Talkin about Midlife

Many people have heard of Flight, Fight and Freeze when it comes to our autonomic nervous system's defence responses but not all of us have heard of Fawn. Fawning is a pretty sophisticated response that shows up as people pleasing or appeasement. Some practitioners also call it hypersocialisation. We fawn to stay in connection with others, to stay safe. The tricky thing about Fawning is that it can sometimes look like it is a personality trait which I guess we could say is true for many responses driven by Trauma.Today I talk with Rae Halder who is a somatic trauma resolution practitioner about the Fawning response. Rae is a fantastic person to talk about this and she works with many clients with strong Fawn responses.We also get into talking about sexual fawning and how that shows up in our intimate relationships. When we say yes to intimacy because our brain says yes but our body is a big No to it. What happens when we do this repeatedly and how does it get in the way of authentic connection with our partners and lovers.You will hear us talk about many different aspects of trauma healing when it comes to the Fawn response, how it shows up in our body when it gets sick of us doing it repeatedly, why we do it, what is underneath it all and how can we connect with our erotic imprints.If you would like to take the Erotic Blueprints quiz we talk about in the podcast here is the link.You can find Rae on her website www.raehalder.com, on instagram @rachel.rae.halder or on her FB page

Today I am talking to Moira Cormack, my multi talented colleague and friend about Human Design. I have to tell you this podcast was a lot of fun because Moira is fun. Moira is a coach, parenting expert, human design expert and all round super human being. This is Moira's third time on my podcast, if you didn't catch the last two on inner child and creativity you should check them out also.Moira doesn't so much go into the different human design profile, rather she gives us the bigger context of why we would use Human Design. How does it help us be more human, how does it help us connect with our deeper self.We talked about:Why we would use Human Design and how, at this point in time, Human Design is helpful to people to further their personal growth and development,How life is made up of many decisions and choices we make each day and how human design helps us, through understanding our profile, how to better make decisions to align with our energy system in our body,How many of us end up in careers, influenced by our family systems, not doing what we really love.How energy systems in different types work and why not listening to our body leads to health issues,How when we move outside our design, we often experience a discordant note or emotion and this is a sign we are not listening to our body.You can find Moira on Gates of the Moon FB Group, on instagram she is @moira_coach and she has a substack she writes on.

In this episode, I talk with Daniella Matutes who is a somatic coach, breathwork teacher, a very talented human really, who has a not for profit focused on healing gender based violence against women in two generations. We discuss her own journey of healing from abuse and how a body based approach to healing trauma has helped her to process the trauma in her body.Daniella has created an approach called Pleasure Alchemy that offers a road map to individuals with trauma that helps them to understand the healing journey by orienting and resourcing to pleasure and building capacity in the nervous system to feel more. More sensations, emotions, feelings.In this podcast you will hear:Daniella describe her own experience of healing trauma and the different ways she experienced healing,How trauma is passed down generationally through our attachment system and within the physiology of the body,Different survival strategies and how they show up in our body,How the culture we grow up in is internalised and significantly impacts how we show up in the world,Leadership culture in large organisations and how individuals trauma plays out on a daily basis,Our inner ecology and how it influences what we see in the outer world.You will find Daniella at www.somaticself.love, on Instagram, Facebook and Substack.

Today I am talking with Gemma Donnellan who is an artist and art curator, a creator of community and a natural born network. Gemma has a gift of bringing people together around art. Gemma began her career as an artist which she has created over time whilst working full time and also being a stay at home parent. She has spent many years painting, in community, before moving back into a curatorial role, bringing emerging and established artists together in exhibitions.Gemma is skilled in how she pulls together different artists to curate art shows of diverse pieces of art that seem to have a common thread running through them that you can only work out once you have looked at all the paintings.She has created networks for women to come together around art in her quarterly sessions she calls Reciprocity, where ideas are shared, provocative conversations created around topics of interest. In the podcast we talked about: - Art as a support for all of us in tough times and the healing power of art,- We talked about the creativity that exists within all of us and expressed in our own unique ways,- The healing power of art and how we can express what sits deeply within us, bypassing the rational part of our brain and express from the deepest parts of ourselves,- How to choose art for your own personal collection. Whilst buying art can be overwhelming we don't have to buy the most expensive piece but rather what speaks to us and evokes an emotional response.You can find Gemma at www.artfortoday.com.au, on instagram @artfortoday and facebook

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

Burnout is a complex health syndrome that we seem to be hearing more cases of everyday. I am seeing it more and more in workplaces and working with people moving trough big life transitions. So I have been deeply curious about it for the last couple of years and wanting to talk to a guest about it on my podcast. Who better to discuss than Dr Ashlea Broomfield - The Vitality Doctor.Dr Ash is a specialist GP, sexologist, Mind-Body Therapist, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, Meditation Coach and Credentialed Eating Disorder Clinician. Dr Ash is invested in her patients health holistically, she is invested in supporting patients to flourish holistically as a whole person, mentally, physically, sexually and spiritually.Today we talked about Burnout. What is it? How does it come about? Is it a workplace issue or a cultural issue. Given the culture we live in how can we resource and nourish our bodies to ensure this doesn't happen to us. We talked about the body as a whole system and that our health exists and is influenced by the environments that we exist within. We also discussed:- Women's menstruality, their menarche, motherhood and menopause and how these big changes to our endocrine system and the roles that we take up in life impact our mental and physical health;- Chronic workplace stress that is not being managed well;- What the conditions are that set someone up for burnout, as defined by the world health organisation (WHO);- How the working conditions and the 40 hour work week were created 150 years ago when we had more community support for families and roles and expectations for parents were very different;- Burnout as a complex systemic issue and what are the solutions that we can put in place to solve it;- It starts with us as individuals being clear about our own limits and boundaries and learning to identify what a YES and NO feels like in our body.Dr Ash really has fantastic perspective on this so make sure you listen to the very end because there are some really wise words she has for all of us. If you would like to connect with Dr Ash you can find her at drashleabroomfield.com.au, on instagram @thevitalitydoctor. On facebook Dr Ashlea Broomfield - The Vitality Doctor.

As we get older many of us experience joint pain and muscle pain. We think it is just our old joints but it might very well be dry fascia. In this episode I talk to Sophia Breust who is a structural integration practitioner about the many benefits of working with fascia.Sophia has an interesting story and her own health and wellbeing today is a direct reflection of the benefits of structural integration. After going through some relational trauma in 2014, Sophia was diagnosed with PTSD. Experiencing symptoms from extreme anxiety, recurring nightmares, and shakes to lethargy, Sophia explored talk therapy to help resolve what she thought was a problem in her mind. Over 2 years, she showed up religiously to her psychology sessions, but she felt she wasn't getting anywhere.​After years of looking for answers and feeling totally helpless, Sophia found Structural Integration & Myofascial Bodywork (MFB) and realised how disconnected she was from her physical body. This was the missing link for her; the problem wasn't just in her mind, it was in her body! Trauma is stored in the body, and if we become disconnected from the sensations that are going on in our physical body, our mind won't get a chance to be at ease.After many years of healing, processing, feeling, and deeply connecting to her body, Sophia now helps many people make sense of their physical pain and what may be going on for them emotionally. She calls this Emotional Anatomy. While a free and open fascial system creates a more balanced emotional state, Sophia has seen the impact of MFB on excellent recovery, lymph & blood flow, and injury prevention. MFB, according to Sophia and many of her clients, is truly life-changing!In this episode we talk about all things fascia, the bodymind connection, healing trauma and a bit about ageing bodies. You can find Sophia on instagram @muscle_sense or via her website www.musclesense.net

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.

In midlife, we start to notice changes in how our body metabolises food, how we recover from exercise and how we are able to deal with stress in our life. No longer can we drink lots of alcohol and pull up OK the next morning. Maybe there are a few sneaky kilograms piling on. This is because as we enter perimenopause, our hormones start to shift how we metabolise food changes and this impacts on many areas of our health.Annie Gaudreault, who is a Licenced Nutritionist and Health Coach from Toronto, CA, joins me in the podcast to talk about the impact of nutrition on our life as we move into our midlife. Annie specialises in working with women in midlife to make sense of all the wellness information out there and to make sustainable changes to their health and wellbeing.Annie has her own interesting midlife transition story. She started running in her 30s and as she approached her midlife transition she really trained hard and found emotional and mental resilience expanded and she was able to deepen her running expertise to run marathons. From there she moved into competing in Iron Man Triathlons. For Annie her midlife transition was an awakening. An awakening to becoming her true self and pursuing a new career in nutrition that created more meaning in her life.In the podcast we talked about:- The lack of education around menopause and how this impacts our lifestyle choices,- The impact of estrogen decline on other hormones in particular our metabolic health,- How estrogen decline impacts on how our body can process sugar and simple carbohydrates. The impact on insulin production and how this may cause insulin insensitivity and pre-diabetes health issues,- Strategies to deal with addiction to sugar and carbohydrates,- Fibre and Protein in our diet and how eating more of these in midlife supports our health,- How internalised cultural belief systems impact our perception of midlife and the impact of it on our life.You can find Annie at www.veev.ca or on instagram @veev_wellness. Annie works globally online, so if you would like to book a time to talk to her about your nutrition needs at midlife you can book a call via her website.

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 is a coach, teacher and facilitator and she works predominately with women who are becoming mothers. 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.You can buy the Emotional support for mothers toolkit at www.thecompassionproject.au and you can find Belinda on instagram at @thecompassionproject.au

Many of my 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 your will 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.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.

When it comes to midlife we often talk about the concept of ‘women stepping into their power”, what does this actually mean? Well in today's episode I will unpack that with my friend and colleague Celine Levy. Celine is a Sex and Power coach who works with women to help them gain a sense of agency and connection with their bodies.Celine and I talk about power and how it is relational and what is actually happening in the neurobiology of the body when we are not in an ‘empowered' stance; by the way we both really dislike the word empowered. Celine has a really interesting story and her path to this work, showed her that ‘power over' another can be devastating, and how the cultural conditions in an environment can set us up for these experiences as we adapt to cultures to try and belong and feel safe. This close shave with a cult has propelled her forward into work with women so that they can learn to listen to their bodies through building a strong connection with their nervous system and the messages it sends.In this podcast we talk about:What power is, how it can only exist within a relationship and how the state of our nervous system drives our responses to what we are experiencing.How when we interact with another person there are two conversations going on at the same time. There is the conscious dialogue that comes through the mouth and at the same time our nervous system is having a conversation and when there is a mis-match between the two we notice this in particular ways.How we can rewire and re-pattern the nervous system to achieve a different outcome.How estrogen creates a biological behavioural drive for soothing, connection and accommodation and when in our post menopause life we don't have those high estrogen levels, this impacts on our behavioural response.You can do all the fancy communication classes you want but if you don't do the work on your autonomic nervous system you won't get the result you are after.We all have a sense of deep knowing in our body. When we disconnect from our bodies we lose this connection. Reconnecting with our bodies builds reconnects us with our deep knowing.How our cultural conditioning impacts on our acceptance and willingness (often unconsciously) to demonstrate certain behaviours.How learning to hold the energy of sensation and emotion within the body, gives you more power and therefore more options in how you are able to choose to respond to what life throws your way.You can find Celine at www.celinelevy.com or on instagram at @thelovedwitch or her french language instagram account @sorcierotique

For my last podcast of the year, my good friend and colleague Dianne Shepherd joined me as we talked about all the weird and whacky stuff that can happen in our midlife transition. Dianne's work focuses on supporting midlife women in sacred sexuality, connecting with their sensuality and pleasure and really building a sacred relationship with their body. Dianne is also an astrologer so we went there too.We talked about Dianne's own turbulent midlife transition and how it was a healing pathway for her. How finding pleasure practices helped her find and connect with her authentic self.You will also hear us discuss astrology and the major midlife transits that happen and how they impact on us. In particular, Uranus opposition, Chiron return and Venus return. We experience 3 Venus returns in midlife (around 40, 48 and 56 years of age approximately), how all of these returns of supportive of our emotional growth and healing if we embrace them and pay attention to what is coming up for us.Dianne and I also spoke about how in our fifties the integration of masculine and feminine energies is common and this is also reflected in psychology literature as well and talked about as anima and animus. That this integration is important and midlife as it is an enabler of deep connection with parts of ourself and necessary to be able to step into elderhood and the roles we are required to take up in community in these years.You can find Dianne at her website www.shakticore.com and on instagram @vital.goddess. She is also has an amazing podcast you can find on Spotify called The Vital Goddess.

It has become more important than ever that organisations focus on developing their leaders to cope with the Volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) times that we work in. We have been talking about VUCA for the last 15 years, it has come and to be honest it is more dysfunctional than every as organisations struggle to deal with the many complex adaptive challenges that they are facing; coming off the back of the pandemic many organisations are simply drowning in these problems.Today I talk to my friend and colleague Deborah Pascoe who is a leadership development expert about how we develop these leaders and why it is important. Deb began her career in the corporate sector where she worked in a range of business roles before quitting in her thirties to work out what she really wanted to do. She fell into consulting by accident really and realised very quickly that it was her great love. Now thirty years later she has worked with many organisations from all different sectors and has a deep and broad understanding of leadership and adult development.This is a varied conversation where we talked about: why leadership development is so important and why organisations should invest in it, why collaborative problem solving is integral to solving adaptive challenges, How organisational purpose keeps us anchored in tough times and the ability to articulate our organisational purpose is the single biggest driver of employee engagement, How our individual north star helps us to navigate the intracacies of life when we lose our way,Why people get stuck in the personal development and how learning trauma stops us from pursuing growth on a personal and professional level,What the learning cycle of the brain is, the dopamine-opioid cycle and we we can hook into that we can keep on learning and growing throughout our life.You can find Deb at Phronesis Foundation.

As the world we live and work in has become more complex, we have had to change the way we live and work. Our global society has gone through significant change but the way we create and build businesses has not.How we approach organisational design, redesigning organisational processes for complexity has been the most challenging aspect for many business owners regardless of their size. Unfortunately many of our big societal processes and systems are broken and falling apart because the very foundations and rules that guide them do not account for the full complex picture of what is actually happening in their business and the externalities that they produce are having far reaching and detrimental impacts on the wider communities they exist within. I have been waiting for years for someone to tackle this head on and there are a few brave visionary souls out there who are ready to do this.Christine McDougall is one of them. Christine is a visionary, a writer, a pioneer and self-described edge dweller. She created Syntropic World to educate and build systems and processes to support the running of business in a VUCA world that support the health of the planet. Christine works at the level of societal and organisational change by educating individuals and teams on how to create the day to day of running their business so that it supports our society to thrive. Her mission is to educate people to build sustainable organisations that support the health of the planet.In this podcast we hope to challenge your thinking on how you run your business. You will also hear about Christine's midlife transition and how it has supported her to be radically honest with herself and step into her wise woman power.You can find Christine at www.syntropic.worldorld/, on facebook at Syntropic World and Instagram @syntropicworld

Midlife is a time that tend to show up the vulnerabilities in our bodymind. We experience these as physical or mental health issues, challenges in relationships and sometimes just a really strong needs to make some big changes in our lives. In this episode I am joined by Dr Beth Claxton to talk about wellbeing in midlife and beyond. Beth is a board certified OBGYN and a certified functional medicine practitioner who reside in Northern Arizona in the USA.In this episode we talk about many aspects of our health and wellbeing in midlife. We talk about Beth's own midlife transition and how it has brought her full circle with the desires she had at a very young age to work in a healing role of some capacity. Beth has always had a strong sense of inner knowledge that healing has been a pathway for her.In the podcast we cover:Beth's experience in healing and where it can be most powerful,They key areas to focus on in midlife for your overall wellbeing, Stress Management, Sleep, Exercise and Food and explore each of those,We talk a little about MHT/HRT and how it can support your health and welbeing,The work Beth offers now in her functional medicine practice such as her 10 week Ayurvedic course and how it offers us a different perspective through which we can connect with our bodymind and Beth's upcoming Detoxifying Menopause summit that is coming up.During the podcast we talked about Athletic training for perimenopause women and the reference Beth mentioned was Athlete Project 51, which is information about how women can train for their own physiology.You can find Beth at www.flagstafffunctionalmedicine.com on instagram and she has a facebook group is Flagstaff Functional Medicine

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. Moira has an interesting life story and in many ways all of her life experiences have lead her to understanding this work deeply and work with clients to do this work.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

I recently went to see the Barbie movie and loved it. There were so many great messages in there and the dealt with what are extremely complex cultural messages and phenomena in a way that was digestible for even the youngest members of the audience.So today I wanted to reflect on those messages and points and unpack the patriarchy a little bit and how it impacts all of us and share some stories of my own about how I have seen how patriarchy gets in the way of women mentoring and supporting each other. Of loving and complimenting each other, of being able to brag and cheer for each other. This is where the bucket of frogs story comes in.Sisterhood wounding is a real thing and many women suffer from it. Let's face it, most of us have many wounds from our teenage years when it comes to the sisterhood. Patriarchy pits women against each other, we learn to not only hate each other but we hate ourselves. We hate the feminine aspects of ourself and this is what disconnects us from our bodies. In the long run, that wound causes signifiant damage. In stops us from speaking our truth, we lose our voice. It stops us from having deep, honest, vulnerable relationships with each other. We disconnect from ourselves and from each other.I offer some tips and guidance about where to start when it comes to sisterhood wounding and healing the collective trauma that lives within all of us.If you want to join my Magnificent Midlife course click on the link and sign up.

Midlife is an incredibly transformational period of our lives and when it comes to our relationship with our sexual selves it is almost a revolution that most women feel they experience. Midlife can be a new chapter in our lives. Today I have women's sexuality and empowerment coach Gabriella Espinosa with me to talk about how we can thrive sexually in midlife and beyond.Gabriella experienced her own revolution in her midlife transition and she talks about it in this podcast how it become an invitation for her to get to know herself on multiple levels. Her story is an inspiration for those of us who may feel lost and disconnected from their bodies or those of us who have strived and achieved the long held vision for their life for years only to find in midlife that all our own methods of success no longer work for us.In this podcast we talk about:We have to re-pattern our nervous system to reconnect and rebuild our relationship with pleasure. The key to rekindling our relationship with pleasure is to become sexually self-sufficient is doing it from a place of fullness and we can only do this when we learn to connect with what feels pleasurable to us.How our sensuality is the pathway to rekindling the relationship with pleasure that we feel inside of our bodies.We talk about our life force energy, Eros, and how connecting with it helps us understand our body. Erotic blueprints. What are they, how can they help you connect with your own erotic wiring, how they can help you understand your partner's to experience better sex both on your own and in relationship.How in midlife we have to bust up our cultural conditioning and internalised belief systems around pleasure to connect with our sexuality.When we learn to connect with our own pleasure we befriend our body and learn to treat it as an ally. This helps us to advocate for ourselves both in the bedroom and in the Doctors office.You can find Gabriella on instagram @gabriellaespinosa and at www.gabriellaespinosa.com.If you would like to try the erotic blueprint quiz please click on this link

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. The 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.

We often hear the term self sabotage and it is generally referring to a behavioural response where someone is stopping their own growth, success or connection with others in relationships.Is it really a thing and do we understand what is going on in the person's response?I often talk to my clients about the concept of ‘getting in our own way'. That is where our autonomic nervous system is acting out a response from the past in the present moment because we are triggered. Do you find yourself attracting the same type of people in relationships, getting the same feedback at work or finding it really hard to shift some patterns of behaviour no matter what you do or try? What is really going on here?We have stuck stress or trauma in our body and the stress cycle is uncompleted so we have this stuck survival energy in our body. It can be either stuck in ‘on' high sysmpathetic arousal where we might feel constriction, tension, anxiety, hyper alertness or just being stuck in a constant state of fear. Or we can get stuck in ‘off' where we feel disconnection, frozen, exhausted, flat and just have no energy to connect with others. Either way this is stress physiology that is stuck in our body.When we work with the body somatically we are able to unwind those old patterns that have become well worn pathways in our nervous system. The path of least resistance for our body to travel down.

Dr Kathryn Theodosis joins me for this fantastic podcast where we are talking about our amazing bodies, in particular our nervous systems. Kathryn is a chiropractor who works with clients to allow their nervous system and energy system to move out of a state of stress and fear and into one of greater safety and connection. This shift allows a greater sense of safety to be held by the nervous system and the energy system, giving space for us to connect with parts of us we have not felt safe to priorKathryn started off as a traditional chiropractor and was introduced to network spinal analysis a gentle mode of adjustment using contact points on the spine. This transformed her own healing experience and she completed further professional training in network spinal analysis, a modality of chiropractic care created by Donald Epstein. This then lead her to two years of professional training in Integral Energetics with Dr John Hare and Dr Fred Swan, who have developed a modality that works with the body's energy system.In the podcast we talked about:Different nervous system responses and how they show up in our bodies,How our life experiences and our life story are held in our muscles and organs and we can often see this in a person's posture and stance, How network spinal allows the body to unravel, reorganise and integrate its life expreriences in a gentle way allowing it to continually adapt and become more flexible,Our brain loves novelty and new experiences and this helps our brain stay young and have capacity to create new neural pathways as we age,How repressed emotions and old trauma and stress are held in the body and how that can sometimes manifest as pain,The heart and its energetic field are another area where we pick up on the emotions and energy of the environment around you. Often it is our heart reaction picking up on the emotions of others that reacts before our conscious brain,Different body holding patterns such as rigidity of the spine and what the somatic story behind that is,What practices suit what nervous systems. We talked about meditation and it not being for everyone and how in fact it can for some people, reinforce a trauma pathway of avoiding their body,Why creativity is so important for our emotional well-being,The current trend in cold water exposure and heat through saunas and why they don't suit everyone,Women's bodies and listening to our cyclical natures, taking queues from our body and not punishing ourselves for not able to be ‘on' all the time.You can find Kathryn on her website www.theenergychiro.com or on instagram @drkathryn.theenergychiro

Today my good friend Richie Angelo joins me to talk about skin through the major rites of passage we go through. Richie is a beauty therapist who is a skin guru. She has incorporated further study into her practice and uses both kinesiology and energetic work to treat her clients.In this podcast Richie explains how our skin is more than just the boundary of our body, it is part of the detoxification system of our body and it interacts with all other body systems. That our skin is part of our immune system and often represents on the outside what is going on in the inside for us. How we can tell by our skin whether it is hormone changes or toxicity in our body based on where our skin is changing on our body.We decided to frame the conversation around our rites of passage: Maiden, Mother, Maga, Crone and how our hormonal changes drive significant changes in our skin.if you want to skip through sections to get to content that is relevant to your life stage, the time stamps are:17:10 Maiden, the teenage years21:50 Mother - the impact of pregnancy on our skin28:45 Maga - midlife and the menopause transition45:55 Crone - Our early 60s onwardsOf course there are lots of gold moments throughout, Richie's knowledge and wisdom about skin is incredible.You can find Richie at www.madebyself.com.au or on instagram @_madebyself_

The midlife crisis is one of the most poorly misunderstood transitions and no surprises that menopause is too. In this episode I talk about the deeper meaning of both and go into explaining the challenges of all the rites of passage we have.I talk about:-What the developmental challenge of the individual rites of passage are,-What happens when you don't address that-How you have to look at menopause through multiple lenses; biological, psychological, social and cultural and how these impact on each person,-That every individual's menopause transition is unique and it is an invitation into preparing yourself to transition to your second half of life.-How midlife is transition into 2nd adulthood and what that means,-Elderhood and the role of elders in society,-How grief plays out in all of our transitions.At the end of the podcast I refer to my INNER SEASONS content. If you click on the link you can get through to that are you will be able to download a copy of it for yourself.

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 is 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

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 it you like it.

This week I'm talking about Emotions and how a somatic approach to your inner work will support you to have a really healthy relationship with your Emotions. Emotions are not a ‘nice to have' luxury item in our makeup, they are an essential aspect of it. We don't have them just for the pleasure of feeling; they help us to survive and stay alive. They orient us to the world and give us information so that we can thrive. They tell us when there is danger, they tell us what is benign, what is ok for us and what will nurture our growth. When we shut them down we lose a really important part of our sensory experience. And also a really big part of who we are. They drive our exploration of the world, our sense of adventure.In this podcast I talk about:What emotional repression is and how it can show up in many ways,How we learn to repress our emotions and why we do it,How emotions are a critical part of our human makeup and help us to stay safe and thrive in the worldHow emotions are connected to our sensory experiences. Sensory experiences are how we interpret and experience the world and are the language of the body, the nervous system and are experienced by our primal brain,Why emotions come up big time in our major life transitions of adolescence, parenthood, midlife, menopause and elderhood,How unstructured play for children is an essential experience for emotional maturity at that developmental stage because it turns on the neural pathways for emotions such as grief, betrayal etc,How vulnerability is essential for the development of emotions and continued learning in life,That we find ourselves in a time in the world where their is high demand for mental health services coming off the back of the pandemic for various reasons and their is a huge amount of collective grief in the cultural system that we have little capacity to hold collectively because we have not been taught how to do that in the western world as we are so disconnected from our grief.There is no such thing as negative emotions we need them all to survive and thrive.

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 that are simple, you could start with.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. Changing rhythms for Mammas is also on sale for $39.50 available on my website www.kelliestirling.com

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.

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 which is which maintains feedback loops to maintain homeostasis in the physiology of your body. That changes impact your neuro-endocrine, behavioural, autonomic and metabolic functions,That hormonal changes will then impact your autonomic nervous system states and this in turns 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 into the 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.

Today I talk with my friend and colleague Casey Hall, who is a stress management 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 its 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 ar 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.sensualitycoaching.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.

In this episode 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 there 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

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 she is Ellen Clarke.

Becoming a parent is a huge transition for all of us one that is often poorly supported. We often receive lots of guidance with regard to caring for the baby but little regarding the rite of passage of becoming a mother or father; the identity change and how that impacts on our sense of self.Today I talk to Carla Crivaro, a sex, love and relationship coaching who works with men and omen 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 a dynamic of cis gender, heterosexual relationship. However as we are talking about dynamics in family systems and the roles we can take up in those systems you may find his information helpful if that Cis/hetero partnership does not reflect your own relationship dynamic.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,- ow they can into really unhealthy systemic patterns with a female partner when she steps into the role of mother,- That men's hormones do change when the 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 them,- What inner work is helpful for men to participate in to shift the relationship dynamics that are not supporting their transition to fatherhood and learning to co-parent with their partner.You can find Carla and www.carlacrivaro.com or @the.forgotten.father on instagram.

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 out 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

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 and soothe ourselves in the moment is a big part of working consciously with our relationship with money. Learning to meet our emotions and express them in a grounded way, feeling that in our nervous system creates new capacity in our nervous system to feel these darker emotions. Emotions that our brain often doesn't let us feel, regardless of whether it is a cultural imprint, a familial imprint that is stopping us from feeling that.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.

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. Having the support during this period creates both a safe and comforting space for us to grow. These 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 many life transitions, in particular she supports women through Divorce. Elizabeth uses a body based, trauma based, coaching methodology to support people coming back to their original essence. Your blueprint is coherent, aligned, tapped into your greater vision of you. In the podcast Elizabeth talks us through the four phases of her Divorce transition methodology. Starting with getting your needs met, then Boundaries and Gatekeeping, Learning to Trust your Intuition and finally Self Expression.This 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 www.theunicornacademy.com on instagram @the.unicorn.academy.tm or on tik tok @theunicorn academy.

Where does creativity come from? This question has always sat with me. I am a very creative person and I have been painting, sewing, dancing, drawing since I was a young girl. I've rarely stopped. I'm always curious when people say to me ‘I am not creative'. The curious part of me always thinks, what no, it is in there somewhere we just have to find it.So I invited one of my most creative friends and colleagues Moira Cormack to to talk today about creativity. Creativity is healing and it is meditative; it brings us straight into our subconscious.Despite Moira and I both being incredibly tired, we connected so beautifully in this conversation and held space for each other.In this podcast we cover:- To be yourself creatively in the world we live in is a big challenge because we are always pushed to conform by our sense of wanting to belong;- That creativity can be incredibly playful;- How the schooling system stifles children's creativity;- How creativity, sexuality and spirituality feed each other and are door ways to each other;- How fear squashes creativity;- How sexuality is soothing to our nervous and endocrine systems. When we soothe and bring our nervous system down, it promotes endocrine health and creates space in our body for our own creativity to grow;- Our creativity changes throughout our life, depending on how it feeds the systemic role we are taking up. You can find Moira on instagram at @moira_coach or on facebook underMoira KC

The world is in a really weird place at the moment and the last two years has shown us we still have a very long way to go to build a sustainable future for ourselves. Systems are breaking down and need to work differently if we are going to build sustainable change for broader societal issues. How do we learn to think broader than ourselves and what is going on for us right now.Today I talk to the fabulous Mangala Holland. Mangala is Women's empowerment and sexuality coach. We talk about how healing and growing our sexuality is a profoundly life changing experience for those who pursue their learning in this part of their lives. How our sexuality is a foundational part of who we are as human beings and through embodiment work and working with our nervous system we can build strength and resilience within us.When we do deep work on ourselves, it impact positively on our relationship with ourselves, with others and ultimately our relationship with the planet. In a profoundly positive way.You can find Mangala at her website www.mangalaholland.com . She is also on Facebook and instagram.

The transition to menopause is complex and multifaceted. It is a death and rebirth, a shift in all the different aspects of ourselves. There is a lot of stigma around sexuality and ageing, so for many women there is a 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 in the midlife and menopause transitions. Laura shares with us her own sexual awakening post menopause and we talk about the possibilities for growth and development in terms of a women's sexuality that menopause can present.In this episode you will learn:- How our desires can become very different what they have been previously,- How the enormity of the menopause transition can be challenging for women in their partnerships and can present 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 presents 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 often assumes it is just that along,- Connecting with 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 tend to apply.You can find Laura on instagram @drlauramonk and on her website www.drlauramonk.com

Self love is a concept that I am not sure everyone has their head wrapped around. Sometimes when we think of self love we think of a narcissistic type of self love. That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about really loveing who you are as a person, all the parts of you. Loving your sexuality, your sensuality, the masculine and feminine aspects of yourself. In this episode I talk with my friend Gina Catherine who is a Sexuality, Love and Relationship coaching 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 supports our healing and gave us both a deep sense of awe, wonder, respect and love for our bodies.In this podcast we discuss:- How fuelling yourself with pleasure rather than rewarding yourself supports self love,- How we have been conditioned to be humble and the underbelly of that is counter to self-love,- That your sexual energy, which is your life force energy, is an incredible source of creativity,- When we are closed off to our sexuality, it is like closing yourself off to a room in your house,- How celebrating yourself is not only a good boundary practice but it sets you up for self love,- How our sensuality and sexuality is so unique to us and discovering the joy of both is so rewarding and empowering.You can find Gina at www.ginacatherine.love or on instagram at @gina_catherine coachingGina also hosts a lot of conversations on clubhouse and you can find her on clubhouse under Gina Catherine.

I've wanted to do this podcast for quite some time and have been quietly searching for a Doctor who is a menopause specialist and who takes a holistic and systemic view of the Midlife and Menopause transition. I looked at practitioners all over the world and found Dr Fatima Khan who funnily enough works about 2.5kms from my house!Fatima is a highly skilled Peri-Menopause and Menopause Specialist with a holistic approach to women's physical, emotional and mental wellbeing. She completed her medical training in the United Kingdom from Imperial College London in 2007 achieving a Bachelor in Medicine and Bachelor in Surgery. She also achieved a Bachelor in Science in Pharmacology and Therapeutics with publication of her research. I asked Fatima to not only talk about HRT and explain what it is, its history and the messaging around it, but also to talk about Estrogen and the role it takes up in our female bodies beyond our menstrual cycles and fertility. This is because Estrogen plays an important role in supporting the functioning of a number of our body's systems. Additionally I asked her to talk about how the decline in estrogen and progesterone impacts on other hormones in our body.Fatima has given us a multi-faceted, in depth, explanation of HRT and our hormonal health. In this podcast you will learn:- The link between estrogen and our mental health;- The impact of estrogen decline on our metabolic health, cardiovascular health, cellular health, and our bone health;- The lifestyle factors you need to consider when you are in your perimenopause transition;- A thorough understanding of Hormone Replacement Therapy and the history of it, the clinical trials that have occurred in our recent past that have impacted our perceptions of HRT;- And why taking a multi-faceted view of your health and well-being is important in the menopause transition.You can find Fatima on Instagram at @menopausespecialist or on her work website www.agoracentre.com.au. I encourage you to follow Fatima on instagram if you use it, she has some excellent posts that are all evidence based. I think it is incredibly important to understand the many facets of the menopause transition and that includes Hormone Replacement Therapy. Broad knowledge and understanding of your health, in mind, body and spirit, gives you information, options, discernment and choice. It empowers you to be creative in driving you life from a desire based perspective.

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 has created and that she offers 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.

Today I talk to my friend and colleague Kendra cover who is a women's intimacy coach about stepping into womanhood. What does it look like and how would we know what it feels like inside of us.In this podcast Kendra and I discuss:- The rites of passage that women go through and 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, good sister; 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 archtyepal roles are available to women in terms of how they show up and tis narrowing down of how we ‘are' diminishes so much of who we are and what others see,- How learning to hold all of our emotions and listening to the signal 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 to really get to know themselves at a very deep level, - 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”.

Our sensuality provides us with so much pleasure and is a pathway to our sexuality. When we start to experience an enjoy the pleasure of our five senses, we build pathway in side of us that greater capacity to feel pleasure in all aspects of our lives. It brings us into the present moment, in the present moment is where life happens.In this 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,-How our sensuality and pleasure gives us ‘fuel in our tank' for tougher times,- Out sensuality is a pathway out of our rational and logical brain to experiences the goodness in our body in tough times,-Our body has a natural orientation to pleasure and this contributes greatly to our healing and harmony in our body,-Connecting to 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 at her website www.carolanne.com.au or at instagram @carolannealive

I've watched many of my friends navigate new relationships in their midlife in the past ten years. In this time of our life, relationships often fracture as we go through this complex transition. Growing in the same trajectory is challenging.Today I talk to Ana Kosta, who is an holistic Sexuality Love and Relationship coach who focuses on Supporting Women in Conscious Dating. Ana talks openly about her own life experience that lead her to this pathway and how she empowers her clients to find that clarity in their own life. You can find Ana at her website www.anakostacoach.com on instagram @anakosta.coach and on Facebook at Ana Kosta Coaching

Today Dr Nicole Pawley and I discuss the Three Golden Opportunities. According to traditional Chinese Medicine, there are three times in a woman's life where she can risk her health or enhance it and set herself up for vitality in later life. The Three Golden Opportunities are Menarche, Post Partum and Menopause. Three Significant transitions that are gateways in women's lives. In these transitions we have opportunity to risk our health or set ourselves up for living with vitality later in our life.This is all dependant on how we learn to nourish and restore our Jing. Jing, also known as essence and life force energy is a finite resource of energy we have within us. iIs is important to learn how to restore this and this is not something we are taught in the western world.In our practice of pleasure, both sensual and sexual, we can replenish and nourish our Jing.Our Western Culture that is very Yang, constant and always on is very depleting of Jing.When you are depleted of Jing these transitions can be very challenging.You can find Nicole on instagram at @drnicpawley

I am a big supporter of cyclical living for women and this is a reason I wanted to do a podcast on it. Jaime Lauren is a menstrual cycle and fertility awareness coach. In this podcast you will learn what our inner seasons are, how to design your life around your cycle. I feel this is very important for all women to know regardless of their age or stage of life given the epidemic of hormone related issues we face. Understanding your cycle is, I believe, a big lever when it comes to self-love, self-acceptance and women stepping into their wild power. You can find Jamie at www.jaimelauren.coach at her FB group Cyclical Living for women or on instagram @menstrualmagic_

Sensual movement is a non linear form of dance that is particularly good for our pelvic floor and core. It is different than other forms of movement like Yoga and Pilates, as it works beyond the horizontal and vertical planes of the body. It builds great bodymind connections between our brain and all the different parts of our body, particularly our pelvis. Dianne has a whole host of free content on her website if you want to explore Sensual Movement, look her up at www.shakticore.com and go to the Goddess Vault. I teach sensual movement to clients I coach one on one and in my group online program ReConnect.

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 Trauma, the definitions of it, what Somatic Experiencing is. We focus in on birth trauma and how it can show up post partum but also later points in our lives. How we might know what a trauma response is and how it impacts on our health, wellbeing and relationships.You can find Nisha on her website www.feminineinstincts.com.au, her Facebook pages, Birth Trauma Awareness and Feminine Instincts and her Instagram account @feminineinstincts.

Have you heard of Mastrescence? I hadn’t heard of it until a couple of years ago. It is the journey of becoming a mother. It seems absurd that this word is not more well known; we’ve known about adolescence forever. In this episode I talk to Belinda Haan from the motherhood gathering. Belinda runs the online gathering to support mothers in their journey entering matrescence. In this podcast we talk about the challenges and joys of navigating matrescence. The reality is that many years after our children have arrive we are still in the process of becoming a mother. It is a never-ending learning process and our identify within that context constantly grows and evolves.You can find her at www.themotherhoodgathering.com on instagram at @themotherhoodgathering.