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 45 Creating and running a socially responsible, sustainable business with Christine McDougall

As the world we live and work in has become more complex, we have had to change the way we live and work. Our global society has gone through significant change but the way we create and build businesses has not.

How we approach organisational design, redesigning organisational processes for complexity has been the most challenging aspect for many business owners regardless of their size. Unfortunately many of our big societal processes and systems are broken and falling apart because the very foundations and rules that guide them, do not account for the full complex picture of what is actually happening in their business. The externalities that they produce are having far reaching and detrimental impacts on the wider communities they exist within. I have been waiting for years for someone to tackle this head on and there are a few brave visionary souls out there who are ready to do this.

Christine McDougall is one of them. Christine is a visionary, a writer, a pioneer and self-described edge dweller. She created Syntropic World to educate and build systems and processes to support the running of business in a VUCA world that support the health of the planet. Christine works at the level of societal and organisational change by educating individuals and teams on how to create the day to day of running their business so that it supports our society to thrive. Her mission is to educate people to build sustainable organisations that support the health of the planet.

In this podcast we hope to challenge your thinking on how you run your business. You will also hear about Christine’s midlife transition and how it has supported her to be radically honest with herself and step into her wise woman power.

You can find Christine at www.syntropic.worldorld/, on facebook at Syntropic World and Instagram @syntropicworld

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