WEBVTT
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In this episode, you'll discover why your body isn't breaking down in midlife.
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It is finally brilliantly and unapologetically telling the truth.
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Empowering brilliant women in healthcare over 50 to transform burnout and compassion fatigue into renewed passion.
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Reigniting your spark to create a life that energizes you every single day.
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I'm your host, Dr.
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Jules.
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Let's get to it.
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So I'm gonna give you three reasons to encourage you to stay with me throughout this episode.
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One.
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You're going to understand the exact neurobiological cascade, allostatic load, predictive processing, and the collapse of your hormonal buffering system that explains why symptoms that felt manageable at say 38 are stopping you cold at 52.
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Two, you're gonna learn what Energy Center has been silently absorbing every patient, every broken system, and every person you've held together in the last 30 years.
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And three, you're gonna leave this episode with a somatic practice.
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I call the power renegotiation, and it speaks directly to the insular.
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Cortex.
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That's the part of your brain that is responsible for reading your own body's signals, and it begins to reset your nervous systems threshold for distress.
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Okay, girl, glad you're here.
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Let me start with something I need you to hear before we go anywhere else.
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Your beautiful, gorgeous body is not betraying you.
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I know that is not what it feels like at times.
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I know.
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It feels like your joints woke up angry.
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Hello, Julie.
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Today, your brain is sometimes wrapped in cotton.
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Your energy is gone before noon and your nervous system is running a five alarm, fire drill every single day for no apparent reason that you can point to.
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I know it feels like your body chose the absolute worst possible moment, right when you're hitting your clinical stride, right?
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When you thought you finally had a handle on this work to stage a complete all systems revolt.
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Ah, but here is what, 25 hell, more like close to 30 years of clinical practice, and the peer reviewed science will tell you, this is not a revolt.
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This my friend, is a reckoning.
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Your body has been carrying a load that was never designed to be carried indefinitely.
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It has been absorbing the weight of your patients trauma, your family's unspoken grief.
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The relentless dysfunction of a healthcare system that was built to consume the people who serve it, and the invisible unacknowledged labor of being a woman and a demanding profession that runs on your nervous system as its primary source of fuel.
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And midlife, specifically the neuro rin shifts of perimenopause and beyond.
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It strips away the last of the biological buffers that allowed you to keep going.
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The body didn't suddenly break.
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The body finally ran out of ways to pretend it was okay and y'all.
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Hear me now.
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That is a very different story.
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Okay, so I hope I got your attention.
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I want to tell you about four scientists that are sharing one truth.
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So into the research we go.
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We're gonna start with Dr.
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Bruce McEwen and he teaches us about allostatic load.
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The first concept you need to sit with today is this allostatic load and Dr.
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McEwen at Rockefeller University spent his career studying what happens to the human body under sustained chronic stress, and what he found is this, the body is a brilliant adapter.
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It shifts, compensates, recalibrates.
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It will do almost.
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Anything to keep you functional.
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But every single adaptation girl, it's got a biological cost.
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So Ewen called this the Allostatic Load.
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This is the Cumul cumulative wear and tear on the body systems from the ongoing effort of adaptation.
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So I want you to think of it, I don't know, like a compound interest, if you will, working against you.
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Every emergency response, every cortisol spike, every night of fragmented sleep, every client, patient, student encounter that required you to metabolize someone else's pain, girl, it left a biological residue.
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And over time.
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That residue accumulates.
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And here's the piece of mccuen's research that I need you to hear.
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The body can sustain high allostatic load for years, sometimes decades.
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Look at the mirror, man before the system tips you were not weak before midlife, you were compensating brilliantly.
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The symptoms you're experiencing right now are not new damage being done.
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They are the unveiling of damage that has been quietly accumulating since your first, I don't know, clinical rotation.
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First year as a professor, first year as a clinician.
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Since the first client, student patient whose pain you absorbed and carried home in your chest without a word to anyone.
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Midlife did not create the problem.
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Midlife removed the compensation.
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Okay, so let's slide over to scientist number two, Dr.
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Lisa Feldman Barrett.
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And look at the body budget.
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So the second piece comes from Dr.
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Barrett at Northeastern University, and Dr.
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Barrett's research on predictive processing tells us something that fundamentally reframes how we understand what is happening in a burnout body.
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The brain, y'all.
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It is not a passive receiver of information from the world.
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It is a prediction machine.
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Before a single sensory signal arrives, your brain has already made a forecast about what is likely happening, what your body will need, how much energy to allocate, and whether the situation is safe or threatening.
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And Dr.
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Barrett calls this the body budget.
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Your brain is the budget manager constantly predicting expenditures and allocating resources based on what it has learned from your history.
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And here is what it means for you, girl.
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If your brain has spent 25 or 30 years predicting that threat is always nearby because a trauma saturated healthcare environment, a trauma saturated academia life, a trauma saturated clinical existence, is it, it, it.
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Has rewired your brain to expect crisis.
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Your nervous system is not overreacting.
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It is running on the exact program it was trained to run on.
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The problem is that the program was written in survival mode, right?
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And you are now trying to build a life inside of it.
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And in midlife when the hormonal and neurological buffers shift that misfiring predictive system becomes impossible to ignore.
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Okay.
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On to scientist number three, and we talk about him a lot on my podcasts.
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Good old Dr.
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Steven POEs, and y'all know.
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He gave us the polyvagal system or theory rather.
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And you know, I always bring Po Hayes into this conversation because polyvagal theory is essential to understanding the body of a woman over 50.
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We gotta know it ladies.
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We gotta know it.
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And poor Hayes identified the three distinct states of the autonomic nervous system.
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And I'm sure y'all could say'em with me, the ventral vagal state where you feel safe and connected.
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Alive, creative.
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The sympathetic state, mobilized, anxious driven, reactive, and the dorsal vagal state.
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The oldest, the deepest, the shutdown, the freeze.
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Women healers who hit the wall of compassion fatigue are frequently spending significant unrecognized time in dorsal vagal shutdown.
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This is what I call going behind Glass Girl.
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You can see your life happening, right?
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Your clients, your patients, your family, your students, your work, but you cannot.
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Feel it.
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You're frozen, numb.
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You are present and absent at the same damn time.
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Your emotional range has flattened.
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Your joy responses are blunted.
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You are doing everything that used to matter and what's happened.
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You feel almost nothing.
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It's not laziness, it's not depression as a character flaw.
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This is the autonomic nervous system's, most ancient protective response to an overwhelm that has no visible exit.
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And in midlife when your window of tolerance narrows because the buffering is gone, the slide into dorsal vagal happens faster with less provocation.
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Okay, and onto.
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Our final scientist, Dr.
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Roberta Brenton, and she talks to us about the estrogen factor, and this is the fourth layer, the one that ties all of this together in the midlife body specifically.
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Dr.
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Britton at the University of Arizona has produced some of the most important research on estrogen and neurological function that exists today.
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Thank you, Dr.
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Britton.
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Thank you very much.
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So.
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Estrogen is not simply a reproductive hormone, it is a neuroprotective agent.
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We've talked about this on the podcast before, but it is worth revisiting'cause this is not shit we're talking about daily.
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We need to be, we're experiencing it daily and it needs to be a daily conversation.
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So estrogen is not just about reproduction, it's about neuroprotective agency, it supports.
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The mitochondrial function in the brain, and this protects against oxidative stress, regulates inflammatory pathways, and plays a direct role in maintaining the brain's capacity to manage allostatic load.
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For decades, estrogen was quietly doing some of the most important buffering work in your beautiful body, helping your brain stay resilient against the accumulated weight of chronic caregiving, stress functioning, managing everyone when estrogen levels shift in perimenopause and beyond.
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That buffer begins to thin and what was manageable?
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The cognitive fog, the emotional dysregulation, the sleep disruption.
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The physical pain is no longer being softened by the same degree of neurological protection.
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The symptoms do not appear out of nowhere.
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The protection that was hiding them begins to lift.
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So let me put this together for you.
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You have been running high allostatic load for decades.
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Your brain's prediction system has been calibrated to chronic threat, your autonomic nervous system.
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It's learned to default towards shutdown under pressure and the hormonal system.
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That hormonal system that was quietly protecting that gorgeous brain of yours from the worst of the accumulated impact has begun to shift this.
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All of this is why midlife is when the body says, no, no complete sentence.
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And it's not because you failed you.
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That's it had crap to do with it.
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It's because the system that was protecting you from yourself has finally had to tell the truth.
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So I wanna take it a little deeper because the neuroscience tells us the mechanism, right?
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I mean, gives us some words.
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But y'all know, I'd like to step into chakra psychology and somatic psychology.
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So we're gonna step there now because the, those two psychologies tell us the meaning and you need both to understand what is actually happening in that gorgeous body of yours right here, right now.
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The energy center at the heart of everything I'm describing today.
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It is the third chakra, and this is located at the Solar plexus.
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The seat of personal power will identity and agency, and in Sanskrit it means city of Jewels.
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It is the energetic center of who you are when no one is asking anything of you, and I really.
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Need you to hear what I'm about to say.
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The solar plexus, that third chakra in your body.
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In the body of a woman healer, high achiever over 50, has been under siege for years.
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Girl, every time you absorbed someone else's pain without adequate support.
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Your body charged your solar plexus every time the system asked you to do more with less the solar plexus in absorbed that impact every time you swallowed your own.
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No, because the patient, the student, the client needed you because the shift was short staffed because there was no one else.
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The solar plexus held it every boundary.
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You could not enforce every grief, you did not process.
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Every time.
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The system told you to be more resilient instead of being more resourced, it all went into your solar plexus at the neural level.
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That third chakra in that your upper belly right, um, above your belly button that maps directly onto the insula, the interceptive cortex, and the interior singulate cortex, which Dr.
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Barrett identifies as central to allostatic regulation.
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So the insula is where your body's internal signals are translated.
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Into information that your brain can act on.
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It is the biological translator between what your body is experiencing and what your mind is able to register and when that gorgeous solar plexus of yours is chronically compressed, 10 bracing.
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When your sense of self, your will, your identity has been subsumed by endless caregiving over years and decades.
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The interceptive signal, the one that reaches your insula, becomes distorted.
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The body stops communicating clearly.
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You stop being able to feel your own needs as clearly as you feel everyone else's.
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Wow.
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Girl, you lose the internal signal that says, holy shit, this is too much.
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This is not okay.
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I need something.
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I need help.
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We lose that signal, and when that signal goes quiet long enough, the body stops whispering and starts screaming.
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The symptoms of midlife are not the body failing.
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They are the solar plexes screaming through the only language the system will finally hear.
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Okay, that's a lot.
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I'm gonna take a deep breath, squeeze your shoulders up to your ears, and then feel your whole body relax.
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Relax into it.
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We're going.
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To step into a gift I have for you, I want to give you something right here, right now, something you can use today before this episode is done.
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I call this practice the power renegotiation, and before I walk you through it, I wanna tell you the science underneath it because understanding why something works is part of what makes it safe to trust.
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Dr.
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Francis Magone and colleagues at Liverpool, John Moore's University identified a specific class of sensory nerve fibers called the C tactile afferent fibers.
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They're mechanoreceptors that are located just beneath the surface of the skin, and these respond to sustained deliberate pressure.
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When activated these fibers send signals directly along the interceptive pathway into the insular cortex, and the message they carry is not complex.
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It is ancient and it is clear.
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You are real.
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You are here, and girl, you are safe.
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It is not a breathing exercise.
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It is not visualization.
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This is a direct.
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Neural conversation between your hands and your body's distress center.
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And here's how we do it.
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I want you to sit up tall, both feet on the floor, place both hands flat against your solar plexus and y'all that set soft space just between your sternum.
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And I want you to feel the warmth of your own hands against your body.
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Now.
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Press in.
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Not hard.
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But with intention firm, deliberate, steady pressure, and now add isometric resistance.
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Push your hands into your body and push your body back into your hands at the same time, equal and opposite force, sustain that tension for a slow count of eight one.
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2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
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Release.
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Keep your hands in place but release the pressure and in the release you may feel warmth spreading outward.
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A slight pulsing.
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A slow involuntary breath that comes without effort that happens for me every time I almost lose my breath.
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That is your solar plexus beginning to reregulate.
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That is your insular cortex receiving a signal.
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It has not received in a very long time that you sweet soul are paying attention.
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That your body's experience is worth your hands.
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Now, one more round press resist.
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Eight count release.
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Now, and this is where the renegotiation actually happens.
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I want you to say one truth out loud if you can.
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It's important.
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I really want you to put your name before that, Julie Truth internally if you have to, but still use your name first.
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One truth about what this body needs right now.
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Not what it needs to give, what it needs to receive.
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Maybe it's rest.
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Maybe it's to be held.
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Maybe it's for someone to ask how you're doing and actually wait for the answer.
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Whatever the truth is, say it.
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Into your own hands, into your own solar plexus, into the neural fibers that are right now listening.
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That is the power renegotiation.
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You are rewriting the contract between your nervous system and your identity.
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You're telling your insula that your own needs are data.
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That your depletion is also information that deserves a response that your no is a complete sentence.
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I want you to do this practice three to five minutes a day.
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It's short, it's direct.
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It goes exactly where the wound lives.
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Okay.
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Before we go further, I gotta tell y'all I'm excited about this.
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We just walked you through the solar plexus shutdown and the body.
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Losing its ability to feel its own needs, it does not stay in the clinical room.
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It follows you home.
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And for so many of the women I work with, it follows them into their most intimate parts of their lives.
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And I'm writing.
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Well, I've written it, I've been writing it for a while, but I've written a book called Are We Gonna Have Sex or What?
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It is the Midlife Guide to Reigniting Desire Reclaiming Your Body and Living Fully Alive.
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And it's for women over 50 who are trying to understand why intimacy has gone quiet and what nervous system, what has got to do with it.
00:26:11.474 --> 00:26:20.174
Because the body that has been carrying everyone else's pain for decades, that same body is the one your partner reaches for at night.
00:26:20.684 --> 00:26:27.704
And this book is the conversation about what happens then and how you find your way back.
00:26:29.474 --> 00:26:29.984
So.
00:26:30.944 --> 00:26:42.285
If you hop over to my website, www Julie Merriman PhD, buy the book there and sign up for my monthly group where I meet with you gorgeous souls, and we support each other.
00:26:42.734 --> 00:26:46.845
The moment is here and you deserve this.
00:26:48.315 --> 00:26:51.944
Okay, so let's.
00:26:52.380 --> 00:26:57.630
Bring us back to something that has been living underneath everything we've talked about today.
00:26:58.259 --> 00:27:02.220
I call it sacred resentment and sacred resentment.
00:27:02.220 --> 00:27:04.559
Friends, it's not bitterness.
00:27:05.069 --> 00:27:06.809
It is not a character flaw.
00:27:07.410 --> 00:27:10.740
It is not something to apologize for or explain away.
00:27:10.950 --> 00:27:11.970
Please don't do that.
00:27:12.420 --> 00:27:21.025
Sacred resentment is the accumulated energetic record of a self that was chronically asked to disappear.
00:27:22.005 --> 00:27:24.555
And refused to fully comply.
00:27:25.424 --> 00:27:40.394
The frustration you carry toward the system, toward the schedule, toward the administrators who cut staff and called it deficiency toward the colleagues who walked past your exhaustion without comment toward the patients who called you.
00:27:42.134 --> 00:27:45.914
Just a nurse, just a social worker, just an educator.
00:27:46.755 --> 00:27:47.984
That resentment.
00:27:48.404 --> 00:28:05.744
Is sacred and I tell you what, it's also all the truths you swallow to keep the peace and girl that resentment is sacred because it is evidence of your soul's refusal to fully surrender to erasure.
00:28:06.494 --> 00:28:12.464
Some part of you always knew you deserve more, and that part kept a record.
00:28:13.394 --> 00:28:18.255
And midlife is when the body presents that record for collection.
00:28:19.934 --> 00:28:23.565
It's not pathology, it's the beginning of integration.
00:28:23.684 --> 00:28:31.065
And the neuroscience supports what the chakra psychology has told us and has known always.
00:28:32.474 --> 00:28:32.805
Dr.
00:28:32.805 --> 00:28:33.884
Kirsten Neffs.
00:28:33.944 --> 00:28:34.994
Oh, I always say Kirsten.
00:28:34.994 --> 00:28:35.744
It's Kristen.
00:28:35.954 --> 00:28:36.285
Dr.
00:28:36.285 --> 00:28:39.464
Kristen Neff's, uh, research on self-compassion.
00:28:39.914 --> 00:28:41.055
She's got a great book.
00:28:41.144 --> 00:28:41.204
Um.
00:28:42.210 --> 00:28:43.619
I turn my students onto it.
00:28:43.619 --> 00:29:00.029
This is, she has done good research and it's about self-compassion and it's neurological correlates, and that shows up in the way that we are able to shift from self-criticism towards self-compassion.
00:29:01.305 --> 00:29:03.315
It's not merely psychological y'all.
00:29:03.345 --> 00:29:08.595
It's biological as well, and it activates the brain's mammalian care system.
00:29:09.045 --> 00:29:17.684
It downregulates cortisol and inflammatory markers and begins to reengage the ventral vagal system.
00:29:17.984 --> 00:29:19.875
I mean, come on.
00:29:19.875 --> 00:29:21.015
That's good stuff.
00:29:21.525 --> 00:29:27.674
When you stop fighting your bodies know and start listening to what it is actually telling you.
00:29:27.974 --> 00:29:29.325
Your physiology.
00:29:29.865 --> 00:29:31.125
Is gonna shift.
00:29:32.625 --> 00:29:46.424
The body's know is an invitation not to retirement, not to disappearance, to renegotiation, to redesign, to finally, oh girl.
00:29:46.424 --> 00:29:48.704
Finally build a life.
00:29:48.704 --> 00:29:57.255
Your nervous system can actually sustain a life that does not require you to sacrifice yourself to be of service.
00:29:58.634 --> 00:30:26.714
I have watched women walk through this passage in my Radiance Method work, and I will tell you what I have seen on the other side, not less, more, more presence, more clarity, more pleasure, more capacity, more capacity for genuine connection, and more access to the parts themselves that chronic stress had quietly put into storage.
00:30:27.974 --> 00:30:42.404
But it requires you to stop treating your body signals as obstacles to override and to start treating them as the most honest data you have ever been given.
00:30:44.384 --> 00:30:45.075
Okay, sweet.
00:30:45.075 --> 00:30:50.174
So let's close with these three truths that I promised you at the top of this episode.
00:30:50.654 --> 00:30:56.984
One Your body's No is not a malfunction, it is an adaptation.
00:30:57.315 --> 00:30:58.095
And Dr.
00:30:58.095 --> 00:31:08.609
Mccuen's research on out static load tells us that your body has been brilliantly compensating for decades and what you're experiencing now, it's not new damage.
00:31:09.660 --> 00:31:13.140
It's the honest accounting of what was always there.
00:31:13.559 --> 00:31:17.789
Finally visible because the buffers have shifted.
00:31:19.049 --> 00:31:33.599
Two, the solar plexus chakra, your energetic seat of your identity, your will, your personal power has been absorbing the cost of chronic caregiving at the neural level for years.
00:31:35.250 --> 00:31:37.890
The power renegotiation gives you a direct.
00:31:39.539 --> 00:31:42.990
Pathway back to your body's signals.
00:31:43.680 --> 00:31:52.140
Don't underestimate, underestimate how powerful it is to put your hands on yourself with intention.
00:31:52.769 --> 00:31:57.960
And three, the symptoms of midlife are not the end of your story.
00:31:58.289 --> 00:31:58.769
Oh, sweet.
00:31:58.769 --> 00:32:00.059
So it is your homecoming.
00:32:00.944 --> 00:32:01.424
Dr.
00:32:01.424 --> 00:32:10.454
Barrett's predictive processing framework tells us that the brain can be retrained, the body budget can be recalibrated.
00:32:10.875 --> 00:32:17.805
The life on the other side of this is it's not smaller, it's not quieter, it's not less.
00:32:18.134 --> 00:32:27.375
It's more fully yours, more honest, more aligned with the soul you came here to express.
00:32:28.785 --> 00:32:30.134
You are not.
00:32:30.855 --> 00:32:31.875
Breaking down.
00:32:33.345 --> 00:32:35.355
You are breaking through.
00:32:36.105 --> 00:32:38.115
Welcome to your homecoming.
00:32:38.355 --> 00:32:40.125
I will see you next week.
00:32:40.618 --> 00:32:41.489
Sweet soul.
00:32:41.729 --> 00:32:44.578
Give yourself what you actually need.
00:32:44.969 --> 00:32:59.159
Tap the show notes right now to discover your somatic signature, because if bubble baths and breathing exercises could fix this, you'd already be back to your radiant self.
00:33:00.064 --> 00:33:01.594
You need the right map.
00:33:02.163 --> 00:33:08.193
Let's find out which of the four somatic signatures your body is using.
00:33:09.094 --> 00:33:10.443
Girl, this isn't homework.
00:33:10.834 --> 00:33:12.993
This is a homecoming.
00:00:00.959 --> 00:00:06.389
In this episode, you'll discover why your body isn't breaking down in midlife.
00:00:06.809 --> 00:00:12.449
It is finally brilliantly and unapologetically telling the truth.
00:00:16.420 --> 00:00:25.420
Empowering brilliant women in healthcare over 50 to transform burnout and compassion fatigue into renewed passion.
00:00:25.899 --> 00:00:32.350
Reigniting your spark to create a life that energizes you every single day.
00:00:32.890 --> 00:00:34.179
I'm your host, Dr.
00:00:34.179 --> 00:00:34.719
Jules.
00:00:35.020 --> 00:00:36.310
Let's get to it.
00:00:39.539 --> 00:00:44.789
So I'm gonna give you three reasons to encourage you to stay with me throughout this episode.
00:00:46.244 --> 00:00:46.465
One.
00:00:47.564 --> 00:01:05.715
You're going to understand the exact neurobiological cascade, allostatic load, predictive processing, and the collapse of your hormonal buffering system that explains why symptoms that felt manageable at say 38 are stopping you cold at 52.
00:01:07.049 --> 00:01:19.230
Two, you're gonna learn what Energy Center has been silently absorbing every patient, every broken system, and every person you've held together in the last 30 years.
00:01:19.799 --> 00:01:23.909
And three, you're gonna leave this episode with a somatic practice.
00:01:23.909 --> 00:01:29.344
I call the power renegotiation, and it speaks directly to the insular.
00:01:29.659 --> 00:01:30.799
Cortex.
00:01:31.250 --> 00:01:42.980
That's the part of your brain that is responsible for reading your own body's signals, and it begins to reset your nervous systems threshold for distress.
00:01:44.359 --> 00:01:46.069
Okay, girl, glad you're here.
00:01:46.909 --> 00:01:51.319
Let me start with something I need you to hear before we go anywhere else.
00:01:51.709 --> 00:01:56.900
Your beautiful, gorgeous body is not betraying you.
00:01:58.709 --> 00:02:01.620
I know that is not what it feels like at times.
00:02:02.069 --> 00:02:02.879
I know.
00:02:02.879 --> 00:02:05.189
It feels like your joints woke up angry.
00:02:05.250 --> 00:02:06.629
Hello, Julie.
00:02:06.629 --> 00:02:11.490
Today, your brain is sometimes wrapped in cotton.
00:02:11.789 --> 00:02:24.449
Your energy is gone before noon and your nervous system is running a five alarm, fire drill every single day for no apparent reason that you can point to.
00:02:25.664 --> 00:02:36.405
I know it feels like your body chose the absolute worst possible moment, right when you're hitting your clinical stride, right?
00:02:36.405 --> 00:02:45.615
When you thought you finally had a handle on this work to stage a complete all systems revolt.
00:02:47.175 --> 00:02:59.444
Ah, but here is what, 25 hell, more like close to 30 years of clinical practice, and the peer reviewed science will tell you, this is not a revolt.
00:03:00.074 --> 00:03:01.990
This my friend, is a reckoning.
00:03:04.215 --> 00:03:09.585
Your body has been carrying a load that was never designed to be carried indefinitely.
00:03:10.935 --> 00:03:17.985
It has been absorbing the weight of your patients trauma, your family's unspoken grief.
00:03:18.344 --> 00:03:39.014
The relentless dysfunction of a healthcare system that was built to consume the people who serve it, and the invisible unacknowledged labor of being a woman and a demanding profession that runs on your nervous system as its primary source of fuel.
00:03:41.294 --> 00:03:50.294
And midlife, specifically the neuro rin shifts of perimenopause and beyond.
00:03:50.985 --> 00:03:57.344
It strips away the last of the biological buffers that allowed you to keep going.
00:03:58.335 --> 00:04:01.064
The body didn't suddenly break.
00:04:01.485 --> 00:04:07.574
The body finally ran out of ways to pretend it was okay and y'all.
00:04:07.979 --> 00:04:09.060
Hear me now.
00:04:09.810 --> 00:04:13.830
That is a very different story.
00:04:15.599 --> 00:04:18.930
Okay, so I hope I got your attention.
00:04:19.199 --> 00:04:25.290
I want to tell you about four scientists that are sharing one truth.
00:04:25.800 --> 00:04:27.360
So into the research we go.
00:04:27.930 --> 00:04:29.595
We're gonna start with Dr.
00:04:29.595 --> 00:04:34.560
Bruce McEwen and he teaches us about allostatic load.
00:04:35.910 --> 00:04:42.120
The first concept you need to sit with today is this allostatic load and Dr.
00:04:42.180 --> 00:04:58.920
McEwen at Rockefeller University spent his career studying what happens to the human body under sustained chronic stress, and what he found is this, the body is a brilliant adapter.
00:04:59.279 --> 00:05:03.060
It shifts, compensates, recalibrates.
00:05:03.480 --> 00:05:04.500
It will do almost.
00:05:04.949 --> 00:05:07.620
Anything to keep you functional.
00:05:08.279 --> 00:05:13.740
But every single adaptation girl, it's got a biological cost.
00:05:14.399 --> 00:05:17.129
So Ewen called this the Allostatic Load.
00:05:18.089 --> 00:05:26.314
This is the Cumul cumulative wear and tear on the body systems from the ongoing effort of adaptation.
00:05:27.345 --> 00:05:33.375
So I want you to think of it, I don't know, like a compound interest, if you will, working against you.
00:05:34.064 --> 00:05:54.704
Every emergency response, every cortisol spike, every night of fragmented sleep, every client, patient, student encounter that required you to metabolize someone else's pain, girl, it left a biological residue.
00:05:55.545 --> 00:05:56.024
And over time.
00:05:57.165 --> 00:05:59.235
That residue accumulates.
00:06:00.464 --> 00:06:05.564
And here's the piece of mccuen's research that I need you to hear.
00:06:06.795 --> 00:06:14.204
The body can sustain high allostatic load for years, sometimes decades.
00:06:15.134 --> 00:06:25.394
Look at the mirror, man before the system tips you were not weak before midlife, you were compensating brilliantly.
00:06:26.384 --> 00:06:32.204
The symptoms you're experiencing right now are not new damage being done.
00:06:33.615 --> 00:06:42.824
They are the unveiling of damage that has been quietly accumulating since your first, I don't know, clinical rotation.
00:06:43.370 --> 00:06:48.600
First year as a professor, first year as a clinician.
00:06:50.610 --> 00:06:59.009
Since the first client, student patient whose pain you absorbed and carried home in your chest without a word to anyone.
00:07:01.170 --> 00:07:04.170
Midlife did not create the problem.
00:07:04.620 --> 00:07:08.160
Midlife removed the compensation.
00:07:08.160 --> 00:07:14.519
Okay, so let's slide over to scientist number two, Dr.
00:07:14.519 --> 00:07:16.019
Lisa Feldman Barrett.
00:07:17.564 --> 00:07:18.975
And look at the body budget.
00:07:20.595 --> 00:07:22.949
So the second piece comes from Dr.
00:07:22.949 --> 00:07:26.144
Barrett at Northeastern University, and Dr.
00:07:26.144 --> 00:07:37.725
Barrett's research on predictive processing tells us something that fundamentally reframes how we understand what is happening in a burnout body.
00:07:39.314 --> 00:07:40.754
The brain, y'all.
00:07:40.754 --> 00:07:44.504
It is not a passive receiver of information from the world.
00:07:45.285 --> 00:07:47.175
It is a prediction machine.
00:07:48.134 --> 00:08:03.975
Before a single sensory signal arrives, your brain has already made a forecast about what is likely happening, what your body will need, how much energy to allocate, and whether the situation is safe or threatening.
00:08:04.920 --> 00:08:05.745
And Dr.
00:08:05.745 --> 00:08:08.310
Barrett calls this the body budget.
00:08:08.970 --> 00:08:21.600
Your brain is the budget manager constantly predicting expenditures and allocating resources based on what it has learned from your history.
00:08:23.009 --> 00:08:27.600
And here is what it means for you, girl.
00:08:27.600 --> 00:08:50.129
If your brain has spent 25 or 30 years predicting that threat is always nearby because a trauma saturated healthcare environment, a trauma saturated academia life, a trauma saturated clinical existence, is it, it, it.
00:08:50.850 --> 00:08:56.039
Has rewired your brain to expect crisis.
00:08:57.240 --> 00:09:00.570
Your nervous system is not overreacting.
00:09:00.929 --> 00:09:06.000
It is running on the exact program it was trained to run on.
00:09:07.769 --> 00:09:12.750
The problem is that the program was written in survival mode, right?
00:09:13.139 --> 00:09:18.000
And you are now trying to build a life inside of it.
00:09:19.019 --> 00:09:30.419
And in midlife when the hormonal and neurological buffers shift that misfiring predictive system becomes impossible to ignore.
00:09:31.950 --> 00:09:32.460
Okay.
00:09:33.929 --> 00:09:39.210
On to scientist number three, and we talk about him a lot on my podcasts.
00:09:39.450 --> 00:09:40.440
Good old Dr.
00:09:40.440 --> 00:09:42.720
Steven POEs, and y'all know.
00:09:43.605 --> 00:09:47.085
He gave us the polyvagal system or theory rather.
00:09:48.044 --> 00:09:59.205
And you know, I always bring Po Hayes into this conversation because polyvagal theory is essential to understanding the body of a woman over 50.
00:10:00.014 --> 00:10:01.184
We gotta know it ladies.
00:10:01.245 --> 00:10:02.264
We gotta know it.
00:10:02.534 --> 00:10:07.875
And poor Hayes identified the three distinct states of the autonomic nervous system.
00:10:08.835 --> 00:10:15.225
And I'm sure y'all could say'em with me, the ventral vagal state where you feel safe and connected.
00:10:15.404 --> 00:10:16.695
Alive, creative.
00:10:17.445 --> 00:10:25.304
The sympathetic state, mobilized, anxious driven, reactive, and the dorsal vagal state.
00:10:25.575 --> 00:10:29.504
The oldest, the deepest, the shutdown, the freeze.
00:10:31.335 --> 00:10:43.485
Women healers who hit the wall of compassion fatigue are frequently spending significant unrecognized time in dorsal vagal shutdown.
00:10:44.565 --> 00:10:49.695
This is what I call going behind Glass Girl.
00:10:49.695 --> 00:10:51.735
You can see your life happening, right?
00:10:52.485 --> 00:10:56.570
Your clients, your patients, your family, your students, your work, but you cannot.
00:10:57.450 --> 00:10:57.960
Feel it.
00:10:58.139 --> 00:10:59.820
You're frozen, numb.
00:11:00.419 --> 00:11:04.200
You are present and absent at the same damn time.
00:11:04.830 --> 00:11:07.169
Your emotional range has flattened.
00:11:07.529 --> 00:11:09.779
Your joy responses are blunted.
00:11:10.320 --> 00:11:16.110
You are doing everything that used to matter and what's happened.
00:11:16.799 --> 00:11:19.769
You feel almost nothing.
00:11:21.570 --> 00:11:26.039
It's not laziness, it's not depression as a character flaw.
00:11:26.970 --> 00:11:36.330
This is the autonomic nervous system's, most ancient protective response to an overwhelm that has no visible exit.
00:11:37.019 --> 00:11:49.740
And in midlife when your window of tolerance narrows because the buffering is gone, the slide into dorsal vagal happens faster with less provocation.
00:11:51.570 --> 00:11:54.509
Okay, and onto.
00:11:56.144 --> 00:11:58.875
Our final scientist, Dr.
00:11:58.995 --> 00:12:15.014
Roberta Brenton, and she talks to us about the estrogen factor, and this is the fourth layer, the one that ties all of this together in the midlife body specifically.
00:12:15.929 --> 00:12:16.409
Dr.
00:12:16.409 --> 00:12:27.059
Britton at the University of Arizona has produced some of the most important research on estrogen and neurological function that exists today.
00:12:27.450 --> 00:12:28.559
Thank you, Dr.
00:12:28.559 --> 00:12:28.799
Britton.
00:12:29.610 --> 00:12:30.539
Thank you very much.
00:12:31.529 --> 00:12:31.919
So.
00:12:32.804 --> 00:12:39.105
Estrogen is not simply a reproductive hormone, it is a neuroprotective agent.
00:12:39.105 --> 00:12:45.014
We've talked about this on the podcast before, but it is worth revisiting'cause this is not shit we're talking about daily.
00:12:45.225 --> 00:12:51.315
We need to be, we're experiencing it daily and it needs to be a daily conversation.
00:12:52.125 --> 00:13:01.544
So estrogen is not just about reproduction, it's about neuroprotective agency, it supports.
00:13:01.934 --> 00:13:21.524
The mitochondrial function in the brain, and this protects against oxidative stress, regulates inflammatory pathways, and plays a direct role in maintaining the brain's capacity to manage allostatic load.
00:13:22.320 --> 00:13:50.399
For decades, estrogen was quietly doing some of the most important buffering work in your beautiful body, helping your brain stay resilient against the accumulated weight of chronic caregiving, stress functioning, managing everyone when estrogen levels shift in perimenopause and beyond.
00:13:51.404 --> 00:13:55.784
That buffer begins to thin and what was manageable?
00:13:56.054 --> 00:14:00.794
The cognitive fog, the emotional dysregulation, the sleep disruption.
00:14:00.794 --> 00:14:08.684
The physical pain is no longer being softened by the same degree of neurological protection.
00:14:09.375 --> 00:14:13.125
The symptoms do not appear out of nowhere.
00:14:13.845 --> 00:14:17.960
The protection that was hiding them begins to lift.
00:14:20.024 --> 00:14:21.735
So let me put this together for you.
00:14:22.784 --> 00:14:26.894
You have been running high allostatic load for decades.
00:14:27.254 --> 00:14:35.085
Your brain's prediction system has been calibrated to chronic threat, your autonomic nervous system.
00:14:35.565 --> 00:14:42.735
It's learned to default towards shutdown under pressure and the hormonal system.
00:14:44.610 --> 00:14:56.940
That hormonal system that was quietly protecting that gorgeous brain of yours from the worst of the accumulated impact has begun to shift this.
00:14:57.870 --> 00:15:06.419
All of this is why midlife is when the body says, no, no complete sentence.
00:15:07.815 --> 00:15:10.095
And it's not because you failed you.
00:15:10.575 --> 00:15:12.764
That's it had crap to do with it.
00:15:13.065 --> 00:15:21.524
It's because the system that was protecting you from yourself has finally had to tell the truth.
00:15:24.585 --> 00:15:30.524
So I wanna take it a little deeper because the neuroscience tells us the mechanism, right?
00:15:30.524 --> 00:15:32.865
I mean, gives us some words.
00:15:34.470 --> 00:15:38.370
But y'all know, I'd like to step into chakra psychology and somatic psychology.
00:15:38.370 --> 00:15:52.230
So we're gonna step there now because the, those two psychologies tell us the meaning and you need both to understand what is actually happening in that gorgeous body of yours right here, right now.
00:15:53.190 --> 00:15:58.139
The energy center at the heart of everything I'm describing today.
00:15:58.200 --> 00:16:04.470
It is the third chakra, and this is located at the Solar plexus.
00:16:05.309 --> 00:16:16.919
The seat of personal power will identity and agency, and in Sanskrit it means city of Jewels.
00:16:18.345 --> 00:16:27.269
It is the energetic center of who you are when no one is asking anything of you, and I really.
00:16:27.975 --> 00:16:29.894
Need you to hear what I'm about to say.
00:16:31.725 --> 00:16:37.215
The solar plexus, that third chakra in your body.
00:16:37.274 --> 00:16:45.674
In the body of a woman healer, high achiever over 50, has been under siege for years.
00:16:46.754 --> 00:16:52.394
Girl, every time you absorbed someone else's pain without adequate support.
00:16:53.250 --> 00:17:09.150
Your body charged your solar plexus every time the system asked you to do more with less the solar plexus in absorbed that impact every time you swallowed your own.
00:17:09.299 --> 00:17:22.049
No, because the patient, the student, the client needed you because the shift was short staffed because there was no one else.
00:17:22.740 --> 00:17:26.819
The solar plexus held it every boundary.
00:17:27.089 --> 00:17:32.160
You could not enforce every grief, you did not process.
00:17:32.519 --> 00:17:33.630
Every time.
00:17:33.809 --> 00:17:50.099
The system told you to be more resilient instead of being more resourced, it all went into your solar plexus at the neural level.
00:17:50.670 --> 00:18:07.680
That third chakra in that your upper belly right, um, above your belly button that maps directly onto the insula, the interceptive cortex, and the interior singulate cortex, which Dr.
00:18:07.680 --> 00:18:12.569
Barrett identifies as central to allostatic regulation.
00:18:13.680 --> 00:18:19.049
So the insula is where your body's internal signals are translated.
00:18:19.785 --> 00:18:23.865
Into information that your brain can act on.
00:18:24.795 --> 00:18:41.859
It is the biological translator between what your body is experiencing and what your mind is able to register and when that gorgeous solar plexus of yours is chronically compressed, 10 bracing.
00:18:42.944 --> 00:18:50.325
When your sense of self, your will, your identity has been subsumed by endless caregiving over years and decades.
00:18:50.654 --> 00:18:57.134
The interceptive signal, the one that reaches your insula, becomes distorted.
00:18:58.154 --> 00:19:00.525
The body stops communicating clearly.
00:19:00.795 --> 00:19:09.194
You stop being able to feel your own needs as clearly as you feel everyone else's.
00:19:09.855 --> 00:19:10.214
Wow.
00:19:11.789 --> 00:19:16.859
Girl, you lose the internal signal that says, holy shit, this is too much.
00:19:18.000 --> 00:19:19.529
This is not okay.
00:19:19.980 --> 00:19:21.089
I need something.
00:19:21.119 --> 00:19:22.019
I need help.
00:19:22.380 --> 00:19:31.980
We lose that signal, and when that signal goes quiet long enough, the body stops whispering and starts screaming.
00:19:32.670 --> 00:19:36.900
The symptoms of midlife are not the body failing.
00:19:37.650 --> 00:19:45.690
They are the solar plexes screaming through the only language the system will finally hear.
00:19:48.420 --> 00:19:51.329
Okay, that's a lot.
00:19:51.900 --> 00:20:00.359
I'm gonna take a deep breath, squeeze your shoulders up to your ears, and then feel your whole body relax.
00:20:00.690 --> 00:20:01.559
Relax into it.
00:20:02.519 --> 00:20:03.240
We're going.
00:20:05.085 --> 00:20:14.234
To step into a gift I have for you, I want to give you something right here, right now, something you can use today before this episode is done.
00:20:15.404 --> 00:20:29.744
I call this practice the power renegotiation, and before I walk you through it, I wanna tell you the science underneath it because understanding why something works is part of what makes it safe to trust.
00:20:30.779 --> 00:20:31.200
Dr.
00:20:31.200 --> 00:20:45.900
Francis Magone and colleagues at Liverpool, John Moore's University identified a specific class of sensory nerve fibers called the C tactile afferent fibers.
00:20:46.859 --> 00:20:56.730
They're mechanoreceptors that are located just beneath the surface of the skin, and these respond to sustained deliberate pressure.
00:20:57.434 --> 00:21:10.815
When activated these fibers send signals directly along the interceptive pathway into the insular cortex, and the message they carry is not complex.
00:21:11.144 --> 00:21:13.515
It is ancient and it is clear.
00:21:13.755 --> 00:21:14.505
You are real.
00:21:15.285 --> 00:21:18.555
You are here, and girl, you are safe.
00:21:18.555 --> 00:21:21.315
It is not a breathing exercise.
00:21:21.644 --> 00:21:23.295
It is not visualization.
00:21:23.505 --> 00:21:24.180
This is a direct.
00:21:24.930 --> 00:21:31.230
Neural conversation between your hands and your body's distress center.
00:21:32.069 --> 00:21:33.119
And here's how we do it.
00:21:34.589 --> 00:21:45.480
I want you to sit up tall, both feet on the floor, place both hands flat against your solar plexus and y'all that set soft space just between your sternum.
00:21:45.960 --> 00:21:50.099
And I want you to feel the warmth of your own hands against your body.
00:21:51.390 --> 00:21:51.599
Now.
00:21:51.599 --> 00:21:53.009
Press in.
00:21:53.549 --> 00:21:54.420
Not hard.
00:21:54.960 --> 00:22:05.789
But with intention firm, deliberate, steady pressure, and now add isometric resistance.
00:22:06.150 --> 00:22:23.970
Push your hands into your body and push your body back into your hands at the same time, equal and opposite force, sustain that tension for a slow count of eight one.
00:22:24.660 --> 00:22:34.200
2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
00:22:34.589 --> 00:22:35.640
Release.
00:22:36.240 --> 00:22:45.000
Keep your hands in place but release the pressure and in the release you may feel warmth spreading outward.
00:22:45.690 --> 00:22:46.769
A slight pulsing.
00:22:47.714 --> 00:22:54.855
A slow involuntary breath that comes without effort that happens for me every time I almost lose my breath.
00:22:55.964 --> 00:23:01.305
That is your solar plexus beginning to reregulate.
00:23:02.684 --> 00:23:07.785
That is your insular cortex receiving a signal.
00:23:07.964 --> 00:23:16.305
It has not received in a very long time that you sweet soul are paying attention.
00:23:17.625 --> 00:23:22.035
That your body's experience is worth your hands.
00:23:24.105 --> 00:23:28.005
Now, one more round press resist.
00:23:29.295 --> 00:23:32.295
Eight count release.
00:23:34.650 --> 00:23:41.039
Now, and this is where the renegotiation actually happens.
00:23:41.490 --> 00:23:44.910
I want you to say one truth out loud if you can.
00:23:45.210 --> 00:23:45.990
It's important.
00:23:46.019 --> 00:23:56.190
I really want you to put your name before that, Julie Truth internally if you have to, but still use your name first.
00:23:56.369 --> 00:24:00.359
One truth about what this body needs right now.
00:24:01.605 --> 00:24:07.005
Not what it needs to give, what it needs to receive.
00:24:08.505 --> 00:24:09.674
Maybe it's rest.
00:24:10.394 --> 00:24:11.865
Maybe it's to be held.
00:24:13.214 --> 00:24:18.105
Maybe it's for someone to ask how you're doing and actually wait for the answer.
00:24:18.674 --> 00:24:21.615
Whatever the truth is, say it.
00:24:23.384 --> 00:24:33.285
Into your own hands, into your own solar plexus, into the neural fibers that are right now listening.
00:24:34.785 --> 00:24:38.234
That is the power renegotiation.
00:24:38.684 --> 00:24:44.775
You are rewriting the contract between your nervous system and your identity.
00:24:45.855 --> 00:24:50.115
You're telling your insula that your own needs are data.
00:24:51.345 --> 00:25:03.285
That your depletion is also information that deserves a response that your no is a complete sentence.
00:25:04.365 --> 00:25:08.984
I want you to do this practice three to five minutes a day.
00:25:09.914 --> 00:25:12.585
It's short, it's direct.
00:25:13.365 --> 00:25:17.265
It goes exactly where the wound lives.
00:25:19.755 --> 00:25:20.115
Okay.
00:25:21.974 --> 00:25:25.815
Before we go further, I gotta tell y'all I'm excited about this.
00:25:28.724 --> 00:25:31.545
We just walked you through the solar plexus shutdown and the body.
00:25:33.210 --> 00:25:38.430
Losing its ability to feel its own needs, it does not stay in the clinical room.
00:25:38.700 --> 00:25:39.930
It follows you home.
00:25:40.140 --> 00:25:46.680
And for so many of the women I work with, it follows them into their most intimate parts of their lives.
00:25:46.890 --> 00:25:48.240
And I'm writing.
00:25:48.579 --> 00:25:53.289
Well, I've written it, I've been writing it for a while, but I've written a book called Are We Gonna Have Sex or What?
00:25:53.740 --> 00:26:01.390
It is the Midlife Guide to Reigniting Desire Reclaiming Your Body and Living Fully Alive.
00:26:01.930 --> 00:26:10.539
And it's for women over 50 who are trying to understand why intimacy has gone quiet and what nervous system, what has got to do with it.
00:26:11.474 --> 00:26:20.174
Because the body that has been carrying everyone else's pain for decades, that same body is the one your partner reaches for at night.
00:26:20.684 --> 00:26:27.704
And this book is the conversation about what happens then and how you find your way back.
00:26:29.474 --> 00:26:29.984
So.
00:26:30.944 --> 00:26:42.285
If you hop over to my website, www Julie Merriman PhD, buy the book there and sign up for my monthly group where I meet with you gorgeous souls, and we support each other.
00:26:42.734 --> 00:26:46.845
The moment is here and you deserve this.
00:26:48.315 --> 00:26:51.944
Okay, so let's.
00:26:52.380 --> 00:26:57.630
Bring us back to something that has been living underneath everything we've talked about today.
00:26:58.259 --> 00:27:02.220
I call it sacred resentment and sacred resentment.
00:27:02.220 --> 00:27:04.559
Friends, it's not bitterness.
00:27:05.069 --> 00:27:06.809
It is not a character flaw.
00:27:07.410 --> 00:27:10.740
It is not something to apologize for or explain away.
00:27:10.950 --> 00:27:11.970
Please don't do that.
00:27:12.420 --> 00:27:21.025
Sacred resentment is the accumulated energetic record of a self that was chronically asked to disappear.
00:27:22.005 --> 00:27:24.555
And refused to fully comply.
00:27:25.424 --> 00:27:40.394
The frustration you carry toward the system, toward the schedule, toward the administrators who cut staff and called it deficiency toward the colleagues who walked past your exhaustion without comment toward the patients who called you.
00:27:42.134 --> 00:27:45.914
Just a nurse, just a social worker, just an educator.
00:27:46.755 --> 00:27:47.984
That resentment.
00:27:48.404 --> 00:28:05.744
Is sacred and I tell you what, it's also all the truths you swallow to keep the peace and girl that resentment is sacred because it is evidence of your soul's refusal to fully surrender to erasure.
00:28:06.494 --> 00:28:12.464
Some part of you always knew you deserve more, and that part kept a record.
00:28:13.394 --> 00:28:18.255
And midlife is when the body presents that record for collection.
00:28:19.934 --> 00:28:23.565
It's not pathology, it's the beginning of integration.
00:28:23.684 --> 00:28:31.065
And the neuroscience supports what the chakra psychology has told us and has known always.
00:28:32.474 --> 00:28:32.805
Dr.
00:28:32.805 --> 00:28:33.884
Kirsten Neffs.
00:28:33.944 --> 00:28:34.994
Oh, I always say Kirsten.
00:28:34.994 --> 00:28:35.744
It's Kristen.
00:28:35.954 --> 00:28:36.285
Dr.
00:28:36.285 --> 00:28:39.464
Kristen Neff's, uh, research on self-compassion.
00:28:39.914 --> 00:28:41.055
She's got a great book.
00:28:41.144 --> 00:28:41.204
Um.
00:28:42.210 --> 00:28:43.619
I turn my students onto it.
00:28:43.619 --> 00:29:00.029
This is, she has done good research and it's about self-compassion and it's neurological correlates, and that shows up in the way that we are able to shift from self-criticism towards self-compassion.
00:29:01.305 --> 00:29:03.315
It's not merely psychological y'all.
00:29:03.345 --> 00:29:08.595
It's biological as well, and it activates the brain's mammalian care system.
00:29:09.045 --> 00:29:17.684
It downregulates cortisol and inflammatory markers and begins to reengage the ventral vagal system.
00:29:17.984 --> 00:29:19.875
I mean, come on.
00:29:19.875 --> 00:29:21.015
That's good stuff.
00:29:21.525 --> 00:29:27.674
When you stop fighting your bodies know and start listening to what it is actually telling you.
00:29:27.974 --> 00:29:29.325
Your physiology.
00:29:29.865 --> 00:29:31.125
Is gonna shift.
00:29:32.625 --> 00:29:46.424
The body's know is an invitation not to retirement, not to disappearance, to renegotiation, to redesign, to finally, oh girl.
00:29:46.424 --> 00:29:48.704
Finally build a life.
00:29:48.704 --> 00:29:57.255
Your nervous system can actually sustain a life that does not require you to sacrifice yourself to be of service.
00:29:58.634 --> 00:30:26.714
I have watched women walk through this passage in my Radiance Method work, and I will tell you what I have seen on the other side, not less, more, more presence, more clarity, more pleasure, more capacity, more capacity for genuine connection, and more access to the parts themselves that chronic stress had quietly put into storage.
00:30:27.974 --> 00:30:42.404
But it requires you to stop treating your body signals as obstacles to override and to start treating them as the most honest data you have ever been given.
00:30:44.384 --> 00:30:45.075
Okay, sweet.
00:30:45.075 --> 00:30:50.174
So let's close with these three truths that I promised you at the top of this episode.
00:30:50.654 --> 00:30:56.984
One Your body's No is not a malfunction, it is an adaptation.
00:30:57.315 --> 00:30:58.095
And Dr.
00:30:58.095 --> 00:31:08.609
Mccuen's research on out static load tells us that your body has been brilliantly compensating for decades and what you're experiencing now, it's not new damage.
00:31:09.660 --> 00:31:13.140
It's the honest accounting of what was always there.
00:31:13.559 --> 00:31:17.789
Finally visible because the buffers have shifted.
00:31:19.049 --> 00:31:33.599
Two, the solar plexus chakra, your energetic seat of your identity, your will, your personal power has been absorbing the cost of chronic caregiving at the neural level for years.
00:31:35.250 --> 00:31:37.890
The power renegotiation gives you a direct.
00:31:39.539 --> 00:31:42.990
Pathway back to your body's signals.
00:31:43.680 --> 00:31:52.140
Don't underestimate, underestimate how powerful it is to put your hands on yourself with intention.
00:31:52.769 --> 00:31:57.960
And three, the symptoms of midlife are not the end of your story.
00:31:58.289 --> 00:31:58.769
Oh, sweet.
00:31:58.769 --> 00:32:00.059
So it is your homecoming.
00:32:00.944 --> 00:32:01.424
Dr.
00:32:01.424 --> 00:32:10.454
Barrett's predictive processing framework tells us that the brain can be retrained, the body budget can be recalibrated.
00:32:10.875 --> 00:32:17.805
The life on the other side of this is it's not smaller, it's not quieter, it's not less.
00:32:18.134 --> 00:32:27.375
It's more fully yours, more honest, more aligned with the soul you came here to express.
00:32:28.785 --> 00:32:30.134
You are not.
00:32:30.855 --> 00:32:31.875
Breaking down.
00:32:33.345 --> 00:32:35.355
You are breaking through.
00:32:36.105 --> 00:32:38.115
Welcome to your homecoming.
00:32:38.355 --> 00:32:40.125
I will see you next week.
00:32:40.618 --> 00:32:41.489
Sweet soul.
00:32:41.729 --> 00:32:44.578
Give yourself what you actually need.
00:32:44.969 --> 00:32:59.159
Tap the show notes right now to discover your somatic signature, because if bubble baths and breathing exercises could fix this, you'd already be back to your radiant self.
00:33:00.064 --> 00:33:01.594
You need the right map.
00:33:02.163 --> 00:33:08.193
Let's find out which of the four somatic signatures your body is using.
00:33:09.094 --> 00:33:10.443
Girl, this isn't homework.
00:33:10.834 --> 00:33:12.993
This is a homecoming.
