Conversations about life transitions, relationships and trauma for people who want to understand what this life is about.
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In this episode, I sit down with artist Leah — a former accountant turned figurative painter known for her portraits of women — to talk about art as a language for the body when words run out. We trace Leah's path from the audit floor to the easel, sparked by an unexpected, almost hormonal pull toward painting during her first pregnancy, and unpack why the hands are one of our most primal, expressive tools — closely tied to speech, gesture and emotion long before we could name what we felt. Leah opens up about painting women as a form of self-discovery, why every portrait carries a bit of dark
What if the most transformative journey you could take wasn't to a faraway place, but back to yourself? In this episode, I sit down with Damianne President, a coach who helps midlife women use intentional solo travel as a catalyst for self-discovery. Damianne has lived and worked across four continents — from St. Lucia and Canada to India, Sudan, Japan, and now Prague — and her extraordinary cross-cultural life is the foundation of her work. What you'll hear in this conversation: How a Sufi teacher in India told a 20-something Damianne she was "watching her life from the window of a train" and
What if the systems that have shaped our world for centuries aren't just political structures but are actually living in your body right now? In this rich conversation, I sit down with my dear friend Sasha Ostara, writer, coach and decolonisation educator, to explore how capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and human supremacy don't just exist "out there"; they show up as chronic tension, hypervigilance, collapsed chests, shame, and the relentless hum of never-enough. Drawing on Sasha's viral blog post and Rupa Marya's book Inflame, we trace how colonisation becomes embodied and what it me
Today I talk with Ashely Miley, a sacred intimacy coach, about how we can develop a deeper connection with the our sensuality and sexuality. With our life force energy. Ashley talks about her own journey of connecting with her sexuality after long periods of disconnection from her body and what was helpful for her. We discussed how trauma, particularly for people with a history of sexual trauma, disconnects us from our bodies as a strategy of protection and how we can understand that when we look through the contextual lenses of the nervous system and embodiment. Ashely studied music at Univer
One of the most challenging aspects of midlife transition for many women is coming to terms with your own mortality and ageing. The paradigm is indeed different for men, there is more acceptance of the ageing man with grey hair. But for women, aside from menopause, there is great fear in ageing and becoming irrelevant. This largely has been perpetuated by the cosmetics industry and popular culture. How many role models of women ageing on their own terms do we see in the media, social media or television and films? In this podcast, I talk with Faith Agugu, psychotherapist and founder of Silver
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
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
Fawning is a survival response rooted in our nervous system's need for safety—it's how we learn to please, appease, or over-adapt to avoid conflict or threat. In this episode, we explore the origins of fawning, how it shows up in relationships, and what it takes to gently unlearn it.
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
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
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 co
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 ex
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
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 t
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,
In midlife, we start to notice changes in how our body metabolises food, how we recover from exercise and how we are able to deal with stress in our life. No longer can we drink lots of alcohol and pull up OK the next morning. Maybe there are a few sneaky kilograms piling on. This is because as we enter perimenopause, our hormones start to shift how we metabolise food changes and this impacts on many areas of our health. Annie Gaudreault, who is a Licenced Nutritionist and Health Coach from Toronto, CA, joins me in the podcast to talk about the impact of nutrition on our life as we move into o
How do we navigate life with self compassion? What is self-compassion? Today I welcome Belinda Haan to my podcast, Talkin' about Midlife, to talk about how we can navigate life with self-compassion. Belinda is a coach, teacher and facilitator and she works predominately with women who are becoming mothers. She is the creator of "Emotional Support for Mothers" - simple practice for difficult days. This toolkit is a thorough guide for simple exercises we can use when we are having a tough day. In this podcast Belinda and I have a great chat about what self-compassion means, why it is so hard for
Many of my the clients I work with, whether they be senior executives I am coaching, or clients I am doing relationship coaching with, often have a goal of wanting to get better at being with their emotions. They want to be able to respond better to the challenges that life throws their way. The only way to do this is to work with the autonomic nervous system (ANS). Your ANS state drives your thoughts, feelings and emotions. When you feel safe, connected and regulated your will different feelings and think different thoughts than when you feel unsafe and disconnected. Most of us, over years of
When it comes to midlife we often talk about the concept of ‘women stepping into their power”, what does this actually mean? Well in today’s episode I will unpack that with my friend and colleague Celine Levy. Celine is a Sex and Power coach who works with women to help them gain a sense of agency and connection with their bodies. Celine and I talk about power and how it is relational and what is actually happening in the neurobiology of the body when we are not in an ‘empowered’ stance; by the way we both really dislike the word empowered. Celine has a really interesting story and her path to
For my last podcast of the year, my good friend and colleague Dianne Shepherd joined me as we talked about all the weird and whacky stuff that can happen in our midlife transition. Dianne’s work focuses on supporting midlife women in sacred sexuality, connecting with their sensuality and pleasure and really building a sacred relationship with their body. Dianne is also an astrologer so we went there too. We talked about Dianne’s own turbulent midlife transition and how it was a healing pathway for her. How finding pleasure practices helped her find and connect with her authentic self. You will
It has become more important than ever that organisations focus on developing their leaders to cope with the Volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) times that we work in. We have been talking about VUCA for the last 15 years, it has come and to be honest it is more dysfunctional than every as organisations struggle to deal with the many complex adaptive challenges that they are facing; coming off the back of the pandemic many organisations are simply drowning in these problems. Today I talk to my friend and colleague Deborah Pascoe who is a leadership development expert about how we
As the world we live and work in has become more complex, we have had to change the way we live and work. Our global society has gone through significant change but the way we create and build businesses has not. How we approach organisational design, redesigning organisational processes for complexity has been the most challenging aspect for many business owners regardless of their size. Unfortunately many of our big societal processes and systems are broken and falling apart because the very foundations and rules that guide them do not account for the full complex picture of what is actually
Midlife is a time that tend to show up the vulnerabilities in our bodymind. We experience these as physical or mental health issues, challenges in relationships and sometimes just a really strong needs to make some big changes in our lives. In this episode I am joined by Dr Beth Claxton to talk about wellbeing in midlife and beyond. Beth is a board certified OBGYN and a certified functional medicine practitioner who reside in Northern Arizona in the USA. In this episode we talk about many aspects of our health and wellbeing in midlife. We talk about Beth’s own midlife transition and how it has
In this episode I am joined by my colleague and friend Moira Cormack to talk about Inner child work and how powerful it is for all of us to do. Moira has an interesting life story and in many ways all of her life experiences have lead her to understanding this work deeply and work with clients to do this work. In her coaching work, Moira focuses. specifically on supporting people to heal their emotional pain with inner child and body based healing. Moira is currently in the process of creating an inner child online course so it seemed like a good time to talk about what inner child work is all
I recently went to see the Barbie movie and loved it. There were so many great messages in there and the dealt with what are extremely complex cultural messages and phenomena in a way that was digestible for even the youngest members of the audience. So today I wanted to reflect on those messages and points and unpack the patriarchy a little bit and how it impacts all of us and share some stories of my own about how I have seen how patriarchy gets in the way of women mentoring and supporting each other. Of loving and complimenting each other, of being able to brag and cheer for each other. Thi
