Ep 49 How do we get better at being with our emotions and regulating ourselves

Many of the clients I work with, whether they be senior executives I am coaching, or clients I am doing relationship coaching with, often have a goal of wanting to get better at being with their emotions. They want to be able to respond better to the challenges that life throws their way.

The only way to do this is to work with the autonomic nervous system (ANS). Your ANS state drives your thoughts, feelings and emotions. When you feel safe, connected and regulated you will experience different feelings and think different thoughts than when you feel unsafe and disconnected.

Most of us, over years of experiencing chronic stress or traumatic events, have a nervous system that is really struggling with the capacity of what it is experiencing. That means our band width gets very small and we can get overwhelmed quickly. The key is working with the nervous system to build the capacity to feel all your feelings. You cannot just block one out and expect to feel everything else. Our system is not that clever. When you repress one, you repress them all.

My other observation is that many of us experienced emotional neglect growing up. Our parents are the children of people who were very traumatised by wars, the depression and who lived in survival mode. There are many parents out there who think that their job is to provide a house, warm clothing, food and schooling and that that is enough. There was no capacity, focus or understanding of how to nurture the emotional life of their children because this was not role modelled to them. In the broader context of what these generations experienced this is understandable.
It doesn't have to be this way anymore.

We can be the generations that change that, we don't have to continue these patterns.

Talk therapy or coaching does not work because it does not work at the level of the nervous system. You have to work with a somatic approach with someone who is trained to work with the nervous system and trauma.

The benefits to your overall health and wellbeing are huge. You will have more energy to function each day and doing this nervous system work frees you from constantly having to spend huge amount of energy to calm yourself down when you feel anxious, reactive and unable to switch off. It helps you make some choices and start to take action when you are feeling constantly stuck and disconnected because your body is in shutdown.

Best of all it allows you to put your precious energy into what matters most to you. Into the relationships you care about and to enjoy life. It reduces your needs for experiencing big highs and lows and to learn to feel safe to feel contented and even sometimes bored. That life is made up of long period of contentment and experiencing joy from the simple things in life.

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 47 Midlife the path to authenticity with Dianne Shepherd

For my last podcast of the year, my good friend and colleague Dianne Shepherd, joined me as we talked about all the weird and whacky stuff that can happen in our midlife transition. We actually recorded it a few months ago but I wanted to leave it until the end of the year, a little Christmas and New Year gift to you. Dianne’s work focuses on supporting midlife women in sacred sexuality, connecting with their sensuality and pleasure and really building a sacred relationship with their body. Dianne is also an astrologer so we went there too.

We talked about Dianne’s own turbulent midlife transition and how it was a healing pathway for her. How finding pleasure practices helped her find and connect with her authentic self.

You will also hear us discuss astrology and the major midlife transits that happen and how they impact on us. In particular, Uranus opposition, Chiron return and Venus return. We experience 3 Venus returns in midlife (around 40, 48 and 56 years of age approximately), how all of these returns of supportive of our emotional growth and healing if we embrace them and pay attention to what is coming up for us.

Dianne and I also spoke about how in our fifties the integration of masculine and feminine energies is common and this is also reflected in psychology literature as well and talked about as anima and animus. That this integration is important and midlife as it is an enabler of deep connection with parts of ourself and necessary to be able to step into elderhood and the roles we are required to take up in community in these years.

You can find Dianne at her website www.shakticore.com and on instagram @vital.goddess. She is also has an amazing podcast you can find on Spotify called The Vital Goddess.

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 43 Liberating the Inner Child with Moira Cormack

In this episode I am joined by my colleague and friend Moira Cormack to talk about Inner child work and how powerful it is for all of us to do so that we can heal our childhood wounding.

In her coaching work, Moira focuses. specifically on supporting people to heal their emotional pain with inner child and body based healing. Moira is currently in the process of creating an inner child online course so it seemed like a good time to talk about what inner child work is all about.

Moira talks about the inner child and how we can find our inner child somatically because it lives within us in our body. Our nervous system stores every experience that we have in our body and we can connect to our inner child through sensation and the language of the felt sense. The felt sense is the language of the body. We talk about how it is the unmet needs of our inner child that are coming out in our adult relationships and that we project these needs onto our partners to meet. It is not the role of our partners to provide those needs, they are not our parents. Part of this work is learning to find your own inner parents and adult parts of yourself so that you are able to regulate and soothe yourself when you find your inner child parts triggered.

Moira shared many personal experiences of her own life journey, how midlife has been a powerful transition for her to do this deep work herself, that illustrate how highly impactful this work is. We can see through the gift of hindsight how all of her life experiences and work experiences make her the perfect person to teach and coach deep healing experiences with inner child work.

You can find Moira on instagram at @moira_coach or on Facebook and her link Tree is linktree/Moira-Coach

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 37 Skin magic with Richie Angelo

Today my good friend Richie Angelo joins me to talk about skin through the major rites of passage we go through. Richie is a beauty therapist who is a skin guru. She has incorporated further study into her practice and uses both kinesiology and energetic work to treat her clients.

In this podcast Richie explains how our skin is more than just the boundary of our body, it is part of the detoxification system of our body and it interacts with all other body systems. That our skin is part of our immune system and often represents on the outside what is going on in the inside for us. How we can tell by our skin whether it is hormone changes or toxicity in our body based on where our skin is changing on our body.

We decided to frame the conversation around our rites of passage: Maiden, Mother, Maga, Crone and how our hormonal changes drive significant changes in our skin.

if you want to skip through sections to get to content that is relevant to your life stage, the time stamps are:

17:10 Maiden, the teenage years

21:50 Mother - the impact of pregnancy on our skin

28:45 Maga - midlife and the menopause transition

45:55 Crone - Our early 60s onwards

Of course there are lots of gold moments throughout, Richie’s knowledge and wisdom about skin is incredible.

You can find Richie at www.madebyself.com.au or on instagram @_madebyself_

EP 36 The deeper meaning of midlife, menopause the the seasons of life

The midlife crisis is one of the most poorly misunderstood transitions and no surprises that menopause is too. In this episode I talk about the deeper meaning of both and go into explaining the challenges of all the rites of passage we have.

I talk about:

• What the developmental challenge of the individual rites of passage are,

• What happens when you don’t address that

• How you have to look at menopause through multiple lenses; biological, psychological, social and cultural and how these impact on each person,

• That every individual’s menopause transition is unique and it is an invitation into preparing yourself to transition to your second half of life.

• How midlife is transition into 2nd adulthood and what that means,

• Elderhood and the role of elders in society,

• How grief plays out in all of our transitions.

At the end of the podcast I refer to my INNER SEASONS content. If you click on the link you can get through to that are you will be able to download a copy of it for yourself.

Ep 35 Is it masculine, feminine or just being human with Sasha Ostara

Today I am joined again by my very fabulous friend and colleague Sasha Ostara. Sasha is a Somatic Intimacy Coach. Sasha and I both have a really strong aversion to the labelling of behavioural traits as masculine or feminine and instead prefer to categorise them as human qualities.

In this podcast we talk about why we believe this and how our somatic training around the nervous system has helped inform this view. We also discussed:

• How labelling a behaviour masculine or feminine just weaponises the division that already exists between genders. That they are often confused with gender and somewhere along the way historically, someone decided to assign males to masculine and females to feminine, it could have been the other way,

• How our autonomic nervous system drives our behaviour and actually it is more helpful to look at the nervous system state in any given moment,

• How women have been conditioned to be in fawn and freeze response and that behaviour is deemed acceptable,

• The wave of gender self help books that came out in the 1970s and 1980s whilst helpful for some people in understanding others just further replicated earlier ideas of division and reinforced this point of view,

• How hormones impact on our nervous system response,

• The different polarities that exist in a social system and that it is the polarity and the patterns to look for not a masculine of feminine quality,

• How our relationships can be a replica of broader patterns that exist within social systems and cultural contexts that we are a part of,

• That we’ve noticed with female clients who want their partners to be more masculine, when asked to describe what that is what they are actually looking for, what they responded with is a description of adult behaviour, not child like behaviour,

• How gendered terms carry a confirmation bias and it is important to actually look at these terms and whether you are doing this when you label a behaviour masculine or feminine and how that narrows people’s perceptions of how they can show up in the world.

  We talked about three different books in the podcast, they were ‘The Tragedy of Heterosexuality’ by Jane Ward, ‘Delusions of Gender’ by Cordelia Fine, ‘The Flowering Wand: rewilding the sacred masculine’ by Sophie Strand. The podcast Sasha Mentions is “If books could kill”

  You can find Sasha at her website www.sasha-ostara.com or her instagram page @sasha_ostara

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.

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 27 Feeling the wild belly of grief with Ellen Clarke

Grief is one of the toughest emotions that most of us have to feel and work through. In our culture we seem to have lost our way when it comes to expressing grief. We have really narrowed our understanding of what being human really means and that includes the emotions we let ourselves feel. Establishing a relationship with our grief and being able to stay present with it in our adult selves is one of the learning challenges of working with sorrow, sadness and grief. It is part of our maturation into our elderhood that we learn to befriend and express grief. To develop structures that support us to hold it and work with it in the community.

In this episode my friend and colleague Ellen Clarke and I talk through all the ways that grief can come into our lives and the challenges we have in being able to let ourselves fall into the belly of it.

In this podcast you will hear us talk about:

• Death and how in the western world we expect to wake up and be alive each day;

• Grief is part of our transition through our rites of passage in life that the expression of it helps us let go of parts of ourselves that we don’t need anymore and birth new parts of ourselves. That in midlife learning to connect with our emotions allows us to transition into our emotional adulthood;

• We can experience grief after severe illness or life threatening experiences in conjunction with gratitude and this can be a lonely and confusing experience;

• Without any structures, supports or containers to hold us, it feels too wieldy and scary to let it flow. If we had someone who is a non-griever shepherding us through it how might that be for us?;

• If we got good at letting ourselves feeling the little moments of sadness and disappointment each day this might help us deal with the bigger feelings of grief and it might actually be a highly connected experience for us;

• Grief can feel like an emotional rollercoaster (we both hate rollercoasters by the way) and pinging all over the place in our nervous system can feel like we have no foundations;

• There is often fear and shame wrapped over the top of those emotions that we stuff under our proverbial rug and this can make what we are feeling feel really murky and hard to connect with.

You can find Ellen at her website www.ellenmay.com.au on instagram at @ellenismagic or on facebook

Ep 25 Sacred Sexuality with Suzanne Najarian

Many people, regardless of gender, come to midlife and start to wonder about their sexuality. It might not be conscious thoughts but often a yearning or longing for something more in their intimate life. Both with themselves and their partner, if they have one. That more, is often better sex or a more sacred connection with their sexuality.

Today I talk to my friend and colleague, Suzanne Najarian, who is a sacred sexuality coach about what sacred sexuality is and how the big changes and transitions in our life point us home to that truth of what that is for us. Suzanne is also a lactation consultant and works with many women and their partners pre and post birth not only in helping them with breast feeding but also understanding their bodies pre and post birth.

In this podcast we talk about:

• Sometimes the sex dies in our relationship as we go through the big life transitions of becoming a parent or midlife transition or menopause. However few of us have the language to describe what that yearning actually as. We just feel deep in our bones that there has to be more.

• Many of us are taught to please our partners or that our pleasure can only occur in conjunction with another person. These big transitions drive us toward our truth and to come home to what is pleasurable for us.

• We are so many different women during our lives and these big transitions, particularly Menopause are a chance to pause and integrate all the different parts of ourselves.

• How our sexuality and desire changes throughout our lives and how our hormones can facilitate that.

• How both childbirth and menopause crack us open and unravel us making us feel immense discomfort in how we feel in our bodies. This can be very confusing.

• To create your own pleasure practice and learn to understand your own responsive desire that you can turn on over time with attention to pleasure.

• How working on our sexuality and cultivating your own pleasure will unblock and/or increase your creativity.

• How our bodies are able to often tolerate more discomfort than pleasure. We then seek pleasure through pathways that don’t support our optimal health. When we pursue a sacred sexuality practice and work out what is pleasurable for us we stop those previous strategies we created to numb out from discomfort.

You can find Suzanne at her website www.suzannenajarian.com or on her instagram @suzanne.najarian

Ep 24 Your Money Relationship with Tamara Lee

How would you describe your relationship with Money? Yes you are reading it correctly, we have a relationship with money. How does your nervous system feel when you think about money? Did you know that money and sex have a relationship? Today I talk with Tamara Lee who is a Money Coach about Money and how we can improve our relationship with it.

Tamara is a Sex, Love and Relationship Coach who specialises in coaching people around Money. Tamara is a multi-talented human who has a wide variety of work experiences and has been a facilitator of training for people around financial fitness when they are coming out of bankruptcy. She decided to study Sexuality, Love and Relationship coaching on an intuitive impulse which is how I met her. Tamara has been described by her clients as a Magical Money Witch!

Many of us have unusual relationships with money and it shows up in a myriad of ways. We overspend or we hoard our money. A lot of training around money management deals at the surface or topical end often on skills. In her work, Tamara goes deep into the unconscious exploring our level of safety in our nervous system with money.

There is so much to our relationship with Money and it is intimately linked to our nervous system, how safe we feel, our relationship with darker emotions; how able we are to let ourselves experience them. Our childhood behavioural habits and wounding, which we talk about as inner child, from which we are making decisions about our money life. Our ability to notice our triggers from our child parts of soothe ourselves in the moment is a big part of working consciously with our relationship with money.

During the interview we talk about a book by Lynn Twist called The Soul of Money which is worth a read.

You can find Tamara on instagram @tamaraleecoaching and Facebook at Tamara Lee.

Ep 23 Blooming after Divorce with Elizabeth Clair de Lune

Divorce is an extremely complex transition that many of us go through, that can really rock our foundations and sense of self. For many people, post divorce can be a time of immense growth and identity change and having support during this period creates both a safe and comforting space for us to grow. These life transitions are portals calling us to the next phase of our life.

Today I talk with my friend and colleague Elizabeth Clair de Lune who is a Life transitions Coach and Trauma Resolution Guide in training. Elizabeth supports people through Life Transitions, in particular, she supports people through Divorce.

Elizabeth uses a body based, trauma based, coaching methodology to support people coming back to the blueprint of themselves, their original essence. Your blueprint is coherent, aligned, tapped into your greater vision of you.

There are four phases that Elizabeth works with to help people bring their blueprint back online. First, learning how to get your Needs met. Second, Boundaries and Gatekeeping how to sense back into your boundaries and work with them flexibly. Third, learning to trust your intuition again, this feeds into boundaries, and finally, Self Expression. This is where the new version of ourselves emerges as we come toward the other end of the transition portal. Elizabeth finds that often our attachment styles come into play in the first two stages.

Elizabeth talks about as we go through any transition, self expression is the last phase that we start to emerge. Growing and emerging these new parts of ourselves that wants to express differently in the world.

This is a beautiful and rich conversation that will help you think differently about divorce and offer you a new mental map of how transitions can be.

You can find Elizabeth at The Unicorn Academy, on instagram @the.unicorn.academy.tm or on tick tok @theunicornacademy

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