099 Reclaiming Your Midlife Self

Midlife isn’t a restart, it’s a remembering.

This episode is an invitation to call back the parts of you that have been quiet for too long, the ones hidden under survival, pleasing, and performing.

 We’ll explore the realms of reclamation, inspired by Women Who Run With the Wolves and the Bodies of Breath: creativity, sensuality, healing, sexuality, timelines, magic, and the wisdom beyond endings.

You’ll hear how these aren’t lofty concepts but living, breathing parts of you that can return through the simplest of moments.

Because integration isn’t just about the big turning points. It’s the daily act of carrying your truth into the most ordinary places of your life.

If you’re ready to return to your own centre and live from a place of truth, not performance, let’s talk.

Book your Clarity Call here

Resources and Mentions

Women Who Run With the Wolves — Clarissa Pinkola Estés (Audio -  Paperback )

 The Bodies of Breath was taken from my Breathwork training at Breathing Space. If you'd like to find out more about becoming a Breathwork coach or facilitator find out more here: The Exhale Awakening

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

Carly: 0:47

Hello, lovely people and welcome back to the Strong Bones Coach Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. And again, I would like to start this episode with a question. What does midlife feel like to you? Maybe when you were younger, it seemed like a long way away, a meeting place for grownups who'd already figured it out. Kids grown up, houses paid off, dreams done ticked off. But now you're here in the middle and life feels very alive. Still questioning, still very much unfinished. At this moment, that doesn't sound like a bad thing at all, but there's a narrative that midlife should feel steady, and yet everything else just feels off track. And what if that's just noise? This season might not call for fix it energy, but perhaps more of a return to yourself. This is a topic I've been talking more about over these last few episodes, but it's not about becoming who you used to be. It's more about recovering the parts of you that you had to put aside to belong. And in the words of one of my favorite authors, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, in her book, women Who Run With the Wolves. She shares this particularly poignant quote, which I think applies very much to this time of life for us. And she says, to be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves. And I feel like that says a lot. It builds this tension that lives in so many of us today, and midlife reminds us ultimately. To come home to ourselves. So now is it time for you to come home to yourself the one you were before, the contorting, the adapting, the abandoning the self who has lived and lost and learned, the one who knows more about what matters. Now, midlife isn't about starting again. It's a remembering, a reclamation, a return to self. So let's talk about the cost of surviving. To adapt is often to bend to contorts, to move into shapes that maybe are not our natural states. Most of us have done a lifetime of this. For me that contortion began early. I had undiagnosed A DHD, which meant my brain worked in ways that didn't quite match the moulds. I didn't wanna sit still or color inside the lines or follow the script, although sometimes I really wish that people could have handed me the script, so I could have played along a little bit more easily because I also had a very strong, good girl inside of me. Someone who desperately didn't want to upset anybody. So I learn to perform to mask, to stay small, stay sweet, stay quiet. It was exhausting. I remember believing I was just a tired person, always longing for bed. That was when I felt like myself in the dark alone. No one needing anything from me, but that way of living, well, it wasn't really living, it was surviving. When I experienced really severe postnatal depression, which eventually tipped over into psychosis, I realized how fragile that survival mode had left me. Had no tether to my real self, no roots because I'd spent so many years living someone else's life, and I know I'm not alone in this. So many women learn to survive by shapeshifting, by becoming what's expected. If they notice what's praised do more of that, what won't cause discomfort to others. And we learn early on, too early on. Don't be too loud. Make sure you're heard, don't speak out of turn, but do contribute something valuable. Be seen, but don't draw too much attention. Be thin, but not obsessed. Be strong, but not hard. Be nurturing, but don't neglect your ambition. Get the grades because that's the path to safety. And climb that ladder. But don't forget to smile and care for everybody. Don't ask for too much. I feel a bit dizzy after all of that. And we carry all of these contradictions in our bodies. In the perfectionism, the people pleasing, that silent resentment that we carry for too many years. It's leading to that numbness that comes when your true self is buried under years of performance. We silence our instincts. We override our need to rest. We tone down our pleasure. We compress our truth to fit into spaces that were never designed for our fullness. And over time, that gap between who we are performing to be and who we truly are becomes this giant gaping chasm. And in that space, we often find ourselves in burnouts, resentment, loneliness, that quiet ache, we can't quite name. And these are not personal failings. The echoes of an unlived self. Parts of you that had to go quiet, not because they didn't matter, but because survival came first. Now you're invited to choose something different. Now many people talk about midlife as a time of reclamation. So when we talk about coming home to self, it can sound a bit abstract, even unreachable. But what if it's not about becoming someone new? Reclaiming the parts of yourself that were always there. Just those ones you had to mute or hide or forget because they didn't feel safe to express in the world where you were trying to belong in my breathwork course, we explore what they call the bodies of breath realms about being that hold memory, energy, desire, grief, instinct. They mirror many of the archetypes and metaphors in women who run with the wolves. Each one a little portal back to your whole self. So I thought I'd take a moment to name them. Let's start with creativity. This is your wild mind, your ideas, your urge to make meaning or beauty, and not just for applause, but to truly feel alive. Perhaps you've silenced this part of yourself when you felt like you had to be realistic or to grow up, but creativity isn't childish. It's your vitality in motion. And when we say creativity, we don't just mean producing artwork, it can mean the way that you live your life, noticing beauty. Even being creative, how you run your business or do your job. There really is no limit other than the limits we've had placed upon us, the limits we choose to continue with. And next we have sensuality. And this is different from sexuality, although it can include that too. Sensuality is your ability to feel, to be truly present in your skin. This is your senses to taste, to touch, to move. And know that moment through your body, and we often numb our senses. We often lose the very part of life that brings us back into our presence. But when we start to engage with our breath again, I feel like it really does breathe life into our senses. Bringing back feeling in places that I felt numb for so long. Is why breath work is truly such a powerful practice. Next, we have healing the places we've felt hurt and the ways we've survived. Healing isn't a one-time act, it's a continual, often non-linear Path of softening, tending, witnessing our own wounds without becoming them. Without claiming them as the whole part of ourselves. It's allowing our pain to speak, to be witnessed without letting it be the driving force of our whole life. And again, I also believe that healing isn't one of these things, that we have a destination and it's complete. I really do feel like it's the path of just living life. Finding ways to find enjoyments, feeling everything that's available, the highs, the lows, knowing that we have a center that we can come back to, so it's safe to go out and push the boundaries now and then. To me that feels like true healing. Next we have our sexuality, and this is your life force, your power. This is your no and your yes. So it's not just about the performance, it's about feeling into your true sovereignty. What do you really want? This is reclaiming your right to feel pleasure, to own your body, to say, this is mine. Even if that's private, even if that's just for you. When you do decide to share with somebody else, it's from a place of wholeness. Not trying to fill a gap that you feel you can't find within yourself. We also look at the past, present, and future. The timelines we carry within us, the memories that have shaped us, the visions we've buried. The version of you who still needs to be held and the version of you who's calling from the future come over this way, the water's fine, and the reclamation asks what needs to be forgiven and what needs to be remembered. So it's not just about fortune telling or figuring out what went wrong or what needs to be fixed. It really is holding all of ourselves, all of our story, knowing there's still more to come. But of course there is something magical about breath work and about the work of being a human. So when we move into the magical side of things, we really are looking at our intuition, our inner knowing, the part of you that sees beyond logic. And as women, I think we are especially talented in this, but this is the quiet voice that's always new. What was right for you? Maybe it's been drowned out by rules or routines. Is always still there, still whispering, it's always trustworthy. What I find in the magic of breath work is it really allows me to come home to just myself. It really lets the noise of the world drop away. It's through breath work. I've really learned to trust myself and to test out these little theories. What is my truth and what feels like a story from someone else or some past version of me that was still in survival mode? When we start to hear ourselves and trust ourselves, this is truly magical. And lastly, we look at the end of our lives, our death and beyond. And this is the part of us that learns to understand the cycles. To honor endings and to trust that decay is something that simply precedes every rebirth. Here we get to meet with grief, mystery, the wisdom that's carried with impermanence and in honoring what has passed in clear space for what's next. I really love that with breath work, we get to explore such deep topics in a place that feels so safe. And in a way that we can integrate into our whole lives. So this brings us through into integration. What is it really like to live into our wholeness? cause there's a tender truth here that reclamation isn't a big single moment. It's not about spiritual fireworks display or a lightning bolt of clarity, although sometimes these things happen. These moments come and they do matter, but they're not the full story. Integration is where the real magic lives, and it happens in the small things maybe when you're washing the dishes and instead of rushing through, you feel the warm water on your hands when someone sees you, not just the version you curate, but the raw, honest you and instead of shrinking, you let yourself be felt when you catch yourself. People pleasing and pause. Even just for a breath and choose to speak your truth instead, when you let yourself feel pleasure just for you without needing to perform, to prove, to earn it. Or even share it. Although one day perhaps you might choose to, and this is what it means to chop wood and carry water, carry the sacred into the mundane, to bring your soul home through your body. The kitchen, the morning routine, the school run, and let quiet cup of tea. Integration is not the absence of chaos. It's the presence of you within whatever life brings. It's choosing again and again to live as the version of you that you fought so hard to remember, to show up for her, to belong to her, to root your life, not in performance, but in truth. So reclaiming your midlife self isn't about reinvention, it's about resonance. It's not always going to be dramatic. Sometimes it's you wearing clothes that feel like you again, or speaking a truth without softening it for the comfort of others or saying no without needing to give an explanation. It is the power and the pause, that breath you take before you answer the quiet moment. You choose yourself over that old script. Midlife doesn't ask you to fix yourself. It invites you to see yourself clearly. Tenderly, honestly not as broken, not as late or behind, but as a woman returning coming home, the parts that survived. The parts that still long to lead Coming ho to the wisdom you never lost. It's just been waiting there for you. So wherever you are in the season, may you walk slowly. May you listen inwardly and may you remember. You are not starting over. You are starting from wisdom. And on that note, I'd like to let you know that that was the very last episode of the Strong Bone Coach Podcast. But don't worry, I will be back next week with a few changes, which you may have already felt coming if you've been listening recently. It is exciting, thank you so much to those of you that have supported the podcast so far. Every share, every comments, review and suggestion, it helps to keep me going and it helps me to help as many people as possible. So I will see you next week with a few changes. So until then, take care.