Ep 150 Midlife as a Second Spring: The Season Nobody Told You About

What are you really longing for when you wish you could get back to who you used to be? It's almost never about the old body or the old energy. It's about wanting a different relationship with your life, and that's found ahead of you, not behind.

In this milestone one hundred and fiftieth episode, and the final part of a three-part series, Carly explores why the strategies that got you here won't necessarily carry you forward, why the grief of midlife deserves to be honoured before we rush to the reframe, and the idea, drawn from Kate Codrington's book Second Spring, that midlife isn't a decline but a whole new season of growth with its own fruits.

With a client story, a piece of Carly's own, and a gentle question worth sitting with: is something twinkling for you?

Part 3 of 3. A gentle note: this episode touches on grief and loss of identity in midlife with care.

If this has stirred something, and you'd love someone alongside you as you step into your own next season, I'd be honoured to be that person. That's the whole heart of my Embodied Strength Profile: Learn more HERE

Thanks for listening to Rooted In Presence

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Transcript

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0:46

Hello, and welcome back to Rooted in Presence. I'm Carly, your curious midlife guide and founder of Still Space Hull. And here we are at episode 150. 150, let's have a little moment with that because, well, those episodes are getting on, and that's a bit of a round number. So even if you've been here for a handful of those, thank you, and I really do mean that. It means more than you know that you keep choosing to spend some of your time here with me, so thank you. And this is also the third and final part of a little series I've been sharing about three shifts that I've noticed again and again over the years in the women that I work with. We've talked about the shift from fighting your body to working with it, the shift from trying to fix everything to joining up the dots, and today we come to the third one, which feels like a really amazing one to land on for episode 150, because it's all about that looking back in order to move forward. And if you've missed the others, you can absolutely start here, and you might enjoy going back for the other two if you are yet to listen in So let's start here then with something I see so often and that I think perhaps is often misread So many women come to me wanting to get back to who they used to be, to the old body, the old energy, the version of themselves from 10 or 20 years ago, and that longing is real, and it's tender, and I never dismiss it. But when we sit with it properly and really get underneath it, it's almost never actually about how your body is, or the weight, or the specific number, or the favorite pair of old jeans. What they're really longing for is a different relationship with their life, to feel at home in themselves again, to feel capable and free, and really like themselves. And that's the thing, though, it is actually available, but usually not by going backwards, not by trying to reconstruct a version of yourself that belonged to a completely different season of your life. And that's a bit of a trap in the looking back. We look back at what we used to be able to do, what we used as the measure of success, and we can grieve that we can't do it the way we did when we were 25. And staring in that old version so hard, like some magical mirror, we can completely miss what we're actually able to do now. What this season, this body, this self is genuinely capable of, and that the old version never was But I don't want to rush to that because I think, you know, that's something that's often skipped over, especially in the good vibes only kind of areas of wellness community, and we can skip over this very quickly. Let's just sit with that for a moment, because before the wonderful reframe, before the new possibilities, there is usually a period of grief, and that deserves to be honored, not just hurried past. So let me give you an example that has really stayed with me. I mean, there is a last time you lift the heaviest weights you'll ever lift, and you don't know it-it's the last time that's happening. You just think, "It's Tuesday, it's training day. That was a good one." And maybe you think there'll be more, and only much later looking back do you realize that, ah, that was it. That was the peak. That was the heaviest weight I ever lifted, and never really marked that. And I've had that experience myself. That's from me, but from others that I speak to too. And when you notice that, you start to see it's true of so much more than lifting. That was just one example. But there's a last time you pick up your child before they get too big, For those of you that have children in your life, there's a last time that you see a friend without knowing it's the last time. There's versions of ourselves we say goodbye to without any ceremony at all because we didn't realize we were leaving that chapter behind. Moments that marked the beginning of the end of something that we only recognize as such once we're on the other side of it And midlife, I find, brings a lot of this reminiscing. It's a kind of quiet life review. And for women, some of this comes with real physiology behind it. As our estrogen drops, it naturally removes some of that emotional buffering we've had for much of our lives, and that can leave us more open, more raw, more porous to those deeper emotions. We can feel more grief quite often first, but eventually there is greater capacity for joy and the things that we might decide to term as the good emotions. Um, yeah, it does get to feel better, I promise. But grief really is the one that often comes first. And let's just be really clear about how this can feel, because I'm not being dramatic when I say this. These are the words I've heard more than once for many women and, and myself. But it can feel like a real loss of self, a loss of identity, like losing your grip on everything you thought you knew about who you were. And if that's where you are now, I want you to know that you're not being over the top, and you're not alone. It's real, and it's a common experience, and there are reasons for it, and it is not a sign that anything has gone wrong. And yes, of course, this is a time of life, if it feels particularly strong, particularly challenging, this is absolutely a time to reach out for more help, whether that's coaching, whether that's a therapist. But these are not things that you need to go through alone, as I said. So before we talk about more beginnings, I want to give you that permission to let the grief actually be there, to not skip it, because I really believe that letting that grief be felt is a healthier road to those beginnings, not a detour from them. And the joy that can come later can be fuller, it can feel more real when we haven't bypassed the, the goodbye to... that happens along the way But then there is a shift itself, that third shift. The strategies that got you here aren't necessarily the ones that are gonna carry you forward to this other chapter of life, and that's not because you did anything wrong or because they were bad strategies. They were probably brilliant. They got you all the way here, and that's not a small thing, right? But they belong to a particular season of your life and served a particular version of you. The pushing, the willpower, the discipline, the doing it all, the ways you coped and achieved and held everything together, they were the right thing for who you were and what you needed then. But you're not in that season anymore. Sorry, not sorry. You're becoming someone new. Well, a new layer of who you are anyway, And that next season asks for new ways of being, not trying harder or more desperately applying the old versions of what worked before. And this is why so many women feel like they're failing when really they're just trying to use the tools of their first spring in a season that's asking for something completely different And there's that word, spring. I deliberately use that because there's an idea I love and I've worked with, and it's really beautifully explored in a book called Second Spring by Kate Codrington, which I would recommend if this speaks to you. So the idea around it is this, like we're taught to think of a woman's life as a single arc, a rise to some peak in youth, and then a long, slow decline afterwards. Downhill after a certain age, as we're so often told in the culture we've grown around, but that is not how the natural world actually works, and it is not how a woman's life works either. So menopause in this framing is not actually the beginning of the end. It is actually an opportunity for a second spring, a whole new season of growth, which has its own fruits, fruits that simply were not available to you in the first spring of your young years when we didn't have the experience, and perhaps we didn't have the freedom to choose our own life in the same way as we might do now But this is what the second spring asks of you. You can't carry the whole weight of your first part of your life with you. You have to be willing to put some of it down, and I mean that in every sense. There's the literal putting down, just like the barbell, the acknowledgement that this body, in this season, may not do the exact things it did before, and that's allowed, and there's a deeper putting down as well, setting down the weight of who you used to be, the pressure to keep performing a version of yourself that belonged to this other season. The exhausting effort of trying to be her again, trying to keep that exact version of you going. But putting that weight down is not giving up. It's what frees your hands to gather up the new fruits. You can't pick up what the season is offering you whilst your arms are still full of the last one. And this doesn't mean about saying completely goodbye to an old version of you, getting rid of past versions. You can't do that. It's all you. It's all still there. It's just allowing that all to sit with you as it is. You know, things will drop away. But there's parts of you that have developed because of everything you've done so far, which can never be taken away from you. They're just probably gonna be carried a little bit differently, and that doesn't need to be a bad thing. So, let me tell you about one of the women I've worked with, um, because her story holds all of this. Keeping her details private, of course, um, but I have permission to share this. So, she came to me and somewhere in our conversations, she said something like, "I've always wanted to start a business." Always. It had been there, this little quiet twinkle, for years and years, and I could see it in her eyes when we were speaking. But it sat behind this wall of, of buts. She was too far from that version of herself at that moment. She thought it was too late in life to start a business. That was a dream for a younger version of her, a first spring dream, surely not something a woman navigating menopause goes and actually does. And what struck me was that the things she longed for wasn't behind her at all. It genuinely was ahead of her. It was a fruit of her second spring, just gently ripening over time. And ripening so slowly that she almost couldn't let herself see it because she was so busy looking back and deciding it was too late and trying to get hold of the version of her that could do all the old things. And I recognized it completely in that moment because it has so much of my own story in there, too. Still Space Hull, the studio, this whole thing I've been doing for just about a year now, it was a twinkle in my eye a good nine months before I did anything about it. It was on my mind quietly, and I really did not think I would actually ever create this. And I remember the exact feeling because my own words at the time were, "Do I dare even to do that? Do I dare?" And I want to And I want to be real about where I was when I was asking that. I wasn't standing there in confidence. I was in the middle of my own season of life review, grieving a version of myself I thought I knew, i had no certainty at all that everything would be okay if I let myself evolve into this version of myself I hadn't even got to know yet. I didn't have any guarantees, just a twinkle, a question, and eventually, a decision to step toward it anyway. And here we are, 150 episodes deep into a podcast I started on a similar vein, with a studio that is approaching its first birthday. So this is what I want to leave with you today on this auspicious episode. That is there something twinkling for you? Some longing, some quiet idea, some version of a life that flickers up now and then, and that you just keep putting down because you think, "Nah, it's too late. That's gone. Surely there's no way I could be that person now. Surely that was a dream for a younger version of me." But, hmm, what if it isn't behind you at all? What if it's ahead of you? Perhaps it could be a fruit of your second spring, still ripening whilst you weren't looking. And what if the grief you might be feeling right now, the loss of the old self, isn't really the end of your story, but maybe just the composting, the very thing that makes the ground rich enough for this new thing to grow. And you don't have to know any of that yet. You don't even have to be certain, and yeah, I definitely wasn't. You just maybe need to let yourself do a bit of wondering, and maybe, do I dare? And let that question stay open rather than rushing for an answer, or joining straight in with that automatic no. So that's the third shift for you, and the close of this little series from looking back at who we were to moving forward as a version of us that we're becoming. Honoring that grief of what we're leaving and what's turning, and perhaps gently taking steps forward to the season we're actually in. So if this series has stirred something in you across all three shifts, from ending that fight with your body, joining the dots, and maybe daring to move forward, and perhaps you'd love to have someone alongside you as you step into your own next season, I would be incredibly honored to be that person if it feels right for you. So this is the whole heart of my work. It's why I created the Embodied Strength Profile. Now we spend real unhurried time together looking at how you move, breathe, and how your body and your life all fit together so you can put down what's really not yours to carry anymore and find that next step that you can really trust. So we do that in person here at Soul Space Hull or online, wherever in the world you are, and you can find everything you need at carlykillen.com, and I'll pop that into the show notes. So thank you, really thank you for being here for episode 150. Here's to the next season, yours and mine both. And until next time, may you meet yourself with compassion, walk with presence, and remember you already have everything you need