Ep 43 Liberating the Inner Child with Moira Cormack

In this episode I am joined by my colleague and friend Moira Cormack to talk about Inner child work and how powerful it is for all of us to do so that we can heal our childhood wounding.

In her coaching work, Moira focuses. specifically on supporting people to heal their emotional pain with inner child and body based healing. Moira is currently in the process of creating an inner child online course so it seemed like a good time to talk about what inner child work is all about.

Moira talks about the inner child and how we can find our inner child somatically because it lives within us in our body. Our nervous system stores every experience that we have in our body and we can connect to our inner child through sensation and the language of the felt sense. The felt sense is the language of the body. We talk about how it is the unmet needs of our inner child that are coming out in our adult relationships and that we project these needs onto our partners to meet. It is not the role of our partners to provide those needs, they are not our parents. Part of this work is learning to find your own inner parents and adult parts of yourself so that you are able to regulate and soothe yourself when you find your inner child parts triggered.

Moira shared many personal experiences of her own life journey, how midlife has been a powerful transition for her to do this deep work herself, that illustrate how highly impactful this work is. We can see through the gift of hindsight how all of her life experiences and work experiences make her the perfect person to teach and coach deep healing experiences with inner child work.

You can find Moira on instagram at @moira_coach or on Facebook and her link Tree is linktree/Moira-Coach

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