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Transcript

Midlife Alchemy: How Sobriety Becomes Your Superpower · Love Sober Podcast

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Music.
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Hi and welcome to Love Sober Podcast, the podcast for the sober and sober curious.
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Hi and welcome back to Love Sober, the podcast for the sober and sober curious.
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Today, it's just me, it's Kate. I really wanted to just talk about.
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Midlife transition and sobriety through a framework that I've been developing
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for a few months now, which I really want to talk about.
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It's about the midlife rite of passage and the impact on sobriety and why alcohol-free
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living really is a superpower in the midlife.
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But not just about that kind of perimenopause, menopause transition that I've spoken about before.
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But indeed, this whole kind of midlife transition from a kind of emotional,
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social, even spiritual point of view, as well as the kind of physicality of
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what's going on for us and what's impacting us at that point in our lives.
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So I may have talked
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about on the podcast before the fact that I trained as a menopause doula
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with the menopause school a couple of years back when
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I realized in my coaching a lot of clients were
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coming experiencing challenges to their sobriety
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as they were entering early 40s and
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that kind of perimenopausal time or people
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were coming to me in their midlifes having used alcohol
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for many years and suddenly going there is just
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no way this is working anymore help me so I
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knew that there was something really impacting women
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at this point in their life and you know to to refresh about my my journey is
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I am in my 10th a continuous year
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now of sobriety but I did start my first rodeo was in about 13 years ago,
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And I was sober for just over a year. I was soberistas.
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This is the very first kind of internet kind of connections we were having back then before.
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Even Instagram was a thing if you can even imagine that as a possibility.
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I don't know, maybe you've never been on Instagram, that's an assumption,
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but you know, it's working in the sober space. I know how powerful it's been.
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Anyway, I digress. So I managed a year. I didn't have a lot of tools.
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I think I was very much white-knuckling it, but using community as a big tool.
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But I didn't really have any of that kind of self-care awareness that I talk about a lot.
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I didn't have my yoga practice, so I didn't have a somatic body-based modality
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that was helping me to regulate my nervous system and heal my nervous system.
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I hadn't got my ADHD diagnosis by that point.
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I didn't really know what was going on, to be honest.
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So after a year, the stress built up, perimenopause kicked in.
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I didn't know anything about that. No one was talking about that either.
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And so I started drinking again after 13 months.
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So what I really
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wanted to offer was kind of a bit
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of a retrospective toolkit that
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I've put together and really talk about it
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with the benefit of hindsight I guess in terms of the perimenopause and menopause
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transition so I'm post-menopausal now at 56 however I would say that I'm a real
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baby still in terms of the whole midlife rite of passage well not baby maybe
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a teenager. I don't know. Call it a queen-ager.
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So I really want to just talk to that piece and.
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Kind of, yeah, talk about midlife transition as a rite of passage through anthropological
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terms, if you'd like, and how it's impacting us, a bit of a sobriety and hormone 101.
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And also then talk about my model, which is the midlife alchemy method.
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So midlife as a rite of passage, we
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have ritualized transitions for millennia I studied a fantastic course at university
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called Systems of Ritual and Belief back in the 80s and so anthropologists were
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talking about that then you know births, ritualizing births, deaths,
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marriages parenthood, elderhood, sometimes puberty this is universal to all
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cultures that they had found at that point.
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Now, it's led by biology, as is our midlife transition.
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So obviously, we are looking at midlife transition and really doubling down
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on that as a very specific rite of passage, which should be in there,
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but that has often been overlooked for many reasons,
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partly up till the last 100 to 200 years, say,
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maybe we weren't living much beyond menopause.
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So now we are, it's distinct as a, you know, a good 20 year period of midlife,
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which is not just going from parenthood to kind of old age.
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So it's led by biology. We are all bound by universal natural principles of
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nature. We are aging and there we go.
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We can't do anything about it. So we are led by our biology,
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but it's very much felt, as well as the kind of biological nature of it,
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which really impacts us during perimenopause and menopause years.
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We feel it in the emotional and social space with our mental health,
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and we also feel it in terms of our identity as well.
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So this period has to be looked after. and
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in modern times we know that we've had a
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death of a lot of our social rituals so
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we're often left without adequate shepherding
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I would call it or doulering through these rites
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of passage and what happens then is that we can just feel like we are you know
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something's broken something's wrong something's wrong with us we're not coping
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we can feel like we're falling apart when actually what we're doing is we're
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kind of coming out of a chrysalis into a new identity.
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But as I said, these all need to be looked after.
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Sobriety is a superpower in our midlife. So we're looking at menopause transition,
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menopause being said by the medical profession as the day one year after our last bleed.
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So that's menopause. Perimenopause is happening up to 10 years prior to menopause.
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And so when people talk about, oh, I'm sure it's just the menopause,
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I'm sure it's just, I'm so menopausal, what they're actually talking about is
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the perimenopause symptoms, which are caused by those fluctuating hormones, fluctuating estrogen.
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So the hormones that are in flux are usually what we're generally talking about
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is estrogen or estradiol.
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So, and this is why we need holistic health lifestyle and really robust toolkits around this time.
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HRT is obviously an option, you know, that you'll be talking to a healthcare
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provider about that or maybe going to a women's hormone clinic.
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I was told to go away by my doctor when I was about 45, who said I was far too
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young to be going through the menopause.
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Obviously, my 12-year-old doctor probably had only had half a day's training
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in his medical career on the menopause.
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So we are sorely under-resourced and under-supported.
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So this is why it's really, really important to get your menopause support groups
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on board to talk to your groups about this.
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If you're sober, this is coming up in your sobriety groups
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hopefully it is definitely in love sober
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because we're a midlife women's group and also
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you can get on board with your you know your sober coaches and
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make sure they are you know they know about this stuff otherwise if they're
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just doing mindset stuff with you that's you're not going to be being properly
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supported so what we need to do obviously is support the hormonal changes there
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are other podcasts where i'm talking about this with fiona catchpole who is
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at the founder of the Menopause School.
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So you can go back to that podcast if you want to hear more about that.
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We're also looking at stress, hormones, adrenaline, and cortisol,
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which are really ramping up around this time with often with the kind of caring
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loads, maybe we're reaching the peak of our career around this time as well.
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And we're looking at the liver as well.
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And so the reason why sobriety is a real superpower around this time is because
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if the liver is prioritizing removing alcohol, removing that carcinogenic neurotoxin
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from our bodies, which it will prioritize to keep us alive,
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it is not metabolizing available estrogen correctly, whether we're taking HRT or not.
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It's not metabolizing that estrogen and it's not removing the excess oestrogen.
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It is also not, and also we, so we need oestrogen for all of our 11 systems
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of the body rely on oestrogen for work.
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That's respiratory, cardiovascular, you know, all of the systems of the body.
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There are oestrogen receptors in every single cell of the body.
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This is why this is crucial for us as we're going through this transition and
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with our fluctuating hormones.
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We're also looking at adrenaline and cortisol levels.
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So we are, you know, often we're maybe at the peak of our career at this time.
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We might be juggling career and family.
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So, and as we're going through these hormonal fluctuations, we are more vulnerable
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to this kind of dysregulation of the nervous system and dysregulation with cortisol.
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And this is important, you know, we might have been.
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Used to say a particular type of exercise we must
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be introducing much more into our toolkit
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as well as you know doing our doing our
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movement of course that we love but also in putting strength training in there
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but also rest so yoga nidra yin yoga restorative yoga or the tai chi slow warps
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in nature those things that are going to lower the cortisol levels are very
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very very important at this time.
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If we're drinking, it will really be affecting cortisol as well,
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peaks and crashes, and can give us a really high cortisol baseline.
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So again, alcohol, even though we've been marketed and told that the glass of
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wine at the end of the day or the half a bottle for most people,
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actually in reality, isn't it,
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is good for us and it will you
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know reduce stress it's kind of worth it for
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that that payoff it's not central nervous system
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depressant it makes us less cortisol effective
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and it will not properly authentically shift us into rest and digest which is
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what we want to be it just is a central nervous system depressant and then obviously
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the levels are all whacked out the next day i've talked a great length about
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this I'm not going to bang on about it in this one.
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So really wanting to talk about this rite of passage into what I would like
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to call the queen age phase or the queen phase.
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Maybe you're aware of the kind of the archetypes that have been in use for the
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maiden mother crone archetypes that we have used in Anglo-Saxon cultures,
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which is very much that sort of maidenhood or the energy motherhood is when
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we're giving all of our energy out to other people or our projects or our jobs.
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And then the crone is that kind of wise woman archetype. But now coming through
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very strongly in sort of well-being, even well-being brands.
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I saw one in my, what is it, Ancient and Brave doing a blog on Queen as being
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one of those big archetypes.
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And now we have this really long kind of period of midlife from,
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say, early 40s to mid-60s.
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So that's a good, like, 20-odd years we've got of this midlife queen-ager period
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that is really, really great, you know, but really needs to be resourced so
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that we're feeling on top of our game.
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And setting ourselves up for healthy aging and healthy elderhood,
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which I believe Gen X women are co-creating at the moment this version of what
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elderhood might look like.
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Again, Sharon Blackie does great work in this collecting stories and her work with Hagitude.
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So very exciting times for us to be co-creating positive ageing models.
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So, what I am working with in my program,
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which starts on the 21st of September, we have our first call on the 22nd of
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September at 7 o'clock, so that's a Monday,
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and we will have calls every other week, and it's a very small set mentoring.
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It's only going to be 12 women total plus me, so we are going to be meeting
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and going through the pillars of six pillars of change of midlife alchemy with
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lots of positive psychology, coaching tools.
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Somatic tools, and really bringing what you would like in terms of your challenges
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you might be having at the moment in your own midlife journey.
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Because obviously we have a lot of things impacting us at this point.
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So we might be recovering from illness. We may have divorce in the picture.
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We may have kids leaving home, aging parents.
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So this is a container for kind of showing up as you are with your stuff,
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but going through a very strength-based program to support the kind of the physical
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side of things and the mental and emotional side of things with other women
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as well. So this is midlife alchemy.
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So the first pillar that we talk about, The pillars are rest,
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regulate, release, root, ritual, and rise over 12 weeks.
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So the first one is rest, and we must pause to replenish and reclaim energy.
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Why? Because of the cortisol, alcohol, stress, stuff that I have talked about,
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the HPA axis, hypothalamus, pituitary.
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Axis and our stress response. So we literally need to rest.
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So we'll be looking at somatic exercises and what we might need to do to attend to that need.
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So we will literally rest. As I said, I'm a yoga teacher as well.
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I've trained and practiced yoga for a decade, three times a week.
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My yoga practice has changed to be
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much more somatic led restorative
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nidra yin based as well as my
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strength practice as well so i can share all
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that kind of stuff with you if you come on
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to midlife alchemy we research our
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resources we start tracking if you are post-menopausal
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you will be tracking in a different way but if
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you're perimenopausal you'll be tracking your symptoms perhaps
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to advocate to your healthcare provider so
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I can help with all of that stuff we'll be looking at that
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we're looking at diary as weapon of
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choice we need to really take control
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of our time management to advocate for our
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needs of rest and to prioritize our well-being
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we'll be looking at what we can outsource and
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really asking the question how can we do less and rest more
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we also really start with
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the end in mind which is asking that great coaching
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question you know what do i want how do i want to
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feel how do i want to feel as i
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age and what needs to happen so
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we're looking at that very forward focused
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knowing what or dreaming
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and imagining and co-creating together what that what what we want what that.
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Ideal looks like for us and how we can bring that into being by taking aligned.
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Action and finding that support and accountability within within our beautiful container.
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So that is rest. The next pillar is to regulate.
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Now, this is the next super important bit is nourishing our nervous systems,
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looking at our strength, looking at our hormonal health. Again,
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we're continuing to track.
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We are finding our supportive groups and we're really finding our calm center here.
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So we are getting established and we are maintaining our momentum.
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And maybe we're adding in other things that are really
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nourishing for ourselves at that point but those first
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couple of weeks that first couple of modules we're getting the basics
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and then we are maintaining that so that
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is our regulation and more stuff on yeah
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the nervous system and making sure that we've got those kind of
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modalities around us that
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scaffold that's going to keep us really really
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strong in this period so this
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sets us up for and then this we go
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through a bit into the messy middle of it all and this
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point we're releasing we're very we're very clear
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on naming here and working together of what needs to be let go of what no longer
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serves us and getting really clear on that and the reason for this midlife is
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a real time of shedding old identities obligations and beliefs block our growth.
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So this pillar is about clearing the emotional, mental and physical clutter to make space.
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Now the reason we don't do that straight away is we want to be researching our
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resources and creating a really solid foundation and the rapport with ourselves as a group.
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So we create this firm foundation first and then we start to do some of this
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because this can be kind of emotive, right?
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So we want to make sure we've got some really good foundations and resources
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around us before we do that.
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We know alcohol was no longer serving us, we got rid of that.
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But what about overworking? What about people pleasing?
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What about those feelings of, you know, that we can feel quite upset when we
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realise maybe our families haven't supported us?
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Or maybe we've been let down by the medical profession?
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You know, so some of these things that we can have some feelings around, and that's fine.
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Part of this is that we have space to and
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ways to process our feelings in
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ways that feel nurturing and supportive so
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maybe in this one we are looking at some boundaries work
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which typically would come up in part way
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through my when I coach one-to-one and often
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in group programs so we're continuing to
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track our progress and supportive practices so
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what do you need to do would you go to a boundaries workshop do
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we do some work around self-compassion at
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this point maybe that needs to come in so we're
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very much around resourcing the person as we're
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moving through this transition of kind of letting go of
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a version of youth which we might have been clinging to and
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this is that kind of falling in love with the you that you are now
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right but maybe we're not quite there yet beautiful practice
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that I like to work with is Liz Gilbert's letters from love
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so we'll be looking at that as well dear love what would you have me know today
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and that can be such a beautiful supportive kind practice as we're going through
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some of this doing some of this emotional work so the next one is root this
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is our next module week eight so.
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This pillar is about identity meaning and a secure base again really rooting
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down so So we are looking at really strengthening that feeling of kind of true
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north as we're stepping towards what we kind of want.
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Now values work is really great for this. Values clarification,
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we'll be working on revisiting our values.
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We'll be looking at our character strengths and we'll be really identifying,
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you know, who is this queen right now? You know, what's she great at?
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What does she love? What might she like to do as well?
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So we're really rooting into that sense of the possibility of who we might be
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emerging as, as we revisit those kinds of core, core practices around our values and our strengths.
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Just super exciting, connecting passion with our kind of maybe our vocations
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or our families, you know, our lives.
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So the next one, the penultimate, which is week 10, it's our fifth group call.
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We are looking at ritual.
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We've started to create supportive practices around some of the emotional shifts.
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And this is really to help establish
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rhythm, meaning and strengthen those habits that are supporting us.
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But they can use us anchors in transitional times.
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So they're really good for stability and connection to self and community.
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So you might have personal rituals they
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could be just well-being rituals that you do so you might have a
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journaling practice in the morning in the evening maybe you
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have creative habits and we're looking at some
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of those wider ones that we can use and we can
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use the moon as a really good the moon cycles especially
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when we've menopaused and we're not tracking our
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menstrual cycles we can still be
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very much connected with the cyclical kind of
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nature of life and a very feminine energy
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if we we use the moon so I'm going to be sharing some
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of the the creative rituals that I
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use around seasons around the moon
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that could be really lovely working physically mentally
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and emotionally and of course we're a
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group so you're really welcome to bring your own practices and
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share with the group we're going to be co-creating this as we
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go but this is very much permission to play
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as well and get into that those states of flow.
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Look at our glimmers yeah and maybe
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our all practices and if all of
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this is sounding like i don't do those i
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don't know what you're talking about do not worry that's
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why we're diving into them because this is permission to play
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so who knows what we might find in exploring
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and sharing together things that we didn't realize
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that we loved and might be nurturing to us and then
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we come out the other end right we
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rise we step into our next chapter and of
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course midlife transition itself I said it's like.
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20 years or so we're not gonna you know
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suddenly I like I
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said I haven't stepped into elderhood yet but I
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am working with this process pretty much every
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season to keep stepping into
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my new chapter it's a good as I'm kind of shedding layers you know the reason
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after replenishing releasing regulating rooting ritualizing the energy is now
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here to rise into our new role it could be a creative project It could be a leadership thing.
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It could be just a fresh take on where we are in our family lives.
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It was just simply a slightly fuller expression of ourself now because this
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is about being self-expressed.
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Within a group and knowing, making ourselves known to ourself,
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but also having that beautifully married back within a group, which is so great for us.
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We will be looking at models of positive ageing, reframing elderhood.
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We'll look at Sharon Blackie's Hagitude.
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We'll be looking at and Bloom following positive ageing, age-positive accounts online,
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just continuing with those practices and sharing
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this kind of inner sage future
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self kind of work that we'll
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be doing together and we are sharing and celebrating and then we have our end
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of program ritual celebration where we get to share all this stuff with each
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other so if you are interested in finding out about working with me in this midlife alchemy.
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Please go to lovesober.com.
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I've linked it below actually in the notes. You can find that if you've got any questions about it.
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You can book a discovery call. I'll link that below again.
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So please do just get in touch, follow the link. We've still got,
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we've got now 10, no, we've got eight spaces left.
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So, but I will close the doors when we haven't got you
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know so and if you don't get into this uh program i'll
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run it again if so you'll just join the
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next cohort and i'll be uh you know sign up
25:58
to my newsletter and i will keep you
26:02
posted about that as well so i'm
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very excited to share this program with
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you and if you want to
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hear more and want to be part of the group as well you can always
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join love sober group and that's all on the website as well and details of how
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to join us there in the main group and stay well everybody stay well and stay
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sober don't drink even if your arse is on fire and I'll see you when I next put the next podcast out.
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Music.