Ep 53 Moving through life with greater ease with Sophia Breust

As we get older many of us experience joint pain and muscle pain. We think it is just our old joints but it might very well be dry fascia. In this episode I talk to Sophia Breust who is a structural integration practitioner about the many benefits of working with fascia.

Sophia has an interesting story and her own health and wellbeing today is a direct reflection of the benefits of structural integration. After going through some relational trauma in 2014, Sophia was diagnosed with PTSD. Experiencing symptoms from extreme anxiety, recurring nightmares, and shakes to lethargy, Sophia explored talk therapy to help resolve what she thought was a problem in her mind. Over 2 years, she showed up religiously to her psychology sessions, but she felt she wasn't getting anywhere.

​After years of looking for answers and feeling totally helpless, Sophia found Structural Integration & Myofascial Bodywork (MFB) and realised how disconnected she was from her physical body. This was the missing link for her; the problem wasn't just in her mind, it was in her body! Trauma is stored in the body, and if we become disconnected from the sensations that are going on in our physical body, our mind won't get a chance to be at ease.

After many years of healing, processing, feeling, and deeply connecting to her body, Sophia now helps many people make sense of their physical pain and what may be going on for them emotionally. She calls this Emotional Anatomy. While a free and open fascial system creates a more balanced emotional state, Sophia has seen the impact of MFB on excellent recovery, lymph & blood flow, and injury prevention. MFB, according to Sophia and many of her clients, is truly life-changing!

In this episode we talk about all things fascia, the bodymind connection, healing trauma and a bit about ageing bodies. Sophia is based in Adelaide, Australia, you can find Sophia on instagram @muscle_sense or via her website www.musclesense.net

Ep 38 The energy chiro, on nervous system healing with Dr Kathryn Theodosis

Dr Kathryn Theodosis joins me for this fantastic podcast where we are talking about our amazing bodies, in particular our nervous systems. Kathryn is a chiropractor who works with clients to allow their nervous system and energy system to move out of a state of stress and fear and into one of greater safety and connection. This shift allows a greater sense of safety to be held by the nervous system and the energy system, giving space for us to connect with parts of us we have not felt safe to prior

Kathryn started off as a traditional chiropractor and was introduced to network spinal analysis a gentle mode of adjustment using contact points on the spine. This transformed her own healing experience and she then completed further professional training in network spinal analysis, a modality of chiropractic care created by Donald Epstein. This then lead her to two years of professional training in Integral Energetics with Dr John Hare and Dr Fred Swan, who have created this modality that works with the body’s energy system.

In the podcast we talked about:

• Different nervous system responses and how they show up in our bodies,

• How our life experiences and our life story are held in our muscles and organs and we can often see this in a person’s posture and stance,

• How network spinal allows the body to unravel, reorganise and integrate its life experiences in a gentle way allowing it to continually adapt and become more flexible,

• That our brain loves novelty and new experiences and this helps our brain stay young and have capacity to create new neural pathways as we age, this means we can keep on learning and this is supportive of good mental health outcomes as we age,

• How repressed emotions and old trauma and stress are held in the body and how that can sometimes manifest as pain,

• The heart and its energetic field are another area where we pick up on the emotions and energy of the environment around you. Often it is our heart reaction picking up on the emotions of others that reacts before our conscious brain,

• Different body holding patterns such as rigidity of the spine and what the somatic story behind that is,

• What practices suit what nervous systems. We talked about meditation and it not being for everyone and how in fact it can for some people, reinforce a trauma pathway of avoiding their body,

• Why creativity is so important for our emotional well-being,

• The current trend in cold water exposure and heat through saunas and why they don’t suit everyone,

• Women’s bodies and listening to our cyclical natures, taking queues from our body and not punishing ourselves for not able to be ‘on’ all the time.

You can find Kathryn on her website www.theenergychiro.com or on instagram @drkathryn.theenergychiro

Ep 37 Skin magic with Richie Angelo

Today my good friend Richie Angelo joins me to talk about skin through the major rites of passage we go through. Richie is a beauty therapist who is a skin guru. She has incorporated further study into her practice and uses both kinesiology and energetic work to treat her clients.

In this podcast Richie explains how our skin is more than just the boundary of our body, it is part of the detoxification system of our body and it interacts with all other body systems. That our skin is part of our immune system and often represents on the outside what is going on in the inside for us. How we can tell by our skin whether it is hormone changes or toxicity in our body based on where our skin is changing on our body.

We decided to frame the conversation around our rites of passage: Maiden, Mother, Maga, Crone and how our hormonal changes drive significant changes in our skin.

if you want to skip through sections to get to content that is relevant to your life stage, the time stamps are:

17:10 Maiden, the teenage years

21:50 Mother - the impact of pregnancy on our skin

28:45 Maga - midlife and the menopause transition

45:55 Crone - Our early 60s onwards

Of course there are lots of gold moments throughout, Richie’s knowledge and wisdom about skin is incredible.

You can find Richie at www.madebyself.com.au or on instagram @_madebyself_

Ep 29 The power of Slow with Casey Hall

Today I talk with my friend and colleague Casey Hall, who is a sensuality coach, about the power of slowing down. Casey is both a sensuality coach and holistic wellness coach and has studied and worked in the wellness landscape for many years. She is the best person to talk to about this subject because not only is it the centre of her work but it is her life story also. She learned that slowing down was helped her heal and grow after many years of living a fast paced life.

In the podcast we discuss:

• How Casey moved into corporate wellness and realised that 90% of the cases Doctors deal with are related to stress,

• That sensuality is a key to helping us slow down and live a life with more presence,

• That the emptiness and loneliness many of us feel is a disconnection from self and slowing down helps us to reconnect with ourselves,

• How pleasure is a great tool to help us to slow down and be more present in our lives,

• That many of us have internalised cultural belief systems around slowing down and pleasure that stop us from pursuing both and this lives largely in our unconscious so most of us are not aware of our blockages toward pursuing both,

• Our bodies speak their own language and they are talking to us all the time, we just learned to ignore their messages,

• Slowing down helps us to make better conscious choices and decisions in our life.

You can find Casey at her website www.sensualitycoach.com on instagram @sensuality_coaching. Casey does a podcast with her Business Partner Elizabeth Menzel called “Slow the F Down” you can find it on all major podcasting platforms.

Ep 26 The Forgotten Father with Carla Crivaro

Becoming a parent is a huge transition for all of us one that is often poorly supported in terms of the identity change in the transition and how it impacts on our relationship with our partner. Women receive quite a bit of support in terms of the aspects of being a mother that involve the physical care of the baby, not so much in terms of the challenges of becoming a mother. However they have a support structure in place that can support that. Men receive very little if any support in their transition to becoming a father.

In this episode I talk with Carla Crivaro, a sex, love and relationship coach, who works with women and men to achieve their goals in delicious sex, profound love and authentic relationships. Carla creates awareness around men’s transition into parenthood where they can feel isolated, rejected and miss intimacy with their partner. She has named this phenomenon, The Forgotten Father.

This episode is centred in the dynamic of cis gender, heterosexual relationships. However, as we discuss dynamics in family systems, roles that we may be playing and patterns of interaction you may find this useful information regardless of your sexual or gender orientation. In this episode we talk about:

• The journey of parenthood for men and what some of the patterns can be when they are not coping,

• How they can get into a really unhealthy systemic dynamic with their female partner where she takes on a role of mothering and they the son in their relationship dynamic and the repercussions of this,

• That men’s hormones do change when a new baby arrives so that they can bond with the baby and provide support and love to their partner,

• That men can also experience birth trauma and how this can impact on them,

• What inner work is helpful to men to participate in to shift relationship dynamics that are not supportive of their transition to fatherhood and learning to co-parent with their partner.

You can find Carla at her website www.carlacrivaro.com or on instagram @the.forgotten.father

Ep 25 Sacred Sexuality with Suzanne Najarian

Many people, regardless of gender, come to midlife and start to wonder about their sexuality. It might not be conscious thoughts but often a yearning or longing for something more in their intimate life. Both with themselves and their partner, if they have one. That more, is often better sex or a more sacred connection with their sexuality.

Today I talk to my friend and colleague, Suzanne Najarian, who is a sacred sexuality coach about what sacred sexuality is and how the big changes and transitions in our life point us home to that truth of what that is for us. Suzanne is also a lactation consultant and works with many women and their partners pre and post birth not only in helping them with breast feeding but also understanding their bodies pre and post birth.

In this podcast we talk about:

• Sometimes the sex dies in our relationship as we go through the big life transitions of becoming a parent or midlife transition or menopause. However few of us have the language to describe what that yearning actually as. We just feel deep in our bones that there has to be more.

• Many of us are taught to please our partners or that our pleasure can only occur in conjunction with another person. These big transitions drive us toward our truth and to come home to what is pleasurable for us.

• We are so many different women during our lives and these big transitions, particularly Menopause are a chance to pause and integrate all the different parts of ourselves.

• How our sexuality and desire changes throughout our lives and how our hormones can facilitate that.

• How both childbirth and menopause crack us open and unravel us making us feel immense discomfort in how we feel in our bodies. This can be very confusing.

• To create your own pleasure practice and learn to understand your own responsive desire that you can turn on over time with attention to pleasure.

• How working on our sexuality and cultivating your own pleasure will unblock and/or increase your creativity.

• How our bodies are able to often tolerate more discomfort than pleasure. We then seek pleasure through pathways that don’t support our optimal health. When we pursue a sacred sexuality practice and work out what is pleasurable for us we stop those previous strategies we created to numb out from discomfort.

You can find Suzanne at her website www.suzannenajarian.com or on her instagram @suzanne.najarian

Ep 17 Understanding Trauma and navigating it in motherhood and midlife with Shelby Leigh

This episode is a fantastic conversation with Shelby Leigh that sits in the intersection of our work; Trauma resolution and education and transitions or rites of passage through motherhood and midlife. Shelby is a former licensed psychotherapist, now coach and consultant - She teaches trauma awareness to coaches, therapists, healthcare professionals, and organisations worldwide.  

Shelby’s great passion is understanding and supporting folks with developmental and complex trauma in a holistic, body-based, integrative way.  Between her own journey with complex PTSD and supporting thousands of students and clients, she is ignited by supporting folks across the globe to be able to support themselves and the people they work with to move from simply surviving to truly thriving.

In the podcast we talk about:

• What Trauma is and why it sometimes shows up in our transitions through our rites of passages of motherhood and midlife,

• We discuss how many women experience a lot of contact with Medical Practitioners during these rites a passage and how you can advocate for yourself if you have trauma in your body when it comes to trauma informed healthcare,

• How slowing down can lead to much more healing,

• What trauma informed healthcare might look like,

• How we can learn to treat ourselves with greater tenderness and care and how the tenderness can come from the simplest places in our lives,

• How healing our trauma can lead us to right here into the present moment of our life, and be able to show up authentically as ourselves in our life every day.

Shelby has two fantastic online courses she runs around Trauma. Creating Safer Spaces is a course for Coaches, Therapists and Facilitators who are looking to learn and understand how they may become more trauma informed in their work. Creating Safer Healthcare is for Medical Practitioners and their teams who wish to provide more Trauma informed Healthcare. It is designed for both allopathic health practitioners and complementary health practitioners and their teams. Both courses offer expert coaching advice from specialists in their fields, theory and knowledge about trauma, and practice skills you can use to implement every day in your work. If you are interested in either course, click on the highlighted link.

You can find Shelby at her website www.shelby-leigh.com or on her instagram account @fierceheart.shelbyleigh.

Ep 16 When do I become a Woman with a capital W with Kendra Cover

Today I talk to my friend and colleague Kendra Cover who is a women’s intimacy coach. Kendra and I were wondering out loud recently recently about this and wondering What does a woman with a capital W look like, what is it that stops us stepping into womanhood and what does it look like to others. How would we know, what does it feel like inside of us?

In this podcast we explore:

• The rites of passage that women go through how poorly supported they are,

• How women feel their value comes from the roles that they take up in their lives. That we are conditioned to be a good daughter, good friend, good mother, good wife; all the time giving so much of ourselves away to others. That within these roles there comes so much discomfort that we feel that is surprising to us;

• How few archetypal roles are available to women in terms of how they show up and this narrowing down of how we ‘are’ diminishes so much of who we are,

• How learning to hold all of our emotions and listening to the signals they provide is both a source of great power and pleasure to us,

• There is so little encouragement culturally in our society to encourage and honour people really to get to know themselves on a very deep level,

• The lack of ritual and honour that exists within our society to support women through the rites of passage we go through,

• When you connect with your sexual energy which is your life force energy you can never turn it off and it is such an incredible source of vitality to us in life.

You can find Kendra on her website www.kendracover.com on instagram @kendracover and her Facebook group is called Into the wild of womanhood.

Ep 14 Conscious Dating with Ana Kosta

I’ve watched many of my friends navigate new relationships in the past ten years. In this time of midlife one product of our personal growth is sometimes a fracture in our relationships. It is hard to grow together. Many of us started long terms relationships in our 20s and we kind of fall together, often lead by our desire for each other, without much thought to what we really want in our life and in a partner.

What I have observed is that dating in your 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s is so much different to your 20s. I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to talk to Ana Kosta. Ana is a Conscious Dating coach who works holistically with women to help them find a life partner.

Choosing a partner that allows you to have a depth in your relationship requires clarity around your desires both for your life and also of the qualities and values of your partner. Ana Kosta talks openly about her own experience and how she empowers her clients to find that clarity in their own life.

There are some beautiful reflective moments in this conversation as we contemplate creating conscious relationships in our midlife.

You can find Ana on her website www.anakostacoaching.com on instagram at @anakosta.coach and in her facebook Ana Kosta Coaching

Ep 13 Three Golden Opportunities with Dr Nic Pawley

Today I have Nicole Pawley with me to talk about the Three Golden Opportunities. Nicole is a Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine and a Birth Educator. The Three Golden Opportunities are three times in our life, as women, that are large inflexion points. Times where we have the opportunity to either foster or risk our health during the transition.

The Three Golden Opportunities are Menarche, Post Partum and Menopause. Chinese Medicine has a long history of menstrual and post partum care. The three golden opportunities are life gateways and periods of life where there is rapid change and a physical reaction. In Chinese Medicine we talk about Qi, Jing, Ying and Yang.

Chinese medicine seeks first to understand natural cycles, and then take advantage of them in order to optimise health and longevity - thereby avoiding future imbalances and making it easier to treat any that do occur. To understand why menstruation, postpartum and menopause are so key in terms of health preservation it’s important to understand the concept of Qi and Jing, which are essence or life force energy.

We are born with a finite amount of life force energy. Qi and Jing are like your bank account if you go hard and fast you will spend it all. Jing is there to help you move through these transitions. If you have a good amount of Jing you will have vitality. If you run hard life will be hectic and these transitions will be difficult. It is important to learn how to nourish and replenish our Jing and this is where pleasure practices come in.

In our practice of pleasure, both sensual and sexual, we replenish our Jing and nourish ourselves.

Our Western Culture is very yang, constant go and on. What is valued is productivity and achievement producing overworked, frazzled and burned out humans. This is detrimental to Women’s health; to everyone’s health. How can we be more Yin our life? Listen to the podcast and you will find out.

You can find Nicole on instagram @drnicpawley. Or you can message me and I can put you in touch with her.

Ep 12 Cyclical Living with Jaime Lauren

This week I have the wonderful Jaime Lauren, who is a menstrual and fertility awarenes coach talking about cyclical living for Women. I loved this conversation! I am a big supporter of cylical living for women and this is why I really wanted to do a podcast on it, it is something I teach in all my work.

Jaime runs a 10 week course of cyclical living and she does one on one work with women around fertility awareness. So what is cyclical living? It is designing your life around the menstrual cycle. This may seem a strange concept to us in the modern western world but women did it for thousands of years prior to the industrial revolution.

We seem to find ourselves in an epidemic of hormone related health issues and this shows up in many health issues in women from teenage years to the 80s. Health issues such as PCOS, endometriosis, infertility, fibroids, acne, IBS, early or difficult menopause, early puberty, sleep problems, anxiety, depression, hair loss and amenorrhea. I am sure there are more.

Understanding your cycle and living with it is, I believe, a big lever when it comes to self-love, self-acceptance and women stepping into their wild power.

You can find Jamie on Facebook in her Group Cyclical Living for Women, her website www.jaimelauren.coach or on instagram @menstrualmagic_

Ep 11 Movement as Medicine with Dianne Shepherd

Dianne Shepherd is back and today we are talking about Sensual Movement. Sensual movement is a non linear form of movement that is a great form of exercise, a meditative process and a source of great healing. It is particularly powerful for working with our pelvic floor and our core.

Dianne and I chat about all the different benefits of sensual movement. It is a great movement for women and so different from other forms of exercise that we do like Yoga or Pilates, that whilst working the core well, are very linear in their progression. Many of these forms of exercise work on the horizontal and vertical planes of the body, not the spiral. The pelvis is a spiral shaped bone, did you know that?

Sensual movement can also build great body mind connections between our brain and our pelvis. It builds life force energy and is a good way for women to build connection with their erotic part of themselves. This form of movement is a great way to work with our emotions and get them moving. Our Emotions are supposed to me in motion not locked up in our body. I have also found with some clients who have trauma in their body, it is a great way for them to work with that, for their body to titrate the energy of the trauma as it is unwinding from their body.

Dianne has a whole host of content on sensual movement in her website portal ‘The Goddess Vault’ which you can find on her website www.shakticore.com it is free to subscribe and you can become a member, just click on the link to get to her website. You can also find her on instagram @wildmenopause and on Facebook her group is The Goddess Vault.

Ep 10 Navigating Trauma in Motherhood and Midlife with Nisha Gill

Information and knowledge about Trauma has become very popular and accessible in the last 5-10 years . This is due to a few factors, greater scientific research and knowledge about the nervous system, the creation of a number of body based approaches to trauma resolution and the fact that there are a whole lot of individual practitioners who have trained in these body based modalities. New practitioners who have written books, started podcasts and started to run trainings both in person and online.

In this podcast, I am joined by Nisha Gill. Nisha is a Somatic Experiencing (trauma resolution) Practitioner who works at the intersection of trauma, birth, female sexuality & embodiment. She draws also from her background in integrative bodywork and counselling. Nisha has a special focus on birth, sexual, medical and developmental traumas through the lens of the nervous system. She combines her holistic tools for a highly tailored approach to body re-connection in the wake of trauma, illness, grief & loss, birth, menopause and other challenging transitions.

Nisha and I talk about what Trauma actually is, how people experience it in their nervous system. We talk about different causes of trauma, the different times in can show up in our life. Primarily, I wanted to talk to Nisha about birth trauma but we talked about a whole lot of stuff related to Trauma resolution work. We talked about developmental trauma and how this can become a big thing either in post-partum, or midlife transition through peri-menopause for us, as our body seeks healing and resolution. How do we know what Trauma responses look like? We explain what Somatic Experiencing is and how it supports individuals through trauma resolution.

This is an important podcast for me because I have coached many women who have unresolved birth trauma or developmental trauma and it can have a hugely negative impact on their life. In terms of the health and wellbeing, their body’s ability to heal and the quality of their relationships, both with their intimate partner and their family but also their broader community. I want to create as much awareness about it as possible.

Nisha and I have a strong relationship; I refer lots of people to her. She also supported me through chemotherapy as I chose to partake in Somatic Experiencing as one of the therapeutic modalities to support me and I believe it had a profoundly positive experience on my body’s healing. My work has a strongly trauma informed focus and I look forward to learning more about it.

You can find Nisha at her website www.feminineinstincts.com.au here facebook groups Birth Trauma Awareness and Feminine Instincts and on Instagram @feminineinstincts.

Ep 9 Becoming a Mother with Belinda Haan

Have you ever heard the word Matrescence? I hadn’t heard of it until a couple of years ago. It means the journey of becoming a mother. In this podcast I talk to Belinda Haan who is a coach and facilitator who runs the group The Motherhood Gathering. The Motherhood Gathering is a little different to your average mothers group; they do not talk about their babies. They talk about their growing pains and joys through the transition of creating their inner mother.

In the podcast you will learn the definition of Matrescence and the different contexts that our growth occurs within. We discuss the cultural and familiar boundaries and hurdles women face in this transition and we wonder why in the year 2021 is it really early days in understanding the complexity of this transition when women has been around since the dawn of creation. Or maybe is it that once it was understood but that ancient knowledge was dismissed in favour of science. Unfortunately it is a not an area the medical field has explored in great depth. Most research is on babies. One of the most challenging aspects of Becoming a Mother is the reconciliation between our projected fantasy of how we will be as mothers compared to how we are once the baby arrives. That and the wide spectrum of emotions we experience can be a lot to handle for a woman who is also sleep deprived and healing from birth with little support (which is often the case).

The reality is even many years after children have arrived we are always in the process of ‘Becoming a Mother’ it is a never ending learning process and our identity within that context constantly grows as expands.

Belinda’s website is www.themotherhodgathering.com and you can find her on instagram @thermotherhoodgathering. In the podcast we mention a new york times article ‘The Birth of a Mother’, click on the link to read it.