#68 - The 3 main armours to break, to feel at Home in your body.

Something feels off… and no matter how much inner work you’ve done, you still find yourself going back to the same patterns.

This episode is a deep, grounded conversation on what it really means to come back home to yourself — not as an idea, but as a lived, embodied experience. Kena guides you through the truth many women in midlife are facing: you’ve outgrown old identities, yet your body is still holding onto them.

Through the lens of somatic healing, neuroepigenetic breathing, and the mind-body-heart connection, you’ll explore how your identity was built, why your nervous system keeps pulling you back, and how to begin shifting it from within.

This is about more than awareness — it’s about embodiment, self-trust, and reconnecting with your inner power, your heart, and your feminine energy.

By the end, you’ll feel a deeper connection to yourself… and a new understanding of what “home” truly is.

✨ In This Episode You’ll Learn

• How to shift from intellectual healing into full-body embodiment
• Why your identity keeps pulling you back to old patterns
• The truth about people-pleasing, overgiving, and survival roles
• What happens when you reconnect with your heart and feminine center
• How to begin transmuting emotional pain through the body

🦋 Reflection Questions

• Where in your life are you still abandoning yourself to feel safe or loved?
• What would shift if “home” wasn’t something outside of you—but within you?
• Are you allowing yourself to feel… or are you still trying to control the experience?

🦋 Work With Kena If you're ready to move beyond knowing and start truly feeling it in your body — I'd love to support you. I guide high-achieving women back to who they truly are, beyond the roles, over-functioning, and patterns that have kept them disconnected from themselves. 

✨ Book your connection call: https://links.ivorey.io/widget/bookings/connection-call-midlife-butterfly

Instagram: @midlifebutterfly
Website: midlifebutterfly.ca

Midlife Butterfly is a podcast for high-achieving midlife women navigating emotional exhaustion, people pleasing, self-abandonment, nervous system healing, identity shifts, and midlife awakening. Hosted by Kena Siu, Identity & Embodiment Guide.

Music: Reborn by Alexander Nakarada

Transcript

Welcome And The Doorway To Home

Kena Siu 0:48

Welcome back to The Midlife Butterfly.If you’ve been doing the inner work… reading, listening, understanding… and something still feels a bit off… this is for you.In this episode, I’m sharing a conversation from A Doorway to HOME—a space I created for women who are ready to reconnect, to soften, and to come back into themselves in a deeper way.Because there comes a moment where it’s not about learning more…it’s about feeling it. Living it. Embodying it.We explore the connection between your mind, your heart, and your pelvis…and why you might feel disconnected even when you “know” so much.And if something in you resonates… if your body is already saying yes…this is the kind of work we move through inside my HOME membership. The space is open and you're welcome inside. Take what resonates and let your buddy guide the rest. Let's begin. Welcome, welcome ladies, to A Doorway to Home. I am Kena Siu, the empowerment guide from Midlife Butterfly, and I am so happy to have you here today offering neuroepigenetic breathing, which is transformational kind of somatic active meditation. Well, first of all, why this session is called a doorway to home. With the experience that I have had in the past years doing different programs and stuff, what I noticed is that home is really here. Home is a feeling, it's not a place. But then if it doesn't land in the body, it's when we come back to the beliefs, to the patterns that we are used to. Because again, the body understands it, but the body needs to feel it, needs to embody that shift, that new knowledge that we might have in the mind. And that's why this session is about working with the mind, of course, but in a way to get out of the mind. And then it's about connecting back to the heart and as well to connect back to our pelvic floor, to the pelvis, to our womb. Because these three main fires, you know, at the same time, we armor up to protect ourselves according to you know how we live life differently, and we tend to armor that. And when we're saying yes to something, it seems it means that you're also saying no to something or to someone, and unfortunately, many times that no, it's against us because we are used to give and give, and we're not used to receive. So for today, it's more for you to have that openness and that willingness to allow whatever it is that it has to move in your body, just to allow it and welcome it. Because the more you accept who you are,

Identity And Ego Rewiring

Kena Siu 4:45

the more you get to love who you are with the shadows and the lights, it's the more you're gonna be feel at home with yourself, and that's the intention for for this, at least my intention to connect you back to yourself because all the questions and all the answers are within. You are the guru, you are your own coach, and coming back home to yourself, to your soul, the connection with the divine within you. That's how you then can live and create the life that that you love. And starting with the mind, then well, the mind is really where we build our identity, right? And that identity, I mean, what I'm gonna tell you now is not is nothing new, it's just kind of like a reminder because we tend to forget. So the mind is where we carry everything that is, you know, from our upbringing, for our ancestors, the culture, religion, the collective, everything it's in there. And also is your life experiences, your memories, the trauma, the wounds, everything that you have built out throughout this life experience, right? And what happened is we keep reshaping that identity as we grow and evolve, we keep reshaping it, reshaping it, and and that's how we create our personality, which is our personal reality. The issue is when we don't like the reality that we are living, so it's about then what can you shift or what can you change in your inner being, in that case, for that personal reality to be better to your to what you expect to experience in life, and of course that identity keeps growing and growing, and a big part of that identity is is the ego, right? And I do believe that with the ego, instead of kind of having a kate experience, have a loving experience because the ego is always going to be there, is the one who protects us, and I think it's just about having that awareness that is there, that the voices of the ego is they are always going to be there. But the cool part in this case with this kind of breathing technique is the fact that you can rewire all those things just by breathing. Because there's too many things hidden in our minds and we don't have a clue about them, but they are there, and the more you practice, the more you can get to make those different shifts, and and then you're gonna start notice them little by little in your in your day-to-day. And also with the mind, is that as I mentioned at the very beginning, we have all these, you know, the thoughts, the beliefs, the patterns, the behaviors, and an out of them, they are actually coping mechanisms for our survival mode, coming back to the ego, right? So that's why we became like people pleasers, or we learned that we need to be the strong one or the rescuer, you know, or even sometimes become invisible. It depends how we how we manage, how we, you know, to in that case to use that coping mechanism to survive in different ways. The thing is that with

Opening The Heart To Receive

Kena Siu 9:15

all the teachings and the inner work that you've been doing, probably you have already outgrown a lot of those identities, and you are kind of like, Yeah, I've done all this work, I know all this stuff, but it's like, how can I really like move forward with it? Because if you tend to go back, right? And again, it's about having the body there to then alchemize every cell, every atom in your body to really embody that new knowledge that is in your mind, and that's that's what this kind of of breathing do. And then moving forward to to the heart again, because of the life experiences, we tend to close it because we want to protect ourselves, which is normal because we don't like pain and we don't want to suffer, right? But I don't know if you know, but the body is so smart, like this machinery that we are carrying that is the most cared part of the body, is you know, it's protected by the ribs, and then it's even kind of hidden behind the left lung. So, how powerful our heart is that it has that the same body protects it that much, and besides the fact that it has around 40,000 neurons, when we want to find answers and stuff, we tend to go here. Yeah, we have more neurons here, but the intelligence and the wisdom of the heart, I mean, it cannot compare to anything, because in your heart is really where your soul, your intuition, your goddess leads, so it's about working with the heart to open it, to break it open again, because there's no need to protect it, the heart is already protected, it's about you letting it open to the love, to the beauty, to the tenderness, to to giving and receiving, because that's the other thing. When we close it to protect ourselves, we are also closing it to receive from others, not only from giving, but we are protecting it from receiving. And if you think about it, how many things have you then not received, not allowing into your life because you are protecting yourself, so just to give it a dot over there, and and the cool part is that once we get to open the heart again and have that awareness, then you're gonna be able to say, Hey, yeah, at this time I want to open it, to close it and purpose, you know, so it's like yeah, you get to have it open, but at the same time, when you have that awareness, you can say, No, at this moment I choose to close it, and and do it in a conscious way, of course, is different because then whenever you are ready again, you're gonna open again, and again, it's it's a protective mechanism of the body. The thing is when we tend to close the heart,

Pelvic Floor Trauma And Pleasure

Kena Siu 13:30

we tend to close it, unfortunately, with the wound inside, instead of healing the wound and then closing the heart consciously, we close it and we leave the wound inside. So, of course, if anything that happens as little as it is, then we're like, oh, we feel like bleeding again and in pain because we never took the time to really heal that wound, and one of the issues is because we were not taught to feel nobody taught us how to feel our emotions, the sensations, not even the sensations in the body, because we have if we have a sensation, it's like no, no, that should not be good, but why not? If you're feeling it, there is a reason. If you're feeling an emotion, there is a reason, and as you know, there's no right or wrong emotion, it's just an emotion, just allow it to go through you, and one of the things that has neuroepigenetic breathing is to heal through through pleasure, and one of the things that I don't I don't know you, but at least for me and a lot of women that I've been connected to, just talking about our womb about sexuality, it's a taboo. It's like, how are you gonna talk about your parts? Well, they are there for a reason, God put them there for a reason, and that's why our pelvic floor is so so important. But first of all, because it's holding the upper body, I mean the whole body on the top, and if that part of the body is very tight, and it unfortunately it's often very tight because we keep a lot of trauma in there. That's the first thing that we do when something happens. What do we do? We close our or hassle. That's the truth. It's the first thing, it's a reaction of the body to close, and that's the first thing we do, close, and we don't notice that most of the time it's actually closed when we can actually relax it, and just you know, when you open your mouth and do this, and then you just breathe out, it's the same. We have lips here, and we as women we have lips down there in our vagina, too. So when we relax this part of the body, also the pelvic floor relaxes, and since this area keeps a lot of yeah, trauma, either is it's personal, you know, interpersonal, even you know, transpersonal, because we are also carrying a lot of things that don't belong to us, and it's important to be aware of that because sometimes we wonder what's going on with us, but as simple as sometimes probably doesn't belong to us. So sometimes that's always good, you know, if you still have your mom or grandma or something to question some things to understand a little bit more, like what might be happening in your body. So, like, yeah, to going back to what I mentioned before, that neuropigenetic breathing, it heals you or it's transmute the energy better said within your body through pleasure. That's that's the doorway to pain, because the odd the only way to overcome pain is to go through it. There's no there's no other way. And even when we might you know have these ideas of yeah, because of the taboo of being disgusted by you know, saying like the vagina or saying womb or these words that they're not very common to use until probably they're coming more and more, but we gotta understand that they are part of us as women, and the thing is we actually come from sex. So, how is it possible that most of the information out there they speak about the mind-body connection, but they don't speak about the heart sex connection, which is actually how we've been created, and with that creation, as us being here, like the daughter or the son, in case of men, of not even our biological parents here on earth, but also the grandmother and the grandfather, who are actually the ones who decided for us to be here, being as part of the divine, and yeah, so with this neuroepigenetic breathing, what we're gonna be doing is connecting these three parts within you, moving that energy, shifting that

How The Breathing Practice Works

Kena Siu 19:35

energy that is within you, not to see it as a way of like getting rid of it, but more about transmutity, because as you know, like energy cannot be destroyed, right? It only transforms, so it's about the energy that you have in your body right now to transform it so your nervous system can regulate, so your energy centers can balance, and in a way, also your brain rewires, and you don't have to know what's happening, that's the cool part about it. You sometimes might relate during the practice, like, oh, this is probably this, this is probably that, but there's no there's no need to know, it's more about if you're feeling a sensation, then just if you can name that sensation, it's like ah, okay, you are there, because when we focus on that sensation, we're coming back to the body instead of being on the mind, and that's why this kind of practice is not about setting a goal, but actually setting an intention, just what's your intention of this practice for

Questions Plus Closing Invitation

Kena Siu 21:10

you, and because you know you don't well, we never know what the body has to process at this very moment, and even when you're gonna practice it with me now, you're then gonna have you know the recording, the audio recording, and then you might have a complete different experience. It's it's always like that because every moment we are different, so we just need to allow the body literally to surrender and to experience whatever the body has to experience. That's it. So I don't know if any of you have any questions before I do. Explain the phases of the meditation. You can unmute yourselves if you have any questions or comments before I go with the explanation of the Kina.

Tracy 22:15

I had one question. You mentioned if we still have our moms and our grandmothers, we should ask them questions. And I wasn't sure what questions you were suggesting that we talk to them about.

Kena Siu 22:28

What I mean is, let's say if you are struggling with something, I'm gonna give you a personal example. Like for me, was I used to have a very bad scarcity mindset. But then I knew it didn't come from my family because my father always had a job. We had vacations, you know, we have a very good lifestyle, at least until my 20s. But I couldn't understand why I had this scarcity mindset. So I went to ask my mom, it's like, what is why is this coming from? And she was like, Well, it's actually from your father's family and from my family. So I started, you know, kind of exploring a bit more, and it's just then to understand, it's like, okay, it's coming from there because I know it was not from this time, you know, and just like my grandfather, he came to Mexico when he was like 12 years old from China without his parents. So imagine, and then the mentality of the Chinese people work, work, work, you know, so that helped me understand a lot of things. Got it. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. You're welcome. Any other questions? So we yes, Alison.

Stephanie 23:50

Uh just a comment. It's so exciting to be in these conversations. Like, this is it's really, it really is where it's at. Like it's when you were saying energy doesn't like we're transmuting the energy, because I kept bumping up against bypassing, keep calm, carry on, bypass. And I was like, I kept rejecting it and digging into it, and it bothered everybody around me because it keeps everything so safe when we just medicate or what I'm not not shading medication, just anything that we're just doing. Well, why can't I feel it? Why can't I have the whole cycle? I'm very grateful. This is it's nice. I feel like I'm in uh we're it's nice to speak the same language, you know.

Kena Siu 24:36

Oh, thank you. Thank you for your share. Thank you for tuning in to Midlife Butterfly. I hope this episode empowers you in some way. Share the love by giving follow wherever you're listening and leave a review if you feel inspired. I also love to connect with you. Come say hi on Instagram at MidLife Butterfly. I love to know you. Until next time, spreading those tweets and enjoy growth and