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 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.

Ep31 Living with Chronic Illness with Elizabeth Ann

Today I talk to my friend Elizabeth Ann about Living with Chronic Illness. Elizabeth is a Music Therapist who herself has living with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for many years now. We thought it was time to have a discussion about Chronic Illness which is so prevalent in our society now days and so poorly misunderstood.

Elizabeth’s journey of Chronic Illness lead her to change her career and she went back and retrained to become a music therapist. Reinvigorating her long love affair with music and being a musician, which is a natural talent that she is incredibly gifted with, and supporting others on their health journey through the therapeutic modality of music therapy.

In this episode we talk about:

• What music therapy is and how it can support you in your health journey,

• What Chronic Fatigue is and the systems in the body it affects,

• How living with Chronic Illness impacts on the relationships in our lives and the power dynamics that exist within them,

• How music, dance and singing are a tool that connects us with our past stories and history,

• How becoming chronically ill can support us to get really good at expressing our boundaries,

• How our current cultural paradigm makes it hard to heal and function because we need so much more downtime,

• How illness can become our identity if we are not careful,

• The notion of what wellness actually is and having the identity of being unwell can be really disempowering for some people,

• How to clean out your cupboards to detox your life. If you want to reference the Dirty Dozen food list we talk about click on the link.

Please contact me if you would like to get in contact with Elizabeth regarding Music Therapy and I can forward on your enquiry to her.

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 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 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 5 Menopause - The Passion Portal with Dianne Shepherd

Menopause as a rite of passage seems to be poorly misunderstood by many people. It is not something many people talk about openly and so many women suffer in silence with physical symptoms that cause pain and exhaustion. Today I talk to the wonderful Dianne Shepherd about Menopause. We discuss her experience of it, what she learned in the process. Dianne is a holistic sexuality coach and astrologer. She coaches women through the midlife journey, teaches Jade Egg practice to many women to help improve their pelvic floor and reconnect with their Yoni. She is also an astrologer and gives fantastic readings.

There is so much wisdom and insight in this podcast from Dianne. You can find Dianne at her website Venus Rebirth or on instagram @venus.rebirth