Talkin about Midlife

Becoming a parent is a huge transition for all of us one that is often poorly supported. We often receive lots of guidance with regard to caring for the baby but little regarding the rite of passage of becoming a mother or father; the identity change and how that impacts on our sense of self.

Today I talk to Carla Crivaro, a sex, love and relationship coaching who works with men and omen 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 a dynamic of cis gender, heterosexual relationship. However as we are talking about dynamics in family systems and the roles we can take up in those systems you may find his information helpful if that Cis/hetero partnership does not reflect your own relationship dynamic.

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,

- ow they can into really unhealthy systemic patterns with a female partner when she steps into the role of mother,

- That men’s hormones do change when the 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 them,

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

You can find Carla and www.carlacrivaro.com or @the.forgotten.father on instagram.

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 out 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

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 and soothe ourselves in the moment is a big part of working consciously with our relationship with money. Learning to meet our emotions and express them in a grounded way, feeling that in our nervous system creates new capacity in our nervous system to feel these darker emotions. Emotions that our brain often doesn’t let us feel, regardless of whether it is a cultural imprint, a familial imprint that is stopping us from feeling that.

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.

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.

Having the support during this period creates both a safe and comforting space for us to grow. These 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 many life transitions, in particular she supports women through Divorce.

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

In the podcast Elizabeth talks us through the four phases of her Divorce transition methodology. Starting with getting your needs met, then Boundaries and Gatekeeping, Learning to Trust your Intuition and finally Self Expression.

This 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 www.theunicornacademy.com on instagram @the.unicorn.academy.tm or on tik tok @theunicorn academy.

Where does creativity come 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.

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

The world is in a really weird place at the moment and the last two years has shown us we still have a very long way to go to build a sustainable future for ourselves. Systems are breaking down and need to work differently if we are going to build sustainable change for broader societal issues. How do we learn to think broader than ourselves and what is going on for us right now.

Today I talk to the fabulous Mangala Holland. Mangala is Women’s empowerment and sexuality coach. We talk about how healing and growing our sexuality is a profoundly life changing experience for those who pursue their learning in this part of their lives. How our sexuality is a foundational part of who we are as human beings and through embodiment work and working with our nervous system we can build strength and resilience within us.

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 at her website www.mangalaholland.com . She is also on Facebook and instagram.

The transition to menopause is complex and multifaceted. It is a death and rebirth, a shift in all the different aspects of ourselves. There is a lot of stigma around sexuality and ageing, so for many women there is a 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 in the midlife and menopause transitions. Laura shares with us her own sexual awakening post menopause and we talk about the possibilities for growth and development in terms of a women's sexuality that menopause can present.

In this episode you will learn:

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

- How the enormity of the menopause transition can be challenging for women in their partnerships and can present 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 presents 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 often assumes it is just that along,

- Connecting with 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 tend to apply.

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

Self love is a concept that I am not sure everyone has their head wrapped around. Sometimes when we think of self love we think of a narcissistic type of self love. That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about really loveing who you are as a person, all the parts of you. Loving your sexuality, your sensuality, the masculine and feminine aspects of yourself. In this episode I talk with my friend Gina Catherine who is a Sexuality, Love and Relationship coaching 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 supports our healing and gave us both a deep sense of awe, wonder, respect and love for our bodies.

In this podcast we discuss:

- How fuelling yourself with pleasure rather than rewarding yourself supports self love,

- How we have been conditioned to be humble and the underbelly of that is counter to self-love,

- That your sexual energy, which is your life force energy, is an incredible source of creativity,

- When we are closed off to our sexuality, it is like closing yourself off to a room in your house,

- How celebrating yourself is not only a good boundary practice but it sets you up for self love,

- How our sensuality and sexuality is so unique to us and discovering the joy of both is so rewarding and empowering.

You can find Gina at www.ginacatherine.love or on instagram at @gina_catherine coaching

Gina also hosts a lot of conversations on clubhouse and you can find her on clubhouse under Gina Catherine.

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. 

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.

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 has created and that she offers 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.