A quick little podcast with just me today. I have been reflecting on how some people struggle through growth and healing, more in terms of being lost in the liminal space. In the darkness we might say. I did write a blog about the anatomy of life transitions where I talked about it a few months ago but I think with a podcast you can sometimes say a little bit more.

Recently, I had an experience where something of mine came up again and I was thinking wow I have al the resources, training and skills to know what is going on. What I noticed is that the impact of it was significantly less than in the past. Minimal really. It was more a noticing and then I was able to resource myself.

So often, when people begin trauma healing or embark on a personal growth journey, they imagine it will be a straight line: one step after another, always moving forward, never looking back. But real healing and growth rarely follow that kind of neat, linear path. Instead, they are more like a spiral or a tide, flowing in cycles, circling back, rising and falling.

Healing also has the rhythm of the tide. There are moments of expansion, clarity, and energy—like the incoming tide that fills and nourishes. And there are moments of retreat, rest, and stillness—like the tide going out, leaving space for reflection and integration. Neither state is better or worse; both are necessary.

When we expect healing to be linear, we can feel shame or discouragement when old triggers resurface or when we find ourselves “back where we started. Recognising this cyclical rhythm allows us to meet ourselves with more compassion.

Caroline Shabaz is a colleague, mentor and friend who I am so happy to talk to today. She is a meta psychotherapist, who is deeply experienced and who has trained in many different therapeutic modalities. She is a Clinical Psychologist, has a masters degree in Depth Psychology, is trained in Family Constellations work, is a certified in providing psilocybin assisted therapy and has trained in many wisdom traditions and modalities. Caroline is also a member of the kink community and she trains other therapists how to work with Kink and BDSM.

We talk about how relationships are crucibles for our transformation and growth throughout our lifetime. They trigger our core wounds so that we may heal and burn away who we think we are. We learn how to be in relationships through our family system and internalise much of this from our parents and caregivers, but we are born into a cultural narrative or story that shaped you and often our growth is about reclaiming part of that or alternatively it may be about letting go what we no longer need.

You will also hear:

Understanding the midlife narrative through the Jungian Lens. We also apply an astrological frame to it (Neptune square Neptune),

How our hormones and the changing hormonal cocktail we have facilitates changes through our lifetime,

Understanding the deeper architecture that drives the general level of disatisfaction in midlife many of us experience,

The Hero and Heroines Journey and how they are an archetypal framework for the many initiations we face in our lifetime,

The concept of the Shadow and how it plays out in our relational life,

The different alchemical stages of relationship transformation.

Caroline runs a program called Transforming Relationships that is for couples and individuals who want to explore themselves deeply in a group container.

You can find Caroline at Transformingrelationships.com.au or metapsychotherapy.com

Many people have heard of Flight, Fight and Freeze when it comes to our autonomic nervous system’s defence responses but not all of us have heard of Fawn. Fawning is a pretty sophisticated response that shows up as people pleasing or appeasement. Some practitioners also call it hypersocialisation. We fawn to stay in connection with others, to stay safe. The tricky thing about Fawning is that it can sometimes look like it is a personality trait which I guess we could say is true for many responses driven by Trauma.

Today I talk with Rae Halder who is a somatic trauma resolution practitioner about the Fawning response. Rae is a fantastic person to talk about this and she works with many clients with strong Fawn responses.

We also get into talking about sexual fawning and how that shows up in our intimate relationships. When we say yes to intimacy because our brain says yes but our body is a big No to it. What happens when we do this repeatedly and how does it get in the way of authentic connection with our partners and lovers.

You will hear us talk about many different aspects of trauma healing when it comes to the Fawn response, how it shows up in our body when it gets sick of us doing it repeatedly, why we do it, what is underneath it all and how can we connect with our erotic imprints.

If you would like to take the Erotic Blueprints quiz we talk about in the podcast here is the link.

You can find Rae on her website www.raehalder.com, on instagram @rachel.rae.halder or on her FB page

Today I am talking to Moira Cormack, my multi talented colleague and friend about Human Design. I have to tell you this podcast was a lot of fun because Moira is fun. Moira is a coach, parenting expert, human design expert and all round super human being. This is Moira’s third time on my podcast, if you didn’t catch the last two on inner child and creativity you should check them out also.

Moira doesn’t so much go into the different human design profile, rather she gives us the bigger context of why we would use Human Design. How does it help us be more human, how does it help us connect with our deeper self.

We talked about:

Why we would use Human Design and how, at this point in time, Human Design is helpful to people to further their personal growth and development,

How life is made up of many decisions and choices we make each day and how human design helps us, through understanding our profile, how to better make decisions to align with our energy system in our body,

How many of us end up in careers, influenced by our family systems, not doing what we really love.

How energy systems in different types work and why not listening to our body leads to health issues,

How when we move outside our design, we often experience a discordant note or emotion and this is a sign we are not listening to our body.

You can find Moira on Gates of the Moon FB Group, on instagram she is @moira_coach and she has a substack she writes on.

In this episode, I talk with Daniella Matutes who is a somatic coach, breathwork teacher, a very talented human really, who has a not for profit focused on healing gender based violence against women in two generations. We discuss her own journey of healing from abuse and how a body based approach to healing trauma has helped her to process the trauma in her body.

Daniella has created an approach called Pleasure Alchemy that offers a road map to individuals with trauma that helps them to understand the healing journey by orienting and resourcing to pleasure and building capacity in the nervous system to feel more. More sensations, emotions, feelings.

In this podcast you will hear:

Daniella describe her own experience of healing trauma and the different ways she experienced healing,

How trauma is passed down generationally through our attachment system and within the physiology of the body,

Different survival strategies and how they show up in our body,

How the culture we grow up in is internalised and significantly impacts how we show up in the world,

Leadership culture in large organisations and how individuals trauma plays out on a daily basis,

Our inner ecology and how it influences what we see in the outer world.

You will find Daniella at www.somaticself.love, on Instagram, Facebook and Substack.

Today I am talking with Gemma Donnellan who is an artist and art curator, a creator of community and a natural born network. Gemma has a gift of bringing people together around art. Gemma began her career as an artist which she has created over time whilst working full time and also being a stay at home parent. She has spent many years painting, in community, before moving back into a curatorial role, bringing emerging and established artists together in exhibitions.

Gemma is skilled in how she pulls together different artists to curate art shows of diverse pieces of art that seem to have a common thread running through them that you can only work out once you have looked at all the paintings.

She has created networks for women to come together around art in her quarterly sessions she calls Reciprocity, where ideas are shared, provocative conversations created around topics of interest.

In the podcast we talked about:

- Art as a support for all of us in tough times and the healing power of art,

- We talked about the creativity that exists within all of us and expressed in our own unique ways,

- The healing power of art and how we can express what sits deeply within us, bypassing the rational part of our brain and express from the deepest parts of ourselves,

- How to choose art for your own personal collection. Whilst buying art can be overwhelming we don’t have to buy the most expensive piece but rather what speaks to us and evokes an emotional response.

You can find Gemma at www.artfortoday.com.au, on instagram @artfortoday and facebook

Today I am talking to the fabulous Heidi Trudinger about midlife relationships. Our bodies go through huge changes at midlife and women in particular feel the change more acutely due to the hormonal dropoff of perimenopause. Men go through their own hormonal change with Andropause however the hormonal shifts are small each year and the decline is steadier.

All of this impacts how we feel about our bodies and our imprint on ageing that we learned through both our family system and culturally, has a huge impact on our ability to embrace our changing bodies at midlife. Most of the fear that we experience around ageing is not about getting old it is actually about dying and Heidi and talked quite a bit about this.

How do we sustain sexual intimacy at midlife with all these changes? Well it is not too hard but for most of us it is about learning about what sex actually is; something few of us learned when we were younger. It is about learning what true intimacy is and how to hold space for that with each other.

We also discussed:

- Self love as an antidote to ageing and how to find that,

- Embracing the Maga (archetype) at midlife really understanding what our individual expression of that that is and how it is different to the Crone,

- How we can reconnect with the playful parts of ourselves, parts we have often buried deep in our unconscious, to reinvigorate our relationship,

- How our body brings up old trauma for resolution at this transition and what a gift that can be,

- How deep rest is incredibly sustaining for our bodies and is part of our erotic practice,

- How our midlife transition is a portal for us to claim our authentic sexual selves and how we might start the path to explore this aspect of our selves.

You can find Heidi at heiditrue.com.au. She is also on instagram @true.intimacy and Facebook

Burnout is a complex health syndrome that we seem to be hearing more cases of everyday. I am seeing it more and more in workplaces and working with people moving trough big life transitions. So I have been deeply curious about it for the last couple of years and wanting to talk to a guest about it on my podcast. Who better to discuss than Dr Ashlea Broomfield - The Vitality Doctor.

Dr Ash is a specialist GP, sexologist, Mind-Body Therapist, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, Meditation Coach and Credentialed Eating Disorder Clinician. Dr Ash is invested in her patients health holistically, she is invested in supporting patients to flourish holistically as a whole person, mentally, physically, sexually and spiritually.

Today we talked about Burnout. What is it? How does it come about? Is it a workplace issue or a cultural issue. Given the culture we live in how can we resource and nourish our bodies to ensure this doesn’t happen to us. We talked about the body as a whole system and that our health exists and is influenced by the environments that we exist within.

We also discussed:

- Women’s menstruality, their menarche, motherhood and menopause and how these big changes to our endocrine system and the roles that we take up in life impact our mental and physical health;

- Chronic workplace stress that is not being managed well;

- What the conditions are that set someone up for burnout, as defined by the world health organisation (WHO);

- How the working conditions and the 40 hour work week were created 150 years ago when we had more community support for families and roles and expectations for parents were very different;

- Burnout as a complex systemic issue and what are the solutions that we can put in place to solve it;

- It starts with us as individuals being clear about our own limits and boundaries and learning to identify what a YES and NO feels like in our body.

Dr Ash really has fantastic perspective on this so make sure you listen to the very end because there are some really wise words she has for all of us. If you would like to connect with Dr Ash you can find her at drashleabroomfield.com.au, on instagram @thevitalitydoctor. On facebook Dr Ashlea Broomfield - The Vitality Doctor.

As we get older many of us experience joint pain and muscle pain. We think it is just our old joints but it might very well be dry fascia. In this episode I talk to Sophia Breust who is a structural integration practitioner about the many benefits of working with fascia.

Sophia has an interesting story and her own health and wellbeing today is a direct reflection of the benefits of structural integration. After going through some relational trauma in 2014, Sophia was diagnosed with PTSD. Experiencing symptoms from extreme anxiety, recurring nightmares, and shakes to lethargy, Sophia explored talk therapy to help resolve what she thought was a problem in her mind. Over 2 years, she showed up religiously to her psychology sessions, but she felt she wasn't getting anywhere.

​After years of looking for answers and feeling totally helpless, Sophia found Structural Integration & Myofascial Bodywork (MFB) and realised how disconnected she was from her physical body. This was the missing link for her; the problem wasn't just in her mind, it was in her body! Trauma is stored in the body, and if we become disconnected from the sensations that are going on in our physical body, our mind won't get a chance to be at ease.

After many years of healing, processing, feeling, and deeply connecting to her body, Sophia now helps many people make sense of their physical pain and what may be going on for them emotionally. She calls this Emotional Anatomy. While a free and open fascial system creates a more balanced emotional state, Sophia has seen the impact of MFB on excellent recovery, lymph & blood flow, and injury prevention. MFB, according to Sophia and many of her clients, is truly life-changing!

In this episode we talk about all things fascia, the bodymind connection, healing trauma and a bit about ageing bodies. You can find Sophia on instagram @muscle_sense or via her website www.musclesense.net

Midlife is not a crisis it is an awakening. It is about healing your childhood adaptive strategies to become your most authentic self. The development challenge of midlife is radical honesty with yourself. There is a strong mystical side to the midlife transition and this can be best understood by using archetypes to explore the story and road map of what this transition is all about.

What about menopause and how does this fit in? Menopause is the end of our fertility and it is part of the midlife transition. Our hormones changes facilitate growth and development, physically, psychologically, culturally through the different phases of our lifetime.

Listen in to find out which feminine archetype I have found the most useful to provide guidance in what is required in midlife to support our growth during this transition.

If you would like to explore the mystical side of midlife transition more deeply you can also explore my ebook Magical Midlife and Menopause and my Midlife Masterclasses.