Why Women Feel Lost in Midlife (And What’s Actually Happening) | Dr. Mindy Pelz

Between the ages of 45 and 55 is the most common time for a woman to kill herself. After [music] 40, 70% of divorces are initiated by women. I just boiled it down to [music] one single statement, which is now's the time to get to know yourself. >> If you had a megaphone that reached every woman on the planet and [music] 60 seconds to share an important message about the truth of aging, what would it be? I started to notice women who were in my practice would tell me stories that they wouldn't say in front of their [music] family and the stories went something like so what I want women to know is it's so liberating try it out [laughter] so liberating when you do not care when women are like I had a hunch this was going to happen that actually is a physiological state [music] in your brain and on the last day I said something that it freed me and I think could free all women [music] and I said I'm not Okay. >> Hey everyone, welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast. Our guest today is a returning guest. She is a best-selling author, a keynote speaker, a functional health expert. Y'all loved our conversation last time on fasting, and she is just such an incredible communicator, and I'm really looking forward to diving into this new topic about aging and all the things that come with us growing and learning more about ourselves as we grow. And uh yeah, Dr. Mindy Pel, thank you so much for coming back. >> Oh, thank you for having me. I I want to say I've done a lot of podcasts and yours is one of the top like five for me. So, it's just a cool experience to be here. So, thank you. I know I say this probably often because I get to I'm fortunate enough to sit down with a lot of people I really love having conversations with. Um, but I just feel like our conversations are always so alive and that the feedback from our last conversation really supported a lot of people. So, >> uh, in your new book, Age Like a Girl, you start the book dedicating it to your authentic voice and having the courage to speak up and out. And I'm just curious to start there and ask why did you feel like it was necessary to start with that? you know, of all the interviews I've done, nobody caught that. Nobody's asked me that. So, thank you because that was very purposeful. So, every book I think about like, you know, it's a it's years of of work and heart and who do I want to, you know, acknowledge for that. And so, it's, you know, it's always been like I had a patient who got put me on a journey um of learning how to manage lifestyle and cancer. And so, I dedicated a book to her. My family's been impactful. I dedicated a book to her. But this book or to them this book is all me in the sense that I really really had to dig into my soul um to pull the information out. It it was as everybody in the publishing my publishing world told me you've t you took on an ambitious task and what I wanted to do was show the positive side of aging, the positive side of menopause. I wanted to understand in a deeper way what was going on. And in that I actually found more of myself. And so the book literally as I was writing it, I was changing and I was discovering parts of me. And so when it came to the dedication, I realized that I had a deeper connection with what I would say is my little girl. And who I was before the world told me who I should be. And it just became very clear the only person I could dedicate it to was her. I think a big theme I see on this podcast is getting to interview people on their journey of what could be referred to as the return to the second innocence. >> Like we're born and we're this bright light in the world and we're this child with so much curiosity and play that's just alive with us within us. And then all the cacophony of things society, familial, >> uh different traum traumatic experiences, conditioning, positive or negative, shape us with these personalities. And then the journey back to the second innocence, the matured one, the evolved one where we discover it again is seems like a big thread that you're pulling on both with what you just shared and throughout the topics in your book. And I'm just curious why do you feel like this is such an important conversation not just for menopausal women which we'll go into but for people of all people from all walks of life evol with you know different evolving identities and that are growing. Um I'm curious to set the framework a bit as we dive into this conversation um how you feel like it's going to be able to serve people. >> Yeah. Well, so the whole book started actually 10 years ago when I was in clinical practice and I started to notice women who were in my practice behind closed doors would tell me stories that they wouldn't say in front of their family. And the stories went something like, "I'm depressed. Um, I'm angry. I'm not sleeping. I don't like the life that I have built and I don't know how to get out of it. And I'm starting to get suicidal thoughts." And these women on paper had amazing lives. And so there were so many of them that told me that that I started to unwind like, okay, what's going on neurochemically here? And that's when I found a statistic that showed that between 45, the ages of 45 and 55, that decade is the most popular time for a woman to kill herself. Most common, I should say. popular is a horrible word to use, but is the most common time. And then I saw another statistic that said after 40, 70% of divorces are initiated by women. And then I found another statistic that said if a woman is lucky, she'll spend 42.5% of her life without a reproductive system post-rouctively. And when I started to put those three together, I was like some it's like an awakening. There's an awakening that's happening to women in this process and we need to put language to it because there's the nothing the human body does it by mistake ever. So, if women were created to live 40 over 40% of our lives without a major organ system working, there's a reason for that. And that's what dove me into just looking at how could I look at this from as many different angles as possible because I didn't want to just look at it from one angle. I wanted to really dive into it and go, what happens to women at this moment? And I think what we're seeing is that there's not a lot of reverence in our culture for rights of passage. And women are incredibly scared of becoming invisible because the culture has taught women if you're gray, if you wrinkle, if you're not the perfect size, then you're not worthy. And yet the aging process is providing more wrinkles, more gray hair. A lot of women gain weight through the process. So, does that mean we don't listen to her anymore? So, those were the kind of questions and thought process that I wanted to what's going on here and and and honestly like in full full authenticity like I think that the patriarchal culture is scared of the power of post-menopausal women >> because and of women in general. And so there is this sort of understanding that if we create a word like anti-aging and we create an industry around anti-aging, like we hate aging so much we had to put anti in front of it, that we could keep her hooked in to a a belief system that keeps her tethered to her external purpose or her external look. Whereas what I think needs to happen and what I discovered in this research is that this is an opportunity for a woman to understand herself and to get to know her own internal purpose on her terms, not on what everybody else is saying. >> I spent a lot of time being raised with my mom and my sister and with a level of reverence for the feminine that I still carry with me very much so to this day. I've just always really respected, deeply respected the capacity that women have that is distinct from the way men do, which is its own thing, which is incredible. >> Um, and you look throughout history, throughout the ancient wisdom traditions, the suppression of the feminine through the witch trials >> up until recent times, women starting to have uh a deeper sense of freedom and agency more widespread. I love the way that you frame sort of the three hormonal pivots within a woman's journey and how that correlates to the different brain shifts that are happening because I think and we'll kind of get we'll get to the point where we're >> re we're reawakening the perspective of the oracle of the woman who is incredibly [clears throat] wise and especially post-menopausal has this incredible capacity and gift to be leaders for society. Um but there's a journey to get there and so could you walk us through that hormonal and you know um and and neural journey. >> Yeah. So when I wanted to understand I just boiled it down to one single statement which is what's the purpose of menopause like why is this process happened? And so when I looked at it through a neuroscience lens um I've just stumbled upon Lisa Moscone's work which you you probably had her on your podcast. Oh yeah. So she's, you know, she's a scientist and she has been looking at female brains and what she discovered is that in times of mass hormonal changes, the female brain actually prunes itself. So it prunes away those neurons that it no longer needs in order to prepare itself for the next job that that woman's going to embark upon. So let's use puberty as an example. the neurons during puberty get pruned away that kept you attached to your parent or kept you attached to a caregiver and making room for new neurons that allow you to be independent. That makes sense. We all know that the teenagers start to push away from their parents as they move into puberty and especially teenage girls. Postpartum after pregnancy, same thing. When the when the hormones crash, big hormonal change, the neurons that kept the woman knowing where her keys were, knowing how to handle the te to-do list, those all go away. Because this is what this this research is really interesting to me that not every species on the planet has a baby when it's born that's so dependent on a caregiver. If you look at like the chimpanzees and the and apes, which we're always comparing ourselves to, they those those baby chimps come out and they can climb trees and they can eat and they can live on their own, but humans can't do that. So, the mom has to have incredible intuitive skills to be able to read the baby's clues. So the neurons that kept her attached to the logical keyfinding task list ideas, those go away. So she can become highly intuitive. So she knows what her baby needs. So if we just look at those two moments like, wow, that's so cool. So then the third moment is menopause. This is the moment we're not giving enough credit to the neurons that kept women addicted to people pleasing. and women are our brains are actually uh neurochemically set up for people pleasing addiction. Those neurons go away and it makes room for neurons that put you in more of an independent individual state of mind. And when you compare that with an anthropological lens, a mystical lens, you look at societal pressures, you start to see that this woman's brain is rewiring itself to think on its own. It's built for leadership. It's built for uh standing up for herself. It's built for speaking the truth. How many women how many people have hung out with like a 65year-old woman? She'll tell you exactly what she thinks. And so there's a really cool process happening with the brain that is turning the brain into what I call a get out of jail free card for women. Because the way our culture is set up is it's set up for women to feel worthy if they're a certain size, to feel worthy if we perform in a certain way. And those are the neurons that go away. And now the woman's brain is turning into one where she's turning inward for worth. And she's turning inward for happiness, not outward. And just to riff off that, what is the grandmother hypothesis and why we of very few species have this shift and for for women in in their later years? >> Yeah. So the anthropological lens of this is wrapped up into this thing called the grandmother hypothesis. >> And it doesn't mean you have to be a grandmother. I always tell people like if you can still fall into this. But basically what it says is that back in the primal days when a woman stopped having her menstrual cycle, the the tribe knew that she would now be needed in another capacity within the tribe. And the reason the there you know their instinctual logic at that point was that all the energy that goes to releasing an egg in every single month actually comes back to her. And it comes back to her in three forms. her fitness abilities go up, her cognition goes up, and her ability to socially lead together with other grandmothers, it goes up. And so in that primal day, what happened was a woman lost her period. All of a sudden, she was moved to a new status within the tribe and that status was protection of the tribe and forge for food. Now, if we go back and we think about the huntergather days, the men and the probably, you know, I've did a lot of research on this trying to make sure it wasn't just male female, I do think some of the stronger younger women, teenage girls were probably going out for these big animal kills. And when they they didn't have guns, you know, their tools were significantly less than what we would have access to now. So, they only came back with a kill like 3% of the time. That's one out of 30 days. Meanwhile, back at the tribe, you've got you've got a woman who's pregnant, you've got a woman who's nursing, you've got a baby, you've got toddlers. And so, it was the post-menopausal woman. It was the grandma that actually made sure that she got food. So, the grandmas, what they would do is they would gather every morning like at the crack of dawn, and they would go on a 7-hour trek every single day to go forge for food. And then they would bring that food back and then they there was there's so much to talk about just in that activity. But they would come back and they would feed the women and children. And there's a belief that if it hadn't been for these post-menopausal women that we actually would not be sitting here right now because they kept our species alive while the men were off trying to get a big animal kill. So, in some sense, and and Lisa Mscone wrote about this in her book, uh we're evolutionary heroins because it was the grandmother that saved our species. And when you like you dive into that, it's like, oh my god. And you women are worried about a wrinkle that's going to make her invisible. Like, they didn't worry about wrinkles. They had a task to do. Go find food. Keep the keep the clan alive. There was purpose, there was focus, there was meaning. That's not what we're doing right now. >> How do you compare what the anthropological shift is to the psychological and sort of archetypal shift of the coron and post-menopausal woman in terms of what happens with the growth from knowledge to wisdom and how they um yeah, how they shift in terms of also relation towards others. Well, so first I'd love I love to take apart the word the crown because we in our culture look at it like it's really negative, but it actually means crown. So it's like, you know, Clarissa Pinkola Estus I write a lot about in this book like she talks about the dangerous crown and about the a woman coming into this initiation and putting her crown on so that everybody can see that she's a wise elder. Now, I I spent about a year or two walking around asking everybody, "What does wisdom look like? How do you know you're in the presence of a wise person? If everybody's going to freeze their faces, we have no wrinkles, we have no gray hairs, how are we going to find the wise elder?" And it was a really interesting, nobody could give me a really good answer. I still haven't come up with a great answer, but back in those days, you know, you saw the wise elder because of the wrinkles. You saw the wise elder because she was gathered with other wise elders and and there was there was appreciation for her knowledge and appreciation for her wisdom. The grandmother hypothesis, one thing I found was they believe our language actually developed because of the grandmother. So when she would come back and cook food, the little children, she would tell stories to the little children and those children's their brains grew because grandma had more more sophist a more sophisticated language. So she would talk down to or you know talk to the children and that's how their brains grew. So, you know, when we look at the lens of the modern menopausal woman right now, um, yeah, I mean, there's not a lot of putting her on a pedestal because she's a wise elder now. So, my experience in talking to so many women is that um, women are scared of this transition. Um, especially if they're in the workplace, like will they AISM is real. Will they be tossed aside? and women who maybe have left marriages and are going in, you know, single for the first time, will they ever be loved again? And women that, you know, are even, you know, trying to step into new careers and try to create something new. Like, do they have the energy to do that again? And so, there's this really interesting pivot that we don't I don't have like a good language for because we've never put women aging women on the pedestal they deserve. The only the one that we do have is Okinawa. We put the women on a pedestal be because oh they lived over a hundred. But do we break down what they do? The women in Okinawa, one of the things they do is they come together and create a moi and a moi is a gathering of women and everybody in the village knows that if they need advice, they go to these elder women. So we have examples in other cultures but not in western culture. >> What do you think is really happening when you mentioned those statistics around suicide and divorce? >> What are the main psychological shifts and factors that would contribute to that do you think? >> Well, so let's go back to one of the people I studied for this book which was Carol Gilligan. And Carol Gilligan was a feminist psychologist in the 1980s. And she studied girls and boys as they were transitioning into their teenage years. And one of the things she found is that if you ask a boy at 9 and a girl at 9 what they what they want. So let's say they say, "What do you want to eat?" They'll both tell you exactly what they want to eat. You ask him at 11, the boy will tell you what he wants. The girl might waver a little bit. By 13, the boy will absolutely tell you what he wants. And the girl will say, "I don't know. What are you eating?" I was just at a conference this morning giving a keynote and I asked I didn't even say what the girl would say at 13. I said to the women in the audience, what would the what would the girl say? And literally all the women in the audience were like what are you eating? So, Gilligan came out of the her study in the 80s and she published a book called In a Different Voice. And what she discovered was that girls were being trained by the culture to be that that with the message that they are worthy. If they are selfless, if you give to the people around you, then you are worthy. So, I was born in 1969. I was raised here in Malibu in the 1970s and 80s. She studied me. I mean, that was exactly what I learned. So now, fast forward to menopause and all of a sudden out of nowhere, you have never had an opportunity to think for yourself. You've never asked yourself what do you want? you've never thought about what is meaningful for you because you've spent your whole adult life trying to bend and fit into a culture that wants you to be one way. So, it's really interesting when you start to see the cultural impact because I think what's happening for women when they go into menopause is there's like a wakeup moment. They're like, "Whoa, wait. Okay, I've been doing everything for everybody else. Now, I want to turn it on myself, but they're empty. There's nothing in there. It's like about, you know, after after the fire is when I evacuated from the palisades, I went into a real downward spiral and my therapist said to me, um, Mindy, what do you want? And I was like, I'm 50. At that point, I was 55 years old. I'm like, nobody ever asked me that. I I never even asked myself that. And so I think what's happening is you have these women moving into their aging years and they're having to exercise a muscle that they've never exercised before and they've never been given permission to exercise it before. And there's so many like I I I've had so many great conversations with men who were raised by really amazing women. And um what I hear a lot is what an incredible servant their mother was to the family. And how cool would it be to just turn to your mom at the point of menopause and be like, "Thank you. Thank you for everything you've done for us. Now what are you going to do for yourself?" Like think about your mom through that lens. >> Yeah, I know. I'm in that exact conversation with her specifically also, you know, like I'm just what are all the things she's afraid of doing, the things she's always wanted to do but never gave herself permission for? Like >> excited to just see her spread her wings in that regard. And >> um but you have this muscle that's atrophied because of the peopleleasing tendencies and being such a relational creature which always of course bears its own beautiful fruits and the things that how it supports other people. um in your journey from the beginning of this year going through the fires discovering and asking yourself what do you actually want? What would the key message be that you would give to people to show up and you can still support others but without abandoning yourself and your own needs? What would what would be the predominant message that you would give >> for the women? Yeah. >> Yeah. Um well, now's the time to get to know yourself and and it and I want to just point out that that can be scary. It it seems like so easy like, "Oh, yay. It's me time now." But what happens? I want women to be aware. What happens when all your worth came from being a superm mom or all your worth came from rocking your career? Like we've outsourced our worth over and over and over again. So there there is going to be a really discomfort or let me say it this way. There's going to be some disorientation when you start to ask yourself what you want over and over and over again. So the first thing I want women to know is it can be a as beautiful as this sounds, it can be a little bumpy if you haven't exercised the muscle. So this is a big part of the book. I want women to exercise the muscle. Like we don't need women to cower and fade away as they age. We need actually women to stand up in their full truth and stand up in their authenticity. We don't need a billion women right now are in menopause. We don't need cookie cutters. We don't need size twos. We need women that are speaking boldly about who they are and what they feel deeply about. That's true leadership. So, I think the transition from I'm going to do everything for everybody else to I'm going to do for me now, it it's not as easy as it sounds. And this is why in the book I tried to map out different ways we can look at that. So, like for me, when when my therapist said, "What do you want?" I was shocked for about a week. I walked around. I was like, "What do I want? What do I want? What do I want? I don't know what I want. I don't know what I want like everything and I don't I don't know where I want to live. Um I don't know if I like even the way I dress anymore. Maybe I want to dress different. Um am I staying in my marriage? Am I going Do I like this thing I created? What do how do I feel about about my children? Like how do I feel about my career? Do I even like who I'm showing up in my career? All of a sudden everything came up for grabs. And I looked at everything to see, okay, this stays. this goes. I like this part of me. And that process was so liberating. It was really, really important. So, >> yeah. I always think about how you can't see the picture while you're in the frame. And it takes some space to be able to have perspective on self cuz we're so close to it and how we've been operating for so long. So, we can't necessarily be objective always about what's going to serve us and how to get our own needs. I'm curious because I think men typically have a disposition towards a fear of not being enough and women a disposition more of being too much. >> And for women, whether their identity has been wrapped around being a mom or their career, menopausal or not, I think this is a theme that comes up across the board. Y >> uh is giving yourself permission to take up space which usually comes >> to fruition by virtue of saying no and having boundaries. >> So good. >> So I would love to just see you know your own personal journey how you've been in conversation with other people and other women um and taking up space and >> saying no. >> Yeah. Well, women aren't taught to take up space. this is this is the this is what I'm trying to change. It's like let's take up a lot of space because our voices are are powerful and and need to be heard. So that too much I can tell you that almost every woman I've talked to says, "Yep, I was told I was too much." So that I just want women to know if they feel that that's that's totally normal. Um, so for me, I I went through a real like dark night of the soul trying to understand who I was. Um, I I discovered a few really really profound things there. Um, I discovered I was a classic codependent. I just discovered that this year. And I always thought somebody who was codependent was somebody who was wimpy or had alcoholic parents. I didn't have alcoholic parents. I had beautiful, wonderful parents. Of course, there were a few a few bumps in the road like everybody. But um but I was like, okay, why do for me codependency showed up as if you're hurting, I'm going to do everything I can to make you stop hurting so that I can feel better, >> even at the expense of your own needs and self. Mhm. >> Yeah. So my husband, that was one of the conversations that had to change. I was like, "When you do X, Y, and Z, I take on your emotions and I start to feel like I need to do something to soothe you." So we changed that conversation. He was like, "You don't have to do anything for me." So literally, I started saying to him, "Um, I can tell you're upset right now. I've got to leave the room because I want to fix it for you. I want to make you stop feeling upset so that I can feel better. It's not even like a a pure reason. You know what I mean? Like it wasn't like I want you to stop feeling upset so that you can feel better. It was so that I can feel better. >> That is what I learned was true true codependency. >> So you don't fall into the habit or pattern of attending to somebody's needs or just showing up in the way that the relationship used to be or has been, >> right? you can take space and and not fall into that tendency so quickly. >> Yeah. And then if you know I really looked at my childhood a lot um and um there was a lot of chaos in my home um and a lot of arguing and I realized that I learned to not take up space because if I spoke my truth I might escalate the arguments. And so I learned to try to stay quiet. I learned to be the funny one. I learned to try to keep everybody calm. And then I just did that in my marriage. I did that as a parent. I did that in the workplace. So, it was like that was revealed to me last year of all the ways I changed myself in order to make everybody else feel better. But really, once they felt better, then I could feel better. Did you catch that? So then, so now I just feel I just make myself feel better. [laughter] >> Literally, I'm like I catch myself all the time. >> Yeah. is like like let's I'll give you a really insidious example. Coming up here today, I was like, "Okay, I had to come from San Diego all the way up here. Am I going to get here on time? We had it all time perfectly." And then we hit a little bump in the canyon. And the first thing I thought was, "Oh, I hope I don't disrupt your schedule." I thought about you. And then I had to pause and go, I think I think he didn't have anything else in that afternoon. And then I had to turn it within and go, wait, I'm feeling upset because I like to be timely. Okay. Well, what if he's not mad? Then why are you suffering? You see where I'm going? Like you really have I started unpacking all of that. this book, you know, it's the book game is a game of numbers and the numbers are coming in every week and one week I got bad numbers and I was like, "Oh my god." And I found myself suffering and then one day I was like, "Oh my god, you want the numbers to be good so you can feel worthy. How about you just feel worthy right now?" >> So that's the game I'm playing with myself and it is so freeing. Oh, wait. Right now I'm upset because I decided this thing was important and it it's not that important. The only thing that's important is that I keep loving myself and I keep turning within and calming myself. >> So it's I don't I don't know if your brain works like that or other people's but that's the inquiry that I had to do. I have talked to a lot of people especially women recently about this sort of discerning where is the where is the fine line between like over like being considerate for other people's reality and not taking responsibility for their whole emotional landscape right >> you know and not taking where empathy goes too far is like again sacrificing your own needs >> and I think as women because we've been taught let's go back to Carol Gilligan's work we were taught that you are worthy if you're selfless So, every woman seems to have a pair of glasses on that is like, "Is this person happy with me? Did I did I kill my did I knock it out of the park with my profession? Am I being the best? Am I doing the best I can in my relationship? Am I do I look the way that everybody wants me to to look?" And so, what happens is you ha you haven't gone within and looked in and been like, "What do I want?" Again, back to the dedication. That's why I had to dedicate it to myself because I was like, "This book is all about going within and finding your little girl. Go within and find who you really want to be." Because the way that the brain is rewiring itself through this process, you are you are being given that opportunity. Neurologically, you are being given that opportunity. But when you first start asking yourself, what do I want? What do I need? What do I care? Then it's like it's empty. There's I didn't I didn't get a lot of answers back for a long time. And I even did it like when do I like to eat dinner? Like I would always eat dinner at 8:00 at night because that's when my family ate dinner. And one day I'm like I don't like eating dinner and going to bed. Why I like eating dinner at 5:00, you know? I just I literally looked at everything in my life to try to figure out how do I live it on my terms? But I still catch myself like today. >> Yeah. >> I'm like, "Oh, I don't I don't want to be late. I don't like being late. And then I was like, I don't I don't think you have another podcast. Like I literally had to talk myself off the off the edge. >> Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I can where that even shows up in me is like, oh, I hope they feel like they're not stressing out too much about being late. Like it's totally chill with me. It's like 20 minutes or whatever, however many minutes. Like, and so it's so funny the narratives we have about situations, which the other person is in a completely different world, too. >> That's right. That's right. Hey guys, if you've listened to the show for a while, you know that I love the products from this company called Peak Life. 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Solitude, time alone. What is that uniquely given you that nothing else probably could have? >> So, one thing I learned in this year is that the mind doesn't work on its own. It's often the body many times the body is informing it. I'm sure you've had a lot of experts on here talking about that. I mean it's the classic the body keeps the score. And so mix that with the research I found on menopausal women. I actually think our nervous systems become finely tuned. Our neurochemical system dramatically changes and we become so much more sensitive to our environments. So, we know when we walk into an environment if if it's safe or if it's not. Now, most women would say they know that, but we when you get into your post-menopausal years, you really know that. So, for me, solitude became the only way I could get control over my body feelings. So, after the fire, I you know, in in full transparency, um I evacuated three times in 36 hours. I I ran from fire for almost two days. Um I had a moment on Sunset Boulevard where things were lighting on fire around me. Embers were going through the street and I was at Sunset and B and Venita and there was two dads that were trying to get cars out of the canyon of B and Venita and my first reaction was what are those jerks doing? Like they're blocking traffic. And then I realized, oh no, their dad's trying to get kids out of the school. And as I sat there in traffic and watching things burn around me, I this thought hit me of am I dying today? Like that's how much chaos it was. Like is today the day? It's it's really quite a question to have cross your mind. And so I I from there I and then continuing to run. I was so anxietyridden. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't think. Um I couldn't remember passwords. Um I hadn't I didn't eat for several days. At one point I actually went to my best friend's house and she was like, "When's the last time you've showered?" Like I was so in trauma a trauma state that it didn't matter where you put me. you needed to put me I needed to isolate myself so that there was no more input. >> Yeah. >> I didn't want to have to deal with anybody else. This is how I end up in Santa Cruz. I'm like I'm going to Santa Cruz to heal and to hide. And that's what I did and write this book. And every day I woke up and I was like, what do I want? Who am I? How do I feel? Um I slowed everything down. But it's the body that that is why solitude is ne is needed because there's so much input happening for women and then if trauma upon trauma upon trauma builds there's no way for us to find our grounded space. >> So isolation becomes something that calms us. And that's I think that's actually really unique to post to menopausal women. I've heard so many women say, "Yep." I I I've several friends that went and bought another house so that they could go somewhere um and be by themselves. Um I have some friends that told me every 5 to 6 weeks they take a weekend off by themselves. Um I have friends that moved and created little she sheds in the backyard so that they could be by themselves. But there's something that happens in this process where women need to isolate. And I think it's because we need to kind of we need to learn how to ground ourselves and get back into our body so that we aren't falling prey to all the the stimuli around us. >> I think so much of what makes solitude powerful is non-doing. But when you do take space away, what are the practices and the things that you've done that have really supported or made that process more exponential? Um well so the first thing I did that was given advice to me that I loved was every morning I made a date with grief. I realized I didn't have a relationship with grief. I was so busy working and serving and writing and helping everybody that I didn't know how to process grief. And prior to the fires I had lost a very good friend who was 52 died of a heart attack. And um I closed my practice three years earlier and patients I loved. So there was grief upon grief upon grief that I hadn't dealt with. So what I did every morning is I put music on and me and grief had a go at it and I thought of all the things that I was mourning and were gone and all the things that um will no longer be. Um you know I grew up here in Malibu, the Malibu feed bin. My sister raised rabbits and sold rabbits to the Malibu feed bin. The Malibu feed bin was a really big part of my childhood and it's it's gone. Like it's only lives in my memory now. And there was things like that that I just needed to sit and process. So I think we as a culture, you know, your audience might be a little different, but we don't want to look at the hard emotions. And it required I needed to look at the hard emotions. So, the date with grief became like my go-to. And I will tell you, for about 3 to four months, I would cry every morning when me and grief would have a date. And then after about 4 months, I was like, I'm not crying anymore. It was like it had moved through me. So, that would be the first thing I would say. The second thing I started doing is really going back to the stimuli. I started looking at where I was getting too much input into my body or my mind. So much like this studio, I changed all the lights out. I was in an Airbnb at the time. I changed all the lights out to red light or or orange light. Um I at the end of the day would play chanting music because I know chanting music stimulates the vag nerve and can stimulate the whole parasympathetic nervous system. Um so I I made sure in the morning I woke up slowly. I had my date with grief. I I move through that and at the end of the day I I would wind down slowly and then I did another trick that I really encourage people to do because so many women are rushing from thing to thing to thing is that I started moving slower. So I washed the dishes slower, I walked slower, um and then I drove slower. I know I know that's hard to imagine in LA. Um but I and then I started telling myself um you have time. You have time. you're not in a hurry anymore. So, I I used my lifestyle to repattern my whole nervous system. And again, I had the luxury of living alone, not thinking about anybody else. Um, you know, we were still doing some of the things in our business and that was being handled by a lot of people, but no became my best friend and slow became my my mechanism. >> I resonate a lot with what you said even though I'm not >> Yeah. a menopausal woman. I feel like there is this beauty in minimalism and in an aspect where you're reducing things to their maximum. There's like a level of intentionality that I strive to create sort of in this like the Japanese philosophy and wabishabi of like the beauty and the imperfection and everything having a sense of intention um in your environment and your home. There's something so liberating about realizing how many things in the world that you do not want and you do not need. >> Oh my god. Oh my god. [sighs] I I I just got to jump in here. Two things. I was just in Santa Monica for a hot moment grabbing some food >> and I was looking at Santa Monica Place and I was looking at the stores and I was thinking like this is exhausting to walk into these stores and buy this thing that gives you a dopamine hit that will eventually 3 days from now or maybe 3 weeks from now be on your floor and you're going to have to fold it, you have to put it away. Like all of that is so draining and we don't even realize it. And that's just one little thing. When I looked, one of the most interesting things I've ever been forced to do in my life is when I saw that the neighborhood was on fire, I went into my closet and I looked at my clothes and I'm like, "You're all replaceable." And then I I went through the house and I was like, "Repaceable, replaceable." Like all this stuff I had spent so much time accumulating in a moment of trauma, I'm like, "Peace out. >> [laughter] >> I'm going. And I literally took like three things. I took my jewelry because I was like, "Oh, okay. I've spent years collecting you. Come with me." Uh, and then I took my hormones cuz I'm like, I that could get really ugly really quick. Um, and I took I took one sweat off outfit that my son had given me two days, you know, a week before at Christmas. >> And it was like when I left, I'm like, I think every time I go to buy something now, um, I'm going to ask myself, would you take this in a fire? >> It's a good question, >> right? You you probably went through the same exercise. I did. Yeah. I mean I same thing. I was coming home from the gym. I saw this big willow. What is it? Pillow. Willow. Big >> smoke pillow. >> Smoke pillow. [laughter] >> Yeah. It was It was a bumpy pillow. >> Yeah. Huge. Just the atmosphere in the sky was filled with all this black smoke and then realized, okay, everything's [laughter] turning to fire really quickly. And I was like, okay, what do I want to carry with me? And it was like, well, I can't carry my podcast studios, unfortunately. Um, I carry like my hard drives, a guitar a friend gave me, and the rest of it is like replaceable. You know, there's the sentimental things that it's like important to bring with you, but the rest of it, there's sort of a liberation in realizing that you're actually you can be nonattached to to it. >> And and for a couple of days, I didn't know if the house made it. >> And I was like, I actually, this was also an interesting exercise. I had to walk into a store to get clothes cuz I'd only taken one sweat outfit. M. >> And so I walked in and I'm like [laughter] I looked at the woman who who said, "How can I help you?" And I'm like, "I know this is going to sound funny, but I don't have any clothes." And then and she's like, "You don't?" I'm like, "Well, I was in the Palisades fires." And but it then buying clothes felt so stupid. I'm like, "I just told my other clothes. I didn't care if I saw them again." But but the point that I want to make is like the accumulation is a burden >> and the overpacked schedule becomes exhausting and why are we doing that? What do we do that all for? And so my lens of consumerism and my lens of workaholicness has drastically changed since those fires. >> Yeah. In Ayurveda the first of seven stages towards disease I believe is accumulation being the first to say. So for example, environmental toxins that we accumulate that you know overload our bucket or capacity for that. And I think about that like psychologically we think about our food diet so often but we don't think about our mind diet and our light diet and all the other stimulus that comes into our life. >> So I just look for opportunities to get rid of things quite often and you know Black Friday just happened. A small example of that is like why I actually like Black Friday is cuz I get all the emails from companies. I can unsubscri unsubscribe from the emails. You're like, "Oh, I still have your [laughter] list." >> Yeah. Remove, remove, remove. >> Oh my god, I love that. >> That's just like one example of like our digital social space is an environment that we get to prune and be mindful and have a cleaner relationship to. So, >> yeah. >> So, from, you know, we found out that the house had made it, but we didn't know if the things in it were going to be, you know, worth like were they going to have smoke damage. And so, um, when I I spent about three months not knowing like I had three to four outfits. Now, when you write a book, you don't need a lot of outfits. So, that but you know how liberating that was. Every morning I went I got up, I'm like, I have three to four choices. And it was it was so nice to know that it was just like here you go. Here's here's what you've what you have. The amount of no opposed like let's jutapose that to what I'm doing next week. I'm going to New York to promote this book. I'm going on the Today Show. I'm going on the Tamron Hall doing all the big media and I'm thinking all these clothes are being sent to me. We're trying outfits on. We're trying to decide what to do, what I would look best in on these shows. And inside my heart, I'm like, I don't really give a [ __ ] >> Yeah. >> And this has taken about 15 hours of my week trying on these clothes so that other people think I'm spectacular because I look a certain way. Like I would have rather had those 15 hours to go hike in the forest or take a like I just started learning to surf or go surf in the like I would have that would have been more meaningful for me than trying to wrap myself up in some outfit so that I can look good to the external world. >> It's exhausting. >> I hear it. I hear it. And that shirt is fly, by the way. [laughter] >> Thank you. Um, but I I totally just understand the rep prioritization of our values and living in alignment with them and how much more ease that brings into our life. >> We were talking a bit extensively, you know, before the podcast just about the journey with the fires and everything earlier this year and >> sometimes the survivor guilt also that comes into the picture cuz I know we both have so many friends who have lost their home and >> um, yeah, just >> a beautiful lesson and painful one in impermanence. Um, and >> I think both of us feeling very lucky to be able to have walked away and Yeah. >> Yeah. Lucky. And I don't know if you feel a little detached from your home now. >> Yeah. More so. >> Yeah. >> More so, for sure. >> I I'm I feel a det level of detachment from my stuff that I'm not I I like it. It feels good. Um, and but yeah, I you know, there were a couple of things I went through. For starters, it it wasn't my the home I raised my children in, so I didn't have pictures to worry about. So I had that luxury to not be like, "Oh my god, the picture of my daughter when she was born that wasn't going to get burned." So So I, so there was a little bit of guilt with that. Um, I have no idea how that house made it. I really don't like there was some some magical bubble going on there. Um, and then you know I was telling you about the neighbor who lost all like his collector car set and like so you do sort of realize that like how lucky you were to have a house but um but it doesn't matter. The experience was also intense for us. Just the experience of having to pull things out and make a decision. I'll take you. I won't take you. Like that's enough right there. the I don't know if you spent a couple of days wondering if your house was standing. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, I did. I was They were just say they just kept saying when they when you see your street name repeatedly mentioned on the news, it's just not a good vibe. >> No. >> No. What So what what went through your mind on those couple of days when you didn't know? >> Uh I just like surrender and then be like, "Oh, did it really happen?" And then worrying about like, "Okay, what would we do?" You know, build a new podcast studio, where would we move? Is this what's going to be the state of the city for a few months afterwards with all the toxins from the burning electric EV, you know, EVs and all the things? It's like so much just I don't know. >> Um and there's >> a few of my friends and I just kind of just got an Airbnb miles out outside the city and >> um I think there's there at least we arrive eventually arrived to the point of just like whatever is going to happen is going to happen and just let go and just surrender to it. >> Yeah. So the other thing outside of grief that I got really familiar with was the liinal space. >> I lived in a space of I don't know what's next and um I went from thinking about what's happening next week to waking up every morning and just going what am I doing today? >> And that was freeing. So it's it it was a weird on one hand to have the survivor's guilt and to know that it wasn't you know my house didn't burn and it wasn't my family home. But on the other hand, um I was displaced and um didn't have a place to land that felt like a home. Um and um that liinal space, I'm sure you've talked a lot about that on here. It is fertile ground. >> Yeah, >> there's a lot you can discover there. >> Mhm. I think what really determines so much of success as a species or, you know, on an individual level of our own well-being is our ability to to operate in the face of uncertainty. >> Um, and >> I like how you mentioned in the book the shift of power over to power with or power within. >> And I'm just curious, how does that how do those two energies feel to you differently? because we're very much so speaking to whether it's through the fires or the shift psychologically through menopause as a woman um growing through different identity you can you shift you're shifting how you relate to the world and the energy and and and the source of your power and how you're operating. >> Yeah. So it's interesting because we spent a lot of time looking at the word patriarch and then I thought well if patriarch is what is not serving and patriarch by the way is both is hurting both men and women. if if if that's the damage, maybe we should all have a we should have a matriarchal society. But then when you look into matriarchal societies, it's just like women leading or men leading. And I was like, how do how do we all lead together? And so I started to flip these terms and look at patriarch as power over and matriarch as more of a power within or a power together. And I think for me um the fires and the transition that I went through over the last year mixed with going through menopause is that I unhooked myself from the power over culture. I would say I'm the most free from the power over culture right now than I've ever been. And it's so it's so liberating. Try it out. [laughter] It's so liberating when you do not care. when you are ask you're living life the way you want to live it and and you're only asking yourself if you're proud of you is so amazing. So now I go power within or I go power together. Um I've learned to ask for help better. Uh I think there was something one interesting insight that I just sort of had in the fire but it also translates to menopause is that um if it is an initiation into a new version of you who's going to determine that new version of you. If a woman has been living her whole life with the patriarchal culture saying this is how you should look, this is how you should be behave then like that's her guiding light is applause from the patriarch. But then when you go over to a more of the power within and the power together um there's a deeper sense of connection that makes all the external stress go away. M >> I think that's what I like I sometimes I think I wish every woman could pop into my brain for a moment and then pop in back into their brain because what I learned in both writing this book through the fires and just going through the menopausal journey is that power within done with power together to me power together is gathering people that support you not people that fix it for you people that go with you on that journey that became the juice of life for me that became oxyto And that became compassion. That became what made me feel whole, not the external. >> Does that make sense? >> Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. >> Like that. And that that like I'm sure you you've talked about that a lot here and all the mystics talk about it. And it's like this is what I loved about Clarissa Pinola Estus' work is she calls this time of life for women the right of passage. And she says it's the life, death, life cycle. You lived a life, that life is over. So it dies and a new life emerges. And the new life that emerges sh I think if you want to live the happiest life ever should be power within and power together because power all over always has one person that's dominating and one person who's submissive and that's not the way the human species finds happiness. >> Yeah. So we mentioned briefly earlier this shift towards women becoming wisdom bearers. We talked about the anthropological lens but then also the shift of women into deeper roles of leadership. >> Um as you go through that life death and life cycle. There's a new energy that's being born. You know a level of sovereignty and individuality. um but one that operates with wisdom and has the ability to really see patterns and and support people at a much deeper capacity y >> than just attending to their own needs in the in the very moment. Um and you speak and write in this book as well about wisdom and how it's not just a personality trait but there's a brain architecture and neurochemistry that's going along the ride with it. >> Is there anything you feel called to share and and what's happening to us with that? Yeah. So I wanted to understand uh the hero's journey and I wanted to understand this life death life cycle but I wanted to understand it not through just a mystical lens because I think it's really lovely to be like oh you know I had a breakdown and then I had a breakthrough and look at me I'm all happy now. I think that's sort of what the outward facing that we put out there. So I really wanted to know does it change the brain? what happens if so I I literally took Joseph Campbell's uh hero's journey and I took the life deaf life cycle steps and I mapped them to neuroscience and here's what I found. So the first thing is that there's something called the hunch or I call it the hunch where you know you need to change you know something's not right. Okay, we can actually neuroscience will tell you what that hunch is. The hunch is that the frontal cortex is viewing the world outside and the body is sending a signal and they're meeting in the prefrontal cortex. It's actually in a part of the cort prefrontal cortex called the anterior signalant and in there it's saying is my environment and what my body feels are those are those congruent. So when women are like, I had a hunch that or men will do this too, but I had a hunch this was going to happen. That actually is a physiological state in your brain. So we don't want to ignore hunches. Women often times get a hunch. It's time to change. It's time to stop doing everything for everybody else. It's time to become something new. And I think it's easy to go, "Well, that's nice and woo woo and it's great that you that that you feel called to to change." But what we're not acknowledging is that there's a message from her body that is in congruent with what's going on in her environment. And I think this is why the women are killing themselves. This is the divorce that there's a mismatch between the internal navigation system and the external environment. So the first step would be absolutely pay attention to those hunches because there's something there. Don't get rid of that. Second thing is uh the second two stages that I call the shedding and the grief. Um [snorts] what's interesting when we face adversity and we stay there this is super important. You stay in change. You stay in getting rid of what doesn't work for you. you stay along a path that you know needs to change and it's hard. You actually rewire your brain. So resilience is necessary for happiness and wisdom. And you can only get resilience by staying in a difficult moment and finding a new way out of that. When we look at things like dementia and Alzheimer's, women are panicked about Alzheimer's. That is absolutely something topical for women in their 50s and and the zeitgeist has permeated the fear around that. But what we know is that if you can create one of the things about neur uh Alzheimer's is that it's neurodeeneration. What happens is that neurons start to crumble and they start to die. So you want to do the opposite of that. You want to create neuroplasticity. So, when I have something that happens to me that I'm really struggling with, like my neighborhood burned, I don't know where I'm going to live, I got to turn this book in, what am I doing? When I hung in there and I didn't run from it, you create new neuronal pathways and all of a sudden a new insight comes in like maybe you should go to Santa Cruz or maybe you should slow down. And all those new neuronal pathways are now pathways that I can continue to lean in on. So resilience is so important that we do not shy away from it because that is where we grow new neurons that are going to to inform the next phase of our life. That was probably the most surprising to me. Um, I even dove into and I I tell it a little bit in the book. Um, looking at the the plight of the butterfly and the caterpillar. So, do you know Michael me? >> Sounds familiar. >> You you need to know Michael me. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> He was my guiding light a lot of times. He's a mystic and he um he he's a he's deep into mythology. >> Yeah. So his podcast is called The Living Myth and it's all about, you know, using mythology to inform our everyday life. So I would listen to him every single day this year. And he has this thing about the butterfly. When a caterpillar decides that it has consumed too much of life, it gets a hunch and it decides it needs to create a chrysalis around it and it wraps itself up in a chrysalis. And once inside the chris crysalis, what it does is it dissolves the parts of it that it no longer needs. So it literally forms into a goo. >> In that process, its head literally comes off too, which is so fascinating. >> But but check this out. It actually in order for the goo and the the dissolving to happen in the greatest way possible, it has to resist its own transformation. Mhm. >> So it resists its own transformation so that it can amplify its immune system to turn around and attack itself so that it can completely dissolve into a goo. And then within the goo are what they call imaginal cells. And the imaginal cells were cells that were there from birth. And those imag out of the imaginal cells becomes the butterfly. So it has to resist its own transformation in order to completely dissolve. To me, that's what resilience is. We have to come up against adversity and resist it and and fight it for a moment in order for the brain to come in line and go, "Wait a second, there's there's another way to do this. There's another way." And then now you create those neuronal highways. So, when I started to put this through a menopause lens, I was like, "Okay, we've got women that are rageful. We've got women that are depressed. Anxiety is a number one uh experience of women going through this process. And the message these women are getting is we read the HRT study wrong. Um you've been gaslit in your doctor's office. You've been given anti-depressants and now we want to give you a different medication. We want to do something. You don't need to suffer. And I don't think women should suffer. But what I want to say is don't fall asleep to the moment >> because the depression might be that you did you built a life you don't love anymore. The anxiety might be that you're fearful of the future because it's not a future you want to step into. And the rage might be that you're really upset about a culture that told you you needed to look a certain way, act a certain way, and be a certain way that took you away from your own authenticity. express that like understand that so that then you can dissolve the parts that no longer fit and you are left with what does fit and a butterfly can emerge. H >> it's so fascinating the aptly named imaginal cells that lie dormant a potential that is to come that comes and this sort of transformation of suffering and of the goo and >> I think like if we had enough perspective one of the aspects when wisdom is studied is this thing called perspectival metacognition the ability to take on many perspectives at once is a key contributor of what wisdom is and when I study it. When you think about the process of suffering and going in the goo, a transformation of our identity and personality, like the caterpill caterpillar going into the chrysalis and becoming a goo before a butterfly, like if we had the context for what feels like a death in the moment is a rebirth into a into a new phase, >> I think it would obviously support so much of the stat, you know, incredibly depressing statistics around suicide and depression and and all of this. So, what what's coming up for you? >> Yeah, keep going. I'm just curious where you're going with this cuz >> Yeah. Well, I'm just just just the perspective like if we can have the context for the shift in our life, then we can meet it fully like don't let the suffering go to waste in a sense and then we can embrace a bit more of the transformation even though it's painful and sucks at times. >> Um, and it doesn't have to be the end of our journey, which unfortunately it is for a lot of people, >> right? what what I was resonating with and and is a bit of where you went is but maybe we're not supposed to know. >> Mhm. >> Like maybe that's part of why, you know, the caterpillar doesn't know it's turning into a butterfly. It has a hunch. That hunch is initiated by these imaginal cells. It's done consuming life and so it makes a shell around itself. You start to see I isolated myself. I couldn't do it that way anymore. this is the plight of many women and then it took a moment and resisted what was happening and that resistance was needed. So if I go into an adverse situation and I'm like okay well something great's going to come out of this I think we we we miss the opportunity for more wise neurons to appear. I feel like we might need to like have a little bit of a temper tantrum for a moment. >> Yeah. No, it's it's great because an an aspect of being able to take many different perspectives is not necessarily knowing what's going to come next because birth like in any in any field there is there's an emergent phenomena there. You don't know what is to come from the next iteration of you for you know and >> this the process of emergence is there is energy that is moving us in a certain direction which we don't know how it's fully going to be actualized yet. Right? And so and so I think like I'm just curious how important you feel it is to have the perspective that something is being birthed. It's okay you don't know what it is but to like just be with that and to be you know and to allow that to take up space as as you're sharing. >> Yeah. Yeah. Sit with it is is really important. Um you know what I'm hoping with this book is that women will see this as an opportunity as they as their hormones change. they'll start to see, wait a second, I can change. And you know, there's a reason that this hormonal transition lasts 10 years. It's because there's an opportunity to take to try on new things, look at things a little bit closer, and go, "Ah, that doesn't work for me. I don't want to do that anymore." And so there it's a journey that takes time to fully marinate so you can become the butterfly you were meant to be. So I do think that there's something really profound about the in between the about the the liinal the liinal space the liinal that word became something that I thought so much about and um [snorts] you know I there was a couple of things that came to me as you were talking. The first is the day they came out with the guy who started the fire. I looked at that guy's picture and I thought, I've spent 55 of my years trying to control my life, making sure I had checked all the boxes and that I'd gotten everything. I got the family, the career, the everything. And some guy I don't even know from Florida throws a cigarette butt on the street next to mine. And a week later, the neighborhood burns down and my whole life turns in a totally different direction. We have no control. We have no control. And all of a sudden, once I accepted that, this was like a couple months ago when they found him, I realized, okay, [sighs] so then how am I going to live every day? How what's the state I want to be in? Um, and the liinal space became possibility. All of a sudden, the liinal space didn't scare me because I don't know what's going to happen next. And I think that grasping that trying to direct and control like that is what is exhausting the human race. But for the menopausal woman, she comes to a point where she's like, I can't do that anymore. Like I don't care if you call me the best mom in the world. I can't I don't care if you tell me I'm beautiful. I'm exhausted. I did something really interesting the week of the fires. Um, I was leading a a water fast for a h 100,000 people that week and when I was evacuating and on sunset wondering if I'm going to live or not, I was trying just to get down to PCH so I could get into a parking lot because two hours after I left my house, I had a I had to lead a 100,000 people worldwide through a water fest. And I was so dedicated to others that I was told my staff, I'm like, "Don't worry, I'm just going to find a parking lot to go to." That's how warped into the patriarchal culture that I was. Of course, I never found that parking lot. But at the end of this week, on the very last day, because it was a five-day experience, and on the very last day, these 100,000 people had watched me go through this experience. Like, I showed up the next day. I'm like, "Oh my god, I evacuated from the fire and blah blah blah." And on the last day, I said something that it freed me and I think could free all women. It could free everybody, but especially women. I was like, I kind of let an exhale out and I was like, I just want to tell you all thank you for being here this week. We had like 100,000 people on this webinar and I said, I'm not okay. I'm really not okay. I don't know how I'm going to get okay, but I I bet on myself to get okay. So, I appreciate you all being here this week. I'm going to go now heal myself. And I said, everybody put in the chat if you don't feel okay. How many of you are not feeling okay? Oh my god, the chat blew up. And I have been sharing that story and so many women are like, I'm not okay. I just did this morning. I did a keynote this morning and I told the same story and a and woman after woman said, thank you for saying that. I'm not okay. So we can be invited into the liinal space when we're willing to let go of the known even if we're dying in it. If you can let go of that known and realize how exhausting it is to constantly be outward facing just so that everybody thinks you're okay. And you let that go. You enter this liinal space and it's crazy what appears there. It's crazy how life unfolds from there. And I I don't think I can ever see life different because of that. There's something so liberating about like the gift of that perspective and how you can carry it forward in in future moments like how you relate to that liinal space moving forward now as you're saying like you look forward to it and instead of >> what we can tend you know what we can often do is like >> have fear of the uncertain future right and of course past hurt is going to inform future fears and the things that we're concerned about but the more that you've made it out on the other side the more that you can view that uncertainty as just pure possibility, you know. >> Yeah. And that's resilience. >> Yeah. >> So now I have a neuronal pathway. This is what what this is why the comfort culture is destroying us because once you're willing to let go of the rock of comfort, you start realizing, yes, life can get really bumpy, but the resilience builds these new neuronal pathways. And so when I get into places where I'm like, I'm very unsure right now. I don't know what's going down. And my brain's like, "It's okay. You've been here before. Remember when you were here before? This happened. And then you were here and that happened." And so all of a sudden the control lets go because I have the my own internal experience of surrender. >> Yeah. >> And that's wisdom to me. >> Talk to me about the journey for women getting up to that point because we talked about this like being a 10-year process. >> Yeah. P menopause and for women that are whatever at stage what at whatever stage in their life where they start to go on this journey. Talk to me a bit about what's happening for women as they approach that moment. >> Yeah. So typically what happens is it s starts off slow and it happens in your late 30s where all of a sudden you might be a little more anxious. You can't really calm yourself and the hormone that first goes starts to decline is progesterone. So progesterone stimulates GABA and GABA is our calming neurotransmitter. So somewhere in the late30s, women start to feel like they just are a little more wound up. They're a little more anxious. Then in the 40s, what happens is estrogen goes on a wild ride. She's up, she's down, she's up, she's down. So one day a woman feels incredible. The next day she feels horrible. So she's very erratic, which is probably really helpful for most people to know. is like, "Yes, yes, you're built to be erratic because estrogen's going on a wild ride." But what I brought forward in this book that isn't being discussed enough is that estrogen stimulated over 12 neurochemicals. So estrogen stimulated, dopamine and serotonin, acetyloline which is memory, oxytocin which is connection, BDNF which is brain fertilizer, um GABA, glutamate like uh collagen, creatine, melatonin, like estrogen made all that neurochemical magic happen in a woman's body. So somewhere along her 40s now, she's gone from just feeling a little tense to feeling like she's crying one day, suicidal the next, and then she's smiling and super happy. So that is part of the journey. I just for women who are like that's me. That's part of the journey because there's this neurochemical shift that is happening. And then when you get on the other side of it all, then things become more stable. So once you're in your post-menopausal years, that tends to be more stable. But what I brought forth in the book that I'm really hoping women see is that these neurotransmitters you can make on your own every single day. So like right now, we're getting oxytocin by just sitting here and connecting with each other. So if you're feeling lonely, who can you connect to? Go find somebody who feels like they're really hearing you or pet your dog or do something. In the book, I give lists of things that you can do to get oxytocin. If you're feeling unmotivated, we'll know that dopamine has gone down a little bit because estrogen left the building and dopamine's vulnerable now. Well, what does dopamine love? Dopamine loves novelty. So, are you doing the same thing over and over and over again? Like maybe you need to switch your routine, maybe you need to learn something new. This is why I started surfing. I was like, let's try this. >> And I was just blissed out for the first couple of months. Every time I would get in the water, it did not matter if I was good or not. It was just new and fun and dopamine came back. Serotonin, we actually have serotonin receptor sites in our eyes. Our eyes came, both men and men and women came equipped to turn sunlight into serotonin. And so if you're feeling a little blue, get out in the middle of the day and let serotonin get into those get light into your eyes so you can make serotonin. So, I started to take these neurochemicals and I started to break down lifestyle tools that we could do. So, now let's juxtapose that to what women do. They go roaring into their 40s. They're like, I I got the career. Maybe they've got the family, maybe they don't. Um I'm, you know, I'm the like when I turned 40, I was like, I'm in the best shape of my life. Like, that was a badge of honor. So, we go into our 40s being like, we conquered the patriarch. We conquered the power over. And then all of a sudden the wheels come off the bus and we're like, "Okay, well I know that I'm a size two, but I don't feel like going to the gym anymore. Um, I know that I have a great relationship, but I don't really feel like connecting anymore. Um, I used to be able to sleep and now I just wake up 10 times a night." These are all indications that estrogen, I call it our girl gang, this like neurochemical system is off. And so what are we going to do about that? And right now, one of the things that has been disturbing me the most is that women are getting the message that, well, you didn't get the right hormone replacement therapy. I'm not opposed to HRT. I'm just saying that you're not suffering because you got the wrong doctor or you didn't get the right dosage of HRT. In this massive change to your attitudes are hidden messages and one of them might be you need to change your routine. You need to learn something new. You might need to go deeper with your spouse. Maybe the you're connecting in a very superficial way. You need to go even deeper into a connection with your spouse. Melatonin, the only way you're going to make melatonin is if you start to sync yourself with light. So you need to start to get out in the middle of the day, get up in the morning. So, so there's a lifestyle that needs to shift with the hormonal shift and it happens in the late 30s and then it come it comes to complete fruition in the early 50s. So, I think that 10-year buffer is not just for us to know thyself, to use your your phrase, but it's also to change our whole lifestyle. I think the whole lifestyle is meant to change. And we're meant to start to look at ourselves as neurochemical beings, not to go, I'm suffering because my doctor messed up. >> That was all great. Yeah, that's I feel like so important and powerful reminder for for everyone in regards to those lifestyle shifts. If there was one thing that you wanted people to know most about how our body uses energy and glucose and how that shifts and the importance of it, >> um, what would that be? Yeah, you're going right into my you're going right into my my love language now. [laughter] Um here's here's the interesting place I've landed with fasting and menopause. Um there's it's been a very h really highly contested topic out in social media land. Um when a woman after 40, your brain and body doesn't know how to use glucose as well. End of story. So what you ate at 35, it might be making you gain weight at 45 because you this vessel you're living in, it doesn't know how to use glucose. Alzheimer's is considered diabetes type three because the brain doesn't know how to use glucose. So we've got to switch to our other fuel source, which is a ketone. And ketones are like electrical, like an EV, like a like a car. It's like a much more efficient form of energy. So when a woman learns how to use ketones, then all of a sudden what can end up happening is her brain can come back online because she's giving a fuel source that powers up those neurons in a way that it knows how to use that fuel. It doesn't know how to use glucose. So what I want women to know is a clean up your diet. Like get off the ultrarocessed foods. It that is going to make your menopausal symptoms and your brain worse than ever. You might have been okay at 25 and 35, but you're not going that is going to be an experience that puts you on a wild ride at 45 and 55. So, clean it up. Let's go back to just good quality food. I'm not talking, you don't have to count macros or anything like that. Just how about we clean up our food and then start learning how to fast. Um, I know I sound like a broken record, but I'm not even talking long fasts. I figured out that the primal days, the grandmother fasted about 17 hours. There's actually a tribe in the modern world that's still practicing this. It's in Tanzania. We always refer to it in the longevity movement and it's the Hadza tribe. And they still fast 17 hour about 17 hours every single day. So those grandmothers are getting ketones all day long because that's the fuel source that you click into when you fast. So, I think what we're seeing, and I'm hoping this is going to change, but what we're seeing is women go screaming into their 40s. They're o they're like the rushing woman who's doing too many things. They've been dieting. They've been exercising. Um, and all of those tools that got them where they wanted to be at 40 don't work anymore. And that's because the rules of the game changed. And one of the major rules is you can't use glucose. And if you don't use glucose, you store glucose. And so it goes to the belly, it goes to the brain, and now all of a sudden the brain fog, the weight gain, the confidence goes down. But the beautiful thing is you have this other fuel fuel source called a ketone. And if you tap into those ketones, like today is a really interesting example. Um, I didn't really eat much today and I was really careful before I came here. I wanted to eat a little bit of something, but I didn't want to take the ketones away because I want to sit here and be have the best fuel source for my brain with you. And it that's that's how we maneuver this as we go into these years as opposed to my memory is going away. I can't remember everything. I don't my brain fog. I have ADD. Like again those those l that languaging is becoming badge of becoming a badge of honor for women. >> I like how you kind of breaking these down to a few different buckets. The things that we can do that are additive that bring us a lot of vitality. the things that we can stop doing or do less of or do in a proper time window and then also unfortunately we live in a time with unprecedented levels of environmental toxins and is there any word you want to share on just how important detoxification is in this day and age? >> Yeah. Yeah. So in my clinic, the last 10 years of my clinic, I would say 90% of what we were doing was detox. Um I have tested heavy metals on thousands of people. Most of them are women and um heavy metals are real and they can disturb brain function like nothing you've ever seen. And they are in your environment. They're in the water. They're in the soils. They're in your food. Um they're everywhere. And a heavy metal is a form of toxicity that's heavy. So the body doesn't know what to do with it. So it stores it. So when a woman goes into menopause, one of the things that happens is that that hormonal up and down of estrogen actually signals bone to break down. This is one of the things that we start to see that leads to osteoporosis is estrogen's up, she's down, and and the more she has that wild ride, the more the body's like, I'm going to go ahead and leech calcium and phosphorus out of the bones. And with that comes heavy metals. And the heavy metals go up into the brain and they start to affect how you function. So lead is a dumber downer. Lead is a heavy metal that makes you go, "Wait, what was I saying? What was I doing? Why did I walk into the room?" Sometimes that can be lead because heavy metals will stick on the end of neurons. So the information can't pass to the to the other neuron. So it's like that stunted thought. What was I shoot? What was I saying? Sometimes that can be heavy metals. Mercury actually winds us up. So, women who have fillings in their mouth, fish, if you're eating a lot of fish, um there's tons of mercuries in our in our water. And so, if your body has a ton of mercury in it, all of a sudden the anxiety goes up, the OCD processing goes up and you start to notice that your behaviors are different. And yes, we could put a patch on that. Um that would be one thing to help, but that well, I call it the toxic dump of menopause. that all those toxins are coming out of your system and they're being redistributed and they toxins like to go to places that have a lot of fat and your brain is got a lot of fat. So all those toxins start to go up into the brain. So you're not only getting the release of stored toxins if you combine that with other toxins like your in home environment, your food, your beauty products, now is the time to clean that up. You got to clean that up because the stored stuff's coming out and if you're bringing more in, you are absolutely amplifying the symptoms that that you don't want. >> Yeah. The beauty products is one especially that I think being a woman uh cuz they're exposed to way more toxins via all the care self-care products, right? Um, if somebody wants to just like what is the most effective way in terms of knowing what they have that they need to detox? So, like what do you just recommend for >> for testing and what do you recommend for >> detoxing? >> Yeah. Yeah. It's such a big topic. Have you done detox on your >> I've done different cleanses and fasts, but in terms of a topic on the podcast, >> um, >> not as a whole episode, but yeah, throughout many different conversations. So, it's funny because it's one of those conversations that like everybody's aware of um but nobody really wants to bring it forward because the answers aren't easy. So, let me start with this. We live in the most toxic time in human history. >> Um and you know, not to get political, but under this administration, um environmental laws are being turned over left and right, which is making everything way more toxic in our air and in our soils. So, we need to be aware of that. The first thing, so the first thing you want to do is open up your own detox pathways. Like before you even spend money on fancy detox, like understand that your body knows how to get rid of this. And one of the tricks that I tell people all the time, both men and women can do this, but it it tends to be women see it more, is look in the mirror at your armpit. Do you have a pit or a puff? Like a pit. You're supposed to have a pit where the where it's an indentation, not a puff. If it's a puff, it shows you that your lymph is working really hard to start to get those toxins out of your body. So do a visual check. Check right here above your clavicle. That shouldn't be puffy either. It should be an indentation talk. These are they call this the toll booth where the brain is detoxing constantly and the and the lymph from the body comes together right above the clavicle. And so if that's puffy, it tells you that the lymph system is not working at at its best. Grab a lofah, get on a on a rebounder, uh move your body, sweat, um just get circulation going so that you can keep that lymph moving. That's everybody can do that. So we have awareness, we have our own detox pathways. Then if things are not functioning well from there, we can go to nature. We have chlorophyll [snorts] and corella and um like I've I've gotten really into some cool minerals, fulvic and humic acids that come from the earth that are natural detoxifiers. Fiber. Oh my god. Women, all women going through menopause should be eating a fibery diet because it feeds the microbes. You actually have microbes in your gut that break these toxins down and start to get rid of them. Sleep. when you go to sleep at night, all of a sudden your brain shrinks and the cerebral spinal fluid goes up and washes your brain. So, make sure you prioritize sleep. Um, so you can you there's a lot you can do without having to go to the big ones. >> Um, if you go to the big ones, um, there's a whole scary world there and you can spend anywhere from $1,000 to $20,000 to get your toxic load out of you. So, I always say make sure you work with somebody. I'm not even going to go there on the podcast. Um because there's >> plasma exchange and all the different alternative things. >> Yeah. Got it. >> So, have you have you tried TPE? >> No. No. I want I'm going to I'm going to get my mom one when she comes out here cuz I think she could probably use it more than me, especially cuz she like worked in a hair salon or like her own for so many, you know. I think >> Yeah, please do. >> Um but >> what do what are your thoughts on it? What do you recommend? >> I've done it. >> Yeah. I stopped doing supplement detoxing once I discovered TPE because it's so efficient. So basically what they do is they put a lot a line in one arm and they pull out 65% of your toxins. But really what they're doing is they're pulling out 65% of your plasma which is the part of blood where toxins live and then they put albumin back into your body so you're not like low in fluids. Um and so they're putting the clean in pulling the bad out. Uh we have I've done it four times now and we've done pre and post uh videos or uh blood work and it's crazy what it's brought down. Cholesterol, big thing it'll bring down is cholesterol, um mold, heavy metals, plastics, all the environmental toxins it brought down. Now the question is does it stay down? So that's what why we keep retesting. So every time I go back, which is usually about 3 or 4 months later, what I notice is the toxic load seems to have gone up a little bit, but never back to what it was. So we take skin off skim off another load and then we do it again. What I notice as a human, uh, the mental clarity is through the roof, um, and just silly happy. It's like TPE drunk. like you're just so blissed out, which makes you wonder like are all those toxins like shutting down our neurochemical system >> and affecting how we move what our moods are like? Like it's like literally I can't wait to do the next one because when I go and do them, I feel so amazing afterwards. >> Cool. >> Yeah, it's it's fascinating how many cool innovative technologies are coming out and >> Yeah. >> Yeah. It's it's really like I used to give people supplements and I'd say it's going to take like a year to get this out of you. Um and and it it might be a little bit bumpy. >> Ibu, another great one. >> Ibu was good. Yeah, I was good too. My understanding of Ibu is it's great for molds and candidas and lime. >> Ebo for people that want to check. >> It's not as good for heavy metals as is the last, you know, the the kind of the way we looked at it for the last couple years. And then TPE came around and it kind of was the shiny new thing. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, >> cool. Well, so much to dive into there. While we're on the topic of alternative modalities, I'm just curious what your thoughts are as it as it relates to healing trauma through holotropic breath work through EMDR, through assisted psychotherapy with MDMA, >> and micro doing psilocybin. So, take your your pick of your favorite there. [laughter] >> I've done them all. >> Fantastic. Um, I've done them all. So, let me let me think on what I want to say. Um, holotropic breathing was really interesting for me because I couldn't um I did not understand how deep my body was holding on to trauma. So, there was something about that experience that brought up old traumas and let me release them. So, I loved holotropic breathing for that. Um, EMDR is, I think, phenomenal for getting into the subconscious and starting to repattern old belief systems. So, that right, you know, the I we use buzzers. My therapist is an EMDR therapist and that right foot like it buzzes one side and then the other side and that starts to help you access your subconscious belief system. So, I think EMDR is really good. If you have a belief you keep thinking over and over and over again, you're like, I don't know how to get rid of this. go go find an EMDR specialist. Um micro doing uh psilocybin um is really profound and what I got really into understanding psilocybin because it goes into the 5HT2A serotonin receptor site which is the same receptor site that estrogen goes into. So when I first started putting this all together, I was like, wait a second, maybe women could micro dose in as she's starting to lose estrogen to get that happiness back. And I would say most women that micro micro dose appropriately find that there is a mood lift to it. So it's I think it's good for the everyday. MDMA [laughter] is not for the faint at heart. Um, but I say that with so much love because what MDMMA did for me is it brought down the default mode network and it was like your behaving, your acting, your beliefs about yourself were put there by other people, not by your own vition. And so I actually the year before I went through all this, I went into an extensive MDMA experience with a guide where we did several MDMAs over a course of a year. And each one I came out and realized that a lot of the voices in my head were my father, were my my mother, my sister, adults that lived with me that that I hung around. Those were not my my thoughts. And to be able to separate that out was so liberating. So it's I feel like what MDMA does and the reason I say it's not for the faint at heart. It's such a lovely experience when you're in it, but the integration afterwards, you have to realize that you may have built a life that was built around a belief system that you don't really own anymore. You don't even want it. It was your parents. It was other people's belief system. So now what do you do? So the integration becomes critical. It is if you want to change your life, get with an MDMA therapist because you're about to unwind a belief system about yourself. I I included it in the book um because I had to leave it there as a possible tool for women because I think it's one of the most transformative things you can do um to start to become more your authentic self. >> Have you Have you done it? I've out of all of those I've don't only done holotropic breath work. I've done MDMA not with a a psychotherapist. >> Yeah. Like in a in a party setting. >> No, not even in a party. Um this was actually even before I started the podcast. I went and just did a solo MDMA journey in the middle of a forest by myself. [laughter] >> Amazing. >> And it was like I felt it was like right before I started this podcast. I like had this intuition of creating it and I felt it was going to be a big chapter in my life. So like, okay, I want to go get really intentional about this. >> And I did I experimented with that. Um, >> incredibly powerful and potent medicine for sure. >> And big big psilocybin journeys like hero's journeys and like a heavier dose. Um, I think they improve neuroplasticity. Um, and so, you know, if you go off that understanding that we're only using about 10% of our brain. I know they've rethought that a little bit, but just for the sake of the conversation, you're only using a small percentage of your brain. When you tap into a big dose of psilocybin, you actually start to see what your brain is capable of. >> You start really understanding what a full spectrum brain would feel like. >> Yeah. >> And that's a really cool experience. >> Yeah. I'm curious to experiment with micro doing. Um I've heard great things. >> Yeah. And I think you even with micro doing you having somebody along the journey with you. Um because what these plant medicines do is um they hold a mirror up to you >> and then you get to decide if you like what you're seeing, >> which you very well may not. >> That's right. [laughter] That's why it's not for the faint at heart. But of all the things I've done, I would say psychedelics is the most transformative. In fact, a little funny fact. Um 3 years ago I wanted to write this book and we were going to call it micro doing menopause >> because I was like there's these little things that women can do to make this experience um so much more different. And I started to see that like when you dive into the science on psilocybin even if you dive into the science on LSD it's really impressive. You know I always say you're you're maybe too young to remember this but I always say Nancy Reagan messed us all up. Nancy Reagan in the 70s and 80s used to have the you know she was like >> just say no to drugs and there was this commercial commercial that was like a pan with an egg and it was like this is your brain on drugs and so you know people who are like you know Gen Xers like me we were like no drugs no drugs we were told never to do drugs even though many people did drugs but now to rebrand some of these drugs as helpful tools for transformation that can be difficult ult for some people to understand. >> Yeah. But it's also getting increasingly hard to ignore that in the right context, especially with uh therapists guiding the experience. >> Y >> the like the clinical trials that are coming out of John Hopkins and the studies that are showing how efficacious they are compared to SSRIs are like what are we doing here? We got it all backwards. >> Yeah. What are we doing? Is is really a great question. >> Yeah. What um if you had a message for men out there that are living with a woman in their 40s, 50s, 60s that are going through this transition, what is one message that you think would be really important for them to hear to be able to effectively support their partner? >> Such a good question and something I'm hoping this book will bring more men into the conversation. I think the first is whatever your partner is going through, um it's not personal. So, her moods can be all over the place. she might be witnessing one day she's up, one day she's down. Um, don't try to control her. Um, and don't take it personally because she doesn't even understand herself yet. So, that's usually, especially in those early 40s, you're kind of like, why am I crying one moment and the next moment I want to kill you and the next moment all I can think is amazing, lovely thoughts about you. Like, all of that exists in this brain that's rewiring itself and transforming. So, that's the first thing. Second thing is sit and listen to her. So I know my husband and I have been married 30 years and one of the things I know about his temperament is he likes to fix everything for me. And that's kind of a, you know, a more traditional look at male and female roles. Um, and so I had to be like, "No, no, no, don't fix it. I need to just share what I'm going through." And to have somebody who's a really good listener and hear you is probably the greatest gift you can give a woman in your life. just I hear you. That sounds difficult. Um I can't even imagine what that would be like. Um as opposed to you're overreacting. Um and it'll it's going to pass. Don't worry. Uh like really sitting in the experience with her and making her feel seen and heard is really important. Um, and then the last piece of it that I has something my husband and I have done that is really helping and this is why I love the butterfly example is that um I once he understood that I was crawling into the chrysalis and I was dissolving what I didn't want of me anymore and I was emerging another person um I would tell him I'm the butterfly version now and in the butterfied version I don't act the way I used to act in the caterpillar version and so he started saying back to me is, "Well, tell me what you're discovering about yourself." That was one of the most beautiful things he said to me. I'll never forget, we were out to dinner one night and I had isolated myself. I was trying to ground myself and and it was a really tough time for both of us. And he looks at me and he goes, "Tell me what you're discovering. Who are you finding?" And I started unfolding. You know, my dad hit me when I was a kid. He had a lot of anger. He threatened to hit. He hit. And when you get angry, um that all comes back. And so when you're angry now, um I'm going to need to leave the room because I can't put myself in that situation. And then in that moment, he knew it wasn't him. He knew it was something I became aware of that I needed to make sure that it wasn't reagravated. Um, you know, there we we have conversations often where I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no. That's not that's old me. Remember, new me operates like this." So, the butterfly became our metaphor. I actually one day found a hat that had a butterfly on it. And I told him, "Whenever I wear this hat, just know it's the new version of me." And so, he he came on that journey with me. And as a, you know, it wasn't always with a big smile on his face. I just want to point that out. But he was committed to the relationship. And so he kept like changing and being more empathetic and trying to work with me as I changed. He didn't try to change me in my own desire to change. And he didn't want to hold me back to who he met at 21 when we first met each other. He was like, "Okay, invite me into this process with you. and I tried to put language to it and I think that was that saved our marriage. >> So for the men is like in in the book I actually wrote an appendix to men because I thought a lot of women would pick up this book and they would see themselves and then they would struggle to turn around and try to explain it to the men in their lives. And so I was like well let me just put a appendix in there so a woman could hand the book to a man in her life and be like here's what I'm going through. because it's one thing to know it in your brain, but when you're actually going through the experience, it's very it's very different. So, I think we really we really need men in this journey with us, supporting us through it. And I think you'll find uh that the woman you love comes out the other side more connected to you. I think the reason we have 70% of divorces initiated by women is because men are like, "What is going on? We were we were good. you were great and now you changed and I'm not sure that this is right for me anymore. So, we know our teenagers are going to change. Why don't we accept that our menopausal women are going to change and and really work with that? Um, my husband and I came up with a statement that really worked for us is we started to take our marriage and look at the first part of it was marriage 1.0 before we had children. With children was marriage 2.0. 0. And now that our kids are grown and out of the house, we're creating marriage 3.0. So it stopped him and me trying to pull what the old stuff, like we used to do it this way. It was always like that. And we started to have new experiences with each other, >> which is really cool. >> That's amazing. Is there is there something you would say to the women that are listening that don't have that support system or have potentially a partner that isn't as willing and open to the conversation like that can be I'm assuming very hard to navigate and >> yeah what would you say to those peeps? Yeah, I think where the menopause conversation is going right now, um, is that everybody knows there's an emotional roller coaster. And so, um, I just want to say that I think it's okay for women to start to say like, I it's I'm overwhelmed right now. I've got a lot of emotions. Um, I'm just going through something. So, do I'm not okay. Do the this is what's going on with me. Don't hide behind the mask. And you might be surprised because the culture is already warming up to this idea. How many people are receptive to that? I don't think we say, "Oh, you're I'm hormonal." I think we say it's just overwhelming and and this is what's happening to me. So, don't put the mask on. Take the mask off and be authentic about how you're feeling. That would be the first thing. Second thing, in the book, I did something that I really enjoyed writing, which is surround yourself in the inner circle. This was my go-to this year and I created three categories of women and people. It doesn't have to just be women. It could be everybody in your life that really I found helpful. Um the first one is the butterfly. So I went to a lot of women that were 10, 15, 20 years older than me and I was like, "How did you do this transition?" And they were so helpful. So if you don't have a spouse, look for a wise elder. That's the whole point of this is turning us all into wise elders. people who have gone into the cocoon, gone into the crystis, dissolved the goo and came out the other side. Go find those people because they know what you're going through. The second one was the anchor. And the anchor is sometimes you just need somebody to listen. And my anchors for me, they they would say things like, "Mindy, I'm just going to stand next to you and I'm just going to be here as you take your steps. I'll shine a light on the next step. You tell me how you're feeling, but it's your initiation. It's your right of passage. So, I can't tell you how to do it, but I'm here for your experience and I can hold you in that. Find some anchors. My anchors were so powerful. And then potentialists is my third category. And I have a couple really close friends that when things got really muddled and dark, um, what happened was you you want to become revengeful. You want to become angry. you want to lash out at people and a couple of my potentialists would remind me that that's not the human I want to be. And um potentialists are there to to show you what you're capable of and and what what you they know in your heart is the person you want to be and what you're trying to become. So your circle becomes really really important. And if you can't, if you don't have people in your circle and your environment that are supporting you through this transformation, you need to get rid of them. I I really strongly believe that's why I isolated myself because I I couldn't identify what was for my best benefit and what wasn't. So, I isolated myself. Once I got to know myself, then I could go back into other environments and be like, "Oh, okay. You're supporting my transformation. You're not. we're going to need to either get rid of you or we're going to need to talk have a talk. So, it's it was really a beautiful inquiry that I went through and I lost some friends. Um I shut out some relatives. Um like I said, I isolated myself from my family because I the only person that mattered was me and then I invited each person back in and it was like is this feeling supportive? You don't need to be married to do that. >> Yeah. >> So >> that's great. That's great. I think just >> it's a reminder of our resourcefulness to be able to create what we seem what seems to be lacking in terms of the connections or relationships or >> partner um probably more anchors and potentialists and butterflies in our life or that we have access to um one degree away that we could, you know, bring bring into the picture. >> Yeah. You know, this is a this I think you'll you'll like this thought that I've had going through my head. When you're in connection with another human, the goal is to have a an energy that is flowing between the two of you. And when you go to somebody who has been in pain and come out the other side and you ask for their help, what you're doing is you're receiving the energy that they've been dying to put somewhere, to give somewhere. so many women that are waiting to be asked to help other women and it and there needs to be a flow of energy and when we don't ask then we don't receive and the energy flow is stagnant. So you actually deepen connection by asking for help. And if that person has been through that problem already, they want they want to share their wisdom because it makes their situation worth it. >> Yeah. >> I have so many friends that just signed up like, "I'm here to help you, Mindy. Let me tell you what happened to me." They didn't say, "This is what you do." They said, "Let me tell you what happened to me when I was 55 and at your stage and life was unfolding." And it was it what I learned is that it helped them as much as it helped me. So ask for help. >> So good. Mindy, one more question. >> Yes. If you had a megaphone that reached every woman on the planet and 60 seconds to share an important message about the truth of aging, what would it be? >> Well, the first thing is your brain is rewiring to help you live life on your terms. Don't fall asleep to the moment. Don't don't try to make yourself so comfortable that you're not aware of what's not working for you. Second thing I would say is that as we age, it is truly a coming home to yourself. And when I mean yourself, that might be your little girl who the culture decided needed to behave differently. You get to be the one that protects her now. Bring her back and start to bring her back, her playfulness back into your life and take back the qualities of who you were. That's what your brain is designed for. Now, if you don't stand in your truth, if you don't start to do life the way you want it to be done, you will become invisible. And we don't need a billion women to become invisible. We need a billion women to stand up in their own uniqueness and speak what matters. That we've never seen that on the planet yet where a billion women stand up and say, "This is what I believe. This is what I what I own as being myself and how can I make an impact on the culture through my own certain identity. That's what menopause is meant for. I love the fire and passion you bring because this is like the the message is one thing, but the messenger also really makes it land so much more powerfully for people. And it's just no question that your your platform and the way that you show up has been resonant with so many people, so many women across the board. Um because there's a few like really key things that I just see in the way that you share. One, you're you share your authentic journey and the vulnerable parts that really connect with people. The the admitting of I'm not okay and how that really connects with people that also truthfully feel like that is something that's so powerful. Um, and then the way that you interweave the science and what's happening in the biology alongside the psychology and the mythical and the archetypal lens just creates this package that I think is actually like really really needed right now. Um, so I'm just such a big proponent of you, Mindy, and your new book, Age Like a Girl, which people can find links in the description for. And that's it. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. >> Thank you. I did, too. I know. We should probably converse more outside of the podcast world because I'd love your brain. >> Yeah, we got >> Yeah, exactly. If I lived here, that would be a lot easier. But yes, agreed. Agreed. And and thank you. No, and I really um I really appreciate the depth of connection that you bring um and the thoughts that you bring because I think the world is asking us all to to go vertical, to stop being in the horizontal. We got to go into the depth with each other. That's what this moment is bringing us all and you do such a good job of that. So, thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> And any other last words where people can stay connected with your work, the book, anything else there that I haven't mentioned? >> Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of everywhere. Um, YouTube is my passion project. I mean, if you're looking for more how-tos, go check out my videos there. Um, the one thing I'd say about the book is, I mean, you can get it everywhere, but keep in mind that the independent bookstores are mom and pop bookstores, and famil family's livelihoods depend on us going there. So, if you have a local independent bookstore, please go there or you can go to bookshop.org and order from there and it'll support an indie. Um, so, you know, just in the vein of let's get away from the corporate greed and go back into supporting everyday humans. And that's what those independent bookstores mean to me. >> I love it. It's great. Yeah, we'll we'll link down for that below. And for everybody that's tuning in, if you feel called to share your own journey along this process, I'm so curious to hear where you're at and what resonated with you and you find supportive from this conversation moving forward. >> I strive in this podcast to have conversations that support people of all stages and all journeys of life. And I think this has been a topic that is needed now more than ever as we need conscious leaders and women to own their power. And thank you again. >> Thank you. Appreciate it. >> All right. We did it. Cheers. >> We did it. Yay. [music] >> [music]

@DrMindyPelz returns to explore the deeper meaning of aging, menopause, and the profound psychological and neurological transformations women undergo as they grow older. Drawing from neuroscience, anthropology, mythology, and personal experience, Mindy reframes menopause not as a decline—but as an initiation into wisdom, sovereignty, and inner authority. We discuss the concept of the “second innocence,” the pruning and rewiring of the female brain across hormonal transitions, the grandmother hypothesis, and why modern culture fears aging women. Mindy shares how trauma, grief, solitude, and uncertainty can become gateways to resilience, neuroplasticity, and self-discovery—especially when women stop outsourcing their worth and begin listening inward. Boost your hydration with Pique Life Tea (20% off here): https://www.piquelife.com/knowthyself Andrés Book Recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list ___________ 00:00 Intro - Dr. Mindy Pelz 03:39 The return to the second innocence 08:18 What’s the purpose of menopause? 16:09 Where the shift begins 23:04 Supporting others without abandoning yourself 31:57 Being considerate vs owning others’ emotions 34:14 Ad: Pique Life 35:55 The power of solitude 43:26 Letting go 52:48 From power over to power within 56:48 The brain architecture of wisdom 1:02:24 Transformation: From a caterpillar to a butterfly 1:19:58 Fasting during menopause 1:26:35 Knowing when and how to detox 1:32:10 EBOO 1:32:31 Healing through breathwork, EMDR, psilocybin 1:45:12 Lacking a support system 1:49:07 Closing thoughts ___________ Episode Resources: Her new book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/age-like-a-girl-why-the-brain-changes-that-happen-after-40-set-you-up-for-your-best-life-yet-dr-mindy-pelz/1d7c0fe95ab52c4f?ean=9781401975562&next=t https://www.instagram.com/dr.mindypelz https://www.drmindypelz.com/ https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcast https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com Listen to the show: Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX