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 49 How do we get better at being with our emotions and regulating ourselves

Many of the clients I work with, whether they be senior executives I am coaching, or clients I am doing relationship coaching with, often have a goal of wanting to get better at being with their emotions. They want to be able to respond better to the challenges that life throws their way.

The only way to do this is to work with the autonomic nervous system (ANS). Your ANS state drives your thoughts, feelings and emotions. When you feel safe, connected and regulated you will experience different feelings and think different thoughts than when you feel unsafe and disconnected.

Most of us, over years of experiencing chronic stress or traumatic events, have a nervous system that is really struggling with the capacity of what it is experiencing. That means our band width gets very small and we can get overwhelmed quickly. The key is working with the nervous system to build the capacity to feel all your feelings. You cannot just block one out and expect to feel everything else. Our system is not that clever. When you repress one, you repress them all.

My other observation is that many of us experienced emotional neglect growing up. Our parents are the children of people who were very traumatised by wars, the depression and who lived in survival mode. There are many parents out there who think that their job is to provide a house, warm clothing, food and schooling and that that is enough. There was no capacity, focus or understanding of how to nurture the emotional life of their children because this was not role modelled to them. In the broader context of what these generations experienced this is understandable.
It doesn't have to be this way anymore.

We can be the generations that change that, we don't have to continue these patterns.

Talk therapy or coaching does not work because it does not work at the level of the nervous system. You have to work with a somatic approach with someone who is trained to work with the nervous system and trauma.

The benefits to your overall health and wellbeing are huge. You will have more energy to function each day and doing this nervous system work frees you from constantly having to spend huge amount of energy to calm yourself down when you feel anxious, reactive and unable to switch off. It helps you make some choices and start to take action when you are feeling constantly stuck and disconnected because your body is in shutdown.

Best of all it allows you to put your precious energy into what matters most to you. Into the relationships you care about and to enjoy life. It reduces your needs for experiencing big highs and lows and to learn to feel safe to feel contented and even sometimes bored. That life is made up of long period of contentment and experiencing joy from the simple things in life.

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 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 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 20 Menopause as a pathway to our authentic sexuality with Dr Laura Monk

The transition through to Menopause is complex and multi-faceted. It is a death and rebirth, a shift in identity in all the different aspects of ourselves. There is a lot of stigma around sexuality and ageing, so for many women there is great fear that their sexuality will disappear. In this episode, Dr Laura Monk and I talk about the pathway that Menopause provides to discover your authentic sexuality.

Laura is both a Psychotherapist and Sex, Love and Relationship coach who loves to work with women through midlife and menopause. Laura shares with us her own sexual awakening post menopause and we talk about the possibilities for growth and development in terms of a woman’s sexuality that Menopause can present.

In this episode you will learn:

• How our desires can become very different from what they have been previously,

• How the enormity of the menopause transition can be challenging for women in their partnerships and bring us a question of whether we bring our partner with us or not,

• The many pressures that women face throughout life that prevent them from being who they really are and menopause present an opportunity to be our true selves,

• Our sexuality which is such a core part of our humanity is rarely addressed in most mainstream therapeutic contexts,

• Your sexuality is not about your estrogen levels and the medical model assumes it is just that alone,

• Connecting to your sexual energy which is your life force energy is connecting to your energy body; that this is what makes you magnetic and attractive not all the external dressings we learn to apply.

You can find Laura on instagram at @drlauramonk and on her website www.drlauramonk.com.

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 15 Sensuality and Pleasure, a pathway home with Carol Anne

Pleasure, sensuality and sexuality are such core aspects of who we are as human beings. Carol Anne and I talk today about the power of sensuality. Our sensuality is how we experience the world through our five senses. It connects us with our life force energy. It brings us into the present moment. It is a great resource, providing nourishment in the moment in tough times.

Our sensuality provides us with so much pleasure and is a pathway to our sexuality. When we start to practice enjoying the pleasure of our five senses, we build neural pathways inside of us that create greater capacity to feel pleasure in all aspects of our life. Our five senses bring us right into the present moment; our present moment is where life happens.

So why do so many of us get so triggered by the words sensuality and pleasure? Well it is worth listening to the podcast. You will learn:

• How our ‘good girl’ conditioning has us disconnecting from our sensuality,

• How the sensations in our body are the voice of our sub conscious,

• How our sensuality connects us with our emotions,

• Our sensuality and pleasure gives us ‘fuel in our tank’ to deal with the tougher times in life,

• Our sensuality is a pathway out of our rational and logical brain to experience goodness in our body in the present moment,

• Our sensuality and pleasure allow us to feel all the emotions that are available to us,

• Our body has a natural orientation to pleasure and this contributes greatly to our healing and harmony in our body,

• Healing does not always have to be hard and gruelling, it can be pleasurable,

• Connecting with our sensuality brings us into the core of our being, how it allows us to be ourselves at the most primal level. That when we can access this part of ourselves we don’t have to try so hard at life.

  You can find Carol on her website www.carolanne.com.au or on her instagram account @carolannealive

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 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.