MenoPause S2E5: Freeing From Patriarchy Samantha Nolan Smith

Samantha Nolan-Smith believes we can reshape the world when more diverse voices and perspectives are shared and heard. She knows that as we break through the silencing influences that have been plaguing women for millennia (hello patriarchy), new ways of living, working, and relating to one another and to the planet, will become apparent. What she also knows is that we cannot do this individually. The collective voices of women must be expressed.

Please note: This track may include some explicit language.

Transcript

The years leading up to and during menopause are a rite of passage.

The wise woman inside of us is calling to slow down,

To take stock,

To speak our truth,

To burn away all that no longer serves us ready for our next cycle of life.

The good news is with the support,

Community,

Connection and most of all sharing our stories and being truly seen and heard,

We will travel through this powerful,

Sometimes painful heroine's journey and out the other side.

Welcome to the Menopause Podcast,

Real and raw stories of midlife and mental health.

I'm your host,

Kylie Patchett,

Menopause self-care coach and storyteller,

And I am so glad you found us.

Let's get on with the show.

Hello everybody.

I am so excited today.

I have the beautiful Samantha Nolan-Smith from the School of Visibility here.

How are you,

Samantha?

I am well,

Kylie.

Thank you for having me.

I'm just beaming because I know we've been talking about so many different visibility kind of themes,

But also menopause being a time of reckoning and chronic fatigue and all these different things.

So where shall we start?

Let's start with why is it so important to you to speak with women about being visible and taking up space in the world,

In the marketplace,

In their homes?

My heart just got really warm when you asked that question.

And I think it's because I have a vision of the world,

Which is different to the world that we live in.

And I believe that we can get to that vision,

A vision of inclusivity and diversity and thoughtfulness and courageous conversations and intimacy,

Emotional intimacy and intuition guiding us as well as reason and logic and so forth.

And this vision,

I think,

Can only be made possible when we have all the voices at the table,

So to speak.

And living in societies,

We have historically suppressed so many voices.

I focus on women.

So I focus almost exclusively on women's voices.

And I'm talking about all women there.

I'm talking about the absolute range and diverse,

Beautiful ways in which women show up.

I'm talking about cis women.

I'm talking about trans women.

I'm talking about women of different races and colors and sexuality and the whole shebang.

When you have all of those people being told,

Your voices don't matter,

Your voices are insignificant,

It diminishes the society that you live in.

It diminishes people.

And we don't live in the fullness of our capacity and our beauty.

That's why I like to talk about.

Oh,

Speaking of.

Your heart just got warm.

My heart just started thudding because those the intimacy,

Intuition,

Inclusivity,

They're some of my favorite values.

It's like and I feel like.

I've got such a strong injustice streak in me and I cannot stand it when people.

In any situation,

Feel that they have more of a right to speak or be heard or be seen or influence than someone else in any like any imbalance of like I have a right and you don't have a right.

And I just I don't know.

We're talking about racism the other day,

Actually,

My elder daughter and myself.

And I'm just like,

I feel like I.

I miss so many things that are happening in the world because I don't feel the same and I don't act the same,

So it's like I don't even see it.

And I said to you before we started talking,

I feel the same about the patriarchy and I feel like the patriarchy has long been a big topic and particularly on social media.

And I feel like sometimes when something becomes a big topic,

It becomes one of those topics where there's a lot of things that are stated or assumed that aren't the truth or the or the truest version of reality.

And I always struggle with these big concepts.

I'm so grateful to have this conversation and the thoughtfulness with which you just answered me makes me very excited.

It's so beautiful.

When when you think back to I'm really interested about.

When you when you think about your journey yourself in being completely visible and taking up space,

How does 20 year old Samantha versus 50,

Almost 50,

I'm not sure exactly how old you are,

But around about like 40s.

No,

50.

OK.

What's the shift been?

How did it start?

What's what's it like now?

What changes have happened?

Oh,

It's such a good question.

So 30 years span,

It's such an interesting period of your life,

Too.

And I think that 20 year old Samantha.

Thought she was taking up space and didn't really understand fully the circumstances around her.

Certainly that was when I first became interested in feminism.

I was at university.

I was doing a dual degree and I was setting up actually with some friends,

Some girlfriends,

A women in law space at the university that I was at.

And we were trying to get more women to connect with some more female students connected with women in senior roles in the law.

Yes.

See this glass ceiling.

We couldn't work out what to do about it other than to start to create a network of women and to build the equivalent of an old boys club,

Basically.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Except old girls club just doesn't have the same ring,

Does it?

There's something in that.

So I was definitely I was doing these things.

I was learning like I was I was learning.

I was studying law.

So I was learning to be an advocate.

I was developing the professional skills around that.

I was going to reclaim the night marches.

And whilst all of that was happening,

I was really incredibly unwell from a mental health perspective.

I was struggling with depression.

I was struggling with anxiety.

My concentration was absolutely shot because I couldn't come into rest in my body because my body through traumas from childhood and teen years,

My body felt unsafe.

So I.

So my version of visibility was very limited.

It was one sort of mold of visibility where I was using my voice,

But I wasn't comfortable in myself.

And when I talk about visibility now as an almost 50 year old,

I I'm talking about showing up absolutely comfortable in your own skin,

Speaking without second guessing yourself or without worrying about.

What other people's perceptions might be of you,

And that doesn't mean that you're,

You know,

Storming through the world,

Imposing your view on other people,

It means recognizing I'm valuable,

You're valuable.

I I'm in deserving of taking up space and it's perfectly OK for me to take up the amount of space that I need to in this world,

In this conversation.

And that is a human birthright to do that.

So the shift,

I think,

Is one of.

Is one absolutely of comfort in myself,

It's acceptance of myself.

I think a lot of my confidence in my 20s came from external sources.

So it came from doing well at school,

Then doing well at university,

Then having a status.

Exactly.

Having an employer who is saying you're doing a good job.

Yeah.

And,

You know,

All of these kinds of things.

And also being in a 20 odd year old body,

Which they're pretty good.

You know,

They look pretty good.

Why do we not appreciate them?

And now it all comes from within.

It all is about the sense of confidence,

Of belonging,

All of the pieces.

They have shifted 180 degrees from requiring them from outside of myself to absolutely sourcing them from within and then walking through the world from there.

Mm hmm.

Do you know,

As you're talking,

I feel I really,

Really appreciate and relate to that feeling in your 20s,

Like.

That external sourcing,

But also of.

Mistakenly thinking that your power.

Actually,

I wrote a post about this,

One of my highest values is freedom,

And in my 20s.

I actually thought I could source freedom.

And to me,

That is.

You know,

In the end,

Power because freedom is about choice,

Etc.

But I thought that storming through,

You know,

University and then getting a good job and inverted commas and climbing the ladder and becoming the general manager of a medical company,

All of those things,

I was thinking I would get freedom from them.

So I was fighting externally for the freedom.

And I got a lot of like I have a very strong rebel streak.

So the rebel inside of me is like,

Yeah,

I am,

You know,

I am challenging all these like challenging the status quo.

And then I was like,

I got to the top of that tree and I thought,

Well,

Shit,

I am on the wrong tree.

That does not.

Yes.

OK,

So let's scramble down this one and look outside.

And when you talk about sourcing your power from inside,

It's a very different feeling,

Isn't it?

It's that quiet,

Grounded power.

And exactly like you said,

It doesn't mean I have to storm over people or through people or shout my opinion from the rooftops and everyone has to agree with me.

It's just that.

Quiet,

It's a word that keeps coming to me is a quiet knowing in my bones that,

Yeah,

I have value,

You have value,

We have equal value.

And I really treasure being able to exchange opinions without the need to have you agree with me or vice versa.

Oh,

And I wish my younger self had known that she's times because I've always also like you have had such a big social justice streak going my whole life.

And so,

You know,

I remember in my teenage years fighting with people because I was so distressed that they would express opinions which I felt were damaging to people and were closed minded and so forth.

And it was so difficult for me to mature into a place of recognizing how to speak in a way that enabled other people to listen.

Yes.

Oh,

My goodness.

Yes.

And and that just allowed for people to come to these concepts in their own times,

In their own time.

And I really look back on my younger self and I feel sad for her because I feel like she was so stressed,

So concerned that if she didn't convince somebody of her position,

Then the whole world was about to fall apart.

Yes.

Oh,

My goodness.

To have this long view of the world.

She didn't realize,

You know,

This conversation,

You're not the first person to have this conversation.

No,

And you won't be the last.

You won't be the last.

This is a conversation being had over and over again for hundreds and thousands of years.

Yeah.

And you're just one piece of the puzzle.

And if you come to a point where you are much more settled in your being,

You are going to be more resonant,

You're going to be more effective and you're going to feel better about the fact that not everybody is going to agree with you or come on board with you.

And you're going to be OK with that.

Yes.

Add your piece to the puzzle and recognize everybody else has a piece to.

Yeah,

Absolutely.

And it doesn't cost so much to voice something from that space,

Whereas I feel,

Yeah,

I look back on my time.

I don't know.

I don't feel necessarily sad.

I think that life has a way of showing you things when you meant to,

But it cost me so much to have such a that's challenging,

Challenging,

Challenging,

Challenging.

And I also I think that for me,

Yeah,

There was unseen,

Untended to trauma as well.

So with that very much that I've got to strive against or struggle against or fight for because there wasn't that feeling of safety.

And I want to go in two different directions.

I'm just going to make a note and come back to something.

When you when you say before the 20 year old version of you internally was not well settled,

What happened?

Because if we were talking before we started recording about,

You know,

Menopause being this great reckoning and anything that you haven't looked at or felt or healed or at least got a gentler perspective of will bubble to the surface and knock you sideways if you're not careful.

And you said,

I'm coming to this a little bit kind of bum about because I had all of that reckoning in my 30s.

So can you tell us a little bit about that?

Because I'm interested.

How your experience of this time of life is different,

And thank goodness it is,

Because you also have young kids,

And I don't think I would want to be going through menopause this way with young children,

I think I would someone would not be coming out of that very well.

Let's put it that way.

Yes,

Well,

I completely understand that.

I so really,

I feel like I really had very significant depression and anxiety from about the age of 15 to about in my 30s.

I really started to look at it quite seriously.

Yeah.

I had also started yoga at 19.

I'd been a dancer up until that point.

I'm really glad that I had done all those years of dancing because it kept me connected to my body when otherwise I literally just would have been a walking head the whole time.

Yeah.

And then I needed something a little bit gentler on the body because one of the things that I was doing was ballet.

It's not the gentlest on the body.

And yoga.

Yeah.

And I was doing yoga through my 20s.

And I was still very unwell mentally.

Unwell mentally.

Even though I was high functioning,

Really super high functioning,

I was self medicating on the weekends with too much alcohol,

All of these.

And I was doing well in my career.

So from the outside,

I sort of looked okay.

Yeah.

But I was quite unhealthy on the inside.

And one of the ways that this was manifesting was workaholism.

So I was pushing,

Pushing,

Pushing.

And really,

I was very A type personality.

And.

Parallel lives,

Man.

Parallel lives.

Yes.

Continue.

And then in my sort of early to mid 30s,

In that period,

That first sort of 30 to 35,

I got very sick with chronic fatigue and came off the back of glandular fever.

I had actually come home one day from working super long hours,

Lay on my bed.

And because I'd been doing yoga all these years,

I was very aware of the fact that when I would meditate or when I would stand in a posture too long,

Things would start to come up.

Yeah.

Messiness.

Yes.

And I just lay on the bed and I just went,

I don't know how to stop.

Like I physically don't know how to stop.

I don't know how to stop mentally.

Yeah.

And so I just said,

Universe,

I'm,

I'm,

I need to know how to stop.

Like I need to learn this lesson.

And within three days I had chronic fatigue.

I was,

I was literally walking to the doctor's surgery.

Like I was.

You know,

99 years of age.

Yeah.

And that started four years of what I call that a couple of different periods.

It's like the period of laying in bed and looking at white walls because that's all you could do.

That's all I could do.

I couldn't take any stimulus at all.

I couldn't take light.

I couldn't take sound.

I couldn't,

I even going to the bathroom would lay me flat for hours.

And.

I also call it my apprenticeship into the feminine.

It was when I finally unraveled the nervous system slowly.

This was very slow,

Started to unravel.

And I started to learn through lived experience,

How to surrender,

How to undo a lot of those habits,

How to face.

The things that I had been running from.

How to sit with my emotions and actually embrace them and learn from them and develop wisdom as a consequence.

And I'm,

I am really grateful for that time.

Whilst at the same time,

It was very,

Very difficult.

I was trying to work out where to find support and not everywhere that I was going was particularly supportive.

I wasn't getting a lot of help from traditional medical establishments at that time.

I was crying a lot to doctors in doctor's surgery saying,

Please give me help.

The indication of what to do.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Part of that I realize now was this.

Evolving out of the good girl,

What I call the Google and evolving from just tell me what to do and I'll perform.

Yes.

Or standards to,

I'm going to have to navigate my own path here and I've got the wisdom within me to find that for myself.

And so I tried a lot of things in those years and eventually one of the big pieces was I realized I can't actually hold down a traditional job anymore.

I'm actually not well enough.

I got medically retired from a job and I thought,

What am I going to do?

And that was when I moved online because I thought,

Well,

At least I can.

There's this thing called blogging.

Yeah.

Like 2008.

People seem to be doing it.

Oh,

Those were the days.

Yeah.

Oh,

Maybe I can do that.

And I would literally work for an hour and then sleep for two hours.

Then I would work on my laptop again from bed for an hour.

Then I would sleep for a couple of hours.

And what happened,

I had done many,

Many,

Many therapies over that time.

Yeah.

It changed radically as a human being.

Relationships had dropped away.

You know,

My identity as this woman totally fell away.

That was the absolute turning point when that last piece where I thought I'm either going to have to give all of that up.

Yes.

If I don't give all of that up and find a new way,

I'm going to have to go on disability pension and that's my life.

So what do you want,

Kid?

And that's what I said.

Yeah.

What's my story?

Yeah.

So I let go of all of that.

I opened into this magical world of online entrepreneurship.

The magical carpet,

Right?

Exactly.

And I have never had,

I have not in that since that time had a really significant relapse.

Wow.

And so it really,

I still have,

I absolutely still have compromised immune immunity.

Yep.

And so I have to be careful with that,

But my whole lifestyle is so different.

It is so much more,

So much quieter,

So much more rhythmic,

So much more honoring of the body,

So much slower.

Gentle.

And all of these things mean that I haven't required the lesson of laying in bed for months on end anymore.

So,

So much wisdom.

I want to dive into when you said about the good girl and it's such a clear difference,

Isn't it?

It's the good girl.

And this is so much to do with visibility.

So obviously this is where we're going to be going next.

This good girl of like,

I need to do it in a way that's the right way to do it.

And I need your approval and I need to kind of check in on your opinion or your expertise or something outside of myself to get the tick to make me feel okay about this versus.

This inner wisdom that says,

Hmm,

I actually have this little voice of intuition or power wise woman,

Whatever you want to call it inside that's calling me to take a chance on trusting myself.

And I feel like this is such an important part of this conversation because I bet that Samantha who had that little inkling,

That was a scary thing to choose to trust yourself.

But here's the thing.

You don't develop self-trust without going first.

Like you can't,

You don't just automatically one day wake up with self-trust.

It's like,

Oh,

Yeah,

My good girl tendencies are over.

Let's rock on.

We're cured.

I've seen the light.

If it were that simple.

No,

It's not meant to be that simple.

You know,

I think a lot of women particularly will relate to this thing of,

Well,

I tried to do it.

Everybody else told me to do it.

I tried to be the good girl and it just didn't work somewhere along the line.

I had to make a choice for myself.

And and that's how I feel.

I feel like I kept trying to be the good girl for a while.

I kept when I first got sick,

I kept trying to work from bed and try and rush back into the office as quickly as I could.

As soon as I felt like halfway decent,

I'd go back into the office.

I actually ended up,

I was supposed to go back for three hours one day and then go home and rest.

And I ended up staying for seven.

This is how deeply ingrained the workaholism is.

Yes,

Exactly.

I worked for seven and I got to the end of seven hours and I sat at my desk and I just started crying because I realized I can't get home.

I physically cannot actually even get up right now from my even now when I think about it,

I get sad thinking about what a distressing moment that was.

Horrible.

I realized what am I going to do?

Because I physically am not even going to be able to walk to the lift,

Let alone get myself home.

Fortunately,

A colleague came through and they literally picked me up and walked me to their car and then drove me home.

But that's what the desire to stay in the good girl and keep trying to impress people and live up to their standards.

And that's what it does.

That's what it can do to you.

And breaking that down for me really came down to recognizing.

This isn't working,

So you've tried all the strategies now,

You have literally tried all the strategies,

None of them are working,

And so you're going to have to try the one that you don't want to try,

Which is the scary one.

Yeah.

Deep surrender to the unknown.

Exactly.

And it's beyond acceptance.

It's exactly what you say.

It's deep surrender.

It's not even,

Yes,

I accept my circumstances,

Because in that there's just a little bit of,

And then I'll try.

Maybe I'll try another strategy.

What is often the unsaid part of that is I'll accept my circumstances.

And once I do that,

I will get the end result that I want.

So I'm only doing it to get,

And it's like,

No,

No,

That's not surrender.

That is not surrender.

That is like on the edge of the cliff with your fingernails in the rocks,

You know,

Trying to hold on for grim life and just saying the words,

I accept,

It's like,

It's not going to cut it.

It's not going to cut it.

And I think this is why I like to talk to women about the patriarchy and how it works,

Because I think that we're all,

We often are walking through life thinking we're all having these individual experiences.

Oh,

This was something that I thought I would going through this on my own.

Nobody else is experiencing this.

Yes.

And it's only hard for me to get out of the good girl conditioning.

Everybody else is fine.

They just seem to be doing well.

And of course,

Actually,

What I was unravelling in myself was a system that's over four and a half thousand years old,

Which has inherited generation after generation after generation,

Which has narrative around what women and girls can do,

Can't do,

Who they are,

What they're allowed to be,

Which is so deeply ingrained in every aspect of our lives that it is almost invisible to us.

And it's and when I look as a mother,

I have a six year old boy and an 11 year old girl.

And when I look at my 11 year old girl,

She is right on the precipice.

All the data shows us that she's been confident up until this point,

And she's about to drop off the cliff of confidence.

And she's not alone.

And it's not about our individual family circumstances.

This is a collective experience that's being had across the board as girls start to get more and more and more messaging about what your body needs to look like,

What your hair needs to look like,

How you're supposed to take up space and not take up space.

How to dress,

How to behave,

How to be polite,

How to hug the uncle,

Even though you don't want to.

All of that.

How to challenge the boys,

How not to be too ambitious.

All of the pieces.

There's this excellent work,

Feminist,

Longtime feminist,

Carol Gilligan wrote many books.

One of them is Why Does Patriarchy Persist?

And in that she talks about patriarchal initiations,

Which I find really some really interesting work around the psychological initiation into the patriarchy that boys and girls go through.

And the boys go through it in an earlier stage,

Six to seven.

They start to experience this move from I'm allowed to be open and emotionally expressive and gentle and kind and all of these things into I now have to shut down my emotions.

I have to shut down my empathy because I now am being enculturated into a particular version of masculinity.

And that is happening for the boys.

And then the girls,

The initiation is about will keep you safe if you stay quiet.

And if you don't stay quiet,

You will be punished.

Now,

When you think about these two enculturations,

These two initiations that are happening and you just follow those threads through.

You see so many for you see the cause of so many problems in so many,

My brain is just going,

Oh,

Because one of the things that I.

I always feel about the good girl persona,

And I very much relate to that high achieving external like all of that.

And it's all about ticking some sort of external box so that we can feel good about ourselves.

And I always think back to I listened to a Glennon Doyle episode and I must go back and figure out who she was interviewing.

But she asked the question,

Where are you abandoning yourself?

That word.

Was such a.

Like I just smacked me right in the head and I was like,

Whoa,

Whoa,

Whoa,

Whoa,

I'd never thought about abandoning myself.

And one is that one of the biggest things that I wrote after journaling about that was about the good girl.

Every time I'm trying to be the good girl,

I'm abandoning who I really am every time.

A hundred percent,

Because you can't you can't be both.

You can't you can't fit an external narrative about how you're supposed to be in the world.

And as you're talking,

I'm thinking,

So your daughter's 11,

My daughter's a 17 and 18.

And I have ridiculous conversations with people.

I feel like I my husband and I both really,

Really value individual thought and opinion and the ability to have complete choice.

And I hope that one of the things that I've given our girls is it's not your job to please anyone,

Including us.

Never,

Ever.

It's not your job to please anyone.

It's not your job to get approval from anyone.

It's not your job to fulfill a particular box.

But when I talk to parents,

I often have these stupid conversations.

I live in a little country town.

So just to give you a little bit of an idea of the ocean I'm swimming in,

Or sea I'm swimming in when I'm not online talking to beautiful people like you.

I spoke to someone the other day and she's like,

Oh,

What are you girls doing?

And I was talking about them.

And because neither of them do traditional girly jobs,

It's like,

Oh,

My God,

That's so amazing.

It's like,

It's not fucking amazing.

It's the the it's you believing some preconceived notion that girl what girls should and shouldn't be doing for work that is creating that reaction for you.

Don't tell me that it's amazing or that my girls are amazing.

No,

Hopefully they're just a little bit less.

I don't know whether this is true,

But maybe a little bit less because I've always been like,

Fuck off.

Fuck that.

Fuck everyone else's expectations.

Fuck trying it.

Because I'm like,

I tried for 30 or probably 40 years to fulfill this good girl concept.

How to be and and let's talk about all the different versions of good girl.

How to be a good worker,

How to be a good mom,

How to be a good woman,

How to be good wife slash partner,

How to be a good community member,

How to be a good boss,

How to be a good bloody like like all of these.

How to be a good caretaker,

How to be a good grandma,

Good daughter.

Oh my God.

Yes.

So many versions of how to abandon yourself 101.

And as you're talking,

I'm just like my brain.

Thank you for giving me a better understanding of patriarchy in terms of how it turns up.

I think that's that was the my missing piece.

Any system,

Any system of inequality,

Whether we're talking about patriarchy or racism or heteronormativity,

And they all intersect,

Obviously.

Mm hmm.

They all teach you the same thing.

They're all basically operating in a very similar manner.

They're all centering one and then othering everybody else.

Yes.

And so everybody who is othered has been taught at some point to take themselves out of the center of their own life and replace it with the male,

White,

Straight,

Etc.

,

Etc.

,

Ably bodied,

Etc.

And so when you're doing that.

You're necessarily outside of your own life on some level in order to stay safe,

In order to not be harmed by the system.

You must perpetuate strategies and approaches and so forth that don't benefit you.

And so constantly what I'm saying to people is it is a radical act to recenter yourself in your own life and to choose to use your voice from there.

That is the most radical thing that you can do because it disturbs these systems that are at play.

It upsets them and starts to break them down.

And that's why I'm very passionate about people doing that all of the time.

And like you said,

How to center yourself when you've been taught your opinions matter or your desires don't matter or your needs come second or third or fourth behind your children and your partner,

Everybody.

That is the journey.

That's the thing that I think when you get to menopause particularly or perimenopause and then menopause.

Many women at that point just say,

I'm done.

I am done.

I am done.

I'm done.

So zero bucks to give.

Exactly.

And these things are going to change whether you like it or not.

Yes.

So if you haven't done that before then,

You will absolutely do it then and you will be aided by your hormones to do that.

Which I think is mother nature has not screwed this up.

She knows what she's doing.

Can you repeat this?

I feel like I'm having a chiropractic adjustment of the soul.

I call these.

You said it is a radical act to center your yourself,

Sorry,

To recenter yourself in your life.

And then to speak from there.

Oh,

I've got goosebumps.

And then to speak from there.

Oh,

My goodness.

It actually makes me quite emotional because particularly,

And I want to circle back to this is the circle back point that I wanted to,

You said originally that you,

Some of the mental health things that you had experienced were from trauma and childhood type of things.

Has your journey of doing this,

Of recentering yourself and speaking from there,

Been entwined with that healing?

Like,

Can you talk about that?

Because I feel like you're just about to give me something that's like,

Oh,

Big.

Absolutely.

Yes.

So I don't think it's not like I set out and thought,

Oh,

I need to recenter myself in my own life.

No,

No.

But like when I was in my twenties,

Right?

Yeah.

So I,

What I did was I kept looking at another piece,

What I would now call another piece of harm manifesting or expressing itself in my life.

And I will,

And I said about just trying to fix.

No,

I don't think fix is the right word.

I said about focusing on that and trying to understand how do I heal that?

Because it was obvious to me that healing was required.

And first of all,

It was simple things like in my early twenties,

I just decided.

I'm going to just do yoga Nidra for every day for 30 days because I felt so chaotic in my head.

I had lots of white noise just there.

And so I thought I'll just try yoga Nidra for 30 days and see if it makes any difference.

This is this,

When I talk about I'm focused on one element,

That's what it looks like.

I did it for 30 days and I felt like a completely different person at the end of those 30 days.

I thought,

This is this what's possible in the world that I could be.

I was quieter in my head.

I felt more focused.

I felt more like when I was reading,

I was doing so much reading at the time because I was doing philosophy.

I was doing English literature.

I was just reading,

Reading,

Reading like obsessively.

And I thought I was noticing,

Oh,

I can actually read and I'm absorbing the information much better because there's a quieter space for me to get that through into my mind.

I thought,

Okay,

Well,

There's one piece.

And then I was in a relationship at the time and I thought this relationship is not working.

It's not,

I can't grow in this relationship.

And I'd spoken about it.

Obviously,

We'd done lots of different things to try and make it work.

And then,

And that was a scary moment where I realized,

Well,

The next piece to focus on is you need to create the domestic environment that you need in which to grow.

And so then I broke up with that person and set off on a space of just being on my own and working out what's my domestic environment need to look like to facilitate growth and to facilitate healing.

So that was another piece of the puzzle.

And then I had all of the physical issues,

Chronic fatigue.

And so that was another level.

But each time I was being called to go another layer deeper and another layer deeper.

And so as I was doing all of this,

I was addressing different points of trauma and the scale of the trauma was from a level that I had almost been murdered as a child.

And the level of trauma associated with that was like mind shatteringly bad.

And the consequences of that,

I call it like when I'm white knuckling it to stay alive.

And I had a thread of that through many,

Many decades after that happened.

And so there was that thread,

Which I could not always touch.

I had lots of stories I had to come back to,

Et cetera.

It took me a long time to address that.

But on the other end of the spectrum,

I had traumas around being bullied at school and the impact that had on my voice and my willingness to be seen at all.

Because when you bullied,

You are visible in a very,

Very negative way.

And I had learned so many of my lessons now and the things that I teach around speaking up and taking up space are connected to what I learned when I was being bullied for months on end.

And that was its own set of trauma.

That was its own set of lessons that I had to work through.

And I would just take a little piece of that and a little piece of that and a little piece of that.

And then,

Of course,

Then there were other things that I wouldn't personally categorize them as trauma,

But they were woundings.

And so they were woundings like I was in a school play once and I wasn't doing a good job of the singing.

And some people were laughing at me.

Parallel lives.

And so then I loved being on stage.

I always have loved being on stage.

And yet there was a piece that was closing my voice down a little bit because I didn't want to feel the embarrassment or the shame of not performing well.

There were those kinds of woundings and healings that needed to take place.

So that was kind of the spectrum.

What I found was every time I met another piece,

My resilience grew,

My capacity to be willing to see the fullness of my lived experience and see the beauty and the horror that I had been through.

And then I was able to deepen just a little bit and then face the next piece and then deepen and face the next piece.

And really,

Because I see everything now through this lens of visibility,

It was building my capacity to see the fullness of myself,

My life,

The things that I had done and the things that had been done to me and be able to hold it all.

And bring compassion to all of it.

Yeah.

And not make it mean anything except what it was.

You said before that you had this feeling of not being safe in your body.

And as soon as you speak about yoga,

Nidra,

Like,

You know,

My entire jam is about teaching women to be back in their bodies and feeling and being much more connected to what they truly need and then being intimately able to respond.

So there's lots of pieces in that puzzle.

But when you talk about yoga,

Nidra,

Or even simple breathwork where you're just,

You know,

I feel like for decades I lived from the neck up because that was what was safe.

Because,

You know,

All the feeling stuff,

All the stuckness,

All the trauma,

All the stories that are limiting whatever living down here.

So don't touch them.

Don't face it,

You know,

Until you hit this great reckoning.

But that sense of safety,

Do you feel like each layer that you went to,

Like you said before,

Like the biggest trauma,

Obviously,

You're not going to start there.

Like your nervous system is going to shut the fuck down as soon as you start trying to,

You know,

Touch that thing.

And I think,

I don't know,

This is entirely my own opinion,

But sometimes when people realize that they do have trauma,

That there's an invitation to unwind,

They want to hit that big thing first because they think everything comes from that.

And it's like,

Don't do that to yourself.

Be gentle.

This is a journey.

And,

You know,

So much for me,

And I know many,

Many women,

So much of our trauma is associated with sexual assault and the level of violence that is,

That occurs when you're assaulted in that way.

Yes.

Is directly pinpointed at a woman's source of power.

Yeah.

It's physical,

It's in the body,

It's of the body.

And so it doesn't,

It doesn't,

To me,

It doesn't make sense to try and go straight to that point because that's,

That's re-traumatizing in and of itself to do that.

Yeah.

But if you can start,

And you don't,

It's like trying to run a marathon and never having really.

.

.

Walked around the block.

Yeah.

You have to build a skillset around this.

Yes.

Being able to face things around sitting with these things and pushing that too hard is another form of.

.

.

Yeah.

Abuse.

Post-traumatizing yourself,

Abusing yourself.

Yeah.

And it's also part of this society that we live in where it's like,

Well,

We don't really want to be in our emotions.

We want to stay protected by our minds.

And so if we have to do this stuff,

Let's do it as quickly as possible and then.

.

.

And fix it.

And it's like,

That's not fixing.

This is like,

This is self-awareness,

Self-compassion,

Self-gentleness when we have had decades and decades and decades of being taught to push against our own natural cycle,

To show up in ways that aren't naturally,

You know,

Meant for us,

Et cetera,

Et cetera.

So it's just like,

No,

That hard,

Fast,

Instant gratification is not,

Is not where it's at.

If you really want to be growing.

I do understand that when you're in pain,

You want to get out of it.

Everybody does.

Yeah,

Of course.

And that's where coming into really embracing emotion,

And I don't mean embracing the emotions we all want to embrace,

Like your.

.

.

Love and joy and happiness.

You know,

All of those.

We're good with them,

But we embrace those emotions.

But I mean,

Genuinely embracing disappointment,

Shame,

Embarrassment,

Fear,

Terror.

And as I have,

And you know,

This is probably now,

It's certainly a 20 year investigation on emotion specifically.

I have really come to love all the emotions.

I spent a couple of years in,

From about 2016 to about 2019.

I felt like I was in this space of the Crohn energy.

Ironically,

I just had my second child.

Good timing.

Like I said,

Nothing's linear in my life.

The maiden Crohn.

And she was teaching me about the energy of disappointment.

And I was sitting in that for about three years.

And it was manifesting in the world in the sense that I'm not saying I was manifesting these,

I was observing in the world,

Things that were disappointing me greatly,

Politically,

Things were happening in America,

Things were happening in Britain.

Yes.

Yeah.

Things that were happening in Australia.

I was watching all of this.

I was deeply disappointed with where the world seemed to be headed.

And I was looking at my own life and really coming to reconcile what I thought my life would look like at the age I was and what it did look like.

And I had to sit in this,

It took me a number of years to learn really the deepest lessons of,

Again,

More surrender around having a vision of what your life is supposed to look like and then trying to live up to it and pushing and forcing and making it happen and opening to something very different,

Which is a receptivity for sure,

But it's an acceptance of life without story and what that looks like.

And from that journey,

I was joking.

I remember at the time joking with my students,

I said,

I'm doing this new apprenticeship now.

It's not like I hate these heavens,

It's just something comes to my life.

Okay,

We have got a new season here.

Exactly.

And I said,

I'm doing this apprenticeship now in disappointment.

It's the one personal development program nobody wants to sign up to.

But there's so much freedom at the other end though.

Yes.

I'm not saying that you want to come with me on this,

But where I am with it is that the level of peace at the other side is really breathtaking.

And sometimes people push back against that because they're like,

Well,

You've still got to direct your life and you've still got to,

You know,

It's not just like you're on a boat and there's no navigation happening and you're just sailing here and sailing there and it's not that.

That's right.

It's not.

And there is something about grounding your life,

Sort of couching your life in this place of peace and non-story and then allowing things to load up from there and then engaging the brain and engaging your capacity for focus and,

You know,

All of the pieces that we all,

We know both very well,

Having had histories as A type personalities.

Yes.

We do.

Engaging those things rather than engaging them first.

So,

So much.

I just,

There's so again,

Parallel lives.

I feel like I'm on this journey of,

So simplicity has always been really important to me.

It's one of the reasons why we live in the country.

I'm not interested in living somewhere busy.

I'm not interested in having a bigger than what feels comfortable to me mortgage.

I'm not interested in raising my kids where I personally,

Because of my history,

Working as a forensic biologist,

You know,

Would feel that they're exposed to things that I don't want them to be exposed to.

I mean,

That is another story.

So anyway,

I'm very aware of that,

But this notion of simplifying,

But also my very,

Very first yoga teacher used to say to me,

The very definition of stress is the difference between what you expect to happen in reality.

And that is something that feels so true to me.

And then there's this also this concept of enoughness.

It's been so much a part of my personality and I still very much value in traditional Chinese medicine.

It's the wood element.

It's that pioneering,

Like it is status quo challenging and it is pioneering.

But I feel similar to what you just said,

It's the feeling.

Yeah,

Grateful and grounded and quiet in myself.

And then from there,

But also really marinating in this enoughness.

Like I really love my life.

I love my little sun filled room.

I love my ridiculous zoo of animals.

I love the people I share my life with.

I love online business because I can literally go to the gym and turn up and record an interview with a piece of shirt on my head to keep my hair from drying weirdly.

Like I love all of those things.

And I think,

Yeah,

Without the story,

Because I've definitely,

I've got lots of stories.

Like I used to compare myself until just recently,

I just went on holidays with friends of mine from forensic and I used to have this narrative of if I could just stick to something.

So A,

Making myself wrong for not being like other people.

If I could just stick to something,

I would be at this level in forensic,

Like all my friends are.

And I'm like,

A,

You would still be in a capital city because you can't work anywhere else.

B,

You would be deeply unhappy professionally and satisfaction wise.

And you wouldn't have gone on this whole self-development journey,

Which has been your seeking part going,

This can't be it.

You know,

It can't be it.

And so I've only just let go of that story.

And I'm like,

Oh my God,

So much more peace just to go.

That's just not my journey.

Like it's not.

Yeah.

So it's without the story.

I love the way that you describe that without the story.

Like I'm here right now.

And I really want for everybody who's listening to be compassionate with themselves about dropping the story.

It's really,

It takes a lot.

And every time you think,

Oh,

I've dropped that story now.

There it is again.

You find another iteration of it.

And I completely resonate with everything that you've said.

I think simplicity.

I realize as I look at my life,

My life is exactly an expression of my highest values.

Simple,

It's quiet.

It's I live in Canberra and it's such a beautiful,

If you're going to live in a capital city.

Oh,

It's gorgeous.

I love it.

It is quiet and green and there's no population pressures almost don't exist.

Yes.

And I mean,

I grew up in Sydney,

So I'm comparing it.

I've lived in Toronto,

I've lived in different places around the world.

So I'm comparing it to bigger cities.

And I know many people love living in those cities and in no way saying don't live there.

For me,

Even just the move here was an enormous,

Had an enormous impact on my nervous system.

Yep.

All of a sudden I realized that when I lived in busier cities,

I'd go away on the weekend,

Let's say for a holiday and I would come back.

And as I was coming toward the city,

I would start to feel anxious and I would start to feel like,

Oh God,

Here we go.

I've got to build up again.

Yeah.

I've got to ratchet up,

Getting ready.

And I thought,

And I just thought,

Oh,

That's just part and parcel of life.

And now when we go away on holidays and we're driving back into Canberra,

I feel exactly as I did when I was on holidays.

Same here.

Very relaxed,

Very at ease.

So nice.

And it is lovely.

And I think this willingness to just take one piece of the story,

Look at that,

Is it serving,

Is it not serving me?

Gently.

And the stories,

One of the things that we look at at the School of Visibility is we have individual stories that we've developed as a consequence of our families,

Who we've grown up with,

Friendship groups,

Teachers,

All of that kind of thing.

Then we've got a set of stories that comes from the societies in which we live.

And these are the systems that I spoke about before.

We've got stories that relate to white supremacy,

Stories that relate to women and sexist stories that we've all internalized to some degree.

Yes.

Then we've got another set of stories,

Which are our stories that we've inherited,

Like lineage stories.

So stories from our mothers,

For example,

And their mothers and their mothers about what it is to be a mother,

What that looks like,

What the appropriate type of role,

How we show up in that role,

How we do it,

How we don't do it.

And when we can unpack each of those different stories,

Then we get to the fullness of the picture.

And one of the things that's unfortunate about a lot of the personal development realm is it's extremely focused just on the individual stories.

Agreed.

Because a lot of it's coming out of countries that are deeply influenced by the philosophy of individualism,

The personal development work that's come out of those countries is also deeply influenced by the philosophy of individualism.

Absolutely.

So it focuses on those things.

And I think when we can expand that out and look at collective stories and also be willing to understand how we both are affected by collective stories and how we influence collective stories.

Yeah.

We can start to move toward a genuine sense of sisterhood,

Which we don't.

It's very difficult to do when we're stuck just in talking about individual stories.

But when we start to see ourselves as individuals within the collective,

Then we can start to move toward the kind of thing I was trying to get to in my 20s.

Yes.

Network and building these partnerships and building these relationships and so forth.

And what I didn't know then was an entire system was stopping us from doing that,

Was trying to work against us doing that.

Yeah.

Consciously and unconsciously.

I'm not saying that this is all at the conscious level at all.

And what I realize now is,

Oh,

We have to be at a place in ourselves,

In our own personal growth and evolution to then be open to being in and of the collective.

We can set aside this idea of exceptionalism and really come into this idea of collectivism in a healthy way,

In a way that really benefits all.

Yeah.

Benefits all,

Not just specific types of people.

And when you're talking before about in the School of Visibility,

Talking about taking up space,

And I know you're in the middle of recording a podcast kind of series on this specific topic.

I'm interested in,

I shared with you before we started recording about seeing something on social media where there was a lady who does a lot of somatic work.

And she had shared that for many years,

She tried to be a particular size and a particular shape and dieted her way down and been the good girl and gone to the gym five times a week to try and control her bad,

Bad body,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah.

Yes.

And what she had noticed is that now she's free or broken those kind of chains and that sort of story about herself,

That she has become physically bigger.

And so she's physically taking up more space and she was sharing how emotionally and energetically she's much more comfortable and grounded and safe in herself to take up space out in the world and in her relationship.

I love that.

I never really thought about that.

And I wonder,

Yeah,

I wonder what you have to say about the taking up the space and what stops us taking up space.

I know there's so many different stories,

But if you could do like a,

Here's the top five,

I will do my best.

I'm sorry.

It's such a big question.

No,

I love it.

Yeah.

Awareness wise,

I think there'll be people out there going,

Oh my God,

I did not actually connect that to taking up space.

So I think when you're talking about that woman,

I think that's such an interesting example because you look around the world and literally women are shrinking in order to take up less space because it's perceived as offensive to,

For a woman to be too loud,

To take up too much space,

To be too ambitious,

Too bossy,

To this,

To that.

So we get called to X,

Whatever the X is,

For things that men are celebrated for.

And so we have a situation,

You know,

The phrase boys will be boys.

What that basically is,

Is a permission piece for boys to be themselves.

But then the toxic version of that is for boys to be really terribly behaved and,

You know,

Get away with it.

It's an immunity badge or whatever.

Yeah,

It is.

Isn't it?

Immunity pin.

Yeah.

I didn't think like that.

But the piece of it that's important there is there's a permission to be,

And women and girls don't get that same permission.

We don't have a saying,

Girls will be girls.

Just let them be,

Just let them do their own thing.

Whatever,

If that's what they're interested in,

Let them do it.

And so what we get instead is,

This is our expectation of you.

And anything that steps outside of that box is too much.

So that looks like too much body size,

Literally.

It looks up too much noise.

It's the thing where we go,

Oh,

I'm sorry I talked too much then.

Or I'm sorry I've left you that really long message.

And I've taken up too much of your brain space listening to me talk.

It's about sitting in a meeting and trying to speak up and then feeling like,

Oh,

Have I been too dominant in that conversation?

Oh,

Goodness.

That's been my entire working life.

There's this,

There was a photographer many years ago,

And I reference this all the time,

And I don't remember who the photographer was.

It's one of those things,

Isn't it?

Anyway,

He was,

I think it was a he,

He was a German photographer who became interested in how gender takes up space,

Which is interesting for a man to do that.

And took photographs of people on public transport in different parts of Germany.

And the women were shrinking all over the place.

They were putting,

Had their bags on their laps.

And they were like.

Tucking your shoulders in.

I can feel it in my body,

Exactly what you're talking about.

Physically trying to make sure.

And the men were sitting there.

Open their legs.

Legs open.

Yep,

Exactly.

And this was just,

And I remember at the time,

It really striking me as,

Oh,

We are literally walking through the world trying to be as inoffensive as possible in every way.

It's so crazy,

Isn't it?

It's awful.

It's awful.

And so I think,

I mean,

One of the things that I think is a good news about menopause is there's a point at which you've got no more fucks to give and you just think.

I'm just,

I'm too tired actually to do anything than just be myself.

I'm sick of it.

I'm over it.

It's exhausting to try and play by the rules all the time.

And for me,

That's been my,

You know,

Mental health wise,

I do not have any bandwidth.

So I cannot do anything that is any sort of pretense or doing something because I should,

Like,

I just don't have it left.

No,

Gone.

Gone.

And that is the blessing of menopause.

I totally believe that.

It's like,

Oh,

Okay.

And then what also happens is because we become,

As women,

We become more and more invisible as we get old.

So the patriarch is invested in young and beautiful.

Yep,

Yep,

Yep.

And is not invested on any level in older,

The crone,

Just not interested.

So,

So older women become invisible to the system as they grow.

And on the one hand,

That's got lots of problems and we have growing numbers of homeless women and so forth and people aren't paying attention.

Or full consequences.

Yes.

So on the one hand,

There's deep problems with that.

And on the other hand,

There's a freedom that comes with that,

That is finally,

I don't have the patriarchal gaze on me.

I can just do whatever I like because I am not,

There's no way I can live up to the standard anymore.

Correct.

Now you see the occasional woman,

If you think about famous people who is,

Who's still trying to cling to the visibility that they had from their twenties and thirties.

But for many women,

It's a total break from that,

Which then leads to like the woman you talked about on socials,

An expansion of space taking or a taking up of more space because the expectations dropped,

The,

The,

Almost the interrelationship between the per,

The woman and the system has broken away and she's suddenly free to just be herself.

And that's why when you look at those happiness reports and the surveys and so forth,

Women over 60 are the most happy people.

Yes.

And there's like a,

It's like a you,

It's like,

And I'm like,

Being straight,

I've got more time,

More space,

More freedom,

More independence.

And I found,

I found mothering difficult in that my independence and freedom is so important to me.

And often it'd be like,

I just don't want to be responsible for little people.

I love them to bits.

And I would never,

Ever,

You know,

If I could choose again,

I would never,

Ever change that decision,

But I found it hard.

And I think more people need to be honest about that,

Frankly.

It is so hard and it is,

And we're in system and we're in societies rather than,

Um,

Do not wrap themselves around,

Around parenting,

Do not wrap themselves around children.

And so as a consequence,

We've got all these women,

Mainly some men we've got,

But predominantly we've got all these women having these individual experiences in their individual homes,

Whether it's when the baby's first born and you're thinking,

Oh my God,

I can't take another moment of the crying.

And there,

And you look around and there's nobody,

It's just you in the room and you suddenly have to work out,

Well,

How do I do this?

And because we don't have that support structure,

We've kind of band-aided on pieces here and there.

We're like,

Here's a little,

Here's a little offering a service over here and here's a little service over here and here's a little service over here.

But I'm talking,

Ballers,

Ballers,

Societal change.

Yeah,

Absolutely.

Completely different resourcing,

Completely different focus.

And budget,

Everything.

Yeah,

We are,

We are being pulled and I don't know how long it will take for the pendulum to start swinging in the other direction,

But we are being pulled back to that community collective.

I actually,

I don't even know what that was on.

I don't think it was on social media.

Maybe it was on TV where there was a younger person talking and she said that she lived with 20 of her closest friends.

So I didn't hear that.

I think it was in kind of like a piece of land that each of them had built separate dwellings on.

And she said,

One of the things that they do is they only cook once every two weeks because they share the cooking and they come together.

They've still got their separate kind of,

But she was talking about what makes a happy life.

All the research about what ramps up happiness is connection and relationships.

And yet we've designed societies now where everyone is in their separate little bubble pretending that their life is better than what it is on social media,

Showing the highlight reel.

And I just thought,

Wow.

And she was,

I reckon she would have been young 20s.

And I'm like,

Oh my God,

We've been saying for years we wanted to buy land in Malania and Sunshine Coast hinterland and yeah,

Have,

You know,

Buy in with sort of,

There was about six,

Six or eight couples at the time.

No,

Six,

Six couples,

You know,

Each of us to kind of buy.

And we all sort of joked about it at the time.

And I look back and I think,

Wow,

We really could have all benefited from that over the years,

Particularly raising kids and particularly that shared responsibility for that kind of grind sort of stuff,

Like the cooking and the cleaning and the organizing and the bloody getting kids to places and all that stuff.

I saw something recently around a woman,

A couple of single moms actually coming together and deciding to pull their resources,

Get a place together,

Do all of that.

And I looked at ever since I worked many,

Many years ago,

I was finishing up my degree at University of British Columbia in Canada in Vancouver.

And I was working part-time in the disability resource center there and I was supporting a bunch of the students.

So I would,

They would,

For example,

I would type their exams for them.

They would tell me what to write and then I would be the typist.

And one woman at that time,

This was in the mid to late nineties.

She was writing a paper,

She was doing a PhD on alternative methods of being in family.

And I loved writing that essay.

I didn't do any of the work.

I just had a bit of knowledge and I just typed it up for her.

And I,

That really sparked something for me then about why are we not living in community in all these different ways,

You know,

And not,

Not trying to come up with one model that's supposed to fit everybody,

But having multiple models,

Whatever people want,

Models around multi-generations or,

You know,

Family,

Friendship.

Yeah,

Yeah,

Yeah.

All of this kind of thing.

And I think that part of that is what I was speaking about before is this,

This,

The,

All of these systems set themselves up in hierarchies.

They set themselves up as there's a duality.

There's men,

Women,

White,

Black,

Able-bodied,

Disabled,

Heterosexual,

Homosexual,

Etc.

So they've all got a duality and they all have a hierarchy and they all put one on top of the other.

And when that's a foundational piece of the way that you understand the world that,

Because you've inherited that structure,

It doesn't open you in relationship to relationships,

Which are communal.

It opens you to hierarchical relationships.

Yeah.

Who's winning,

Who's losing.

Literally.

Exactly.

So we're constantly setting up our societies to create winners and losers,

And we are all fighting to become the winner and not to be the loser,

So-called,

Putting that in inverted commas,

In that scenario.

Whereas if we could break down this hierarchical duality in our own minds,

By which I mean,

Really noticing,

Oh yeah,

I do try and position myself in a superior manner.

Oh,

Far out,

Yes.

Person A or B or C or group A or whatever it is.

And really working to unravel that and then see,

Well,

What would relationship look like if I didn't approach things from that perspective?

Mm-hmm.

Then all sorts of possibilities open up for us.

Even in my own business,

I have a program we call Women Speaking Up,

And I was thinking about bringing other women on as part of the teaching group.

And I knew before I did that,

And I'm always looking at what other ways could we partner together,

What are the opportunities?

I knew I had to spend time breaking down hierarchical thinking in my own mind,

Because I knew if I didn't do that,

I was going to create unconsciously,

It wouldn't have been intentionally,

More of this,

I'm at the top of the tree and everybody else is underneath me,

And I'm the boss and you just do as I say.

And I thought,

That's not what I want to create in my business.

Mm-hmm.

And so what is the core?

I'm always interested in what is the core idea that then perpetuates the entire set of behavior that follows?

Yes.

And so I went to that core idea and I spent some time really watching all the ways that I would either put myself below or above,

Because sometimes we put ourselves below.

Oh,

Very much so.

Sometimes we put ourselves above,

Right?

So every time I was doing that hierarchical analysis in a really unconscious way,

I'd watch and I'd say,

What's going on here really?

How does it make me feel?

Where does this come from?

Can we drop it?

What can we replace it with?

And so I was doing that over and over and over reprogramming my brain away from that.

And once I'd done that,

I was able to,

And none of these things are completely finished,

Right?

It was still an investigation that goes forever.

But where I'd felt that I'd done a substantial amount of that work,

I was then able to go,

Okay,

So what could things look like now?

Yes.

And then start to reframe it.

So much more.

I love the concept of,

Because what you're really saying is even the field of possibilities that we can conceive with our mind is by definition limited by the fact that we're in these structures where someone's on top,

Someone's on the bottom,

That there's a power imbalance.

And that's something that,

Like if I'm working with someone on scratching up a particular story or mindset or belief system,

That's exactly what the whole intention of any of that work is,

Just opening the field of possibilities.

Because as humans,

Our perception and our expectations are all based on what we expect to see,

What we've seen before,

What we've programmed to see,

What we've conditioned to see and not see.

And once we understand that we're only seeing a slice of the reality and a slice of potential,

Then the field of possibilities becomes way wider and then there's choice as well.

And so you're saying the same thing.

It's like understanding that already your blinkers are on because of these systems that you're inside of,

Then actually gives you the choice to widen,

To widen the viewpoint or the perspective.

And as you say,

Continue,

Because obviously we've been in this system for,

What do you say,

4,

000 years?

Well,

Yeah.

I mean,

The earliest evidence of it is that we know is about four and a half thousand years old.

There's Sumerian codes written on stone tablets which say,

If a woman speaks out of turn,

Her mouth will be smashed by a brick.

Wow.

Okay.

Upsetting,

Isn't it?

Yep.

It really is.

Because at some point,

And this is what's so interesting to me about ingrained belief systems,

Because we've heard something again and again and again and again,

And we've seen evidence of,

Like if I lived then and someone opened their mouth,

They got smashed by a brick.

Guess what?

I'm not opening my mouth.

That's how we've known it's happened for hundreds of years.

Yeah.

They're like,

Well,

I can't speak up because if I speak up,

I'm going to be next.

Yeah,

Exactly.

All right,

Man.

That all comes back to,

It's the quote that I never know whether it's Marianne Williamson or Nelson Mandela about that we're,

It's that one about we're not scared of how,

Oh my goodness,

I'm going to stuff up the quote.

Do you know the one I mean?

Like we're afraid of,

It's the life of the moment.

Yes,

Exactly.

The light inside of us that we're afraid of.

And I think that for me,

Menopause has been this transition point where I'm realizing that for so long,

I've not been in my full power.

I've not been in my full wisdom.

I've not been in my full self.

I've abandoned myself all over the place and not making myself wrong for that with deep compassion because,

You know,

Well-conditioned to patriarchy gets a big tick.

But I feel like having these conversations in opening or even getting people to understand that they have blinkers on because a lot of us don't even see it.

And I will count myself as that.

I said to you before we started,

Like my focus is so internal,

Exactly like you're basically saying,

Like on the individual that I,

When people are talking about it,

I'm like,

Oh,

I,

When people have spoken to me about big concepts like patriarchy,

I'm like,

I don't even really understand the concept or how it turns up in my life.

And after this conversation,

I'm like,

Oh,

Okay.

So I know.

I mean,

I'm so glad you said that because I feel like,

But this is more of the work that we need to do at the School of Visibility is to share this in a way that,

Because it's confronting to,

It can be confronting to hear this.

And I would like to share it in such a way that it,

It feels,

Oh,

I can understand it and I can understand how I'm a part of it.

Yeah.

And then,

And because of that,

Then I can step toward a level of freedom that I wouldn't otherwise have been able to.

Cause if you don't know what waters you're swimming in,

How do you know what you've got to address,

How to clean up the waters?

It's the same thing that I realized,

Like I've shared on this podcast before,

Like I have a history of binge eating disorder and then severe restriction and like all the shit that comes along with diet culture and trying to self-medicate with food instead of dealing with trauma and all that type of stuff.

And when I finally woke up to the fact that I was,

Yeah,

I will just call it self-abuse.

And again,

With deep compassion,

I then looked at the ocean I was swimming in and I was like,

You cannot see that this is not reality because you are so deeply entrenched inside of it that it is your normal.

And it's like,

The fish can't see the water in the ocean because they've always been in it.

And I'm like,

Holy shit.

And that's when I was starting to really do the work of like,

All right,

So let's choose,

Let's choose what you're consuming.

What let's choose who you're listening to.

Let's choose what you're seeing.

And that's what terrifies me about.

Social media with girls at the moment,

It's just,

And my daughters who,

You know,

They've grown up with me going,

You know,

Think for yourself,

Think for yourself,

But it's so,

It's so pervasive.

Jessica So pervasive.

One of the things that I'm working on with the podcast that you mentioned,

The series is I've got data coming into it.

So I'm combining with story with data and then solutions and so forth.

And the data's in there to help people see the waters because I don't,

I think data's,

I love data.

And I think data is an incredible visibility tool.

It helps us to see what we otherwise wouldn't understand.

So for example,

In the visibility space,

We have,

There's this incredible statistic to share wherever I possibly can about women and visibility in the art world,

For example.

So in 2010 in the National Gallery in London,

So the primary gallery,

They did an audit of their,

Of their works.

They found that they had 2,

300 works in their collection.

Of those works,

10 were by women.

2,

300 total works and 10 were by women.

Then you look at something like Hollywood and you look at movies and women seem to,

When you just like at first glance,

You go,

Well,

Women are in movies all the time.

Men are in movies all the time.

What's the problem?

There's no patriarchal issue there.

And then when you drill down on the data of who gets the speaking roles,

Women get one third of the speaking roles,

Get two thirds of the speaking roles.

Jessica And the types of women are young,

Thin,

White women.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And thanks to,

You know,

It's really thanks to people like Reese Witherspoon that that's slowly starting to change now because she started to say,

Hang on,

There are no jobs for people over 40.

There are no women of color are not getting the same roles as white women,

Et cetera,

All of these pieces.

So we have these different statistics.

Another one,

For example,

Is on Australian television,

You know,

That we have lots of sport.

Yes.

All of that sports coverage,

The last piece of data that's come out about that,

All of that sports coverage,

7% of it focuses on women's sports.

93% is of men's sports.

So we're walking through the world in a man's world,

Literally focused on men's issues,

Focused on the things that men are interested in.

The medical profession,

You may well have come across this in your own background,

Set up the entire concept of looking at a body of anatomy and so forth based off a man's body.

The original idea was women were an aberration.

They were kind of like a weird man.

And so everything was based off the man.

And then there was just these few little bits that womanhood was about.

And as a consequence,

We're missing all of these things.

Women,

Women are not being treated properly.

They're not being treated according to their own biology.

According to those pesky little cycles make us very,

Very dangerous scientific study.

Participants,

Pesky little cycles.

I'm like,

Oh yeah,

The thing that makes us different to you.

Yeah,

Yeah,

Exactly.

So I think that,

You know,

If people are listening and they're wondering,

Well,

Where do I even start with this?

I think a really simple place to start is to understand the data.

It's just to look at some of the really basic facts because then that shows you,

Oh,

This isn't just me.

We saw this with me too.

Oh,

It's not just me who was sexually harassed in the workplace and then felt really uncomfortable about it.

And then it all got turned on me and I was the troublemaker.

Actually,

There's a pattern.

Across the world,

Not just even in English speaking countries or not just in,

You know,

Australia or whatever it might be around the world.

This is a pattern.

And so we look at those,

We can look at those types of things and then we start to really see the sea,

The ocean,

The toxicity of it.

And that I think is really empowering.

I put lots of people,

Not lots,

But there are people who say to me,

Oh,

You're just focused on the problem.

And I'm like,

No,

We're focused on making the problem visible.

Visible.

So then you have choice.

You can be empowered to change it.

Yeah.

You don't know what you're swimming in.

You have no power to change it.

Correct.

Yeah.

That's exactly what I would say.

Like to me,

Any change starts with awareness.

Then you look at the beliefs that,

You know,

Contribute to creating it and then you have a choice.

But only when you're aware and only when you pull to the surface the unsaid collective expectation,

Understandings,

Whatever the rules,

The unwritten rules,

Unsaid rules.

And then you have a choice to.

And I think that if I could give my 20-year-old self any kind of advice or like go back,

It would be you're only seeing the very,

Very,

Very tip of the iceberg and you're fighting against the tip of the iceberg.

And actually,

You're not even seeing the 90% that's under the water.

That's the real root cause of the problem.

So you're never going to win,

You know,

Fighting here,

You know,

Never,

Ever,

Ever.

Anyway,

I have enjoyed our conversation so much.

It's been so rich.

And I just,

I really want to honor how,

I'm going to use the word thoughtful again.

I've really enjoyed learning from you and the way that you say things in very gentle,

But this beautiful,

Quiet power,

Exactly what we were talking about before.

It's like,

You're a living example of how,

Yeah,

Re-centering yourself and speaking from that place.

Doesn't mean shouty,

Shouty,

Look at me.

There's this quiet voice of knowing that people pay attention to.

And that's why you will be one of the contributors of what is hopefully a tsunami of change eventually.

Eventually,

Eventually.

Let us all.

Yes.

And we will put all of the links.

Is there a simple link?

We will link to the series that you were talking about,

But your website is the school of visibility.

Is it .

Com or .

Au?

The school of visibility.

Com.

.

Com.

Beautiful.

We're the same on socials.

We're just the school of visibility.

Yes.

Beautiful,

Beautiful,

Beautiful.

Thank you for sharing your wisdom and your time and your,

Yes,

Just gorgeous,

Thoughtful way of speaking about such big,

Meaty,

Confronting topics.

Yeah.

Hopefully through these conversations,

People are more aware and therefore do have choice.

Thank you so much for listening in to this episode.

I hope you enjoyed it and you took away some golden nuggets or a chiropractic adjustment of the soul around how to more gently and self-compassionately step through this sometimes tricky transition point.

If you loved this episode,

Please take the time to send it to a friend who's also in the messy magical middle or even better go and rate the show with a five-star review or.