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 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.

Ep31 Living with Chronic Illness with Elizabeth Ann

Today I talk to my friend Elizabeth Ann about Living with Chronic Illness. Elizabeth is a Music Therapist who herself has living with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for many years now. We thought it was time to have a discussion about Chronic Illness which is so prevalent in our society now days and so poorly misunderstood.

Elizabeth’s journey of Chronic Illness lead her to change her career and she went back and retrained to become a music therapist. Reinvigorating her long love affair with music and being a musician, which is a natural talent that she is incredibly gifted with, and supporting others on their health journey through the therapeutic modality of music therapy.

In this episode we talk about:

What music therapy is and how it can support you in your health journey,
What Chronic Fatigue is and the systems in the body it affects,
How living with Chronic Illness impacts on the relationships in our lives and the power dynamics that exist within them,
How music, dance and singing are a tool that connects us with our past stories and history,
How becoming chronically ill can support us to get really good at expressing our boundaries,
How our current cultural paradigm makes it hard to heal and function because we need so much more downtime,
How illness can become our identity if we are not careful,
The notion of what wellness actually is and having the identity of being unwell can be really disempowering for some people,
How to clean out your cupboards to detox your life. If you want to reference the Dirty Dozen food list we talk about click on the link.

Please contact me if you would like to get in contact with Elizabeth regarding Music Therapy and I can forward on your enquiry to her.

Kellie Stirling

20 October 2022

Chinese Medicine, Creativity, Emotions, Grief, intimacy, menopause, perimenopause, Pleasure, rites of passage, Sensuality, Somatic Experiencing, Trauma, trauma resolution, womens health

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

Kellie Stirling

20 October 2022

Chinese Medicine, Creativity, Emotions, Grief, intimacy, menopause, perimenopause, Pleasure, rites of passage, Sensuality, Somatic Experiencing, Trauma, trauma resolution, womens health

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 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