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 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 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 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