Sisterhood wounding: reclaiming desire, belonging and our essential self

Recently I have had three old friends who I haven’t seen since before the pandemic, get in contact with me to catch up. In a heart beat I said yes lets do it. The thing I love about many of my long term friendships is that ability to connect, drop back into conversation, despite the long time period apart, like it was only yesterday that we spoke.

It is a joy and privilege to have friendships like this where there is mutual support and understanding, the ability to be open and vulnerable with each other. They are not easy to come by though. There is so much power in women supporting each other and lifting each other up. Holding space for each other and just listening.

Recently I have seen some really abusive behaviour online, toward women putting themselves out there, whether it be clothing stylists, ladies with their grey hair and showing that it can be beautiful. Just awful criticism and commentary on their physique, looks, or ageing naturally. This is not a new observation for me. For many years when I worked in the corporate environment some of worst behaviour I saw was of women not supporting and promoting the women coming up behind them.

They had internalised patriarchy and it was being projected out to everyone around them. To be fair we are all guilty of doing this in some way, but many people have the self awareness to curb egregious behaviour, despite what they may be thinking in their head. For many women they turn this anger or sadness back inward upon themselves, with often pretty devastating consequences.

Why do we do this?

So many women carry an invisible wound that rarely gets named: the wound of sisterhood. It shows up as competition, comparison, envy, gossip, and distrust between women. It’s the quiet sting when we see another woman shine and feel “less than.” It’s the inner critic whispering that we don’t measure up. It’s the subtle withdrawal of support or the quick judgment we direct toward one another.

This isn’t who we truly are. This is the legacy of patriarchy. A system that has long thrived by keeping women divided, pitting us against one another, and convincing us that our value rests on beauty, youth, status, or approval from men. It has trained us to measure ourselves against impossible standards — and then to measure each other in the same way. It disconnects us from the beauty and wonder of our cyclical body and from our true essence, our core self.

But here’s the truth: when women disconnect from themselves, they also disconnect from each other. And in midlife especially, this wound gets stirred. The old roles and identities start to fall away, and what remains is a deep call to come home to our essential self — the part of us that is whole, wise, and not defined in comparison to anyone else.

The Loss of Desire and Will

Another layer of this wounding is the way many of us have been implicitly and explicitly taught that to want is selfish, sinful, or dangerous. In so many cultures, desire has been shamed or suppressed. Women were told that “goodness” meant self-sacrifice, silence, or service to others, not listening to their own desires.

It is our jealousy that helps us attune to what it is we desire. If we can learn to listen to this trigger, rather than projecting the discomfort of it outward and onto others it can be incredibly helpful in helping us to focus on what we are passionate about. It can give us a north star.

Desire is not something to fear — it is a compass. It reveals what we value, what gives us meaning, what brings purpose to our lives. Desire fuels our passions and directs our growth. In my work, I often see that boundaries and will are inseparable: to know your “yes” or “no,” you must first know what you want. Without honouring desire, boundaries collapse into either compliance or defence.

Reclaiming our desire — our right to want — is part of reclaiming our wholeness, and it’s essential to healing sisterhood wounding. Because when women own their desires, they no longer need to compete for scraps of permission; they stand in the fullness of their own direction.

Art - Jonas Peterson

Ageing and the Fear of Invisibility

Ageing brings another layer to this. Beneath the surface lies a primal fear — the fear of being neglected, forgotten, left behind. In a culture that idolises youth and treats women as disposable once they pass a certain age, this fear often runs very deeply. Our nervous systems equate invisibility with danger, with exile from the tribe. This is a very primal layer that is passed down from our ancestors and is often deeply unconscious for many women.

No wonder so many women feel pressured to cling to youth with Botox, fillers, hair dye, or endless self-critique. We are presented with impossible beauty standards, thank-you airbrushing, that no one can stand up to. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with choosing these things, the real question is: why do men get to age with dignity while women are told they must fight nature itself? This double standard isn’t just about appearance — it’s about belonging.

To heal this, we need to create spaces where ageing women are honoured, desired, and deeply seen. Where we can meet one another not through comparison or competition, but through shared humanity — and reclaim the beauty and wisdom of every life stage.

Triggers, Projection, and Creative Expression

Sisterhood wounding also shows up in the ways we judge one another’s choices. For example, if we find ourselves triggered by women who embrace makeup, fashion, beauty treatments, or polished appearances, it’s worth asking: what part of me is being touched here?

Often, these judgments are projections. If we grew up in families or cultures where vanity or adornment were shamed, we may have repressed that part of ourselves. When we then see another woman fully expressing it, our nervous system reacts: she’s doing something I wasn’t allowed to do. That discomfort often emerges as criticism. Or maybe or you saw growing up was lots of hair and makeup and their is a general fear of ageing and being left out. A lack of understanding of those who choose to go au natural and not wear any makeup, who love that they don’t dye their hair. It is so different it feels terrifying to us on the inside.

But makeup, clothes, hair, and nails can be more than masks — they can be forms of art, creativity, and play. Sometimes they’re chosen from fear of invisibility, and sometimes they’re chosen from joy and self-expression.

Both can be true at once.

The work is not to judge but to notice our own triggers. To ask:

• Am I judging her because she reflects a part of me I’ve disowned?

• Can I allow space for the many ways women express themselves?

• What does my own authentic expression long to be, if I gave it freedom?

When we soften judgment, we open the door to sisterhood. We create space for women to be whole — and wholeness always includes differences.

Coming Home to Ourselves and Each Other

Healing sisterhood wounding begins with this return to ourselves. By finding our inner ground, by reclaiming desire, and by honouring the truth that ageing does not diminish us but deepens us. When we recognise that another woman’s success does not diminish our own, that her beauty or wisdom is not a threat but an invitation, something shifts.

In any life stage we can heal this wound but Midlife, with all its shedding and awakening, is an opportunity to lay this wound down. To stop carrying what was never ours in the first place. To choose solidarity, support, and sisterhood as the ground we walk on.

Because the truth is this: when women rise together — in their desire, their wholeness, and their wisdom — everyone rises.

Co-regulation, sharing joy, awe and wonder

My husband and I go for a walk most days. It’s our rhythm — a way to move our bodies and catch up on the day. Yesterday, something unexpected caught our eye. Tucked along the top of a fence were a handful of tiny plastic ducks, placed as if they'd just wandered into the world on their own. There was no sign, no explanation. Just… ducks.

We both smiled, paused, and shared that kind of gentle, wide-eyed delight you get when something small pierces through the ordinary — wonder, joy, amusement. We giggled and wondered who might have placed them there. There are several schools in the area and we thought maybe one of the high school students. We wondered, is it art? Is it a puzzle? Or, did someone do it just for their own delight? And as we walked on, I noticed: I felt better. Not just because of the ducks, but because of how we felt together.

You see, you could have easily missed these tiny ducks they were as big as an Australian 5 cent coin. If you were caught in your head thinking about some problem, or looking elsewhere, looking at your phone, you would never have seen them. I will admit my husband saw them first, I was looking at some trees wondering when winter will end and when might the leaves start to arrive. As we started looking together, we saw 8 little ducks along two streets over an 800 metre stretch.

That moment we experienced together was co-regulation.

Co-regulation is more than a feel-good moment — it’s a biological necessity. Our nervous systems are constantly scanning the environment and people around us for cues of safety or threat (neuroception). When we feel safe with someone, our ventral vagal system activates — this is the branch of the parasympathetic nervous system responsible for connection, calm, and social engagement.

Co-regulation is the process by which our nervous systems connect and attune to one another, helping each other return to a state of balance, calm, or connection; especially after stress or activation. It’s something we are wired for, from birth. In infancy, we rely on caregivers to regulate our nervous system through touch, voice, gaze, and presence. As adults, we continue to rely on co-regulation in our relationships, though we often forget just how powerful it is.

At its heart, co-regulation is:

• Relational regulation: one person’s regulated state helping another feel safe, grounded, or more connected.

• Non-verbal: eye contact, tone, facial expression, body language, even silence can co-regulate.

• Mutual: it’s not about fixing, it’s about being with.

• Built on safety: when we feel safe with someone, our nervous system can soften and settle.

Co-regulation matters to the nervous system because it is foundational to nervous system health supporting vagal tone, heart rate variability and overall resilience. It supports our emotional well-being because when we share these tiny moments of joy, we feel less alone and more supported, seen and understood. It fosters trust and attunement, between partners, within families, friendships and teams, Co-regulation is supportive of trauma healing. Remember Trauma occurs when we experience too much, too fast, too soon or too little for too long. Healing happens in safe relationships when we can go slowly together. It is fair to say that without co-regulation our nervous system could end up in a constant state of vigilance or shutdown. With co-regulation we slow down, we are more present and we expand our capacity to feel joy, grief, pleasure and connection.

How do we find these moments for co-regulation?

Well every day offers us opportunities of ‘moments of tiny joys’.

We often think co-regulation has to be deep, profound or emotional. It can be, and, it can also be simple and playful too. What matters is the shared presence and the ability to attune to each others experience.

When I was going through cancer treatment five years ago, I decided I wanted to practice orienting to pleasure and what feels good to support my nervous system. You see I knew that small moments of pleasure are very healing for the nervous system. So I used to go for a small walk twice a day. This was during the pandemic, so often I would see my neighbours and we would stop and chat from a small distance; remember we had to social distance, and my immune system was smashed from chemotherapy, so I really had to mind how close I got to people. But what I really attuned to was admiring people’s gardens and the plants and flowers. You see I love gardens. My husband and I really looked forward to these small walks because they helped both of us in our own way and we could appreciate the moments of tiny joy in what was a really tough time for us.

““Being awestruck dwarfs us, humbles us, makes us aware we are part of a universe unfathomably larger than ourselves… Wonder makes us stop and ask questions about the world… whether spectacular or mundane.””

— Phospherescence - Julia Baird

What are some practice ideas for you to find little moments of co-regulation with another person?

Walking rituals: Regular, low-stress time in movement and nature together.

Noticing beauty: Make it a shared game to find one “small wonder” each day — something delightful, surprising, or tender.

Name the moment: Saying aloud, “That’s so sweet!” or “That made me smile” helps anchor the moment and co-regulate more deeply.

Touch points: Eye contact, a hand squeeze, a shared laugh — they reinforce safety in subtle, nervous-system-friendly ways.

You can build a micro-ritual around this — one that supports connection even during stress or busyness.

So here is your invitation to think about what brings you shared delight, awe and wonder?

What are the small and unexpected things that bring you joy?

When was the last time you felt a quiet togetherness in a moment of delight?

Is there someone you could begin a small ritual of ‘tiny moments of joy’ with?

Remember, co-regulation doesn’t require words, big feelings or problem solving. It begins with another.

Grief at Midlife: Letting go of you who you thought you had to be

There comes a quiet moment in midlife—a reckoning, a soft ache that sits beneath the surface of busy lives. It's not always dramatic. Sometimes it arrives like a sigh you didn’t know you were holding. But when it comes, it brings with it a flood of emotion: grief, sadness, even anger. And for many, it’s disorienting.

It is disorienting because many of these emotions get couple and mixed up together so it can feel really overwhelming when we are triggered.

This midlife grief we often feel doesn’t always have a name. It isn’t always tied to a death, a divorce, or a specific loss. It’s the grief of a life lived in service to someone else’s expectations. A life shaped by what your parents hoped for you, what culture told you success should look like, or what you thought you should want.

In your twenties, you made plans. You built dreams based on a vision of the world that was handed to you. You worked hard, ticked boxes, created a life. And maybe from the outside, it looked like you “made it.” But at some point—often in your forties or fifties—you wake up and feel the soul knocking.

And it doesn’t always knock gently.

Sometimes it arrives as a sudden wave of sadness or emptiness that you can’t explain. Other times it shows up as restlessness, irritability, or a low-grade resentment toward your life or those closest to you. It might look like a deep craving for freedom—a need to break out of your current life structure—which can get projected outward in dramatic ways: affairs, spontaneous spending, quitting jobs impulsively, or fantasising about starting over somewhere far away.

You might feel like you’re coming undone. But what’s really happening is that something deeper is trying to come through.

This is the soul’s call. It’s asking you to return to the essence of who you are beneath the roles, the responsibilities, and the expectations. Come back to the truth of who you are and it is asking you, what wants to be expressed through you.

And with that call comes a kind of heartbreak.

Heartbreak that you didn’t listen to the whisper of your own longings when you were younger. Heartbreak that you silenced your true self to belong, to be responsible, to be good. There’s sadness for the years that were spent climbing a ladder that wasn’t even leaning against the right wall. Or maybe you got close to the top of the ladder and realised there is nothing there for you , it’s not the place you want to be. There’s grief for all the parts of you that went underground just to survive.

Sometimes, that grief turns to anger. Anger that no one taught you to trust your inner voice. Anger that you betrayed yourself to meet others’ expectations. And sometimes, it turns inward—an ache of self-blame, of “Why didn’t I know better?”

But here’s the truth: you couldn’t have known better. The conditions weren’t there. You did what you needed to do with the tools you had. And now, something new is emerging.

Midlife is not just a crisis. It’s a rite of passage.

It’s a threshold between who you have been and who you are becoming. And every threshold requires a letting go. This is why grief walks alongside transformation—it clears the ground. It softens us. It prepares us to live a life that is more aligned, more honest, and more intimate with our soul.

This grief is not something to fix or rush through. It’s something to be honoured. It’s sacred.

Because on the other side of it is a new kind of freedom. The freedom to stop performing. To stop striving. To live in deeper integrity. To choose from the inside out.

In this second half of life, something quieter but more enduring begins to take root: a life built on your truth; not the one you inherited, but the one you are here to live. Your are free to be the most authentic expression of yourself and it takes time to grow into those shoes because you have been avoiding those shoes for a while to stay safe, to survive, to get the love your old self wanted.

Grief is the crucible that will allow you to transform into your true self, to let go of all the masks you have had on for many years. One of the hardest things to do is to learn to feel the grief in your body and let it express because so many of us have cut ourselves off from our grief. We are terrified if we lay down and let it flow we may never get up again.

You see this is not just an exercise in thinking about our emotions; it is somatic. You have to learn to feel safe to feel the grief in your body so that it will flow and sometimes you might need some help to do this.

Grief is your friend.

The tears of our grief are the fluid that helps us keep on learning, growing and changing.

When we make space for grief, we are not falling apart—we are making room. Room for new life. Room for truth. Room for becoming.

Because on the other side of grief is a new kind of freedom. The freedom to stop performing. To stop striving. To live in deeper integrity. To choose from the inside out.

The freedom to be your true self.

Healing our abandonment wounds

Many of us have abandonment wounds. They are deeply imprinted in the nervous system, often at a very young age. When our early emotional needs weren’t met—when we lacked attunement, presence, or consistent caregiving—an abandonment wound can take root deep within us.

There are many reasons this happens, sometimes it is a really stressed or depressed parent, a parent who is extremely unwell themselves, and unable to connect and attune to us. Sometimes it is circumstance. I have worked with many people who were premature babies who spent their first few weeks in a humidity crib, so didn’t get the touch from their parents in those first few weeks to soothe their tiny nervous system. Even though one of their parents were most likely there with them all the time, sitting by them, they were separated by a little wall.

This is how deeply wired we are for connection and co-regulation when we are tiny. Our nervous system learns through regulation from our parents and caregivers.

Abandonment wounds are not always obvious. Sometimes they show up not as a gaping wound, but as a subtle hum of anxiety in our relationships. A feeling of being "too much" or "not enough." A belief that love must be earned, not received freely.

To avoid the unbearable terror of disconnection, many of us learned to fawn. We became hyper-attuned to the emotional landscape of others. We learned to appease, to over-function, to say yes when we meant no. We self-abandoned in hopes of staying connected.

Fawning is a survival strategy. It’s what our nervous system chose when fight, flight, or freeze didn’t feel safe or available. While it helped us survive, it often keeps us from truly living—because it asks us to leave ourselves behind.

Healing the abandonment wound isn’t about blaming our caregivers—it’s about reclaiming the parts of us that learned love meant losing ourselves.

Attunement is largely body based; eye contact, mirroring through action and language and most importantly, we attune through touch. These are all essential in establishing secure attachment. When these components are missing our nervous system learns to perceive that we will be left on our own.

Art - Giulia Rosa

For female nervous systems, which are more finely tuned to social engagement because we have lots of estrogen, which creates oxytocin, wiring us for connection and bonding - this perceived abandonment can often be felt more intensely. So we fawn to establish connection.

When we fawn, when we please, appease, over-function, we abandon our own needs. We stop asking for what we want, because we know our needs won’t be met. We hyper-attune or hyper-socialise to stay connected and receive the sense of love, safety and belonging that we all need at a very foundational level just so we can function.

Healing self abandonment begins when we learn not to abandon our selves. When we learn to feel our big sensations and emotions and stay in our body, expanding capacity inside of us to be with what what life throws our way. When we learn to self-soothe and have our little strategies to come back to our zone of resilience. This establishes a sense of safety and trust within ourselves and then we learn to trust others.

It starts with learning how to stay with ourselves. To feel what we couldn’t feel then. To expand our capacity to be with emotion and sensation—including the terror that once overwhelmed our small bodies.

Very slowly, as we learn to stay, something beautiful happens; we begin to trust that we will no longer abandon ourselves and that safety, the safety of self-attunement, becomes the foundation for all our relationships.

Why the feminine is the change maker - part 2

Last week I started this conversation about why the feminine energy in our culture tends to be the instigator of change. I know this is not always true but I do find that many women whether by choice or force of life events, tend to explore themselves deeply and the fact that we have this deep inner knowing which I talked about in last week’s blog which means we tend to read the ‘tea leaves’ and know when it’s time for change.

Anecdotally, when I think about all the training and professional development I have done over the years, there has always been a much higher percentage of female participants than male participants and so we notice this and we talk about it. You could complain about it and say men don’t do the hard work, but I don’t think this is entirely true because I have lots of male clients and friends who have committed to exploring themselves, but to be honest it is usually after something going really wrong in their lives. Maybe it is that it is women who are the instigators of change in relationships, in families, in cultures. Many studies of couples on relationships and marriages consistently show that around 70% of divorces are instigated by women.

There are many ways we can explore why this happens and I always love taking a Jungian lens on what is actually happening because it always explores the shadow side of everything which I find super interesting. If we look through a Jungian lens, It is always the masculine within the feminine that changes first. In Jungian parlance, the animus (the inner masculine in a woman) seeks direction, clarity, and forward motion. When a woman begins her transformation (say, through grief, menopause, creativity, or awakening), it’s often her inner masculine that reorients first, perhaps by finding new values, boundaries, or purpose. Once that internal alignment shifts, her outer relationships must also adjust. How I notice this in clients is they cannot pretend to be anything other than their authentic selves anymore and this often causes friction in different relationships in their lives as this authentic self in them is emerging. Things can be a bit wobbly for a while as she finds comfort with meeting these new parts of self.

And yes, often this catalyses change in the masculine partner or in the wider system. But not always right away. Sometimes the feminine awakens and moves first, and the masculine (whether internal or external) resists or lags—until it feels safe or necessary to catch up. That friction can either break the container or refine it.

Digital image - Womb in the Sky, Kellie Stirling

Why does the feminine change first?

In the simplest form, we are the ones who can create life and give birth to that. Even beyond biological birth, the feminine is the archetypal womb—the container that holds, gestates, dissolves, and re-emerges. This role isn’t limited to women, but in most systems, it is the feminine energy that initiates the deep work: the descent, the death, the regeneration. Women, especially at midlife, often step into this initiatory role on behalf of their families, partnerships, and communities.

It’s like we become the crucible in which the old dies and the new is born. Let’s look at it from a few different perspectives:

• Biologically: Our hormonal cycles force us into regular encounters with change. Life transitions like menstruation, pregnancy, birth, perimenopause, and menopause demand transformation. For example, every month when we have menstrual cycles, we are moving through a cycle of change, a cycle of birth, death, rebirth metaphorically speaking that is experienced in an embodied way with our menstrual cycles.

• Emotionally: The feminine is finely attuned to relational field dynamics because we have lots of estrogen which helps creates oxytocin. Our nervous system is regulated by oxytocin which acts as a neuro-modulator. Neuro-modulators fine tune and shape how our nervous system reacts to stimuli over time. So we become more relationally attuned and attuned to social safety. We feel what’s missing, what’s breaking down, or what wants to emerge sooner. So oxytocin plays an enormous role in regulating arousal, stress responses and healing.

• Spiritual/Archetypal: The feminine holds the wisdom of the underworld. We know how to descend and return with insight. That’s where true alchemy happens.

So when it comes to relationships, often, when a woman begins to change, it upsets the systemic homeostasis of the relationship. If she holds the relational field (as is often the case), any shift she makes is deeply felt by the other. This can either provoke resistance or invite the partner to evolve too. Sometimes both. In this sense, women often become the alchemical fire that either transforms or reveals what’s no longer sustainable.

Why the feminine are the change makers - part 1

I have been doing a bit of work with a biodynamic cranio osteopath on my pelvis. I have had pelvic issues for years, predominantly starting with a car accident as a kid, and things just go layered upon it. I have worked with different body workers over the years and I have to say it is in a pretty good state now. If you aren’t familiar with this modality it is a lot of neuro-affective touch work, and the body in all its wisdom and intelligence, reorganises, because it knows how to heal. It is very similar to the touch work we do sometimes in somatic experiencing.

My osteopath and I have big chats when I am on the table. Last session she asked me “do you think it is trauma that causes all the autoimmune issues in women”. (if you don’t know the stats, something like 80% of autoimmune condition sufferers are female bodies). I said sometimes, but I think it is because as women we carry so much of the relational field and after a while that takes an enormous toll on a woman’s body if there is not enough sharing of the load going on in the family system or she does not have a good circle of support around her. After a period of time the body screams whether it be relational rupture, physical pain or discomfort, illness. It tells us, things need to change now!

So let’s talk about that because there is a price we pay for holding the relational field.

Why do we hold the relational field and how does it prime us to lead change?

Well some of it is biological, some is cultural and some is archetypal.

Biologically and neurologically we are wired for connection. Our estrogen creates the oxytocin that drives us to connect and attune to our children.

Women’s bodies are literally designed to attune:

• Oxytocin, the bonding hormone, is more prevalent in women. It surges during intimacy, birth, breastfeeding—but also during conversation and emotional connection.

• Our mirror neuron systems, which help us sense and empathise with others' emotions, tend to be more active.

• From a nervous system lens, many women are socialised (and biologically primed) to track relational dynamics, often before we even understand we’re doing it.

The social conditioning is strong. From a young age, girls are typically taught to; caretake others’ feelings, keep the peace, maintain connection and be “good,” agreeable, relationally aware. We are socialised to value harmony over truth.

On a deeper level, the feminine principle (not just in women, but especially expressed through them) is associated with; holding, containing, gestating, weaving the web between things

So the relational field—that unseen space between people where emotion, meaning, energy, and nervous system cues travel—is often carried by the feminine. Not because it’s our duty, but because we feel it first, and most acutely.

Women tend to track what's happening in the in-between. This might look like noticing when something feels “off” even if nothing is said, adjusting ourselves to keep harmony, carrying the emotional labour of a relationship or family.

While this conditioning can be limiting, it also hones an early sensitivity to emotional tone, unspoken tensions, and disconnection. We’re trained, often unconsciously, to sense and hold the relational space around us. My neighbour always said to me, ‘if mum is okay the whole family functions well. If she is not the cracks start to occur’. We are the emotional anchor in the family system.

From a more archetypal or somatic-mystic view, the womb is not just a biological organ but a relational centre; a place where life is created, held, and nourished. Even for women who do not have a physical womb, the energetic imprint always remains. The womb and ovaries have a incredibly strong energetic imprint, so even if you have an hysterectomy, the energetic imprint never leaves you.

This womb-space can sense the field like a tuning fork. It picks up resonance and dissonance, and often prompts us to move toward repair, connection, or withdrawal. So even beyond personality, trauma history, or conditioning—there is an embodied deep knowing that many women carry. A sense of what’s happening in the space between.

The big challenge.

Many women hold the relational field at the expense of themselves.

We track everyone else’s nervous systems, needs, moods—and forget our own. We become hyper-attuned, hyper-responsible, and depleted. This is where somatic reclamation, reconnecting with our body, becomes essential. Learning the skills to come back to your body so you can hear it when it is speaking to you. We learn to track ourselves first, then engage from a resourced place. This is what transforms holding the relational field from a burden into a gift.

It is this gift, that tells us when change is needed.

Women don’t hold the relational field because we ‘should’, we hold it because we are tuned to life, to connection, to what moves between. To coherence in the field, to what is working well and what is not working well.

Midlife, when the cost and payment becomes due.

In midlife, the body begins to speak more loudly. Years of holding the field—of tracking, softening, absorbing—can begin to show up as: chronic fatigue, autoimmune conditions, thyroid dysfunction, mystery symptoms, emotional exhaustion and uproar or a sense of grief no one can name.

Many women reach a point where their bodies refuse to keep playing the role. Where the cost of emotional labor has accumulated and the body keeps the score. Not because we are broken. But because we are done.

I often wonder if all of these health issues in midlife or the tough perimenopause journey experienced by some midlife women are the body’s way of saying:

“You’ve spent a lifetime turning against yourself to preserve connection. Now I’m turning inward to get your attention.”

It’s not our fault. But it is our invitation—to begin again, from the inside out

But we’re also being called now to hold it differently; not by abandoning ourselves, but by anchoring into our bodies, our knowing, our rhythm.

That is where true healing begins, not just for us, but for the whole field we’re in.

The healing path isn’t about abandoning our relational gifts. It’s about reclaiming ourselves as part of the field we’re so attuned to.

It’s about learning to: track our own nervous systems first, let others hold space for us, to feel safe saying no, set boundaries without guilt and recognising that we are not here to carry it all alone

This is where deep nervous system healing and somatic work become essential. They help us untangle the pattern of self-abandonment woven into our care.

We were never meant to carry it all.

We are capable of holding so much but we were not meant to hold all of the emotional dysregulation of others, all of the unspoken weight of a relationship. Nor were we meant to hold all of the relational field of a family, the workplace, the world - at the cost and detriment of our own health.

This is a huge price to pay and our midlife transition is the initiation into change we need to let some or all of it go. When this initiation happens it causes change in all the relational fields we are in.

So if you are finding ourself, exhausted or unravelling at midlife, you are not failing, your are awakening. Your body is asking you to step out of the role of ‘holding all the relational energy’ return to yourself.

I work with women who are ready to listen to what their bodies are saying, to come home to their own rhythm, needs, and truth.

Part 2, coming next week…..

The Siren, the Queen Bee and the Journey back to Self

It was my birthday last week, I had a really great week. As I move further into my fifties I have to say I love this time in life so much. I remember one of my coach colleagues, who is ten years older than me, saying to me about 5 years ago, “Oh the fifties are the best”. I have to say that so far, I whole heartedly agree. There is something really great about not having your life run by estrogen and knowing yourself so well - and being more than happy to explore the deep and dark places when they come up. It is liberating. This is the thing about midlife, we talk about it being empowering and it definitely is. But it is more than that. It is liberation. It is not reinvention but remembering.

Midlife is the moment we stop performing. We descent, we grieve. And, we rise knowing who we are.

Over the weekend, I watched the Netflix series Sirens. I went in expecting dark comedy and fantasy. It was all that but there was also a lot of the cultural underbelly on display. And yes, there were nods to the mythical Sirens—those seductive, powerful figures feared for luring men to their doom—and to Persephone, who descends to the underworld and rises as Queen.

But what stayed with me was something more subtle. More familiar.

The story centred around women who contort themselves—twist their truth, their instincts, their bodies, their very being—to belong. And what shook me was how often I see this in the real world, especially in the women I work with. I see it on social media all the the time. I find it bizarre that there is a whole fashion trend of people dressing in a way that makes them look wealthy. The whole anti-ageing story crafted by the skincare industry; it is really insane. Why does a 65 year old woman have to have skin the looks like a 25 year old’s?

After watching, I turned to my husband and said something about how heartbreaking it was, but also how powerful it is to have a television show that cleverly shows us the mirror on the collective unconscious. He looked at me and said, “This is your work. You help people come back to their authentic selves, their essence.”

He was right.

So many of the people I work with—especially women in midlife—come to me having spent years (even decades) twisting themselves into shapes they were told would bring them love, safety, or acceptance. They’ve played the roles: the good daughter, the accommodating partner, the high-achieving professional, the one who keeps the peace. But beneath all that performance is often a profound grief: the grief of self-abandonment.

That shows up in many different ways, it can be anger, deep sadness and grief, and also a deep searching for something different or more.

Mythology offers us maps for these kinds of journeys. The Siren is often seen as dangerous, but perhaps she’s just a woman who refused to stay quiet. And Persephone? She was taken underground, but she didn’t just return—she rose transformed, a ruler in her own right. Stripped of her ego and connected to her core self.

There’s another layer to the story that cut even deeper. One of the central characters—the so-called “queen bee”—is replaced. (sorry for the spoiler if you haven’t watched it yet) She’s ousted by a younger, much less confident version of herself. At first, we’re led to believe, the Queen Bee is the villain; she was behaving pretty badly. Then we think the younger replacement maybe is, but we soon see the truth. It was her billionaire ex-husband, who represents the culture of patriarchy, who had the real power all along. A cultural narrative, that builds women up, shapes them to a particular taste, then discards them when it gets bored or their behaviour no longer suits.

And what struck me most is this:
She had contorted herself to make him/them happy.
She had shaped her power around what he wanted, not what was true for her.

I see this in so many women in midlife. They realise, often with some pain, that the power they thought was theirs… wasn’t. It was bestowed—by a relationship, a career, a title, a system. It could be taken away. And often, it is. They don’t know who they are without it.

That’s the heartbreak. But it’s also the turning point.

Because when a woman realises she’s been performing power rather than embodying it, she can begin a different journey. One that doesn’t require contortion. One that descends into grief, yes—but also into truth. Into agency. Into the kind of power that can’t be stripped away. She becomes authoring and starts to write her own story.

These stories speak to the deeper truth: that reclaiming your voice, your instincts, your knowing, often requires going into the underworld of your own psyche. It means feeling the grief of the parts you've left behind. It means listening to the song of the Siren—not the one the world fears, but the one that sings from within your own bones.

This is the kind of healing work I guide people through. It’s somatic. It’s slow. It’s deep. We listen to the body, not just the mind. We notice the nervous system patterns shaped by a lifetime of contorting. And over time, a different kind of belonging emerges—one that doesn’t require performance, one that comes from being rooted in your own truth.

The journey isn't linear. Like Persephone, we may descend many times in our lives. But each time, we bring back more of ourselves. And eventually, we stop contorting to fit the world—and start shaping a world that fits us.

It’s not about becoming someone new. It’s about remembering who you are when you stop performing. When you stop shaping yourself around what others want and start listening to your own body, your own knowing, your own nervous system.

If you're in that moment of reckoning…
If you're realising the version of power you held was conditional…
If you’re longing to come back to the essence of who you are—
I’d love to walk with you.

If this resonates with you—if you feel like you’ve been contorting for too long, or if you’re longing to find your way back to your own voice and centre—I’d love to support you. I offer one-on-one coaching and somatic work for women navigating life transitions, grief, and the reclamation of self. You can learn more about working with me or reach out to talk about coaching.

Your real power is not out there.
It’s in you.
And it’s waiting to be reclaimed.

Your journey home to yourself is sacred. You don’t have to do it alone.

The anatomy of life transitions

Transitions are not problems to fix, they are patterns to Inhabit

We often think of change as linear but it is not at all, it is often a spiral, or a network of spirals. Life transitions are the unspoken pulses that shape our lives. Like the changing of seasons, they are natural and inevitable but they often catch us off guard, pulling us into the unknown. Whether it's the end of a relationship, a career shift, menopause or a profound personal awakening, transitions are both a death and a birth — a letting go and a stepping forward.

When big change happens in our life we are taught to treat change like an emergency. Something is really wrong with us. We search for clarity, next steps, and solutions as if something has gone wrong.

But what if transition isn’t something to fix?

What if it’s a pattern to inhabit?

I’ve come to see life transitions not as interruptions to life, but as part of its underlying design. The common model of life transitions is ending, the liminal space in between and then emergence or new beginnings. Whilst I think this is true to an extent, I believe its actually a bit more complex than that. The metaphor that captures this most powerfully for me is the torus: a self-renewing, spiralling field found everywhere in nature—from galaxies to trees, to the electromagnetic field of the human heart.

The Toroidal Field: A Natural Pattern of Change

A torus is a continuous, dynamic flow. It is not linear. It is not chaotic. It is regenerative. If you can’t picture it in your head it is a donut shaped field where energy moves up the middle and around the edges to the bottom and back up again. The heart has a toroidal field. The earth is a toroidal field.

Image source here

In nature, we see it in the vortex of a storm, the flow of sap in trees, the shape of magnetic fields, the inhale and exhale of breath. In us, it shows up in the rhythm of emotions, healing, grief, growth, and yes—transitions.

The torus reminds us that everything alive follows a rhythm of emergence, dissolution, and return. This rhythm can help us reframe how we experience life changes: not as problems to solve, but as intelligent patterns we are invited to move with.

The Four Phases of Transition (Through the Lens of the Torus)

Transitions often unfold in four phases, which mirror the toroidal flow:

1. The Known Self (Center)

This is the phase of structure and identity. You know who you are, what your roles are, and how the world responds to you. There is stability, predictability, and sometimes stagnation.

2. The Stretch (Expansion)

Something begins to shift. A role no longer fits, perimenopause starts, a relationship starts to change, a loss arrives, or a new longing awakens. You begin to spiral outward, away from the known. This phase can bring both fear and discomfort one minute and exhilaration and joy the next. It often triggers urgency—we want to know what’s next. We feel thrown off our centre - which we literally are because we are moving to the edges of the torus shape.

This is the start of what feels like a wild ride, it begins to get tough but this is a necessary unwinding.

Resistance often comes up here. Whilst this is to be expected, our nervous system feels very uncomfortable often at this point, it is bound to constrict and pull in with fear or anger as a defensive strategy if we have no context to make sense of what is happening. Or maybe we collapse into sadness and grief. This is the time to ask for help or support.

3. The Void (Outer Edge)

The old story has fallen away, but the new one hasn’t formed yet. This is the liminal phase—a sacred pause. It can feel like floating in the dark, ungrounded. We can feel like we have completely lost our connection with our north star or our rudder is missing. This is where many people feel most lost, because the inner compass that once guided them is no longer available. It can feel like being on a road less travelled—or in some cases, a road never travelled before.

This inner void is like a composting process. What no longer serves begins to break down and dissolve. Old identities, beliefs, or stories decompose in the darkness. And just like on a forest floor, that breakdown nourishes the ground of becoming. It's slow, it's unseen, and it's absolutely essential. Composting isn’t glamorous—it’s earthy, rich, and full of alchemy. Nothing is wasted here.

This space is deeply fertile. This is where integration, rest, and surrender happen. The soil of transformation is richest here. This is the time we often need the most support, to hold space for us through the via negativa, the road of letting go. This can also be the hardest because most of us have never experienced what it feels like to let go, we are afraid we may never get up if we do completely let go.

Again at this point more resistance can come up.

When we resist, it adds turbulence to the natural movement of the spiral out, and that can create loops of stagnation, denial and reactivity which shows up somatically in our bodies as tiredness, fatigue, over-activation, as our system tries to hold onto what is known but dissolving, or alternatively rush hard into what is emerging without allowing time to fully metabolise the middle.

4. The Return (Integration)

Eventually, something new takes shape. Not as a quick fix, but as a deeper coherence. You begin spiralling back inward, bringing with you what you’ve learned. You emerge changed. Not a return to the old self, but a return to your centre—wiser, more whole.

I always say to my midlife clients, the developmental challenge of midlife is to be radically honest with ourselves. So that means there is a lot of busting up belief systems, reconnecting with parts of ourselves we have pushed into our unconscious. It is time to do your healing work and come back to that very core essence of who you are. Let go of all the ego strategies that have got you here that don’t serve you well anymore in your adult life. Come back to the real you. You can see that by using the metaphor of the Torus, the core isn’t just a psychological concept, it is also physically coming back to your core.

I see this also in somatic experiencing because the toroidal field shows a natural expression of our vitality and coherence. What I learned form Brigit Viksnins, who is a pretty fabulous trauma resolution teacher is this. The core in the toroidal field is our life force, our true selves, our inner sovereignty. This supports boundaries, presence and our capacity to be with our own emotions and the emotions of others. It sets our blueprint of health. Trauma disrupts the flow of energy, we fragment, collapse in, leak outward, get disorganised, freeze and get stuck outside of our true centre. Our trauma leaves an imprint that can make it hard for us to get back to our centre.

These four phases are not steps to rush through. They are invitations to inhabit. They are cyclical, often overlapping. You may revisit them again and again in any given transition.

Inhabiting the Pattern

Most of us are conditioned to resist the stretch and rush through the void. But when we orient to transitions as toroidal patterns, we allow ourselves to stay in the flow of life itself.

In somatic work, I see how the body holds these transitions intimately: the contraction of loss, the expansion of grief, the trembling spaciousness of the void, the grounded return of integration. Nature doesn’t rush its seasons—why should we?

Whether it’s menopause, a relationship ending, a career shift, or a spiritual awakening, each transition carries the same energetic intelligence. We are being stretched, softened, and re-shaped. And the more we honour the pattern, the more we can inhabit the change with greater ease.

A New Orientation

If you’re in the middle of the stretch, or sitting in the void, you are not broken. You are in motion. You are in the field. The torus is holding you.

Transitions are not detours.

They are invitations into deeper coherence.

So the next time change arrives, try asking not "How do I fix this?" but instead:

"Where am I in the pattern?"

And then, with grace, let yourself inhabit the unfolding.

Reflection Questions for you

• Where in your life are you being stretched or dissolved?

• Can you name the phase of the transition you are in?

• What might shift if you trusted this phase as intelligent, necessary, and even sacred?

The energetics of betrayal

Betrayal is one of the deepest wounds a human can carry — not just because of what happened, but because of the energetic imprint it leaves behind.

When betrayal comes early, it doesn't just teach the mind something — it teaches the body, the heart, and the nervous system. When the betrayal has come from our caregivers the very people who were supposed to love us, keep us safe, and foster our sense of belonging in the world, it teaches that connection isn’t safe, that trusting others is dangerous and that perhaps maybe, trusting myself is dangerous.

The very parts of us that long for closeness are forced to adapt. They learn to duck, weave, armour up, or disappear. They do whatever it takes to avoid feeling that devastating rupture again.

The Energetic Imprint of Early Betrayal

Betrayal creates a deep rupture in the fabric of trust and it doesn’t go away. For many people, the pain of betrayal doesn’t start in adult relationships. It begins much earlier, in the formative years of childhood or adolescence, when someone they relied on — a parent, caregiver, or close friend — didn’t show up in a way that felt safe or consistent.

When betrayal happens early, it etches a kind of template into the nervous system. One that says: “People can’t be trusted.” Or “I have to protect myself because no one else will.” These imprints often live just beneath the surface subtly shaping how we engage, withdraw, or defend ourselves in relationships.

In human terms, that energetic scar can show up as:

• Hypervigilance, constantly scanning for signs of disloyalty or danger.

• Emotional ducking and weaving , avoiding directness for fear of being hurt.

• Self-sabotage, abandoning ourselves or others before they can abandon us.

• Self-betrayal , silencing our needs and instincts in an effort to stay “safe.”

• Avoidance of connection, having relationships that are light or transactional to avoid getting hurt.

• Constant fawning an over-functioning to stay safe within relationships, over attaching, ignoring our own boundaries to avoid further harm.

At a body level, betrayal activates the primal fear of annihilation: "If the people I'm attached to hurt or abandon me, I might not survive." Many people with this wound feel misunderstood and lonely in relationships.

Early friendships and our first lessons in trust

While early caregiver betrayal leaves a profound mark, it's important to recognise that peer relationships — especially in late childhood and early adolescence — can also create powerful energetic imprints.

Many years ago, I was at a Trauma conference lead by Bessel van der Kolk. We were talking about how tween years developmentally, are important when it comes to relationships because they are the first experience we have with betrayal. He explained that the 9–12 year-old stage for kids and girls in particular, is a crucial time for learning about trust, loyalty, honesty, and boundaries. During this time, friendships often become intense and emotionally charged. Young people are testing the waters of emotional intimacy, authority, and social belonging outside of their families for the first time.

He said, ‘12 year old girls are the meanest people on the planet’, we all giggled because we could all relate at some level. This is not because they are inherently cruel, but because they are instinctively testing how far loyalty stretches, what betrayal feels like, and where their own boundaries begin and end.

These early friendship betrayals — being excluded, gossiped about, shamed, or losing a "best friend", can leave scars just as deep as familial betrayals. You may be thinking is there any way we can prevent this? Developmentally, these early close friendships give tweens practice for navigating their first intimate relationships in their teenage years. What is important as parents, is that we offer containment for our teenagers during these years so they are able to process these emotional experiences in a healthy way and they do this through our co-regulation. When you parent teenagers, you will find that what they need is a lot of containment to help them feel all the big feelings they are having which are often overwhelming because of their hormonal surges.

When they don’t receive that co-regulation and containment, they are left out on a limb to navigate this on their own and their nervous system will most likely be quite overwhelmed by this. They may develop unhealthy adaptive strategies to cope and what they will learn is that trust can be dangerous, speaking the truth gets you abandoned and ignored, and your vulnerability can be used against you.

For many women especially, these early relational wounds create an energetic template that later influences teenage romances, adult friendships, and even professional relationships.

Unless tended to, these imprints can quietly guide our choices, our trust levels, and our capacity for authentic connection, long into adulthood.

What happens when betrayal wounds show up at work?

Betrayal doesn’t just haunt our intimate relationships — it shows up everyday in our professional lives too. Most organisations lack any psychological safety and one of the reasons for this (there are many more) is that many people carry an unconscious expectation that colleagues, bosses, or teams will betray them.

As a result, they hold back: not speaking up in meetings, withholding ideas, disengaging from group dynamics, or interpreting neutral interactions through a lens of mistrust. Some may skip meetings or avoid collaborative projects altogether — not out of laziness, but because their nervous system is protecting them from what it perceives as a relational threat. The workplace becomes a battleground of unhealed childhood and teenage wounds, silently shaping how we show up or don’t.

What is the impact of our younger parts taking the lead in our adult relationships?

When betrayal wounds go unhealed, younger parts of ourselves — child parts, teenage parts — often step in to lead adult relationships.

These parts don’t have the skills for mature communication. They know how to survive, but not how to thrive. They know how to protect, but not how to open.

So we might find ourselves communicating indirectly, lashing out, withdrawing without explanation, testing others unconsciously, or assuming we’ll be misunderstood before we’ve even spoken. Our inner child has no place running our adult relationships and when it dominates our behaviour and decisions it often leads to poor choices and outcomes.

Poor communication is not just a skill gap; it's often a symptom of an unhealed betrayal wound.

How betrayal wounds shape who we draw in

One of the most painful patterns is that unhealed betrayal often pulls us toward people who cannot meet us, as friends, lovers or partners, unless they’ve done their own deep healing work.

Without realising it, we may magnetise:

• People who are unavailable, distracted, or unreliable.

• People who cannot understand or hold our unspoken pain.

• People who, energetically, mirror the early betrayals we experienced.

It's as if the energetic wound keeps echoing outward, unconsciously seeking resolution, while simultaneously protecting itself from getting too close. This will keep happening until we do our own healing, the pattern tends to repeat.

What most people find when they do the healing work on these relational wounds, is that they charge they felt when connecting with people who couldn’t meet their needs goes away. They start being attracted to a different type of person.

Image- Kellie Stirling

Healing the energetics of betrayal

Healing betrayal isn’t about telling yourself to "just trust people" again. It's about repairing the energetic fractures in your system, slowly, gently, consistently.

Here’s how it often begins:

1. Rebuilding Trust with Yourself

Betrayal healing involves learning to stay with yourself rather than abandoning your truth to stay safe. Tiny, consistent acts of self-loyalty rebuild trust from the inside out. Keeping promises to yourself. Honouring your needs. Setting boundaries by learning what a Yes, No and Maybe feels like in your body and then learning to listen to that in your body will help to build this skills. Each act sends a signal to your system: I am safe with myself now.

2. Listening to the Younger Parts

Instead of shaming the child or teenage parts for their survival strategies, we acknowledge them and we listen to them. We learn how to reparent them. We show up as the adult they needed but didn't have.

3. Creating Repair Experiences

In safe, steady relationships — whether with a friend, therapist, coach, or partner — you practice staying present through small ruptures and repairs. Many of us haven’t learn how to have a repair conversation when we have a relational rupture. This is an incredibly important relating skill to learn and it is something our children learn through our role modelling of it. Each moment of being seen, heard, and stayed-with, rewires the nervous system’s expectation that betrayal is inevitable.

4. Tending the Nervous System

Betrayal activates primal states of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Through somatic practices — grounding, orienting, gentle self-touch, breathwork — we teach the body that it is no longer trapped in the past.

Healing betrayal is like tending a storm-battered tree. We don't expect it to "get over" the damage overnight. This is slow, long and steady work. We nurture its roots, protect its tender branches, and trust that over time, it will grow stronger — not despite the scars, but through them.

Building a new kind of loyalty to yourself

When we heal the energetic imprints of betrayal — whether they originated from family or early friendships — we become fiercely loyal to ourselves. Not in a hardened, guarded, self-centred way, but in a rooted, emotionally mature, self-authoring way.

From there, we begin to choose relationships differently. We communicate more cleanly. We are able to ask for our desires and we learn to recognise when someone cannot meet us — and we no longer abandon ourselves trying to make them.

And most importantly, we remember: Betrayal does not define us.

The way we choose to heal, love, and live — that’s what shapes who we become.

If you need some support with betrayal wounds so that you can thrive in your relationships, come talk to me about relationship coaching or somatic experiencing.

Reclaiming menopause as a sacred rite

Somewhere along the way, we have lost our way about the life transition in midlife.

Menopause—this sacred threshold in a woman’s life—has been reduced in the dominant narrative to a list of symptoms to manage, a decline to delay, a hormonal malfunction to correct. It’s treated as pathology. As though something is wrong with you. As though you are breaking down.

And every time I hear that framing, I feel a deep ache in my gut. Because it’s not only wrong—it’s harmful. It robs us of the true power and meaning of this life stage. It narrows it down and over simplifies it. More than that, it obscures the possibility that this transition could be the beginning of something more, not less.

In my work with women moving through midlife, I see something astonishing. When the noise of cultural conditioning is quieted—when we slow down enough to listen to our bodies and our deeper rhythms—what emerges is not depletion. It’s ripening. A flourishing. Something ancient and wise begins to move through. The psyche softens. The soul speaks louder. A different kind of power shows up.

A Culture That Fears Ageing

We live in a world obsessed with youth and productivity. That obsession comes at a great cost. It leaves little room for the natural seasons of life and no roadmap for the descent that midlife brings.

In the medical system, menopause is often treated as a condition to be treated. In the workplace, it’s barely acknowledged. Even in leadership and personal development spaces, there’s an undercurrent of “fix it, push through, stay relevant.” But menopause isn’t asking us to push through. It’s asking us to look deep within and to go downward.

It is, in many ways, an initiation our culture has forgotten how to hold.

The Sacred Descent of Midlife

There is a path in the mystical traditions known as the via negativa—the path of unmaking, undoing, letting go. It is not a glamorous path, but it is a sacred one. Many times during our life we are called into the path of the via negtiva. It is the path of letting go.

Midlife calls us into that descent. It asks us to shed identities we’ve outgrown. To let go of belief systems that no longer serve us. To lay down roles that once defined us. To grieve the things that will never be. And in that letting go, we begin to remember who we are beneath the masks.

This descent is not a breakdown. It is a re-rooting. It is the composting of what no longer serves into the fertile soil of wisdom. And yes, it can be disorienting. But it can also be deeply freeing.

Becoming Ourselves by Deepening, Not Striving

In this season of life, with our hormonal cocktail changing, the nervous system begins to tell the truth we may have avoided for years. The body no longer tolerates what once was bearable. The soul begins to whisper (or sometimes roar), asking for integrity, alignment, authenticity.

This isn’t about striving to become some upgraded version of ourselves. It’s about softening into who we’ve always been. It’s about expanding our capacity to feel—grief, joy, awe—and to live from a place that’s more honest, more grounded, more whole.

This is where somatic work is a game-changer. By learning to be with our sensations, to regulate our systems, to hold ourselves in the tender places, we create the space to truly meet ourselves. Not as a project to fix, but as a mystery to unfold.

Stepping Into Stewardship

The journey doesn’t stop with self-discovery. There is another unfolding—one that calls us into relationship with community, with the next generation, with the wider web of life. We often find our passions and interests broadening to issues of the wider system, of community.

This is the forgotten role of the elder. Not just someone who is older, but someone who has metabolized their life experience into wisdom. Someone who can hold space for others, offer perspective, and serve as a steady presence in uncertain times.

Our communities are starved of elders. Not because they don’t exist, but because the path to eldership has been erased. What if we reclaimed it? What if menopause was not the end of relevance, but the beginning of true leadership?

We don’t just become an elder by getting older. This work requires us to do the deep self inquiry, the deep integration work on ourselves. When we can reclaim the lost parts of ourselves and invite them all to coexist together. When we can honour their voices and tend to them when they need support.

Regulation as a Return to our Blueprint

One of the most powerful shifts I witness in the women I work with—one I’ve lived myself—is what happens when we begin to create more capacity in the nervous system.

It sounds simple. But it’s deeply radical.

So many women have been running on high alert for decades—juggling careers, caregiving, emotional labor, all while trying to keep it together. Their bodies are stuck in “go” mode, and rest doesn’t feel safe. Stillness feels unfamiliar. Slowing down can feel like failure—or worse, danger.

So the work begins gently. We slow down, yes—but we also build the internal scaffolding to support that slowing down. We build safety in the body through somatic practices. We learn to recognize sensation without needing to fix it. We explore the thinking patterns that reinforce overdoing. And little by little, something begins to shift.

There’s more space inside.

And in that space, something magical happens. Life doesn’t get easier—but it becomes more liveable. Triggers still arise, but they’re like whispers instead of alarms. You start to notice: “Ah, there’s that pattern again”—and you choose how to respond instead of being hijacked by it. The nervous system no longer dictates your reactions. You come home to yourself.

This is what I mean by returning to our core, our blueprint.

Not just physically—though that’s part of it. But to the energetic and psychological centre of who you are. That place in the body where you are most you—before the world told you who to be. That grounded, wise, tender place that knows how to move through life with presence.

It’s not about becoming someone new. It’s about remembering who you’ve always been—beneath the striving, beneath the masks, beneath the noise.

And that remembering? That is the real gift of this life stage.

This return to the core also supports what I believe is the central developmental challenge of midlife: radical honesty. Not the performative kind, but the deeply embodied kind—the honesty that arises when you’re no longer willing to betray yourself. At this life stage, we’re invited to tell the truth about where we are. About what hurts. About what we want. About who we’re becoming. And the more capacity we have in our nervous system, the more we can meet those truths without collapse or denial. We can meet them with presence. With curiosity. With love.

"At midlife, the call is not to climb higher, but to descend deeper — into the ground of the soul, into the roots of being, into the core of what is most genuine and lasting in us."
— Michael Meade

A New Story

I believe we are being called to tell a new story—or perhaps to remember an old one.

A story where menopause is not a problem, but a portal.
Where aging is not decline, but deepening.
Where midlife is not a crisis, but a rite of passage.
And where those who walk through it with presence and courage emerge as the elders and stewards we so deeply need.

If you’re in this threshold season, you’re not alone. And there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re ripening. And the world needs your wisdom.

Becoming in Midlife

What if midlife isn’t a crisis, but a threshold?

Not the beginning of decline, but the beginning of becoming. A shedding of what no longer fits, and a ripening into who we were always meant to be. Not the self built to survive—but the self born to belong. To the body. To the truth. To community. To the wider web of life.

This isn’t a solo journey. We need spaces—safe, regulated, and wise—where we can do this work together. Spaces where we can slow down enough to hear our own knowing. Where our nervous systems can root into rest. Where radical honesty is welcomed, not feared. And where the fullness of this life stage can be honored as the powerful initiation it truly is.

Because when women reclaim midlife, they don’t just change themselves.

They become stewards. Guides. Elders-in-the-making. Not in the hierarchical sense, but in the soulful sense—those who carry the flame of embodied wisdom forward for others to gather around.

This is the gift. This is the work. And it’s time we told a different story about what it means to grow older.

If you would like to explore your deepening come talk to me about life transitions coaching or somatic experiencing.

If you are based in Melbourne, I will be holding a talk on Tuesday 13th May at the Tree of Life Integral Centre, 3 Denmark St Kew at 6pm. Click here to book your spot as we explore Midlife as a sacred rite of passage.