The Menstruality Podcast - 69. Claiming Rest and Working Soft in Menopause (Karen Brody)

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

For many years Karen, the founder of ‘Daring to Rest’ experienced severe panic attacks. It wasn’t until she started a deep rest practice that she learned how to meet her anxiety with grace and she hasn’t had a panic attack since. During her menopause process, this devoted practice of rest enabled her to clearly feel her ‘no’ and ‘yes’ in her body, process the rage arising and listen for what she needed to navigate this almighty transition. In our conversation today we explore:How rest at menopause helps us to manage the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual challenges that can show up in menopause, including hot flushes, insomnia, low energy, brain fog, anxiety, grief, and rage.How rest enables us to feel the ‘No’ of menopause in our bodies, so that we can pay attention to it, act on it, and in doing so, make way for our next level ‘yes’.Why rest is non-negotiable while we’re navigating the death and a rebirth initiation of menopause, and how to actually get it, even amidst the responsibilities of our lives (and the key is dropping any ideas of perfection). ---Registration for our 2022 Menstruality Leadership Programme will open again soon. You can check it out and join the waiting list here: https://www.redschool.net/menstruality-leadership-programme-2022---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [e-mail]---Social media:Red School: @red.school (https://www.instagram.com/red.school)Karen Brody: @karen_brody (https://www.instagram.com/karen_brody)

Welcome to the Menstruality Podcast, where we share inspiring conversations about the power of menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause. This podcast is brought to you by Red School, where we're training the menstruality leaders of the future. I'm your host, Sophie Jane Hardy, and I'll be joined often by Red School's founders, Alexandra and Sharni, as well as an inspiring group of pioneers, activists, changemakers and creatives to explore how you can unashamedly claim the power of the menstrual cycle to activate your unique form of leadership for yourself, your community and the world. Hey there, welcome back to the Menstruality Podcast. It's really, really good to be here with you. We're continuing our theme of entering the year consciously, gently, and our topic today is rest. For many years, Karen, who's our guest today the founder of Daring to Rest had severe panic

attacks and it wasn't until she started a deep rest practice that she learned how to meet her anxiety and she hasn't had a panic attack since today she shares about her menopause process and how this devoted practice of rest enabled her to clearly feel the no and the yes in her body, to process the rage that was rising in her through menopause and to listen for what she deeply needed to navigate this transition. Through the conversation we look at many of the themes of Alexander and Sharni's new menopause book, Wise Power, and we look at how to actually claim rest in our lives, how to work soft and why a dedicated rest practice could be the key to coming home to our authority and power in menopause. Apologies for my sound in this episode, I recorded it last year when I had a house full of little people running around so you might hear their bangs for my sound in this episode. I recorded it last year when I had a house full of little people running around so you might hear their bangs and squeals in the background. So let's get started with claiming rest and working soft in menopause with Karen Brody.

So Karen, it's so good to have you back on the Menstruality Podcast. You're the first person who's coming back for the second time. It's wonderful to have you. Wow. I'm super honored. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me. It's such an important topic. Your calling, your genius, your expertise in life, rest, you know, it's so important for all of us. And I'm thrilled to be having particularly a menopause focused rest conversation. I'd love to start how we always do though, which is checking in with your cyclicity, your cyclical nature. How are you feeling yourself as a cyclical being in this, in this moment, in this phase of your life? Well, for me, it's the moon, you know, that really ties me to the cycles and it's the

new moon right now. So it's, you know, I love the darkness. I love this invitation that I feel with the new moon to, to even go more inward. And I, I usually, I feel magic around the new moon and the full moon in different ways. So like for me right now, I just, I don't know, there's a stillness that the new moon brings for me that I really enjoy and I don't menstruate anymore. So, you know, there's not that for me, but the moon is really it. And I wasn't in tune with the moon that much for most of my life until I went through menopause and realized, oh, I don't have this guidepost of

having my menstruation. So the moon is really... And I grew up in a city where there was a lot of light pollution. And so I didn't consciously see the moon until I was 22 years old. I was in the Peace Corps. I went into the Peace Corps. I was in Belize near Guatemalan border. And I remember looking up, I was living in a Mayan village and I remember looking up and I went, what's that flashlight in the sky on a full night of the full moon. And, and then I realized and women would do rituals then as well and went down to the water and all of these things that just became like, for me, so precious that it's something, a world I didn't know of. I really lived very unconsciously for many, many, many years. Yeah, I really relate. You're making me remember a night that I had in Thailand. So similar, there was no light pollution, it was on an island. And the full moon was so big. It's like it filled

the whole sky. And it reflected on the water and the water looked like mercury, it looked like metallic, because the light of the moon was so bright. And I had the same feeling of, have I ever seen the moon before? And we are. It's true that our city life really can disconnect us in that way. So true. Yeah. And it affects us being able to sleep, the light pollution and all the other things.

You know, yeah, absolutely. We just had friends here and they, they live in more of a city. And the first thing the husband said is, oh, you could put lights all around your trees and have, we live in the woods in the middle of nowhere, you know, in the mountains. And I went, the last thing I want to do is put lights everywhere and light my house up like a Christmas tree. I like it dark. And you would, you would like it because you're the queen of rest. And what, but there is, there is a connection, isn't there, between befriending the darkness and the nighttime,

the slow time, the fallow time and the capacity to let go into rest. Absolutely. It just mirrors almost like the inner work we always have to do of the shadow consciousness. And, you know, when we bring things to consciousness, to the light, usually we feel lighter, you know, or we can hold the challenge. And we can hold that there's also, you know, because yes, it's dark at night, but there's the sun comes out, not every day, but you know, the light comes out as well. So we have the opposites every single day.

We're always holding that tension of the opposites every day. We're going to speak a lot about holding the tension of opposites in this conversation. Before we get into, you know, really looking at how we can rest more in menopause, I'd love to hear about your personal menopause experience. If you could sort of give us the headlines of how it was for you. Yeah, well, I was really brought to a place in my own journey with my menstruation where I had fibroids, endometriosis. I had gone to multiple, multiple, well, doctors, but a lot of, I was more into alternative medicine. So, you know, I had people waving feathers over my head. I did Chinese herbs. I did acupuncture, everything in service to having more ease with my menstruation. And my diet was already pristine because when I was in my twenties, I had a health challenge that I then changed my diet completely.

So I really ended up making a decision to have a supra cervical hysterectomy, which was a very hard decision, but in some ways in the end, it was, it was actually very liberating. It was very conscious. Uh, I would call it a conscious hysterectomy in the sense of, um, I even had a farewell to my uterus party with my girlfriends and I still believe the energy of the uterus remains within me. So I always honor my uterus. That energy is still there. But I kept my one ovary, my right ovary. And so I continued to ovulate even after, but I didn't bleed, of course.

But I was very in tune with my body. So I knew when I was ovulating. And then when I finally stopped ovulating, I really wondered like, when are the hot flashes going to start? When are the, you know, all these things, I didn't have a lot of menopause symptoms. And I think at the time, you know, I was already like had a deep devotional rest practice at that point. I mean, rest was, it was a lifestyle for me. I didn't realize that until I got a bit older that I was raising my kids on rest, like that, that was the tone in our home. It wasn't just like my practice, but it was the tone in the home. Not that we didn't party and have dance parties. And oh my gosh, I cooked to Michael Franti all the time and with the boys and

you know, we had fun. You know, it's not like we just laid down and sat on a couch. But what I will say is that, you know, not having my ovulation did again, bring me to the moon more. And that's that cyclical nature tying into that. And my rest practice became essential because what I did notice is there's something that happens at menopause where you just must live your most authentic life, your most authentic story. You know, there's like, you don't give a flying, I don't know if I can curse on here. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? You can actually, Alexander Shadi curse. Oh, beautiful. Okay, good. I do too. That's why I get along with him so well. But you know, you really, you really take no shit anymore. Like you, and actually even women who

maybe don't feel they have the voice to voice themselves, they can feel it in their bodies if they're not speaking up. And so I felt that a lot. Whereas, you know, like I remember with my husband, he's not as into consciousness, spirituality, those kinds of things as I am. And I remember literally it right around the time I stopped ovulating and I was fully in, in the perimenopause, you're also in that space too. You're, there's, it's a whole continuum. It's a whole journey. But I remember literally taking him aside in a parking lot and saying, listen, this is what I need from you. And this is the only way I can go forward in this relationship. The relationship wasn't terrible, but I felt like I was coming out of a

shell of where I needed to be in a new story. And if he wasn't going to be able to be a part of that story, I didn't know. I was in question about even the relationship. I have a friend who in menopause, what did she call it? Oh, maybe I'll think of it by the end of this episode, but she had a great name for that menopausal time. Oh, she goes menopause. Yeah. I need to take a little pause from then. And she, and she was also in question about her, her relationship, which my husband and I've been together. You know, let's say, I think it's 30, 33 years, we've been married for 28 of those 33 years. So, you know, we had a deep commitment to each other, but every, and so the pause is really actually interesting in menopause because pause, rest, it's built right into the word. Pause. Let's pay attention. Let's pay attention. And if we pay attention, we start to see,

we actually have this beautiful opportunity, this journey that will actually, it may be hard to go through the door, but once you're through the door, it's like, you know, when you go into these fairy tales and the door opens and you actually see it wasn't that scary through the door. It's actually so much better. It's so much more authentic. And yes, sometimes relationships have to fall because we have to be who we are. And menopause really feeds that, fuels that in a lot of women. And I think if we don't follow that, we feel often mentally not so well, but also physically we start to, and there's biological changes in our

body. The hormonal changes are certainly can give us hot flashes and things like that. We didn't have too many symptoms, but I did feel this yearning to be exactly who I am, my truest self with no apologies. Yeah. Can you remember what that felt like in your body? I'm thinking now for the people listening who are perhaps in those perimenopause years and starting to feel things or maybe bam in the middle of menopause. And it's like, can we normalize what that looks like? Or just shed some light on what did it feel like to have to feel those kinds of promptings and longings and the discomfort of them? Well, for me, again, I had a rest practice. So I just felt like I needed to listen, to listen to that inner voice. And sometimes I would get pissed off really

quickly with things. I'd just be like, I'm done. And those kinds of things, I felt rage come out of me. There were so many pieces. Usually if I was in what, you know, I'm now exploring gene keys a lot for myself personally. And there are these contemplations of our inner essence. And I realized through my gene keys, and I knew this even in menopause in many ways, that whenever I would succumb to the inner compromise, I often didn't feel well mentally, physically. So I would compromise something that was very precious inside of me, whether it was overgiving, which I think is such a, such a, a thing for women that we overgive. And we end up in this cycle of exhaustion because we think we need to show up perfectly. Oh, perfect was chucked out the window.

It was just like, no, no, no. In fact, I almost adamantly, you know, know I have I work at showing up imperfectly Alexandra and Shani have this word in the book uh called snudging which means I've read the book I don't know if I remember that part it's a funny piece where it's it's one of the um it's basically one of the the ways to get through menopause, I think. And it's essentially, you just do as little as possible, but just get by the art of snudging, where you just do just enough. So no one really notices, you just keep things ticking along, but you're not doing anything extra. Yeah, pulling back. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I was the queen of no, no, no. But even like not having to say no, it was just like,

it was a no. But with rest, I knew the no in my body. See what I feel like when I meet a lot of women who haven't been resting is they don't know their yeses and their nos. When you rest, you know, the no in your body. Can you tell us about it, about the no in your body? Well, there's, there's, there's honestly almost like a vomit that goes on in your body. It's just, it's a, it's a, and I do think in menopause, it becomes the most pronounced because we honestly, we have however many more years of our lives, but we're in the final act. We're headed to the final act of our lives. So it's now or never that we're going to pay attention to the no's.

Yes. You know? It's real. It's real. Yes, this shit is real at this point, you know, in our whole evolution as a woman in this lifetime. And so the no can feel as simple as, you know, something where you feel like an anxiety, a vibration in your body. If you feel anxiety, pay attention to that. If you're feeling anxiety, I would have a conversation with her. And you can't have a conversation usually unless you pause. You can't have a conversation in your

head because some beautiful phrase I learned from Sierra Bender, the itty bitty shitty committee lives up in your head. And it's always going to be telling you to be a good girl or you're not worthy or whatever your inner critic has been programmed with, right? Because we all have different inner critics. But whatever it is, it's going to be telling you that. And so if you're going to be, let's say, in good girl mode, it's going to be hard to find your no. But when you rest, when you rest and you give that pause, you have this, I think, direct

line to your truest self. And when you're in alignment with her, she can't say yes, because she knows the no. And the anxiety when you have a conversation with it is saying no, it's saying this isn't safe for me in some way. Like this isn't aligned. And when we pay attention, and I had a lot of years of severe panic attacks. My father had severe panic attacks and it wasn't until I started a regular deep rest practice that I actually, I've never had a panic attack since. That doesn't mean I won't have one. Again, what I do find there have been times and certainly during the pandemic where I could feel energy in my body because anxiety is just energy it's energy in the body and so I know now not to run from it which is

what I used to do but I can meet it and rest helps me meet it with grace. It's really profound for me to hear you put these two things together. I've got tears in my eyes because anxiety has been with me the last couple of years in a way it hasn't been before in my life. And it is so connected to my no. As a new mum, I've got a lot of no that I can't necessarily act upon. And I can imagine that people in menopause listening will relate from a different phase in their life that, you know, there might be work commitments or family commitments, or I know you've recently been talking about caring for your mother. And that's a commitment. Commitments where we feel the no, but we can't necessarily follow the no because people need us in that moment.

And I've watched it escalate into anxiety. And it's only when I've taken more time for myself, got a bit more space and seen, oh, hang on, there's a lot of no going on. So, and you need to make some space so that you can find some more yes. And it is reducing the anxiety. That's really powerful. Yeah. We all have real life that we come up against, whether it's, you know, raising young children and that's a constant, you know, it's almost like you're a waitress, you're this, you're everything. Taxi driver, doctor, nurse, counselor, playmate, singer, chef. Yeah. And so those are real life things. And for me right now in my life, my kids are in their early twenties and I would say they're not living with us, but they may be in any moment again,

because they're in the pandemic. We thought we were empty nesters, and we weren't. But, but I have a mother now that has dementia. And I am her primary caretaker, they have no other sibling that helps or any other, my husband helps. But you know, those kinds of real life things that on a Sunday, if I want to, if my body says, no, I don't want to go to my mother, I will probably go because that's the day I see her. However, my body says, no, what I would have done in the past is see her every day, go every, that's a no. And sometimes she is unraveled and I know I have to let it be and let her be in the unraveledness of where she's at. And that actually, I just need to take a nap or go for a walk. And that's, you know, not

inner compromise too much because I won't feel well. So in that moment of, because I feel like a squeeze in the center of my chest when you say that of like you make that move which is a leadership move you know leadership is a big theme in your work and I see this as a leadership move so you have someone who you deeply care for who needs something in that moment and you take the decision because you know in the run, it's going to be better for everyone to step away and take time for yourself. How do you manage the rub of that inside you? I mean, maybe there isn't, maybe there isn't a rub anymore, but I kind of feel a squeeze in me of like, I'm not allowed to, it's not okay. Well, rest has taught me to be good enough

to just show up good enough. And, and I, and it started actually my rest journey really started when my boys were young, because my oldest son from day 10 of his birth, he screamed nonstop. With a vacuum cleaner on for almost two years. That's the only way he would stop crying. If we would, and we would hold him nothing, he would cry through the night. I mean, it was insane to talk about torture, talk about trauma, trauma. He cried and we took him to doctors. There's nothing. Oh, maybe it's colic, but colic is three months. It's now been over a year and a half. I mean, it was intense and you have to, and that's when I had to rest. It was life or death for me. It was truly like, I wanted to eat, pray, love out of my life. Get me to Bali, you know?

Give me a bowl of pasta. Yeah. I don't know., I was privileged and still thought some days like, wow, I understand why people put their babies in dumpsters, who are in really difficult situations. Because this is nonstop. And I have resources. And if you don't have resources, yeah, I can understand it. And so I needed to resource myself because I was so undernourished and I had these panic attacks. It was really scary. It was really scary to have panic attacks. And that's when I realized I have, oh, I didn't rest because of that. I actually rested because I was just exhausted. And by accident, I saw people lying down in a, like, I thought I was going to take a yoga class. And I just saw people, you know, just lying down, practicing this yoga nidra,

which is like, honestly, deep, deep transformational rest. But, and I just thought, oh, I want to nap. But what it did help me with is panic attacks. And it helped me with so many other pieces of speaking up, finding my no, knowing the boundaries I had to put. Like I had to say to my husband, my husband traveled five months of the year when my kids were young. So I was alone with them a lot, nonstop. And when he came home, I literally had to start going to a hotel for the night to finally get my rest. It was the only way I could get. I had to get out of the house and go to a cheap motel. And I would sit there eating popcorn, watching Pretty Woman. And I didn't have a rest practice then.

I didn't realize that was before I had discovered yoga nidra. That was just to like begin to start just being good enough and not being the perfect mom of being there 24 seven, which is impossible. And actually I became a better mother through rest. And then I had a better mother through rest. And then I had a rest practice. And once I had a rest practice, it completely transformed our entire family. And through menopause, it's really like now with my mom, it's a critical piece. It's a critical piece in growing older to grow older and just feel that wise power. Wow, what a great title for the book

about Alexandra and Shani. It's true. It's a wise power. It's a wise power. And we have the wild woman in us still, that archetype of the wild woman. So the wild is there, but the wise really grounds us. Which is so beautiful. So the rest has taught you to just dissolve this myth of perfection, which I can feel the wild and the wise woman in that, because when we look out at the natural world, there is no perfect, you know, everything's trees are all kinds of shapes and sizes you know the colors are all different no two flowers are the same there's no perfection anywhere in the natural world and yet we're obsessed for some reason we're obsessed with trying to be to reach some kind of pinnacle of perfection that is burning us all out and making us all exhausted. Yeah. Yeah. It's baked into capitalism. It's baked

into patriarchy and, and women, I think suffer, men suffer as well. You know, that's an, and any gender suffers. But, but, but for women, because we have these transition moments, like we continually will menstruate and then we'll go through menopause. We have these almost built in initiation times where we're going to sink to the ground probably before we then rise like a Phoenix and, and, and without rest, we often will bypass these times and we'll continue in this cycle of fatigue. So with the rest, we're able to be more primed for contemplation and see this time as a time to contemplate, a time to step into our wise power. I'm going to pause the conversation here because we have a restful invitation for you.

We're gathering to start the year with rest on Friday, January the 20th. There's actually over 750 of us gathered now. It's going to be some big magic and we'd love to have you there. For two nourishing and rejuvenating hours, we're going to dream, play, create and vision guided by the intelligence of the menstrual cycle, your own wise oracle for 2023, the year to come. If you're in menopause or postmenopause, this free online event is for you too. The menstruality medicine circle that we're guiding you through is relevant for you whether you have a menstrual cycle or not. So this is not your usual annual planning retreat, it's an invitation to step out of strategy and ease into some deep listening. You can take your seat for free at redschool.net forward slash podcast forward slash 69 where you'll find the link to register.

Let's speak about this initiation that is happening at menopause. You know it's a huge part of wise power it's essentially the premise of wise power is that menopause is a death and a rebirth it's initiating us into our authority our fullness our full expression and as you say if we are resting through these initiatory times we can harvest the juice from them but also if we're able to rest then it supports the physical and emotional and mental health symptoms that can be arising too. There's this poem that you shared on your Instagram. I mean, I'm saying it's a poem. It reads like a poem. And it says,

Arrested woman, as she quiets down and uses her intuition, discovers the real reasons she is distraught. When she asks the questions, the answers arrive. Her doing is birthed from being. And I feel like this speaks volumes about why we need to rest in order to actually receive the initiations that are happening to us. Yeah. I think it's a whole different paradigm when you're doing is birth from being. And the being is so hard because we're conditioned to do, and we're not ever taught really to be. In fact, we're not praised when we be. So, you know, when we're growing up, we start to gravitate or our ways of being are really where we get the praise. And we get the praise from productivity, from doing. And so we do and we do and we do and we do.

And then we burn out. And then maybe you can take a little break, you know, because you might be depressed and you can take a break then. Only when you're depressed, you know, it's like, what about birthing the doing from the being? And I think in daring to rest, this is where we really focus because we really use the, the model of Marine Murdoch's heroine's journey. And, you know, in our lives, we usually have a fairly toxic, unhealthy relationship with

masculine and feminine. Feminine's been under attack for a long time and masculine energy, this whole, you know, the feminine being, you know, slowing down, receptivity, your intuition, we've been burned at the stake for being intuitive, wise women. So going into your wise power, it's like, wait a minute, it's dangerous. There's a constellation at play here that actually for women feels like it's danger to go. She may disrupt her family unit if she's in her wise power. She may disrupt her relationships one-on-one. She may disrupt her work environment. She may have to leave her job if she's in her wise power because she realizes her wise power doesn't want to be in that job anymore.

And so there's so many places where rest is essential because in order to step into your wise power, we have to come from a place of being and rest is being, rest is the do nothing, rest is the pause that we're all so afraid of because when you pause, we don't know what we're going to meet when we're pausing. You know, that's when we often like the darkness will go into shadow consciousness. And those are the challenge places that often we do have to meet. What's so beautiful, especially about a practice like Yoga Nidra, which we teach it during to rest, but we teach other rest practices, but you really learn witness consciousness. You know how we feel so like something feels magnified 20 times when we're in it.

And then you rest and you get perspective. You go, you know what? That's a shit show, but actually I can show up this way. You get insight that drops in in the pause and you get like, oh, okay, I'm getting hot flashes and I can maybe go to a function medicine doctor. I don't have to go to the doctor who's disempowering me again and again and again. I can go to, you know, you start getting insights when you rest. And so in the heroine's journey, in Maureen Murdoch's work, we talk about this a lot at Daring to Rest in terms of a leadership

model. You know, in order to be in your wise power, to be your truest self, you have, most people, they're going to have some form of an initiation. And usually that requires what Maureen Murdoch calls the descent to the goddess. Well, the goddess is rest. You know, that's the descent, and not just descent to the goddess, it's like descent to re-exploring your relationship with the feminine, the healthy feminine. And so rest is feminine. It's a feminine energy.

And why now I think we're talking about rest so much is because we realize we've gone into such a toxic masculinity cycle that we don't need no masculine. We need a healthy masculine and we need a healthy feminine. And so when you rest, you, you re remember that you're, you're, you're, there is this healthy feminine within you. And so the being becomes a part of yourselves, becomes a part of your bones. And it's, and again, when I talk about rest as a lifestyle, it just becomes a non-negotiable that rest is, it's like an IV drip through you. So you can spot, you know, the, the, when you're overdoing and then you bring yourself back into a more rested place. So it's not like we're not

always rested, but the rested woman is a woman who, you know, she is tapped into her intuition. She's not afraid of this piece that we've been, well, we've been historically, you know, taught to actually not express. She's actually brought back into relationship with her. And in being in relationship with her, she knows her yeses and knows, and she follows them because she knows that's when she feels her most vibrant self. There's a section in wise power that I just want to read this quote from, because it feels really relevant to what we're talking about. It's in the part of the book where they're talking about the five phases of menopause. And the second one is repair.

They say in repair, you surrender to the reality of what's currently in you in order to experience the truth or deeper truth of who you are. It's a big challenge to keep holding that line to yourself when it feels as if everything's crumbling and all is dark to trust that the seed of your new life is quietly germinating a seed packed with the alchemized jewels from the trials and tribulations of your life to date I mean there's so much in there for the heroine's journey but it's that the rest might be like the one thing that's holding you while everything else around you is breaking down and being remade. Absolutely. And I mean, it's one of these things that we feel challenged, so challenged to rest, and we can't access the jewels without rest. And everyone possesses their jewels, you know, but we can't even hear, we can't even sense in our bodies what it is unless we rest. And I think the biggest challenge is, is that, you know, why we put rest at the center at Daring to Rest is because it's so easy to, and I, you know, I,

I come from a women's leadership background before I got into rest and it's so easy to, and I, you know, I come from a women's leadership background before I got into rest. And it's so easy with leadership to, to put the doing first, to put the, and we'd end with menopause, you know, you really do have like, oh, flash things you need to get checked out, or, or you, you, you feel you, it's hard to just sit in contemplation when you feel like crap. And so that's real life. But there is, when we put rest at the center, we start to see that everything branches out from rest, like how we lead comes from rest. And there's a lot of, we're actually fueled in our doing through rest.

And so the jewels are all there and we discover them. And it's not through our intellect, which is where we've been all trained to go to our minds. It's from a whole different place, a more feminine mind. And when we're in the feminine mind, we're able, I think in menopause is calling out for us to be in our feminine mind. And when we're in the feminine mind, we're able, I think in menopause is calling out for us to be in our feminine mind. We can't access it without rest. And it's easy to say you need to rest. It's harder to actually rest. And that's why we create community to rest at Daring to Rest. And with other women who are rest positive, because most people aren't rest positive.

You get a little laugh from people. Oh, you're going to go take a nap or you're going to go rest. And I don't rest all the time. I love walking. I'm actually a big walker. And so I'm not always resting. Doesn't mean you rest all the time, but you know that rest is essential to building your house.

It's the foundation. It's within the foundation. And to just be told to rest, most of us won't rest. Some people might take a nap, but a lot of people don't like to nap. So there's other ways to rest and to slow your body down, you know, through breath work and other places, other ways to kind of power down. It's hard to power down. That's why we're not sleeping. Nobody's sleeping. We need to, I mean, women tell me all the time they do what, at Daring to Rest, we have the 61

point body rotation. I do it every Friday with women. It's totally free. Women come to yes to rest Friday and we do it every single week. And I do it mostly the same thing so that women will have the muscle memory to do it themselves at 4am in menopause when you're waking up with those early wake waking, and it will help you if not go back to sleep, at least be in less of an anxious place about those wakings, which usually pass, but it's hard to, I mean, everybody's different and it's really, it's hard when you are going through it. Everything's hard when you're not getting sleep. Everything's hard. I really want to get to the how toto because yes it's so true that it's um it's a very big challenge to actually rest in our world but before we get to the how-to I think it's important to look at a couple more of the things that make rest hard especially at menopause so we've named the like

the responsibilities and the caretaking that people have um I'd also love to speak about or to get your take on something that I see happening in me and I see it happening in my friends who are in perimenopause and in menopause and I see it in our community that this the thing that's getting in the way of us resting is that something inside us is on the run I mean you could call it anxiety you know you could call it fight or flight but it's like there's our traumatic things we've experienced in our lives kind of keep us hovering on the surface and and then we just get into this kind of snowball of doing and to actually slow down that momentum, like our nervous systems are jazzed. Yeah, they are. And I mean, I think, you know,

well, first of all, not resting is often a trauma response. It's some form of a trauma response, not resting. So everyone is different in terms of where that root, the root of that is, but, but there's so much when we, when we are going, when we are having that activation in our bodies. There's often I mean and it's it's understandable it's kind of goes back to what I was saying about not wanting to meet certain shadow places. And not that rest has to be, not for everybody, rest is like, oh my gosh, I'm going to meet all these dark, horrible things. But like when you slow down, you meet yourself. And people are fearful of that. And we've also been just so conditioned to be productive that we feel unworthy. And then there is the trauma pieces of everyone.

Again, it's a root trauma is different for everybody. It can be ancestral. I really, in Daring to Rest, we very much explore, you know, often our mothers were like this, our mother's mothers. Sometimes it skips a generation, but it often goes through the mother line, right? And so there are ways that we can resource our whole system. We can resource ourselves. I mean, at Daring to Rest, we, we kind of work with this when we, I do something called breaking the cycle fatigue of your mother line. And we, we kind of address this because there are a lot of core wounds that we

carry. And often we are in overdrive in order not to sit with those core wounds, not wanting to touch those core wounds. And so, but what we find often when we pause is that actually it feels like a relief. It's liberation. It's freedom when we actually sit with that. And we may cry and crying is great. Crying clears the river. You know, it keeps us in flow.

It moves us forward. If you're talking about birth, rebirth, you know, this rebirth of menopause, it helps us to rebirth because that's the descent we needed to go. The initiation, you know, that brought us to a place and rest will, rest will initiate you. If you, you're usually brought to rest through some form of an initiation, but rest, you know, a health challenge, depression, health symptoms of some sort, but rest will also initiate you to a healthier relationship with yourself. And usually we're in overdrive and we're revved up all the time. Really because our society just revs us up all the time.

There's, you know, I mean, Netflix has said that their biggest competition is sleep. So what's their goal? Their goal is for us not to sleep. You know, think about how we binge watch things or whatever it is. That's their goal. The goal is to get us, keep us revved up because we will be consumers and we will be unconscious consumers. We will be asleep. I should see the faces I'm pulling right now. Cause it's just so true what you're saying. I'm like, Oh, I mean, when you really look the,

look the devil in the eye, like that is quite brutal, isn't it? It's true. And what social media is designed to keep us plugged in. It doesn't mean you have to like go and live on an island, although sometimes that sounds really nice. I want to create that someday. I want to create a place for women just to come during these years, you know, like to have a retreat space, but I'm not create a whole retreat space, but, you know, just to have a space.

But the, but the, what I, what I do feel like is there is this, um, there is this calling that we have, and then there is society and we're slam up against it. So when you say you're, you're revved up, it's that's because our bodies want one thing and the society is teaching us another. We want to wake up and the society wants to keep us asleep. Now we also want to go to sleep. That's the irony. That's the paradox we live in is that, you know, waking up is the consciousness that you get from rest. From resting, you lie down to wake up. When you lie down, you wake up. You do. And waking up to your wise power, back to wise power here, this is the thing. We lie down, we wake up. And what does society want us to sleep? Because then we will be unconscious consumers. And then

that can feed a really toxic economy and a toxic masculinity that has been keeping us sick and unhealthy. And menopause is tied into all of this because our society has all this toxicity, you know, toxic work habits, toxicity, and it's built in and some, some of it is in our control and some of it's out of our control. You know, we have to pay the bills. I mean, my mom was depending on the level of privilege we have as well. That's really relevant here. Absolutely. Absolutely. We have to pay the bills. We have to, I was a community organizer for years, you know, I mean, in communities where women didn't have options, like, you know, in, in, in, in a privileged world, you, you would have more options. There aren't options. And so that's still, you know, even with the constraints,

with the challenges that we face, there's like, I think I've heard Shawnee and Alexandra talk about this. And we talk about daring to rest like 1% more. Where can you be 1% more rested in your life? So start really soft. Start with that. Where can I be 1%? And everyone can be 1% more rested. Everyone before they go into their job can take three breaths. When they leave their job can take, you know, get into your

car. That can be your opportunity or when you, before you eat, take three breaths, a little more rest, 1% more rested. So start with 1%. That's all, you know, that, and because that starts to inform you, you take three breaths before you have each meal and you go, wow, just those three breaths. Suddenly I feel more present. I feel more open, available. I can feel my anger. Let's say if you do feel, you know, like I feel just how angry I actually am. Cause most of us, if you ask someone, how do you feel? Everyone says fine. You know, until they feel like not fine. And that's like rage. That's the spectrum from fine. You ought to rage to a hundred percent rage.

Sometimes, sometimes, you know, if someone asks me how I feel, I go, you know, well, that would take about an hour to tell you how I feel completely. So here's the short version, you know, how I feel. Yes, I love that. Continuing on this practical thread where you've guided us, thank you. I saw that you're launching something about working soft and that feels relevant here because one of the things that can get in the way of people resting at menopause is the fact that they might well be at the peak of their career. And it's asking a lot of them to you, what does it mean to work soft or to work in a rested way? Yeah. So working soft actually kind of feeds into really living, working and leading softly. For me, it's all together because you can't separate your professional work from the work we do in the home. We work all the time,

women. We're always working, you know? So working so working soft is, is, is all of that. But when we rest, we often get really, this is about, you know, yeses and nos and all the intuition piece. When we rest and pause, we start to, we start to really be able to move through these portals of imagination, the dream of what can be, what's possible in our work lives. And I'm talking not just about professional work. It could be our home life and all of it. And we start to be able, once we have the dream, then we have something we can move towards. But if we don't have a dream, we don't have anything to move towards. But if we don't have a dream, we don't have anything

to move towards. And often we can't have the dream really that clearly when we're not resting, because the dream is like in our heads, again, like eat, pray, love, I'm just going to go to Bali and that's the dream. But then there's the realistic dream. I couldn't leave my children when I was raising them. Or some people do, and they get to that end of the thread. But for the most part, financially, because of my heart for my children, I wasn't going to leave my children. So I had to find a way to work soft, to work more softly, to caretake more softly with my mother, to approach my caretaking more softly for myself. And that involves when you're more soft with yourself, you're soft for others. Like, like, like that

ease is actually, that's helped my relationship with my mother working soft also in my business. I often work from bed for me personally. That's like a yum place. I just feel, I just feel so relaxed in bed. Like I don't, you know, so I love working. I also love just going to a cafe in the middle of the week or something like working in a different location, uh, going out in nature. And if I need to work, I'll work there just taking my breaks in nature. So I'll be working, but then every hour I'll be going out and lying on the ground. And that will help me to feel more soft. Taking those pauses.

And when we take a pause, we, again, we, we, we, the body not only relaxes, but we, we have insights. We have awarenesses about how we want to be and how we want to live and work and lead in our lives. And often it's from a soft place because the pause will teach you the scent of softness, more ease, slowing down. It doesn't mean you don't do in the world. I actually am a programmed doer. I'm like somebody who I know I'm on this earth. Like I'm part of my mission is very connected to, I guess, in a broad sense, changing the world. Like, you know, I feel connected to that mission and I know that I'm of no service to anyone if I'm not feeling ease in my body and not feeling.

And I think that menopause is a time where it's just a non-negotiable that you need more slowness, you need more ease. And so this is a time for women. We need it in our bodies. Our bodies are literally asking us for that. And even in terms of the weight gain that we have, often the lack of sleep is causing more weight gain. So we need to get our sleep back together, all of this. But sleep isn't just like the nighttime sleep. During your day, you bring sleep along with you. I learned this from my rest mentor, Dr. Ruben Nyman. He talks about, we think like sleep starts and it ends and waking starts and ends, but waking and sleeping play with each other all the time. So can we enter the morning in grogginess?

Like, can we, can we not just groggy, like spacey, because some of us have, you know, but can we, can we, can we have more of a grogginess and kind of bring that into our day where we not just feel groggy necessarily, but we have more of this dreaming, the liminal dream place. Can we bring that alongside of us? Because it will help your sleep if you bring sleep along with you during the day. And usually if you're not waking up, if you're not waking up without, you have to need an alarm to wake up. Usually two things you can, if you get to bed by 10 o'clock, you're usually going to be waking up at somewhat of a time. It depends on your kids. Like, listen, my son, Jacob, the oldest, the one that was screaming all the time, he woke up, he was a

5am waker until he was about, I don't know, seven. So, you know, I talk, you know, and there comes a certain moment where you don't have to be up with them, but when they're young, you know, I talk, you know, and there comes a certain moment where you don't have to be up with them, but when they're young, you do. And so, so that's really brutal for a lot of people. But so there are times in women's lives where they do need to be up at certain times or have, or they get woken up by the kids or, or all of that. But then like in the menopause time, usually that's the time for women, although we're having children later. So I won't say it's for all women, but we're able to have a little more grogginess in the morning, wake up slowly. Often if you say to yourself, before you go to sleep, this is a time I want to wake up, you will wake up at that time. So tell yourself

before you go to sleep, I want to wake up at seven and your body eventually will start waking up at seven or eight or six 30. Let's, let's wrap up today by talking about the power of yoga nidra, because it's so key to your work, isn't it? And I'm imagining it would be the number one thing that you would recommend someone in menopause that's looking for more rest. Is that true? Well, it depends on the person. So like, sometimes it's really hard to start with a full yoga nidra practice, maybe some kind of short rest practices are, are a way to start if it feels really intimidating to do something yoga nidra is 20 minutes up to 40 minutes of time. But yeah, yoga nidra is really powerful, because it's more than rest. It's actually, it's a transformational sleep practice. So you're taken from waking to sleeping

to dreaming to a forced state of consciousness where you are very open, very fertile, connected to your subconscious mind where it can be more open to change, to rebirth. It's like you can reprogram yourself and we use intention. So we direct conscious energy towards an intention. So you can play, it's very nice in menopause to play with intention, to really have an intention during your menopause. Like as simple as I feel ease, you know, I feel ease more and more, something like that. And just to have some kind of form of a focal point of conscious energy that you're directing. And when you do it in your, this rest practice of yoga nidra, you usually have a lot of breakthroughs and a lot of insights you start to have about your life and how things need to change.

I would journal afterwards for a while. And I always suggest that, but you don't even have to journal. You just feel it in your bones. When you get such deep rest, it powers you down to almost zero thoughts. And what is our stress? What is our suffering? It's usually from our thoughts. So Yoga Nidra is so good at taking your ego mind away, bringing in a more cosmic mind,

which is where you start to become more the observer of your life. Like, oh, okay. Yeah. And when you become the observer of your life, you can usually make changes without all that charge that you feel when your ego mind is all in it. And like, you see all the obstacles with the ego mind. And then suddenly you get in the cosmic mind and you go, oh, I actually could ask to go to a hotel for the night. Or I could go to, I can go to my mom's and she can come to the kids. And so I can go to her house. It doesn't have to be a place where you even spend money. You can do an exchange with someone or something like that. You start to

see possibility. So it's all connected and rest really helps us. It primes us for contemplation. It primes us for claiming our power. Without rest, we can't see that. Yeah. I think you said this before we started recording actually, but you said something like rest is the foundation of the house and without the rest, none of the rest of the house of self-care and leadership and the calling and the fulfillment of ourselves can happen none of it can happen that rest is the foundation of all of it it's what unlocks the capacity to receive the initiations we're experiencing rest is the foundation this is why rest is at the center of everything because and it doesn't mean again like I'm a big walker I hike every weekend I'm hiking it's not like you're laying on a couch but the

foundation you can't build a house without a strong foundation and rest is a key piece and rest informs I think we were saying before we came live onto this call and this in the podcast that rest for me has really taught me how to eat better. And my, and eating is critical at menopause as well, what you're putting in your body and rest informs me of that rest makes me know when that's in alignment and not in alignment. So rest is like this GPS. Once we start resting, we can access our internal power switch. And we have this internal GPS that says the yeses and the nos. And it doesn't mean you don't eat a pint of ice cream some nights, right?

We're still human. We're still human. And there's no perfection here. This is the Chuck perfect piece that we continually say at Daring to Rest. Chuck perfect on everything, please. It's so exhausting to be perfect. It's so tiring. It's been so wonderful to talk with you I just feel I feel more relaxed and rested and I feel like you just you bring this permission for all of us to to let go to soften to rest it's really beautiful thank you for your work thank you for everything you've shared today thank you so much appreciate being together. Oh, what a beautiful episode. I have Frodo, my black Labrador on the bed next to me and he is snoring away merrily. So I think that episode really worked its magic on him. I hope you enjoyed it. If you're enjoying the podcast, it would be great if you could subscribe

and leave us a review on apple podcast because it helps to spread the reach of this work that's it for now i'll see you next week and until then keep living life according to your own brilliant rhythm