EP 51 Supporting your body with nutrition in Midlife with Annie Gaudreault

In midlife, we start to notice changes in how our body metabolises food, how we recover from exercise and how we are able to deal with stress in our life. No longer can we drink lots of alcohol and pull up OK the next morning. Maybe there are a few sneaky kilograms piling on. This is because as we enter perimenopause, our hormones start to shift how we metabolise food and this impacts on many areas of our health.

Annie Gaudreault, who is a Licenced Nutritionist and Health Coach from Toronto, CA, joins me in the podcast to talk about the impact of nutrition on our life as we move into our midlife. Annie specialises in working with women in midlife to make sense of all the wellness information out there and to make sustainable changes to their health and wellbeing.

Annie has her own interesting midlife transition story. She started running in her 30s and as she approached her midlife transition she really trained hard and found emotional and mental resilience expanded and she was able to deepen her running expertise to run marathons. From there she moved into competing in Iron Man Triathlons. For Annie her midlife transition was an awakening. An awakening to becoming her true self and pursuing a new career in nutrition that created more meaning in her life.

• In the podcast we talked about:

• The lack of education around menopause and how this impacts our lifestyle choices,

• The impact of estrogen decline on other hormones in particular our metabolic health,

• How estrogen decline impacts on how our body can process sugar and simple carbohydrates. The impact on insulin production and how this may cause insulin insensitivity and pre-diabetes health issues,

• Strategies to deal with addiction to sugar and carbohydrates,

• Fibre and Protein in our diet and how eating more of these in midlife supports our health,

• How internalised cultural belief systems impact our perception of midlife and the impact of it on our life.

You can find Annie at www.veev.ca or on instagram @veev_wellness. Annie works globally online, so if you would like to book a time to talk to her about your nutrition needs at midlife you can book a call via her website.

Ep 48 Women, Power and Deep Knowing with Celine Levy

When it comes to midlife we often talk about the concept of ‘women stepping into their power”, what does this actually mean? Well in today’s episode I will unpack that with my friend and colleague Celine Levy. Celine is a Sex and Power coach who works with women to help them gain a sense of agency and connection with their bodies.

Celine and I talk about power and how it is relational and what is actually happening in the neurobiology of the body when we are not in an ‘empowered’ stance; by the way we both really dislike the word empowered.

Celine has a really interesting story and her path to this work, showed her that ‘power over’ another can be devastating, and how the cultural conditions in an environment can set us up for these experiences as we adapt to cultures to try and belong and feel safe. This close shave with a cult has propelled her forward into work with women so that they can learn to listen to their bodies through building a strong connection with their nervous system and the messages it sends.

In this podcast we talk about:

• What power is, how it can only exist within a relationship and how the state of our nervous system drives our responses to what we are experiencing.

• How when we interact with another person there are two conversations going on at the same time. There is the conscious dialogue that comes through the mouth and at the same time our nervous system is having a conversation and when there is a mis-match between the two we notice this in particular ways.

• How we can rewire and re-pattern the nervous system to achieve a different outcome.

• How estrogen creates a biological behavioural drive for soothing, connection and accommodation and when in our post menopause life we don’t have those high estrogen levels, this impacts on our behavioural response.

• You can do all the fancy communication classes you want but if you don’t do the work on your autonomic nervous system you won’t get the result you are after.

• We all have a sense of deep knowing in our body. When we disconnect from our bodies we lose this connection. Reconnecting with our bodies builds reconnects us with our deep knowing.

• How our cultural conditioning impacts on our acceptance and willingness (often unconsciously) to demonstrate certain behaviours.

• How learning to hold the energy of sensation and emotion within the body, gives you more power and therefore more options in how you are able to choose to respond to what life throws your way.

You can find Celine at www.celinelevy.com or on instagram at @thelovedwitch or her french language instagram account @sorcierotique

Ep 42 Barbie and the bucket of frogs - Tales of Sisterhood

I recently went to see the Barbie movie and loved it. There were so many great messages in there, and they dealt with what are extremely complex cultural messages and phenomena, in a way that was digestible for even the youngest members of the audience.

So today I wanted to reflect on those messages and points and unpack the patriarchy a little bit and how it impacts all of us and share some stories of my own about how I have seen how patriarchy gets in the way of women mentoring and supporting each other. Of loving and complimenting each other, of being able to brag and cheer for each other. This is where the bucket of frogs story comes in.

Sisterhood wounding is a real thing and many women suffer from it. It is both collective and ancestral trauma that impacts us individually. Let’s face it, most of us have many wounds from our teenage years when it comes to the sisterhood. Patriarchy pits women against each other, we learn to not only hate each other but we hate ourselves. We hate the feminine aspects of ourself and this is what disconnects us from our bodies. In the long run, that wound causes signifiant damage. In stops us from speaking our truth, we lose our voice. It stops us from having deep, honest, vulnerable relationships with each other. We disconnect from ourselves and from each other. We disconnect from our hearts.

I offer some tips and guidance about where to start when it comes to sisterhood wounding and healing the collective trauma that lives within all of us.

If you want to join my Magnificent Midlife course click on the link and sign up, or you can go to my website www.kelliestirling.com

Ep 41 Thriving sexually in midlife and beyond with Gabriella Espinosa

Midlife is an incredibly transformational period of our lives and when it comes to our relationship with our sexual selves it is almost a revolution that most women feel they experience. Midlife can be a new chapter in our lives. Today I have women’s sexuality and empowerment coach Gabriella Espinosa with me to talk about how we can thrive sexually in midlife and beyond. Gabriella is the founder of Women’s Body Wisdom, an online coaching, education and movement platform that guides women to reclaim their pleasure and power in and out of the bedroom. Her work lies at the intersection of embodiment, eastern traditional wisdom, female sexuality and menopausal health and is informed by over 15 years of guiding women to connect to their bodies and love themselves more.

Gabriella experienced her own revolution in her midlife transition and she talks about it in this podcast how it become an invitation for her to get to know herself on multiple levels. Her story is an inspiration for those of us who may feel lost and disconnected from their bodies or those of us who have strived and achieved the long held vision for their life for years only to find in midlife that all our own methods of success no longer work for us.

In this podcast we talk about:

• We have to re-pattern our nervous system to reconnect and rebuild our relationship with pleasure. The key to rekindling our relationship with pleasure is to become sexually self-sufficient is doing it from a place of fullness and we can only do this when we learn to connect with what feels pleasurable to us,

• How our sensuality is the pathway to rekindling the relationship with pleasure that we feel inside of our bodies,

• We talk about our life force energy, Eros, and how connecting with it helps us understand our body,

• Erotic blueprints. What are they, how can they help you connect with your own erotic wiring, how they can help you understand your partner’s to experience better sex both on your own and in relationship,

• How in midlife we have to bust up our cultural conditioning and internalised belief systems around pleasure to connect with our sexuality,

• When we learn to connect with our own pleasure we befriend our body and learn to treat it as an ally. This helps us to advocate for ourselves both in the bedroom and in the Doctors office.

You can find Gabriella on instagram @gabriellaespinosa and at www.gabriellaespinosa.com.

If you would like to try the erotic blueprint quiz please follow this link

Ep 40 Embodiment is Liberation

Embodiment, it is a word that we hear a lot. What does it really mean?

It is our ability to sense and be present with our internal feelings, sensations and emotions. The skill of being able to sense this all of this is called interoception. Interoception is available to all of this but most of us don’t know this, it often takes a bit of practice. Sometimes when we have trauma or lots of stress, it can be difficult for us to be with our interoceptive awareness.

In the podcast I talk about:

• What embodiment is, and the difference between feelings and emotions. They are often used interchangeably as the same thing. They are not;

• Why does embodiment matter? How it helps us to be more present to our life in the moment, it builds our resilience, it improves our mental and physical health, it connects us to our pleasure - both sensual and sexual;

• How our life experience leaves a trace in our nervous system. Our body creates meaning maps in our implicit memory which is important for our survival but sometimes these old maps hold us back and get in the way of our personal growth;

• Why you can’t think your way out of being with your emotions and feelings and a somatic approach is the only way to heal these old stuck patterns of stress and trauma;

• Why embodiment is liberating. Our body is the house we live in, we become less reactive and make better decisions and choices, we project our emotions less and this deepens and enriches our relationships with ourselves and others. We let go of the old stories and rewrite the story of our life going forward. This is empowering and it improves not only our experience in the world but the connections we have with others.

Ep 34 Why nervous system healing is important when it comes to connecting with our sexuality

Hello and happy new year. 2023 is the year of the Rabbit and it is a yin year in chinese astrology. So given it was Chinese New Year yesterday I feel its worth mentioning this and that this year is supposed to me more of a YIn energy year. Here’s hoping. Today I’m talking to you about why we have to start with working with our nervous system when we want to connect with our sexuality.

The autonomic nervous system drives all our behavioural states and the emotions that are affected by that. One of the keys to connecting to and working with your sexual energy which is your life force energy, is being able to use your skills of focus and attention to be present with it and this requires, calm, surrender and the ability to focus and track pleasure in our bodies. It is very hard to do this from a hyper aroused or frozen state in our nervous system.

So in this podcast I break it down for you so you can understand how it all works and why we start with the nervous system when we want to connect with our sexual energy, when we want to develop a stronger relationship with our emotions or when we want to improve the quality of our intimate relationships in our lives.

In the podcast I talk about:

• Tools to regulate yourself, like resourcing that will support better interactions with the people in your life,

• How our sensuality is a gateway to regulating our nervous system but also connecting with our sexuality,

• The six holistic sexuality tools we can use to enhance our connection with our sexual energy,

• Why working with a coach or therapist who is trauma informed is super important when it comes to sexuality work,

• Why is is imperative that we go slow in this work,

• How our cultural narrative around sexuality has shut has down to feeling our life force energy.

I hope you enjoy this episode and don’t forget to pass it onto a friend who may find it helpful AND to give it a rating on the podcast platform you are listening to if you like it.

Ep 32 How experiencing more pleasure in your body can be a pathway through pain

This week I’m talking about pleasure and how experiencing the expansive energy of pleasure in our body can be a pathway through pain. When we have trauma and stress stored in our body it has a very constrictive quality to it. You would know this be either a tight jaw or pelvis, or maybe tension in the shoulders and the back between your shoulder blades.

In this episode I talk about:

• How it can be tricky when we start doing somatic healing work at first because we might be stuck in a constant state of constriction so to feel anything other than this can make us feel unsafe,

• The different survival responses in our nervous system and what they are,

• How some food and drinks can actually mimic the constricted state we are in,

• How we all learn to push through the boundaries of our body and come to ignore its messages to us all the time,

• How pleasure expands our capacity in our body and that gives us more choice and breadth in our nervous system and how this improves our ability to be with our emotions,

• Why micro doing on pleasure is more effective at slowly building your orientation toward it,

• What some pleasure practices are.

At the end I mention my free Feminine Embodiment course and my ReConnect course. Reconnect is on sale all through December 2022 for AU$149.50.

Ep 30 Menopause - all the aspects of it that no one talks about

Today I’m on my own. I decided to do a shorter podcast in honour of world menopause month and in fact this week the 18th October being world menopause day, about all the stuff related to menopause that no one talks about. Believe me there is a lot. Menopause is larger sold as a disorder. It is a natural part of life for people in female bodies and most people think its just a whole host of physical symptoms.

Menopause is a rite of passage that is an identity change and a spiritual change. It is an awakening to purpose and meaning in our life and welcomes us into our wise woman power. So in this episode you will hear my talk about different aspects of it that are not often talked about or well explained.

So in this episode I talked about:

• How hormonal changes impact on your HPA axis. The HPA axis maintains feedback loops to maintain homesostasis in the physiology of your body. Changes in those feedback loops impact your neuro-endocrine, behavioural, autonomic and metabolic functions

• That hormonal changes will then impact your autonomic nervous system states and this in turn influences your behaviour,

• That perimenopause often highlights vulnerabilities that we have physically and mentally. What if we approached the physical symptoms as signs or messengers of area we should focus on and pay attention to,

• That cultural belief systems we have internalised around ageing, sexuality, sensuality and femininity come under scrutiny and they may very well be holding us back from growing intot he next evolution of ourselves,

• That our libido may be affected and how you might manage that if you are in a relationship,

• That the flow of your kundalini energy changes. Kundalini is your life force energy, this is also sexual energy.

• That you can review and reinvent how you do transitions and deal with change,

• That grief pops its head up in most transitions and it has a role to play in allowing us to let go of parts of us that we don’t need anymore. This is super important in menopause as often shadow work is required to grow into your wise woman power.

• There is no road map for this and every person’s journey is unique. There is however a requirement for slowing down, resting and taking time out for yourself,

• Relationships can be heavily impacted during this transition and learning to be vulnerable and talking about how you are feeling and what is coming up for you will go a long way toward building intimacy and connection in your relationship.

I hope you enjoy this and if you want to explore more reading on this I have a list of great books in my resources page. You could also reach out to me for coaching and book a clarity call if you need support during your menopause transition.

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 28 Breathe to Create Flow with Timmy and Jackie

People have been asking me to do a podcast on Breathwork for a long time. So finally here it is. Today I talk to my friends and colleagues Jackie Verinder and Timmy Noad who are both Breathwork teachers about Breathwork. Jackie and Timmy have a great story about their own journey to breathwork and how it has helped them release trauma from their body, connect with their emotions and feelings, grow into emotional adulthood and how it has improved their overall sense of wellbeing, self-acceptance and self-love.

Timmy and Jackie between them are trained in a number of different modes of breathwork including , Oxygen Advantage, SOMA breath, XPT Performance Breath and both are Zen Thai Shiatsu (level one) practitioners.

In the podcast we talk about:

• Jackie and Timmy’s own story and how breathwork has helped them in their lives,

• What is breathwork?

• What are the different styles of breathwork and how do they help,

• How you might go about picking a style that suits your needs and what questions to ask of your potential teachers,

• What to expect in a group session and one on one sessions and how to determine what might suit you between the two delivery methods,

• Questions you can ask potential teachers to work out if they are a good match for your needs,

• How our current culture impacts on how we experience our emotional lives.

Jackie and Timmy are based on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. They do individual and group sessions there, on the Gold Coast, Brisbane and Melbourne. You can find them at www.create-flow.com.au on instagram @createflowbreathwork and facebook at Create flow Breathwork

Ep 27 Feeling the wild belly of grief with Ellen Clarke

Grief is one of the toughest emotions that most of us have to feel and work through. In our culture we seem to have lost our way when it comes to expressing grief. We have really narrowed our understanding of what being human really means and that includes the emotions we let ourselves feel. Establishing a relationship with our grief and being able to stay present with it in our adult selves is one of the learning challenges of working with sorrow, sadness and grief. It is part of our maturation into our elderhood that we learn to befriend and express grief. To develop structures that support us to hold it and work with it in the community.

In this episode my friend and colleague Ellen Clarke and I talk through all the ways that grief can come into our lives and the challenges we have in being able to let ourselves fall into the belly of it.

In this podcast you will hear us talk about:

• Death and how in the western world we expect to wake up and be alive each day;

• Grief is part of our transition through our rites of passage in life that the expression of it helps us let go of parts of ourselves that we don’t need anymore and birth new parts of ourselves. That in midlife learning to connect with our emotions allows us to transition into our emotional adulthood;

• We can experience grief after severe illness or life threatening experiences in conjunction with gratitude and this can be a lonely and confusing experience;

• Without any structures, supports or containers to hold us, it feels too wieldy and scary to let it flow. If we had someone who is a non-griever shepherding us through it how might that be for us?;

• If we got good at letting ourselves feeling the little moments of sadness and disappointment each day this might help us deal with the bigger feelings of grief and it might actually be a highly connected experience for us;

• Grief can feel like an emotional rollercoaster (we both hate rollercoasters by the way) and pinging all over the place in our nervous system can feel like we have no foundations;

• There is often fear and shame wrapped over the top of those emotions that we stuff under our proverbial rug and this can make what we are feeling feel really murky and hard to connect with.

You can find Ellen at her website www.ellenmay.com.au on instagram at @ellenismagic or on facebook

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 24 Your Money Relationship with Tamara Lee

How would you describe your relationship with Money? Yes you are reading it correctly, we have a relationship with money. How does your nervous system feel when you think about money? Did you know that money and sex have a relationship? Today I talk with Tamara Lee who is a Money Coach about Money and how we can improve our relationship with it.

Tamara is a Sex, Love and Relationship Coach who specialises in coaching people around Money. Tamara is a multi-talented human who has a wide variety of work experiences and has been a facilitator of training for people around financial fitness when they are coming out of bankruptcy. She decided to study Sexuality, Love and Relationship coaching on an intuitive impulse which is how I met her. Tamara has been described by her clients as a Magical Money Witch!

Many of us have unusual relationships with money and it shows up in a myriad of ways. We overspend or we hoard our money. A lot of training around money management deals at the surface or topical end often on skills. In her work, Tamara goes deep into the unconscious exploring our level of safety in our nervous system with money.

There is so much to our relationship with Money and it is intimately linked to our nervous system, how safe we feel, our relationship with darker emotions; how able we are to let ourselves experience them. Our childhood behavioural habits and wounding, which we talk about as inner child, from which we are making decisions about our money life. Our ability to notice our triggers from our child parts of soothe ourselves in the moment is a big part of working consciously with our relationship with money.

During the interview we talk about a book by Lynn Twist called The Soul of Money which is worth a read.

You can find Tamara on instagram @tamaraleecoaching and Facebook at Tamara Lee.

Ep 23 Blooming after Divorce with Elizabeth Clair de Lune

Divorce is an extremely complex transition that many of us go through, that can really rock our foundations and sense of self. For many people, post divorce can be a time of immense growth and identity change and having support during this period creates both a safe and comforting space for us to grow. These life transitions are portals calling us to the next phase of our life.

Today I talk with my friend and colleague Elizabeth Clair de Lune who is a Life transitions Coach and Trauma Resolution Guide in training. Elizabeth supports people through Life Transitions, in particular, she supports people through Divorce.

Elizabeth uses a body based, trauma based, coaching methodology to support people coming back to the blueprint of themselves, their original essence. Your blueprint is coherent, aligned, tapped into your greater vision of you.

There are four phases that Elizabeth works with to help people bring their blueprint back online. First, learning how to get your Needs met. Second, Boundaries and Gatekeeping how to sense back into your boundaries and work with them flexibly. Third, learning to trust your intuition again, this feeds into boundaries, and finally, Self Expression. This is where the new version of ourselves emerges as we come toward the other end of the transition portal. Elizabeth finds that often our attachment styles come into play in the first two stages.

Elizabeth talks about as we go through any transition, self expression is the last phase that we start to emerge. Growing and emerging these new parts of ourselves that wants to express differently in the world.

This is a beautiful and rich conversation that will help you think differently about divorce and offer you a new mental map of how transitions can be.

You can find Elizabeth at The Unicorn Academy, on instagram @the.unicorn.academy.tm or on tick tok @theunicornacademy

Ep 22 The heart of creativity with Moira Cormack

Where does creativity comes from? This question has always sat with me. I am a very creative person and I have been painting, sewing, dancing, drawing since I was a young girl. I’ve rarely stopped. I’m always curious when people say to me ‘I am not creative’. The curious part of me always thinks, what no, it is in there somewhere we just have to find it.

So I invited one of my most creative friends and colleagues Moira Cormack to to talk today about creativity. Creativity is healing and it is meditative; it brings us straight into our subconscious.

Despite Moira and I both being incredibly tired, we connected so beautifully in this conversation and held space for each other.

In this podcast we cover:

• To be yourself creatively in the world we live in is a big challenge because we are always pushed to conform by our sense of wanting to belong;

• That creativity can be incredibly playful;

• How the schooling system stifles children’s creativity;

• How creativity, sexuality and spirituality feed each other and are door ways to each other;

• How fear squashes creativity;

• How sexuality is soothing to our nervous and endocrine systems. When we soothe and bring our nervous system down, it promotes endocrine health and creates space in our body for our own creativity to grow;

• Our creativity changes throughout our life, depending on how it feeds the systemic role we are taking up. Sometimes it is for others and then sometimes it swings around and is for us;

• How connecting with our body and learning to listen to it opens you up to your innate creativity.

You can find Moira on instagram at @moira_coach or on facebook under Moira KC

Ep 21 Healing and growing ourselves to heal the planet with Mangala Holland

There is no doubt that we are in a pretty strange place in the world today and the last two years have been surreal on all fronts. The whole covid situation has shown us how divided we are but also how community oriented we are also. The environment has suffered terribly all over the world. Some countries are doing a fabulous job of investing in alternative energy products, whilst others in the developed world barely have it on their radar. Often I ask myself how can this not be a priority?

What is it going to take for us to change the way we show up in the world and think about not only ourselves but others in our community? Do people not think about the circles of influence in their life?

I’m very pleased to be able to have this conversation with Mangala Holland. Mangala is a Women’s empowerment and sexuality coach and she works globally with female, trans and non binary individuals, supporting them in their personal development, holistic health and wellbeing.

There are many great points in this conversation. In the conversation we cover:

• How sexual healing supports your overall health and wellbeing,

• That sexuality is a foundational part of who we are as human beings so to avoid it is like having a room in a house that you lock up all the stuff you don’t like in and never go in there,

• Sexual healing is a journey to liberation and learning to resource yourself with pleasure opens you to a level of joy in your life that is profoundly life changing. It improves all the relationships in our lives

• Embodiment work is a key to connect deep within yourself,

• When you are able to orient from within, you develop stronger ‘roots’ and your resilience builds for tougher times,

• There is a tension we have to learn to master between ‘me’ and ‘we’ and it involves learning how to resource yourself and take care of yourself so that you can do your ‘we’ work and think about the broader community.

• Activism work is exhausting and often leads to burnout and that is essential to learn how to do the ‘me’ piece and show yourself love and care to sustain yourself for the long game,

• When we do deep work on ourselves, it impact positively on our relationship with ourselves, with others and ultimately our relationship with the planet. In a profoundly positive way.

You can find Mangala on her website. www.mangalaholland.com. She is also on facebook and instagram under Managala Holland.

Ep 19 Self love as a pathway to healing and personal growth with Gina Catherine

Self love is a concept that I am not sure everyone has their head wrapped around. Sometimes when we think of it we might think of a narcissistic type of self love. That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about really loving who you are as a person, all the parts of you. Loving you sexuality, sensuality, the sense of masculine and feminine that we all have within us. In this episode I talk with my friend and colleague Gina Catherine who is Sexuality, Love and relationship coach who supports people on their journey to Self Love.

Gina and I are both cancer survivors and we talked about our own journey to self love and how it supporting our healing and gave us both a sense of deep awe, wonder, respect and love for our bodies.

In this podcast you will learn:

• How fuelling yourself with pleasure rather than rewarding yourself supports self love,

• How we have been conditioned to be humble but the underbelly of that is counter to self love,

• That your sexual energy, which is our life force energy, is an incredible source of creativity,

• When we are closed off to our sexuality it is like closing off a room in a house and never going in there,

• How celebrating yourself is not only a great boundary practice but it sets you up for self love,

• How our sexuality, sensuality, how it shows up in our lives within us is so incredibly unique and discovering the joy of it, is so rewarding and empowering.

You can find Gina and her website www.ginacatherine.love on instagram at @ginacatherine_coaching or listen to Gina on clubhouse. Gina hosts regular conversations on clubhouse. Her handle on clubhouse is Gina Catherine

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