Ep 48 Women, Power and Deep Knowing with Celine Levy

When it comes to midlife we often talk about the concept of ‘women stepping into their power”, what does this actually mean? Well in today’s episode I will unpack that with my friend and colleague Celine Levy. Celine is a Sex and Power coach who works with women to help them gain a sense of agency and connection with their bodies.

Celine and I talk about power and how it is relational and what is actually happening in the neurobiology of the body when we are not in an ‘empowered’ stance; by the way we both really dislike the word empowered.

Celine has a really interesting story and her path to this work, showed her that ‘power over’ another can be devastating, and how the cultural conditions in an environment can set us up for these experiences as we adapt to cultures to try and belong and feel safe. This close shave with a cult has propelled her forward into work with women so that they can learn to listen to their bodies through building a strong connection with their nervous system and the messages it sends.

In this podcast we talk about:

• What power is, how it can only exist within a relationship and how the state of our nervous system drives our responses to what we are experiencing.

• How when we interact with another person there are two conversations going on at the same time. There is the conscious dialogue that comes through the mouth and at the same time our nervous system is having a conversation and when there is a mis-match between the two we notice this in particular ways.

• How we can rewire and re-pattern the nervous system to achieve a different outcome.

• How estrogen creates a biological behavioural drive for soothing, connection and accommodation and when in our post menopause life we don’t have those high estrogen levels, this impacts on our behavioural response.

• You can do all the fancy communication classes you want but if you don’t do the work on your autonomic nervous system you won’t get the result you are after.

• We all have a sense of deep knowing in our body. When we disconnect from our bodies we lose this connection. Reconnecting with our bodies builds reconnects us with our deep knowing.

• How our cultural conditioning impacts on our acceptance and willingness (often unconsciously) to demonstrate certain behaviours.

• How learning to hold the energy of sensation and emotion within the body, gives you more power and therefore more options in how you are able to choose to respond to what life throws your way.

You can find Celine at www.celinelevy.com or on instagram at @thelovedwitch or her french language instagram account @sorcierotique

Ep 44 Exploring wellbeing in Midlife and beyond with Dr Beth Claxton

Midlife is a time that tends to show up the vulnerabilities in our bodymind. We experience these as physical or mental health issues, challenges in relationships and sometimes just a really strong drive to make some big changes in our lives. In this episode, I am joined by Dr Beth Claxton to talk about wellbeing in midlife and beyond. Beth is a board certified OBGYN and a certified functional medicine practitioner who reside in Northern Arizona in the USA.

In this episode, we talk about many aspects of our health and wellbeing in midlife. We talk about Beth’s own midlife transition and how it has brought her full circle with the desires she had at a very young age to work in a healing role of some capacity. Beth has always had a strong sense of inner knowing that healing has been a pathway for her.

In the podcast we cover:

• Beth’s experience in healing and where it can be most powerful,

• They key areas to focus on in midlife for your overall wellbeing, Stress Management, Sleep, Exercise and Food and explore each of those,

• We talk a little about MHT/HRT and how it can support your health and welbeing,

• We talked about a range of different strategies we can use to monitor and support our health during midlife and beyond,

• The work Beth offers now in her functional medicine practice such as her 10 week Ayurvedic course and how it offers us a different perspective through which we can connect with our bodymind and Beth’s upcoming Detoxifying Menopause summit that is coming up.

During the podcast we talked about Athletic training for perimenopause women and the reference Beth mentioned was Athlete Project 51, which is information about how women can train for their own physiology.

You can find Beth at www.flagstafffunctionalmedicine.com on instagram and she has a facebook group is Flagstaff Functional Medicine

Ep 42 Barbie and the bucket of frogs - Tales of Sisterhood

I recently went to see the Barbie movie and loved it. There were so many great messages in there, and they dealt with what are extremely complex cultural messages and phenomena, in a way that was digestible for even the youngest members of the audience.

So today I wanted to reflect on those messages and points and unpack the patriarchy a little bit and how it impacts all of us and share some stories of my own about how I have seen how patriarchy gets in the way of women mentoring and supporting each other. Of loving and complimenting each other, of being able to brag and cheer for each other. This is where the bucket of frogs story comes in.

Sisterhood wounding is a real thing and many women suffer from it. It is both collective and ancestral trauma that impacts us individually. Let’s face it, most of us have many wounds from our teenage years when it comes to the sisterhood. Patriarchy pits women against each other, we learn to not only hate each other but we hate ourselves. We hate the feminine aspects of ourself and this is what disconnects us from our bodies. In the long run, that wound causes signifiant damage. In stops us from speaking our truth, we lose our voice. It stops us from having deep, honest, vulnerable relationships with each other. We disconnect from ourselves and from each other. We disconnect from our hearts.

I offer some tips and guidance about where to start when it comes to sisterhood wounding and healing the collective trauma that lives within all of us.

If you want to join my Magnificent Midlife course click on the link and sign up, or you can go to my website www.kelliestirling.com

Ep 41 Thriving sexually in midlife and beyond with Gabriella Espinosa

Midlife is an incredibly transformational period of our lives and when it comes to our relationship with our sexual selves it is almost a revolution that most women feel they experience. Midlife can be a new chapter in our lives. Today I have women’s sexuality and empowerment coach Gabriella Espinosa with me to talk about how we can thrive sexually in midlife and beyond. Gabriella is the founder of Women’s Body Wisdom, an online coaching, education and movement platform that guides women to reclaim their pleasure and power in and out of the bedroom. Her work lies at the intersection of embodiment, eastern traditional wisdom, female sexuality and menopausal health and is informed by over 15 years of guiding women to connect to their bodies and love themselves more.

Gabriella experienced her own revolution in her midlife transition and she talks about it in this podcast how it become an invitation for her to get to know herself on multiple levels. Her story is an inspiration for those of us who may feel lost and disconnected from their bodies or those of us who have strived and achieved the long held vision for their life for years only to find in midlife that all our own methods of success no longer work for us.

In this podcast we talk about:

• We have to re-pattern our nervous system to reconnect and rebuild our relationship with pleasure. The key to rekindling our relationship with pleasure is to become sexually self-sufficient is doing it from a place of fullness and we can only do this when we learn to connect with what feels pleasurable to us,

• How our sensuality is the pathway to rekindling the relationship with pleasure that we feel inside of our bodies,

• We talk about our life force energy, Eros, and how connecting with it helps us understand our body,

• Erotic blueprints. What are they, how can they help you connect with your own erotic wiring, how they can help you understand your partner’s to experience better sex both on your own and in relationship,

• How in midlife we have to bust up our cultural conditioning and internalised belief systems around pleasure to connect with our sexuality,

• When we learn to connect with our own pleasure we befriend our body and learn to treat it as an ally. This helps us to advocate for ourselves both in the bedroom and in the Doctors office.

You can find Gabriella on instagram @gabriellaespinosa and at www.gabriellaespinosa.com.

If you would like to try the erotic blueprint quiz please follow this link

Ep 38 The energy chiro, on nervous system healing with Dr Kathryn Theodosis

Dr Kathryn Theodosis joins me for this fantastic podcast where we are talking about our amazing bodies, in particular our nervous systems. Kathryn is a chiropractor who works with clients to allow their nervous system and energy system to move out of a state of stress and fear and into one of greater safety and connection. This shift allows a greater sense of safety to be held by the nervous system and the energy system, giving space for us to connect with parts of us we have not felt safe to prior

Kathryn started off as a traditional chiropractor and was introduced to network spinal analysis a gentle mode of adjustment using contact points on the spine. This transformed her own healing experience and she then completed further professional training in network spinal analysis, a modality of chiropractic care created by Donald Epstein. This then lead her to two years of professional training in Integral Energetics with Dr John Hare and Dr Fred Swan, who have created this modality that works with the body’s energy system.

In the podcast we talked about:

• Different nervous system responses and how they show up in our bodies,

• How our life experiences and our life story are held in our muscles and organs and we can often see this in a person’s posture and stance,

• How network spinal allows the body to unravel, reorganise and integrate its life experiences in a gentle way allowing it to continually adapt and become more flexible,

• That our brain loves novelty and new experiences and this helps our brain stay young and have capacity to create new neural pathways as we age, this means we can keep on learning and this is supportive of good mental health outcomes as we age,

• How repressed emotions and old trauma and stress are held in the body and how that can sometimes manifest as pain,

• The heart and its energetic field are another area where we pick up on the emotions and energy of the environment around you. Often it is our heart reaction picking up on the emotions of others that reacts before our conscious brain,

• Different body holding patterns such as rigidity of the spine and what the somatic story behind that is,

• What practices suit what nervous systems. We talked about meditation and it not being for everyone and how in fact it can for some people, reinforce a trauma pathway of avoiding their body,

• Why creativity is so important for our emotional well-being,

• The current trend in cold water exposure and heat through saunas and why they don’t suit everyone,

• Women’s bodies and listening to our cyclical natures, taking queues from our body and not punishing ourselves for not able to be ‘on’ all the time.

You can find Kathryn on her website www.theenergychiro.com or on instagram @drkathryn.theenergychiro

Ep 34 Why nervous system healing is important when it comes to connecting with our sexuality

Hello and happy new year. 2023 is the year of the Rabbit and it is a yin year in chinese astrology. So given it was Chinese New Year yesterday I feel its worth mentioning this and that this year is supposed to me more of a YIn energy year. Here’s hoping. Today I’m talking to you about why we have to start with working with our nervous system when we want to connect with our sexuality.

The autonomic nervous system drives all our behavioural states and the emotions that are affected by that. One of the keys to connecting to and working with your sexual energy which is your life force energy, is being able to use your skills of focus and attention to be present with it and this requires, calm, surrender and the ability to focus and track pleasure in our bodies. It is very hard to do this from a hyper aroused or frozen state in our nervous system.

So in this podcast I break it down for you so you can understand how it all works and why we start with the nervous system when we want to connect with our sexual energy, when we want to develop a stronger relationship with our emotions or when we want to improve the quality of our intimate relationships in our lives.

In the podcast I talk about:

• Tools to regulate yourself, like resourcing that will support better interactions with the people in your life,

• How our sensuality is a gateway to regulating our nervous system but also connecting with our sexuality,

• The six holistic sexuality tools we can use to enhance our connection with our sexual energy,

• Why working with a coach or therapist who is trauma informed is super important when it comes to sexuality work,

• Why is is imperative that we go slow in this work,

• How our cultural narrative around sexuality has shut has down to feeling our life force energy.

I hope you enjoy this episode and don’t forget to pass it onto a friend who may find it helpful AND to give it a rating on the podcast platform you are listening to if you like it.

Ep 32 How experiencing more pleasure in your body can be a pathway through pain

This week I’m talking about pleasure and how experiencing the expansive energy of pleasure in our body can be a pathway through pain. When we have trauma and stress stored in our body it has a very constrictive quality to it. You would know this be either a tight jaw or pelvis, or maybe tension in the shoulders and the back between your shoulder blades.

In this episode I talk about:

• How it can be tricky when we start doing somatic healing work at first because we might be stuck in a constant state of constriction so to feel anything other than this can make us feel unsafe,

• The different survival responses in our nervous system and what they are,

• How some food and drinks can actually mimic the constricted state we are in,

• How we all learn to push through the boundaries of our body and come to ignore its messages to us all the time,

• How pleasure expands our capacity in our body and that gives us more choice and breadth in our nervous system and how this improves our ability to be with our emotions,

• Why micro doing on pleasure is more effective at slowly building your orientation toward it,

• What some pleasure practices are.

At the end I mention my free Feminine Embodiment course and my ReConnect course. Reconnect is on sale all through December 2022 for AU$149.50.

Ep31 Living with Chronic Illness with Elizabeth Ann

Today I talk to my friend Elizabeth Ann about Living with Chronic Illness. Elizabeth is a Music Therapist who herself has living with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for many years now. We thought it was time to have a discussion about Chronic Illness which is so prevalent in our society now days and so poorly misunderstood.

Elizabeth’s journey of Chronic Illness lead her to change her career and she went back and retrained to become a music therapist. Reinvigorating her long love affair with music and being a musician, which is a natural talent that she is incredibly gifted with, and supporting others on their health journey through the therapeutic modality of music therapy.

In this episode we talk about:

• What music therapy is and how it can support you in your health journey,

• What Chronic Fatigue is and the systems in the body it affects,

• How living with Chronic Illness impacts on the relationships in our lives and the power dynamics that exist within them,

• How music, dance and singing are a tool that connects us with our past stories and history,

• How becoming chronically ill can support us to get really good at expressing our boundaries,

• How our current cultural paradigm makes it hard to heal and function because we need so much more downtime,

• How illness can become our identity if we are not careful,

• The notion of what wellness actually is and having the identity of being unwell can be really disempowering for some people,

• How to clean out your cupboards to detox your life. If you want to reference the Dirty Dozen food list we talk about click on the link.

Please contact me if you would like to get in contact with Elizabeth regarding Music Therapy and I can forward on your enquiry to her.

Ep 29 The power of Slow with Casey Hall

Today I talk with my friend and colleague Casey Hall, who is a sensuality coach, about the power of slowing down. Casey is both a sensuality coach and holistic wellness coach and has studied and worked in the wellness landscape for many years. She is the best person to talk to about this subject because not only is it the centre of her work but it is her life story also. She learned that slowing down was helped her heal and grow after many years of living a fast paced life.

In the podcast we discuss:

• How Casey moved into corporate wellness and realised that 90% of the cases Doctors deal with are related to stress,

• That sensuality is a key to helping us slow down and live a life with more presence,

• That the emptiness and loneliness many of us feel is a disconnection from self and slowing down helps us to reconnect with ourselves,

• How pleasure is a great tool to help us to slow down and be more present in our lives,

• That many of us have internalised cultural belief systems around slowing down and pleasure that stop us from pursuing both and this lives largely in our unconscious so most of us are not aware of our blockages toward pursuing both,

• Our bodies speak their own language and they are talking to us all the time, we just learned to ignore their messages,

• Slowing down helps us to make better conscious choices and decisions in our life.

You can find Casey at her website www.sensualitycoach.com on instagram @sensuality_coaching. Casey does a podcast with her Business Partner Elizabeth Menzel called “Slow the F Down” you can find it on all major podcasting platforms.

Ep 28 Breathe to Create Flow with Timmy and Jackie

People have been asking me to do a podcast on Breathwork for a long time. So finally here it is. Today I talk to my friends and colleagues Jackie Verinder and Timmy Noad who are both Breathwork teachers about Breathwork. Jackie and Timmy have a great story about their own journey to breathwork and how it has helped them release trauma from their body, connect with their emotions and feelings, grow into emotional adulthood and how it has improved their overall sense of wellbeing, self-acceptance and self-love.

Timmy and Jackie between them are trained in a number of different modes of breathwork including , Oxygen Advantage, SOMA breath, XPT Performance Breath and both are Zen Thai Shiatsu (level one) practitioners.

In the podcast we talk about:

• Jackie and Timmy’s own story and how breathwork has helped them in their lives,

• What is breathwork?

• What are the different styles of breathwork and how do they help,

• How you might go about picking a style that suits your needs and what questions to ask of your potential teachers,

• What to expect in a group session and one on one sessions and how to determine what might suit you between the two delivery methods,

• Questions you can ask potential teachers to work out if they are a good match for your needs,

• How our current culture impacts on how we experience our emotional lives.

Jackie and Timmy are based on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. They do individual and group sessions there, on the Gold Coast, Brisbane and Melbourne. You can find them at www.create-flow.com.au on instagram @createflowbreathwork and facebook at Create flow Breathwork

Ep 20 Menopause as a pathway to our authentic sexuality with Dr Laura Monk

The transition through to Menopause is complex and multi-faceted. It is a death and rebirth, a shift in identity in all the different aspects of ourselves. There is a lot of stigma around sexuality and ageing, so for many women there is great fear that their sexuality will disappear. In this episode, Dr Laura Monk and I talk about the pathway that Menopause provides to discover your authentic sexuality.

Laura is both a Psychotherapist and Sex, Love and Relationship coach who loves to work with women through midlife and menopause. Laura shares with us her own sexual awakening post menopause and we talk about the possibilities for growth and development in terms of a woman’s sexuality that Menopause can present.

In this episode you will learn:

• How our desires can become very different from what they have been previously,

• How the enormity of the menopause transition can be challenging for women in their partnerships and bring us a question of whether we bring our partner with us or not,

• The many pressures that women face throughout life that prevent them from being who they really are and menopause present an opportunity to be our true selves,

• Our sexuality which is such a core part of our humanity is rarely addressed in most mainstream therapeutic contexts,

• Your sexuality is not about your estrogen levels and the medical model assumes it is just that alone,

• Connecting to your sexual energy which is your life force energy is connecting to your energy body; that this is what makes you magnetic and attractive not all the external dressings we learn to apply.

You can find Laura on instagram at @drlauramonk and on her website www.drlauramonk.com.

Ep 19 Self love as a pathway to healing and personal growth with Gina Catherine

Self love is a concept that I am not sure everyone has their head wrapped around. Sometimes when we think of it we might think of a narcissistic type of self love. That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about really loving who you are as a person, all the parts of you. Loving you sexuality, sensuality, the sense of masculine and feminine that we all have within us. In this episode I talk with my friend and colleague Gina Catherine who is Sexuality, Love and relationship coach who supports people on their journey to Self Love.

Gina and I are both cancer survivors and we talked about our own journey to self love and how it supporting our healing and gave us both a sense of deep awe, wonder, respect and love for our bodies.

In this podcast you will learn:

• How fuelling yourself with pleasure rather than rewarding yourself supports self love,

• How we have been conditioned to be humble but the underbelly of that is counter to self love,

• That your sexual energy, which is our life force energy, is an incredible source of creativity,

• When we are closed off to our sexuality it is like closing off a room in a house and never going in there,

• How celebrating yourself is not only a great boundary practice but it sets you up for self love,

• How our sexuality, sensuality, how it shows up in our lives within us is so incredibly unique and discovering the joy of it, is so rewarding and empowering.

You can find Gina and her website www.ginacatherine.love on instagram at @ginacatherine_coaching or listen to Gina on clubhouse. Gina hosts regular conversations on clubhouse. Her handle on clubhouse is Gina Catherine

Ep 18 Demystifying Hormone Replacement Therapy with Dr Fatima Khan

I’ve wanted to do this podcast for quite some time and have been quietly searching for a Doctor who is a menopause specialist and who takes a holistic and systemic view of the Midlife and Menopause transition. I looked at practitioners all over the world and found Dr Fatima Khan who funnily enough works about 2.5kms from my house!

Fatima is a highly skilled Peri-Menopause and Menopause Specialist with a holistic approach to women’s physical, emotional and mental wellbeing.  She completed her medical training in the United Kingdom from Imperial College London in 2007 achieving a Bachelor in Medicine and Bachelor in Surgery. She also achieved a Bachelor in Science in Pharmacology and Therapeutics with publication of her research. 

Fatima has an Advanced Menopause Certification accredited from the British Menopausal Society and  Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive and Healthcare of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. This was achieved after training extensively at Kings College London, which is a tertiary referral centre for menopausal women with complex medical backgrounds. She has also undertaken further training in the USA on optimising hormonal health for anti-ageing and longevity.

I asked Fatima to not only talk about HRT and explain what it is, its history and the messaging around it, but also to talk about Estrogen and the role it takes up in our female bodies beyond our menstrual cycles and fertility. This is because Estrogen plays an important role in supporting the functioning of a number of our body’s systems. Additionally I asked her to talk about how the decline in estrogen and progesterone impacts on other hormones in our body.

Fatima has given us a multi-faceted, in depth, explanation of HRT and our hormonal health. In this podcast you will learn:

• The link between estrogen and our mental health;

• The impact of estrogen decline on our metabolic health, cardiovascular health, cellular health, and our bone health;

• The lifestyle factors you need to consider when you are in your perimenopause transition;

• a thorough understanding of Hormone Replacement Therapy and the history of it, the clinical trials that have occurred in our recent past that have impacted our perceptions of HRT;

• And why taking a multi-faceted view of your health and well-being is important in the menopause transition.

You can find Fatima on Instagram at @menopausespecialist or on her work website www.agoracentre.com.au. I encourage you to follow Fatima on instagram if you use it, she has some excellent posts that are all evidence based. I think it is incredibly important to understand the many facets of the menopause transition and that includes Hormone Replacement Therapy. Broad knowledge and understanding of your health, in mind, body and spirit, gives you information, options, discernment and choice. It empowers you to be creative in driving you life from a desire based perspective.

Ep 13 Three Golden Opportunities with Dr Nic Pawley

Today I have Nicole Pawley with me to talk about the Three Golden Opportunities. Nicole is a Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine and a Birth Educator. The Three Golden Opportunities are three times in our life, as women, that are large inflexion points. Times where we have the opportunity to either foster or risk our health during the transition.

The Three Golden Opportunities are Menarche, Post Partum and Menopause. Chinese Medicine has a long history of menstrual and post partum care. The three golden opportunities are life gateways and periods of life where there is rapid change and a physical reaction. In Chinese Medicine we talk about Qi, Jing, Ying and Yang.

Chinese medicine seeks first to understand natural cycles, and then take advantage of them in order to optimise health and longevity - thereby avoiding future imbalances and making it easier to treat any that do occur. To understand why menstruation, postpartum and menopause are so key in terms of health preservation it’s important to understand the concept of Qi and Jing, which are essence or life force energy.

We are born with a finite amount of life force energy. Qi and Jing are like your bank account if you go hard and fast you will spend it all. Jing is there to help you move through these transitions. If you have a good amount of Jing you will have vitality. If you run hard life will be hectic and these transitions will be difficult. It is important to learn how to nourish and replenish our Jing and this is where pleasure practices come in.

In our practice of pleasure, both sensual and sexual, we replenish our Jing and nourish ourselves.

Our Western Culture is very yang, constant go and on. What is valued is productivity and achievement producing overworked, frazzled and burned out humans. This is detrimental to Women’s health; to everyone’s health. How can we be more Yin our life? Listen to the podcast and you will find out.

You can find Nicole on instagram @drnicpawley. Or you can message me and I can put you in touch with her.

Ep 12 Cyclical Living with Jaime Lauren

This week I have the wonderful Jaime Lauren, who is a menstrual and fertility awarenes coach talking about cyclical living for Women. I loved this conversation! I am a big supporter of cylical living for women and this is why I really wanted to do a podcast on it, it is something I teach in all my work.

Jaime runs a 10 week course of cyclical living and she does one on one work with women around fertility awareness. So what is cyclical living? It is designing your life around the menstrual cycle. This may seem a strange concept to us in the modern western world but women did it for thousands of years prior to the industrial revolution.

We seem to find ourselves in an epidemic of hormone related health issues and this shows up in many health issues in women from teenage years to the 80s. Health issues such as PCOS, endometriosis, infertility, fibroids, acne, IBS, early or difficult menopause, early puberty, sleep problems, anxiety, depression, hair loss and amenorrhea. I am sure there are more.

Understanding your cycle and living with it is, I believe, a big lever when it comes to self-love, self-acceptance and women stepping into their wild power.

You can find Jamie on Facebook in her Group Cyclical Living for Women, her website www.jaimelauren.coach or on instagram @menstrualmagic_