Ep 64 Roots: Understanding somatic decolonisation with Sasha Ostara

What if the systems that have shaped our world for centuries aren't just political structures but are actually living in your body right now? In this rich conversation, I sit down with my dear friend Sasha Ostara, writer, coach and decolonisation educator, to explore how capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and human supremacy don't just exist "out there"; they show up as chronic tension, hypervigilance, collapsed chests, shame, and the relentless hum of never-enough.

Drawing on Sasha's viral blog post and Rupa Marya's book Inflame, we trace how colonisation becomes embodied and what it means to begin the slow, tender work of decolonising from the inside out.

In this episode, we explore:

• The four "legs" of colonialism — human supremacy, white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism — and the distinct somatic signatures each one leaves in the body,

• Why decolonisation isn't just a political act, but an embodied one: the ideas that have lived in our nervous systems for generations can't be thought away,

• How white supremacy lands differently in different bodies, as hypervigilance, fear, shame, and disgust; and why those experiences are more interconnected than we often assume,

• The somatic cost of patriarchy: the tight throat, the collapsed chest, the learned habit of making ourselves smaller and policing our own voices to stay safe,

• Why men are often the first and most hidden victims of male supremacy; cut off from their own feeling, craving connection but conditioned to perform disconnection,

• Capitalism as extraction: how the "never enough" of consumerism mirrors the same extractive logic we apply to our bodies, our time, and our life force,

• What actually happens in the body when safety begins to return — and why healing often feels heavier before it feels lighter,

• The invitation to move from a mechanistic relationship with our bodies to an ecological one — drawing on Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass and the concept of the Honourable Harvest.

There's also a gorgeous thread on the gifts hidden inside perimenopause, the "hungry ghost" of consumerism, and why — as Sasha puts it — the moment we start seeing these systems clearly, we begin changing the paradigm for everyone around us.

Find Sasha at: sasha-ostara.com, on instagram @sasha-ostara, tiktok, and facebook.

Ep 63 Embracing Sacred Intimacy with Ashley Miley

Today I talk with Ashely Miley, a sacred intimacy coach, about how we can develop a deeper connection with the our sensuality and sexuality. With our life force energy. Ashley talks about her own journey of connecting with her sexuality after long periods of disconnection from her body and what was helpful for her. We discussed how trauma, particularly for people with a history of sexual trauma, disconnects us from our bodies as a strategy of protection and how we can understand that when we look through the contextual lenses of the nervous system and embodiment.

Ashely studied music at University and was an orchestral oboe player. For many years this gave her an avenue for self-expression however it got to a point where the rules and processes of a professional classical music career became too constricting for her and she was not able to express who she was anymore. This lead her to pursue training in sexuality and relationship coaching. We talk about this was a natural avenue into connecting with her life force energy and embodied expression.

We also discussed:

• How sensuality is a fabulous bridge to pleasure and often a great starting point when we are feeling really disconnected from our body,

• We define sacred intimacy and what is actually means in partnership and for also developing a very deep connection with ourselves,

• How sacred intimacy can take us from performance to pleasure particularly when we are in long term relationships where we might experience intimacy as something we do rather than something we feel,

• What foundation conditions need to be in place for couple’s to experience greater intimancy especially when their is a history of trauma within the relationship,

• How reclaiming our sexuality in midlife can be incredibly healing.

You can find Ashely at www.thesacredintimacytemple.com .

Ep 61 A map for growth and healing

A quick little podcast with just me today. I have been reflecting on how some people struggle through growth and healing, more in terms of being lost in the liminal space. In the darkness we might say. I did write a blog about the anatomy of life transitions where I talked about it a few months ago but I think with a podcast you can sometimes say a little bit more.

Recently, I had an experience where something of mine came up again and I was thinking wow I have all the resources, training and skills to know what is going on. What I noticed is that the impact of it was significantly less than in the past. Minimal really. It was more a noticing and then I was able to resource myself.

So often, when people begin trauma healing or embark on a personal growth journey, they imagine it will be a straight line: one step after another, always moving forward, never looking back. But real healing and growth rarely follow that kind of neat, linear path. Instead, they are more like a spiral or a tide, flowing in cycles, circling back, rising and falling.

Healing also has the rhythm of the tide. There are moments of expansion, clarity, and energy—like the incoming tide that fills and nourishes. And there are moments of retreat, rest, and stillness—like the tide going out, leaving space for reflection and integration. Neither state is better or worse; both are necessary.

When we expect healing to be linear, we can feel shame or discouragement when old triggers resurface or when we find ourselves “back where we started. Recognising this cyclical rhythm allows us to meet ourselves with more compassion.

Ep 58 Understanding Human Design with Moira Cormack

Today I am talking to Moira Cormack, my multi talented colleague and friend about Human Design. I have to tell you this podcast was a lot of fun because Moira is fun. Moira is a coach, parenting expert, human design expert and all round super human being. This is Moira’s third time on my podcast, if you didn’t catch the last two on inner child and creativity you should check them out also.

Moira doesn’t so much go into the different human design profile, rather she gives us the bigger context of why we would use Human Design. How does it help us be more human, how does it help us connect with our deeper self.

We talked about:

• Why we would use Human Design and how, at this point in time, Human Design is helpful to people to further their personal growth and development,

• How life is made up of many decisions and choices we make each day and how human design helps us, through understanding our profile, how to better make decisions to align with our energy system in our body,

• How many of us end up in careers, influenced by our family systems, not doing what we really love and how knowing our design helps us to choose work that is more aligned with our natural gifts and energy systems,

• How energy systems in different types work and why not listening to our body leads to health issues,

• How when we move outside our design, we often experience a discordant note or emotion and this is a sign we are not listening to our body.

You can find Moira on Gates of the Moon FB Group, on instagram she is @moira_coach and she has a substack she writes on.

Ep 57 The Pleasure Alchemist with Daniella Matutes

In this episode, I talk with Daniella Matutes who is a somatic coach, breathwork teacher, a very talented human really, who has a not for profit focused on healing gender based violence against women in two generations. We discuss her own journey of healing from abuse and how a body based approach to healing trauma has helped her to process the trauma in her body.

Daniella has created an approach called Pleasure Alchemy that offers a road map to individuals with trauma that helps them to understand the healing journey by orienting and resourcing to pleasure and building capacity in the nervous system to feel more. More sensations, emotions, feelings.

In this podcast you will hear:

• Daniella describe her own experience of healing trauma and the different ways she experienced healing,

• How trauma is passed down generationally through our attachment system and within the physiology of the body,

• Different survival strategies and how they show up in our body,

• How the culture we grow up in is internalised and significantly impacts how we show up in the world,

• Leadership culture in large organisations and how individiual’s trauma plays out on a daily basis,

• Our inner ecology and how it influences what we see in the outer world.

This is a rich and broad conversation that will really deep your understanding of trauma and give you a new set of glasses to help you see new ways of healing.

You will find Daniella at www.somaticself.love, on Instagram, Facebook and Substack.

Ep 56 Art, a resource for all of us, with Gemma Donnellan

Today I am talking with Gemma Donnellan who is an artist and art curator, a creator of community and a natural born network. Gemma has a gift of bringing people together around art. Gemma began her career as an artist which she has created over time whilst working full time and also being a stay at home parent. She has spent many years painting, in community, before moving back into a curatorial role, bringing emerging and established artists together in exhibitions.

Gemma is skilled in how she pulls together different artists to curate art shows of diverse pieces of art that seem to have a common thread running through them that you can only work out once you have looked at all the paintings.

She has created networks for women to come together around art in her quarterly sessions she calls Reciprocity, where ideas are shared, provocative conversations created around topics of interest.

In the podcast we talked about:

• Art as a support for all of us in tough times and the healing power of art,

• We talked about the creativity that exists within all of us and expressed in our own unique ways,

• The healing power of art and how we can express what sits deeply within us, bypassing the rational part of our brain and express from the deepest parts of ourselves,

• How to choose art for your own personal collection. Whilst buying art can be overwhelming we don’t have to buy the most expensive piece but rather what speaks to us and evokes an emotional response.

You can find Gemma at www.artfortoday.com.au, on instagram @artfortoday and facebook

Ep 55 Finding true intimacy at midlife with Heidi Trudinger

Today I am talking to the fabulous Heidi Trudinger about midlife relationships. Our bodies go through huge changes at midlife and women in particular feel the change more acutely due to the hormonal dropoff of perimenopause. Men go through their own hormonal change with Andropause however the hormonal shifts are small each year and the decline is steadier.

All of this impacts how we feel about our bodies and our imprint on ageing that we learned through both our family system and culturally, has a huge impact on our ability to embrace our changing bodies at midlife. Most of the fear that we experience around ageing is not about getting old it is actually about dying and Heidi and talked quite a bit about this.

How do we sustain sexual intimacy at midlife with all these changes? Well it is not too hard but for most of us it is about learning about what sex actually is; something few of us learned when we were younger. It is about learning what true intimacy is and how to hold space for that with each other.

We also discussed:

• Self love as an antidote to ageing and how to find that,

• Embracing the Maga (archetype) at midlife really understanding what our individual expression of that that is and how it is different to the Crone,

• How we can reconnect with the playful parts of ourselves, parts we have often buried deep in our unconscious, to reinvigorate our relationship,

• How our body brings up old trauma for resolution at this transition and what a gift that can be,

• How deep rest is incredibly sustaining for our bodies and is part of our erotic practice,

• How our midlife transition is a portal for us to claim our authentic sexual selves and how we might start the path to explore this aspect of our selves.

You can find Heidi at heiditrue.com.au. She is also on instagram @true.intimacy and Facebook

Ep 54 Understanding Burnout with Dr Ashlea Broomfield

Burnout is a complex health syndrome that we seem to be hearing more cases of everyday. I am seeing it more and more in workplaces and working with people moving trough big life transitions. So I have been deeply curious about it for the last couple of years and wanting to talk to a guest about it on my podcast. Who better to discuss than Dr Ashlea Broomfield - The Vitality Doctor.

Dr Ash is a specialist GP, sexologist, Mind-Body Therapist, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, Meditation Coach and Credentialed Eating Disorder Clinician. Dr Ash is invested in her patients health holistically, she is invested in supporting patients to flourish holistically as a whole person, mentally, physically, sexually and spiritually.

Today we talked about Burnout. What is it? How does it come about? Is it a workplace issue or a cultural issue. Given the culture we live in how can we resource and nourish our bodies to ensure this doesn’t happen to us. We talked about the body as a whole system and that our health exists and is influenced by the environments that we exist within.

We also discussed:

• Women’s menstruality, their menarche, motherhood and menopause and how these big changes to our endocrine system and the roles that we take up in life impact our mental and physical health;

• Chronic workplace stress that is not being managed well;

• What the conditions are that set someone up for burnout, as defined by the world health organisation (WHO);

• How the working conditions and the 40 hour work week were created 150 years ago when we had more community support for families and roles and expectations for parents were very different;

• Burnout as a complex systemic issue and what are the solutions that we can put in place to solve it;

• It starts with us as individuals being clear about our own limits and boundaries and learning to identify what a YES and NO feels like in our body.

Dr Ash really has fantastic perspective on this so make sure you listen to the very end because there are some really wise words she has for all of us. If you would like to connect with Dr Ash you can find her at drashleabroomfield.com.au, on instagram @thevitalitydoctor. On facebook Dr Ashlea Broomfield - The Vitality Doctor.

Ep 53 Moving through life with greater ease with Sophia Breust

As we get older many of us experience joint pain and muscle pain. We think it is just our old joints but it might very well be dry fascia. In this episode I talk to Sophia Breust who is a structural integration practitioner about the many benefits of working with fascia.

Sophia has an interesting story and her own health and wellbeing today is a direct reflection of the benefits of structural integration. After going through some relational trauma in 2014, Sophia was diagnosed with PTSD. Experiencing symptoms from extreme anxiety, recurring nightmares, and shakes to lethargy, Sophia explored talk therapy to help resolve what she thought was a problem in her mind. Over 2 years, she showed up religiously to her psychology sessions, but she felt she wasn't getting anywhere.

​After years of looking for answers and feeling totally helpless, Sophia found Structural Integration & Myofascial Bodywork (MFB) and realised how disconnected she was from her physical body. This was the missing link for her; the problem wasn't just in her mind, it was in her body! Trauma is stored in the body, and if we become disconnected from the sensations that are going on in our physical body, our mind won't get a chance to be at ease.

After many years of healing, processing, feeling, and deeply connecting to her body, Sophia now helps many people make sense of their physical pain and what may be going on for them emotionally. She calls this Emotional Anatomy. While a free and open fascial system creates a more balanced emotional state, Sophia has seen the impact of MFB on excellent recovery, lymph & blood flow, and injury prevention. MFB, according to Sophia and many of her clients, is truly life-changing!

In this episode we talk about all things fascia, the bodymind connection, healing trauma and a bit about ageing bodies. Sophia is based in Adelaide, Australia, you can find Sophia on instagram @muscle_sense or via her website www.musclesense.net

EP 51 Supporting your body with nutrition in Midlife with Annie Gaudreault

In midlife, we start to notice changes in how our body metabolises food, how we recover from exercise and how we are able to deal with stress in our life. No longer can we drink lots of alcohol and pull up OK the next morning. Maybe there are a few sneaky kilograms piling on. This is because as we enter perimenopause, our hormones start to shift how we metabolise food and this impacts on many areas of our health.

Annie Gaudreault, who is a Licenced Nutritionist and Health Coach from Toronto, CA, joins me in the podcast to talk about the impact of nutrition on our life as we move into our midlife. Annie specialises in working with women in midlife to make sense of all the wellness information out there and to make sustainable changes to their health and wellbeing.

Annie has her own interesting midlife transition story. She started running in her 30s and as she approached her midlife transition she really trained hard and found emotional and mental resilience expanded and she was able to deepen her running expertise to run marathons. From there she moved into competing in Iron Man Triathlons. For Annie her midlife transition was an awakening. An awakening to becoming her true self and pursuing a new career in nutrition that created more meaning in her life.

• In the podcast we talked about:

• The lack of education around menopause and how this impacts our lifestyle choices,

• The impact of estrogen decline on other hormones in particular our metabolic health,

• How estrogen decline impacts on how our body can process sugar and simple carbohydrates. The impact on insulin production and how this may cause insulin insensitivity and pre-diabetes health issues,

• Strategies to deal with addiction to sugar and carbohydrates,

• Fibre and Protein in our diet and how eating more of these in midlife supports our health,

• How internalised cultural belief systems impact our perception of midlife and the impact of it on our life.

You can find Annie at www.veev.ca or on instagram @veev_wellness. Annie works globally online, so if you would like to book a time to talk to her about your nutrition needs at midlife you can book a call via her website.

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 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 40 Embodiment is Liberation

Embodiment, it is a word that we hear a lot. What does it really mean?

It is our ability to sense and be present with our internal feelings, sensations and emotions. The skill of being able to sense this all of this is called interoception. Interoception is available to all of this but most of us don’t know this, it often takes a bit of practice. Sometimes when we have trauma or lots of stress, it can be difficult for us to be with our interoceptive awareness.

In the podcast I talk about:

• What embodiment is, and the difference between feelings and emotions. They are often used interchangeably as the same thing. They are not;

• Why does embodiment matter? How it helps us to be more present to our life in the moment, it builds our resilience, it improves our mental and physical health, it connects us to our pleasure - both sensual and sexual;

• How our life experience leaves a trace in our nervous system. Our body creates meaning maps in our implicit memory which is important for our survival but sometimes these old maps hold us back and get in the way of our personal growth;

• Why you can’t think your way out of being with your emotions and feelings and a somatic approach is the only way to heal these old stuck patterns of stress and trauma;

• Why embodiment is liberating. Our body is the house we live in, we become less reactive and make better decisions and choices, we project our emotions less and this deepens and enriches our relationships with ourselves and others. We let go of the old stories and rewrite the story of our life going forward. This is empowering and it improves not only our experience in the world but the connections we have with others.

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 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.