So this is a wonderful opportunity for you to meet my new and my old friend. We met several years ago and then reconnected, right? Yes, so this is Marcie Rey Landreth. I’m the Fierce Feminina and owner of Heart Development Strategies.
This is Dr. Sam. I’m Dr. Sam Graber, Dr. Sam Graber Coaching. I am in the space of helping women navigate life right now. I’m primarily focused on our menopause community, and that’s what brought Marcie and I together. So we’re having a wonderful conversation. We thought it might be fun for you all to peek in and see two colleagues chatting about life.
Absolutely, so we’re going to be asking a bunch of different questions from my intern. She’s going to yeah ask us.
All right, so what were the questions? What inspired you to create this groundbreaking three-day event?
That is an excellent question. It has been something brewing for years because a lot of my work—and you know the way this goes—is where you can’t get into enough in a quick master class. And there’s so much to cover when you work with someone. I was trying to find something in-between, and something being that it’s a live virtual event. It’s not somebody sitting there watching a master class, which can be valuable, right? That has its place. But this was all about being more immersive, taking yourself out of your day-to-day for a few days to focus inward, focus on us, and that was the idea behind it. So I saw coaching on how to do this well, and through my coaching I was able to figure out a way to bring a lot of my work to life in a more casual way.
What do you think are women’s barriers to understanding menopause?
Well number one, we don’t talk about it, right? Yeah, we really don’t. And or it’s been portrayed as something that you have to grin and bear it through. It’s going to be terrible, right? everything else. we’ve been basically conditioned that being a woman is to struggle, yeah, and to suffer. And we do that all based around our womb and our body. And we don’t really learn the flip side of it, the positive sides. And it’s a lack of understanding. that in the medical space we as people have outsourced our health to professionals that, they’re very capable, but they don’t know us as well as we can know ourselves. that’s really the big parts of the barriers, the big arching themes. And then we’re so damn busy. I mean, who really has time to figure all this stuff out? And each one of us is a little different. So that it’s a great way for women to become more connected to themselves, to understand from a little physiology. I try not to make it too nerdy, although I do go down a nerdy rabbit hole from time to time. I love me a good nerdfest. But I also think that it’s teaching women how to ask the questions of themselves, much I’m sure you do in your mental strength space. I do in the physical space.
So what questions do you feel women begin to ask themselves in that menopause space? Because I am in my early 40s and I hear other women that are my friends, they’re a little bit older than me, that are talking about being premenopausal and having issues already. And I have to admit, I’m a little nervous. I have no idea what to expect. So what are the questions that people begin to ask themselves? Because I’m not really sure.
That is a great question to ask yourself already: what do I not know that I don’t know, right? anything in life. And then seeking sage wisdom, seeking guidance. What I find is oftentimes women come to me when they are at their wits end, so to speak. They are beyond that point that they are even comfortable in their own bodies. I would love for people to come my way earlier than that. And that that’s by getting out and educating, it’s going to happen. What I mostly see is why can’t I lose weight. That’s the number one thing, okay, because we start to realize okay, what I was doing in the past is no longer working. There’s a whole ton of nerdy physiology reasons why that is, but that’s the number one thing. Number two is energy, sleeping a full eight, nine hours like they used to, and they wake up feeling crumby. Now this isn’t all because of menopause. Menopause… it intersects with midlife, right? It usually happens around there. So at that point we can sometimes have a different relationship with insulin in our body. Our adrenals are often having some issues. so I always like to preface these conversations with that all this isn’t due to quote unquote menopause. Some of it’s due to life, life and time on this planet, and things that have been going on and accumulate over time.
But they’ll ask that. They ask, “am I losing it”? I’ve heard that before. Yeah, “am I losing it”? And honestly, I had these “come to Jesus” moments with myself too. All right, I’m pretty sure I’m not, but I’m not sure I ever really had “it”. Can you lose something you never had? And I would go down these little rabbit holes with myself and in the mental games we can play.
And oftentimes they will already come to me with a laundry list of labs, and normal, quote quote normal, normal, normal, normal. And then they’re, well if nothing’s wrong with me why do I feel so bad? And so those are the questions that they often present with. And when you go to your doctor and ask that, they’re looking for, they’re looking for the numbers on the blood work. Yeah, thank goodness something’s not wrong. No, no.
I recently went to the doctor and they’re saying, “well, all your numbers are good”. And I’m replying, “well, that’s great, yeah, why do I feel so bad”? But you’re still not addressing this.
So what’s the age range that women should start thinking about being premenopausal?
Well technically the stages are: you’re premenopausal and then all a sudden you get into this, this wild wild west called perimenopause. But as I’ve uncovered and many other women have come to the conclusion, you don’t know you’re in perimenopause until you look back and you realize “oh, so that’s what was happening, okay”.
I have seen all sorts of different numbers. Now, a woman can go right into the postmenopause phase if she’s had any sort of major hormonal interventions or if she’s had her ovaries removed. That puts you into what’s called a medical menopause. And then there are also some medications that will basically flip the switch.
And menopause technically is twelve months without your period. But now that’s the medical definition. And then you’re post-menopause after that. Menopause is one day in your life.
I had the same ding. I had the same thing eight years ago where I thought, I never did that either. And I’m trained in the medical and the health field. But we were always taught menopause, check, you haven’t had your period, okay, you’re menopausal. And there was nothing we really learned about with that.
Now, there are a bunch of things that can be going on all along the pathway. Usually it starts with changes in your period. Either it’s heavier or lighter, more frequent or less frequent. there’s some change, change in the consistency, all the things that we know about ourselves. So I tell people to forget the normal out there, okay? Know your normal. Know what is normal for you, what feels right.
Sometimes it’s more of an emotional change than before the physical, but some it’s those physical changes. a little bit of extra, of holding on to water a little bit, some some of those kinds of changes. Sometimes sleep starts dwindling or we don’t feel as refreshed. But then we’ve always got to go back and think about what’s going on with adrenals, what’s going on with our thyroid.
So there’s no, there’s no cookie cutter answer or really One size fits all, yeah. That’s why I highly recommend people be informed so they can make the best decision for themselves and then seek from someone who will help you work through it. Doesn’t have to be a lifelong forever thing. It can be, I need to bridge a gap.
I like the point that you said something about the emotional aspect of going into menopause. I know for myself, I’ll have a super emotional day and then the next day I’ll start my period and I’ll realize, oh, that’s why I was so upset. That’s why my emotions were all over the place. I didn’t really know what was going on with me. And there is an emotional component to all the hormones, the lack of sleeping, the lack of your life is completely changing and shifting with women that are beginning that metapausal space or state.
What are some of the emotional things that you’ve begun to notice with individuals?
Yeah, but you definitely address that where you’re having those changes, they might be heightened . They might have higher highs and a little bit of lower lows. We look at progesterone for that primarily, progesterone, estrogen, and then we can’t forget our main mama Oxytocin. She is really the gatekeeper. Someone that I have worked with and I follow, Dr. Mindy Pels, she and Dr. Carrie came up with this concept of the hormone hierarchy and it’s phenomenal. And we got to remember what hormones are made out of? The sex hormones as well as our, our cortisol. We look at a cholesterol backbone. That’s what they’re created from, from cholesterol.
So you’ve got cholesterol that’s the backbone and then these components get built onto it. But it starts from there. And then we go into, there’s a master, a pro-hormone, okay, that then depending on triggers within the body, both biochemically, possibly, emotionally, not enough studies there, but all that fits together then create, we go down whichever pathway. More estrogen, estrogen starts as testosterone. We’ve got all these different pathways that it comes through.
We have three different types of estrogen, okay. So one of them is more dominant during our quote unquote reproductive phase, our premenopausal, and then, and then it becomes another one, estrone, which is E1, that is more predominant after menopause. And E3, estriol, comes in when we’re pregnant. So we have this beautiful hormonal cascade but we don’t learn about it.
And there’s different slides up and down of those hormones during monthly cycles.
Yes, I got to attend something where you had talked about our decision making and our menstrual cycle and it blew my mind. Because what I’ve really learned in the mental health space is that we have to be aware of life cycles, yeah.
And as women we, when we’re out of that summer space. We go from spring to summer and then to fall. And sometimes we don’t know what is really next in that fall space. And I almost see us entering into menopause is like that “fall” space of our lives that can be filled with so much beauty and harvest and really great things.
But we’re not having the conversations to say what part of the life cycle are you in and do you understand that that is where you’re at. Because what I see in the mental health space is I see my client sometimes, acting like or being stuck or having a mental or emotional block in a space that really was their 20’s and they’re 45 and they’re still living from that space of being 25.
And having to help them come into their current season of life and really bridge all those gaps for them. And that this is a part of that season that we really should be talking about as women because no one is really saying anything other than, oh you’re, you’re gonna start going through menopause, yeah, here’s patch, slap it on, you’ll be fine, you’ll be fine, don’t worry about it.
I fully love that and that’s where we’re very much on that same page, very much in flow with each other because there are, there’s life cycles. There’s a yearly cycle, yeah. There are monthly cycles. And the most beautiful part about being women, from the foundation, is we are so much more in tune with nature than we give ourselves credit for.
But as a result of that, we need to be more in tune with nature. That doesn’t necessarily mean we need to be walking around barefoot, although that is a fabulous and wonderful situation. It’s a wonderful, great way, it’s grounding. Earth connects us with the Earth. There’s all sorts of electrons and I mean it’s really cool stuff that can be very helpful.
But even looking at, what are the seasons on the outside? Looking at your spring, your summer, your fall, your winter. For us, we go through that cycle on a monthly basis. Our menopause is the winter and comes into the spring, the follicular phases start creeping up. We have ovulation, which is summer, where you feel like you can take on the world, like Superwoman.
And then we get into that fall when we start having progesterone come on scene. And it’s, I won’t say it’s predictable, but there are ways to start to learn yourself so right now, yes, I am focused more on per menopause, menopause, helping women through that postmenopause. And I want to come back and scoop up all these younger women and help them learn what’s going on, what their nature is and to be in tune with it.
For example, something’s not feeling right instead of taking a pill or something to make it go away or self-medicating with alcohol or all sorts of other things which we can do for our coping skills as we both very well know. We know so many people in this space that do that.
And it’s even being socially conditioned now for women, ah red wine, red wine with everything, right. And, and it doesn’t last. It doesn’t, it doesn’t solve the issues.
The both of us come from our different space but being able to speak the same language has really opened up my eyes too. So much of our mental health is associated with our physical health. And if we don’t understand what’s going on in our bodies, then how are we supposed to understand what’s going on in our minds?
Yes, yes. And if we can really begin to bridge that gap, and then with the heart stuff too, but that’s a whole another conversation, then we can begin to be whole beings.
And I also like the part that you were talking about, being we, we are more in alignment with the cycles of our Earth and our planet. That’s absolutely true. And when we begin to get away from that, then that’s when we become out of alignment. We become out of alignment with ourselves, out of alignment with the world around us, and aren’t able to love and give and nurture in the ways that we absolutely could.
Yet it’s demanded of us in the world, right. Our societal role is caregiver, and it’s given to everyone else. And we’re even if we’re never actually told this, we don’t, we’re not sat down and said, okay Marcie, you’re going to give everything of yourself to everyone and everything else. And you, if that’s ever said to us, we don’t necessarily go, oh cool, I know what that means.
I mean we, oh that’s my role, okay let me go do it. And that it’s over time. And that’s why also now of pre-menopause, menopause, that whole continuum, we finally become so ingrained with our nature because our nature is saying listen sister, you’ve been ignoring me for decades. It’s time to have a little “come to Jesus” moment and I’m gonna, I’ve created this as in, as your menopause continues, so we’re gonna do this. You’re either going to come willingly or not. I call it cut off, I say it’s a, it’s an unraveling. And I borrow that from Brene Brown, who we all know and love, yeah, absolutely. But she calls it, she says midlife isn’t a crisis. A crisis is something that you get into and you get out of. Midlife is an unraveling, and I absolutely love that term.
Because you can do it reactively. You can unravel reactively, oh crap, here’s this, this, this, and you’re trying to make it all happen. Or you can proactively go about it and say, I wonder what my body’s trying to tell me. What my emotions, these feelings… What are they trying to tell me? Yeah, how do I listen?
But to do that we have to, to slow down the patriarchal pace for ourselves because there is nobody else that’s going to do it for us. Nobody. So we have to do that.
And what sometimes happens with women is we’ve been so busy taking care of everyone else, doing all the things, raising all the babies, running the households, doing all the stuff, and our careers. And then all a sudden something shifts. We have big changes in life. Maybe there’s a relationship change, our kids grow up, thank goodness, and leave the house cuz very capable, or they stay with you forever, or they stay forever and that’s not bad either.
But, all these things start happening and then we have, we sometimes fill that space though, right. I mean you from the mental health space, we go out and be, oh no, I can’t sit here with these, so I’m gonna go get busy, right. I’m gonna go get myself busy somewhere else. I’m gonna go rescue something else instead of, oh I like that, reckoning, right, instead of having the reckoning with ourselves.
And sitting in that space of silence with a professional, with a friend, with ourselves, that’s the tough stuff. And, and I realize absolutely, that is the space that it gets real. And it’s easier to ignore in your 20’s and maybe in your 30’s. When you start getting into your late 30’s, your 40’s, something happens and you start to reflect and go, what in the world, what have I been doing for all this time.
And I recently had a conversation with a client and she said, I realized that I was up the ladder, the corporate ladder, and then I realized my ladder was on the wrong building. I, that one, yeah.
So when you get to that point in your life, when you realize your ladder is on the wrong building, what do you do? And that’s where I feel like I fit in, is help, helping women that realize that their life isn’t, isn’t ended. And that even if their ladder is on the wrong building, there’s always something that they can do.
And they can honor where they are on that ladder and shift it. Absolutely. They’re transferable skills, life skills that you learn no matter what you’re doing, right. Even paralleling from more of a home, if you’re working at home or being at home and raising a family and taking care of the domestic duties as we’ve been taught.
If you’re doing that, you can transfer those skills to other things. And that, that’s something that we have, I don’t even want to go down that path of the woman’s worth, right, and woman’s work, oh good God, I’ll be forever.
But all this stuff can be transferred. And what we do have that reconciling sometimes because it’s all right, here I had this career or I raised my kids and now that’s our identity. And so a lot of its identity shifts.
And how we’ve coped with things becomes how we are. If we’re the helper or if we’re the problem solver, it’s all sorts, it’s beautiful facets.
I mean, I bring a lot of “energy work” into what I do because it’s the head, the heart, and the body, looking at the centers of intelligence. But, what are our filters, how do we filter the world.
And then definitely dial it all back to how we, we fuel ourselves and how we nourish ourselves. Because from all the research I’ve done and all the years and decades in, in practice, the metabolic makeup of someone really is a foundation. Because if we don’t have the proper nourishment for our brains, our nervous system— or, getting the cholesterol to become these different hormones, we’re in a tough spot. That’s why it all fits together. That’s true, holistic, yeah, right, versus here, here, take this supplement.
Because, yeah, and it, the way I got into more of what we eat and when I’m sitting in this huge seminar, the best minds in all of the supplement world, natural healing, integrative health. And they’re going over all these different supplements and it dawned on me.
I mean, here we are thinking, the medical or the, more the pharmaceutical here take this mentality isn’t all that great. Then we go and sub it out for a bunch of supplements. I’m, there has to be something better.
So we’re doing it in a more healthier way, but it’s still relying on a supplement out there, something out there instead of in here. Yes.
I believe we’re designed in a way that is sheer perfection, the human body and brain and how all this stuff works. It’s phenomenal. And I do not think that, to get it back to menopause, I do not think we were built with a self-destruct button named menopause. I don’t see it.
I think the Creator and the designer was way smarter than that. Yeah, melt down. Yeah, right, exactly. But that’s what it could feel like. I must melt down right now. I will self-destruct in five minutes, yeah.
But it’s that isn’t, I don’t, I don’t believe that. I can’t. And all the things I’ve studied, all the, all it, I, that doesn’t sit right with me.
And so if we come at menopause with another thing here’s a pill, patch, potion, you’ve got to take something to fill something, I think we’re missing it. I totally think we’re missing the mark. And I think we’re missing the opportunity to really grow as humans.
And not everyone wants to. I mean there’s plenty of people that aren’t there. That’s fine. I never, I mean bless them and go, go about your life, go for it. We have free reign, free will. I love that.
But if you, if you want something different and that same old, same old here take this, or wow your labs look great, nothing wrong, and yet you don’t feel like you, you don’t feel like you belong in this entity that you’ve, that you’ve got that it’s carrying you around and you’re not feeling that connection, that isn’t the final answer.
But it takes work. It takes first realizing and, and being even open to something new, . You have to be willing to be open.
And then from there, that’s either coaching or a therapeutic relationship with someone that you can really talk to, not checking the boxes and not being, well, this is good, that’s not good, maybe. Or distilling it down to our size, what, how much space we take up.
Missing the mark, yeah. I mean missing the mark by a long shot.
And, what you’re saying, I want to say what you’re preaching really, I think so many women resonate with that because they don’t feel comfortable in their bodies, whether that’s physically or size wise.
For me it’s physically, having had physical issues most of my life and having to compartmentalize how I live my life so that I can be in, do for others. And it really took me taking that step back and going, okay, how am I going to continue to live my life because I can’t continue at the rate that I’m going.
And so much, I love what you were saying about nourishing. One of the things that I really learn too, it’s we talk about this self-care, which I go back and forth about the wording, but it really, it’s self nurturing, yes.
So if we can self nourish ourselves, nourish ourselves with good things and nurture ourselves, right, I think that we will begin to be more whole. I do too, 100%.
And so as I work with others and teach them how to begin to nurture themselves, getting away from that self, self-care mindset because then I, I feel like it’s limited. Yeah, yeah. Because we mostly think self-care is getting your nails done, spa day. I mean those are all nice and lovely, but there’s much deeper work, yes.
And it’s not something that has to be behind the gated gate of a professional either. There are many of these skills that we can learn, but we have to find a place to do them.
And whether we want to realize this or not or face it or not, women are collectives. We are collective beings. We’re collaborative beings. The way that we evolved is to be a tribe, to be tribal, familial, being with each other, nurturing each other, helping each other, .
And as, as we grow along that continuum and age into the grandmother role, that is an incredibly powerful role and a very important one. Yet we’ve decided to put people into a little, little box and put them up on a shelf. But there’s so much available there.
But if we dial it back to that, the menopause stage, it is a reckoning. It’s a time where our body, our brain, and menopause happens in the brain. That’s where a lot of those shifts happen.
Dr. Lisa Mosconi, she will talk about things there’s, there are, it’s pruning basically. So you’ve got a bunch of nerves, you’ve got your memories, you’ve got your thinking patterns, things start to shift and the brain will start pruning.
And that happens because of the difference of the estrogens. So as we have a decline in that E2, or estradiol, and E1 is coming more on scene, she’s not quite as potent as E2, so it causes these shifts.
And what I have found in my clients is when they have a face like yours where, oh, it’s making sense, that can be the absolute difference between going down that path of there’s something wrong with me, what’s wrong with me, what’s wrong with me, why can’t I, whatever all the questions we ask ourselves.
It, it shifts to what’s my body telling me, what does my body need right now, how do I up the oxytocin and decrease that cortisol, how do I eat in a way that promotes healthy insulin, because insulin and cortisol will, get each other in a headlock. Cortisol always wins. Stress will always win. Stress trumps sex every time.
So our sex hormones are going to be like “peace out”. The stress will take in because the body and the brain is, oh my God, we’re under stress. We can’t have any babies right now. We can’t be thinking about feed and breed. We are, we’ve got to be fight or flight. Yeah, right.
So we’re, and then that can lead to freeze, because our, our, our chemistry has been dialed up for so long the body’s, I can’t do it anymore.
So that’s why we can get into that freeze and literally function in freeze mode throughout decades. And the brain being so beautiful and, and intelligent and resilient starts to shut some things down because, we can’t, I cannot focus on that, I’m trying to stay alive.
When really, I mean, what dangers do we really face in most cases, especially chronic danger? It’s what we eat, the lifestyle we live, the pace we try to keep up with, all that stuff, stuff.
And I feel like we can peel ourselves back, and I feel like our menopause transition is the most perfect inborn time to do it.
And I think you’re, you’re right. As you’re talking about pruning, I see so many people that are still living in their past. And it sounds like menopause can also be a really beautiful thing to help people make, make some sense of, but also leave it behind, release it, honor it, and leave it behind.
Absolutely. And those are definitely skills that we are not taught, yeah. We’re definitely not modeled on them, anywhere that we go.
It’s, it’s we’re taught to be very linear and success is climbing a ladder against some wall. That’s the vision we have for it. And we have never really had those collective conversations about something being different.
And we feel like, I think as a society we see that the people who escape from that, they’re, they’re the rebels, they’re the, they’re the one-offers.
But really, if more of us start having the conversations with others, but also within ourselves, and we start asking what does, what does this mean to me, what, what really makes me light up, .
I use a lot of my work with what makes you tick and what makes you a Ticking Time Bomb. These are the important things, right? More often than not, we know what the ticking time bombs are, but we don’t know what really lights us up. We compare it, you hear things, “what’s your why, what’s your why?” I really think it comes down to what’s your who, who are you doing this life thing for?
And if every single answer is someone outside of the entity that you are, I think that’s where we get this disconnect.
But do you think that is from a male perspective with the why? Could be, because what I do, listen to a lot of male coaches, and because I enjoy their stuff, absolutely. And, I think service to others is important.
But as a woman, I feel like that’s already baked in the cake. It is very much so. And we’re typically already showing up in the world with, “hey, let me give, let me give, let me give.” And it really is that time when we have to self-reflect and look at ourselves.
And, I’ve read some different studies where they talk about, “oh, well, if you give, then that will create more happiness,” right? And what I see with women at times, it isn’t that they haven’t given—they’ve given everything. It’s that they haven’t sat down for two seconds to say, “Who am I, what do I want, and how am I going to live a more fulfilled life?”
Absolutely.
So I’m wondering, have you considered that maybe that, that, I don’t know, is that controversial or your why?
And another thing I tell people is, with purpose, maybe your purpose was to really raise amazing children. That could be the purpose. It doesn’t have to be this big, all the time, giant, “I’m gonna take over the world” or “I’m gonna build this a multi-million dollar company” or “I’m going to be the first woman to go to Mars.”, it doesn’t necessarily have to be that.
No, sometimes our purpose and our fulfillment can be this beautiful, beautiful small thing.
Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, the social conditioning is that everything’s got to be big and, out loud and cataclysmic, but often it’s not. So we think we’ve done it wrong because, again, as women, predominantly as women. And men do this too. I’m not—I don’t—I don’t like to feed the division because I think we’re all beautifully, collectively connected.
And we have feminine and masculine energy. Yeah, we have feminine and masculine, desires and goals. And, all the things, everything is, is a, it’s a flow. It’s the yin and yang. I love that, that yin and yang, for many reasons.
But I think we, everyone has those energies in us and we can, we can lean more into the masculine or the feminine when we know what that even means. When we’re willing to even look at anger, what does that even mean? How does that feel?, what is flow, being in the groove, what does that really mean?
Yeah, and then when we look at our motivators, some of these are beliefs about ourselves, the beliefs of how we should be in the world. This is where a lot of our work can really be very, very collaborative for the individual, not us, but for these individuals that want to start looking at their lives.
And I think the way to get better answers is to ask better questions. Yes. And sometimes we’re asking the wrong questions. And sometimes we don’t even know what questions to ask, not even in it. We’re literally phoning it in because our nervous system is, “TV time out, man, I’m done. I’m tired. I’m exhausted. I’m frazzled.”
So we have to nourish ourselves. So it’s, it’s this constant cycle and circle. There’s no, there’s no way around it. It is not linear. And that’s where, getting to know what your, what the hormones are even in the first place. I try to teach people, this is what is considered a hormonal cycle.
And that’s where then, then you take that information, you go, “Okay, well, what is my hormonal cycle? And then, how does this all fit together? And then how do I, if I realize I’m depleted here, how do I build that up without taking my eyeball off everything else?”
Yeah, you don’t want to be doing whack-a-mole. It’s, “Okay, I got this handled, that mole’s whacked, now I’m— Go over here. That’s how we live. Isn’t that how we live, triage? Yeah, .
And what are we waiting for? Are we waiting for disaster, really bad? I mean, I think often, yeah, we’re, “Okay, I’ll wait. This happens to deal with something.”
And so I’ll often say, why not act as if?, why not act as if now the way that you want to be in the future and start doing the things now?
If you’re waiting to, let’s say, change the way you eat and nourish yourself until you have a bad score on one of your labs, what are we waiting for? Yeah, because then it’s reactionary, and that’s that reactive unraveling versus the proactive.
And what we have to choose, and if you’re reactive, then that takes that control away from you. Totally. It makes it extrinsic, right? External locus of control versus internal. Yeah.
And, you can manage more when you recognize that you have the ability to control what the outcomes could potentially be. 100%. And that’s where that mind shift changes. We can be proactive towards the thing as opposed to reactive.
We really are putting and setting ourselves up, I think, as women for a different phase of life and recognizing that it is a different phase of our lives. And it’s beautiful, and it is a time to really get centered within ourselves.
I like to say that this is the time when the inner creatrix, that energy that we’ve been putting out there for everyone else, now we can really store it inside and build it inside and create whatever, whatever creative work you want to have or be, or one’s life can be creative, can be out generating love and energy for other people. That’s incredibly creative.
And it’s almost the energy shifts when we’re no longer spending that energy on the reproductive cycle. I mean, that’s a technical term, but it takes a lot of energy. But now, when that’s when the ovaries are, “peace out, I’m going to bokeh,” it’s retirement.
Now we have all this other energy where we can put that towards other things, and it’s amazing to be able to do that. But again, we’ve been taught, “You, a woman, is valued in her relationship to others. Men get to be valued for who they are.”
And I’m not, again, not trying to make this divisive. This is the way it’s pretty much experienced when we, when we pull that, pull back all the layers, or peel back all the layers. This is really what we’re conditioned to think, believe, and how we should, should act.
But there comes that point, the little bit of that rebellion that comes out. That’s why I say I love to work with rebellious women and teach them to get connected to their inner rebel, because she has to come on scene to be like, “Wait a minute, hold on, this is not working for me.”
Yeah.
But you have to, you have to go there, and it’s hard. Everywhere we go, every, every, every place you go—your churches, your workplace, your families, everywhere you go—you’re modeled this certain way.
And once you start to have that inner stirring, where you’re, “This doesn’t, this doesn’t feel right,” it takes a lot to shift. It’s inertia and moment. A body emotion stays in motion. You can keep going down that path, but when you want to start dialing it back and you want to say, “I, I would like to see what my other options are,” that’s when you get the resistance.
Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I have had that experience. And I think it also is hard for others when you begin to change and take on a whole other identity.
And I think that’s really what I discovered for myself with Fierce Feminina, creating that idea and thinking, “Oh, well, this is something that I’m creating, and, this is for other people.”
And it took me a year of writing to go, “Oh no, this is for me. I am the Fierce Feminina. This is the other part of me that hasn’t been able to be shown because I’ve been all of this for everyone else.”
And to fully begin to start owning that fierce self, that both masculine and feminine energy, and putting them together and recognizing it’s me, has really been a, has really helped me, shift, shift and be all fully who I am. And I think when you’re able to be fully who you are, then that’s that path, that’s that purpose, that space where you can be the most creative self. 100%.
And when you, you—it’s really difficult to give from a cup that is empty, but when you’re full, you can give over and abundantly. Absolutely.
And so now that I feel as if I am able to give in that space, I think that’s one of the best spaces to be in. It is. Yep. And simply being there, right?, we don’t need to ask for anything else in exchange. being there—that’s the gift. Absolutely. That’s the gift.
And then being around others that are working towards that, because we’re always a work in progress. Because life happens. Life keeps lifting, as one of my friends says. It does. But we, we shift. And there’s never a destination. We’re not healthy and, “Oh, there you go, you’re healthy now forever,” or, mentally well forever. It’s, it’s a constant.
But there’s beauty in that, because that means we’re never stagnant. We’re never static. We don’t have to stay where we’re at. We can constantly keep growing and learning. And that’s where growth mindset versus fixed mindset comes in. Growth mindset is one of my pillars, and it’s a concept I have introduced to so many people because, again, we’re not taught it. Yeah, right.
And it’s this idea of being open to something new. It doesn’t mean you have to try on everything. It’s, “Oh, interesting. I didn’t even know that was a thing. I didn’t even know that was a style.” And trying different things sometimes, fun. It’s, “Oh, I never, never thought of being as creative. I never thought of myself as powerful. I always thought power had to mean if you have power, someone else has less power.”
But feminine power is, we all have power. Yeah, that’s, it’s —you are, therefore you are. And, this goes way beyond the metabolic work, but I, I try to level people at that metabolic state first so that we even have the energy to consider something different. Yeah.
And to take us through a life of not getting by, because so many, it’s, get up in the morning, rush to get to the work, or get to whatever their requirements are or their expectations, do that thing, come home, literally fall apart, fall apart. Yeah. Take the bra off, take the shoes off, take the pants off, and veg on the couch, because that’s all we’ve got.
We’ve given everything to this other conditional experience, and we don’t question it. living for the weekend or living for the vacation or whatever the thing is. Life really is such a beautiful gift. I mean, ask anyone who’s facing their transition—there are so many things they wish they’d done differently.
And I guarantee none of it is, “I wish I’d worked harder. I wish I’d looked better on social media. I wish I’d fit into whatever size dress or pants.”, it’s, it’s really, those aren’t the most important. Yeah.
But then there are things metabolically, when our body is holding on to excess body fat or excess water or excess chemicals, we need to ask our body, “What’s going on? What’s out of balance? What am I not giving you or providing you that is making you respond in this way?”
And that’s why the better you understand your body, the better you take care of it. And the metabolic stuff isn’t as complicated, I should say. It’s not as complicated as we’re shown. Again, that gatekeeper of, “Well, I’m the doctor. You don’t need to know all this stuff. I know this stuff, and your labs look okay, so you must be okay.”
, and then we look at our food. I mean, I start on the food—the stuff I, I, I say that I’m going to start spelling food “p-h-o-o-d,” processed food. Okay? Because there’s no food in that food. Real food, with an F, is real stuff that comes off an animal, out of the sea, hopefully non-polluted seas, .
And, I will not go down that path, but there are so many things we need to be eating. Real food that nourishes our body, heals our gut. The gut is the gateway. If the gut is not healthy, you are not going to be healthy. It doesn’t matter how many supplements you take, how much, how many infusions you do, how many patches you slip on your body—if your gut isn’t healthy, it’s not going to function the way it’s supposed to. It’s the barrier between outside and inside, and our gut is incredibly important.
But it isn’t as complicated as we’re led to believe. looking at real food, prioritizing protein, making sure that the carbs we eat are nature’s carbs, not laboratory carbs, and looking at fats—good, healing fats that build our structure. Every cell we have has a fatty layer around it, and if we don’t have enough fats, and we grew up with, “No fat, low fat,” that is literally one of the worst things, not only for our metabolic health but our mental health.
Yeah. AB has has been a very, very damaging thing for our brains. And no matter what, I mean, our body was designed to be a brain transport system. It’s there. The reason we have this really thick noggin—some of us are thicker than others—is because it’s protecting us. It’s that important.
So all of this stuff fits together, but it doesn’t have to be as hard. Yeah, and there’s definitely no easy pill and there’s no easy button. It takes some time. And by the time we reach our menopause transition, all this other stuff is acculated—the traas, big T, little t, right? All that’s acculated. The chemistry, the chemicals in our food, pH-o, and the chemicals in our environment—the stuff we put on our body, stuff we breathe in. I mean, it’s —I could go on and on.
But I mean, these are the things that I teach people how to be able to recognize. And I think that’s one of the questions that people are asking right now, especially with mental health and physical health. “Well, why is everyone so sick?” And everyone’s so sick because we are continuously putting things in our body and around us, and our lifestyles are not conducive to who we are as human beings. Right. Absolutely.
So it’s getting back to our inner nature and experiencing it through an outer nature experience is really some of the most foundational things. And because a lot of this takes decades to get to, it’s not going to be a 12-week program and, wham, bang, done. It’s not even 12 months. It’s like you’re constantly going to be on this evolutionary pathway until the day we are— we are done with this experience.
But until then, it’s not—we don’t have to buy into the life cycle of, “Well, do a great peak around 25 and then it’s all downhill from there.” Excuse me, not going very limited. Very—yeah. I am so not into that.
And, I mean, I have a goal of being at least 107. I will see my 107th birthday. Oh, I like that. Yeah, yeah. So I’ve already envisioned that, and I’m doing the things now that my 107-year-old self is thankful for. Okay, that’s how I look at it.
And I think, okay, what would she do? What would she hope I would do today? Because, I mean, she’s relying on me. And the same with everyone else. And everything in our society is putting us in that cattle, whatever—the cattle run of getting more and more dependent on society, on others, on the systems.
I mean, the sick care systems—we, I do not call it health care. It is not health care. It is sick care. It is disease care. I don’t care how you slice it, because when they’re, when you’re healthy, “Oh no, hes and L’s, we don’t know what to do with you. Here’s an anti-depressant,” because, as a woman, you probably need a little anti-depressant. No. You’re not. In most cases, you are not suffering from a deficiency of anti-depressants.
It’s this world around you that is literally going against your nature. And nature wins. Nature trumps everything. Yeah. Yeah. she’s gonna keep on going after we’re long gone. And the mental health model is, abs, absolutely.
In parallel with the health care system, it’s really like doing the same things. And even, I think, the providers are all burnt out too. Heck, yeah. We’re all burnt out. No one can be in—yeah, it’s really not. And that’s why it really comes down to the individual taking the responsibility for themselves. You have got to stop outsourcing your health and well-being to other nebulous entities, your insurance company doesn’t give a rip about you. Yeah, absolutely. It’s, don’t, nobody else can care about you the way you can care for yourself, but you have to do it. Yeah, you have to literally opt out of some of these other systems in an intelligent way, and, and, you’ve got to have a plan for it. You can’t go, forget it, I’m, I’m opting out of the whole system. I mean, you can opt out of everything, but that’s a pretty extreme swing back, right?
So it’s start building your health, start building your wellbeing, start fortifying the metabolic machinery that is absolutely amazing inside of us. By doing that, you start shoring up your footing, and you can really establish a healthier Body, Mind, and Spirit on a solid footing, right, instead of sand, we built everything on around here. Yeah, but it’s, I mean, could go on and on, and I would love to, and I look forward to more conversations about it.
I think really the, the, the dial-in, message for people is you’ve got to start asking better questions. Okay, and it can’t be that why me or what’s going on with me, why, why, why. It’s getting some education, opening up conversations that matter, and start listening to yourself. I like that.
So I know you mentioned that you have this three-day event that’s happening. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Yeah, absolutely, love to. so it is, it’s a third Friday, a Thursday evening, a Friday all day, and a Saturday morning. We’re doing this one at the end of January because we’re recording this now in January 2025. I look forward to creating more of these in the future. But what we’re going to do is basically learn a little bit about what menopause is. It’s called Making Sense of Menopause U because I think again, an education, foundational education is incredibly important. We need to be using the right words for the right things, right?
, and then we’re going to get into some of those, some of what we’ve talked about here, looking at what’s what’s happening, what’s shifting, what are some of these, these shifts that happen that I’m maybe not aware of, or I can now give language to what’s happening, oh, okay, that’s because different hormones are coming into play, or that’s because insulin and cortisol are having their issues, or, the physical stuff.
And then we get into that head, heart, gut, or body congruence. How do we get our head, our heart, and our gut, or our intuitive, nature? How do we get those aligned? And so it’s really starting to help women get, get more in tune with themselves, and to, yeah, it’s like starting to deflect some of the societal things or the familial things or the shoulds that we have of ourselves because of how we’ve been conditioned, start asking some different questions, opening it up.
And then my biggest goal, my biggest underlying “you” reason for doing this is to help someone come up with a Health Plan.
Oh, great.The idea there is, okay, where am I? Where am I needing to shore up my, my, systems, my way of being, and how do I walk away with this, with, with something to do, ?
And then, if, if they’re an ideal client for me, and, and you, and whoever else we’re going to be, helping people direct themselves towards, it’s helping them understand you’re not stuck. I mean, you are if you want to stay stuck. You can definitely stay there. You can finish this up and be, good, I’m good, I’m stuck and I’m happy. That’s cool. I will never judge anybody, ever, ever, ever.
But if they want something different, it’s, okay, well let’s explore potentially working with us. That might be an option for them. They may need to go a different route for a little while and get some healing done through a different, different avenue. They’ll know, they’ll have a better sense of what’s going on with them, and better, better questions to ask of their healthcare team.
That’s great. I think that’s really important. You’ve got to have a healthcare team. They’ve got to be, emphasis on the healthcare, not that so much the disease care, unless you have an active disease. Let’s look at what’s going on with the active disease, but my way of thinking is I can go and fight that disease, or I can build my health. Health will overshadow that disease every day, so I’m on a team “let’s build the health”. That’s great, and let’s crowd out that disease.
It’s like darkness and light. Darkness is the absence of light. You have to turn on a light to get the darkness to go away. It’s the same with disease and health in a way. Some are past that point, but that’s an exception.
But yeah, so that’s what we’re going to do, and this is the first one, so I’m going to get a lot of good feedback, and I am always evolving, always growing, always looking to really be of value.
That’s great. So this is a way for someone to be part of something different.
Yes, and also I’m going to be participating in this in the mental health space, so really adding value to your individuals that are going to be participating here, so I’m really looking forward to that.
Yeah, well thank you so much for being with me and Dr. Sam. We really hope to get to see more about what you’re dealing with either mentally or physically and how we can help support and serve you.
So until next time, have a great day.
All right, bye y’all.