Midlife Is the Portal: Why Your Restlessness Is an Intuitive Calling

Your intuition has been trying to tell you something. 

In this episode, I get honest about my own midlife invitation and why yours might be the most important portal you ever walk through.

In this episode:

• Why Jung and Erikson both saw midlife as a crossroads of becoming, not a breakdown
• How grief, stillness, and disruption can clear the channel to your intuition
• Why your intuition is a two-way signal: divine guidance and your future self calling you forward
• How to stop outsourcing your knowing and start trusting the inner voice

Resources Mentioned:

1:1 Coaching

7 Days of Self-Trust

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There is a moment in a woman's life, and maybe you know exactly what I'm talking about here, where you look around and you think, is this it? Is this what I was building? Not from a place of feeling despair and not from feeling ungrateful, but from something really deeper in your body, something that's been building, and it's like a kind of a restlessness that doesn't really have a specific name. And it's unlike anything you've experienced in the past. And it's actually a question, a question that keeps rising, even when you're kind of trying to push it back down. And that's what I want to talk about today. Not just as a coach, not just as someone who studied this, but as someone who is living it, has lived it recently from a very messy place and honestly. Welcome back to an intuitive life. I'm Elena Lipson, your intuitive coach, your decision-making strategist, and a woman who is in the middle of this midlife becoming. And today we're talking about midlife as a portal, not as a symptom or a group of symptoms, but a portal. And I want to share something with you today that I don't always share because the truth of my last three years might be exactly what someone listening needs to hear. So let's go. About three years ago, my life and the infrastructure of my life changed in ways that I did not see coming and I couldn't have controlled, even if I had wanted to. My husband retired early, which sounds like a gift and it is on so many levels, but it also completely reshuffled the scaffolding of my daily life, the rhythms I built around, the spaces I've carved out, the way I organize myself. And there's so much amazingness. I actually really love having him here. We we spent a lot of time together. So that part has actually turned out to be quite a blessing. We also lost a very close family member to suicide. I'm gonna say that and then just give it a second to breathe. And grief like that, that sudden, sort of senseless, violent grief, it doesn't just break your heart in the moment. It breaks something in your framework of life. And I lost my dad when I when he was 53, I was about 24, very suddenly as well. And that that also is that moment, but this is a different kind of loss that just feels very confusing. The way you understand the world, the way you trust that things make sense, it just cracked me open in so many ways that I'm still integrating. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I crossed over the threshold of being 50 years old on this planet. It's a lot. And I stopped. Like I just actually pressed the brakes, not all in one shot, not because I planned to, not because I had a stretch strategic, like, you know, sabbatical planned. I had to stop because my body and my soul both said enough. I ended up over those three years putting down my work, my copywriting, my like my retainer clients. I put down the striving also. I put down the identity that I've been building and curating and performing so well over the last 20 years, not always well, but performing nonetheless, very authentically, right? I am who I am, but a lot of it is very visibility focused and out there. And all that output, all the content, all the courses, all the retreat leading, all the writing, all the trying to create and be seen and prove something ultimately, I stopped. And I did something I had never really given myself permission to do before, in a in this longer way, in this really stretched-out way, is I tried to create peace in my nervous system. And that's it. Like that was the whole goal for months now. Even though, yes, I have been doing things. I've hosted a workshop and I hosted um, I've had some client work, I've also done some content creation, but all of that has come from not striving. It's just sort of come to me and I just decided: is this a yes, is this a no? But overall, my life has been, and I know sometimes you can't see it because I don't share a lot of things publicly. That's my choice. I share what I think is useful for you, and I do think this is very useful right now. I just chose slowness, I chose peace and space, and taking care of my body as my first line of purpose while I had this other question sort of building in my mind. And I think this is really important because I'm not all the way through it, like I can see the shore, I'm moving toward it. A lot of things have become very clear and very peaceful in my body and in my soul and in my energy. I'm still in the water, I'm still finding some footing, I'm still learning who I choose to be on the other side of all of that. But I've definitely have come through the darker parts where I just had almost no motivation and it scared me. I had no ambition and it scared me because I have been working and getting paid money since I was 12 years old. And for the first time in my life, I have been separating that from my self-worth and my self-presence. And I have been relying on and activating and rebuilding my intuitive, energetic presence more than anything else. Right. And that's like that's the honest truth. So I'm not talking to you from like a top of a mountain that I've climbed and saying, like, come on up, the air is great here. In a lot of ways, I have done that for myself and that and the path which is on the way to that place is actually where we live. And I don't actually need to be on top of that mountain to saying I'm done, because I see now more than anything, it's not a done place at all. Let's take a breath together. So, what I've come to understand through this period of not rushing, of stopping, through grief, through stillness, through dancing, a lot of dancing, a lot of a lot of somatic practices. And just like that choosing of a quiet rebuilding is that what I'm moving through has a very specific name. It's not unique to me. It's ancient, it's documented. And Carl Jung talked about it. He called the set that second half of life a turning inward. That doesn't mean you stop creating outward, but it's a psychological shift. And he believed that the first half of life is about building a career, a family, an identity, a collecting, like an achieving. But midlife is when the soul starts asking different questions. Not what do I need to do, but who am I actually becoming? He called it individuation, which happens in our teen years as well. It happens again in our 20s, but this is a different kind. It's like a journey toward a wholeness element, towards your most authentic, integrated self. And so you start to see which areas of your life and yourself are not integrated, not authentic, and it starts to feel like that restlessness that I mentioned early in this episode. Another psychologist, Eric Erickson, mapped it out a little differently, but arrived at the very similar kind of truth. Ericsson described it as a confrontation between generativity, like when you're creating, and stagnation, where you're like, and now what? Right? Do you move towards something really expansive that contributes, that feels purposeful, that matters, or do we contract repeating old patterns, shrinking, and disappearing? Listen to this, disappearing into the life we built by default, allowing that part of us to go really quiet and dim. Like that part gives me chills because so many women that I've worked with over the years, especially now in this era, this midlife era, there is a choice. You can either disappear into the life that you built by default, like that is, oh, that seems so powerful, right? Or do you generate something new? And back to Young, he also gave us this concept of the shadow, those parts of ourselves that we've like quietly tucked away, the desires that we silence because they either didn't happen, we didn't make them happen, we have resentment and regret, or they just didn't fit the life that we were constructing, right? Like the knowing that we were overriding something because it was impractical, or someone told us it was too much, or we told ourselves we'd get to it later. Later always comes, but maybe not in a way that you imagine, right? Because midlife is later and that's where we are. And so what starts to surface from this shadow is not your worst self, but it's your honest self, that honest part of you that like no longer has the tolerance for quieting that part, right? The parts of you that want to be integrated, it's seen and lived. And so you start feeling that restlessness, that questioning. It's it's like that shadow asking to come into the light. Okay, so now I want to talk to you about something the psychologists don't cover because as much as I value my education and what Young and Erickson mapped and learned so much from it, I know, and you know, there is another dimension to what happens in this midlife era. And it's the dimension that I choose to live in. I believe that intuition is not just internal, it's not just your body communicating with you. It's not just you processing your own accumulated experiences, though that is real and it's powerful. But I believe intuition is a signal that moves in two directions at once. One direction is down from something larger than you, call it divine guidance, the universe, God, source, whatever language feels true in your body. And there is something that knows, something that has been with you the entire time and has always known who you are, what you're here for, and is, especially in moments of disruption and restlessness and stillness and grief, trying to communicate with you more clearly than ever. The other direction that intuition takes is forward. I believe your future self, the version of you, has already, who has already moved through this, who has already made the aligned choices, who is already living a life that's trying to emerge now, she is sending you signals too that pulls you forward towards something that you can't quite name yet, because you don't know it yet. And you don't even need to know the whole picture. It's like she's pinging you with these tiny little moments of read this, go there, talk to her, go take that chance, go post, send that email, go get that opportunity, go travel here, right? It's not like a clear thing, but that's her. That's her, and that's you reaching back toward yourself. And that intuition is not a guess, it's not wishful thinking, it's not you being impractical or emotional or unscientific. This is a deep conversation ongoing all the time, like a river flowing between you, the divine, and the woman you are in the process of stepping into and becoming. And for me, here's what three years of loss and stillness and rebuilding has taught me with the fear of, oh my gosh, is this ever gonna shift? Like when the noise of your life gets loud enough, when life and grief and change and that restlessness strips you of everything non-essential, when for me, retirement reshuffles the architecture, when a milestone birthday cracks something open, what's left is that signal, that inner signal. That disruption doesn't break you, it just clears out like a really good spring cleaning in your garage or your closet or your kitchen cabinets, right? So here's what is true. Midlife, this portal, this magical portal of allowing your intuition to finally lead as a co-author of your life, your divine self, your future self, is the most extraordinary portal into your intuition that you can move through, that you can choose. Because your nervous system now has decades of data. Your body has been listening and absorbing and patterned, recognizing, and knowing long before your conscious mind catches up. You have wisdom living in your cells that you haven't fully claimed yet. And that's what this time in life is all about. You have a future self who's already there, already clear, already free of all the constraints and patterns and society's rules and that self, that cage we put ourselves into by creating our own rules of what's possible and the things we never did, and the regret and the shame and the resentment towards self and others. And the question is: are you listening? Or are you scrolling outside of yourself for answers? Are you constantly seeking advice? I know how it goes, right? Like you get restless, the questions get really uncomfortable, and instead of turning inward and finding stillness, going to nature, getting rest, we start to turn outward. We look at what she's doing, what they're doing. We ask advice from people who are living a completely different life than the one that you're trying to emerge into. And we outsource our knowing to anyone who seems more certain than we feel in this moment, which is such a shame because everyone else can seem so certain, but there is just marketing, okay? And then we drift further and further from our own center, from our own inner voice. So, what if you just stopped? Maybe not the way I stopped, like everything, which was extremely uncomfortable, extremely uncomfortable. I'll just say that. Not forever. But stop long enough to embed and weave in uh oh, asking yourself the real questions, not the productive ones about ROI and how much you can get done and how much money you want to make and the kind of house you want to live in and the kind of car you want to drive and where you want to travel on vacation next year. But like the honest questions. Like, what do I actually like now? How do I want to feel? How do I want to dress, to eat, to create, in my world? What do I want? That's the hardest question for some women to answer. What do I want now? Not who you were 10 years ago, not who someone else needs you to be, not the label, not the identity that you built during that first half of your life, but you now, in this chapter, with everything you've been through, with everything you know, which is beautiful. Don't ever discount it. At any point in your life, any point, you can make a different decision. You can check in with yourself, you can remove the urgency, you can take a deep breath, and you can let go of what no longer fits from the clothes in your closet to the clients you don't want to work with, to the things in your home, to the decisions you make. You can allow yourself with curiosity and joy to wonder what comes next. That's how you find your way forward. And I want to be really clear about something. This does not need to be a dramatic overhaul of your entire life all at once, right? No. In fact, that's what people think they need. And it's not like that at all. It doesn't look like blowing up your life. It doesn't look like moving to Tuscany, though. I mean, if that's what calls you, let's do it, I'm with you. Like tomorrow. It looks like just starting to pause before you answer. It's starting to notice what actually lights you up, not just the things you've been doing so long that they become part of your identity and your character and your personality, right? Start noticing what drains you quietly. And then from that place, you start making those small, brave, aligned decisions, one at a time, one at a time, one at a time. And then you discover that each decision makes the next decision a little bit easier because that's where we get frozen. We want to know the answers, we want to know the next 27 steps. And according to social media, like we can change everything and make a million dollars in 30 minutes, right? Like that's that's noise. It's starting to treat your own body as an instrument of knowing, of shaking off all the old patterns through some really simple, somatic daily work, which is what I always include when I'm working with clients. Part of it is movement, part of it is really reconnecting back to your body so you can start to clear away some of that past like trauma patterns and past assumptions about how things should be, so that you can actually hear that quiet signal that's always running beneath the noise, and really decide, maybe from the first time, for the first time in a long time, to trust that signal, which can feel very difficult. And it might be easy in some areas of your life, like, oh, I know exactly how my body wants to nourish, I know what I want to eat. But when it comes to bigger decisions or other decisions in your business, maybe things that felt really easy in the past now start to feel really hard. Maybe things that felt really good in the past don't feel aligned anymore and you just don't know what to do with it. Right. But your body knows things, your gut knows things, your soul and your heart know things. It's it's all wrapped up in that intuitive signal, that conversation happening between you and the divine and the woman that you are already just a little bit forward. She's like waiting for you to just tune back in to that energy. And the channel is so clear that you'll know, you'll know it feels different when you're in it. Let's take a nice deep breath again together because I know I talk about this a lot. I talk about intuition and how your future self is trying to ping you. And I just really want you to know like this isn't marketing. This isn't um, I'm not trying to sell you something. I would love for you to work with me if that feels what you're called to, but I'm not saying this to give you like some sort of AI-approved script or like, wow, that's really good marketing. Like, no, this is this is me talking to you as a woman that I know I would admire if we were sitting across each other, across a table from each other, having a coffee or a meal. I I'm not someone who likes to stay on the surface. I want to go deep, and there's just so much more. There's so much depth into all of this. We can take just intuition, just midlife, just your decisions, just dance. Like dance. You've I'm if you're here, I know you see me dance quite a bit. What I first did several years ago, in fact, I shared this on a past episode, is when at the beginning of this sort of like crazy time in our lives, one of my very best friends, we were having dinner, we went to Santa Barbara for the weekend, we just kind of needed a getaway. And she asked me, she's like, What do you want? What do you want in this next chapter? And I was so blank, like I didn't know what the hell I wanted, to be honest. And but the first thing that came to my mind was, I just want to dance. And I can just cry thinking about it now because what I know now, three years later, was that in that moment, my future self was pinging that woman. That that particular moment of sitting there drinking a spicy mojito, having delicious food with my best friend, this gorgeous city, feeling lost, but grateful for where I was, lost in a like on a soul way, right? Grateful for my life, acknowledging all the things I was grateful for. But in that moment, I didn't know what else to say. And I know now that it was my future self, my now self, going back to her, saying, You just dance. And I came back from that weekend and I started all kinds of dance classes from modern dance to uh burlesque type dance to bachata to samba to salsa, like all these different dances I've done in the last three years, so much of it, several times a week, Zumba, like choreography, and through all of that, that has been my anchor back into my body, into myself, where I didn't know anything else. I knew that dancing was where I needed to be. And so that's what I'm talking about. Because your future self is pinging you right now and sharing these little directions. Directives, not the next three years or even the next the next year. It's like, do this, do this. This will feel good. Do this. That's the intuition that I want to teach you. And there's so many cool tools that I'll be sharing over the next episodes and in some really cool offerings I'm creating for you. How to access it through movement, through journaling, through breath work, not breath work the way it's taught, like at the really intense way. I believe in gentle breath work because that's what I like. That's what women I work with enjoy through pendulums, through tarot cards, through name it. I've done all of it. I'm like a mystic, intuitive at heart for the last 20 years. I had a pendulum when I was in my teens. Like it's been forever. It's not just a marketing ploy because it's a hot topic. No. So okay. I need to take a breath myself sometimes. I just get so like passionate about this. So I shared what I shared today because I think you need to hear that the person talking to you is also in it. Like I'm also in it, not in a crisis, but in process, right? And still, because of that, I am deeply unshakable, unshakably certain of this, that the restlessness is not the problem, that midlife restlessness is an invitation. And it starts in your 40s and it gets louder and louder and louder as you get into your 50s. I can't wait to see what the 60s is all about. But the questions that you're asking, the question that you're asking now, is this what I want? Is this enough? Is this really me? Those are not signs that your life is wrong or completely needs to be like burned to the ground at all. This is your future self calling you forward step by step. And I believe you have everything you need to answer. If you want support in that, I do one-on-one coaching. I'd be happy to go like do this really deep dive with you. If you want to start actually building the relationship with your inner knowing that changes how you move through your life and your business, I would love to walk that path with you. If you're interested in a short taste of what it's like to really get into that place where you're not second-guessing yourself, where you're learning to tap into those decisions of self-trust, I have the seven days of self-trust audio series. It's a really great place to begin. I'm actually going to be redoing it in the next 30 days. So if you purchase it now, you'll get the next iteration, which we go much deeper as well. But if this episode spoke to something in you, please share it. Listen to it again because what happens when we when we hear something that lands in our body or our mind or our soul, we kind of stop listening for a little bit and then we miss things. Because when something really lands and challenges you, there's a part of your brain that will start to distract you and will tell you to like go scroll, look away, don't listen, do something else. So if you want to listen again, I would like to make a cup of tea, grab a journal, write things down, pause it where you need to, because sometimes that first listen will give you that invitation, and the second listen will give you more anchoring into what is actually resonating with you. But again, if you if this spoke to you or something in it spoke to you, please share it with someone in your life who needs to hear it. Please share it with me. There's a little blue heart in the show notes where you can just click on it and send me a text. It's private. And I just want you to know that you have this opportunity. And it's not always easy, it's not always pleasant. When you're doing this kind of work, it brings up stuff, your shadow, it brings up your doubts, it brings up the opportunity to just keep going the way things are, the status quo. And that is an option. It is the easier option in some ways, but it does not lead you to where your future self is wanting you to be, where you yourself would like to be, where you start to have the capacity to step outside of that self-built cage of rules and patterns and conditioning that society and your family and life in general has created for you. And it's it's really about like this step into the unknown that can be so beautiful and rich and joyful and curiosity driven. So, all right, that's that's what I've got for you today. It's an invitation. And um, until next time, trust yourself. Your future self is already there trying to pull you forward. So I would love to hear from you again. Please feel free to send me a message, a DM on Instagram, Elena underscore lipson. And I truly hope you receive something from my heart to yours today. And I will see you on the next episode of An Intuitive Life.