Perimenopause & Stress: Why You Feel So Drained Right Now

When did pushing through become more familiar than asking yourself what you need? Robyn Lewin knew how to keep going. A corporate career, 3 children, and heavy periods and exhaustion— she kept pushing through. Working in the period care industry hadn't prepared her to understand her own experience. Now a holistic kinesiologist and author of Flow Well, Be Well, Robyn joins me to share what changed and why she wants women to understand their cycles long before perimenopause. Welcome, Robyn.

Thank you, Rita, for having me.

This is an interesting subject because we— there's so much talk on socials, and it is a very big thing now. Menopause, perimenopause, hormones— everyone's talking about them. But when I was going through your work, what I found really interesting is you're wanting to look way before that even comes along. Do you believe we're starting the conversation like 20 years too late?

Definitely. I think it's great we're having the conversation because 10 years ago, I don't think we were really even having it. We knew that menopause was this scary thing that would happen in the future. But we didn't really understand that, you know, perimenopause was the onset of those symptoms 10 years before our period stopped. Now most women are starting to understand that. It's great that we're having the conversation, but what I see is that what hits us in our 40s— often in our 40s, it can be a little bit earlier— that may be called perimenopause could also be called nervous system burnout, could be called the body saying, I'm not doing this anymore. And so it's a body that's fed up with being pushed too hard in, in many ways, which impacts us hormonally and, and in many, in many different ways. And I do believe that if we start working with our body much earlier, um, in our teens and in our 20s, and if not in our 30s, it's never too late, that our body doesn't have to push back quite so hard when we hit the dreaded 40s and the dreaded perimenopause. It maybe doesn't have to be so dreaded after all. Yeah, and that's our body just responding to how we've lived for the past 20 years.

I think we don't stop enough to reflect on ourselves, do we? We just keep just pushing through. Like, everything external to us seems to be the priority than what— than ourselves. Let's go back to the moment because you're in corporate, you are in The period care industry. And there was— came a point where you— your body basically said no more.

A lot. I started learning as I worked in the period care industry about this thing called the seasons of the female cycle, and it always fascinated me. And, um, I thought, why are we not teaching women about this? That there's a time that we're supposed to be more external, more doing, more pushing, and there's a time that we're supposed to be a little bit more still, a little bit more restful, maybe introspective or reflective. And why do women not know about this? And then Um, yes, I, I left the corporate world with all the signs of burnout and cyclical patterns that go with that, and I decided to heal myself, and I decided to learn how to help support and heal other women. And through that, I studied traditional Chinese medicine. And then as I started to understand Chinese medicine and what is— you can see behind me the yin-yang symbol really is that beautiful encapsulation of yin and yang, and which really means there's a masculine doing, there's a feminine not doing, receiving and stillness. And everything in nature, the more I learned about this concept from Taoism, the more I realized it's in everything and it explains so much. And I realized that the cycle syncing, the seasons that I referred to earlier that I'd learned about in the corporate world that no marketer is ever going to tell women about because how do they monetize that to sell their products? Um, I realized that there was a simpler way to help women understand what it means to be a cyclical being and how to heal oneself and one's hormones through embracing that cycle more clearly. And I guess the simple way to put it is I think where we've gone wrong as women probably since the '70s and '80s is that we were told we could do and be anything. And we took that on with great stride and decided that we were going to do and be all the things. And it ended up meaning that we often had to do and be everything to everyone around us. We just started wearing more capes. We are trying to— we ended up having to become masculine in a world that values really the masculine, which I call in the book, or Chinese medicine I should say, calls yang. So it's a world where yang values dominate and yin feminine values are, uh, put on the back burner, I guess I would say. So that learning about what those 2 concepts meant and understanding actually there's a way we can adapt this to our cycle, and there's a time to be in our masculine, there is a time to do more, but there's also a time to connect inward and find stillness and not push through and decide that that's not what my body needs right now. We're never taught that. So I've decided that if we can teach that to women when they're a little bit younger, we can work with our bodies rather than against them. And, and that's really what the book book is about, both from a hormonal, uh, cyclical standpoint but also a nervous system lens.

That's what women don't hear enough of. They don't get enough or hear enough that there's permission to be able to stop and think. Within, like, say for example, within yoga, you know, there's so many stances that they say not to do if you've got your period. You know, it's about really respecting the body and not pushing through. You describe the menstrual cycle as a monthly report card on health. So what do you, what do you mean by that?

Like I say, we can either listen to the body or we can work And we can work with her or we can work against her. And if we've been working against her for many, many years, that's when she'll start to maybe turn the volume up on the way she's communicating with us. So there's many ways that the body communicates with us. Obviously, when we're well and we're healthy, we feel good. Our chi is flowing from a Chinese medicine standpoint. That's sort of the concept of wellbeing in Chinese medicine. How well does our chi flow? Our female cycle is, is one of the most obvious ways our body will let us know if she's happy or not. It's a metaphor for our health. So that's why I say it's a monthly report card. If something is going wrong in your cycle, it's your body trying to let you know that there's something going on with your body. So that deserves some deeper investigation into what might these symptoms mean, what might this PMS mean, or what might this heavy, unmanageable period mean. We can decode it and we can start to listen to our body and work with it and try to support the body with what she needs rather than just, you know, for example, if you have a period problem and go to traditional doctors, most of them, unless they're holistically trained or integratively trained, might be likely to put you on the pill. Oh, that, that fixes the problem. But really, that's just a bandaid over the problem and doesn't fix any of the hormonal things going on underneath. We can try to turn the signal off for many years, but again, when we turn— when we stop taking that medication and the signal comes back on, it's probably going to come back on even stronger.

What are some of the most common symptoms that a woman comes to you? Pushed too far. My nervous system is up. My period is up, but I've always been like this, or it's been like this for years. It's just the way I am. What are some of the symptoms that you see? see women coming to you with?

The most common woman I see come to me is in her early 40s. And what she's saying is, I'm doing all the things I've always done that have always worked for me, and they're not working anymore. You know, I'm, I'm still working out as hard as I did in my, in my 20s and 30s, but I can't shift the weight around the midsection. I'm getting enough sleep, but I'm still exhausted. And, and they feel like their body's betraying them. Well, why is what I've always done not working for me? And so this is where the nervous system lens becomes really, really important. What I explain to women is that what you could do in your 20s and it worked doesn't necessarily mean it was good for you. So what I mean by that is we, we grow up in a world where our bodies are feeling unsafe, and the nervous system— and the dysregulated nervous system, such a buzzword right now— we're in fight or flight. And so we operate almost all the time in fight or flight, all through our 20s, all through our 30s when we're having kids. And, and our body can cope relatively well with that. Our body, it just becomes the norm. We never have learned how to show the body that it's safe. We never, like the animals do, you know, if the— I always say to kids when they come and see me in my clinic, if the deer is being chased by the lion and the lion, and it gets away and it's free and it's safe, what does it do before it goes off and eats the grass again to let it know that it's okay and that it's, it can go off and be, go on its merry way? And the, the animals know best. The animal do, does this big shake, does this physiological reset of its entire body. And so we're designed to go in and out of fight or flight and back into rest and digest. It's a cyclical, it's, it's a survival need. So that work deadline that you've got, that email dinging, Your kid, you know, kids crying in the middle of the night. Those things are— we're designed to go in and out of that mode, but unfortunately in our modern world with our ancient brain that hasn't caught up, we've become stuck. We become stuck in that survival mode. What ends up happening is we think that becomes the norm and we operate from that level all the time. And this is what I mean, by the time we get to our 40s, our body can't actually sustain that level of dysregulation anymore. It doesn't have the resources to keep pulling, to keep running in fight or flight anymore. So it might be cycle problems, it might be heavy periods, it might be a period that's getting shorter and shorter and closer together and we think, oh, that's just perimenopause, or it's so heavy it's unmanageable. That was me. But when I stepped back, healed my body, healed my nervous system, my cycle problems that I thought were perimenopause went away. So that meant that it wasn't the perimenopause, it was the stress at which I was living my life. And it was— I think again, we can either listen when those symptoms are softer, or we can wait till our body's screaming until we're in a full-blown health crisis that we decide to listen. So that's actually the biggest one, is women falling towards burnout thinking, why can't I do what I've always done? How do I get back there? But the answer is not how do I get back there, it's how do support your body with where you're at now, to find safety, slow down and connect so that you can rebuild your capacity to continue.

It's so relevant to so many women and what they're feeling and what they're going through. On the topic of the nervous system, it would have an impact on our hormones, like our hormonal levels. That would have a major impact on how we're experiencing perimenopause and menopause, wouldn't it?

Absolutely. And this is why the first half of the book is all about the cycle and how to work with your cycle to build your hormones naturally. And the second half is all the tools to support your nervous system to find safety, because it actually starts with safety. When my body is safe, when it's in homeostasis, it knows how to heal itself. It knows how to build the right hormones to support it. Um, the great example of what goes wrong when we're dysregulated or the body is unsafe— the hormone progesterone is the real soothing hormone that we get in the second half of our cycle, which is the one that buffers us against PMS. Um, and it helps, helps us move through a period that's less painful. without the emotional, you know, turmoil that comes with PMS. What happens if we're very stressed? The progesterone has the same precursor hormone as cortisol, and it's called pregnenolone. Pregnenolone's there, and if we're incredibly stressed, the, the reproductive hormone of progesterone is deprioritized and we make more cortisol. So stress directly impacts our ability to make our hormones that are going to support a healthy, happy cycle. So this is why the two work very much hand in hand, that you have to support your nervous system, you have to manage your stress.

Yes.

And I, I get it. We live in a crazy modern busy world where I can't tell a woman just to turn her stress off. It's not how it works, which is why I teach this cycle. There's really just a 7 to 10 day window in the month if we can just be more conscious of how we're living and how we're moving. And, you know, we can't turn off our work deadlines, for example, but maybe we say no to the extra socializing on the weekend, or maybe we just don't push ourselves as hard in the gym that week. Maybe we go for a walk instead of doing the HIIT class or training for the marathon. They're all the things that are going to deplete us and tell our body it's not safe, and then it's not going to make the right hormones. So I've tried to make it a more simple, manageable way to support your body rather than just saying, hey, just manage your stress, because no one's able to do that, you know, 28 days of the month.

In actual fact, when people say that to you, it makes you more stressed.

Absolutely.

It is irritating when someone— when someone's really stressed and they say, oh, don't be so stressed. You just honestly, it makes you infuriated.

Yeah, yeah. It's like when you're angry at someone and they tell you to calm down. It's like, not helpful.

I'm gonna calm down.

It's a framework of how to do it in a very manageable. You know, it doesn't have to mean sitting under a tree and meditating for an hour every day. It can just be 5 minutes or even 2 minutes of conscious breathing. When you learn how to breathe properly, that's how we send the signal of safety to the body. It's all— it all starts there. But when and how to do it is the thing that we were never taught. What are the hormones I should be building at what time of the month is what I think we should be teaching girls when they're in year 7 and 8 at school and learning this stuff.

This, this should come up more in school for, for girls and for boys, you know, for whatever they're going through. Do you mean the week prior to actually starting your period or the week of your period?

So as you can see with the yin-yang symbol behind me, there's 2 sort of— we're always flowing from one phase to another. And in the book, I break it down in— there is what's called an energy building phase and there is a nurture phase. There is a time when our body wants to be, as I think I said earlier, more expressive, more external, more doing. You know, it might be the time where we start, uh, more projects at work, we start a new venture, and we've got the energy and the hormones and the resources to support that at certain times of the month, and that's the energy building phase. And then we come to ovulation, which is our most, you know, vibrant external— where we're our most attractive. We want to be out in the world engaging with the world. And the hormone we have in that first half of the cycle that's building is estrogen. And estrogen's like the extrovert of our cycle. She wants to be out there partying and having all the fun. Then we ovulate. So somewhere around the middle of the cycle, for most women, around— if you had a 28-day cycle, around day 14, halfway through the cycle, We're at that peak energy, that peak doing, that peak yang, I call it, that peak masculine energy, and we feel great. Then we move into the nurture phase, and that's where we still are going to have great energy. We can still be doing lots for a few days after ovulation, but it's just consciously being about, I'm moving into my nurture phase. What does that mean? That means I might be asking for help rather than trying to be so strong and carrying it all for myself. I might let my partner know that my nurture week's coming up in, in another week's time. And I'm going to ask for— being in our feminine means receiving, receiving support, receiving help, asking for help, not having to be the one that carries and does it all, all the time. And I'm very passionate about that and women learning how to prioritize their needs and connect to what even are my needs, because we've, we forgot about them for so long. In that second half of the cycle, it's building to a phase of needing more nurture, to a peak of a week to, you know, 7 to 10 days before that next period is the time that I really think we need to focus on Slowing down, being more yin, resting. And it doesn't mean collapsing on the couch and doing nothing, but consciously, how do I manage my time and how do I manage my schedule this week? How do I find safety, stillness, ask for support, ask for help? And in Chinese medicine, we call that the yin. The yin is the not doing. So it doesn't even mean— some people are like, I'm going to go and do my meditation, and that really active form of doing. It's a more passive Sometimes not doing anything is the most yin and the most restorative thing that we can do for our health and our nervous system. And again, we were taught if I'm not being productive, I'm lazy. So it's undoing a lot of that programming, um, that, that brought us to this point.

I always felt that if I sat on the couch or did something for myself when there were things to be done and maybe someone else was doing something in the house, you know, I'd be like, I gotta get up, I have to contribute, I have to be there, I can't be seen. Always on, on, on. And then I What happens when, like I said, really liked what you said about women understanding what's their needs and, you know, like boundaries, learning to say no, even getting in tap with what their values are. I think if you sometimes you ask someone, a woman that who's stressed out and giving, giving, giving, they can't even answer those questions. Like, I've lost it.

Core of the work that I do with women and what the book is about is when you strip away everything that we do because we've become so attached that our worth is What— and this is all the yang values— what we look like, what we've achieved. What do we praise children for at school? You know, it's always the one that's the fastest, the smartest, the this, that. We learn in this society that our worth is tied to all of that external doingness, and the feminine not-doingness has no value at all. So it's learning to connect to our innate worth as a human. And this is getting to the more deeper spiritual side of it, but it's one of the themes of the book as well. And that's why yin-yang's so beautiful, because it's not about never doing. Obviously, we have to have the yang side or nothing would ever get done, but it's about how do we find more Most people live with too much yang and not enough yin. So it's like, how do we just bring that a little bit more back into balance? And as we do that and we connect to that part of us that, okay, maybe I am still worthy, even if I'm gonna have a day where I'm lazy, we can then, as you said, connect to what are our needs and how do we start to prioritize our needs a bit more? Because most women have become totally disconnected from that, and that's a big part of the healing journey.

Yeah, I think society has a bit to play with that as well, especially if all your friends are in corporate or they're in corporate and they have kids. But you would like to be a homemaker. Well, all of a sudden that isn't valued as much. And it seemed like, is that all you do? Just a homemaker? In the very early years when I was looking after my son and I was at home in those early years, I experienced that. I felt so much shame from people because I was looking after him and not working at that time. So I think that really adds to our nervous system.

Judgment that comes with that. And interestingly, you touch on being, being alone or being at home with a newborn baby. This is quite topical. middle at the moment, and I'm very passionate about this, that for our nervous system, when we— because we have this ancient tribal brain, we're designed to be in a tribe, we're designed to have many hands around us holding us, supporting us. When we're home alone with a baby, body is telling us we're not safe. It's dangerous to be on our own with a baby for our nervous system. We know in our brain that, that this is the world we live in now, but our body doesn't know that. One of the chapters I talk about in the book is how do we reclaim the village. We're never going to be able to go back to tribal living, but we have to acknowledge for our nervous system, the world we live in is signaling danger all the time. And women on their own, sleep deprived with a baby, there's a reason they feel that way. They've gone through the trauma of birth, by the way, and no one ever taught you how to come back to safety after that. That's my experience. And then you add in sleep deprivation on top and you are so dysregulated and you're on your own with a baby. Why are we not teaching women the tools? Come together, connect with each other. The tend and befriend response that women have when they're stressed is one of our most healing tools that we can find. So it is a societal issue. It is an issue that the world evolved in a way that, that our biology doesn't support. So it's about how do we think about it from, from that nervous system lens? How do we support new mothers? How do we just let them know that there's a reason you feel the way you do, that the body is telling you it's not how you— this is not how we're supposed to live? Um, so how do we encourage women to connect with other women more after they've had a baby so they're not feeling so alone and unsafe?

Yeah, it's interesting. You wonder whether the postpartum depression, even though that can be biochemical or even genetic at some point, whether the severity would be there as high if they had that community, if they knew that they could call on others, especially, you know, like I'm in Sydney. I only had a sister here. I had no other family, and she's very driven in her career. So I had no one I could really call on all the time. So it— that loneliness gets to you as well, and I think that's a significant player for women. You said you healed your nervous system. How did you do that specifically?

For me, that involved— well, because I had 3 kids and It was COVID and I was in a pretty hectic full-time job. For me, that did mean, you know, stepping away from the corporate world. Corporate world is fairly yang and fairly designed to keep us in that, you know, sympathetic nervous system state. So for me, it meant stepping away. And I'd already been very much involved in the health and healing space in the past. I've done— learned many different healing modalities. So that's my passion. And I felt like I'll step into my purpose learning about healing. Um, so I spent, you know, years learning and studying further in in that space, that, that sort of helped me work with myself. But if I think about the simple tools that I teach my clients, the first one is honestly— and this is the thing why I say it's a simple guide, it sounds too simple, but there is a way that you need to do it. So the first thing is the breath. When a woman comes to see me, you know, after we've spoken for a while and, and we start to do some work on, on the massage table, I'll ask her to show me how she breathes. And most people are breathing wrong. And by wrong, I mean, you know, when you breathe and the chest moves That's a very shallow breath, which can actually reinforce that unsafe feeling to the body. So in the book, I teach how to— and I teach my clients, obviously— here's how you take a deep diaphragmatic breath. And if you've, you know, studied certain types of breathwork or yoga, you'll know how to do this. That breath is the quickest way to send that signal of safety to the body. So the animals shake, and, you know, there's a reason there's the whole shake it off. Like, that also— there's many, many ways to do this, um, but I always like to start with the breath. And there's a couple of tools with the breath. So one would be to take a longer exhale than inhale because The exhale, the outward breath is the parasympathetic mode. It tells the body that it's safe. And also if we can make some sound on the out-breath. So there's a reason why sometimes if you're in a yoga class, you'll finish with an om, or it doesn't even have to be a— doesn't have to be an om. It could just be a sigh or audibly making that breath sound as you breathe out. Because again, that tells the body that it's safe. What are all the ways we can show the body that felt sense of safety? So it starts with the breath. Some of my favorite ones are morning sunlight in the eye, in the eyes. I love to get out, get, go for a walk in the morning, or even even just sit outside with a cup of tea or coffee, get the early morning sunlight in the eyes. No glasses, no sunglasses, directly into the eyes, because that is helping support our hormonal system, resets our melatonin for that night so we'll sleep better, obviously builds our cortisol for the day so we can get going. Bare feet on the earth, breathing, sunlight in the eyes, bare feet on the earth. So it doesn't have to be complicated things, but it's about how do we do something consciously every day. And that's what I also teach my clients, is try to ask yourself every day, what have I done to show my body that it's safe? Because I know there's no lion chasing me, but my body, when it's dysregulated, Literally thinks that there's a lion chasing it, so we have to work with it to show it that felt sense of safety. You can't think yourself into safety; you have to show it through doing something.

Action is always the best way, isn't it?

Yes, during our nurture phase, and then inaction might might also be. Yeah, well, you're like action as in saying like the animals, you know, shaking your body and you know music on when you've had you know when you've had a dance afternoon with the kids, put some music on and dance and yeah watch watch them change. I mean, the kids do this innately. In in Chinese medicine, we say there's no such thing as bad emotions; there's just the emotions. that we don't feel and haven't flowed through us and they get stuck. So when a kid is having, you know, a big cry or a big angry outburst, that's actually a really good thing because they're naturally discharging the stress and they know how to do that innately. And what, what do we do when kids cry? Oh, don't cry, don't cry. You know, we distract them out of it or we tell them not to be angry. And so we stifle their natural processing of these emotions and these feelings. A tantrum. Think about a kid having a tantrum. You know, they're like fine 2 minutes later. It's just they can't hold on to that emotion anymore. They have to discharge And then they're fine. And the mother's obviously left like reeling from it. But when you learn about it from a nervous system standpoint and an emot— when we learn the emotional language of the body, we might, I guess we might do things a little bit differently once we understand that.

Thousands and thousands and thousands of people need, we need to start doing a reset around all of this. You know, we're so worried about society listening to our child cry or scream or people judge. There's so much that you have to step back from to be able to say, you know what, I don't have to entertain all that and I'm safe not being there. When we get blood tests and we see hormones are low or we're feeling crappy, we're in perimenopause or menopause and we're depressed, we're tired, we're exhausted, all the rest of it. We go to the doctor and the first thing that happens is, if you're in the right age, you get HRT. How do you feel about that as a first port of call? Or do you think going through what you were just saying, the nervous system relaxing, obviously good nutrition, giving time to self, um, or does that help raise our hormones so our first I do think there's a time and a place for HRT if that's what a woman wants to explore.

What I do see though, similar to what I was saying about building your progesterone naturally, I do think that most women jump straight to estrogen with HRT and they're not taught the importance of progesterone. And so I'll have some clients coming to me saying, I'm on 4 pumps of estrogen and I'm so angry and I'm not sleeping. I'm like, are you taking any progesterone? No. And, or they will have had a hysterectomy and their doctor's like, well, you don't need progesterone because all that does is build your uterine lining and you don't have a uterus anymore. So it's like, well, I don't have a uterus anymore. So many mainstream doctors don't understand the role of progesterone, and progesterone is the cool, calm, soothing hormone. It's the sleep hormone. What's one of the first things that hits us in perimenopause? We lose our sleep. So I, I think there's a time and a place for it. I think, again, yin and yang— make sure you're balancing those hormones correctly if you are going to take HRT. However, to your point, when there's dysregulation in play, no amount of hormones is going to fix that.

Yeah.

So absolutely, the first place should always be the nervous system, the figuring out, I've lived my life in fight or flight for the last 40 years, and that's okay. That's what He had to do to cope with the world I was living in. But now I know different. What can I do to find that safety, find that sense of calm? And then if I still need more support, then HRT absolutely has a role to play. But again, I don't think the right information is getting out there to women when it comes to HRT. Even I think slowly it's getting there, but we still have a long way to go.

That's what I wanted to ask about the information. I know that you've done the Chinese medicine, and a medical doctor is in for the HRT. Now from a Chinese From a Chinese medicine perspective, what do you think about giving HRT to women who are 60+? There seems to be such controversy around that.

Well, actually, I'm gonna, I'm gonna answer that from a slightly different perspective because I love the Chinese lens on, on this. So every symptom of perimenopause that we get in Chinese medicine, we group symptoms together and they talk about patterns of disease. Running hot, not being able to sleep, dry skin, moody— all of these symptoms in Chinese medicine grouped together to a group called yin deficiency. So what does that mean? Not enough yin. And if you remember from what I said earlier, what is yin? Yin is the feminine. Yin is the stillness. Yin is the, the not doing. Yin is the receiving support. And so isn't it fascinating that what we call perimenopause in the West is what Chinese medicine calls not enough yin? The other aha that I had of this is not so much, you know, the body has to go through this process. And of course your hormones change and things do change with perimenopause, but it's a body saying, you haven't listened to me enough in the last 20 years. How do we support our yin more as we move into— our, our mature years. So I don't, I don't know the answer to the question about hormones for 60+. I think it— yeah, it's something you'd need to work with a medical doctor. I definitely think as you're getting closer towards menopause that there's a time and a place for it. But I, again, I think working with your body, working to support more— so yin is the nourishment of the body. How do we nourish the body more is, is the bigger question. And how do we— nervous system and supporting our yin is the key to supporting us as we get into our older When you support your nervous system, everything works better.

Your digestion works better, elimination, getting rid of excess hormones, organs work better. So obviously you're going to extract more nutrients from your food and that's going to help your hormones. So it's just the whole thing. The nervous system plays everything. When it comes to mind-body, do you find that the hardest thing with your clients is actually shifting their mindset around? Do they come in with, well, I should just be able to cope, need to be resilient? You know, everything now is be more resilient. You're so resilient. Do you think we need more resilience and I should be able to cope? And how do you go about helping them flip their mindset around that?

Yeah, no, I don't think we need more resilience. I think we need fewer conditions that we need to be resilient from or build resilience from. I think, again, the pattern— I, I sort of see 2, 2 main themes with women that I work with that are doing too much and that might be addicted to their— the busyness of their lifestyle. For a woman that's going to the gym 5 times a week but is exhausted and she's not sleeping and she's working hard, but, you know, just non-stop, you know, raising kids, working full-time, pushing herself in the gym. When I say to her, okay, we need to build in maybe some time where there's— maybe we're not going so hard, there's a little bit of stillness in there. And I know you're busy, but we do get addicted to that busyness. And what's going on there? So the 2 main things are, firstly, if you think about if your body believes it's being chased by a lion, is slowing down going to feel good for that body? No, because I, I— even though I know in my mind there's no lion, I'm running. I'm literally physiologically running away from client. So the first thing again is to start with safety, showing the body that it's safe and that it's okay to be still, because stillness doesn't feel good if you're dysregulated. Stillness feels like danger. So that's the first one. Second one I see, and we touched on it earlier, is this space that I'm— my worth is tied to my output. Laziness is bad. Um, my, my worth is tied to what I achieve at my work, or how much— how tidy my house is, or whatever I get done on the weekend. So it's undoing both at the same time. It's— you're still as worthy of a person, as capable of a person, even if you're achieving less in a day. That means maybe you're not gonna hit the gym as hard as you have been for the last, you know, 30 years. So we do get addicted to our lifestyle is what I'm trying to say. There's a nervous system component to it, but there's also the healing of the emotional self and the belief system that says you must do or be XYZ to be acceptable in this world.

Yeah.

And that's sort of the deeper— the sort of the core of the healing work that I do with my clients that goes a lot deeper. There's no quick fix. It's our life's journey to come back to connecting to our innate value and our innate worth. And that's how we then, when we shift the beliefs, we can shift the behavior around it.

The way we attach our worth to everything, like I said before, to everything external. So is there a particular modality that you use to help people shift their mindset, or is it just through conversation? Is it just through awareness?

I think the best form of healing is there's talk therapy, so you can understand what's happened to you and why and how You know, how did we get here? But then I also like somatic therapy, which is, you know, Chinese medicine says that the emotions that we didn't feel or process get stored in the body. Talk therapy can just sort of talk you around in circles without your— through your thoughts and feelings without actually resolving anything. I do think you need to work with the body to resolve that. For me, that is kinesiology, that's acupressure, that's touch, that's nervous system regulation, that's somatic tools. But any— anything that does a bit of both, for me, I personally believe is best. But what I like to say to women that are struggling to connect to that, their innate worth, it's sort of like imagine if you've— if you have kids, you know, that first time you held your baby, or if you have pets and you, you love that little puppy dog, did you love them because they were doing anything to be loved? Were they producing anything? Were they, were they giving you anything that, you know, anything external? No, they're a little blob that's surviving. It needs you for its entire existence and survival, but that you love it innately. And it's our job to connect back to that part of ourselves to find our innate worth. And if they're, if they're worth loving when they were first born, we're also worth loving whether we're doing and being all the things that we think we need to be or not. Would be so much And I didn't mean to go that deep. To live a more harmonious life, there's all the nervous system, the cycle stuff, but how do we sort of connect back to, to that? That's the key.

When you're stressed out and overwhelmed, the last thing someone wants to hear is just do this. You know, one more thing to tick off, one more thing on my to-do list.

It goes back to your second last question, which is, well, what are the things, the things that are stopping us from changing? And again, it's those belief systems, those deeply held things. And so, you know, I think that's the key. Of, oh, I felt loved when I was 5 because I won an award, and I learned that, that being noticed and being performing was what got me love. Well, how do we undo that programming? That's not easy, but it is possible.

It is possible, and many people do do it, and they come out with— come out the other end so much better and more evolved in themselves.

It's a journey. We're never going to get— be completely 100% there. It's our life's journey to connect back to that part of ourselves. And just with time, we can go more gently with ourselves. But changing who you are and how you live without doing that deeper work, you know, it's possible, but it's not easy.

What's the main point you would love a woman to take away from your book, Flow Well, Be Well?

Well, I use the metaphor of the river, which is a real Chinese medicine concept. How do we flow with the river of life? And I think there's a couple of things. It's either we can be struggling against the river and trying to swim upstream the whole time and battling, um, or we might be white-knuckling onto the edge of the river, holding onto the rock for fear of where the river's going to take us. And the beauty in life, I think, comes when we float onto our back and let the river carry us. Flow with the journey of life, whether that be our cycle, whether that be our nervous system, whether that be balancing our hormones or connecting to our innate worth. Going with what is and accepting what is in life is the key to a more happy and more joyful life.

Thank you, Robyn, for coming on and sharing your wisdom. And for everybody who has loved this episode and listening Robin. All her details will be in the show notes. Her website will be there where you can order the book. Thanks so much for encouraging women to look after themselves.

Thanks for having me, Rita.