Today I am talking to the fabulous Heidi Trudinger about midlife relationships. Our bodies go through huge changes at midlife and women in particular feel the change more acutely due to the hormonal dropoff of perimenopause. Men go through their own hormonal change with Andropause however the hormonal shifts are small each year and the decline is steadier.

All of this impacts how we feel about our bodies and our imprint on ageing that we learned through both our family system and culturally, has a huge impact on our ability to embrace our changing bodies at midlife. Most of the fear that we experience around ageing is not about getting old it is actually about dying and Heidi and talked quite a bit about this.

How do we sustain sexual intimacy at midlife with all these changes? Well it is not too hard but for most of us it is about learning about what sex actually is; something few of us learned when we were younger. It is about learning what true intimacy is and how to hold space for that with each other.

We also discussed:

Self love as an antidote to ageing and how to find that,
Embracing the Maga (archetype) at midlife really understanding what our individual expression of that that is and how it is different to the Crone,
How we can reconnect with the playful parts of ourselves, parts we have often buried deep in our unconscious, to reinvigorate our relationship,
How our body brings up old trauma for resolution at this transition and what a gift that can be,
How deep rest is incredibly sustaining for our bodies and is part of our erotic practice,
How our midlife transition is a portal for us to claim our authentic sexual selves and how we might start the path to explore this aspect of our selves.

You can find Heidi at heiditrue.com.au. She is also on instagram @true.intimacy and Facebook

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 55 Finding true intimacy at midlife with Heidi Trudinger

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