smith is about physical changes to our body in midlife and we talk about this.

The art of receiving

This time of year can be hard. It is busy with Christmas celebrations, buying presents and family get togethers. In the southern hemisphere we have double the pressure to finish up things at work because many people are breaking to go on summer holidays. The thought of family celebrations can be stressful. It is hard when you have done lot of work on your inner child to find yourself back in the family system that caused all those triggers in the first place. We often get caught in so much busy time, that we ignore the signs our body is giving us to slow down and just be. So I thought for my last blog for the year that I would write about receiving.

Receiving is a key to Women’s Empowerment. It is almost impossible to be nourished and practice self-care properly if we cannot receive and we cannot nourish and care for others if we have nothing to give. Being receptive is also a critical element of community; when we receive we participate in an exchange in community that sustains all aspects of community. There is little reflection or understanding of receiving in most people’s worlds; it is not valued as something we need to learn. Self Care is something that few people do well. We seem to value giving more than receiving and often do it in a way that makes being receptive seem to be a sign of inadequacy or neediness. In the book the Tao Te Ching, the feminine expression of receiving is the counter balance to the masculine expressiveness. We all have a masculine and feminine energy within us, regardless of gender.

The tools of listening, intuition and attentiveness without action, are all expressions of receiving. They will deepen our capacity to nourish ourselves. We can get stuck in old repetitive habits and patterns if we cannot receive. How do women today who are filled up with conditioned thoughts and values of how they should show up in the world learn to receive? How do women whose voices has rarely been heard learn to listen? Well it takes a lot of practice for your nervous system to feel safe to receive.

One thing I learned from my practice of Qi Gong is that a womans receptivity is a strong part of her energetic makeup. Men’s Energy fields are strongly focused around their heads, often the front of their head. Interestingly they often are focused on tasks. Womens energy fields are often dispersed. They radiate out in many directions. They take and receive energy from many different perspectives, their field more open, less restricted. Is all this openness the reason for the strong sense of knowing and intuition that women have? Women seem to connect more easily . We connect with our children through our bodies, we connect to the earth easily, we foster connections with people. Does our natural affinity for connection and receptivity mean we are good at it. Not necessarily.

Many physical things on the planet, take in and receive. Plants, Trees, Animals all take in some form of food or oxygen. We humans just produce and do. Do, Do, Do. Women are conditioned in our society to give, give, give. We habitually nourish others and we leak a lot of our own energy. We attune to our children to support them. When you stay in this pattern of nurturing others, you can easily forget that you have a self that is separate to them. A self that needs to be cared for and maintained. I recall many years ago a client asked me to design a workshop that would teach his team to be human beings not human doings. It was a challenge but we got there.

When you start a practice of self-care and take time every day to do something for yourself, you open up to a new paradigm of receiving. You can start to discern what feels good and what does not, what and who supports you and what and who does not. You experience an increase in life force energy in all of your energy centres. Your body fills with pleasure. Give yourself permission to practice receiving every day. Give yourself permission to hold this energy within every day, it will sustain you. The more you practice this, the more comfortable your nervous system (you) will feel with practicing receiving.

What are some practices of self care that you can give to yourself? When someone compliments you, receive it, thank them. Think about the food that you put in your body is it nourishing? Take walks in nature, nature is a huge source of energetic nourishment. Dancing is a huge source of energy for women. Or you could try some form of meditation. It doesn’t have to be a meditation that is still, there are many forms of dynamic meditation that are nourishing. Ten minutes of Breathwork will do wonders for your body. This holiday season practice breaking some old patterns. If you are tired, choose yourself first over going to parties or meetings that will not serve you well. Cut down on screen time. Focus on spending time with people who support you and love you. Spend some time being quiet and resting.

Women have so much capacity to be receptive if they draw in and listen to themselves. Listen to your body, this will translate to listening to your emotions, your truth, your creativity, your desires and your knowledge. The listening happens through your entire system, all your energy centres but the primary centre is your heart. Listening to yourself is an act of radical self care. It takes courage, commitment and time. Women thrive when we listen inwardly and align to our own wisdom through our listening.

Womens Empowerment

Womens empowerment, this is such a broad topic I don’t think I can write about it in one post. So maybe I should call this blog womens empowerment part 1. There are many sources of power, we are surrounded by it. Many of us believe that to be empowered we have to find that power outside of ourselves. We search constantly for it over the course of a lifetime, outside of ourselves and we never really find it.

The story that we have been told by popular culture and the media is that power is defined by; how you look, how much money you make, who you are dating or married to and your trajectory in your career as defined by an external hierarchical structure.

This is an old model of power. It is a model driven by fear and comparison.

We worry about whether we are enough or too much. Am I pretty enough? Sexy enough? Am I too outspoken? Too loud? Too intense? If you have used your sexuality to get what you want then you would worry about getting older and no longer being attractive. In a youth obsessed culture like ours, that worships teenage maidens, we disguise our natural radiance with make-up, botox, facelifts, clothes. The list goes on.

We try to be who we believe we are supposed to be. We constantly pursue personal development to give ourselves permission to make change. Ever had that thought, 'Once I do this course then I’ll be able to make changes I want in my life’, or ‘When I hit this goal then I can do what I want to do’. We contort ourselves to fit an image because we have a belief system that we are not right just the way we are. Focusing on how we should be on the outside or what we should achieve makes us unhappy, crazy, disconnected from ourself and often just downright confused.

What if I told you that you have all the resources you need to empower yourself inside of you. That the new model of power is to connect with yourself, to discover all the different parts of you, to love and accept them even the ones you don’t like so much. That connecting with your pleasure, your sexuality, your authentic self and your capacity to love will empower you like nothing you have experienced before. That it is all there right inside of you, everything you have ever needed.

This is challenging to read and challenging to put into action. We live in a culture of always on, busy all the time, that leads to burnout. Organisations financially reward us for it. Who has time to lean into themselves? You will have to be brave and give yourself permission to not be productive. You will have to give yourself permission to bask in your own pleasure and doing this has not been encouraged in our culture. The cultural warnings we received about pleasure and your desires include ‘be careful what you want because you might get addicted’ or ‘you will just keep wanting more and more’. This carries into spirituality, beware of your desires, they are a bottomless pitt, never-ending downward spiral. Let’s be clear I am not talking about desires that are not healthy for you. I am talking about knowing what you really want in your life.

Women have been treated as second class citizens for thousands of years. We have been maltreated, persecuted and just not considered equal. This gets passed down through generations. Most women do not have a natural sense of safety in their bodies. The impact of sexual trauma, disconnection from our body and unfulfilling sex, because we have not been taught how to ask for what we want, has leaked out of the bedroom and into our daily life. It has shut down our voice. It has shut down a massive source of creativity and energy. It disempowers us in life. We shrink, hide, play small just to stay safe. We lose our voice and our capacity to ask for what it is we really desire in our life. We have become afraid to ask.

What if you could ask for what you want in life.

What if you could learn what a full body YES and NO felt like in your body.

What if you could ask to slow down or stop what you were doing altogether.

What if you could get really clear about what you do want and what you don’t want in your life.

What if you recognised that your sexual energy is a massive source of radiance, vibrancy, energy and creativity in your life.

What if you could pursue one pleasurable activity every day in your life and you used that energy generated from that to fuel you to create the life you desire.

What if you could learn the art of satiation. What it feels like inside of your body to feel satisfied and content and let yourself reside there for a few minutes and then for stretches at a time and it felt safe.

I don’t know about you but all of that sounds like a pretty empowered woman to me.

If you feel like this blog could help someone pass it on to them. If you read this and it resonates with you but you are not sure where to start hit reply and ask me I’ll answer your email.

PS - If you are super interested in this topic keep your eyes posted over summer. I’ve been recording podcasts that I am going to release over summer. There is a podcast on the topic ‘Orgasm as source of Power’, that I recorded with my friend and fellow coach Julia Lally, coming your way.

The healing power of Breathwork

I recently returned from 8 days of Breathwork facilitator training. It was a fantastic week where I got to learn and hang out with 19 other very engaged students learning to teach and facilitate Breathwork. By the end of our time together we had all developed extremely close bonds with each other, which is not surprising given we had spent all of that time breathing together and taking care of each other whilst processing lots of latent trauma.

Breathwork has been around for some time. You may have heard of it or know it as rebirthing, holotropic breathwork, alchemy of breath, BBTRS Breathwork, Breath of Bliss. These are all different teaching methods. Similar but different. There is no branding or copyright around Breathwork because it’s Breath.

So why is Breathwork so effective at moving old stuck energy, tension or trauma out of our body? Well the idea is that you charge up your body with oxygen through a connected breath, in and out, no pause in between. This brings you 100% into presence in your body, bypassing cortical control into an altered state of consciousness. In BBTRS breathwork, which is the modality I am learning, the idea is to bring the body into presence with this old energy and release it by triggering the flight or fight response to give the trauma the opportunity to complete its cycle.

What is the trauma I am speaking about? Well the best way to explain it is to use an example from Peter Levine’s book, “Waking the Tiger”. Imagine you see a Lion chasing a Zebra. The Zebra in an attempt to save itself falls to the ground and plays dead. It is frozen. The Lion, realising the chase is over, gets bored and runs away. Some moments later, knowing that danger has gone, the Zebra jumps up. It immediately starts running around, tremoring and shaking its body. It is discharging the frozen energy from its body. In his book Levine says the Freeze offers two benefits. Firstly, it saves the Zebra because the freeze allows it to run for its life, when danger has dissipated. Second, If the Zebra was eaten by the Lion, when frozen and numb it would not feel anything. Nature has built in compassion into a natural cycle. Humans and animals can both access the freeze response. However, for humans, our body doesn’t naturally do the discharge. We have to give it some help to do that. (for the sake of the article I’m just talking about latent general trauma, there are many different types of trauma the principle is the same).

Every day we experience the fight, flight or freeze response in our body in our autonomic nervous system. The danger coming our way may not be a lion chasing us but maybe it is an angry boss or spouse, or a lack of emotional or psychological safety in our work environment, angry drivers on the road yelling at us or a train stuck on the tracks doing nothing whilst we are stuck inside, worrying about getting to work on time. We have these scenarios happening all the time and because they have become normalised instances in our life, we don’t realise that constantly moving into these states of flight, fight or freeze is putting a lot of stress on our bodies. This is because we don’t have any opportunity to release that energy.

Trauma is the result of the freeze energy getting stuck in our body and not having the chance to complete its cycle. Trauma is not the result of what happened to us. Trauma is the result of how effective our nervous system was able to deal with that energy that was triggered in the traumatic situation. Two people can go through the exact same event, one feeling traumatised, the other being completely fine post the adverse event. It depends on whether the person went into freeze and stayed there or whether they went into flight or flight and were able to ‘save’ themselves. The good news is there are many different ways of releasing trauma frozen in our body. Breathwork is just one.

So how can Breathwork help?

As mentioned above, breathwork allows our body to release this stuck energy. Through charging the body with oxygen, the flight or fight kicks in and the body completes the cycle through discharge. This may be shaking, tremoring, crying, laughing, shouting, myofascial unwinding which is the body moving itself. Emotions that were never acknowledged at the time come back up, muscular tension releases. It creates a lot of space in the body.

People report feeling softer in their body, postural changes, feeling more ‘in’ their body, better at reinforcing their boundaries, feeling their emotions and actually enjoying that. A stronger sense of their own presence and feeling others’ presence.

For me personally, I have released really old tension, lots of trauma, I feel softer in my body, my skeleton actually feels quite different, aches and pains have disappeared. I am present with the sensations and emotions within my body and able to witness and observe them and I have noticed my capacity to be emotionally triggered has significantly decreased.

Breathwork is something you would do with a trained facilitator who can safely hold space for you. However it is your own body doing all the work, releasing all on its own, unwinding, your own breath healing you. You being your own healer. All the answers deep inside of you, all there waiting for you. Your body and its own innate ability to heal working its magic.

There are certain health conditions where Breathwork is contraindicated. These include pregnancy, severe asthma, heart disease, severe mental illness, epilepsy, diabetes, acute physical injuries. If you are unsure if you should try Breathwork, please consult your medical professional for advice.

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.

Boundaries......clear boundaries will set you free

Boundaries are a great container for love and growth in relationships. I love that I have very clear boundaries and part of that means putting my own needs first with self-care. If I don’t look after myself, how can I have the energy to meet my family’s needs? How can I create a safe, deep and nurturing space for clients that I coach?

So what are boundaries? Simply put, what is ok and what is not ok for you. Boundaries are flexible, we are constantly reviewing, inquiring and negotiating them as we learn and grow the skills we need to navigate the world. They are changing all the time as we change.

Our parents help us enforce them for the first 7-8 years of our lives because we are not resourced to deal with life yet. As we learn new skills to navigate life, we learn to be able to express them. In Pre-school, children are taught language to set their boundaries when they learn to say 'Stop it I don't like it”, when faced with behaviour they are not ok with. They are learning to express their Yes and No.

When someone has low boundaries they get stepped on a lot because they often do not know what their ‘No’ is, that is, what is not ok for them.  They can also rub others the wrong way by not being aware of others’ boundaries. People with really high and rigid boundaries often struggle to let others in.  They create distance between themselves and others, often to feel safe, which does not allow others to get to know the real them.

Most of the interpersonal conflict experienced by people I've coached over the years has involved boundary violations. Often without people really understanding what was going on.

How can we think constructively about boundaries?

Boundary setting is an expression of self-love and community care.  It creates healthy relationship dynamics because we are being honest about our needs.  When we honour our own needs, we are bringing our whole self to a relationship.

When we hide what we need, we pretend to be something that we are not, we are performing. When other people set boundaries with you, don’t make it about you and what you need.  Thank them for setting their own boundaries. You might not like what they say or you may not be able to meet their needs but thank them for telling you what they need. All you need to say is, ‘Thankyou for telling me what you need”.

There is a misconception that boundaries are created to keep us small, marginalise us, push us into a corner or keep us from being free.  That is not boundary setting, that is controlling behaviour. There is a huge difference between someone expressing a boundary to protect their sacred space and someone trying to exert control over your space. One is someone protecting their own wellbeing whilst the other is someone who is trying to fill their own desires with dominance over another.

A boundary is as much about what you are saying yes to as it is what you are saying no to. To quote the fabulous writer Elizabeth Gilbert. “Within you sacred space can be your time, your creativity, your loved ones, your privacy, your recovery, your values, your mental health, your joy, your heart and your soul”.

How do we get better with boundaries?

We get super clear on our desires. Many people can tell me what they don't want. But most often they struggle to tell me what they do want in their life. We bring boundaries to life when we can express our desires. When you express your desire and someone honours your boundary, thank them. Praise them. You could say “Thank you so much for……it made me feel…..”.

We work on learning to express and feel our emotions in an embodied way. When we learn to express our emotions in a grounded way, we get comfortable listening to their messages and we learn skills to self-regulate our nervous system.  This in turn helps us work through if we are ok or not ok in a situation. If we are working from a neural network that is an adult part of us, rather than one developed in childhood which is an outdated part of us, we get clarity on what our true Yes and No is.

When someone communicates with you how they like to be touched or not touched, treated or spoken to, they are expressing their boundaries. Try not to see this as a rejection of you. It is ok if they don’t want to engage with you in the way you want to engage. It is not a measure of your worthiness as a person. It is just their boundaries being expressed. Thank them for telling you.

Finally, we work through what our purpose in life is. This is a big existential question but so linked to desire and emotional expression. When we are clear about what our bigger picture is, what we want, how that makes us feel, we experience a sense of love and freedom inside. Then we are content to just 'be'. 

This is not short term work, it is ongoing, forever.

It is the lifelong adventure of learning.

The Birth of the Inner Mother

For much of my professional career I’ve worked in transition.  Firstly organisational contexts where there was large scale change that impacted on culture, then in the development of leaders within organisations and now as a coach.  Ultimately this is all about learning and with that comes change. 

Women experience many archetypal transitions as we go through our life.  One of the most well known in popular culture is maiden to mother. Becoming a mother is a hugely transformational experience for most women.  They birth their own inner mother, their inner creatrix is born. It is an incredibly expansive time for women as they discover a part of themselves that they never knew existed.  It reaches to the core of their identity. Having a small baby to look after brings you out of a more self-serving, even self-centred behaviour that you may have exhibited previously because all of a sudden you have someone other than yourself to think about and look after.

But it is not only women who have children who can experience this.  I have witnessed many women birth this aspect of themselves in the creation of passion projects.  Whether it be launching a new business, a not for profit or creative work. The inner mother is often birthed in this scenario, when the way through to completion is through un-chartered territory.

I often coach women in leadership roles when they come back to a role either from parental leave or major sabbatical and they have experienced the birth of their inner mother.  The expansiveness they embody, the implicit understanding that they are fundamentally different beings than before they left, is front of mind and acted out in how they navigate the world now.  However, often what they experience is ‘oh you are back thank goodness, we need you back to how you were before’. Sometimes it is explicitly stated and sometimes it is implied. Either way it causes massive internal tension for almost everyone subject to it.  For most people, when you have had a transformational experience, you don’t want to go back to being the old version of yourself again. Sometimes the individual puts the pressure on themselves to be the old version of themselves, to be dynamic, on top of everything and in control.  Other times it comes externally, I have heard remarks over the years of ‘she’s lost it’. My response is often actually I think she might have ‘found it’.

When nurtured appropriately, the inner mother has an expanded capacity for listening, for inquiry, for connecting and caring for others, for guiding and developing others, for working collaboratively with others and co-creating solutions.  I’m always puzzled as to why you would not want someone to show this aspect of themselves; these new skills and talents they have. These capacities are the backbone for healthy relating. It is often what I end up working on with individuals on as a coach.

As they continue to grow, learn and transition toward midlife, many women start to awaken to the true essence of who they are.  This shows up in many different ways. Often it is an increase in confidence and a decreased concern for what others think; maybe she is more confrontational.  Or she may be rebelling against patriarchal constraints, the ‘glass ceiling’, pushing back when her boundaries are infringed upon now. Challenging issues at work, like lack of wage parity or inadequate childcare. Most of this is healthy behaviour of course depending on delivery of the message. It is showing a concern for often bigger societal issues at play, bigger systemic problems to be solved. The purpose is often about nurturing of society. Many women at this stage become very purpose driven in their interests and where they channel their energy. Again this new emergent purpose driven self is often criticised or disregarded.

Ladies there are many rites of passage we go through; these are only two.  There is nothing wrong with you, as humans we have the capacity to keep learning, growing and changing forever.  Embrace learning, embrace your body changing, embrace the wisdom in your body, embrace your expanded view of the world. Revel in it.

If you would like to read more about female archetypes and the different passages we grow through I can recommend ‘The Women’s Wheel of Life’ by Elizabeth Davis.

Resilience

There is a lot of talk about resilience now and I see many workplaces putting effort into helping people understand how to be more resilient.  It is generally around play to your strengths and it is pretty cognitive in its focus. That is, a very logical, rational approach to being resilient.  In my experience as a coach when most people struggle with resilience it is their emotions and feelings that they have, that they are struggling to deal with.  Those emotions they are experiencing are either disconnected and unconscious so not being expressed, or, they are so intolerable they will do anything to avoid feeling them. I’m not just talking about the yuck emotions like guilt, disgust, anger, shame.  I’m talking about exalted emotions to; joy, ecstasy, love.

I’ve done a lot of training in working with trauma somatically in the last two years and it has really expanded my view of resilience. For me resilience is growing our ability to be able to be with all our emotions and experiences in life and that includes discomfort, feeling weak, struggling and being challenged.  It is being able to tolerate and embrace positive experiences like connection, amazement, joy and love. It is being able to let yourself feel your emotions in your body and be totally aware of where you are feeling them.  So my focus is on helping people I coach, little by little, be able to have experiences where they may feel weakness or vulnerability or be filled up with joy and be with it in their heart, their body and their mind. Without trying to make it right or wrong.  Just experience it and be with it. So it is in learning to be with anything and everything, whether it feels like it is a good or bad experience, that builds our resilience.

Just like the tree in this picture above, that is thousands of years old, it has weathered, severe heat, storms, floods, insects and animals all over it, viruses, humans creating buildings in the middle of the place that it lives, we learn to be with the experience as it has and keep on growing and learning.  When we are able to be with everything that we experience, we become less reactive, experience a greater sense of safety in our body, we make more considered decisions, we act in greater alignment with what is right and true for us. We are able to pay attention to what might be going on for others under the surface and act from a place of compassion when they may be struggling.

How do we do this?  Our emotions are energy they want to move through our body.  So learning to be with them and experience them in a grounded way, not repressing or over-dramatising them.  Using our breath or movement to help them move through our body and experiencing what is on the other side of them.  We have a common misconception that mindfulness has to be stillness and quiet. This is a very masculine view of mindfulness; growing consciousness through stillness.  We can use techniques like breathwork, somatic movement (yoga and pilates), dance, to work with the energy of our emotions and really connect into the felt sense of them in our body.  Journalling is a great technique to articulate what you are feeling and for those people I coach who hate writing I encourage speaking into a voice recorder app just to get it all out.  There are so many tools and strategies you have to work with. The key is going slowly taking small steps as you push the boundaries slowly of what you can tolerate and be with.