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 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 35 Is it masculine, feminine or just being human with Sasha Ostara

Today I am joined again by my very fabulous friend and colleague Sasha Ostara. Sasha is a Somatic Intimacy Coach. Sasha and I both have a really strong aversion to the labelling of behavioural traits as masculine or feminine and instead prefer to categorise them as human qualities.

In this podcast we talk about why we believe this and how our somatic training around the nervous system has helped inform this view. We also discussed:

• How labelling a behaviour masculine or feminine just weaponises the division that already exists between genders. That they are often confused with gender and somewhere along the way historically, someone decided to assign males to masculine and females to feminine, it could have been the other way,

• How our autonomic nervous system drives our behaviour and actually it is more helpful to look at the nervous system state in any given moment,

• How women have been conditioned to be in fawn and freeze response and that behaviour is deemed acceptable,

• The wave of gender self help books that came out in the 1970s and 1980s whilst helpful for some people in understanding others just further replicated earlier ideas of division and reinforced this point of view,

• How hormones impact on our nervous system response,

• The different polarities that exist in a social system and that it is the polarity and the patterns to look for not a masculine of feminine quality,

• How our relationships can be a replica of broader patterns that exist within social systems and cultural contexts that we are a part of,

• That we’ve noticed with female clients who want their partners to be more masculine, when asked to describe what that is what they are actually looking for, what they responded with is a description of adult behaviour, not child like behaviour,

• How gendered terms carry a confirmation bias and it is important to actually look at these terms and whether you are doing this when you label a behaviour masculine or feminine and how that narrows people’s perceptions of how they can show up in the world.

  We talked about three different books in the podcast, they were ‘The Tragedy of Heterosexuality’ by Jane Ward, ‘Delusions of Gender’ by Cordelia Fine, ‘The Flowering Wand: rewilding the sacred masculine’ by Sophie Strand. The podcast Sasha Mentions is “If books could kill”

  You can find Sasha at her website www.sasha-ostara.com or her instagram page @sasha_ostara

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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.