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.

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?

Healing Our Trauma: Reclaiming Our Connection with Nature

For me, there is nothing better than walking barefoot in the sand on the beach, then having a dip in the sea. I love floating in sea water and the rocking that comes with floating on top of waves as they ebb and flow. It is highly restorative. It grounds me and brings me back into my body. I can feel my nervous system coming into my zone of resilience.

In the quiet of a forest, the crash of ocean waves, or the vast openness of a starlit sky, many of us feel something stir within—a longing, a recognition, a sense of home, a feeling of belonging. But for many, that connection feels distant, as if nature is something separate from us rather than a living web in which we belong.

Much of this disconnection stems not just from modern life but from unhealed trauma—both personal and collective. Our nervous systems, shaped by past wounds, can keep us in states of hypervigilance or numbness, making it difficult to truly be present with the natural world. However, as we heal, something shifts. We begin to experience nature not just as scenery but as an extension of ourselves, rich with wisdom and reciprocity.

So how does trauma disconnect us from nature?

When we experience trauma, our nervous system adapts to keep us safe. If safety was scarce, our body may have learned to stay on high alert, scanning for danger even in peaceful settings. If overwhelming experiences left us feeling powerless, we may have learned to disconnect, numbing ourselves to sensations—including the subtle, grounding presence of nature.

Maybe you are thinking but I haven’t really experienced trauma why do I feel disconnected from my body. Well, modern life is very challenging and often it is the micro-aggressions of daily life that overwhelm us and this stacks up in our nervous system. All of these moments of overwhelm sometimes hit us when we least expect it and we experience pain, illness or relational rupture.

Many of us also carry inherited trauma, passed down through generations. Our ancestors may have lived through displacement, war, colonisation, or environmental destruction, severing their relationship with the land. That rupture doesn’t just exist in history books—it lives in our bodies, shaping how we relate to the earth. The study of epigenetics has explained this to us, so we can see how this unhealed trauma is passed down through generations in both cell expression but also in the attachment system in each of us, that is formed through the maternal bond between an baby and their caregivers.

In modern life, this disconnection manifests in subtle ways as we project our internal disconnection outwards and this shapes how we relate to ourselves, others, the world and life itself. We may find it hard to slow down enough to notice the intricate beauty of a leaf, the rhythmic cycles of the seasons, or the deep nourishment that comes from being immersed in nature. We are stuck on the hamster wheel of flight and fight. Instead of feeling like we belong to the land, we often treat it as a resource to be extracted and used, a background to our human-centered world.

How does healing our trauma restore our sense of belonging within us and also to something greater than us?

The good news is that healing our trauma—whether through somatic work, deep nervous system repair, or ancestral healing—opens the door to a profound reconnection with nature. As we learn to regulate our nervous system, we develop the capacity to be present, to notice, and to receive. The very same skills that allow us to process and release trauma—slowing down, attuning to our sensations, and cultivating safety—are the ones that allow us to feel at home in the natural world.

When we heal, we begin to:

Feel the land as alive – Instead of seeing nature as an object, we start to sense its intelligence, its rhythms, and its ability to communicate. We might begin to feel the energy of trees, the presence of the wind, or the way a particular landscape holds us.

Move beyond fear and control – Trauma often teaches us to control our environment for safety. As we heal, we can interact with nature in a more reciprocal way—learning from it rather than trying to dominate it. When we feel safe in our own bodies, we can soften into a sense of safety in the world.

Trust the body’s belonging – Nature is not something we visit; it is something we are. As we learn to listen to and trust our body and appreciate its deep wisdom, we also learn to trust the wisdom of the earth. We develop a deep understanding of the rhythms of nature and the rhythms in our body. Our understanding of one pattern helps us see this replicated through our own body and other systems we interact within.

Feel the cycles of life more deeply – Instead of fearing endings and beginnings, we start to embrace the cycles of nature as part of us. We see death, decay, rebirth, and renewal not just in the world around us but in our own emotional and spiritual journeys.

Increased self-awareness and environmental awareness - When we tend to our inner landscapes, we become more attuned to the landscapes around us.

Healing give us a new way of relating to each other and a new way of orienting ourselves in the world.

As we heal, we begin to walk through the world differently. We no longer see ourselves as separate from nature but as part of an ongoing conversation with it. We listen more deeply, honour its gifts, and recognise that the earth, like us, holds both wounds and the capacity for regeneration.

Our personal healing ripples outward. When we feel connected to the land, we are more likely to protect it, not from a place of fear or guilt but from love and reverence. Our actions shift from extraction to reciprocity, from dominance to stewardship.

Healing trauma is not just personal work—it is planetary work. As we reconnect with ourselves, we reconnect with the earth. And as we learn to belong to our own bodies, we remember that we have always belonged to the web of life.

Digital Art - Kellie Stirling

What if healing is not just about feeling better, but about remembering our place in the great unfolding story of the earth?

Perhaps the most radical thing we can do is to slow down, place our hands on the earth, and listen.

Healing happens in community and when we connect with something bigger than us. There are many ways we can look at nature and draw a comparison with our body and its innate intelligence and understanding of how to heal.

Just as nature moves through seasons of growth, rest, decay, and renewal, our nervous system cycles through activation, integration, and restoration. Honouring these natural rhythms supports long-term well-being. Here are some other comparisons that might deepen you understanding of both our body and nature’s capacity to generate healing and growth through the building of virtuous cycles and coherence.

Roots & Grounding – Trees grow strong by sending their roots deep into the earth. Similarly, we cultivate resilience by grounding ourselves in connection—whether to our breath, body, relationships, or a sense of purpose.

Storms & Emotional Intensity – A thunderstorm may feel chaotic, but it brings necessary rain and clears the air. Intense emotions may feel overwhelming, but when we allow them to move through us, they can bring clarity and transformation. Emotions like natures storms pass through us when we let them be expressed. When we allow ourselves to feel emotions fully, we become more open to experiencing the depth of nature.

Ebb & Flow of the Ocean – The tides rise and fall in a constant dance with the moon, just as our emotions and energy levels naturally fluctuate. Trying to force constant calmness is like trying to stop the ocean’s waves—it’s unnatural.

Symbiosis & Co-Regulation – Ecosystems thrive through interdependence; plants, animals, fungi, and microbes all support each other. Likewise, humans regulate best in connection—our nervous systems co-regulate through relationships, just as trees share nutrients through their roots.

Fire & Transformation – I have always been fascinated by the dual nature of fire. It can be a force for regeneration and a force of destruction. Wildfires, though destructive, create space for new growth by clearing out the old. In our nervous system, moments of challenge or breakdown can lead to profound transformation when we move through them with support.

Where do we start?

Of course you can start with the simple connections you can make with nature around you. Even if it is taking a walk on the grass in your bare feet start there. Do it with a friend or your partner, take a walk together. Trauma occurs in the absence of a compassionate witness, so healing happens in the connection with one and in the presence of community. We are wired for social connection, we are not meant to do life on on our own.

Midlife, the autumn season of our life. A time to pause, reflect and let go.

We humans are cyclical beings although our modern world doesn’t care or cater much to our cyclical nature. For those of us in female bodies, we are in a constant state of cycling through our menstrual cycles and this brings with it for many people a way of orienting and being in the world that provides a sense of feeling anchored to our cyclical nature. Our life is seasons within seasons, within seasons. Although many of us don’t always feel good about this all the time and I wonder if we talked about our inherent connection with nature and the natural rhythms of the world more, this would provide a sense of meaning to us at a deeper level.

Our midlife season is Autumn. It is a time to take stock, pause, reflect and let go of what we no longer need in our life so we can birth new parts of ourselves. I find this metaphor to be true for all midlife people I work with regardless of gender. It is a process of death and rebirth that happens where we are moving toward a soul oriented life. With this for many comes expanded consciousness where you are stepping into an unknown way of being in the world; this in itself can be overwhelming for many especially if you do not have roadmap or mentors to guide your through. The rebirth is your initiation into your wise woman power that is your authentic self. You are probably familiar wit the archetypes of maiden, mother and crone. This archetypal stage is called Maga which is the stage before Crone. Maga is Portuguese for sorceress and is the feminine of Magus, which is the sorcerer. We are the first generation of woman going through this because we are living longer than the other women in our female lineage.

For Males the archetypal equivalent is the Magician or the Sorcerer and to move to this is a rite of passage, a man needs support and community of wise elders supporting him. The Magician archetype when integrated in a man has the ability to turn disappointing situations and setbacks into opportunities to learn, grow and become a better man.

For all of us when we come to midlife their is often a great deal of inner work to be done for Autumn is the seasons of letting go. In the Celtic tradition, Autumn signifies a time of abundance because harvests are at their peak but also the season where we prepare for austerity, the winter season to come. Autumn is the season that brings the double outer and inner movement, a transition. By midlife we are ready for this big transition. It is the right time for this as we have the wisdom and perspective to really differentiate what is going on for us. Many of us may have been judged as having mental health or personal development needs in the past when they are in fact dealing with cultural overlays that are maligning our life. With our deep life experience we begin to see everything happening in our life for what it is.

Midlife is about healing any trauma or wounding from the first half of your life. When we move through this process of letting go, we are going through a process of dying metaphorically speaking. All the ideas you had about yourself, who you are, who you thought you were becoming, where you thought your life would take you may not have eventuated. So of course there will be anger, grief, resentment and maybe sadness that comes with that. You will find that what used to motivate you no longer does. You will start to pull back into yourself in a way, rather than giving your energy away.

This is because, for women in particular, you are leaving the archetypal mother phase of your life. With that comes some very real deep emotion. I think for many women there is grief regarding fertility ending. This is especially true for women who have not had children regardless of the reasons why, because all of a sudden choice is removed. There will no longer be any choice anymore, no possibility. I have also seen women who have had children experience this even though they were quite adamant that they did not want more children. The nervous system loves choice and agency, so when we are faced with the removal of choice, it does not surprise me that the body experiences either strong fight or flight responses like anger, anxiety and resentment because lack of choice backs us into a corner. But you also experience grief. Grief you see is the emotion that is the secret ingredient that helps us move on. You cannot let go without grief.

For grief to flow it needs the support of the community. it strikes me that at midlife, many of us feel like we are losing our true inner compass we got from our regular cycles and we are trying hard to orient to something new that we have no road map for because there is so much shame and denial in our culture about ageing. I think for males they experience something similar but often later maybe in their fifties is what I have noticed with my clients. All of us are looking for our ‘north star’ to anchor to something.

So why are these big emotional experiences in midlife so hard?

I think it is because we live in a culture where there is collective denial about our emotional lives. Many of us grew up in families where we did not have that emotional life fostered by our parents or caregivers. There was a complete lack of attunement to our needs. This has contributed to a huge array of hurt, trouble and physical symptoms for many people. When we are disconnected from our emotional body we become frozen on the inside, our emotions gets stuck with no means of freeing them. Our nervous system is very clever it will create all manner of management strategies to stop us from feeling that which is painful to us. This is deep work that is required. Learning to befriend our vulnerability so we can feel into our emotions, the harder ones in particular, opens the way to feeling the full spectrum of emotions - Joy, Love, Anger, Amazement, Wonder and Delight. It broadens your emotional landscape.

In midlife, we need our community around us to support us through this transition. But you know what, we need community all the time. Humans are not wired do life on their own. Our interpersonal neurobiology is wired to connect with others for co-regulation. Co-regulation helps us feel like we don’t have to carry the burdens of life all on our own.

Image - Visions in Blue

As my teacher Francis Weller says in his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow “Private pain is a legacy of the creed of rugged individualism. In this narrow story, we find ourselves caught in the shadow of the heroic archetype. We are conditioned from birth to the image of the hero, the one who needs no one, the one who rises above his or her pain, the one who is always in control and never vulnerable. We are imprisoned by this image, forced into a fiction of false independence that severs our kinship with the earth, with sensuous reality and with the myriad wonders of the world”.

The hero archetype, which so many of our stores are centred around, disconnects us from nature, from our cyclical nature, from our natural rhythms and our inner seasons.

Is it any wonder that our rites of passage feel so hard and so overwhelming. They are super complex and we need a circle of support around us to get through and for many of us that is simply not there nor do we know how to put it together.

So how do we navigate midlife better? We face it together we build a circle of support around ourselves. Each life stage has a developmental task that is asked of us, and in midlife it is radical honestly with ourselves, discern our truth. To learn to be kind to ourselves and to stay present to our life. For many of us this might be the first time we have had to do this it re requires vulnerability and acceptance of ourselves for who we are right now. Once we can accept ourselves as we are we start to connect with our unique gifts and slowly we are ready to put them out into the world.

One the principles I really like that helps us frame this experience comes from Japanese aesthetics and it is the world view that is called Wabi Sabi. Wabi Sabi is centred on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. This aesthetic appreciates that beauty is impermanent, imperfect and incomplete. This can be seen in Japanese art.

I think it is a beautiful way of framing life because it helps us to appreciate that all of life is fluid and we are always learning growing, that there is no such thing as perfection. We are all perfectly imperfect.

There is no right way to do your midlife transition. There is your way because you are unique and your life experience are unique and whatever comes up for you, whilst it might have something in common with someone else, will be uniquely your experience to learn from.

The midlife reckoning and initiation

For women, the midlife journey is a time of reckoning and it is our menopausal journey that is often the catalyst for this for many women. It is not to say that midlife is not a time of reckoning for males but I think menopause really puts the jet thrusters on it for women in a way that men don’t experience. Sorry to talk in the binary, whatever you identify as on the gender spectrum, I think if you have ovaries and will go through menopause it puts the jet thrusters on it. Notwithstanding, I have had many male clients over the years go through their midlife reckoning in their own way.

I often talk about this process as being the Autumn season of our lives. A time where we review what works for us, work out what we need to let go of in our life and work through the process of doing that so that you can birth new parts of yourself. The rebirth is your initiation into your wise woman power that is your authentic self. This stage is called Maga which is the stage before Crone. We are the first generation of women going through this because we are living longer than the other women in our female lineage.

When we move through this process of letting go, we are going through a process of figuratively dying. All the ideas you had about yourself, who you are, who you thought you were becoming, where you thought your life would take you. So of course there will be grief that comes with that. You will find that what used to motivate you no longer does. You will start to pull back into yourself in a way, rather than giving your energy away.

This is because you are leaving the mother phase of your life. So whether you have been the mother of children or the mother of a business, or the creator and mother of something else in your life, all that energy you put into mothering is not going to be there anymore. This is what happens when our estrogen starts to decline. When I noticed it within myself I noticed I was really tired and I just couldn’t over-function in all the ways I used to and I was not really interested in lots of things I really used to get passionate about.

I have found this to be a hard habit to break but a necessary one. I noticed one day about two years ago, how liberated I felt and not being full of estrogen and what it used to drive within me. The overarching need to connect and make sure everyone is ok. One day I was I sitting at my desk and I felt down to my bones this freedom at not caring so much anymore. Not is a sociopathic way, but in a light and carefree way, I didn’t care what other people thought of me at all. I didn’t care if I put in a boundary and others didn’t like it, I needed to put me own needs first for my own wellbeing.

The reckoning and initiation hits us all in different ways. For some of us it is our physical health, some of this may be perimenopause symptoms but it can also be in poor health. This was me. Cancer came a knocking in a small way about 8 years ago, I got better and went on with my workaholic ways and then five years ago it was back in a big way and I had no choice but to stop. It was bad, stage 3 colon cancer, a big surgery that really knocked me around and lots of chemotherapy that went on for months. I barely functioned during that time and I could not work. “I am listening” I finally said and learned to feel safe to do nothing and sit with my own misery and distressing emotions. I didn’t do it on my own. I created a circle of support around me with different health practitioners and friends. This is often what we need in midlife, to be midwifed through the reckoning process and we can do this by creating a circle of support for ourselves to get us through. Whether it is a psychologist , a coach, your chiropractor, a nutritionist, friends you meet to talk with this about, you can create this circle of support to midwife you through this change.

My healing that I needed to do was nervous system related and deep inner child work to stop the over functioning. It was somatic work that supported me through this so I could find in my body where that small child part of me that had to solve all the problems and find all the answers lived. My excess of will power has served me well in my lifetime, it has got me through some really tough times and kept me going in jobs, relationships and challenging circumstances far longer than I needed to be. It stopped me from getting stuck and left behind often. But I could not will my way through my midlife transition I had to learn to face my shadow head on and be on the proverbial meat hook that Inanna went through in her heroines journey and have faith that I would come off it when it was time.

I think that we often think that menopause will bring us some hot flashes and night sweats and maybe other symptoms but it is so much more than that. You are faced with your own emotional reactivity, your stress levels bouncing around and it is like an out of control roller coaster. What you do not face in this transition will hang around in your life until you do face it. It is a humbling experience.

It can also be very humbling when you have already done a lot of work on yourself. I have been in a constant learning process full of self reflection for the last 20 years. I thought surely I had explored most of my inner territory. No there is always more to be explored. What I can tell you is that for me is that all the tools and knowledge I had, the ones that I work with my clients on, I used them every day and they got me through the really tough times.

What this journey takes us to is our authentic self. It strips away all the strategies our ego created when we are young to stay safe, you don’t need them and they won’t work for you going forward. To step into your wise woman power you need to address all the aspects of yourself that you have repressed. The emotional reactivity you might be experiencing? That is your body telling you to pay attention and connect with what is coming up. It is our menopausal muse showing herself. I love the saying ‘when the muse arrives let them in or they will burn the house down’. If we ignore what is coming up, if we persist in ignoring it, life gets harder.

Who is the muse?

“Your muse is the part of your that you have kept hidden away to belong or fit in. The Muse is the original essence of who we are. They reveals fears, taboos and expectations that need to be explored as this powerful transition unfolds. All those emotions repressed, feelings we have smoothed over, they want them released. As estrogen declines, a veil is lifted from our eyes. All the things we kept silent about we can longer ignore. We must speak up”.

Midlife and Menopause ebook, Kellie Stirling

Everyone goes through this journey in their own unique way. We often parse out challenging life experiences at this stage as something else, something tough that is unrelated and just bad luck. it is all part of the journey. it may not be your health that suffers. You may experience a relationship falling apart, or having to stop everything to take care of an ailing parent, maybe it is a teenager going off the rails or suffering and you need to stop everything to focus on them. Maybe you have a big career change and you know that you need something different and you don’t know where to start. Something will initiate you into this journey. It will mean you cannot go on the way you have been and you have to actually stop and learn to do life differently.

There is something for all of us in this transformation and it offers us an extraordinary opportunity to do it consciously. When you choose to pay attention to your experience and consciously focus on it, you are not only doing your own healing work, you are healing ancestral trauma, the trauma that has been carried down through family lines.

This is the time to learn to choose what you want in life. To move away from your reactive patterns, to learn to sit back, metaphorically and physically and observe. To be able to sit in your chair, in your back body, in a neutral position, back into the chair, feet on the ground, feeling the stability in your body and not lean forward and react. To learn to observe and watch as a wise elder would and then choose which course to take. You don’t have the high energy lots of of estrogen brings anymore, so taking care of your energy is so important. You don’t have to go in and react and clean up every mess. The lesson here is learning to put your needs first which means sitting back and watching. The thing is when we sit back and watch, we often have a clearer view of what is actually going on and we make better choices every time.

Once you move through this, you are naturally drawn to pursue more meaning and purpose in your life in everything that you do. Whether it is your work, your hobbies, the relationships in your life. This is because our purpose is to be our most authentic selves, lead from the our soul, and every aspect of our life wants to align with that. Because after going through the reckoning and initiation we can be nothing else but ourselves.

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.

Ten things I wish I had known before I started my midlife transition

I ran into an old friend a few weeks back and we were talking about our work. We cross over on the trauma resolution and nervous system work. This friend is in her thirties and we were talking about midlife and menopause and supporting women in this transition and how important it is because it is such a time of overall transition AND it is a gateway to ageing. It is an important transition and we really need to review our life and all aspects of it so that she can set herself up to live well in her second half of life.

I went home and thought what would be the top 10 things I wish I had known before I started midlife? If we had a crystal ball we could stare into that would helps us, what would be the most helpful tips. So here you go.

1.We go through two transitions midlife and menopause at this time in our lives if we live in female bodies. Menopause is the end of our fertility with that comes not just physical change but psychological growth and healing. The developmental challenge at midlife is being radically honest and truthful with yourself about where you are at right now and who you are.

2. Learning about hormone health is absolutely key at this time in life, if you can learn earlier go do it. It is not just your sex hormones that change, they affect all our other hormones, like thyroid, insulin, our stomach hormones and stress hormones because of the change.

3. You cannot push your way through these transitions. The way through is going inward, slowing down and learning to rest.

4. You will get restless, question everything and intuitively feel like you need change in your life. Don't project this all out, explore your inner world.

5. Your body is the home that you live in. Take very good care of it. The overarching question that covers these transitions is "How can I set myself up to live well in the second half of life?". Use that as your guide and refer back to it constantly.

6. Old trauma will come up for resolution at this time and the hormone changes often impact the nervous system to cause that to happen. Remember our body is wise, intelligent and has an innate capacity and orientation to healing.

7. Get the support and help you need. You are the CEO of your body, it is OK to work with different professionals to get the support you need. (I count my chiropractor, shiatsu practitioner, GP, oncologist, massage therapist and somatic experiencing teachers just to name a few in that group)

8. Estrogen is a hormone that fosters connection with others and bonding AND it gives us rose coloured glasses. All of a sudden you will start to see the world differently when it declines. This is normal, you will get mad and annoyed. All of this is OK, you cannot 'unsee' things now, this will help promote your passion and purpose as you move through menopause.

9. You will come face to face with your cultural conditioning around ageing, sexuality and sensuality. Face into it, don't let it hold you back from growing and be radically honest with yourself.

10. Pelvic health is critical at this time in our life. The Pelvis is a incredibly important part of our body that connects the top and bottom of our body. Within it are our reproductive organs and and our organs that get rid of waste. We hold so much old emotional stress and tension in our pelvic floor and this impacts us physically, emotionally and sexually. It is ok to get obsessed about pelvic floor health in my opinion. Do pelvic floor exercises, pilates, jade egg exercises, whatever you need, find people who really know what they are doing.

And one more just because...... you are letting go of parts of yourself you don't need anymore and birthing a new part of yourself, your inner wise women is on the way!