A quick little podcast with just me today. I have been reflecting on how some people struggle through growth and healing, more in terms of being lost in the liminal space. In the darkness we might say. I did write a blog about the anatomy of life transitions where I talked about it a few months ago but I think with a podcast you can sometimes say a little bit more. Recently, I had an experience where something of mine came up again and I was thinking wow I have al the resources, training and skills to know what is going on. What I noticed is that the impact of it was significantly less than in the past. Minimal really. It was more a noticing and then I was able to resource myself. So often, when people begin trauma healing or embark on a personal growth journey, they imagine it will be a straight line: one step after another, always moving forward, never looking back. But real healing and growth rarely follow that kind of neat, linear path. Instead, they are more like a spiral or a tide, flowing in cycles, circling back, rising and falling. Healing also has the rhythm of the tide. There are moments of expansion, clarity, and energy—like the incoming tide that fills and nourishes. And there are moments of retreat, rest, and stillness—like the tide going out, leaving space for reflection and integration. Neither state is better or worse; both are necessary. When we expect healing to be linear, we can feel shame or discouragement when old triggers resurface or when we find ourselves “back where we started. Recognising this cyclical rhythm allows us to meet ourselves with more compassion.

Caroline Shabaz is a colleague, mentor and friend who I am so happy to talk to today. She is a meta psychotherapist, who is deeply experienced and who has trained in many different therapeutic modalities. She is a Clinical Psychologist, has a masters degree in Depth Psychology, is trained in Family Constellations work, is a certified in providing psilocybin assisted therapy and has trained in many wisdom traditions and modalities. Caroline is also a member of the kink community and she trains other therapists how to work with Kink and BDSM. We talk about how relationships are crucibles for our transformation and growth throughout our lifetime. They trigger our core wounds so that we may heal and burn away who we think we are. We learn how to be in relationships through our family system and internalise much of this from our parents and caregivers, but we are born into a cultural narrative or story that shaped you and often our growth is about reclaiming part of that or alternatively it may be about letting go what we no longer need. You will also hear: Understanding the midlife narrative through the Jungian Lens. We also apply an astrological frame to it (Neptune square Neptune), How our hormones and the changing hormonal cocktail we have facilitates changes through our lifetime, Understanding the deeper architecture that drives the general level of dissatisfaction in midlife many of us experience, The Hero and Heroines Journey and how they are an archetypal framework for the many initiations we face in our lifetime, The concept of the Shadow and how it plays out in our relational life, The different alchemical stages of relationship transformation. Caroline runs a program called Transforming Relationships that is for couples and individuals who want to explore themselves deeply in a group container. You can find Caroline at Transformingrelationships.com.au or metapsychotherapy.com

Fawning is a survival response rooted in our nervous system's need for safety—it's how we learn to please, appease, or over-adapt to avoid conflict or threat. In this episode, we explore the origins of fawning, how it shows up in relationships, and what it takes to gently unlearn it.

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.

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. 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 their role. 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. Healing it can be a great gift you can give yourself.