Ep. 82 Uncover Your Inner Knowing: A Midlife Journey

[00:00:00] Meegan Care: Well, hello, my friend. Welcome to the podcast so glad that you are here.

At the moment we’ve got two cohorts of the midlife upgrade course running one is coming to an end.

And we have our final lives in call this week. And it’s been such a.

Inspiring deep dive and seeing these really natural shifts and. Women’s perspective. And also assumptions about themselves.

Has been incredibly rewarding for me as somebody who has,

Worked with people for over 20 years. Normally one-to-one with some group teaching thrown in. Now that I’m more working with groups. I’m discovering so much more the power of the group dynamic, not to fix or to change, but to hold space in a very. A simple human heart to heart. Non-judgemental way.

And when that happens, my God, that changes then the insights and the courage that we can tap into as a woman is so profound. And one of the topics that’s been coming up. And does come up every time I run this group.

And it’ll have different wordings from different people, but it’s this idea. That we’ve.

Become separated from inner knowing from our gut instinct from ad deep. Knowing intuition. And if you’re more of a spiritual kind of person, then that might be something that you’re really already tapping into and really, really interested in. But I know for myself having gone through the whole gamut of. Different forms of spirituality.

And right now in this very natural mundane, but open to the incredible miracle of life and. And the deep body awareness that there is so much more to life that we never ever see. While we’re in the body I know that we don’t need to be a spiritual person and quote max to have a deep connection with our inner knowing And to have that communicate to us and work for us in our everyday life. And I know that because I speak to many women who would never say for themselves at that a spiritual person, or they are part of the consciousness community , they might be in management, I work with a lot of teachers, a lot of.

Women and the helping professions. And,

A lot of women who work in commerce.

All of these women. What we all have in common is that we had this innate. Natural connection to our inner knowing and our gut instinct. How ever Here is the problem for us. Historically. That’s not been okay. Historically, when a woman has been deeply connected to her inner knowing to her intuition, we have had periods in history where our life would have been in danger. We may have been burned as a witch.

We may have been ostracized from communities.

And so we have this. Blocking or dumbing down of a woman’s innate connection with her inner knowing.

So the, we have a fundamental problem that a woman’s intuition historically has been deemed as being. Dangerous. As being something that we don’t want to give credence to something that we don’t want to give support to flourish and flower. Which is probably why. It shows up much more often in our spiritual communities.

Then it does say in the boardroom. And yet you talk to. Many people who are in business, male, female, or other genders. And they will tell you that a lot of their decision-making includes rational thinking includes data. But good. Decision-making also includes tapping into our inner knowing And so I think it’s a really important topic for all of us and for most of the women that I talk to through my course.

They report that they feel disconnected from their. In inner knowing from the gut instinct and some of us may have had. Experience of our inner knowing or intuition when we were children, when we were connected with nature, we’re out in nature and we’re feeling that. Just that deep openness with life itself or nature itself and taking myself back to when I was a child in the forest and the Bush. In New Zealand. And felt so very open and. As if I had was in communication with the Bush around me, with the trees and the ground and the streams and the sky. Around me.

And it’s very normal that, that experience of oneness with nature. And with our natural self. Diminishes as we get older. And, you know, it’s easy to blame,

System, social media schooling, all the rest of it, it’s also a really natural progression that we come into a more rational thinking.

Way of being as very young adults, and then you’re coming into that.

That stage of life. Which is called your saturn return as around 28,

Where you,

Looking at how you’ve been raised. And the values and the morals and the rules and the, the societal expectations. And you’re deciding through that saturn return period. Is this for me? Am I keeping this, am I letting this go?

And you see people around that agent can certainly happen a lot later. We discard what no longer serves us from our family of origin. And we kind of write our own story.

And that’s where we start to have the potential to connect probably in a different way, in a more mature way to our own inner knowing, however, Modern culture is not set up for that. So we have all of that historic dampening down of a woman’s intuition, which we know about that the rational mind became the king of knowing. And that still holds true to this day. In the majority, of course, things are changing and we’re seeing much more around the connection of the mind and the body and the rational thinking mind and the heart knowing and the gut knowing. Working together.

So as women we come into. Peri-menopause and midlife, and we might, you might feel quite disconnected from your inner knowing, particularly if you have been in the business of raising children, of having a career of now you’re dealing with teenage children. If you’ve had children and aging parents, You’re in that sandwich stage of life. There is much less time to give to ourselves. And. What ignites our flame of an unknowing and awareness. It’s really time to reflect on. On ourselves, on our inner landscape and that doesn’t have to be hours and days and weeks and months.

It can be pockets of time. Of doing nothing. Like when we were a child, right. I talked about that experience of my own in the Bush, in the forest. And how connected I felt to. To all that is.

And so if you are feeling. There must be something more to my life than this. I want you to know that you are absolutely not alone. That in every single group of midlife woman that I work with. It comes up time and time again. We might label it differently. But it is that shared experience of disconnection from at and inner knowing

so. Come here now in pyramid of pools. We have the sense of something’s missing. Some of it is about my gut instinct and my connection to myself. There’ll be many other aspects to it as well, but we’ve got this big flux of hormones, this lowering of estrogen. And studies show us. That our brain starts to change for this time. And what was the other time that our brain changed?

One of the other times that our brain changed a lot. It was in our teenage years when we had the incoming flux of hormones. So now we’ve got this. Reducing flux of hormones happening. This can take place for. Years and years we can be in peri menopause early post-menopause. And the connections and the pathways in our brain are changing.

And so this is a really, really beautiful time. To start to be curious about our fixed perceptions of ourself. Of our life of our career of the world around us. And this for many of very stormy time. Physically cause you’ve got all of the physical symptoms going on

But also. Psychologically. And the psychological symptoms of perimenopause arise. Fairly early on in the pace earlier for many women than say hot flushes, we might notice a dissatisfaction with the way lifers. Or our part in life, we might notice that we are more irritable than normal. Or we just feel more flat and that might be our physical vital energy, but it also can be this psychological get up and go. And I know for myself, I became very.

Disorganized in peri menopause. And I just felt like everything was too overwhelming to get things in order.

And so my house became much more. An organized than what it used to be. And I didn’t really understand that that was a part of that menopausal journey until now I’m out the other side and things are becoming more orderly. It’s much more easy for me to. Declutter to put things in their place. Ah, step-by-step of course. And I know that I’m not alone in this.

And if that’s your experience too, I want you to know that you’re not alone in this either.

So we’ve got this change happening in our brain and this.

Has a massive potential for you. To be able to reconnect with your gut instinct and your intuition.

So think of a woman and she’s in mid-life, she’s in a job and all around her is going through a restructure. And prior to. Getting to really know herself and her and inner knowing she was.

Quite understandably, freaking out that she was going to lose her job.

And then she opens the doorway to understanding from that deeper perspective , she creates a perspective shift. She gets in touch with her and a knowing any who got instinct and something tells her. Why don’t you look for another job? That is less stressful. Yes, they may be a pay drop, but think about all that space that you’re now going to have in your life. And to do that, she would need to. Untagle herself from her professional persona. It is normal and expected that we are a little bit bound up with our professional identity. Again, that’s part of our conditioning, right? But this mid-life time is a beautiful time where you can disentangle from that. And look around and what happens is the blinkers come off and you’re much more able to choose.

Where do I want to go? So I’ve seen this for numerous women. When we start working together. They, really, really worried about their career and their job, whether it’s because of restructuring or that, that just not interested in that work anymore.

And that really unsure about what the next step is.

So then what we do is we, and this is kind of a, how to, for all of us. We take a step back. And we use some of the tools that I teach to. Reconnect to your inner knowing. Because it’s in there for every single one of us. It is not some, it is something special, but it’s not something unique to just a few people.

This is a really normal part of being a human is being able to listen to more of our knowing than just our rational thinking mind. And when we’re in that place where we can. Communicate with both our logical rational mind. And our deep gut instinct, knowing, you know, you just have that niggle and your gut of, oh, there’s a, there’s a sort of a warning flag here with this path or. This feels to me very open and I’m all about listening to that gut feeling.

And then also paying attention to our rational thinking mind and looking at the structures. And is this a wise thing for me to do from that place? But when we’ve taken that step back and we’ve been able to reconnect with our gut instinct. Then what happens? It’s kind of like a little mini miracle. I’m thinking about many clients here along the way. Where. Because our perspective has shifted. We’ve taken the blinkers off and. The possibilities for, and next step opens right up. There’s some kind of spacious awareness that then happens. And we can see opportunities. Paths next step forward. That we hadn’t been able to see before. And I’ve seen women’s lives change dramatically and significantly for the better. When they’ve been able to make that perspective shift and that reconnection to their inner knowing.

And how do we do this?

Well, I’m going to tell you, of course, that I think we do this really well in my mid-life upgrade course. There is a shift that happens in the first two to three weeks. Where we just very naturally reconnect to it our inner knowing because we bring in some more curiosity. Around these fixed perspectives and perceptions.

And we start to think about and consider is this really how I. What to be in the world. What will happen if I continue down this path for the next five or 10 years, what is my life likely to look at? And I might think, and I do this very often. I might think that I have no choices. And this matter. Because I need a set income to come in for my family.

This is what I’ve always done. I haven’t trained in anything else. If we’re thinking about a workplace situation.

But I’ve just seen it too many times, where we shift perspective, we step back, we connect and reconnect to our gut instinct and our heart wisdom.

And then our choices open up. It’s like we put on a whole new pair of glasses and we can see the world very differently.

So that happens most potently in my experience, it is ignited.

By a very particular, whole way of holding space and. Inquiry and curiosity. That we do through my program, but you can also do that for yourself. By getting really curious about your fixed structures of perception. So I’m going to give you one journal prompt that will help you to explore your own inner knowing that you can use for yourself to start the inquiry process.

So journaling in this way, where you. Have a few journal prompts or questions, lines of inquiry. And you take one of them. And you just let yourself free write

don’t sensor yourself. Whatever the first word is that falls out of your mind and wants to be written on paper. You just write it. So that’s a flow of consciousness writing and you don’t look back over it and edit it. Until you get to the end. And when you get to the end and I’m going to give you the questions.

So when you get to the end, Of your writing. A journal piece, then read back over it. And notice how you feel. Notice what arises inside you and make any notes that are arising about your perception. It’s very, very insightful. We very often write things that we didn’t know. We were thinking. And we look back over them and they become clear as day to us, but we didn’t know that was going on in our consciousness.

And I’ll put these in the show notes so that you can go back to them and you can use them for some journaling prompts.

So the first one is reflect on a time when you felt strong gut instinct or inner knowing about a decision or situation. And then write about how you responded to that feeling. And what was the outcome?

And what can this experience teach you about trusting your intuition more? Now in your current stage of life. And what pops into my mind. Now for myself is a time where.

Oh, 25 years ago and I rented a little.

Beautiful little. House half house, in Auckland and I just had a gut instinct about the. Situation that was like, There’s an alert here.

Something’s not quite right. But because it was so gorgeous and it was really close to the beach, it was in my price range. It really felt like what I needed. And there wasn’t anything else that I could see. I went for it. And turns out I had to leave that place. Pretty soon after things weren’t right with the landlord.

And one of the neighbors were in a. Abusive relationship. I had a newborn baby and it was not the environment that I hoped it would be.

I often have the. Warning gut instinct and because I try and push my life into certain places where I want it to go. I will put that aside and to my detriment. As I learned down the track, but life is for learning. And so I don’t regret those decisions. I am. Continuing on to learn and lean into my own gut instinct as well.

Have a play with that. With your journaling. And see what comes through. Let me know. I love hearing from you.

Your experiences of the podcast, sometimes.

Women message me and say, Hey. I listened to your podcast. It came up at the exact right time when I was considering this problem.

And I really needed to hear that in that moment.

And then I got another sign from life where it was affirming. My choice I’ve had that reported to me numerous times. And I think it’s just so exciting because. I try and speak on these podcasts based on what I’m feeling in our collective consciousness. As if it’s some kind of answer. Or support from life itself. And. So, if you ever have that experience, do let me know.

Cause it gives me just a little, a gorgeous little thrill. That it has really met. You in the right place for where you need it to be. That’s the end of our show today.

Play with reconnecting with your inner wisdom, annual gut instinct. And even if you don’t feel like you have any connection to it at all, Trust me when I tell you it is there. It might just need a little tender, loving support to be uncovered for you to reconnect to it again, with your conscious mind. All right, my friend go well and I’ll talk to you real soon.