Permission to be slow

There is a rhythm in the body that most of us have never been taught to feel.  It is actually really hard to feel or listen to.

It is not the rhythm of the heart, though that too. Nor is it the rhythm of the breath, though that is closer. It is actually deeper than both of those and also slower than both.  It is a deep rhythm that feels a bit like it is a tidal movement in the body that pulses beneath everything else. It is two deep rhythms, like a deep tide and a middle tide. Or as my teacher described it is like the ocean, which holds both a surface current and a deep undercurrent. The body carries its own layered rhythms. Both are real. Both carry information.They are deep and they require something most of us have forgotten how to do.

It requires us to slow down enough to feel it.

This year I have been completing training in biodynamic craniosacral therapy, a modality that works with exactly this. What struck me most, is how radically unhurried it is. The touch is extraordinarily light, almost weightless actually. The practitioner's hands don't press or manipulate or fix. They listen. They receive. They create enough stillness that the body's own intelligence can begin to express itself.

Art, Vanessa Palmer, Beneath the Lillies 2019

This is a different kind of healing to the one most of us have been taught to expect.

We come to healing whether it be to therapy, to coaching, to body work, often looking for something to happen. We want the insight, the release, the shift we can point to. We have been trained, particularly those of us who live from our minds, to measure progress by what we can articulate and what we can feel ourselves changing. We are used to effort. We are used to working hard, even at our healing.  I would say that many of my clients work incredibly hard.  They show up, they invest in themselves.  I do this too.  I always have, even with my own healing work.

Craniosacral therapy quietly dismantles all of that. Before the body can heal, it needs to feel safe enough to be itself.

This is not a metaphor. It is a biological reality. The nervous system, particularly one shaped by years of high-functioning stress or early relational difficulty, is not simply waiting to be fixed. It is waiting to be met. It is scanning, constantly, for whether the environment, including the practitioner, is trustworthy enough to soften into.  I talked about this last week in my blog when I was discussing how the nervous system is always scanning for safety in belonging and trying to work out what role it can take up in the social system.  It's the same theme.

Attunement is what creates that safety. Not technique. Not expertise, though expertise matters. But the quality of presence that says, “I am not here to rush you. I am not here to interpret or analyse or pull anything from you. I am here to be with what is”.

There are things the body carries that have no words.

Not because they are mysterious or unknowable but because they arrived before language did, or at a moment when language shut down. Shock held in the diaphragm. Grief folded into the chest. A startle response stuck in the body. The memory of a moment when the body braced and never quite let go.

Talk therapy doesn’t reach this because it deals with what is in the rational and logical part of the brain, not the limbic system and primal brain, where the nervous system lives, that holds all the patterns of bracing, tension or stress we may not be fully aware of. The body stores experience in tissue, in posture, in the patterned way the breath moves or doesn't move. Sometimes what a body most needs is not to be spoken to, but to be touched, with such fine attunement, such precision of presence, that the tissue begins to trust it is safe to release what it has been holding.

This is what the lightness of biodynamic craniosacral touch makes possible. It is not passive. It is listening at a cellular level. It is a hand that says, ‘I can feel you. I am not frightened of what I find. You don't have to do anything’.

That kind of touch is a language. One the body recognises before the mind has time to evaluate it. The body is the most incredible self healer.

What continues to move me, both as a practitioner and as a person who has spent years working with what the body holds. It is not the practitioner doing the healing, it is the person on the table receiving the gentle touch.

The body already knows. It has always known. The intelligence that knows how to close a wound, regulate temperature, move food through the gut without a single conscious instruction from us; that same intelligence knows how to process and integrate experience, when it is given enough safety and enough time.

My job as a somatic practitioner is not to fix. It is to create conditions. To hold space that is regulated, attuned, and unhurried enough that the body's own healing capacity can come online.

Slow is not passive. Slow is the speed at which the nervous system's deepest layers operate. Slow is the speed at which the tidal rhythms of the body move, carrying their information. Slow, it turns out, is where the most profound healing lives.  I have constantly been surprised by how much depth and nuance can be achieved when we slow things down. It allows stress cycles that have been stuck for years to be completed.  It creates a level of unwinding in the body that can only happen when the body is not rushed.  Slow is more. 

If you are someone who has worked hard at your healing; and I suspect many of you reading this are, I want to offer you this.

You are allowed to receive.

Not just information. Not just insight. Not just techniques to practise between sessions. But the quiet, almost-nothing of being held in a regulated, attuned presence and allowed to simply be. The body does not need to be pushed into healing. It needs to be trusted to know the way.

Permission to be slow is not a luxury. For a nervous system that has been organised around effort and vigilance and productivity, it may be the most therapeutic thing on offer.

The tide is always moving. We simply need to learn to feel it.

Are you a midlife lady and your libido has disappeared? You are not broken

Midlife transition is a time of enormous upheaval for most of us. The developmental challenge of midlife is for us to be radically honest with ourselves about where we are right now in our life. It is a healing journey and it gives you the opportunity to make some changes, to do some deep inner work, if we need it, to heal childhood wounding. Recently I saw a social media post that said we spend the second half of our life undoing our experience of the first half of life. There is is no doubt in my mind that this is true.

In childhood we will always choose being our adaptive selves over our authentic selves. We create these adaptive strategies to ensure attachment to our caregivers, so that our basic survival needs are met. This is a primal survival response. As Gabor Mate says, adaptation over authenticity every time. That means for most of us, there is a lot to unpick in midlife because whilst those adaptive strategies kept us safe and alive as children, rarely do they serve us well as adults.

If you live in a female body you have menopause happening, often at the same time. This is a lot to handle. Menopause is a mind-bending, shapeshifting transition. Over this time, the deepest system in our body, the endocrine system, goes through a massive act of rearranging itself. This affects us physically, mentally and how we orient and show up socially and culturally. There is no way that this hormonal shift does not affect how we think, feel and perceive the reality of our life. It happens over time. (Unless it is induced by surgery or cancer treatments) Perimenopause is the 5-10 years of gradual change before we arrive at Menopause. That one day when it has been 12 months since we have had a period.

I will tell you something awesome about perimenopause. It is the start of a new phase or your life. Perimenopause is a transition to a time where you focus shifts to be on you. You are at the centre of your world. So often we need to make some changes to ensure that happens.

During this time, many women notice that their libido seems to either go away or change. A changed rhythm is both normal and common. Our rhythm of our desire changes many times during our lives, but for most women the period where they notice it is the most, is either post-partum and perimenopause. Both times we have massive hormonal changes going on in the body.

Don’t worry it is not all over. Well it can be if you want. What I have found with my clients, is that post menopause, many women experience the best sex of their lives. Midlife can be a time of great fun and exploration.

“Sex isn’t just about who we do and how we do them, and it it isn’t only about the ways we get aroused and orgasmic, either. Your sexuality goes to the heart of who you are. All of your relationships, not just your actively sexual ones, grow from this root.

When I say ‘all of your relationships’ I mean that literally…including the most significant connection of all, your relationship you have with yourself.

If you want to have better sex and more satisfying intimate relationships, the place to begin is with yourself - and more specifically, with your relationship to your own sexuality”.

Sheri Winston, Women’s Anatomy of Arousal

Let’s talk about some of the reasons why you are not feeling turned on, on the inside.

Many women have never explored their sexuality. We have just ridden the hormonal waves for years. What brings you pleasure? This transition offers you an opportunity to explore what your body really likes when it comes to what turns you on, what brings you pleasure. Most of us learn about sexuality through popular culture and this is shown predominantly through the male lens, as it is centred around a male body and its arousal patterns. Often, women wonder why does it take them so long to become aroused. The reason it is that it is normal for female bodies to take longer to become aroused because most of us have responsive desire. The alternative arousal pattern being spontaneous arousal which as it suggests happens spontaneously. Most female bodies are responsive, they respond to stimulus.

What many people notice during the menopausal transition is that it takes them longer to become aroused, this is normal. Get curious and most importantly start to tune into what brings you pleasure. I often feel with most of my midlife clients that their body is truly speaking to them and telling them that what they have been doing does not work for it. Imagine you body is yelling at you and saying '“This doesn’t work for me, find out what does”. You can have a lot of fun exploring both on your own and with a partner (if you are coupled) what works for you.

Emotional upheaval is a pretty normal experience for women in perimenopause. Some of this is due to the hormonal changes impacting the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and it become a little dysregulated. Our ANS state drives our behaviour. Think back to what I said about midlife being about being truthful with yourself. Many of us learn to repress ‘negative’ emotions like anger, frustration, sadness, fear, grief for example. There is no such thing as a negative emotion, this is a cultural belief system you have internalised. Your body is asking you to reconnect with these emotions. All emotions are useful and necessary, they orient us toward pleasure and pain and help us navigate the world. Anger is an important emotion for honouring our boundaries, we need it. Grief helps us let go of what we have loved and move through life transitions. If you start feeling these emotions and you have repressed them for year, your body will feel unsafe. When it feels unsafe it will produce stress hormones. You cannot produce stress hormones and sex hormones at the same time, you body will always prioritise safety and survival over procreation. So it makes sense that when you are feeling very stressed that the last thing you feel like sex. Your body will be constricted and tense, the opposite of being open to receive. Make it your mission to develop a new relationship with all your emotions. When you repress one you repress them all. You will be amazed and how alive you can feel when you slowly start to connect with all your emotions.

Pelvic health is super impacted by this transition because estrogen is the hormone that makes our skin, tissue, ligaments, tendons and joints all juicy and supple. it supports the production of collagen which does all the repair work at night on skin and joins. So less estrogen means less hydration. This can be experienced as joint discomfort all over but particularly in the pelvis, vaginal dryness and potentially gynaecological and pelvic health issues. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Make your pelvic health a priority. So whether you become a pilates devotee, yoga aficionado or make pelvic work a priority in the gym, all are good options. You might also need some hormonal support with estrogen for your vagina or maybe use a good internal moisturiser. All are good options. Talk to your GP or Gynaecologist about them.

Perimenopause has this way of highlighting our vulnerabilities showing us where we need to focus. This becomes very obvious with many of us when it comes to our relationships. Many women lose their libido because they are simply bored in their sex life with their partner. Rather than giving up on each other, look at this as an opportunity to explore something new. All of our bodies are changing. Good communication is the foundation of intimacy in a relationship. Intimacy is being able to speak out hearts truth to another and your sex life will become a lot more fun if you are able to talk honestly and truthfully with each other.

There is a cultural expectation that women will be ‘over the hill’, washed up and grumpy. This is simply not true. What is true is that many people experience burnout. If you are exhausted, your libido will go. Again it comes back to those stress hormones being front and centre. There is an emotional burden that women carry in society. The unrealistic expectations of mothering alone. It is simply unrealistic that anyone is able to mother and do all of that work on their own. The problem here is our culture not perimenopause. Make rest your priority.

So what can we do?

Well for a start, make rest and understanding your sleep your priority. Yoga Nidra is amazing when you are feeling exhausted during the day. Rest is part of your erotic practice, make it a priority.

Start with your sensuality. Your 5 senses are the language of your nervous system. What brings you sensual pleasure and really tune into exploring that and practicing it. Explore healthy pleasure. I just might add when it comes to our taste, wine and coffee are not healthy sensual pleasures. Alcohol is a depressant that brings an overstimulated nervous system down and coffee does the opposite. If you are feeling flat and a bit freezy it produces adrenaline and lifts you up. Make sure your sensual pleasures promote health. Food also affects mood, healthy food is medicine for the body. Eat the rainbow.

Explore your desire and erotic blueprint. We each have our own blueprint of arousal. Some good resources are Emily Nagowski’s book, Come as you are or Miss Jaiya’s erotic blueprint quiz. Discover what your turn on’s and turn off’s are.

Work on your trauma. If you are experiencing old trauma coming up in perimenopause work with someone who does somatic work, to help you befriend and connect with your body. This is the work I do, you can book a call with me if you want to talk about this.

If you need to do some deep inner work on reconnecting with your emotions, work with either a somatic therapist or coach, who can work with you to help you to expand your capacity to feel your emotions in your body. This is life changing work, that supports you maturing into emotional adulthood, I do this work with all of my clients.

Read and learn about your body. There are so many good books out there now about perimenopause. I have a great resource list you can look at.

Bust up any cultural beliefs about ageing. These will be stuck in your body, this requires some pretty deep inner work.

You might need to change the way you exercise. Stress is not our friend in perimenopause, it is the biggest hormone disrupter of all. High impact exercise stimulates cortisol (stress hormone) and it can be very easy to become cortisol dominant because we don’t have the estrogen levels to balance it. What most women find is that they actually need to do less exercise but do it daily. In small bits. Low impact and resistance based exercise seems to work best for our bodies as we age. Stacy Sims has written an excellent book on this and has loads of information about training female bodies as they age and to cater for menstrual cycles.

Have fun exploring your own pleasure. When you know what works for you then you can communicate it to your partner. You might need some help from a coach where you can work 1 -1 or you might do a group course but there is a lot of information out there about women’s sexuality. Get curious.

Putting yourself first, is not a self indulgence. it is actually a way of being and an act of self preservation. It is so important for us to ensure we set ourselves up to live well and thrive in our second half of life.