Anti-Aging is BS: Choose Respect, Confidence & Sensuality with Dr. Amanda Hanson

Has society forgotten what it looks like - and means - to age naturally? Are you ready to fall in love with yourself all over again? Listen to this empowering re-released episode with Dr. Amanda Hanson, where she uncovers the secrets to living sensually and authentically at any age. Let's kick anti-aging to the curb and reclaim beauty and worthiness together! To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://drmindypelz.com/ep301 Dr. Amanda Hanson (known as the Midlife Muse) is the psychologist who has crafted a one-of-a-kind approach that blends traditional psychology with time-tested holistic methods to help women heal from emotional traumas and break free from destructive patterns. Dr. Amanda firmly advocates embracing aging as a profound spiritual journey. Her expertise lies in guiding women towards cultivating a profound sense of self-love, viewing themselves with reverence and self-respect, and empowering them to master their confidence along this transformative path. Dr. Amanda is both a biological and adoptive mother to 4 children, and she has been happily married for 28 years. Check out our fasting membership at https://esetacademy.drmindypelz.com https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com/. Please note our medical disclaimer https://drmindypelz.com/medical-disclaimer/.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Mindy Pelz?

  On this episode of the Resetter Podcast, I bring you Dr. Amanda Hanson. Okay, pull up a chair, grab a box of tissues, grab a notebook and a pen. You are about to get a masterclass in what I would call pro-aging. So I want to give you a background on Amanda. I'm going to give you her clinical bio, but then I want to tell you about the journey in which Amanda and I met, and why I brought her to you, and what you're about to experience. So she's known as the midlife muse. So she's on Instagram. If you don't follow her on Instagram, that's where I found her.

• 0:46Mindy Pelz?

  Please go follow her because her reels are insane. And she's a psychologist who has crafted what she calls a one-of-a-kind approach that blends traditional psychology with time-tested holistic methods. And her mission is to help women heal from emotional traumas and break through destructive patterns. Now, what I really caught my eye is that she really looks as aging as a spiritual journey. And when I saw her on Instagram, I was like blown away at how she was breaking a paradigm that we call aging. And if you've been following me at all on the Resetter Podcast,

• 1:28Mindy Pelz?

  I too, as a soon-to-be 55-year-old woman, have really been deeply thinking about how I want to age and how I want to not necessarily stop the aging process. And I've really been diving deep into this understanding of like how we age in a healing way. Because so much of how we age is actually disconnecting us from our true selves and is actually creating more dis-ease in our body. The anti-aging movement has now become harmful, especially to women.

• 2:08Mindy Pelz?

  And if that's a new concept for you, you are in for a total paradigm shift in this podcast.

• 2:17Mindy Pelz?

  Here's where we went. We of course started with why anti-aging is destructive and what would pro-aging look like. We went in to things like the beauty that so many people are trying to hold on to and why that is necessary and why that's not necessary and how that can be toxic and how we can embrace it and it can be natural. So this isn't a shaming of whether you use botox or fillers or did anything like this. This is an opportunity for us as women to really think deeper as to what these tools mean to us that we are using to stop the aging process. We also

• 2:59Mindy Pelz?

  went into why as a woman do we feel the need to stop the aging process and how could we reframe this and look at the back half of our years or what Jane Fonda calls the third act as our most authentic, happy and vibrant time. I think you're going to find all those answers in this podcast. If you're looking for a different conversation on aging, you're about to get one. I hope you take this conversation with love and curiosity and you see what's possible for all women when we discover just how beautiful our bodies are, whether we are 25 or we are 65, and how we can

• 3:43Mindy Pelz?

  come together and become the wise elders of this incredible culture we are blessed to live in. So I'mma let Amanda take it away, Dr. Amanda Hanson, a conversation on aging you no doubt have never heard before. I hope it changes your life and fills you up with hope. Enjoy.

• 4:06Mindy Pelz?

  Welcome to the Resetter Podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. If you have a passion for learning, if you're looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you.

• 4:36Mindy Pelz?

  You know, I have to tell you, I feel like I have called you here because I really resonated so deeply with what you're doing on socials and it hits right into the heart of my fear for women right now, which is built around this idea that we can slow aging down, that we're against aging. And I saw this incredible quote from Jamie Lee Curtis that said, "I'm not anti-aging, I'm pro-aging." And I thought, "Pro-aging, this is what we need to talk about." So when I found your Instagram, I was like, "Here is a beautiful woman who

• 5:18Mindy Pelz?

  is like, it seems like you've been talking about this for a while, has really been helping offer up a different approach to aging." So I'm gonna, A, start by welcoming you, and B, by just, can we dive in to why anti-aging is not the path we want to take for women?

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Yes, thank you, Mindy, for having me. And thank you for having me to speak about what I believe is a very urgent conversation and something that is important, as we both have young daughters in their, I believe, twenties.

• 5:51Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  They're watching. And I feel a massive responsibility to create a different narrative. My daughter will choose her own path, but I feel a huge responsibility to give her an alternative storyline to being a woman on the decades-long journey as she watches me.

• 6:10Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. You know, it is interesting, as when you're a mother of a daughter, you become acutely aware she's watching everything. But then when you launch them, you forget they're still watching. So I think that's so beautiful. And one of the things that disturbs me about the anti-aging movement is that women are toxifying themselves to slow the aging process down. And I want to share a story that I had. With one, a close friend of mine from childhood. And she came, we hadn't seen each other in a couple of years, was both mid 50s. And she, we started talking about plastic surgery and what, what she was doing. I haven't done anything.

• 6:53Mindy Pelz?

  And I asked her, when she told me what she was doing, I said, why? Like, why are you doing that? And she said, well, you know, when you go, you meet people that you haven't seen in a while, or you meet, you could connect with people. The first thing they say to you is you look so good. And I'm like, really? Like, for me, like, that wouldn't be, like, I'd rather them say, I love what you're up to. I love your, I get a lot of people say to me, I love your energy. Like, that is a bigger compliment to me than you look so good. And so I started to unpack this with her because it really, it really baffled me.

• 7:31Mindy Pelz?

  And what I got to is ultimately, you look so good is, equates to you are worthy to the culture.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:41Mindy Pelz?

  So do we, is the anti-aging rhetoric, I love the way you said the urgency. Is it because women are scared of being tossed aside by the culture?

• 7:53Speaker 01

  I believe so, absolutely, because I believe when we look at the patriarchal system at hand, we have built women's really only sense of power. When you think about the fact that women didn't even have financial agency until 1975, at least here in the US, right? So we're not talking about very long ago. A woman's power was in the shape of her body and the youthfulness of her face, the tightness of her skin, the suppleness of everything, the length of her hair. So if that's the only way that you can have any sense of power in the world, you are going to hold on to that as tightly as possible. And I think it's how women secured their place in society.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  It's how they maybe got the, the man, or they could attract the man who was, or, or had more options. And so when we are still operating on an outdated storyline and we haven't revamped the way, and that's what I think this conversation is about.

• 8:49Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  But when we haven't revamped the way we are able to insert ourselves into power in this society as women, we are still borrowing a really outdated system that keeps women.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Forever chasing, I feel like anytime a woman jumps on that train of botox, fillers, plastic surgery, I feel like it is a moving train that you almost can never get off. And I find women becoming more and more addicted to it. And so I think it's a very scary, scary situation that we're in.

• 9:22Mindy Pelz?

  And the, and the problem, again, like, I'm always respectful of people doing it the way they want to do it. But what I'm concerned about, which probably lines up with you, is just that women are doing it without intention. They're like, "Oh, my God, I got wrinkles." Or, you know, "Oh, my God, my eyes are flopping down. Now I need to bring my eyes up." Or, "My neck has got the turkey gobble." And all of a sudden, I, they don't, they just want to stop it and they don't think of it as, "Oh, really, what I'm saying is, I'm going to become unworthy. I'm going to become unlovable." And I, because we live in a patriarchal society, until it's a different world, I see that

• 10:05Mindy Pelz?

  that's sort of the, the, the fate of women. Unless all of us come together and say, "Guess what? Like, you thought I was young and beautiful in my twenties and thirties? I'm a wise elder badass in my fifties and sixties, and now I want, culture, I want you to look at me differently." Is that sort of the transformation that you see could happen for women? And how would we go about making that happen?

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Yes, I do see that as the transformation and the place we're headed and, and really what my entire platform is built upon. I find it to be wildly insulting that my life, my identity, would be based on zero evolution of my face. So what I'm saying is, I'm only worthy if nothing changes. My, every wonderful thing, Mindy, about my life has come through the next expression of myself, the next decade of my life, as I'm constantly in evolution. It seems counterintuitive to me that my face wouldn't be a representation, or my body wouldn't be a representation of that evolution.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  I have zero interest in looking how I looked at 30, now that I'm 51. And I can't wait, the 95-year-old version of me. I'm also doing this for her. I'm also walking out every wrinkle, everything that happens, every sunspot as an honor to her. Because where I stand, there's nothing to be afraid of. There's everything to step into. So while I'm running to try and freeze and around every corner, stop all signs of aging, God forbid, what I'm actually doing, and I know this is a big statement, but what I'm actually doing is I am disconnecting from

• 11:54Speaker 01

  any sense of soulfulness. I would go toe to toe with the spiritual community when they try to tell me like, well, it's just another spiritual expression and this is just our 3D representation. There's nothing to me as spiritual in this modern day world to watch myself every single morning in that mere age and do nothing about it but honor it. There is no deeper spiritual practice as far as I can see in a world that's telling me I should not dare be so free. I have so many women in my DMs saying to me, what does your husband think of your aging?

• 12:27Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  I'm so surprised that you don't color your hair. I have people come into my reels, very rarely, but I have women come in and say, you look disgusting. Do something with your hair. Yeah.

• 12:41Mindy Pelz?

  Do you, so, okay, do I get DMs from women that say,

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Women.

• 12:46Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, women that say botox, you, my elevens, botox, so that because you look older than me, you should really botox. I have had more people, and they're all women, and I'm like, yeah, but my ethos is to not toxify myself. So that doesn't really make sense because botox is rat poison and why would I put rat poison into my body? And on the flip side of that, a question I have been asking, and you are the right person to ask this to.

• 13:20Mindy Pelz?

  Is what does wisdom look like? I'm not saying what does wisdom feel like? I'm not saying what does wisdom sound like? But if we all freeze our faces and we are in anti-aging, how do we know where the wise elders are in our community?

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Full body chills right now when you said that. Like head to toe chills. It's so interesting. My 21-year-old daughter said to me a couple of weeks ago through a really sad tone. "Mom, I don't even know what a 30-year-old face looks like anymore."

• 13:54Mindy Pelz?

  Wow.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:55Mindy Pelz?

  Wow.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  "I don't know. I have no idea of what that looks like." And she was showing me a couple of trends on TikTok for girls her age. And it's a mother-daughter day. They call it like their mother-daughter day bonding, where they go get Botox together and then they go get their manis and their pettys. And I thought, this is so sad to me that we have now created a trend around mothers and daughters bonding through toxifying themselves, rather than sitting down and going for a walk or having conversation like, "Tell me what makes your heart beat so fast that you get so excited about? What's that one thing you can't stop talking about? Or what's that one thing you're really scared about right now? What are you worried about for your future?" You know, where are those conversations? And I agree with you.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  When we are, again, I feel a massive calling in the depths of my soul and a responsibility to this next generation. Mindy, when I go out on the streets of the world, even happened last night here in California, no matter where I am, I could be in Croatia, I can be in Ireland, I can be in anywhere, anywhere. Young women in particular stop me on the streets and say, "Thank you." Girls in their twenties, "Thank you for what you're doing. I don't have any role models for women who are aging. Thank you so much." I had a woman accost me in the most beautiful way recently in New York City. And she said, "I showed your page to my boyfriend." And I said, "Just so you know, I'm gonna age like this. And if you have a problem with it, we should just end this right now."

• 15:25Mindy Pelz?

  Oh my God, that is so beautiful. That is, I feel like I found a kindred sister because I have, you know, being public on, on social media is, you, you need a thick skin. And I have had moments that I have butt up against my own like, like ethos, again, like my value system. And I, I always go back to, I need first to make myself proud of me.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:51Mindy Pelz?

  And if I can't make my own self proud of me, then, then I'm really doomed. And, and then again, I've looked around at people and, and, and looked for other, other people in high positions that are actually saying things that you're saying. Because I think that's the only way we're going to get the culture to see this different, is there's gotta be like, people like you and me, and what Jamie Lee Curtis is saying, and Cameron Diaz is saying something, and like, celebrities are starting to say stuff. And I feel like we need to claim eldership back. We need to claim that, you know, the post-menopausal woman has so much power. When you break it down and you look at like,

• 16:32Mindy Pelz?

  the brain changes that happen to us, like, we are, you should fear us.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Mindy, I think that's what it is. I actually think that, I do. I actually think because you can easily impress a younger woman, more often than not, not every time. More often than not, a 20-year-old, a 30-year-old, maybe even early 40s, is more easily impressed than a woman who's been through some shit. Than a woman who's arrived at this place of agency. You can't impress her as easily. She's gonna say what she really means. And so I think what we actually fear is the power of a woman in midlife and beyond, because she doesn't give any Fs anymore. And she's gonna really tell you what it is that she wants and needs in her life and this relationship. And for a man who's not doing any of his

• 17:17Speaker 01

  own work in his life, that's gonna feel exhausting. That's gonna feel really hard to keep up with. So I feel like, you know, I've had women say to me, "Oh, it's easy for you to say because you've been married for 28 years. If you got divorced, your husband left you, you would run out and color your hair, you'd start getting Botox." And I said, "As a matter of fact, not only would I not, I would double down on not doing it." And here's why.

• 17:39Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  If I'm somewhere in the world, Mindy, and a man is attracted to this...

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Then we may have a possibility of a conversation. I am not an energetic match for a man who needs me to look 35 when I'm 55. That I have no interest in being with a man like that. My husband, when he started aging, he's six years older than me. It wasn't even a, it was a non-event. Let's just say that. It wasn't even an event like, am I going to color my hair? What am I going to do about these wrinkles? It didn't even cross his mind. Life just continued. And then a lot of women around me, as we were starting to approach that age, everybody was starting to whisper like, what are you going to do? How are you going to handle it? I'm like, handle what? What are you talking about? Like, and so I made that declaration like, I'm just going to let Mother Nature take her course.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  I trust that Mother Nature knows what she's doing. We've been doing this for as long as time, just like birthing babies and breastfeeding and so many things. I greatly trust the wisdom of a woman's body. And so I am in beautiful trust. And I see it as every day, a new discovery. And, and being able to go to the mirror and seeing the silver or seeing the new lines. Again, we can make aging mean whatever we want. I've decided to make it mean one of the most beautiful gifts I unwrap every morning. We can go to the mirror and decide what story do I want to tell? I've created the most epic love story, Mindy, with my aging. And for that reason, I'm in love with it. I feel the power of it when I walk into a room.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Because I know that I'm a representation of something that the world has said, don't you dare be that old and that free. Don't you dare love yourself that much. Love this. Don't you walk into a room and love the way you're aging? And then how dare you put it on display proudly? Oh, that's why I think it threatens other women. Because women say to me a lot of times in my DMs, you know, I've had women write litneys of emails to me. You know, I really feel like that reel that you did was very shaming for women who get botox. And I'm like, Well, according to Eleanor Roosevelt, no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. So if you feel shame when you listen to that reel, that's the work for you to do. Because the only time I feel triggered is when there's a deeper message for me to unpack for my own life.

• 19:58Mindy Pelz?

  Yes.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Right? So I, you're not gonna watch that. If you love getting Botox, you're not gonna, you're not gonna feel affected by my work. You're gonna be like, oh, not for me. She's not the person for me. And just go on to the next. But if you take the time to come into my DMs, I know that something is stirring inside of you. There's probably a more beautiful truth for you if you're willing to get honest enough and sit with it.

• 20:20Mindy Pelz?

  Oh my God, that is so beautiful. And I, you know, it's interesting, as you were talking, I was thinking about during the pandemic. My sister, who lives in Boston, and we live in California, said to me, "Will you take a picture of mom's hair color? So that we can see what hair color we are heading towards, because my mom colors her hair."

• 20:44Mindy Pelz?

  And at that moment, I was like, I never even realized that. I don't know my mom's real hair color. Like, yeah. And so I did. I took a picture because her roots were growing out and I sent it to her. I'm like, here you go. Here's, here's what we're in for. And it, without that, there's a little bit of, of female connection you're missing, you know? Like, if you look at the way many cultures pass wisdom down through the women, if we are just completely freezing aging, I believe we're missing out on the wisdom getting passed down that, that can come, again, from a visual expression of aging.

• 21:29Mindy Pelz?

  And, you know, I'm sure you've studied her, her work, but one of my favorite people, or favorite authors is Clarissa Pocillo Estes.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 21:40Mindy Pelz?

  And she wrote a book called The Power of the Crown. And a friend of mine said, hey, you should read it. And I was like, hey, what are you doing calling me the crown? And she said, no, crone means crown. And when I started to think about that, I was like, in our Western culture, we have completely shut the wise elder woman down. And we are not giving her a voice to speak. And this is why I started searching and I was like, what does wisdom look like? I've asked so many people this question. What does wisdom look like? What is wi- and nobody can give me an answer. Because we've all tried to manipulate the look of wisdom.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  You know what wisdom looks like to me? When I, when you go, especially where you live, right? With the access to like such beautiful landscapes and forestry. When I go and I stand in the middle of the redwoods, or I go and I stand in the middle of a forest somewhere, and I look at the majesty of these big, beautiful trees. I don't think, oh, it's a little too mature. If only it didn't have this bark peeling here and that branch was like that. I go there and I am so in awe of all it has withstood and how deeply rooted and firmly planted it is, regardless of the storms that have passed through, that it's still there with the test of time. And to me, that's what wisdom looks like for me to represent.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  I am so deeply grounded. I feel like a safe harbor for a lot of women in my life. I feel like that woman, as, as the tides come and go and people are frantic and they're running around so terrified in their princess energy. I'm standing there as this deeply rooted queen. It's gonna be okay. And when you're done in the fear, I'll be here. I'll be here to guide you to what actually, and you know, I spent many years also in the childbirthing industry. And I also taught, because I loved it so much, as a side gig on Sunday nights, I taught natural childbirth for 10 years. Because I love the wisdom of a woman's body so much. And I was like, that's okay. I'll always be here. When you want to learn about the power of your body to bring a child into this world, I'll be here.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  And for those who are scared, it's okay. That's okay. You're just, you, you heard the lies and you believed they were the truth. You, you interpreted them and took them and absorbed them into your soul. And so what I think is happening for aging is in a world where we have infantilized women.

• 24:07Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  And you think about the pornography culture and you think about the things that happen and what men are looking at. When we are attracted to that look, and you know, I can't remember the name of the Netflix special where they talked about like Abercrombie and Fitch and Victoria's Secret. And they were saying that the ideal age for a woman, like in her prime, is 15 years old.

• 24:29Mindy Pelz?

  What?

• 24:30Speaker 01

  Fifteen. And think about that. Think about how easily it is to manipulate a 15-year-old.

• 24:37Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Right? Because what does she really know about the world? I remember me at 15. What?

• 24:42Mindy Pelz?

  No, nothing.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Nothing.

• 24:44Mindy Pelz?

  And if it's a patriarchal world, what I know is how I look matters.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Absolutely. Have you read the book? Oh, I'm gonna forget the name of it, but somebody just recommended it to me. Actually, I just finished my own book and so my publishing company was saying to me, your book has a tone, my book doesn't come out till March, but they were saying, your book has a tone of, women don't owe you pretty.

• 25:07Mindy Pelz?

  Hmm.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  And it's a book about how we, as we move in the world, we don't owe anybody in the world, beauty or prettiness. We owe the answer, like you said, the number one person that you have to put your head on the pillow for or answer to or make proud is you. And that is not, most women are not moving in that kind of agency. I have clients across the globe of all cultures, all religions, all belief systems, and women universally don't feel like who they want to be ever gets to come first. It's who their parents want them to be, who their partner wants them to be. Women even tell me, Amanda, if I stop doing Botox, I'll probably get fired from my job.

• 25:50Mindy Pelz?

  What?

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know a news anchor, a very well-known news anchor, who is, her co-anchors are men who are visibly way older than her, completely gray wrinkles, and she is fighting tooth and nail to show zero signs of it because as she's approaching 40, there have been conversations already that she may not be the person for the role anymore. Now, they'll never come out and directly say, because of your aging. But she was explaining to me, and I said, then just go create a new table. Why do you keep sitting at the table?

• 26:21Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  That perpetuates that system. And she's like, it's just easier this way. I'm like, that's not a table I'd want to sit.

• 26:28Mindy Pelz?

  It's like, it's like an uphill stream. So, or like swimming upstream.

• 26:36Mindy Pelz?

  Something that came to my attention this year was a feminist philosopher, I keep talking about her on my podcast, Carol Gilligan, I'm trying to get her on my podcast, and she wrote back in the 80s, something called "In A Different Voice." And if you haven't heard about it, this is right up your alley. So what she discovered is if you ask an 11-year-old girl a question, like, "What do you want to eat?" She will tell you exactly what she wants to eat. But if you ask her at 13, after she's gone through puberty, what she wants to eat, she will say, "I don't know, what do you want to eat?"

• 27:14Mindy Pelz?

  And that it's in that time period when our hormones come in, because our hormones give us that sexual feeling now, I mean, we're really sexual beings, to the 15-year-old horrible comment, but is that now that's where we adapt. And I have a real feeling that, and I can only, and this is a journey I'm personally going on, is going back and learning again who the 11-year-old was, who the 10-year-old was, what was her desire before her hormones came in and she became a world-class people-pleaser?

• 27:52Mindy Pelz?

  Because now, I'm 55, or almost 55, I'm two years into my post-menopausal experience, the hormones are gone, and I'm looking at aging and thinking exactly what you're saying. I don't want to manipulate myself to feel worthy, that actually it's a moment for me to reconnect to whoever that authentic woman-girl was. Who was she? And how do I go back and understand her hopes and dreams before the patriarchal culture told her to be something different? And I think aging is a form of reclamation.

• 28:31Mindy Pelz?

  It's bringing back that girl into your life today before you manipulated every single part of you to please a culture that only wanted to keep you sexually attractive.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Yes, and a culture that profits off of you, whether it is selling the products through the vice of fear, right, that you need all of these things to be worthy and to be lovable, whether they're selling to you through the modem of fear, or they're profiting by, you know, sexualizing you in all of the ways that women are sexualized, to sell things, to move the needle in every possible industry. And I completely agree that going back to saying, hell with that, I see, when I look at all of that, I am so, I am so immovable when it comes to all of that because I see exactly what the modem is and why they're trying to tariff.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  I mean, there's not an ounce of fear in me when it comes to aging, like none whatsoever. So I see all of that. I do feel sad for the women who believe in all of that messaging. But my work is exactly what you're talking about. It is a redirection. And before coming on here, I was in, I have a lot of clients via a messaging app where we do voice messages every day. And one of the biggest things I take women through is this reconnection. And I have, I just recorded last week with my team, this beautiful, we call it the inter-maiden meditation, where I take them on a journey back to that seven, eight-year-old, nine, 10-year-old girl, that girl in there, whose dreams, anything was possible, she had the most beautiful dreams.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  And as soon as she realized that the world had expectations from her, bit by bit, the walls started to close in and she lost her magnetic energy because she now realized like, oh, my father has this expectation, the boys at my school have this, the girls. And before you know it, she's so far removed from herself. So I have women in their mid-40s and beyond coming saying, I want to find her again. I want to reconnect with her.

• 30:40Mindy Pelz?

  And that's, that's the opportunity I think of menopause and perimenopause. I, I call it the neurochemical armor. The neurochemical armor is coming down. You're starting to get this reflection of who you've been and who you can be. And, and here we are, either villainizing menopause or creaming it or patching it, which I, is, whatever you choose to do, there's no, there's no criticism on that. But don't miss the opportunity. And what, in my book, when that neurochemical armor comes down, there is like, oh my God, it's like a waking up to the 11 year old.

• 31:19Mindy Pelz?

  And then dealing with the traumas that have been accumulated while you were under this patriarchal hex. So I know you do a lot of trauma work, like speak, because I, I, like some of the stats that really kill my soul are like 50, 40 to 50 is the most common time for a woman to commit suicide. 70% of divorces over 40 are initiated by women. To me, these are women that are waking up to this truth that they had altered themselves and they don't know what to do.

• 31:55Mindy Pelz?

  And I feel like voices like you, me, other people, we need to stand up as, as a, a collective and surround these women and say, you're just, you just were asleep. You were asleep for 40 years and you're waking up. Don't turn on yourself. Go back to your authentic self and let her shine. So how, how do we help these women when they're in that moment, when traumas show up, when they hear words like we're talking about and say, you two are so brave. It's like, no, there's a deeper awakening that you and I are saying, don't miss, but there's also a deeper healing that may need to happen.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Absolutely. You know, I started a podcast maybe 20 weeks ago and it's, uh, Midlife Muse and I, I named it, um, Everything Your Mother Never Told You. Right? And, and it's because our, and it's not about blaming, it's the reality. Our mothers couldn't teach us a different way to source our lives because nobody ever taught them. Right, so women like us are coming with the megaphone saying, "Wait a minute, I do believe there's a different way that we can do this, a more beautiful way." My own mother, possibly yours, I'm not sure, is looking at me like I'm the bravest woman that's ever walked this earth at 75. She's still terrified of aging, colors her hair every two weeks, and can't believe that I'm as free as I am in my life, right?

• 33:15Speaker 01

  To live the way I'm living. So I think the work becomes, first, so much grace and compassion as these women start to come awake, right? Grace and compassion, and you look over your shoulder and you realize you built an entire life through the energy of I will obtain worthiness, maybe even a little bit of love, if I serve. And I serve, and I serve, and I give, and I give, and I give, to the point that I get so far removed, I have no idea who I am, and I'll keep doing that. And then what ends up happening is you get a few decades down the road, and you wake up one day in the middle of your life, and you think, "I don't know if that return on investment was actually what I thought it was gonna be."

• 33:56Speaker 01

  And what I find, almost in every situation across the world when women find my work, is what is missing, Mindy, almost every time, in this beautiful puzzle that they've constructed. I got the house, I got the job, I have the kids, I have the money, we take two vacations a year, I've got the dog, I've got, right, they've got all the things. I eat organic, I work out five days a week. And then the one piece, there's that piece in the middle, they're like, "I can't find that piece of the puzzle, where is it?" Nine times out of 10, it's them. They're doing everything on what I call the patriarchal checklist, but something is missing. Something feels off, and they can, and this is where I see addictions begin to happen, whether it's a shopping addiction, a drinking addiction,

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Netflix addiction, scrolling on their phones. Affairs begin to percolate and happen, because what's actually missing, and the culture hasn't given women alternatives, like we're doing right now, is like, "Oh, my gosh, sister, you're missing." And the women are like, "What?" Mindy, when I sit in a room at my retreats, and I ask 30 women, we're sitting in a circle on the floor, and I ask them to start by going around, two things I ask them, "When we go around and it's your turn, please introduce yourself, tell us your name, what brings you here, and tell us about you. I don't want to know who you serve. I don't want to know if you're married, I don't want to know if you have children, and I don't want to know who you work for. Tell me about your soul." And women are like...

• 35:23Speaker 01

  I don't know what to say. And then a few hours later, we get into the next activity and I ask them like, in the deepest places of within you, I take them through a meditation. And I ask them, what do you desire? Mindy, the things that women desire will blow your heart wide open. It's so beautiful. And then we start to unpack, well, what's kept you from stepping into that? Fear that my partner will leave. Fear that, you know, one of the biggest questions that I get asked all the time is, how does your partner deal with your such a huge opinion? The way you are so public, the way you speak about things. And I have pretty strong opinions. How does he deal with that? How does he deal with you being successful and visible and all the things you are? I'm like, I don't know, maybe you should ask him. It's not like it's up for debate.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  This is just who I am. Right. And I don't understand why they think there has to be a direct threat. Because I feel like my expansion, my truth is an opportunity for his expansion and his truth to root even deeper. So it's fascinating that we think a successful woman, an opinionated woman is somehow means she's not worried, she's going to lose love. That's women's biggest fear. If I go for what I desire, everyone's going to leave me. No one's going to like me and all, and my friends won't like me. Women are worried about losing their friends. And you know what, Mindy? The louder I get, the more public I get, the more things that happen in my career. Beautiful. Everybody loved to cheer for like the Amanda in private practice who was more quiet, just my people in my town knew me, right?

• 36:51Speaker 01

  But as I went on social media around the COVID time, all of a sudden, the people who were rooting for me like, oh, it's so cute. Oh, my God, you're going to go on TikTok. I love that. Go Amanda. And then as everything exploded and all these things are happening now, a lot of people are very quiet. And a lot of women who were standing there aren't standing there anymore. Because it, it, no, I think it's, it, we like a woman when she has a dream, but we don't like her when it's come true.

• 37:20Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, that's so good. And I would think the reason is because it's a reflection of what's possible for women that they're not willing to step into. We have, I've seen that with weight loss over and over and over again, where once somebody loses weight, they lose friends because now you are reflecting back to them what they know they need to do, but they are unable to do. So I want to go back to two, two really important themes through what you just said. One is if you're in a long-term relationship, going through what I would consider this, you know, I think of it like a menopausal metamorphosis.

• 38:00Mindy Pelz?

  If you're willing to see menopause as a real opportunity to stop the people pleasing, to come back to this authentic version of you, it's going to require a conversation with the spouse that might have married, like in my case, my husband and I met at 21 years old, got married at 26. And I've had, it's been hard. There has been conversations of like, I'm doing me now. I'm doing it my way now. And he's getting, he's getting it, but I can see where some marriages, that could be a threat. So can we help women have the courage to step into themselves within the container of something they may have established years ago?

• 38:45Mindy Pelz?

  So that's my first question. And then the second question I want to understand is why women don't collaborate? Why the frickin' A do we turn on each other? We have to stop that.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  Oh, I, chills. So the first one, I think, you know, my husband too, you know, they say, I saw a stat the other day, and I wish I could remember exactly where I found this, but that 30% of men will ever actually step into self-development, right? And the evolution, and I think a lot of them are static. And that's not an insult, it's just the reality, right? I remember about 15 years ago, it was either we were gonna get divorced, and I did file for divorce 15 years ago, because I felt like the woman I was becoming, I was no longer a match to the to the man I married in regards to, I said yes when I was still in my young princess energy, we met when I was 21. I said yes to something that felt like a feast,

• 39:41Speaker 01

  when the woman now, I'm like, ooh, that's a breadcrumb. I need more than that. I'm starving. That that used to sustain me, and I need more now. And so he would say things like, Amanda, I don't think you're ever gonna be happy. You're searching for something that doesn't exist, right? All of these things. And so I said, you know, and maybe we just have walked each other as far as we can, and this is the end of our journey. So I filed for divorce, and we're pretty far down the path, and we're about to sign the final papers. And he says to me, is there anything we can just, can I have six months? Can we just try really hard for six months to reimagine this relationship? Because I said to him, what I was saying all along is, we can't go back to the two of us who walked down the aisle together.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  Those two have grown up and evolved, and we've grown and evolved in different ways. And Mindy, I'll never forget, the light bulb went off. I said to him, let me ask you something. He's in corporate America. I said, let me ask you something. You're in the medical industry. These businesses that you run, are you still running them the way they were run in the 60s, 70s, and 80s? Or is your research and development team constantly looking for innovative ideas? Way to bring new things to the market, to make surgeries more optimal, and recovery more optimal for patients? He's like, oh, of course, of course. Oh, so constant evolution? Absolutely. Your business wouldn't even survive? Oh, okay. Well, think of this as a business. How could you think our marriage would survive and thrive if we were not in constant evolution,

• 41:11Speaker 01

  and reimagining new ways of creating this relationship? So if you can't be side by side with me in that mentality, no harm, no foul. This just, it's come to an end, because I am like a snake shedding my skin. I will shed it until I take my final breath. There are gonna be so many versions of me. And so either that's exciting to you, or it's not, and there's no blame. And that was when a light bulb went off and when he was able to put it, so what I'm offering to women who are listening, somehow in the more simplistic terms, men are often able to cross that bridge when we make it about something they understand, like business, right? Growing of a business, evolution of a business.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  That for him was a game-changing moment in our marriage and we're still together now, 20, total 28 years. And then in regards to the second question with, I think the sisterhood wound stems from, Mindy, when I tell you, I have yet to have a client, maybe I've had one or two in 25 years, I can't even think of any right off the top of my head. It is so rare to have a client who's had a beautiful, healthy connection with her mother. And so if your first example in life of womanhood is with your mother and she is somehow threatened by you, jealous of you, she talks badly about other women, she feels threatened by other

• 42:36Speaker 01

  women, you grow up with the coding that other women are not safe. And I think there's something deeply inside of our nervous systems dating back thousands of years or hundreds of years even as recent as that, where we were in competition for, there was only so many men to marry, to secure, when you think about it, our safety. A roof over our head, food on the table, because we had no financial agency, we were removed from patriarchy. When patriarchy came and women removed from all power. And so I think it stems from some really deep-rooted things that women have been through and when there was real competition. And so now, if we take it to modern day times, women may say, oh, well, there's only so many seats at the board table. So we are in competition.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  So until we start to see each other as collaborators, because I always say this, I don't want to be the only one sharing this message. That's why when I met you in Miami, I was like, Oh my God, I've like never fangirled so hard. I'm like, oh my God, a woman who literally speaks my language, where has she been my whole life?

• 43:39Speaker 02

  That's how I feel what I, that's how I feel about you. I'm like, we gotta partner together somehow because.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  It's unbelievable. It's because I, I do get women who are like, oh yeah, I love your message, but yet there's things that are, let's just say philosophies that are very misaligned in certain ways. I mean, even if we just stand side by side, you could tell that we may both be 51, but it's a definitely different energetic presentation because there's a lot of influencers. I was at an event in New York City for female, well, there were men too, but where many female influencers in my age range were there. And it is a very different, I kind of felt like I was in my little pod and then there was all of them. And I felt like we are speak, we speak two very different languages. Well, I can, I respect that that's what you've chosen for you. I can't even participate in this conversation because

• 44:30Speaker 01

  none of what is coming out of any of your mouths aligns for me. One iota, actually the exact opposite. So I think a lot of women in this space are still posing for the patriarchy.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  As opposed to building the matriarchy. You and I, I, I can speak for myself, I'm building the matriarchy. I'm building a matriarchal conversation, a matriarchal stage, a matriarchal way. Like I'll be here till there's no, there's no air left in my lungs speaking this message. And I think that we, we've, first of all, you and I probably don't have a lot of women who want to come alongside of that, like really arm in arm and be like, yes, shout it from the rooftops. It's a new message. All revolutionaries are considered crazy when they are sharing a new message. And it's only after they're dead and long gone, people are like, wow, she was really on to something. So, but I think

• 45:22Speaker 01

  that we're not going to be able to come together and collaborate as a collective, as women, until we start to become safe women within ourselves. And so my, my clients are always asking me, how do I become a safe woman to other women? I said, when, when you stop betraying yourself, when you also stop seeing that there's only room at the top for a certain amount of women. Because in my, I have a membership group and every Friday we come in and we do brags and celebrations. And I'm like, I want you to brag. So big, so audacious, so wild that anywhere else in the world, you think every woman would hate you. And let's watch how we get inspired from each other's success.

• 46:01Mindy Pelz?

  Ooh, so good.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  Because we've learned how to commiserate in all the misery and I want to change that narrative. Yes, I don't want to bypass the pain. Yes, we, we deal with the pain. But we also have to learn how to celebrate each other and normalize it inside of our bodies. And, and notice like, oh, actually, every time that woman goes higher, it's an example for me of what's possible. If a woman is really successful and amazing things are happening for her, isn't that evidence that I too get to have that?

• 46:32Mindy Pelz?

  Right. It's what's, yeah, it's, yeah. So, so this leads to a concept that I've been trying to bring into the Western world, which is we put the Okinawa women on a pedestal and we're like, look at, they all, look at how old they live. This is amazing. So I went deep down into what are the qualities of the Okinawa Japanese women? And one of the things they do is they create a moai. And a moai is where they come together because they outlive their husbands most of the time. They come together and they share resources. And whether it's financial resources, it's a home, it's food, it's connection. Like here's a friend, here's another friend. And I keep thinking, how in this world do we create a moai?

• 47:16Mindy Pelz?

  Where every woman comes together in a state of collaboration to lift each other up? And say, you know, we're not a threat to each other when you go, okay, you, let's use you and I. We're both on social media. You have one path you're talking, I have another path we're talking, but we're both talking women's empowerment. So that doesn't put us at competition. That puts us in a louder sounding message when we come together and we both speak from the lens that we can speak from. We actually can change women in a deeper way than if we pit against each other and try to do it in a silo.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  I completely agree with you. And you know, it's interesting, I even just heard a word, my husband and I, we're here in California together. We had dinner last night. And I was saying to him, let me ask you something. I said, do you ever hear your guy friends or in business, do you hear men talk about, yeah, I'm feeling really empowered? Or, yeah, I really, I want to, I'm gonna go to this men's empowerment group. Because another word I really am working hard to change is I want us to stop saying empowerment.

• 48:24Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, I love this, okay.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  It's like almost a passive form of power, like, hi, could I have just maybe a little bit of power, please? I just want a little bit of power. Because we think of power as having power over other people. You better believe, Mindy, I want power. I want power over my body, I want power over my voice, over my opinion, agency in my, my decisions I get to make. I want power in my business and how I run it, who I decide to collaborate with. You better believe I want power. And so I want to normalize saying that as women, we want power. I think that's another thing that needs to shift. As opposed, he's like, oh, my gosh, Amanda, I never thought about it. I've never heard men use the word empowerment in my life. And I hear women in business say it constantly.

• 49:03Mindy Pelz?

  Well, it's because we want, we want power over the patri, I mean, the patriarch has had power over us. I, I actually went down a rabbit hole trying to understand the difference between a patriarchal and matriarchal society. And I spent a lot of time trying to figure out where my brain set on it. And I finally came to this conclusion. Patriarchal society is power over, and matriarchal society is power within. And so as I'm hearing you speak, I'm like, you were speaking about power within. So this actually leads me to the question, then, if we don't use the words empower, because I think this is brilliant, what you're saying. How do we help a woman feel the power that's inside of her?

• 49:44Mindy Pelz?

  You know, for me, this is why I love fasting, because I can help a woman drop a serious amount of weight, fall in love with her body again, and nobody helped her do that. She just had to compress her eating window, elongate her fasting window, and the only person she can thank is herself. So she discovers a power that was there that she didn't know was there. So what words can we use? Because so many women are feeling disempowered. What, would there be another language we could speak around that?

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Yes, my vehicle is sensuality. So I bring women, the, the superhighway into a woman's power in my world comes through sensuality. The thing that has been the most taboo, the most feared, the most vilified, the most prophetized and commodified, and as a matter of fact, the most shamed, and God forbid, a woman actually connect to her sensuality for herself because it's something she has understood was actually never hers. It was something other people could use or take from her. And when I refer to sensuality, I don't even necessarily mean, but it does distill down to that, just in the sexual terms. To me, helping women tap in through

• 50:58Speaker 01

  their sensuality, especially women who are coming from deeply, deeply indoctrinated religions, come to my work, and there's so much trauma and healing that has to happen. I help them source into sensuality, because you can't take a woman like that right into it. So I help her get there by starting through the art of living through her five senses, very, very alive, and, and bringing herself through the presence of, what do I hear, what do I see, what do I taste, what do I smell, what do I touch, and beginning to make the most luxurious experience out of the simplest of moments. So coming back alive that way. When you are, yeah, when you are living with the art of your five senses really engaged, you start to live in an energy that has you turned on instead of off for life, for

• 51:43Speaker 01

  the trees, for the birds, for the smells, the aromas, the fabric on your skin, the eyelashes of the person you're talking to. Everything seems to start to take this like new form and technicolor. And then, when she normalizes that kind of living inside of her nervous system, she's very hard to sell to because life feels so sensorial and delicious, just living or walking on the beach and looking at the shells is so erotic. Then I help her go a little bit deeper, and it's, it's a journey, right? But then I help her get in to that root, down into that chakra of that sensual energy. And so I do that by many different forms. But when, when women tap into that, Mindy?

• 52:25Speaker 01

  All bets are off. That's it. All bets are off. That business she's been dreaming of, that conversation she's been wanting to have, she finds her power. And, and women say to me, Amanda, I didn't even know I was capable of feeling that much. Like, I know. Do you understand why the world wanted you to be shut off from that? Because that is potent. When a woman resources into her... I worked with a woman recently who hadn't had an orgasm, hadn't felt anything in over 10 years, uh, who's now having them every day. I work with women who hadn't had any wetness. She's 65, zero wetness, lubrication whatsoever. And now it's like, I, I can't believe that I'm this wet all the time. She's like,

• 53:07Speaker 01

  I don't even know what you did to me. I'm like, oh, you did it. I was only the information sharer. Information is useless if you don't implement. You decided to be brave enough to implement it and now look at the life that you have. So for me, the vehicle of their power is their sensuality.

• 53:24Mindy Pelz?

  Which is really interesting because the patriarch, you know, it's so, it's fascinating because I, I can see that through my lens. Cause I, you know, I'm like, I'm really upset right now about the weight loss drugs because I feel like we are so far off the track. Now I know for people like who have pre-diabetes, like there, it definitely is a lifesaver, but we're missing the deeper meaning here. And now you are being told you need to be a certain weight to be lovable and all. I mean, there's so much there. So when I look at what you said through the lens of my work with the patriarch, it's like, yeah, it's, it, when you show a woman how to lose her own weight and fall in love with her own body, she becomes hard to market to.

• 54:08Mindy Pelz?

  So with you, like the way you're saying, if you feel your true sensuality just by being turned on by your own sense, senses, now you can't be marketed to, that's incredible. Now, uh, one of the things about sensuality that I think is interesting is I create sen- I, I equate sensuality to, to creativity.

• 54:32Mindy Pelz?

  And it's, and when we get tapped into that creative side, I had Martha Beck on this podcast. And she was sharing that why she thinks anxiety is up is because we are all in our left brain. And our whole world has been created by this left brain patriarch. And we aren't in our creative right brain. And she said, the brain was never meant to be only one hemisphere used. It was meant for both hemispheres used. And when we come into that wholeness, now the anxiety goes away. I'm thinking that what you just said is that we were never supposed to outsource our sensuality.

• 55:15Mindy Pelz?

  We were supposed to build it from within. And what you're doing is bringing women back to an energy that was supposed to be there that the patriarch took away.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  Yes, you know, absolutely, Minnie. Thank you for summarizing it so beautifully. You know, when I was doing research for my book, one of the things that I stumbled upon was when Native American women and tribes would celebrate a girl beginning her period by decorating her hair with flowers, lighting a fire and dancing around the fire and singing as a celebration of her stepping into this era of her life, this time of becoming a woman. And the colonizers would be hiding in the woods and finding these women dancing and they would come and rape them. And so the movement of a woman's body was enticing. And again, men thought, oh, well, I now feel turned on, so I get to take that thing.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  So that practice, that art, that rite of passage, that ritual started to be something women feared. So they completely stopped it. Because I was looking for rites of passage when girls started their period. Why we don't still have those. And there's a lot of trauma around why that got stopped. And so a lot of my work, and when we talk about sensuality, is movement and flow and getting women out of their seats and dancing and moving in pretty primal ways. And I showcase that and I demonstrate it. And women are terrified of their own bodies. They're terrified of moving and what gets stirred up as they start moving. And what I said to women is like, listen.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  With all due respect, meditation and yoga are beautiful. But both were created by men for the practices of men. And when you think about masculine versus feminine energy, right? Like that container and that stillness, beautiful. I love both practices, but those alone are not enough for me, Mindy. I need my dance. I need my movement. Women are just like the 28 day moon cycle. Women are created with that constant change and flow. And if we are constantly sedentary, operating just from our cerebral space and not from our womb space, all of our creativity lives down there. And if we're never moving any of that, how do I even know what it is that I want, what I desire? So sometimes when I, in a session with a woman, I'm like, let's get up out of your seat.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  I'm going to get up with you. Let's move. Just close your eyes and listen to the sound of my voice. And I just have her start doing some hip circles and moving. You can't believe, almost immediately, the answer she was looking for comes. The tears start streaming because they're sourcing from a place that they have been cut off from, a place between their hips that they've told, don't go there, don't source there. I mean, even when you think about, this would be another episode. We could do like so many different episodes. But even when you think about how we have prophetized birth in this country.

• 58:07Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Right?

• 58:09Mindy Pelz?

  Which is the most amazing. I've never felt, you know, I have never felt more like a woman than when I delivered my babies. And, and real quickly, I will tell you that my second child, my son, was born at home. And one of the greatest moments of my life was when he came out naturally and I looked, I locked eyes with my daughter, who was in diapers and two and a half years old. And she looked at me like, your body can do that? It was one of the most beautiful feminine moments where an older woman and a younger child, like to be like this. And I, I always tell people that I feel like what I looked at her and said is, this is

• 58:54Mindy Pelz?

  feminine power. Don't forget it.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Mindy? Oh, my skin hurts. My skin hurts, the chills. Yes. It's so resonant, like something ancient inside of me just got activated. It's so powerful. I mean, if people could really pause for just a moment and hear, you know, and again, I've had women say to me when I've talked about this on one of my podcast episodes, "Well, I feel like you're shaming women who had C-sections or epidurals." I said, "No, I'm sharing my story. If me sharing my story or my 10 years of teaching natural childbirth somehow feels like shame to you, you've misunderstood." I'm sharing a different narrative. Just because you and I are sharing different narratives, it doesn't mean that the other one has to be wrong. It just means here's a different way to consider being a woman. Here's a different way to access your power.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  And so I think that when we start patriarchalizing, prophetizing, "Lay on your back, we're gonna numb you up, you don't know how to do this, we're gonna make it happen for you."

• 59:47Mindy Pelz?

  You don't want to feel any pain.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  Oh, God forbid.

• 59:50Mindy Pelz?

  You shouldn't feel any pain. Yeah.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, you know, I think, I think the, that area of a woman's body in general, we've been so disconnected from it that women are afraid to connect to it. And when they do and they realize, "Oh, my gosh, there was actually never anything to be afraid of." As a matter of fact, so many of the answers of my life live there.

• 1:00:12Mindy Pelz?

  Wow. Do you know, one of my sweet friends is LeAnn Rimes and the singer. She's such a beautiful soul. And do you know that she taught me that the vocal cords and the cervix were same tissue and they separate at birth? And when she first said that to me, I literally went to YouTube to look up the vocal cords because I had never looked at the vocal cords before. And I was like, "Oh, my God, you, so what does that mean when a woman's voice is silenced? How does that affect her cervical tissue? And when a woman has been raped, how does that affect her vocal tissue? If these are literally histologically the same tissue,

• 1:00:56Mindy Pelz?

  that, I can see why you're going in through the door of sensuality. Because if we can wake that up, then we can wake the voice up. And I can see why the patriarch would want us to silence us sexually. Because if you silence us sexually, you silence our vocal, our ability to speak for ourselves.

• 1:01:17Mindy Pelz?

  I mean, it goes deep.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  It is so deep. And if you've seen, if you went on YouTube, you've seen the diagram of it. I show that when I start my, my masterminds. I show them the, the visual of that and it, it, it looks like, you know, everything else. And so I explain to women, like, those guts separated, but the vagal nerve, the vagus nerve is still connecting them.

• 1:01:37Mindy Pelz?

  Connects them.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Yes. And so often there are women, when they're really afraid to go the other route to begin the sensuality work. I have them begin here. Like, let, let me hear you. Follow, follow me. We're going to do this together, right? And we get into that, I have them just start making really faint noises and then we get louder. And then I help them move it more guttural. And as this starts to come more alive and open, naturally, everything else does, eventually, right? So it's, every woman needs a different way of getting there. The journey is a bit different for every woman, depending on what kind of trauma she's dealing with. But I have a really beautiful, insanely powerful rage release practice. That rage release practice includes a lot of vocals, right?

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  And a lot of movement that is very primal and very feminine and very sensual. So it's helping because rage is just unalchemized passion, right? You have, you, you have rage and God forbid, we don't want women to be angry. You have to be pleasing and pretty.

• 1:02:34Mindy Pelz?

  No, no.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  Don't be upset.

• 1:02:36Mindy Pelz?

  Culture would not like that. We're called a bitch if we are, just FYI.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. But I teach them how to access their rage because also accessing your rage and being able to usher yourself through that is the flip side of sensuality. It's the other side of passion. So there's just so much beautiful work to be experienced.

• 1:02:54Mindy Pelz?

  You know what I want to say on that is the vagus nerve is the seat of the parasympathetic nervous system. And I look at that, as I was hearing you speak, I was thinking, well, isn't that interesting? So when women aren't resting and they're not accessing their parasympathetic nervous system, they're also not activating their voice, they're not activating their, their cervical, you know, their womb, let's just call it. So, and then the, in the opposite is probably true where when you start to activate the, the cervical tissue through the work you're, like you're doing and you activate your voice, you actually now are activating the parasympathetic nervous system. And when I think about like, things like infertility, I mean, you have the background

• 1:03:37Mindy Pelz?

  in, in birth, like infertility, what if that's just your inability to fully express yourself? And so it keeps you stuck in this sympathetic dominant state that is not leaning into the vagus nerve, that's not leaning into these tissues that are connected. Like, we, we look at the body as, as parts and we are so one whole being that needs to be addressed from so many areas. So, I did, that was just something I thought, I was like, well, that's interesting, because one of the things I'm trying to get women to do is courageously rest. It's time for us to honor rest. And if you honor rest, what I'm also hearing is you're honoring your vocal cords

• 1:04:21Mindy Pelz?

  and you're honoring your creative womb energy.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  And you're telling your body it's safe, right? It's safe to rest.

• 1:04:27Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  That's such a beautiful thing. We could talk forever.

• 1:04:30Mindy Pelz?

  I know. I'm like, I found a sister. I want to be your friend. Like, if all your friends are leaving you, I'm leaning in and I'm gonna be your friend.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  Perfect. We're friends, because I too, when you were speaking, like I said, I was with a friend who is like-minded and I was, said, my gosh, she is so incredible. I cannot believe that another woman like this exists. How did I not hear about her before?

• 1:04:52Mindy Pelz?

  I know. Thank you.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:04:54Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. How do people find you? Because I, you know, I, I'm creating a MOI and I want, if anybody resonated with this, to dive into your work. So how do people find you and talk a little bit about the seminar you have coming up?

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  Yes. So you can find me as @midlifemuse on Instagram and pretty much anywhere, TikTok, Facebook. And I have, my, my website is amandahanson.com, but I have an incredible event coming, when I talk about the matriarchal stage. I have a two-day event happening in Phoenix, Arizona, November 2nd and 3rd, and it's gonna be... Several hundred women already registered coming from all across the world where my entire body of work will be condensed into those two full days. I will be teaching all of the rituals and the ceremonies for everything you and I have been talking about from stage and women who feel called to will be able to also experience those ceremonies and rituals in the room live with me.

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  So all the ways of going in and bringing that innate healing capabilities that we have to the forefront because it's not outside of us. Everything we need for healing is inside. So I will be teaching that for two full days in Phoenix.

• 1:06:03Mindy Pelz?

  Amazing. Well, we will leave links for all of that and just, you know, keep doing the amazing work you're doing. I do have to ask my final question, which always, which always is entertaining for me, which is what is your definition of health and how do you know when you are healthy?

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  The definition of health for me is I have a practice I call emotional hygiene. And so I am radically responsible for the feelings that I'm feeling inside and making sure that I am sourcing and figuring out what I need so that I am not contaminating the people that I love. I'm not contaminating my business or my clients or the world at large. So I have a, which I'll be teaching in Phoenix as well, but I have a daily emotional hygiene practice. And the way I know that I am in good hygiene with my emotional health is that I am very clear in what I speak and I own my feelings. I don't make them about other people. I don't project. And that's how I know I'm doing really good emotional hygienics.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  Just like we brush our teeth every day, I take care of my emotions every day.

• 1:07:07Mindy Pelz?

  Amazing, amazing. Well, again, I could talk to you forever and we need to, we need to start our MOI. Maybe we're the first two members and we'll pull other women into it, but thank you. Like, you know what I want to say? And this is what I, I think women need to say to each other because in this conversation, I actually feel seen by you.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  Same.

• 1:07:28Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. It's like, like you and I have a passion around something that's, that's bigger than us and to hear you speak, I feel heard, I feel seen, and I think that's what is possible for women when we speak our truth and we, and we gather together. So I just want to thank you for that. It's just been, I mean, such a beautiful experience for me. So thank you.

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  Thank you. It's been an honor for me to be a part of it. Thank you very much.

• 1:07:54Mindy Pelz?

  My pleasure.

• 1:07:57Mindy Pelz?

  Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.