Ep 30 Menopause - all the aspects of it that no one talks about

Today I’m on my own. I decided to do a shorter podcast in honour of world menopause month and in fact this week the 18th October being world menopause day, about all the stuff related to menopause that no one talks about. Believe me there is a lot. Menopause is larger sold as a disorder. It is a natural part of life for people in female bodies and most people think its just a whole host of physical symptoms.

Menopause is a rite of passage that is an identity change and a spiritual change. It is an awakening to purpose and meaning in our life and welcomes us into our wise woman power. So in this episode you will hear my talk about different aspects of it that are not often talked about or well explained.

So in this episode I talked about:

• How hormonal changes impact on your HPA axis. The HPA axis maintains feedback loops to maintain homesostasis in the physiology of your body. Changes in those feedback loops impact your neuro-endocrine, behavioural, autonomic and metabolic functions

• That hormonal changes will then impact your autonomic nervous system states and this in turn influences your behaviour,

• That perimenopause often highlights vulnerabilities that we have physically and mentally. What if we approached the physical symptoms as signs or messengers of area we should focus on and pay attention to,

• That cultural belief systems we have internalised around ageing, sexuality, sensuality and femininity come under scrutiny and they may very well be holding us back from growing intot he next evolution of ourselves,

• That our libido may be affected and how you might manage that if you are in a relationship,

• That the flow of your kundalini energy changes. Kundalini is your life force energy, this is also sexual energy.

• That you can review and reinvent how you do transitions and deal with change,

• That grief pops its head up in most transitions and it has a role to play in allowing us to let go of parts of us that we don’t need anymore. This is super important in menopause as often shadow work is required to grow into your wise woman power.

• There is no road map for this and every person’s journey is unique. There is however a requirement for slowing down, resting and taking time out for yourself,

• Relationships can be heavily impacted during this transition and learning to be vulnerable and talking about how you are feeling and what is coming up for you will go a long way toward building intimacy and connection in your relationship.

I hope you enjoy this and if you want to explore more reading on this I have a list of great books in my resources page. You could also reach out to me for coaching and book a clarity call if you need support during your menopause transition.

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 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 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 22 The heart of creativity with Moira Cormack

Where does creativity comes from? This question has always sat with me. I am a very creative person and I have been painting, sewing, dancing, drawing since I was a young girl. I’ve rarely stopped. I’m always curious when people say to me ‘I am not creative’. The curious part of me always thinks, what no, it is in there somewhere we just have to find it.

So I invited one of my most creative friends and colleagues Moira Cormack to to talk today about creativity. Creativity is healing and it is meditative; it brings us straight into our subconscious.

Despite Moira and I both being incredibly tired, we connected so beautifully in this conversation and held space for each other.

In this podcast we cover:

• To be yourself creatively in the world we live in is a big challenge because we are always pushed to conform by our sense of wanting to belong;

• That creativity can be incredibly playful;

• How the schooling system stifles children’s creativity;

• How creativity, sexuality and spirituality feed each other and are door ways to each other;

• How fear squashes creativity;

• How sexuality is soothing to our nervous and endocrine systems. When we soothe and bring our nervous system down, it promotes endocrine health and creates space in our body for our own creativity to grow;

• Our creativity changes throughout our life, depending on how it feeds the systemic role we are taking up. Sometimes it is for others and then sometimes it swings around and is for us;

• How connecting with our body and learning to listen to it opens you up to your innate creativity.

You can find Moira on instagram at @moira_coach or on facebook under Moira KC