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Midlife is a time to turn our focus inward and listen to the wisdom our bodies have to offer.

Those physical symptoms like fatigue and an increase in overwhelm? They’re messengers from within, urging us to prioritize rest and rejuvenation.

But this journey is not one of decline, far from it! Midlife brings about shifts in our personality, goals, and worldviews. Let’s not dismiss them; instead, let’s see them as invitations to grow and evolve.

This is a prime time to access your inner wisdom in a way that hasn’t been available to you in the past.

By paying attention to our inner experiences and emotions, we ignite the spark of self-discovery and true knowing.

During this episode, I share a somatic listening practice that enables both a pause in overdoing and a deep dive into the wisdom of your body and nervous system. 

The key is to focus on being present with ourselves and recognizing our experiences in the present moment.

This allows us to better comprehend the inner language of our thoughts and emotions.

Let’s celebrate this second stage of life, unleashing our purpose and cultivating authentic confidence and courage.

Remember, midlife isn’t a time to settle; it’s an opportunity to make a unique impact on the world while prioritizing our well-being.

 

Episode Topics:
1. Importance of listening to one’s internal experience
   – Accessing inner wisdom in midlife
   – Midlife physical symptoms: fatigue, changes in menstrual cycles
2. Listening to the body’s need for rest in midlife
3. Changes in personality, goals, and perspectives in midlife
4. Paying attention to one’s inner experience and feelings
   – Practice of lying down, placing hands on the belly and heart, and listening to the breath and body
   – Understanding moment-to-moment experience
5. Journey of self-discovery and personal growth
   – Targeting self-doubt, people-pleasing, impostor syndrome, and overwhelm
6. Celebrating the second stage of life
   – Developing authentic confidence and courage
   – Unleashing purpose on the world in midlife
7. Making an impact without compromising personal well-being

Full Episode Transcript

Hey, my loves. So great to connect with you again. I want to speak today about.

Something that I’ve found really useful in my life, but even more so in midlife, and it’s such a simple thing and I was gonna call it a hack, but I really don’t wanna call it a hack because it’s just not, and hacks and imply to me anyway that we are still pushing through and overriding and really not listening to ourselves.

And what I’m gonna speak about today is completely the opposite of that. In fact, it is all about listening to your internal experience. And I just find it so fascinating when I work with women, um, with the particular process that I use, that they learn really, really quickly to tap into their inner wisdom.

And once we’ve opened, well, they have through my guidance though, but they’ve opened that doorway to their inner wisdom. It stays with them forever, like for the rest of their life. In any trick, tricky situation that you can be in or any upset or stress or frustration, they can, they then have this immediate.

Access to their inner wisdom. And I don’t know, maybe once I would’ve called that, you know, spiritual wisdom or definitely transpersonal wisdom cause it comes from, you know, beyond our personal self. But really, honestly, I, I just wouldn’t call it spiritual anymore. It’s just who we are as human beings and it’s.

Requires that we become more present with ourselves and you know, you get to fast track it. If we are coaching together with a particular process that I use, There are, of course, other ways that we can access that inner a wisdom. I am a simple human being and I don’t think of it as coming outside of ourselves because actually in my experience, the way I support my clients to do it, it’s not they’re actually accessing a deeper part of themselves, a deeper part of their psyche, part of the great subconscious.

That is us. Right? And part of that can be collective, and some of that is, is personal as well. So, We have different layers of our psyche and different layers of our subconscious. In any case, what I really wanna deepen into is listening to our body and actually why that’s so bloody important when we are in midlife.

Look, honestly, it’s important through our whole life, but it does become increasingly important in midlife. Um, because coming up to, um, you know, perimenopause time, there’s a couple of things that can, that start to arise. You know, you’ve got the physical symptoms, like you might have a change, the change in your menstrual cycles, but another very common physical symptom that women experience is that they have increasing periods where they feel a bit more tired.

Or they’re needing to take a bit more rest than they used to. So you have this sort of creeping in of fatigue showing up, or they just sort of, sort of can’t do what you used to do. And what I mean by that is you can’t override your body’s need for rest, which is what we are conditioned to do. You can’t do that in midlife without there being a cost.

And actually your body’s saying, you know what? No. Today you are resting and it might throw up, you know, a symptom or two so that you are having to rest. Or it might grind you to a halt because of various other reasons. Low mood, like I said, unwellness, and we are so conditioned to. Uh, go, go, go. To never stop to override feelings of fatigue and needing to rest.

And for many of us, we can get away with that. For most of our adult lives, I wasn’t able to, I, as you know, may know I was sick with chronic illness in my twenties and. I just couldn’t override things anymore. I had to start listening. I had to learn how to listen to my body to rest, to help it to heal. And the beautiful thing about midlife is that it’s such a powerful portal in your life for the women that you are gonna be in the second part of your life.

And with this change, this transition, this portal that’s opening comes some of those symptoms and one of them is that, You know, maybe we can’t override things like we used to in a physical way or a psychological way. And the other thing that shows up for us as women is that we, what has been very stable as our personality, our goals and missions drives can start to change.

What has been stabilized in terms of meaning of how we show up in the world, how we relate in the world, and how we see the world also starts to change. And this is the inner experience that leads to the cliched, mid midlife crisis, ending your relationship, changing your job, buying the sports car, all of that kind of stuff.

And for many of us, those big changes in our life. Are important and timely and needed, and there’s a missing link here, and the link has really been able to go internally and listen to your inner experience, to your felt sense experience, to your somatic experience of your. Self, your responses to the world.

Because what happens when we try and change based on we’ve got those shifting sands starting to happen in midlife and perimenopause, and for many of us, they can lead to big external changes. And for some of us that’s, that’s right. That’s the, that’s the true right direct path for you and for other others of us.

You’ll still get the shifting sands, but. There won’t necessarily be a right. Big external change to make, and in fact, making an external change in some cases is a like a knee jerk reaction to the discomfort that’s coming up inside of ourselves. And so what I wanna suggest first that we do. Is really start to pay attention to your inner experience.

And look, the thing is whether or not you make those external changes, some of them are amazing and can really shift things in your life, but they’ll come with big changes in how you relate to the world. So you’re gonna be forced to pay attention to your internal experience anyway. So what I’m saying is as soon as we start to feel that shifting sands of midlife of.

What used to make me happy doesn’t make me happy anymore. What I used to be really driven for is just not driving me anymore. As soon as we start feeling that, or I can’t push through this anymore, my body is making me rest and. My life is not set up for this. Now is the time to do some really listening to your felt sense experience.

Because we sometimes, we know what we’re thinking, we know what the thoughts are in our mind, and we might know our feelings when they’re really, really big. But do we know our feelings when they’re a little bit deeper, a little quieter, a little more beneath the surface? Well, not always. And so we talk a lot about boundaries, reducing people pleasing in midlife, and how important this is.

Well, the only way we can make those changes is by understanding what our moment to moment experience is, and so, This practice that I’m talking about now, really getting in touch and listening to your body doesn’t have to be something that is really cathartic or about expressing emotion in a really big way, or even going through a process where you’re trying to fix something about yourself.

It’s not about that. It’s actually about lying down. You can put some music on if you want to. You’re just taking time to be with yourself, and you’re placing one hand on your belly and one hand on your diaphragm or your heart, and you’re listening to your breath, and you’re feeling your breath, and you’re listening to your body, and you’re feeling your body, and you’re just being there.

For those moments in time and really paying attention and listening, and you might feel through your hands at first, you might notice what sensations available to you. You might notice how the body feels, and then you might deepen in and start to notice what you you are feeling in terms of emotion. Is there any emotion present?

Is there anything that’s underneath the surface? And just allowing them to be there for those moments. And just for now, we are stepping off the train of trying to fix, fix, fix. And actually learning just to be with our experience of ourself. And you get a twofold benefit with this. The first, of course, is that you are learning to be more in touch with your body’s information.

Cause it’s that information that is gonna support you to have clearer boundaries, stronger boundaries to. Turn down the volume on people pleasing to show up for what you want in your life. We’ve gotta be able to feel our inner experience and to have to be able to make some sense of it first. So that’s the first benefit.

And the second benefit is that you are getting the rest. And the pause that you need, and we always need to have rest. But prior to perimenopause, many of us could override that and ignore it and keep going. But for so many women come the changes of perimenopause, your, your system kind of says, Hey, no more.

We’re not doing this anymore, you’re gonna take some time to rest. So it’s interesting when I work with people with hands-on with craniosacral therapy, really the only time they take that deep rest when they are consciously slowing down is when they come to see me and. I’m supporting them to do that, but actually you can take 10 minutes out of every single day and do that for yourself or 20 minutes, and it’ll give you such a reserve of nourishment and energy that you know, going to see a practitioner once a week or once a month if you can do that for yourself.

How beneficial is that? It’s so deeply helpful. So the other benefit that comes from this is that we are so taught that if there is a problem, we fix it. Yeah. That is such a helpful thing to do in many areas of our life. But when it comes to this time of life, when you’re going through this empowerment portal of change, We can try and we often try and override and fix everything that’s going on, everything that’s uncomfortable, whilst that has its value and its place, there are just some things that we can’t fix that we need to learn to tolerate, need to learn to be kind to ourselves about.

And one way we learn to be kinder to ourselves, to slow down, to pause and really listen to ourselves is by taking these. Somatic rests where you are listening to your body. You’re not trying to change and you’re not trying to fix yourself. You’re just taking this time out to listen. So I am such a huge believer that midlife and perimenopause is an incredible time for a woman to become so empowered in her life.

This is the opportunity that’s available for us, and this is why I’m creating a whole course around this to help us move through this with. Community with sisterhood in a far more empowered way because every woman that I work with has felt isolated in her life going through these challenges by herself.

And I have seen when we come together as a collective and we learn some things together, we do some practices together. But more than that, we have this shared support for one another. So much changes. So I’m really excited for this, this course that’s coming soon. Okay, so this is one of the most powerful medicines you can give yourself is to take the sematic rest you are connecting with your deepest sense of self, which she wants to come forward.

This part of you wants to come forward through midlife because there is you 2.0 who wants to be born, but we can’t do that if we are disconnected from our inner experience. And this is what good therapy, good processes, good coaching helps us to do. But there is so much we can do for ourself as well. And one of those things is to take those somatic causes.

And of course, like I said, the extra benefit of that is you are getting that rest that you need, which I believe is one of the greatest medicines you can give yourself. And just do it. Do it for a week. Get that. A little less set up. You’re gonna spend 10 minutes a day, 20 minutes a day. If you can manage that and you’re gonna take that time, it’s not, it’s not even a meditation, right?

You’re just lying there. You’re listening. You’re feeling. You might have music in the background. You’re not trying to do anything. You’re not trying to fix anything. Might feel really weird at first. It might feel like quite uncomfortable. Just do it for a week and see how you feel. Sometimes it’s the most simple practices and.

That what we are seeking when we go and have the body work, when we go and do the self care, we wanna get back in touch with ourselves. We wanna feel that pleasure. We wanna feel at home with ourselves again. Well, this is one way that we can support ourselves in that journey, and I think it’s such an important piece throughout our whole life, but particularly in midlife.

Give it a try. Let me know what you think. Have an amazing week, my friend. Remember to up the joy, the pleasure, the breaks, the dance breaks, the funny breaks, the enjoyment in your life. I know we, life seems to speed up in midlife. There’s, for me anyway, there’s more demands on my time from my business, my family.

Just life in general. It felt really busy when my kids were young, but for some reason it seems really busy right now and I know this is, you know, the push when as my youngest gets ready to leave home in the next few years and then things will change again. But I’m recommitting to this somatic rest.

Practice as well as, and it’s so important for me because I tend to forget about it a bit, bringing more joy and more play, and more just kind of doing whatever the hell I wanna do in my life and disperse with the pockets of really wanting to support you as a woman in your life to serve in my business.

To show up. In my world, I am recommitting to taking little pockets of time out for myself. I know that’s important. You know, that’s important. Join me on this journey. Let me know how it goes, and I’ll talk to you next week. Bye for now.