Midlife Butterfly: Stop Self-Abandoning & People Pleasing by Healing Your Nervous System — Feel Alive Again

Is there a trip — or a dream — that you've been saying "someday" to for so long it almost doesn't feel real anymore?

What if the guilt you feel about choosing yourself isn't the truth — but just a story you were handed, and never thought to question?

In this rich, grounded conversation, Kena sits down with Maria Kamau — Kenyan-born travel writer, ICF certified coach, and founder of Travel with McKay — to explore what's really behind the trips we never take. Together, they unpack the guilt, the fear, the "I'm waiting for my friend," the mental baggage we carry across borders — and why stepping away, even briefly, might be the most powerful thing a midlife woman can do for herself and everyone around her.

🦋 You'll Discover:

• Why the guilt and the "someday" aren't really about travel — they're about a woman still waiting for permission to choose herself.
• How identity comes from doing, not deciding — and why one small trip can shift how you see yourself.
• What solo travel actually feels like from the inside — and the practical first steps to go from scared to gone.

💜 Coming Home Question:

What is one thing — a trip, a dream, a desire — that you've been waiting for permission to say yes to? And what would change if you stopped waiting, and gave that permission to yourself today?

✨ Where to Find Maria:

• Website: www.travelwithmkay.co.ke
• FB: www.facebook.com/TravelwithMkay/
• IG: www.Instagram.com/Travelwithmkay

✨ Come breathe with me. Every first Friday of the month I offer a free live Neuroepigenetic Breathing session. It's 60 minutes, camera on, and not recorded. Save your spot here. 

💜 I created Coming HOME for the woman who has done everything right and still feels something is missing. It's free, it's private, and it might be the most important thing you listen to this year — sign up here!

🦋 Midlife Butterfly is a podcast for high-achieving midlife women navigating emotional exhaustion, people pleasing, self-abandonment, nervous system healing, identity shifts, and midlife awakening. Hosted by Kena Siu, Identity & Embodiment Guide.

Instagram: @midlifebutterfly
Website: midlifebutterfly.ca

Music: Back Home by Alex Productions and  Reborn by Alexander Nakarada

You've read the books, hired the coaches, been to the retreats — so why do you keep coming back to the same patterns, the same reactions, the same stuck places?

What if the transformation you've been seeking isn't missing — it just hasn't landed in your body yet?

In this solo episode, Kena speaks directly to the woman who has done everything right on the inside — and still wonders why nothing has really changed. She breaks down the crucial difference between intellectual growth and embodied transformation, and why the nervous system, not the mind, is the gatekeeper of real change. She introduces neuroepigenetic breathing as the bridge between what you know and how you actually live — a practice that transforms stored emotional energy without requiring you to analyze, revisit, or retell your story. Raw, honest, and deeply practical.

🦋 You'll Discover:

• Why all the knowledge you've gathered stays stuck in your mind — until your body receives it.
• How neuroepigenetic breathing transforms stored emotion without needing to analyze or relive your story.
• What living in coherence actually feels like — and what becomes possible when you stop surviving and start living.

💜 Coming Home Question:

Where in your body right now are you holding something you've been trying to understand with your mind — and what would it feel like to simply let your body hold it instead?

Stop surviving. It is time to start living — and it starts in your body. Hit play.

✨ Come breathe with me. Every first Friday of the month I offer a free live Neuroepigenetic Breathing session. It's 60 minutes, camera on, and not recorded. Save your spot here. 

💜 I created Coming HOME for the woman who has done everything right and still feels something is missing. It's free, it's private, and it might be the most important thing you listen to this year — sign up here!

🦋 Midlife Butterfly is a podcast for high-achieving midlife women navigating emotional exhaustion, people pleasing, self-abandonment, nervous system healing, identity shifts, and midlife awakening. Hosted by Kena Siu, Identity & Embodiment Guide.

Instagram: @midlifebutterfly
Website: midlifebutterfly.ca

Music: Back Home by Alex Productions and  Reborn by Alexander Nakarada

Have you noticed that the things that used to work — the way you ate, the way you exercised, the way you managed yourself — just don't work anymore?

Your body is changing… and no one really prepared you for this. 

In this conversation, I sit with Dr. Heather Awad to explore what’s truly happening in women's bodies during the menopause transition — from hormonal shifts and weight gain to emotional eating and self-criticism. But more than that, we open a different path, one rooted in awareness, nourishment, and self-trust.

🦋 You'll Discover:

• Why the sudden weight gain, sleeplessness, and cravings aren't your fault — and what hormones are actually doing to your body right now.
• What emotional eating really looks like in midlife — and why most women don't even recognize they're doing it.
• How self-compassion isn't soft — it's the only strategy that actually makes lasting weight loss possible and liveable.

💜 Coming Home Question:

Where have you been fighting your body — treating it like something broken to be fixed — and what might become possible if you chose, just for today, to nourish it instead?

✨ Dr. Heather Awad

Vibrant Menopause Weight Loss Website: https://vibrant-md.com

Vibrant-MD Podcast

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heatherawadmd

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/heathervibrantmd/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heatherawadmd

YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@heatherawadmd7858

Free Gift for Listeners: https://vibrant-md.com/breakfast

✨ Come breathe with me. Every first Friday of the month I offer a free live Neuroepigenetic Breathing session. It's 60 minutes, camera on, and not recorded. Save your spot here. 

💜 I created Coming HOME for the woman who has done everything right and still feels something is missing. It's free, it's private, and it might be the most important thing you listen to this year — sign up here!

🦋 Midlife Butterfly is a podcast for high-achieving midlife women navigating emotional exhaustion, people pleasing, self-abandonment, nervous system healing, identity shifts, and midlife awakening. Hosted by Kena Siu, Identity & Embodiment Guide.

Instagram: @midlifebutterfly
Website: midlifebutterfly.ca

Music: Back Home by Alex Productions and  Reborn by Alexander Nakarada

Have you ever been somewhere beautiful — a holiday, a gathering, a perfect moment — and still felt strangely off?

This is a Reflection Bomb — short, honest, and straight from real life. Kena shares what happened on a morning when she noticed something quietly wrong beneath the surface: a flicker of anger she hadn't even recognized as anger. Instead of pushing through and filling her schedule, she stopped. She put down her mat, did 40 minutes of neuroepigenetic breathing, and let the energy shift. The result wasn't just a better mood — it was a completely different day. This episode is a reminder that you can be in paradise and still miss it entirely when something inside you is asking for attention.

🦋 You'll Discover:

• Why discomfort hides in plain sight — and why you won't feel better by being somewhere beautiful if you haven't noticed what's underneath.
• What happens when you give space to emotions instead of pushing them away
• How simple, personal practices — breathwork, movement, journaling — can shift your entire energy and give your day back to you.

✨ Coming Home Question:

What feeling have you been too busy to notice — and what would shift in your day if you gave it just a few minutes of honest attention right now?

✨ Come breathe with me. Every first Friday of the month I offer a free live Neuroepigenetic Breathing session. It's 60 minutes, camera on, and not recorded. Save your spot here. 

💜 I created Coming HOME for the woman who has done everything right and still feels something is missing. It's free, it's private, and it might be the most important thing you listen to this year — sign up here!

🦋 Midlife Butterfly is a podcast for high-achieving midlife women navigating emotional exhaustion, people pleasing, self-abandonment, nervous system healing, identity shifts, and midlife awakening. Hosted by Kena Siu, Identity & Embodiment Guide.

Instagram: @midlifebutterfly
Website: midlifebutterfly.ca

Music: Back Home by Alex Productions and  Reborn by Alexander Nakarada

Have you ever caught yourself telling the same story about your life — the one where you stayed too long, gave too much, and kept waiting for things to change? 

In Part 2 of this rich conversation, Kena and Kimber Hardick go into the layers of self-abandonment most women never name: the stories we carry like gospel, the desires we’ve quietly buried, and what it really means to choose yourself — not someday, but now.

🦋 You’ll Discover:

• Why so many high-achieving women feel invisible in midlife — and why the real invisibility is the one happening inside, not around you.
• How the stories you’ve been holding as gospel may be keeping you locked in exhaustion, self-sacrifice, and waiting for permission that will never come.
• What it actually feels like to choose yourself without apology — and why reconnecting with your desires, your emotions, and your body is the doorway back to you.

💜 Coming Home Question:

Where are you still waiting for permission to choose yourself — and what becomes possible the moment you stop waiting?

✨ Where to Find Kimber

• Website: KimberHardick.com
• Book: An Invitation to Shine: From Invisible to Invincible on Amazon and Amazon listing page
• Instagram: @kimberlivinglife
• Facebook: Kimberly Ogle Hardick
• YouTube: Kimber Hardick
• Threads: @kimberlivinglife

✨ Come breathe with me. Every first Friday of the month I offer a free live Neuroepigenetic Breathing session. It's 60 minutes, camera on, and not recorded. Save your spot here. 

💜 I created Coming HOME for the woman who has done everything right and still feels something is missing. It's free, it's private, and it might be the most important thing you listen to this year — sign up here!

🦋 Midlife Butterfly is a podcast for high-achieving midlife women navigating emotional exhaustion, people pleasing, self-abandonment, nervous system healing, identity shifts, and midlife awakening. Hosted by Kena Siu, Identity & Embodiment Guide.

Instagram: @midlifebutterfly
Website: midlifebutterfly.ca

Music: Back Home by Alex Productions and  Reborn by Alexander Nakarada

Have you ever caught yourself in the middle of an old pattern — reactive, shrinking, or going silent — and thought, I thought I’d worked through this?

 What if the frustration isn’t a sign you’re failing — but proof that something in you is finally awake enough to notice?

 In this first part of a rich two-part conversation, Kena and Kimber Hardick explore what it really means to come home to yourself in midlife — not through reinvention, but through remembrance. They dig into emotional awareness, the trap of feeding our stories instead of feeling them, and a grounding practice called Wait, What, Watch that can change the way you move through your days.

🦋 You’ll Discover:

• Why midlife isn’t a crisis or a reinvention — it’s an invitation to remember who you’ve always been beneath the roles, the shoulds, and the conditioning.
• How you’ve likely been feeding the story around your emotions instead of actually feeling them — and why that one shift changes everything.
• What the Wait, What, Watch practice is — and how this deceptively simple tool can help you pause, return to yourself, and respond from truth instead of autopilot.

💜 Coming Home Question:

Where have you been feeding a story instead of feeling what’s underneath it — and what might become available to you if you simply let yourself feel it?

✨ Where to Find Kimber

• Website: KimberHardick.com
• Book: An Invitation to Shine: From Invisible to Invincible on Amazon and Amazon listing page
• Instagram: @kimberlivinglife
• Facebook: Kimberly Ogle Hardick
• YouTube: Kimber Hardick
• Threads: @kimberlivinglife
• The Interactive Emotion Wheel: https://gamma.app/docs/The-Interactive-Emotion-Wheel-ctc97ztnzaembwo

✨ Come breathe with me. Every first Friday of the month I offer a free live Neuroepigenetic Breathing session. It's 60 minutes, camera on, and not recorded. Save your spot here. 

💜 I created Coming HOME for the woman who has done everything right and still feels something is missing. It's free, it's private, and it might be the most important thing you listen to this year — sign up here!

🦋 Midlife Butterfly is a podcast for high-achieving midlife women navigating emotional exhaustion, people pleasing, self-abandonment, nervous system healing, identity shifts, and midlife awakening. Hosted by Kena Siu, Identity & Embodiment Guide.

Instagram: @midlifebutterfly
Website: midlifebutterfly.ca

Music: Back Home by Alex Productions and  Reborn by Alexander Nakarada

Have you ever stayed quiet in a conversation — swallowed what you really felt — and then spent hours replaying what you wish you’d said?

In this solo episode, Kena explores the connection most women never see: that the intimacy we long for — in relationships, in friendships, even within ourselves — doesn’t collapse because love runs out. It collapses the moment we stop trusting our own inner signals. Raw, honest, and deeply personal.

🦋 You’ll Discover:

• Why intimacy doesn’t collapse because love is missing — it collapses the moment you stop trusting yourself, and why no partner, friendship, or conversation can fill that gap.
• How people-pleasing, over-functioning, and staying quiet to keep the peace are all forms of self-abandonment, and the hidden price your body is already paying for them.
• What self-trust actually is (hint: it’s not confidence) and the quiet, embodied shift that happens when you start living in coherence with your inner signals.

✨ Coming Home Question:

Where are you silencing yourself to maintain a connection and what is that silence costing your intimacy with yourself?

✨ Come breathe with me. Every first Friday of the month I offer a free live Neuroepigenetic Breathing session. It's 60 minutes, camera on, and not recorded. Save your spot here. 

💜 I created Coming HOME for the woman who has done everything right and still feels something is missing. It's free, it's private, and it might be the most important thing you listen to this year — sign up here!

🦋 Midlife Butterfly is a podcast for high-achieving midlife women navigating emotional exhaustion, people pleasing, self-abandonment, nervous system healing, identity shifts, and midlife awakening. Hosted by Kena Siu, Identity & Embodiment Guide.

Instagram: @midlifebutterfly
Website: midlifebutterfly.ca

Music: Back Home by Alex Productions and  Reborn by Alexander Nakarada

You survived it. You built the life. And somehow you're still carrying it — that secret, that shame, that version of you, you haven't let anyone fully see.

In this raw and honest conversation with Candi Rose, we explore why so many high-achieving women still feel trapped beneath everything they've built — and what it actually takes to step into freedom in midlife.

🦋 You'll Discover:

• Why the success you built to prove your worth might be keeping you locked out of your own freedom — and what finally cracks it open.
• How speaking your truth — not just knowing it — is what moves shame out of your body and into the light.
• What it really means to break the isolation and build the kind of community where healing actually begins.

✨ Coming Home Question:

What truth have you been protecting others from — that is actually keeping you from yourself?

💜 Candi Rose Contact Details:

Website: https://www.candirose.com

TEDex Talk: https://youtu.be/AApYIyGW6YQ

✨ Come breathe with me. Every first Friday of the month I offer a free live Neuroepigenetic Breathing session. It's 60 minutes, camera on, and not recorded. Save your spot here. 

💜 I created Coming HOME for the woman who has done everything right and still feels something is missing. It's free, it's private, and it might be the most important thing you listen to this year — sign up here!

🦋 Midlife Butterfly is a podcast for high-achieving midlife women navigating emotional exhaustion, people pleasing, self-abandonment, nervous system healing, identity shifts, and midlife awakening. Hosted by Kena Siu, Identity & Embodiment Guide.

Instagram: @midlifebutterfly
Website: midlifebutterfly.ca

Music: Back Home by Alex Productions and  Reborn by Alexander Nakarada

What if the love you've been longing for isn't somewhere out there — but has been living inside you all along, waiting to be remembered?

 In this intimate birthday solo episode, Kena shares the journey that transformed how she experiences love — from a fear-based, approval-seeking pattern to an embodied, expansive love she generates from within. Through yoga, ancestral moon ritual, and Neuroepigenetic Breathing, she traces the path back to herself — and invites you to do the same.

🦋 You'll Discover:

• Why the love you've been searching for has been living inside you all along — and the moment Kena finally felt it in her body, not just her mind.
• How three radically different paths — yoga, ancestral moon ritual, and Neuroepigenetic Breathing — all led to the same truth about who you really are.
• What changes in every relationship when you stop making others responsible for loving you — and become the source yourself.

✨ Coming Home Question:

If you truly believed you were the source of love — not just someone who receives it — what would you allow yourself to feel right now?

✨ Come breathe with me. Every first Friday of the month I offer a free live Neuroepigenetic Breathing session. It's 60 minutes, camera on, and not recorded. Save your spot here. 

💜 I created Coming HOME for the woman who has done everything right and still feels something is missing. It's free, it's private, and it might be the most important thing you listen to this year — sign up here!

🦋 Midlife Butterfly is a podcast for high-achieving midlife women navigating emotional exhaustion, people pleasing, self-abandonment, nervous system healing, identity shifts, and midlife awakening. Hosted by Kena Siu, Identity & Embodiment Guide.

Instagram: @midlifebutterfly
Website: midlifebutterfly.ca

Music: Back Home by Alex Productions and  Reborn by Alexander Nakarada

Are you meeting life as it is — or fighting it into what you think it should be?

 In this grounded solo episode, Kena shares what it really means to become the observer — through the lens of a certified neuroepigenetic breathing milestone, a freshly painted room, and the everyday moments where presence either holds or breaks. Short, potent, and deeply real, this episode is an invitation to stop resisting your experience and start moving through it with ease.

🦋 You'll Discover:

• Why the only thing you can truly control is your mind — and what becomes possible the moment you stop trying to control everything else.
• How becoming the observer instead of the reactor is the quietest, most powerful shift you can make in midlife — and what it actually looks like in the middle of an ordinary, frustrating day.
• The difference between choosing love and choosing judgment — and how your body already knows which one sets you free.

✨ Coming Home Question:

Where in your life right now are you fighting what is — and what would it feel like to simply allow it?

✨ Come breathe with me. Every first Friday of the month I offer a free live Neuroepigenetic Breathing session. It's 60 minutes, camera on, and not recorded. Save your spot here. 

💜 I created Coming HOME for the woman who has done everything right and still feels something is missing. It's free, it's private, and it might be the most important thing you listen to this year — sign up here!

🦋 Midlife Butterfly is a podcast for high-achieving midlife women navigating emotional exhaustion, people pleasing, self-abandonment, nervous system healing, identity shifts, and midlife awakening. Hosted by Kena Siu, Identity & Embodiment Guide.

Instagram: @midlifebutterfly
Website: midlifebutterfly.ca

Music: Back Home by Alex Productions and  Reborn by Alexander Nakarada