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 52 The Midlife Mysteries

Midlife is a profoundly transformational life transition that all people experience. It occurs generally at some period between 40 and 60 years of age for most people. Some people may start late thirties. It happens over time it is a general unfolding. Midlife awakening supports our growth into emotional adulthood.

Midlife is not a crisis it is an awakening. It is about healing your childhood adaptive strategies to become your most authentic self. The development challenge of midlife is radical honesty with yourself. There is a strong mystical side to the midlife transition and this can be best understood by using archetypes to explore the story and road map of what this transition is all about.

What about menopause and how does this fit in? Menopause is the end of our fertility and it is part of the midlife transition. Our hormones changes facilitate growth and development, physically, psychologically, culturally through the different phases of our lifetime.

Listen in to find out which feminine archetype I have found the most useful to provide guidance in what is required in midlife to support our growth during this transition.

If you would like to explore the mystical side of midlife transition more deeply you can also explore my ebook Magical Midlife and Menopause and my Midlife Masterclasses.

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 50 Navigating life with self compassion with Belinda Haan

How do we navigate life with self compassion? What is self-compassion? Today I welcome Belinda Haan to my podcast, Talkin' about Midlife, to talk about how we can navigate life with self-compassion.

Belinda Haan is a mindfulness teacher, multidisciplinary coach and creator and humble guide to the full joy, catastrophe and sacredness of life.  She is the creator of "Emotional Support for Mothers" - simple practice for difficult days. This toolkit is a thorough guide for simple exercises we can use when we are having a tough day.

In this podcast Belinda and I have a great chat about what self-compassion means, why it is so hard for us to demonstrate it to ourselves, how we can learn to demonstrate it and how it supports us to thrive in life. We talk about our own journey with self compassion and how challenging it can be.

Belinda shares many examples during the podcast of the ways we sabotage ourselves and how our inner critic can get in the way of accessing self compassion to support us in life.

An Ambassador of Compassion with Stanford University, Belinda founded The Compassion Project and created The Emotional Support for Mothers Toolkit. She also delivers classes, coaching and other experiences at belindahaan.com

You can buy the Emotional support for mothers toolkit at www.thecompassionproject.au and you can find Belinda on instagram at @thecompassionproject.au

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 47 Midlife the path to authenticity with Dianne Shepherd

For my last podcast of the year, my good friend and colleague Dianne Shepherd, joined me as we talked about all the weird and whacky stuff that can happen in our midlife transition. We actually recorded it a few months ago but I wanted to leave it until the end of the year, a little Christmas and New Year gift to you. Dianne’s work focuses on supporting midlife women in sacred sexuality, connecting with their sensuality and pleasure and really building a sacred relationship with their body. Dianne is also an astrologer so we went there too.

We talked about Dianne’s own turbulent midlife transition and how it was a healing pathway for her. How finding pleasure practices helped her find and connect with her authentic self.

You will also hear us discuss astrology and the major midlife transits that happen and how they impact on us. In particular, Uranus opposition, Chiron return and Venus return. We experience 3 Venus returns in midlife (around 40, 48 and 56 years of age approximately), how all of these returns of supportive of our emotional growth and healing if we embrace them and pay attention to what is coming up for us.

Dianne and I also spoke about how in our fifties the integration of masculine and feminine energies is common and this is also reflected in psychology literature as well and talked about as anima and animus. That this integration is important and midlife as it is an enabler of deep connection with parts of ourself and necessary to be able to step into elderhood and the roles we are required to take up in community in these years.

You can find Dianne at her website www.shakticore.com and on instagram @vital.goddess. She is also has an amazing podcast you can find on Spotify called The Vital Goddess.

Ep 45 Creating and running a socially responsible, sustainable business with Christine McDougall

As the world we live and work in has become more complex, we have had to change the way we live and work. Our global society has gone through significant change but the way we create and build businesses has not.

How we approach organisational design, redesigning organisational processes for complexity has been the most challenging aspect for many business owners regardless of their size. Unfortunately many of our big societal processes and systems are broken and falling apart because the very foundations and rules that guide them, do not account for the full complex picture of what is actually happening in their business. The externalities that they produce are having far reaching and detrimental impacts on the wider communities they exist within. I have been waiting for years for someone to tackle this head on and there are a few brave visionary souls out there who are ready to do this.

Christine McDougall is one of them. Christine is a visionary, a writer, a pioneer and self-described edge dweller. She created Syntropic World to educate and build systems and processes to support the running of business in a VUCA world that support the health of the planet. Christine works at the level of societal and organisational change by educating individuals and teams on how to create the day to day of running their business so that it supports our society to thrive. Her mission is to educate people to build sustainable organisations that support the health of the planet.

In this podcast we hope to challenge your thinking on how you run your business. You will also hear about Christine’s midlife transition and how it has supported her to be radically honest with herself and step into her wise woman power.

You can find Christine at www.syntropic.worldorld/, on facebook at Syntropic World and Instagram @syntropicworld