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

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 26 The Forgotten Father with Carla Crivaro

Becoming a parent is a huge transition for all of us one that is often poorly supported in terms of the identity change in the transition and how it impacts on our relationship with our partner. Women receive quite a bit of support in terms of the aspects of being a mother that involve the physical care of the baby, not so much in terms of the challenges of becoming a mother. However they have a support structure in place that can support that. Men receive very little if any support in their transition to becoming a father.

In this episode I talk with Carla Crivaro, a sex, love and relationship coach, who works with women and men to achieve their goals in delicious sex, profound love and authentic relationships. Carla creates awareness around men’s transition into parenthood where they can feel isolated, rejected and miss intimacy with their partner. She has named this phenomenon, The Forgotten Father.

This episode is centred in the dynamic of cis gender, heterosexual relationships. However, as we discuss dynamics in family systems, roles that we may be playing and patterns of interaction you may find this useful information regardless of your sexual or gender orientation. In this episode we talk about:

• The journey of parenthood for men and what some of the patterns can be when they are not coping,

• How they can get into a really unhealthy systemic dynamic with their female partner where she takes on a role of mothering and they the son in their relationship dynamic and the repercussions of this,

• That men’s hormones do change when a new baby arrives so that they can bond with the baby and provide support and love to their partner,

• That men can also experience birth trauma and how this can impact on them,

• What inner work is helpful to men to participate in to shift relationship dynamics that are not supportive of their transition to fatherhood and learning to co-parent with their partner.

You can find Carla at her website www.carlacrivaro.com or on instagram @the.forgotten.father

Ep 25 Sacred Sexuality with Suzanne Najarian

Many people, regardless of gender, come to midlife and start to wonder about their sexuality. It might not be conscious thoughts but often a yearning or longing for something more in their intimate life. Both with themselves and their partner, if they have one. That more, is often better sex or a more sacred connection with their sexuality.

Today I talk to my friend and colleague, Suzanne Najarian, who is a sacred sexuality coach about what sacred sexuality is and how the big changes and transitions in our life point us home to that truth of what that is for us. Suzanne is also a lactation consultant and works with many women and their partners pre and post birth not only in helping them with breast feeding but also understanding their bodies pre and post birth.

In this podcast we talk about:

• Sometimes the sex dies in our relationship as we go through the big life transitions of becoming a parent or midlife transition or menopause. However few of us have the language to describe what that yearning actually as. We just feel deep in our bones that there has to be more.

• Many of us are taught to please our partners or that our pleasure can only occur in conjunction with another person. These big transitions drive us toward our truth and to come home to what is pleasurable for us.

• We are so many different women during our lives and these big transitions, particularly Menopause are a chance to pause and integrate all the different parts of ourselves.

• How our sexuality and desire changes throughout our lives and how our hormones can facilitate that.

• How both childbirth and menopause crack us open and unravel us making us feel immense discomfort in how we feel in our bodies. This can be very confusing.

• To create your own pleasure practice and learn to understand your own responsive desire that you can turn on over time with attention to pleasure.

• How working on our sexuality and cultivating your own pleasure will unblock and/or increase your creativity.

• How our bodies are able to often tolerate more discomfort than pleasure. We then seek pleasure through pathways that don’t support our optimal health. When we pursue a sacred sexuality practice and work out what is pleasurable for us we stop those previous strategies we created to numb out from discomfort.

You can find Suzanne at her website www.suzannenajarian.com or on her instagram @suzanne.najarian

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 23 Blooming after Divorce with Elizabeth Clair de Lune

Divorce is an extremely complex transition that many of us go through, that can really rock our foundations and sense of self. For many people, post divorce can be a time of immense growth and identity change and having support during this period creates both a safe and comforting space for us to grow. These life transitions are portals calling us to the next phase of our life.

Today I talk with my friend and colleague Elizabeth Clair de Lune who is a Life transitions Coach and Trauma Resolution Guide in training. Elizabeth supports people through Life Transitions, in particular, she supports people through Divorce.

Elizabeth uses a body based, trauma based, coaching methodology to support people coming back to the blueprint of themselves, their original essence. Your blueprint is coherent, aligned, tapped into your greater vision of you.

There are four phases that Elizabeth works with to help people bring their blueprint back online. First, learning how to get your Needs met. Second, Boundaries and Gatekeeping how to sense back into your boundaries and work with them flexibly. Third, learning to trust your intuition again, this feeds into boundaries, and finally, Self Expression. This is where the new version of ourselves emerges as we come toward the other end of the transition portal. Elizabeth finds that often our attachment styles come into play in the first two stages.

Elizabeth talks about as we go through any transition, self expression is the last phase that we start to emerge. Growing and emerging these new parts of ourselves that wants to express differently in the world.

This is a beautiful and rich conversation that will help you think differently about divorce and offer you a new mental map of how transitions can be.

You can find Elizabeth at The Unicorn Academy, on instagram @the.unicorn.academy.tm or on tick tok @theunicornacademy

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

Ep 21 Healing and growing ourselves to heal the planet with Mangala Holland

There is no doubt that we are in a pretty strange place in the world today and the last two years have been surreal on all fronts. The whole covid situation has shown us how divided we are but also how community oriented we are also. The environment has suffered terribly all over the world. Some countries are doing a fabulous job of investing in alternative energy products, whilst others in the developed world barely have it on their radar. Often I ask myself how can this not be a priority?

What is it going to take for us to change the way we show up in the world and think about not only ourselves but others in our community? Do people not think about the circles of influence in their life?

I’m very pleased to be able to have this conversation with Mangala Holland. Mangala is a Women’s empowerment and sexuality coach and she works globally with female, trans and non binary individuals, supporting them in their personal development, holistic health and wellbeing.

There are many great points in this conversation. In the conversation we cover:

• How sexual healing supports your overall health and wellbeing,

• That sexuality is a foundational part of who we are as human beings so to avoid it is like having a room in a house that you lock up all the stuff you don’t like in and never go in there,

• Sexual healing is a journey to liberation and learning to resource yourself with pleasure opens you to a level of joy in your life that is profoundly life changing. It improves all the relationships in our lives

• Embodiment work is a key to connect deep within yourself,

• When you are able to orient from within, you develop stronger ‘roots’ and your resilience builds for tougher times,

• There is a tension we have to learn to master between ‘me’ and ‘we’ and it involves learning how to resource yourself and take care of yourself so that you can do your ‘we’ work and think about the broader community.

• Activism work is exhausting and often leads to burnout and that is essential to learn how to do the ‘me’ piece and show yourself love and care to sustain yourself for the long game,

• When we do deep work on ourselves, it impact positively on our relationship with ourselves, with others and ultimately our relationship with the planet. In a profoundly positive way.

You can find Mangala on her website. www.mangalaholland.com. She is also on facebook and instagram under Managala Holland.

Ep 20 Menopause as a pathway to our authentic sexuality with Dr Laura Monk

The transition through to Menopause is complex and multi-faceted. It is a death and rebirth, a shift in identity in all the different aspects of ourselves. There is a lot of stigma around sexuality and ageing, so for many women there is great fear that their sexuality will disappear. In this episode, Dr Laura Monk and I talk about the pathway that Menopause provides to discover your authentic sexuality.

Laura is both a Psychotherapist and Sex, Love and Relationship coach who loves to work with women through midlife and menopause. Laura shares with us her own sexual awakening post menopause and we talk about the possibilities for growth and development in terms of a woman’s sexuality that Menopause can present.

In this episode you will learn:

• How our desires can become very different from what they have been previously,

• How the enormity of the menopause transition can be challenging for women in their partnerships and bring us a question of whether we bring our partner with us or not,

• The many pressures that women face throughout life that prevent them from being who they really are and menopause present an opportunity to be our true selves,

• Our sexuality which is such a core part of our humanity is rarely addressed in most mainstream therapeutic contexts,

• Your sexuality is not about your estrogen levels and the medical model assumes it is just that alone,

• Connecting to your sexual energy which is your life force energy is connecting to your energy body; that this is what makes you magnetic and attractive not all the external dressings we learn to apply.

You can find Laura on instagram at @drlauramonk and on her website www.drlauramonk.com.

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

Ep 18 Demystifying Hormone Replacement Therapy with Dr Fatima Khan

I’ve wanted to do this podcast for quite some time and have been quietly searching for a Doctor who is a menopause specialist and who takes a holistic and systemic view of the Midlife and Menopause transition. I looked at practitioners all over the world and found Dr Fatima Khan who funnily enough works about 2.5kms from my house!

Fatima is a highly skilled Peri-Menopause and Menopause Specialist with a holistic approach to women’s physical, emotional and mental wellbeing.  She completed her medical training in the United Kingdom from Imperial College London in 2007 achieving a Bachelor in Medicine and Bachelor in Surgery. She also achieved a Bachelor in Science in Pharmacology and Therapeutics with publication of her research. 

Fatima has an Advanced Menopause Certification accredited from the British Menopausal Society and  Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive and Healthcare of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. This was achieved after training extensively at Kings College London, which is a tertiary referral centre for menopausal women with complex medical backgrounds. She has also undertaken further training in the USA on optimising hormonal health for anti-ageing and longevity.

I asked Fatima to not only talk about HRT and explain what it is, its history and the messaging around it, but also to talk about Estrogen and the role it takes up in our female bodies beyond our menstrual cycles and fertility. This is because Estrogen plays an important role in supporting the functioning of a number of our body’s systems. Additionally I asked her to talk about how the decline in estrogen and progesterone impacts on other hormones in our body.

Fatima has given us a multi-faceted, in depth, explanation of HRT and our hormonal health. In this podcast you will learn:

• The link between estrogen and our mental health;

• The impact of estrogen decline on our metabolic health, cardiovascular health, cellular health, and our bone health;

• The lifestyle factors you need to consider when you are in your perimenopause transition;

• a thorough understanding of Hormone Replacement Therapy and the history of it, the clinical trials that have occurred in our recent past that have impacted our perceptions of HRT;

• And why taking a multi-faceted view of your health and well-being is important in the menopause transition.

You can find Fatima on Instagram at @menopausespecialist or on her work website www.agoracentre.com.au. I encourage you to follow Fatima on instagram if you use it, she has some excellent posts that are all evidence based. I think it is incredibly important to understand the many facets of the menopause transition and that includes Hormone Replacement Therapy. Broad knowledge and understanding of your health, in mind, body and spirit, gives you information, options, discernment and choice. It empowers you to be creative in driving you life from a desire based perspective.

Ep 17 Understanding Trauma and navigating it in motherhood and midlife with Shelby Leigh

This episode is a fantastic conversation with Shelby Leigh that sits in the intersection of our work; Trauma resolution and education and transitions or rites of passage through motherhood and midlife. Shelby is a former licensed psychotherapist, now coach and consultant - She teaches trauma awareness to coaches, therapists, healthcare professionals, and organisations worldwide.  

Shelby’s great passion is understanding and supporting folks with developmental and complex trauma in a holistic, body-based, integrative way.  Between her own journey with complex PTSD and supporting thousands of students and clients, she is ignited by supporting folks across the globe to be able to support themselves and the people they work with to move from simply surviving to truly thriving.

In the podcast we talk about:

• What Trauma is and why it sometimes shows up in our transitions through our rites of passages of motherhood and midlife,

• We discuss how many women experience a lot of contact with Medical Practitioners during these rites a passage and how you can advocate for yourself if you have trauma in your body when it comes to trauma informed healthcare,

• How slowing down can lead to much more healing,

• What trauma informed healthcare might look like,

• How we can learn to treat ourselves with greater tenderness and care and how the tenderness can come from the simplest places in our lives,

• How healing our trauma can lead us to right here into the present moment of our life, and be able to show up authentically as ourselves in our life every day.

Shelby has two fantastic online courses she runs around Trauma. Creating Safer Spaces is a course for Coaches, Therapists and Facilitators who are looking to learn and understand how they may become more trauma informed in their work. Creating Safer Healthcare is for Medical Practitioners and their teams who wish to provide more Trauma informed Healthcare. It is designed for both allopathic health practitioners and complementary health practitioners and their teams. Both courses offer expert coaching advice from specialists in their fields, theory and knowledge about trauma, and practice skills you can use to implement every day in your work. If you are interested in either course, click on the highlighted link.

You can find Shelby at her website www.shelby-leigh.com or on her instagram account @fierceheart.shelbyleigh.

Ep 16 When do I become a Woman with a capital W with Kendra Cover

Today I talk to my friend and colleague Kendra Cover who is a women’s intimacy coach. Kendra and I were wondering out loud recently recently about this and wondering What does a woman with a capital W look like, what is it that stops us stepping into womanhood and what does it look like to others. How would we know, what does it feel like inside of us?

In this podcast we explore:

• The rites of passage that women go through how poorly supported they are,

• How women feel their value comes from the roles that they take up in their lives. That we are conditioned to be a good daughter, good friend, good mother, good wife; all the time giving so much of ourselves away to others. That within these roles there comes so much discomfort that we feel that is surprising to us;

• How few archetypal roles are available to women in terms of how they show up and this narrowing down of how we ‘are’ diminishes so much of who we are,

• How learning to hold all of our emotions and listening to the signals they provide is both a source of great power and pleasure to us,

• There is so little encouragement culturally in our society to encourage and honour people really to get to know themselves on a very deep level,

• The lack of ritual and honour that exists within our society to support women through the rites of passage we go through,

• When you connect with your sexual energy which is your life force energy you can never turn it off and it is such an incredible source of vitality to us in life.

You can find Kendra on her website www.kendracover.com on instagram @kendracover and her Facebook group is called Into the wild of womanhood.

Ep 15 Sensuality and Pleasure, a pathway home with Carol Anne

Pleasure, sensuality and sexuality are such core aspects of who we are as human beings. Carol Anne and I talk today about the power of sensuality. Our sensuality is how we experience the world through our five senses. It connects us with our life force energy. It brings us into the present moment. It is a great resource, providing nourishment in the moment in tough times.

Our sensuality provides us with so much pleasure and is a pathway to our sexuality. When we start to practice enjoying the pleasure of our five senses, we build neural pathways inside of us that create greater capacity to feel pleasure in all aspects of our life. Our five senses bring us right into the present moment; our present moment is where life happens.

So why do so many of us get so triggered by the words sensuality and pleasure? Well it is worth listening to the podcast. You will learn:

• How our ‘good girl’ conditioning has us disconnecting from our sensuality,

• How the sensations in our body are the voice of our sub conscious,

• How our sensuality connects us with our emotions,

• Our sensuality and pleasure gives us ‘fuel in our tank’ to deal with the tougher times in life,

• Our sensuality is a pathway out of our rational and logical brain to experience goodness in our body in the present moment,

• Our sensuality and pleasure allow us to feel all the emotions that are available to us,

• Our body has a natural orientation to pleasure and this contributes greatly to our healing and harmony in our body,

• Healing does not always have to be hard and gruelling, it can be pleasurable,

• Connecting with our sensuality brings us into the core of our being, how it allows us to be ourselves at the most primal level. That when we can access this part of ourselves we don’t have to try so hard at life.

  You can find Carol on her website www.carolanne.com.au or on her instagram account @carolannealive

Ep 14 Conscious Dating with Ana Kosta

I’ve watched many of my friends navigate new relationships in the past ten years. In this time of midlife one product of our personal growth is sometimes a fracture in our relationships. It is hard to grow together. Many of us started long terms relationships in our 20s and we kind of fall together, often lead by our desire for each other, without much thought to what we really want in our life and in a partner.

What I have observed is that dating in your 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s is so much different to your 20s. I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to talk to Ana Kosta. Ana is a Conscious Dating coach who works holistically with women to help them find a life partner.

Choosing a partner that allows you to have a depth in your relationship requires clarity around your desires both for your life and also of the qualities and values of your partner. Ana Kosta talks openly about her own experience and how she empowers her clients to find that clarity in their own life.

There are some beautiful reflective moments in this conversation as we contemplate creating conscious relationships in our midlife.

You can find Ana on her website www.anakostacoaching.com on instagram at @anakosta.coach and in her facebook Ana Kosta Coaching

Ep 13 Three Golden Opportunities with Dr Nic Pawley

Today I have Nicole Pawley with me to talk about the Three Golden Opportunities. Nicole is a Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine and a Birth Educator. The Three Golden Opportunities are three times in our life, as women, that are large inflexion points. Times where we have the opportunity to either foster or risk our health during the transition.

The Three Golden Opportunities are Menarche, Post Partum and Menopause. Chinese Medicine has a long history of menstrual and post partum care. The three golden opportunities are life gateways and periods of life where there is rapid change and a physical reaction. In Chinese Medicine we talk about Qi, Jing, Ying and Yang.

Chinese medicine seeks first to understand natural cycles, and then take advantage of them in order to optimise health and longevity - thereby avoiding future imbalances and making it easier to treat any that do occur. To understand why menstruation, postpartum and menopause are so key in terms of health preservation it’s important to understand the concept of Qi and Jing, which are essence or life force energy.

We are born with a finite amount of life force energy. Qi and Jing are like your bank account if you go hard and fast you will spend it all. Jing is there to help you move through these transitions. If you have a good amount of Jing you will have vitality. If you run hard life will be hectic and these transitions will be difficult. It is important to learn how to nourish and replenish our Jing and this is where pleasure practices come in.

In our practice of pleasure, both sensual and sexual, we replenish our Jing and nourish ourselves.

Our Western Culture is very yang, constant go and on. What is valued is productivity and achievement producing overworked, frazzled and burned out humans. This is detrimental to Women’s health; to everyone’s health. How can we be more Yin our life? Listen to the podcast and you will find out.

You can find Nicole on instagram @drnicpawley. Or you can message me and I can put you in touch with her.

Ep 12 Cyclical Living with Jaime Lauren

This week I have the wonderful Jaime Lauren, who is a menstrual and fertility awarenes coach talking about cyclical living for Women. I loved this conversation! I am a big supporter of cylical living for women and this is why I really wanted to do a podcast on it, it is something I teach in all my work.

Jaime runs a 10 week course of cyclical living and she does one on one work with women around fertility awareness. So what is cyclical living? It is designing your life around the menstrual cycle. This may seem a strange concept to us in the modern western world but women did it for thousands of years prior to the industrial revolution.

We seem to find ourselves in an epidemic of hormone related health issues and this shows up in many health issues in women from teenage years to the 80s. Health issues such as PCOS, endometriosis, infertility, fibroids, acne, IBS, early or difficult menopause, early puberty, sleep problems, anxiety, depression, hair loss and amenorrhea. I am sure there are more.

Understanding your cycle and living with it is, I believe, a big lever when it comes to self-love, self-acceptance and women stepping into their wild power.

You can find Jamie on Facebook in her Group Cyclical Living for Women, her website www.jaimelauren.coach or on instagram @menstrualmagic_

Ep 11 Movement as Medicine with Dianne Shepherd

Dianne Shepherd is back and today we are talking about Sensual Movement. Sensual movement is a non linear form of movement that is a great form of exercise, a meditative process and a source of great healing. It is particularly powerful for working with our pelvic floor and our core.

Dianne and I chat about all the different benefits of sensual movement. It is a great movement for women and so different from other forms of exercise that we do like Yoga or Pilates, that whilst working the core well, are very linear in their progression. Many of these forms of exercise work on the horizontal and vertical planes of the body, not the spiral. The pelvis is a spiral shaped bone, did you know that?

Sensual movement can also build great body mind connections between our brain and our pelvis. It builds life force energy and is a good way for women to build connection with their erotic part of themselves. This form of movement is a great way to work with our emotions and get them moving. Our Emotions are supposed to me in motion not locked up in our body. I have also found with some clients who have trauma in their body, it is a great way for them to work with that, for their body to titrate the energy of the trauma as it is unwinding from their body.

Dianne has a whole host of content on sensual movement in her website portal ‘The Goddess Vault’ which you can find on her website www.shakticore.com it is free to subscribe and you can become a member, just click on the link to get to her website. You can also find her on instagram @wildmenopause and on Facebook her group is The Goddess Vault.

Ep 10 Navigating Trauma in Motherhood and Midlife with Nisha Gill

Information and knowledge about Trauma has become very popular and accessible in the last 5-10 years . This is due to a few factors, greater scientific research and knowledge about the nervous system, the creation of a number of body based approaches to trauma resolution and the fact that there are a whole lot of individual practitioners who have trained in these body based modalities. New practitioners who have written books, started podcasts and started to run trainings both in person and online.

In this podcast, I am joined by Nisha Gill. Nisha is a Somatic Experiencing (trauma resolution) Practitioner who works at the intersection of trauma, birth, female sexuality & embodiment. She draws also from her background in integrative bodywork and counselling. Nisha has a special focus on birth, sexual, medical and developmental traumas through the lens of the nervous system. She combines her holistic tools for a highly tailored approach to body re-connection in the wake of trauma, illness, grief & loss, birth, menopause and other challenging transitions.

Nisha and I talk about what Trauma actually is, how people experience it in their nervous system. We talk about different causes of trauma, the different times in can show up in our life. Primarily, I wanted to talk to Nisha about birth trauma but we talked about a whole lot of stuff related to Trauma resolution work. We talked about developmental trauma and how this can become a big thing either in post-partum, or midlife transition through peri-menopause for us, as our body seeks healing and resolution. How do we know what Trauma responses look like? We explain what Somatic Experiencing is and how it supports individuals through trauma resolution.

This is an important podcast for me because I have coached many women who have unresolved birth trauma or developmental trauma and it can have a hugely negative impact on their life. In terms of the health and wellbeing, their body’s ability to heal and the quality of their relationships, both with their intimate partner and their family but also their broader community. I want to create as much awareness about it as possible.

Nisha and I have a strong relationship; I refer lots of people to her. She also supported me through chemotherapy as I chose to partake in Somatic Experiencing as one of the therapeutic modalities to support me and I believe it had a profoundly positive experience on my body’s healing. My work has a strongly trauma informed focus and I look forward to learning more about it.

You can find Nisha at her website www.feminineinstincts.com.au here facebook groups Birth Trauma Awareness and Feminine Instincts and on Instagram @feminineinstincts.