Ep 129 When Everything Shifts: Staying Rooted In Menopause

The clocks went forward last weekend. And the night before, Carly did something she does every year without thinking, she left her kitchen clock on the old time. Just as a quiet check. A way to hold both times at once while the world shifted overnight.

She couldn't help thinking... isn't that exactly what menopause feels like?

In this episode, Carly explores what it means to stay rooted in yourself when your body, your hormones, your sleep, your emotions and your sense of self are all quietly (or not so quietly) shifting. 

She talks about the two traps midlife women often fall into around identity and change, why the breath has been her most reliable constant through multiple hard seasons, and what it means to meet yourself with compassion when the version in the mirror feels unfamiliar.

This one is gentle and honest and grounded... for anyone who has ever woken up and thought: who am I now?

Thanks for listening to Rooted In Presence

If you’d like to get in touch with a question about today’s episode or find out how I can support you with coaching, here’s how to reach me:
📧 Email: carlykillenpt@gmail.com
📱 Instagram: @thestrongbonescoach

Do you crave unshakable confidence in your strength from midlife and beyond? Would you love to achieve your goals without sacrificing family time or self-care?

Ready to take your strength to the next level? Start building a stronger body and healthier bones with my Strong Bones Starter Kit; your step-by-step guide to safe and effective strength training at home.
👉 Click here to learn more and access today

🌟 Stay connected and inspired with daily wellness tips on Instagram @thestrongbonescoach.
🌟 For tailored advice or personal queries, email me at carlykillenpt@gmail.com

Thank you for being here, and I look forward to supporting you on your journey to strength, health, and confidence! 💪🦴✨

Transcript

0:46

Hello and welcome back to Rooted in Presence. I'm Carly your midlife and menopause guide, and we're at episode number 129 of this podcast. That is just going so fast. But as always, I'm also super glad that you're here. So this week I want to start with something that happened on Sunday morning. Something very ordinary, but it got me thinking quite deeply, which if you know me, is something I do a lot. Well, I'm in the Northern Hemisphere in the uk. So if you are also in the same area as me or perhaps familiar with our time zone, you might know that the clocks went forward this weekend because we are in spring. I might have mentioned that once or twice, but the night before, I did something I've done every year without really thinking about why I left my kitchen clock on the old time. Now I know I'm not the only one that does this. I'd love to hear if you do this too. I do this as a little check a way to know that when I wake up, whether my phone has done its job and shifted overnight. Never quite trust this automated thing, even though it's super convenient. So I woke up and I looked at my phone, and then yeah, I walked into the kitchen and looked at the clock, and For just a moment. I had to hold both times in my head at once, the old time and the new time where I'd been and where I was now. So honestly, it's actually taken me a few days to fully settle back into it. I kept recalculating and my body still felt like it was walking in the old hour. My rhythm was. Kind of an hour behind, and I have actually changed the clock now. You'd be pleased to know, but the rest of me still has needed a little bit longer to catch up. I think I'm getting there, but I thought, isn't that just a really good description or a way to look at what menopause can feel like for those of you that might have some experience there, that there is something about menopause, isn't there? It's not as if it's a shift that arrives with one big dramatic moment. It's a bit more like the clocks. One day you notice something's moved, your sleep is different. Your body's starting to feel a bit unfamiliar. Perhaps your emotions show up with a new intensity or sometimes a strange flatness. Maybe your patience is shorter, but your intuition is getting louder. And the question that so many women bring to me in our sessions, in messages, in the spaces between their words when they're trying to explain how they feel, is some version of Who am I now? And this is not in a crisis kind of way necessarily. Sometimes it's just this quiet background. Hum. Perhaps a curiosity with a kind of tender bewilderment. They say things to me like, I used to know how I worked. I used to know what I needed and now I'm refiguring it all out. And while I want offer you today as you're listening. Is that re figuring out isn't a sign you've lost yourself. It's definitely a sign of growth. The question isn't who was I? It's more like how do I stay rooted in myself while everything around me and inside me is shifting? So let's take a moment to. Name something I see a lot because I think there's something to be learned here when women hits perimenopause and menopause, they tend to be these two pulls to very understandable, very human ways of responding to change. The first one is often to cling, to try to be who you were in when you were 35 or 28, or whenever you felt most like yourself. It's normal to resist those changes, to measure yourself against the old version of you that existed before, or finding yourself, wanting even to treat your past self as the gold standard that the present self keeps failing to meet. And the second is to abandon, to decide that who you were before doesn't belong in this new chapter to leave her behind to. Reinvent yourself so completely that there's no thread connecting back. And I understand both of these impulses. I felt both of them, they have showed up in my life. But here's something that I've come to believe is that neither of them serves you not on their own. That woman, you were at 30, she had things to teach you. Her energy, her boldness, her way of moving through the world. That's not something to be ashamed of, and definitely not something to erase. She's got you here, right? And that woman, you are yet to become the one you're becoming. She's not a lesser version either. Definitely a, a deep one. She's carrying all of that experience, all of those lessons, all of that hard won wisdom, and you do yourself a disservice if you discount that. So what I'm inviting you to consider instead. Something a bit more like a taproot. Now, a taproot is what keeps a tree in the ground during a storm. It allows the branches to move, the leaves to change with every season. The whole shape of a tree can shift over the years, but the taproot holds not in a rigid way. It grows down too. It reaches deeper as the tree grows taller, and that's all about staying the sane. It's about maintaining a connection. So the question I've been sitting with this week, and the one I would like to leave you with is, uh, what is your kitchen clock? What is the thing that helps you hold both times at once? The woman you've been and the woman you've becoming, what helps you find your bearings? When the shift happens and it will happen again and again in big ways and small. For some of us it's a physical practice. It might be strength training, it daily walk Movement that reminds us what our body can do rather than focusing on what it's no longer doing in the same way. For some of you, maybe it's a creative practice, writing or music or something made with your own hands. For some of us, it's connection. Well, we all need connection, but it can show up in different ways. For some it might be a conversation with someone who knew us before and who knows us now, who can hold both those versions at once as well. And for me, increasingly so it's the breath. Not in a complicated way or adding another thing to my to-do list, but just the simple, always available fact of it. There've been a few times more than one, across, more than one hard season when I've needed something to come back to, something that could meet me wherever I was at, whatever was happening in my body, my mind, my life, changes in health, changes in family changes I didn't choose and had to find my way through anyway, and through all of that, the breath held me. It kept me going. It was that one constant, that thing that was there at 25 and is still here with me now. And that's a thread that runs through every new version of me. Now, I don't have a practice to guide you with today, but you can head over to my YouTube channel. There's a few nice breaths for very different occasions for you, and perhaps I'll lead some on some further episodes. I actually have a few episodes where I've led breaths before. Maybe I'll link them in the show notes, right? That's something on my to-do list, but I do want to name the breath as a tool. If you've ever dismissed breath work as a bit too airy fairy or a bit pointless, then I understand that sometimes these things just look a bit too simple, don't they? And genuinely, I was one of those people too, I also want to gently say there is a lot of science behind it and it does work. And if you're looking for a way to come back to yourself through the shifts of midlife, it might be worth the look just saying. So what I really want to say here underneath all of this, I guess using a lot of words to say something quite simple, is that these changes are real. Experience through perimenopause and menopause. You might call it symptoms, you might call experience, but that's real. The disorientation is real and you are not imagining it, and you are not alone, and you are definitely not failing at menopause. You are navigating one of the most significant transitions a woman's body goes through, and you are doing it whilst also holding down a career a family. Relationships, responsibilities a whole life, and that's a lot. So the invitation, the one I keep coming back to and the one I offer to every woman I work with, is to meet all of that with compassion, not So you have to have it all figured out and absolutely not to perform wellness and really, really not to be fine when you're not Fine. We can ban that word. Hmm. I'm inviting you here just to be rooted enough in yourself that when the clocks do shift and they will, you have something to come back to. A breath, a practice, a quiet knowing of who you are at your core, even when the surface is changing, You don't have to stop the tide, you just need to know where the shore is. So that's what I have for you this week, a clock, a route, and an invitation to stay connected to yourself through the beautiful, complicated, sometimes bewildering season of midlife. And if that resonated with you, I'd love it if you shared it with someone who might need it to hear that today. If you're not already following along, please do. It really does help people find their way here. And if you'd like to explore breath work as a rooting practice, or if you're curious about what's working together, might look like you can find me on my website stillspacehull.com Pop me a message on any of the platforms that you found me on. So until next time, may you meet yourself with Compassion, walk with Presence, and remember you already have everything you need. Take care.