Menopause Rise and Thrive | Helping Women Navigate Midlife and Menopause

136. The permission to pause. Time away was needed.

• Dr. Sara Poldmae | Healer, Doctor of Acupuncture and Chinese medicine, and Functional Medicine Practitioner

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Have you ever longed for a pause button—a moment where no one needs you, nothing is urgent, and you can simply breathe? In this episode, I’m sharing my deeply personal experience from a recent retreat in Costa Rica—where for the first time in a long time, I stepped out of all the roles I usually play and rediscovered what it feels like to simply be me. No titles, no to-do lists, no emotional labor. Just space.

If you’re a midlife woman feeling buried under invisible responsibilities, this episode offers you permission: to slow down, to feel, and to let go of what no longer fits. I’ll also introduce a powerful concept from yoga philosophy that I’m bringing home with me—and that might just change how you approach clarity and self-care in your own life.

 

In this episode:

·         Why stepping away from your roles can be deeply healing in midlife

·         The overlooked emotional labor women carry—and how it quietly adds up

·         A heartfelt letter from a retreat participant that perfectly captures the power of solitude

·         The yoga principle of Saucha—and how it can support mental and physical clarity

·         Why clarity often comes not from doing more, but from removing the noise

·         Simple ways to create emotional and physical space at home—even if you can’t retreat

·         A gentle reminder that you are allowed to rest without guilt


Resources Mentioned:

Connect with me, Dr. Sara Poldmae:

Website: https://risingwomanproject.com

Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/drsarapoldmae 

Have a question I can answer? Send me a message! I love to hear from my listeners!

Sara Poldmae:

Sarah, welcome to menopause. Rise and thrive. I am Dr Sarah pulled May, and this podcast is your go to guide for navigating perimenopause and menopause. If you are feeling a little overwhelmed, trust me, you are in great company. Each week, I'll bring you expert advice, raw, honest conversations and simple tips to help you stay grounded and maybe even find some humor in the process, let's rise, thrive and tackle this wild ride together. Hey, ladies, I am back from an amazing retreat in Costa Rica, and I am so excited to be recording this episode. I went on this retreat in Costa Rica, not as a facilitator, but rather as a participant. If you've been listening to this podcast, you know, I've had a crazy few months after the fire, and I just needed to be in a space where I wasn't responsible for anyone, anything, and I just didn't want to be in charge. So going on our treat just sounded like just the right thing. And honestly, I really needed that time away even more than I knew. I didn't fully realize how much until I arrived. This past year has been a lot of like recalibrating, a lot of decision making, a lot of stepping into roles that needed to be filled, even when I was exhausted. So this retreat wasn't about learning something new or fixing anything I feel like sometimes I go away and I base my travel around something I want to learn or study. And although I love that, I just didn't want that this time. But you know, of course, I did learn new things, and I'm really excited to share them with you. I stepped out of the roles that I play, not only in business, but also in my personal life. I was not a mom, I was not a wife, I was not a business owner. For over a week and without a title, without responsibility, without being needed, I was able to really facilitate some amazing healing for myself. I feel like midlife, with the weight of all the roles that we play is, I don't know, quietly layer on roles without even realizing it, without asking for these roles. And although we wouldn't necessarily want to not have these roles, they can be a lot. I feel like women are always managing, anticipating, holding emotional space, being the steady ones that everybody can count on. And the tricky part of this is that a lot of our roles are invisible and aren't always acknowledged, and we don't realize how on we've been until we finally step away. And what struck me on this retreat so much was how different I felt when I woke up and didn't have like, an agenda for the day. I mean, we had a loose agenda with a couple of yoga classes a day with Heather. And let me just stop here and thank Heather so much for facilitating such a beautiful week. Heather is a yoga instructor here in Annapolis that lives in Costa Rica for a couple months of the year, a few months of the year, and she actually held two retreats at the same yoga center in Nosara, Costa Rica this year, the one I was on and then she's about to hold one next week. So she had a week off in between, but she really created such a beautiful space. And her classes were top notch. Her vinyasa flows were meditative. She offered so much guidance, and I really felt held in such a beautiful container. I'll make sure to drop her links in the show notes. But what struck me again was like just waking up and not feeling like I had to play any roles. I could just be me, no emotional labor, no problem solving before even getting out of bed, just a complete element of having space. And for women in midlife, that kind of space is rare, to say the least. So I think retreats can often be misunderstood, and that's why I'm popping on today that and to share some of the wisdom that I feel like I took away from it. Retreats are not necessarily about escape. They're not becoming a better version of you. They're not necessarily about transformation in like a dramatic, flashy way. Some retreats are. Maybe I'll just talk about this retreat and the retreats that I lead. But what retreats really do is they allow you permission. They allow you permission to pause. They allow. You permission to rest without any guilt, permission to not be productive, permission to process what we've been carrying. And you can process this gently, you can process this with huge amounts of tears, but you just have permission to like, be yourself, to feel yourself, and especially in midlife, when so much is shifting internally, and maybe we don't feel like ourselves anymore, and there's people around us asking a lot of us nothing on this retreat felt forced, and because of that, things really surfaced for me, naturally, and I know they surfaced for a lot of the other participants. In fact, I will be reading a little snippet from one of the participants that I thought was so beautifully written about her experience. And, you know, I the timing of this retreat was quite beautiful, because we moved back into the wellness center a little bit over a month before the retreat, and then we were shoved into the holidays. And so I really needed to take this space, because I've had very little space in my life. It's not like the world stops when you have a dramatic event go on. So I wanted to to share with you the concept that I really am going to be practicing now that I'm home, already started practicing. I've only been home two days, but each day, Heather, our facilitator, gently wove in yoga concepts, not necessarily as a lecture, not as a big thing, but just wove these little snippets in so beautifully. And the thing that stayed with me was saucha. The concept of saucha, sauja in the yoga traditions, is often translated as cleanliness or purity, but that doesn't quite capture it. It's really clarity and clearing what clouds us. It's about simplifying and creating internal and external conditions for clarity. And I've been working on clarity for a while now. In fact, I think last year, some of my computer passwords started with clarity. It's definitely something I've been working on, and I can feel bits of frustration sometimes when I don't feel like I'm seeing clearly, like the the life I want to create for myself in the coming years, and I think what I was doing wrong, or maybe it was what I needed to do at the time. But clarity doesn't always come with effort or with forcing things. Sometimes it comes from removal, by removing noise, removing obligations that no longer fit, removing expectations we've outgrown. And those are the things I'm working on and have been working on. But what I didn't really think about was the connection between my physical environment and my lack of clarity. I've got a lot going on. I've got a house full of animals. I've got many roles that I play again, business, wife, mom to my daughter, mom to my pups, mom to my cat, my nine chickens. Toast. My house can get sometimes quite messy, and my office can be messy. I'm rushing around from one thing to the next, and because of that, I feel like sometimes I don't create the physical space for clarity. I don't have places where I can just sit and be as calm and relaxed. I have one meditation space. But even that meditation space has clutter around it, that part of my subconscious, or sometimes even my conscious mind, will look at and be like, ugh, another thing to do. So one of the women on the retreat shared this beautiful saying, and it's not what I took away, but I think I can kind of loop them together. I'm going to give it a try anyway. I'm going to read directly what she sent me with her permission, of course, and of course, not sharing her name, but she shares that the most impactful lesson that she learned in Costa Rica was, I'm 41 years old. In the last 14 years, I've gotten sober, married, had two kids, divorced, an abusive husband, solo survival, parented, met a guy, got married, found yoga, sprinkle in a few other uninvited adventures, and it's not hard to believe that I have never been, quote, unquote, alone. First time traveling internationally alone, leaving my kids for longer than a few days going to a yoga retreat, meeting complete strangers that quickly became friends and hung upside down in aerial yoga twice, long story longer. The Retreat gave me space to be alone, not lonely, simply alone, to rest by myself. Try classes with strangers. I take long walks to town by myself. I have never had that space to be with my brain by myself, and I know that that sounds silly, but honestly, it's a scary place up there, but the retreat gave me a safe space to look at it, listen to and discover who I am outside of the obvious, I unlearn some false truths that I have been holding on to for 41 years. I accepted the new truth sitting below that surface, and I felt empowered to continue to find the new and let go of the old, to let go, be present. You are enough. Those were the intentions i found and practiced all week, I am still 41 perimenopausal, with two young kids, a husband, a demanding career, but I left today with a much different understanding of my place in this world, all by being alone with my brain and my heart for One week in paradise, I really, really appreciate her sharing that with with me so that I could share it with you. What always moves me is how universal these feelings are and how alone we can feel inside of them. Nothing is wrong with any of us. We just need space and the connection I see here between her realizing that you can be alone and not feel lonely and needing the space that she never really has in her day to day life, to process things. Think there's the similarity there between her needing the space and me needing a clean space. So by clearing the clutter, the mental clutter, the roles that are always around us in our daily life. We're so busy that we don't often get to reflect. And I do spend a lot of time sitting in meditation. I do spend a lot of time working on reflection and intentional living. You know, I feel like I have a good game going on with all of that, but I rush from that into the next thing. I let my space get messy. So my homework from the retreat is to create more intentional physical spaces in my world, these physical spaces that will support mental clarity. Being on this retreat also reminded me why I care so deeply about this work, not just as a practitioner, but as a woman in midlife myself. You know, I'm not sitting across the desk preaching to my patients. I'm a woman in midlife experiencing a lot of the things that all women in midlife can go through. So I love holding a container, like the retreat that I just left, because I just it's just so important to take time for us as women in midlife. We we need to be about around other women, and I feel like we've lost that in society. And you know, being able to share that lived experience of the roles that we play often men cannot understand the emotional labor that we go through to keep everything together. And I have a retreat coming up this spring, and it's being shaped from that place, not from hustle or performance, but from permission, if any of you ladies would like to join me in West Virginia, would love to have you. And being at Bodhi Tree yoga resort really plants a seed. I would love to host there in the future. I'm hoping to host there in 2027 and I'll keep you posted on that I'm also actively exploring other venues for more retreats to really hold that sense of spaciousness and support that women need, because the container matters, the pacing matters, the permission matters. But I am in full acknowledgment that not everybody can go away on retreat, and that doesn't mean don't get to access some of that medicine of spaciousness. So here are a few ways, just quick suggestions of ways you can practice this creating space at home. I'll share the first way, that's the way I'm going to create space is to clean up my space to create more safe, supportive, clean environments in my home, without any clutter, without any reminders of the next thing on my to do list. But also you can create space by creating short windows of time in your day where there's no caregiving, no planning, no productivity, where you put your phone down and ask yourself, Who am I right now and what do I need right now? Short and consistent is more powerful than. You know, just kind of popping in, checking in on yourself every once in a while, and maybe this week. Another thing you could try is crossing things off that you need to let go of, like a commitment that drains you, a conversation you keep rehearsing just drop it. That conversation doesn't need to be in your world, a physical space that feels heavy like I'm doing, or a habit that creates mental noise, like being extreme in your focus on protein powder, there's a lot of things that you can let go of without fixing on retreat, nothing was forced, and that was kind of a simple way to allow things to surface. At home, it can be a little muddy, but practicing just letting emotions roll through without trying to find the solution, and just really leaning into the emotions and letting them process themselves, or perhaps choosing a word for this season that you're in. Do you want to be more clear, more soft, more spacious. Do you want to feel like you're enough? Do you want to feel more gentle with yourself, and just maybe put that word up around your house in a bunch of different places, maybe at work, on your computer screen, so that if you notice yourself feeling stressed, you can go lean into that word and say, How can I make this moment a little bit more supportive of feeling, more clear, more soft, more spacious, more gentle. If midlife is asking anything of us, I think it's honestly to create more space, to create space to clear what no longer fits, space to feel without fixing, space to remember who we are beneath all the layers, all of the different roles that we play. So maybe the question is not necessarily, what do I need to add to my life? Maybe it's what is it that I need to let go of? Thank you so much for being here. I really hope that you do have it within the realm of possibility to take a beautiful retreat like I am so grateful I was able to take part of this week, but if not, there are ways to create space at home. I would love to hear from you. I welcome any questions. You can email me at hello, at rising woman project.com, I would love to hear about retreats that you've been on, but most of all, I would love to hear how you're creating space for yourself. I hope you have a wonderful week and reach out if you need anything foreign.

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Dr. Sara Poldmae

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