Pleasure: how it nourishes us, resources us and helps us to grow

Pleasure is your birthright. When I say that, when you read it, what do you notice in your body?

Pleasure is certainly a word that sets a lot of us off and that is because of the stigma of cultural shame that we hold in our body around it first and foremost. Our body has orientations toward pleasure and pain. Pleasure is opening and expansion and pain is constriction and a move away from energy. Pain tells us when something is not safe and our nervous system moves us into action to take us away from it. Maybe we’ve also had personal experiences of when we overdosed on something we felt was pleasurable and things haven’t turned out well. That is one way to stop our nervous system from letting us feel free to fell it.

Humans are incredibly sensuous beings and our senses are how we experience the world through our five senses of smell, taste, smell, sight and touch/feeling. We experience pleasure through these sensory experiences. When we are consciously doing this we are building new neural pathways for our body to feel this expansive energy. We need to do this in small doses, like microdoses, otherwise that nervous system kicks in, says I’m not enjoying this, or this is too much and that shame reaction comes back.

Let’s just talk about shame for a minute. There is a relational component to shame. It’s usually something like this, “That person made me feel ashamed by saying/doing……. “. People definitely use shame as a weapon, and shame definitely been used to stop us feeling and embracing our bodies need to feel pleasure. It’s been used to take away autonomy and choice without a doubt.

But shame occurs when there is a part of us that agrees with the other. There is some part of you and me that agrees with the shaming idea/assertion/concept and then we feel shamed. The shame that is living there in the unconscious, actually agrees with what the other is saying or their perception and ideas of you. The person might be actually saying the thing that we have always feared is actually wrong with us and now it must be true because they’ve said it.

What this shame tells us is that we are seeking external validation to tell us we are ‘good person’ and that there is a part of us thinking what they are thinking. It wouldn’t bother us if that part wasn’t there feeling the shame.

When we realise this it is liberating because we know that anyone can say anything to us and we don’t have to feel shame.

When we are children we don’t really have the life experience and inquiry skills to look at it this way. To do the self inquiry and perspective seeking work. We rely on our parents and caregivers to support our nervous system through co-regulation and to give us information about ourselves, our behaviour. What is ok and not ok, help us with our boundaries.

When we don’t get that support as kids, we tend to continue to look for external validation from others into our adult life. It would be silly of us to expect children and traumatised nervous systems to not feel shame.

So back to pleasure. That cultural conditioning that said you are a bad person if you feel pleasure, well a lot of it comes from religion and came in times of austerity when the cultural austerity came in to curb the excess of hedonism. The pendulum of culturally acceptable behaviour swang really hared the other way. Those Romans they were hedonists. The French revolution came about after years of hedonism and sensually gratuitous behaviour by the French Royal court. Kind of makes sense, but the pendulum swang too far and here we are a couple of hundred years later disconnected from our bodies because we don’t feel safe to feel pleasure.

This is why sensual pleasure is a good start and starting small is a good way because that small dose of it will feel safe in your nervous system, and that part of you that feels shame, it won’t go into overwhelm. Our sensory experiences help us connect to our bodies, they are the language of the nervous system. So by starting small we build and strengthen the nervous system. Our autonomic nervous system is beautiful and it is always working really hard to keep us safe and to regulate us. Small doses, titrate it for us. We have to practice. It takes devotion too. We have to commit to letting ourselves feel pleasure every day and the best way to do it is by starting off your day with pleasure. Our body will fight us, there will be resistance. “I’m too busy, I have work to do'“. Flight response. “I feel like I don’t deserve to feel pleasure it feels terrible putting myself first’. Flight and freeze working together. “I’m too tired to do it”, that is collapse.

Pleasure is the counter vortex. It builds that alternative neural pathway to the vortex of trauma. This is how it resources us.

So what are some pleasurable activities that are healthy choices.

• Singing, Chanting or Dancing

• Using our breath; doing breathwork or breathing exercises

• Movement, exercise, walking in nature.

• Eating nutrious food and really being present to the taste of it

• Surfing, skiing, rollerblading - they take a lot of concentration and ask of us to be truly present in the moment with our body.

• Going to an art gallery and admiring the art

• Listening to music or creating music

• Sexual self-pleasure is very nourishing and supportive

This helps us in everyday life and it helps us in the bedroom. When we know what we like we can talk to our partner about it. We can ask for what we want.

It turns out that being able to access aliveness & pleasant sensations in the body actually supports our nervous system and makes us more emotionally resilient.

Pleasure isn't only sexual, it's about enjoying being in your body throughout your day.

When we're more connected to pleasure, we're more loving and generous to those around us, we have more energy, we're able to focus better, we're more relaxed... and…

we get more done!

-Source unknown

What about the pleasure we might feel from coffee, drinking alcohol and taking recreational drugs?

Well you might feel good but actually we take them to avoid, to not feel and to soothe most of the time. So coffee is great but it stimulates adrenaline in our body which creates that fight and flight energy. So if we are taking it because we are tired and need more energy, we are ignoring our bodies boundary and its message that we you need to stop and rest. Alcohol is a downer and generally distracts us from feeling. Or for some people they can only express themselves and find a voice when they are drunk which is still avoidance. Recreational drugs, the stimulus response depends on the drug, but they are a tool of avoidance from being present in the moment, to wanting to feel.

Addicted to the pleasure of shopping, that high from buying stuff? This is a little hit of external validation that elevates us to help us feeling a sense of belonging but its a super quick hit and we often feel empty afterward. Don’t get me wrong there is nothing wrong with shopping per say and personally I love a good spot of window shopping and looking at clothes, but when you use it as a distraction to make yourself feel good, to not feel the ‘difficult’ emotions, or can’t stop your online shopping, that is a problem.

Finally, pleasure, how does it help us grow?

Well when we build up our capacity to receive it in our nervous system, we build up our capacity to feel more expansive energy. This is an open and vulnerable energy, we can only grow from this position. We cannot grow from constriction and shutdown, from invulnerability. We are not open to other perspectives in this state, we rarely inquire, we cannot listen to another person’s point of view and we certainly find it hard to let ourselves feel bigger emotions. We are in disconnect.

As always if you like this post, feel free to share it with someone for whom you feel it might be valuable.

Slow down to speed up

I write a lot about slowing down. It has been one of the big learnings for me in my life but overall, if I think of all the people I’ve coached over the years I think on of the biggest issues most of us face is the disconnection from our bodies. This is pretty serious, it is causing lots of health issues, combined with the crazy pace that most people are expected to work at now, it is causing lots of dysregulated nervous systems. This causes some pretty poor decision making and poor behaviour to emerge.

When we slow down we are able to be more present with our life, with what is happening right now. That is where life is happening.

I think one of the most important skills we can learn is to recognise our stress responses and what our habitual patterns are when it comes to reacting to stress. Fight, flight, freeze or fawn? What do you do? Do you get angry, do you want to move, can you not stop talking, do you go into people pleasing mode, do you words escape you and your feel overcome with brain fog? These are all typical signs of a stress response. I generally want to argue or walk away. Sometimes I please, although this is a very atypical for me and the times I have done I’ve been able to observe myself in the moment and thought why are you acting like this?

When we are in overdrive we are making decisions and choices that often are not well thought through, may come from a child part of us, or we spray our emotional response all over people and that takes time to clean up. Or some of us just collapse and withdraw and this is not a great place to be stuck in your nervous system.

When you can start to be aware of your stress response in action this is when you can start to take put practices in place that help you regulate yourself back to a place in your autonomic nervous system that is a bit more grounded and calmer. Practices that help you soothe yourself in the moment. One of the best ways to do this is by learning how to listen to your body and identify the sensations that you are feeling right in the moment of the trigger.

When we slow down and check in with our bodies, take the time to ourselves each day for time out, we are actually able to access so much more information than we would guess. Do you know our body takes in 90% more data than our brains. In truth our body and brain are one but our body is reading our environment all the time. 90% is quite unbelievable isn’t it? When we don’t check in with ourselves we miss all of this.

This becomes super important when we are going through big life transitions because they are generally times of great change so we can easily get overwhelmed. Slowing down has a tremendously positive impact on our quality of life because we start to be aware of what is going on around us all the time. All those parts of life happening that we were missing, we start to notice. We start to build a bit more capacity to regulate ourselves in our nervous system when we practice slowing down techniques like using our breath, or body check ins and that brings us into presence. It is a good place to be.

What I notice in people I coach who are in midlife is that when they start to slow down, their health and wellbeing improves, their perimenopause physical symptoms often dissipate and this gives them more time and confidence to explore the existential questions that they find themselves facing. It gives you more time to reflect on how you can set yourself up to live well in your second half of life. It gives you more time to think and feel into what feels meaningful and purposeful to you.

This is why we can speed up when we slow down, we have more clarity, we are more conscious and deliberate and can take in more perspective.

What would happen if you gave yourself permission to have thirty minutes each day of slow time?

The developmental challenges for our rites of passage

As we go through life there are different rites of passage we go through. In days gone by, we used to celebrate these transitions and create community support around our friends and loved ones who go through these passageways. This is not something we’ve paid a lot of attention to culturally from many years and I can’t help but wonder how that impacts on the shape of how we grow?

For each stage has a developmental challenge that we must address. If we do not, it hangs around at the next stage of life. For some people it retards their growth, particularly into adulthood or into their second adulthood. This is one of the biggest challenges for most people going through these transitions and it is why many people can get stuck. Particularly when the haven't explored themselves in their teenage years or their early adult years.

The rites of passage we go through are our teenage years, our early adulthood where many of us become parents and put our creative energies into the world, our midlife and our elderhood. Another way some people write about these passages are Rite to Birthright, Rite to Adulthood, Rite to Marriage, Rite to Eldership and Rite to Ancestorship. The latter being the rite of passage that is death.

When we go through a passage, which can take a number of years, we go through a separation phase, then a liminal phase, then an integration or incorporation phase. For most of the people I work with in coaching, the liminal phase is often the hardest because our foundations are shaky due to our changing identity. It is in the presence of community that we are able to transition with greater ease through these phases as it offers support and our space being held by others.

For females, we sometimes refer to these stages as Maiden, Mother, Maga or Queen and Crone. The third stage, the Maga/Queen is relatively newer, really only having been talked about a lot in the last 15 years. It has come about because women are living longer and we can clearly see there is a stage that they go through in Midlife where they are really expressing their gifts to the world in a big way and being their most authentic self.

The developmental challenge for each rite is:

Maiden/Teenager - to explore the world and ourselves whilst being held in the container of the community.

Mother - to express our spirit in the world through our creativity to the world. Whether that be in the form of creating a family, creating our vocational gifts through our work and to receive recognition for that. To say yes to life with all of our energy and vitality behind us.

Maga/Queen - To discern your truth within you and to be radically honest with yourself, to stay present and to learn to be kind to ourselves.

Crone - to let go, rest, receive and trust.

When we don’t express these challenges or explore them they show up in the next phase. So the young woman who perhaps lives in a family where there is high control and she is not able to explore her sexuality in her teenage years, will do that in her twenties, in her next phase. For women in mother phase, many women are focused on looking after young children and don’t get to explore their life’s work at this phase. This can also happen to all of us. For many people in the late teenage years they explore areas of study that have been pushed onto them by their parents; it is not really what they are passionate about. So it is not surprising for many women and men, once they hit midlife to explore alternate career choices and hobbies that might be aligned to what they loved to do in their teens. This is very common now days. It requires some discernment on our part, as we squish a lot of stuff into our life at midlife and we can easily become tired and burned out.

At midlife, where radical honesty with ourselves is the challenge, it is not surprising that many people are faced with working through old trauma, slowing down because their body tells them through physical health issues or pain and learning to create a more grounded relationship with their emotions and how they express them. Come back to the truth of who you are is what our psyche whispers to us.

Finally in our crone years, as we wind down and really enjoy life it is hard for many of us to trust and receive when we have been in a constant spin of productivity for years. These are great years when we can offer mentorship to others and enjoy the flow of life.

So if your teenager is driving you crazy think back to your years and know that they are here to explore themselves in this stage in every way. Let them go, to a point. Our role is to keep them safe as parents but that doesn’t mean locking them up. When it comes to our midlife selves, it’s OK to reconnect to passions you had as a kid, explore it, it is normal. What is important is to acknowledge what is going on and speak about it openly.

How do you deal with big changes in your life?

How do you deal with big changes in your life and how do you learn? The way we enter into, navigate and exit transitions really matters because it sets us up for the next stage of our lives.

We all go through a midlife transition, regardless of gender. I think the unfortunate thing for menopause is that a lot the transition volatility of midlife gets blamed on menopause. They are two separate, but often parallel transitions.

One of the reasons I chose to pursue further study around relationship and sexuality coaching was because, at one time, I had so many executive coaching clients blowing up their lives, in particular their relationships in their midlife transition and I thought I need to learn to support these people better. Whilst I had studied adult development intensively and really understood, the shape of the stages of adult development I was unsure as to what the other factors were, that were getting in the way.

Here is what I know about our midlife transition. It is a HUGE opportunity.

Many people come to this time in life and they feel stuck. Maybe in relationships, in jobs they don't really like. They often reach this stage and don't like where they are, they don't know how to express how they feel about it and don't know how to get it out of it. Many people don't know where to go to find answers and they can often make really big changes and life altering decisions to get away from the pain of what they are feeling. They can't actually see that with everything they are feeling what they are actually crying out for is a transformation in their life.

A lot of pain from our childhood resurfaces to be healed. Many people at this inflexion point in their lives do a bit of an audit. There are hidden gifts within your wounds. Some of us are forced to address childhood trauma, wounding from early relationships in our teens and twenties. When you can face your wounding with compassion, from a different perspective, face the consequences of decisions in the past, when you can give your wounding space, you can come to terms with who you have become.

Old pain that resurfaces, needs time for you to release any grief that is accompanying it. This might mean letting go of long held hopes and dreams. This transition gives you an opportunity to really review you life, the road behind you and the road in front of you and align with your purpose. That is what this transition is really all about, moving from an ego driven early adulthood to a second adulthood driven by purpose and meaning.

It can get derailed really easily can't it?

Especially when you look for answers outside of yourself. Because you see, this transition asks you to dive deep inside of you.

The more you heal and release now, the more you make way for spaciousness, new beginnings and new opportunities in your life. Change does get hard as we get older because we do get a bit stuck in our ways. So midlife is the time to deal with it so we can live well in the second half of life.

If you don't deal with pain, unresolved trauma and wounding now, you step further into victimhood and continue to project this wounding outward and that is when a lot of relationship issues, conflict and unhappiness can occur in the long term. In this time in our lives we have more power to accept ourselves fully and take accountability for our healing. We did not have this power when we were younger but we do have it now.

We can rewrite our transition story at midlife. We can rewrite how we deal with this stage and approach it with acceptance and grace but it takes some inner work. When we can accept all the different parts of ourselves fully, we come home to the truth of who we really are. Don’t cling to the past, that is when you get stuck, heal the wounds from the past, accept where you are now. That creates space for the future.

As Carl Jung said, ‘when we look outside we are dreaming, when we look inside we awaken’.

Dancing with Grief

I’ve been thinking about grief a lot this week, well actually I’ve been thinking and feeling it. My husband’s grandfather passed away earlier in the week. He had turned 98 on Sunday and then died on Tuesday. We knew it was coming. He lives quite far from us and we all said goodbye to him in July which was the last time we saw him. He was sharp, funny and a true gentle man. He play online Bridge with my husband and kids and anyone else who turned up online up until about ten days ago.

Grief is a funny emotion. Most of the others pass through if we let them in a matter of minutes but grief seems to come through in bursts and can stick around for quite a while. What I notice, is when I am quiet and still that is when it comes. In surrender.

Even then it comes in bursts, and can keep coming for quite some time. When our Grief last longer than six months, it is now pathologised as depression. To me this seems like a total misunderstanding of grief.

A colleague said to me a few years ago, grief is love not able to be expressed.

I loved this insight and to me this seems true because we always grieve love we have lost, over time it fades but does it ever really go away?

For grief doesn’t just occur when a beloved passes. When relationships end we grieve. When we have acute illness we grieve. When our youngest or only child passes milestones we grieve because we know that we will never see or experience that stage again as a parent.

As our bodies age and we move into a new rite of passage, stage of life, we grieve for what we leave behind and for all the dreams and aspirations that we had that we were not able to experience. We grieve for the choices we made that allowed us to walk through a door way and miss another. We think of what may have been.

When we grieve in the present we often tap into a reservoir of unresolved grief from the past. Grief that wasn’t finished, that still lives in our bodies. It is never too late to heal unresolved grief. Healing is always an option and your body will tell you someway and somehow. Our darker emotions are rooted in alchemy, they always take us some place else. When we open to the wisdom of the darker emotions, particularly grief, there is always another emotions waiting for us. Grief often gives us gratitude.

“The gift that grief offers us is the capacity to see deeply into the way things are. Life is limited. We are here for only a short time. Grief asks us to know this, not only in a disembodied, cerebral way, but in the marrow or our bones - to look into the reality of death and loss with our usual egoic blinders on”

— Miriam Greenspan - 'Healing through the dark emotions'

Unexpressed grief holds a lot of hurt. Culturally we don’t express death well. We don’t acknowledge that the journey of life is a series of death and rebirths all the time as we grow and journey into different stages of our lives. Unexpressed grief gets passed down through generations in individuals and societies and comes out culturally in often unrecognisable forms; forms that are sometimes violent and highly destructive. The lack of acknowledgement of our grief is bringing about the destruction of the planet. The symptoms; increasing busyness and consumption, increasing depression, loneliness, anxiety, boredom and apathy.

I don’t think there has been a more important time to learn the gifts of listening to our body, to be with our darker emotions and learn the transformational power that they bring.

If this post resonates with you feel free to pass it onto a friend.

Your purpose - following the path home to you

When we go through our midlife transition, many people start to question everything about their life. This is perfectly normal and common. Our midlife transition is very much about moving from our first adulthood which has been driven very much by our ego; establishing our career wanting to achieve, meeting a partner and starting a family for some, maybe buying a house. The common theme of doing. Our second adulthood about discovering purpose, passion and meaning in our life. We ask ourselves the questions, Why am I here? How can I be more of the real me? What brings me love, joy, calm, happiness in my life.

Our midlife can be a time of great rupture. Some times this is good, sometimes it is not. What it asks of us is to go inward. A journey into our innerworld. Here is where many people, in my opinion, get stuck, using a first adulthood model when it comes to the bigger questions in this transition. Our purpose is not what we do in the world - it is who you are (be). Other people experience your purpose through your sense of ‘beingness’ or being human. It’s not about making things happen, although to be fair, just being yourself and doing work that lights you up, can allow you to really show the world unapologetically who you are.

We expect our purpose to come to us in an aha! moment. Your purpose blossoms moment to moment as you go into your inner world and explore your cultural conditioning, your ego survival strategies, your childhood wounding. It is more a gentle unfolding. It is how you show up moment to moment in life. Who you are, with friends, with your kids, with your partner, talking to your neighbours, doing the dishes, when you are on the train or the bus. It is you in life, in the day to day moments.

We tend to overthink purpose and turn the finding of it into an achievement of great magnitude. When we do that, we become like Dorothy from ‘The Wizard of Oz’ following the yellow brick road, looking for something outside our ourselves. It is not outside of you, it is in you. Nobody is going to give you a gold medal at the end of your life for finding your purpose. It is the essence of you, the authentic you behind the ego wounding, the persona’s you have created to belong. Who you are to strangers, to animals, in the garden with the earth. It is your strengths, your wounding, who you are in partnership and who you are in friendship. It is who you are with yourself.

We expect our purpose to come to us in an aha! moment. Your purpose blossoms within you. Is is a gentle unfolding, moment to moment.

Midlife is the right time to start this journey for a lot of people because we have the life skills, experience, knowledge and understanding to discern what is really going on for us and in some way our psyche knows this. For women, I often wonder whether the shifts of our hormones starts this quest, this journey of coming home to you, the essence of who you are. You can’t use logic and reason to find your purpose, all you have to do is start to make friends with your emotions, look through the lens’ of conditioning that have imposed views of how you should ‘be’.

When we push on our edges, beyond what is comfortable, when we make mistakes, when we let ourselves slow down, in our moments of stillness; we learn to be with ourselves. Your purpose is your journey of life, in some ways I think our learning journey is a constant state of learning who we are. Who we are in a bigger picture of collective humanity. Of a collective state of being.

For some people it can take their whole lifetime to get to this state, for others they find it sooner. There is no rush, go slowly and gently. My motto in life, SLOW is MORE.

The Good Girl

You know there is something that happens to women in midlife. They develop a burning passion and desire to step into their power. It is the journey toward becoming a crone, the wise woman, for sure. But it is something more. It is a strong desire to pull off that ‘coat’ of good girl conditioning. That part of us that we pull over like a coat to stay safe. On the opposite side of that is absolute fear of what will we happen if we do throw it all away. The polarity within is so strong for most women I’ve coached. On one side the desperate longing to be your true self and on the other side the absolute fear of judgement, hatred and rejection by the tribe.

We get demeaned when the urges come through. When our emotions are bursting at the seams to come through in our perimenopausal journey, when your bodymind is telling you ‘something has to change, enough, you cannot do this anymore’. You get called the angry menopausal woman. That is one of the great things about our hormones changing at this time. Estrogen which is the hormone of accommodation and progesterone, which is a calming hormone start to decline from out late 30s. All of a sudden a vale is lifted and we start to see the world with the lens we had when we were very young, about 10 to 12 years. When we started to see the injustice. Well yes, it is back but we are wiser, more experienced in the ways of the world, and frankly, pissed off and needing some space and change in our lives.

The fear of not belonging is so strong. We adapt and twist ourselves so much that many of us forget who we really are. I’ve seen it in work cultures, social cultures; I see it on social media every day. I know this deeply, I’ve found myself in roles when I worked in large organisations where I was the person who would speak up and ask the hard questions. One of my lovely male colleagues said to me one day, ‘you are the voice of reason in this group’. Let me tell you sometimes it’s hard being that person. Fortunately for me I learned early on to march to the beat of my own drum if I wanted to stretch toward my desires, but honestly it is hard being that person sometimes. I also know this feeling because many clients tell me that trapped in fear to speak out, to create, to desire. The good girl conditioning is so strong that we learn to live inside an invisible box and a limited range of acceptable behaviours and actions. The good girl learns to distrust her inner knowing that the answer must be outside of her. She disconnects from the deep knowing of her body because the masculine view which favours logic, rational and data, tells her that her inner knowing is wrong.

I’ve noticed in the last three years a trend of women getting sick of misogynistic social media posts, bitchy competitive behaviour amongst women, women exhausting themselves trying to be the perfect mother, wife, sister and friend. The assumption that we are on call for our employers 24/7. This is one of the reasons I do this work because I know that women have been subjugated for so long, pushed down to a narrow version of themselves, that they need a lot of support to help their nervous system feel safe enough to be the real version of themselves. The process of unlearning and rediscovering those lost parts of ourselves is slow and gentle. To be able to speak your desires and to listen to yourself deeply takes time and patience and tenderness.

The desire to live, to be accepted and to belong, keeps most of us in our places. And so we spend our lives running from the darkness, trying to our hardest to be good and work hard and keep others happy.

Lucy Pearce

We live in a culture where the masculine view is the norm and all genders of people have suppressed their feminine (the toxic masculine version of it) to survive and belong, to feel safe and loved. She squishes herself into a version of the good girl to feel safe, to please. She has shut down her feelings because an angry or sad or frustrated girl is not easy to handle. She has disconnected from her body and sexuality and when her body calls to her to listen, she soothes and numbs herself through overeating, drinking, overexercising or workaholism. Women are treated like little men in every facet of their life.

So how to we find the fierceness inside of us? Well it starts with connecting with our body and learning to listen to her. We connect with our pussy, the centre of our creativity and listen to her whispers. We start to connect with our pleasure and train our nervous system to accept and receive pleasure. We connect with nature and the cycles of the moon. We are cyclical beings and our menstrual cycles and rhythms of our life line up with the moon. We learn to connect with our dark feminine, our fear, anger, sadness, grief, frustration, we welcome them in for that is the journey for the heroine. We do this because we know that living in a female body, but living like little men is unbelievable unhealthy for us. We are not little men we are women. Ours is the journey of the heroine, spiralling in and out, up and down, into the underworld and back up again. We move inwards through our own dark terrain to find the essence of who we are, before we had to put the good girl coat on. When we find our inner flame, our muse, we realise that the guide we have been looking for is here.

It is all here inside of us. That is why I do this work to take you deep to that place inside of you so you can find your muse, your guide. It is all inside of you, you don’t need to look outside anymore.

My course Magnificient Midlife start on September 7th, pleasure click here if you would like to join the journey of taking the good girl coat off.

Growing all the parts of us

In every system on earth, one pattern you see is the pattern of contraction an expansion. It is the natural ebb and flow of any system. When they are growing in complexity they expand out, and then they contract back in, before they find their new rhythm.

What does that look like in a human? Well I am glad that you asked. Ever shared a really vulnerable comment in a group or online and then wanted to go and hide in a cupboard in the dark? Yes that is when you have really pushed on your edges. Whilst it may feel incredibly uncomfortable you should celebrate yourself because you have just stretched yourself a little bit. Doing it in little titrated bursts is a good thing for your nervous system too. Then the expansion doesn’t feel so overwhelming.

We often see this other systems too. Our natural environment has swings and natural patterns and rhythms to it. Fire, flood, drought, cyclones they are all natural occurrences that some might say are over corrections. However when I look at indigenous Australians and the way the work the land, the use of fire in a controlled way is a natural part of the healthy growth of the natural environment.

One thing that I find super disturbing is the increase in mental health issues in society. It seems a big swing out don’t you think? At the moment, in the pandemic context it is understandable because it is hard to be isolated from our friends and family. Our nervous systems co-regulate each other. The ventral vagal part of our nervous system which is predominantly in our face and upper chest and shoulders and neck is all about connection. Being curious. When we are in our ventral vagal state we are curious and connected. Wearing masks at the moment is necessary, but that can be challenging because when we look at people, at their faces, it’s the ventral vagal part of our nervous system that is sussing that person out. Feeling into their system and asking, can I trust them, are they safe? Combine that with not being able to be around each other too much, so missing out on that co-regulation, it makes sense that people are suffering. In particular, women like to be around each other and tell stories, that is soothing to us. I think men like it too, the like to tell yarns and have a laugh with each other.

Current context aside, the mental health issues have been around for a while. I think one of the reasons is we have been encouraged for a really long time to disconnect from our bodies as a source of wisdom and intuition in favour of rational and logical thought. The part of our brain that controls the logic and rational stuff is the neo cortex. From an evolutionary perspective this is a newer part. We have two other parts that we are really not hanging out with so much, the primal part of our brain and the limbic part. The latter runs our nervous system and the limbic, emotions, feelings, orientation toward pleasure and pain, reward. There is so much benefit from inhabiting those other two parts. When we ignore them we are cutting ourselves off from the message from our emotions and the intelligence of the nervous system.

To access these parts of your self, your inner world, you need to practice focusing in on them, feeling sensations in your body and describing them. There is so much to be gained from doing this. This is our unconscious, it is very clever. Steph Biddulph in his new book Fully Human describes it so well. “When you listen to your insides, they inform you how to change, where the answer might lie. And when you have really ‘got the message, even just wordlessly, making space for it, it very often shifts. You feel a change in your body that is positive, releasing, enlivening, and you know that something has moved and you are different now”.

“If you don’t practice going inside yourself, pretty soon you forget you even have an inside. And this is a problem”

Steph Biddulph, “Fully Human”

I use tools in my coaching to bring people into these parts of their brain and this is what I find; when people focus on their inner world, their unconscious, they realise that they have a wealth of information in there that can help them find the answers they are seeking. This improves their sense of self-confidence and efficacy. They feel a sense. of coming home to themselves. They learn to love their emotions and to be with them and listen to their messages, they stop pushing them away. They stop getting stuck in stories about what happened to them in their lives to explain the way they are. They are able to move on from them and are able to step into their personal power. They learn to trust their bodies as a source of wisdom. They start listening to their body, talking to it and giving it love and attention. They realise that their mind and body are not separated but one. They realise they are multi-dimensional beings with different parts and stop being at war with themselves. They learn to love all the different parts of themselves. When we love and accept ourselves, we start to accept and love others for being just the way they are.

I want everyone to have these skills, so people stop suffering so much. I want people to thrive because given the level of comfort we live in we should be. I want adults to have adult conversations with each other, that are rich, rewarding and vulnerable. I want adults to step into their leadership roles and be able to make tough decisions. I want children to have hope. I want children to be able to be children and have fun and play. I want humans to stop looking outside of themselves for answers, giving their power away to materialism and consumerism and realise they have the answers within. I want the planet to thrive. I want to deal with climate change. My desires are big but I think achievable.

What do you think?

The plight of the over-achiever

I coach many women who are high achievers. I consider myself a reformed over achiever, so it makes sense they connect with me. I have walked a similar path. Often what we find through coaching is that a lot of their excessive productivity, their overachieving, their excessive exercising, their busyness, is a response to trauma. A way of soothing their nervous system. I was reminded of this last week when a friend of mine ,who is a somatic experiencing therapist, put up a post about it. I thought hmm I have to write a blog post about this because I see it all the time. Hell I lived it for 30 years.

The thing that is most challenging about this disposition is that we live in a culture that values and promotes it. Productivity and On 24/7. Many organisational cultures are supported by capability models and values that reward behaviours such as team player, reliable, staying power - which is styled as resilience, focused and determined. Behaviours that simply reinforce this behaviour and often backed up by financial bonuses that reward it. Productivity is valued over rest and periods of quiet. We learn to push up against our window of tolerance in our nervous system and feel ok in a constant state of hyper-arousal. This often leads to burn out physically and in some cases some pretty ‘crazy’ behaviour. I put crazy in inverted commas because it is often perceived as crazy by others and may cause some distress, but is just a sign of a person not coping.

“So much that we do is not logical on the surface. Walking on beaches, growing flowers, lavishing attention on a dog. But it’s actually the very heart of what makes life work”

Steve Biddulph, Fully Human - a new way of using your mind

So where does this over-achieving drive come from? My husband and I met in one of the large global consulting firms and we always laughed and said the place was full of insecure over-achievers. It is true that that is the behavioural model of what they recruited. Often this comes from a strong need to please emanating from an individual’s inner child. From deeply unconscious feelings of unworthiness, or that they do not deserve what they are receiving in life and are constantly seeking to prove that they do. It often begins as a way to be noticed and rewarded by a parent, but over longer periods of time, becomes a way of coping, feeling loved and acquiring a sense of belonging. Stressed out over a conversation; sit at the desk and work. The part of ourselves that needs love, safety or belonging receives that by ‘doing’ stuff and ticking off boxes. The race against the clock to get stuff done.

So how do we stop this pattern? Well the first place is recognising that maybe you have it. I think for me in my twenties I used to work super hard for a couple of years and then take off for a few months and go travelling. Well you can only do this for so long. I got to the point where I realised that the way I worked was not sustainable and that I needed to take on less work, I found this challenging because I have “big shoulders’ and what I mean by that is I can carry a lot mentally and emotionally when it comes to load. I find this quality to be also there in my coaching clients. Also most over achievers are pretty smart, they can talk themselves in or out of most things in life. They talk themselves out of listening to their body, its calls for help whether it be pain for illness and learn to just push through.

For women, I think getting back to the natural rhythms of your menstrual cycle can be a huge help because for one week, give or take, every month, you have a period, it is a time of winter, a time to rest. It will not matter if you do not go to the gym much that week. Your body needs to rest and rejuvenate. I have found this form of relating to my body, beneficial on so many levels. In my experience taking this rest time every month is playing the longer game. It is looking after your energy levels long term. It gives your body recovery time. Acknowledging and accepting that the feminine body is a cyclical one and our energy levels go up and down and are meant to change is a huge step. Choosing to live this way in line with your natural rhythms is truly a blessing. If you no longer have periods you will probably find if you explore, that your energy levels line up with the cycles of the Moon. Check out when the full moon is around, you are often full of energy, when it is a new moon, it is time to rest.

Acknowledging that your energy is not there forever is very important. According to Taoist Tantric theory we are only born with a certain amount of energy - or Qi as the Taoists call it. We have to learn to nourish and replenish it. Mindfulness practices are great but they are not focused on the body. For women in particular, our body facilitates our growth through rites of passage, we are movement. Gentle body based practices that forge a mindful connection with the body are very beneficial. Such practices would include Qi Gong, a Jade Egg Practice, Sensual movement, restorative forms of Yoga, some aspects of Pilates.

Learning to listen to your body and really listen to what a YES and NO feels like inside of your is exceptionally important. It is important for boundaries and it is important for your health and wellbeing.

Ultimately it is also about exploring practices and choosing relationships that nourish and lift us up. Practices that allow the body to recover, so we shift out of that constant state of hyper-arousal, survival mode of fight and flight, and into a state of regulation. Relationships that foster this are vital. When you look at the circle of relationships in your life: immediate family, broader family, close friends, community friends, work friends, what are those that sustain and support you, that allow you to be in that place of nervous system regulation? Review your work culture; is it supportive of your longer term growth away from these survivalist patterns?

Choosing practices that stimulate your five sense and bring pleasure to your life, that bring you back to a place of awe and wonder at the beauty of the world, and to celebrate that you are alive, are incredibly nourishing and offer an incredible doorway to calibration of your system.

My personal tip, when I feel my ego kick in and I get in a frenzy to get something done, I just slow it down and take a rest or go for a walk. The drive for me now comes from creativity and I am a very creative person. So when it feels in flow I do it. When it feels tiring or like I am pushing through, I stop.

It is never to early to choose you. To say a big YES to you. Your pleasure belongs to you, never forget that.

Please pass this onto anyone you feel may benefit from reading this. Drop me a line if you you have any thoughts. I have 2 spots open for coaching . If you are interested, we can have a chat on a free clarity call to see if we are a fit to work together.

Pleasure as a pathway to step into your personal power

There is a saying out there that when a woman begins menstruation she enters into her power, in her menstruating years she practices her power, at menopause she becomes her power. It is a long journey, undoing years of cultural conditioning to reclaim and step into our power.

Many of us have become disconnected from our inherent power by living our lives in high summer mode all the time. That is, ON mode 24/7. Womens bodies are cyclical they are meant to have high times and quiet times, creative times and down times. What is valued in our society is production and achievement; it is at odds with the natural rhythms of a female body.

I look around me and I see many women my age who are exhausted and burned out and unwell. They are trying to work, look after young children and teenagers, some are looking after elderly parents. When I ask many women what they do for their self care practices they often look at me like I am speaking a foreign language. The common answer I hear is “I have no time for that’. If you have time for a glass of wine, you have time for pleasure practices, you only need 5 minutes each day. The question I ask them is “What is getting in the way of you giving yourself permission to pleasure?”

I know a lot of this is cultural conditioning. Women have been heavily conditioned to feel shame around their sexuality and sensuality. The word pleasure has become so coupled with sexuality and sensuality that just the mere mention of it evokes contraction in some peoples bodies. Pleasure can be sexual and sensual but it can also just be something that is pleasurable to us. It has become so coupled with those two words that it has disconnected us from our own bodies. It started thousands of years ago. I have been reading quite a bit lately around Aphrodite/Venus, the Goddess of Love. They are the same person. The Greeks called her Aphrodite as did many others and when the Romans came along they called her Venus.

The Roman Empire is known by some as the Empire without limits. In her book, Venus and Aphrodite, ‘History of a Goddess’, Bettany Hughes quotes the Roman writer Cicero. He states that the name Venus is derived from the Roman word Venire (which is the Italian verb for come). He says ‘Venus was so named by our countrymen as the goddess who ‘comes’ (venire) to all things; her name is not derived from the word Venustas (Latin word for beauty) but rather Venustas from it”. Venus is the goddess of love that is present in all things, that comes to all things, and beauty is derived from that presence of love in all things. It is from this, desire emanates. It makes sense really, don’t we all desire to feel loved. Don’t we want to experience it and see it in others? We all admire beauty when we see it, we desire what is beautiful to us.

The Goddess is simply an embodiment of an archetypal feminine energy that exists within all of us.

Jalaja Bonheim, Aphrodites Daughter.

In understanding these ancient texts, I’m beginning to understand where some of these negative connotations around desire, pleasure, womens bodies and sexuality come from. In the culture of no limits, those Romans in their pursuit of love, pleasure, beauty and desire, became a tad excessive in their life pursuits and it lead to many wars. They basically ruled the world at one point. A similar thing happened in the Renaissance and in the court of Louis XIV the Sun King. The pendulum swings hard sometimes when change is forged. From no limits to austerity. So a whole lot of coupling of concepts happened and before we know it, womens bodies are evil, pleasure is evil, desire is evil and leads to the downfall of empires.

Have you ever seen the painting the Birth of Venus in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence? For me it is one of the most mesmerising paintings around.

OK so back to us and current life. Pleasure is one of the best tools for self healing; it helps you reclaim your body and your life. Pleasure can start small with enjoying stimulating your 5 senses. Walking in nature, a soothing cup of tea. a gentle yin yoga practice. When it comes to sexual pleasure and healing we also start small with simple practices to bring awareness to and into your body. Using tools like breath, focus, intention, movement and sounding we create new pathways. Pleasure is healing because it creates new positive neural pathways in your nervous system. These pathways are reparative. When you build these pathways you develop a strong connection to your body and you are building and honing your capacity to listen to your body. You start to learn to like and love your body. You start to get comfortable in your own skin. You start to become more discerning about your choices of where to spend your time and attention. You learn to your honour your boundaries as your listening skills are enhanced.

The woman you knows her body, who is comfortable in her own skin, who is discerning in her choices, who honours her boundaries; she is powerful.

Mamagena has this great saying “The party starts with you’. Your healing, your growth, your sexuality, your radical self love, starts with you giving yourself permission to explore it. To shaking off that patriarchal conditioning that tells you you don’t deserve it and choosing yourself.

If you would like to bust off your patriarchal conditioning, come join me on my 6 week introductory program ReConnect. The enrolment closes tomorrow, May 11th. We start on the 12th. It’s slow and gentle paced because that is what nervous systems like. Come shake off some of that conditioning and learn some simple tools to pleasure so you can step into your personal power.

Pass this onto anyone you think might enjoy the read.

Maiden to Mother Transition

When a young girl goes through Menarche, she is asked to let go of her childish ways so as to accept her maturing as a menstruating woman. In many indigenous cultures she is welcomed through ceremony and accepted into a circle of adult women in her tribe. This has been largely forgotten in western culture. Menstruation is still shrouded in mystery, shame and secrecy. Cultural norms mean women have to hide what is a massive part of their life.

During pregnancy and childbirth a new mother is asked to let go of egoic behaviour that will prevent her from giving selflessly, gently and open heartedly to her new baby. She is forced to face her shadow or perceived negative attributes that she has buried deep underground. This requires us to get extremely vulnerable. It can be a long and painfull transition. Through this transition you birth your own Inner Mother.

It requires us to get familiar with all the different parts of us - those we like and those parts we don't. It takes a lot of conscious exertion of energy to keep those parts we don't like in our unconscious. This plays out in our conscious life. These are child parts of us that were not loved or acknowledged when we were children, so we fragmented them off into our unconscious to stay safe. To survive we adopted behaviours used as strategies to make our way in the world many of them focused at keeping us in control. When we can really embrace those dark parts and learn to love them we emerge from this transition more whole.

Finding these underworld parts asks something different of us. We cannot access our unconscious through our rational and logical part of our brain. We need to go into our primal and limbic parts of our brain to feel for them in our body. So this work requires us to learn to be in our body; to experience all of our emotions in a grounded way. When we learn to love and accept our dark parts we stop projecting them onto other women. We start to heal our sisterhood wounds which in turn, helps us naturally support other women. We can see and own the messy side of ourselves and not get sabotaged by it.

Why is this transition so important? When we don't accept our dark parts we project them onto others. When we can't be with our own emotions in a grounded way and learn to self-soothe, we cannot soothe the new baby in our arms who comes into this world with an unregulated nervous system. For the development of healthy attachment patterns with our babies, we have to co-regulate their nervous systems to help them learn and grow. We teach them slowly how to self soothe and provide that sense of safety in their nervous system through our attunement to them, when they cry from hunger, tiredness or needing a nappy change. Learning to feel safe to be vulnerable aids in our personal development because we start to ask questions and seek to understand what is going on. When we heal our sisterhood wounds we learn to support other women in community and be able to hold space for them. When we heal our sisterhood wounds we open the door for our sexual empowerment.

Our journey through rites of passage is different to that of men. Women go into a dark place, the underworld. The vulnerability they experience in their descent is challenging and in the stripping back of parts of themselves they don’t need anymore, they plant the seeds for their new expanded self to grow. It is like a tree that sparks from a seed and first it grows roots down in the dark of the earth so that when it grows taller and its branches spread wider, it has a good base to support its growth. Every time we go through a transition in life we go to this place, the time it takes to transition and the degree of transformation is different every time.

When many women go back to work after parental leave many feel quite disconnected because they know they have changed, yet very few workplaces acknowledge that change or provide transition support for them to go back. Often many women experience a huge degree of cognitive dissonance because of this; they have to pretend they don’t have children at work. It can be a very confusing time for many women, they cannot just turn off the mother part of themselves. Why should they?

There is so little support for women post partum to work on all of this. Most of the support is physical and maybe looking for signs of depression. When we support our mothers in society we foster a healthy community and society. Our children are our future.

Well good news. Dr Nic Pawley and I will be launching our online course next year to help you create your inner mother. This course will focus on the bio/psycho/social aspects of your personal development. You will learn embodied practices to develop a healthy grounded relationship with your emotions; you will learn about post-partum health from a TCM perspective; the changing rythms of womens sexuality throughout their life; how to work on your unconscious childhood patterning that may be holding you back and how to create your inner mother.

If you are interested let us know. If you know someone who may be interested forward this email onto them.