E176 - Dr. Mindy Pelz: Why Midlife Feels So Disorienting (And What It’s Trying to Teach You)

Dr. Mindy Pelz 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 1:32:31 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

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Between the ages of 45 and 55 is the most common time for a woman to kill herself. After 40, 70% of divorces are initiated by women. I just boiled it down to one single statement, which is, "Now's the time to get to know yourself."

• 0:15André Duqum?

  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?

• 0:25Speaker 00

  I started to notice women who were in my practice would tell me stories that they wouldn't say in front of their family. And the stories went something like, "So what I want women to know is..." It's so liberating. Try it out. So liberating when you do not care. When women are like, "I had a hunch this was gonna happen." That actually is a physiological state in your brain. And on the last day, I said something that it freed me, and I think could free all women. And I said, "I'm not okay."

• 0:59André Duqum?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know thyself Podcast. Our guest today is a returning guest. She is a bestselling 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 yeah, Dr. Mindy Pallas, thank you so much for coming back.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  Oh, thank you for having me. 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.

• 1:36André Duqum?

  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. 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 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?

• 2:04Speaker 00

  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 years 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 put me on a journey 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 to pull the information out. It was, as everybody in the publishing,

• 2:49Speaker 00

  my publishing world told me, you've, 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

• 3:32Speaker 00

  me who I should be. And it just became very clear, the only person I could dedicate it to was her.

• 3:40André Duqum?

  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, societal, familial, different 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

• 4:23André Duqum?

  an important conversation, not just for menopausal women, which we'll go into, but for people of all, people from all walks of life with, you know, different evolving identities and that are growing. I'm curious to set the framework a bit as we dive in this conversation, how you feel like it's going to be able to serve people?

• 4:41Speaker 00

  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, 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

• 5:20Speaker 00

  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-reproductively. And when I started to put

• 6:02Speaker 00

  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 nothing the human body does 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 can 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?

• 6:44Speaker 00

  And I think what we're seeing is that there's not a lot of reverence in our culture for rites 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?

• 7:23Speaker 00

  And honestly, like in 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 belief system that keeps her tethered to her external purpose, or her external look.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  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.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you, so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 8:49André Duqum?

  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. 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 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.

• 9:32André Duqum?

  Because I think, and we'll kind of, we'll get to the point where we're reawakening the perspective of the oracle, of the woman who is incredibly wise and especially post-menopausal has this incredible capacity and gift to be leaders for society. But there's a journey to get there. And so could you walk us through that hormonal and neural journey?

• 9:56Speaker 00

  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 has this process happened? And so when I looked at it through a neuroscience lens, I just stumbled upon Lisa Moscone's work, which you probably had her on your podcast. 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.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  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, especially teenage girls. Postpartum, after pregnancy, same thing. When the hormones crash, big hormonal change. The neurons that kept the woman knowing where her keys were, knowing how to handle the to-do list, those all go away. Because 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.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  If you look at like the chimpanzees and apes, which we're always comparing ourselves to, 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 key-finding 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.

• 12:08Speaker 00

  The neurons that kept women addicted to people-pleasing. And women are, our brains are actually 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 standing up for herself. It's built for speaking the truth. How many women, how many people have hung out with like a 65-year-old woman?

• 12:53Speaker 00

  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.

• 13:29André Duqum?

  And just to riff off that, what is the grandmother hypothesis and why we of very few species have this shift for women in their later years?

• 13:41Speaker 00

  Yes, 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, 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 tribe knew that she would now be needed in another capacity within the tribe. And the reason, their instinctual logic at that point was that all the energy that goes to releasing an egg every single month actually comes back to her. And it comes back to her in three forms.

• 14:20Speaker 00

  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 forage for food. Now, if we go back and we think about the hunter-gatherer days, the men and the probably, you know, I 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.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  And when 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 at like, at the crack of dawn, and they would go on a seven-hour trek every single day to go forage 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

• 15:48Speaker 00

  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 Lisa Moscone wrote about this in her book, we're evolutionary heroines 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 gonna 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.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  There was purpose, there was focus, there was meaning. That's not what we're doing right now.

• 16:39André Duqum?

  How do you compare what the anthropological shift is to the psychological and sort of archetypal shift of the crone and post-menopausal woman in terms of what happens with the growth from knowledge to wisdom and how they, yeah, how they shift in terms of also relation towards others?

• 16:59Speaker 00

  Well, so first, I'd love, I'd love to take apart the word "the crone" 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 Estes, I write a lot about in this book. Like, she talks about the dangerous crown and about a woman coming into this initiation and putting her crown on so that everybody can see that she's a wise elder. Now, 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?

• 17:44Speaker 00

  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 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, their brains grew because grandma had more sophisticated language.

• 18:28Speaker 00

  So she would talk down to, 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, 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 women are scared of this transition, especially if they're in the workplace. Like, will they, ageism is real. Will they be tossed aside? And women who maybe have left marriages and are going, you know, single for the first time, will they ever be loved again?

• 19:09Speaker 00

  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 because, oh, they lived over 100. 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 moai. And a moai is a gathering of women. And everybody in the village knows that if they need advice, they go to these elder

• 19:53Speaker 00

  women. So we have examples in other cultures, but not in Western culture.

• 19:59André Duqum?

  What do you think is really happening? When you mentioned those statistics are on suicide and divorce, what are the main psychological shifts and factors that would contribute to that, do you think?

• 20:11Speaker 00

  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 nine and a girl at nine 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 them 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

• 20:54Speaker 00

  say what the girl would say at 13. I said to the women in the audience, what would the, what would the girls say? And literally, all the women in the audience were like, what are you eating? So Gilligan came out of 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, 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.

• 21:37Speaker 00

  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 wake-up moment. And they're like, whoa, wait. Okay, I've been doing everything for everybody else.

• 22:20Speaker 00

  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 fires, when I evacuated from the Palisades, I went into a real downward spiral. And my therapist said to me, 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 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.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  And there's so many, like, I've had so many great conversations with men who were raised by really amazing women. And 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.

• 23:35André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 24:04André Duqum?

  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 wants to do but never gave herself permission for? Like, excited to see her spread her wings in that regard.

• 24:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:18André Duqum?

  But you have this muscle that's atrophied because of the people pleasing 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.

• 24:32André Duqum?

  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?

• 24:48Speaker 00

  For the women?

• 24:49André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, now's the time to get to know yourself. And, and, and I want to just point out that that can be scary. 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 super 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, as beautiful as this sounds,

• 25:33Speaker 00

  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 that transition from "I'm gonna do everything for everybody else" to "I'm gonna do for me now," it's not as easy as it sounds.

• 26:16Speaker 00

  And this is why in the book, I tried to map out different ways we can look at that. So like, for me, when my therapist said, "What do you want?" I was shocked for about a week. I walked around and 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 know where I want to live. I don't know if I like even the way I dress anymore. Maybe I want to dress different. Am I staying in my marriage? Am I going? Do I like this thing I created? How do I feel 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.

• 27:01Speaker 00

  This goes. I like this part of me." And that process was so liberating. It was really, really important. So...

• 27:10André Duqum?

  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 because 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 gonna 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...

• 27:39André Duqum?

  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.

• 27:48Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 27:49André Duqum?

  Is giving yourself permission to take up space, which usually comes to fruition by virtue of saying no and having boundaries.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  So good.

• 27:59André Duqum?

  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 and taking up space and saying no.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, women aren't taught to take up space. This is, this is, this is what I'm trying to change.

• 28:16André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  It's like, let's take up a lot of space because our voices are powerful 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. So for me, I went through a real like dark night of the soul, trying to understand who I was. I discovered a few really, really profound things there. I discovered I was a classic codependent. I just discovered that this year and I always thought somebody who was codependent

• 28:58Speaker 00

  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, but I was like, okay, why, for me, codependency showed up as if you're hurting, I'm gonna do everything I can to make you stop hurting so that I can feel better.

• 29:27André Duqum?

  Even at the expense of your own needs and self and.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  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, 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 pure reason. You know what I mean? 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 codependency.

• 30:16André Duqum?

  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?

• 30:25Speaker 00

  Right.

• 30:25André Duqum?

  You can take space and not fall into that tendency so quickly?

• 30:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then if, you know, I really looked at my childhood a lot. And there was a lot of chaos in my home 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?

• 31:13Speaker 00

  So then, so now I just feel, I just make myself feel better. Literally, I'm like, I catch myself all the time.

• 31:21André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 31:22Speaker 00

  Is like, like, 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 timed 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 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?

• 32:03Speaker 00

  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's not that important.

• 32:41Speaker 00

  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.

• 32:57André Duqum?

  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?

• 33:12Speaker 00

  Right.

• 33:12André Duqum?

  You know, and not taking, where empathy goes too far is like, again, sacrificing your own needs.

• 33:17Speaker 00

  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 have, 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.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  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 eight o'clock 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 not? I like eating dinner at five o'clock. 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.

• 34:45André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  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.

• 34:54André Duqum?

  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.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  Isn't that funny?

• 35:03André Duqum?

  It's like 20 minutes, whatever, however many minutes, like, it's so, it's so funny, the narratives we have about situations, which the other person is in a completely different world too.

• 35:11Speaker 00

  That's right. That's right.

• 35:15André Duqum?

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• 35:59André Duqum?

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• 36:43André Duqum?

  Go to peaklife.com/nowtheyself to grab yours now. That's peaklife.com/nowtheyself. Thank you, Peak, for sponsoring the show. Back to the show.

• 36:54André Duqum?

  I feel like you mentioned how it can feel really scary when you start to have the space that you can take up, but you have the tendency to still stay to what's familiar with you. Change is scary. It's a death of identity, and many times, it is like a death. And I'm curious, what do you think solitude, time alone? What has that uniquely given you that nothing else probably could have?

• 37:16Speaker 00

  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 it's safe or if it's not. Now, most women would say they know that, but when you get into your post-menopausal years, you really know that.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  So for me, solitude became the only way I could get control over my body feelings. So after the fire, you know, in full transparency, I evacuated three times in 36 hours. I ran from fire for almost two days. 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 Bein' Venita, and there was two dads that were trying to get cars out of the canyon of Bein' Venita. And my first reaction was, what are those jerks doing? Like, they're blocking traffic. And then I realized,

• 38:43Speaker 00

  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, this thought hit me of, am I dying today? Like, that's how much chaos it was. Like, is today the day? It's really quite a question to have cross your mind. And so, I, from there, I, and then continuing to run, I was so anxiety ridden, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't think, I couldn't remember passwords. I hadn't, I didn't eat for several days. At one point, I actually went to my best friend's house.

• 39:27Speaker 00

  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? I slowed everything down. But it's the body that, that is why solitude is needed. Because there's so much input happening for women. And then if trauma upon trauma upon trauma builds,

• 40:11Speaker 00

  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 have several friends that went and bought another house so that they could go somewhere and be by themselves. I have some friends that told me every five to six weeks, they take a weekend off by themselves. 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

• 40:56Speaker 00

  and get back into our body so that we aren't falling prey to all the stimuli around us.

• 41:04André Duqum?

  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?

• 41:19Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 42:03Speaker 00

  And I thought of all the things that I was mourning and were gone and all the things that will no longer be. 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 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 require, I needed to look at the hard emotions. So the date with grief became like my go-to.

• 42:46Speaker 00

  And I will tell you, for about three to four months, I would cry every morning when me and grief would have a date. And then after about four 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. Changed all the lights out to red light or orange light. I, at the end of the day, would play chanting music because I know chanting music stimulates the vagus nerve and can stimulate the whole parasympathetic nervous system. So I made sure that in the morning, I woke up slowly.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  I had my date with grief. I moved through that. And at the end of the day, 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. And then I drove slower. I know, I know that's hard to imagine in LA. And then I started telling myself, you have time. You have time. You're not in a hurry anymore. So I used my lifestyle to re-pattern my whole nervous system. And again, I had the luxury of living alone, not thinking about anybody else.

• 44:15Speaker 00

  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 mechanism.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 44:56André Duqum?

  I resonate a lot with what you said, even though I'm not

• 45:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:01André Duqum?

  a menopausal woman. I feel like there is this beauty in minimalism and 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 the Japanese philosophy in wabi-sabi of like the beauty and the imperfection and everything having a sense of intention in your environment, in 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.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  Oh, my God. I also 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, three days from now, or maybe three weeks from now, be on your floor, and you're gonna 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,

• 46:14Speaker 00

  and I looked at my clothes, and I'm like, "You're all replaceable." And then I went through the house, and I was like, "Replaceable, replaceable." Like, all this stuff I'd spent so much time accumulating, in a moment of trauma, I'm like, "Peace out. 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 know. Come with me." And then I took my hormones, because I'm like, "That could get really ugly really quick." And I took one sweat-off outfit that my son had given me two days, you know, a week before Christmas. And it was like, when I left, I'm like, "I think every time I go to buy something now, I'm gonna ask myself, 'Would you take this in a fire?'"

• 46:53André Duqum?

  It's a good question.

• 46:54Speaker 00

  Right? You probably went through the same exercise.

• 46:56André Duqum?

  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-

• 47:03Speaker 00

  Smoke pillow.

• 47:04André Duqum?

  Smoke pillow.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. It was a bumpy pillow.

• 47:06André Duqum?

  Yeah. Huge, just the atmosphere in the sky was filled with all this black smoke, and then realized, "Okay, everything's 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 videos, unfortunately. I carry, like, my hard drives, a guitar friend gave me. And then 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 not attached to it.

• 47:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. 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, because I'd only taken one sweat outfit. And so, I walked in, and I'm like, I looked at the woman who said, "How can I help you?" And I'm like, "I know this is gonna sound funny, but I don't have any clothes."

• 48:02Speaker 00

  And she's like, you don't? I'm like, well, I was in the Palisades fires. And but 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.

• 48:33André Duqum?

  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 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 Black Friday just happened. A small example of that is like, why I actually like Black Friday is because we get all the emails from companies that can unsubscribe.

• 49:08Speaker 00

  You're like, oh, I still have your list.

• 49:10André Duqum?

  Remove, remove, remove.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  Oh, my God, I love that.

• 49:12André Duqum?

  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.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  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 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. 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 juxtapose 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 Tamara Hall, doing all the big media.

• 50:07Speaker 00

  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 fuck.

• 50:19André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 50:20Speaker 00

  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.

• 50:37André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 50:38Speaker 00

  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.

• 50:50André Duqum?

  I hear it, I hear it. And that shirt is fly, by the way.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  Oh, thank you. Thank you.

• 50:55André Duqum?

  But I totally just understand the reprioritization 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 there's survivor guilt also that comes into the picture because I know we both have so many friends who have lost their home. And yeah, just a beautiful lesson and painful one in impermanence. And I think both of us feeling very lucky to be able to have walked away and yeah.

• 51:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, lucky. And I don't know if you feel a little detached from your home now?

• 51:31André Duqum?

  Yeah, more so.

• 51:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:33André Duqum?

  More so, for sure.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  I feel a level of detachment from my stuff that I'm not, I like it. It feels good. And I, but yeah, you know, there were a couple of things I went through. For starters, it wasn't 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. I have no idea how that house made it. I really don't. Like, there was some, some magical bubble going on there. And then, you know, I was telling you about the neighbor who lost, like, his collector car set and like, so you do sort of realize that,

• 52:18Speaker 00

  like, how lucky you were to have a house. But, 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. I don't know if you spent a couple of days. Wondering if your house was standing.

• 52:39André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah, I did. I was, they were to 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.

• 52:46Speaker 00

  No, no. What, so what, what went through your mind on those couple of days when you didn't know?

• 52:52André Duqum?

  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?

• 53:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:02André Duqum?

  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. And there's a few of my friends and I just kind of just got an Airbnb miles outside the city. And I think there is, at least I arrive, eventually arrived to the point of just like, whatever's gonna happen is gonna happen.

• 53:27Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 53:28André Duqum?

  And it's like, oh, I'm just surrender to it.

• 53:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the other thing outside of grief that I got really familiar with was the liminal space. I lived in a space of, I don't know what's next. And 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 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, I was displaced and didn't have a place to land that felt like a home. And that liminal space, I'm sure you've talked a lot about that on here. It is fertile ground.

• 54:14André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 54:15Speaker 00

  There's a lot you can discover there.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you, so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 54:47André Duqum?

  I think what really determines so much of success as a species or on an individual level of our own well-being is our ability to operate in the face of uncertainty. 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 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 going through a different identity. You're shifting how you relate to the world and the energy and the source of your power and how you're operating.

• 55:27Speaker 00

  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 hurting both men and women. If that's the damage, maybe we should all have, 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 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, the fires and the transition that I went through over the last year, mixed with going through menopause,

• 56:13Speaker 00

  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 liberating. Try it out. It's so liberating when you do not care. When you're living life the way you want to live it and you're only asking yourself if you're proud of you. It is so amazing. So now I go power within or I go power together. I've learned to ask for help better. 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 if it is an initiation into a new version of you...

• 56:58Speaker 00

  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 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, there's a deeper sense of connection that makes all the external stress go away. I think that's what I like. 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

• 57:39Speaker 00

  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 oxytocin, that became compassion, that became what made me feel whole, not the external. Does that make sense?

• 58:06André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

• 58:07Speaker 00

  Like that, and 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 Pincola Estes's work is she calls this time of life for women, the rite 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, 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.

• 58:47André Duqum?

  Yeah. So we mentioned briefly earlier this shift towards...

• 58:53André Duqum?

  Women becoming wisdom bearers. We talked about the anthropological lens, but then also the shift of women into deeper roles of leadership. As you go through that life, death, and life cycle, there is a new energy that's being born, you know, a level of sovereignty and individuality. But one that operates with wisdom and has the ability to really see patterns and support people at a much deeper capacity.

• 59:19Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 59:19André Duqum?

  Than just attending to their own needs in the very moment. 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 what's happening to us with that?

• 59:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I wanted to understand 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? So I literally took Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey and I took the life, death, 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.

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  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 prefrontal cortex called the anterior signal. And in there, it's saying, is my environment and what my body feels, are those congruent?

• 1:00:49Speaker 00

  So when women are like, "I had a hunch that," or men will do this too, "but I had a hunch this was gonna happen." That actually is a physiological state in your brain. So we don't want to ignore hunches. Women oftentimes 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 feel called to change." But what we're not acknowledging is that there's a message from her body that is incongruent with what's going on in her environment. And I think this is why the women are killing themselves. This is the divorce.

• 1:01:32Speaker 00

  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 the second two stages that I call the shedding and the grief. 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.

• 1:02:15Speaker 00

  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 the zeitgeist has permeated the fear around that. But what we know is that if you can create, one of the things about Alzheimer's is that it's neurodegeneration.

• 1:02:52Speaker 00

  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

• 1:03:37Speaker 00

  because that is where we grow new neurons that are going to inform the next phase of our life. That was probably the most surprising to me. I even dove into, and I tell it a little bit in the book, looking at the plight of the butterfly and the caterpillar. So do you know Michael Mead?

• 1:04:00André Duqum?

  Sounds familiar.

• 1:04:01Speaker 00

  You need to know Michael Mead.

• 1:04:02André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:03Speaker 00

  He was my guiding light a lot of times. He's a mystic and he's deep into mythology. So his podcast is called The Living Myth. And it's all about 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.

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

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• 1:04:53Speaker 00

  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 chrysalis, what it does is it dissolves the parts of it that it no longer needs. So it literally forms into a goo.

• 1:05:20André Duqum?

  In that process, its head literally comes off too, which is so fascinating.

• 1:05:24Speaker 00

  But, but check this out. It actually, in order for the goo and the dissolving to happen in the greatest way possible, it has to resist its own transformation. 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 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.

• 1:06:07Speaker 00

  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 experience of women going through this process. And the message these women are getting is we read the HRT study wrong. You've been gaslit in your doctor's office. You've been given antidepressants.

• 1:06:51Speaker 00

  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 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 need 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.

• 1:07:35André Duqum?

  It's so fascinating, the aptly named imaginal cells that lie dormant, a potential that is to come, that comes in 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 as a key contributor of what wisdom is and when they study it. When you think about the process of suffering and going in the goo, a transformation of our identity and personality, like the 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

• 1:08:19André Duqum?

  is a rebirth into a new phase, I think it would obviously support so much of the, you know, incredibly depressing statistics around suicide and depression and all of this. So what's coming up for you?

• 1:08:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, keep going. I'm just curious where you're going with this.

• 1:08:37André Duqum?

  Yeah, well, I'm 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. And it doesn't have to be the end of our journey, which unfortunately it is for a lot of people.

• 1:08:55Speaker 00

  Right. What I was resonating with, and is a bit of where you went, is, but maybe we're not supposed to know. 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.

• 1:09:40Speaker 00

  I think 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.

• 1:09:53André Duqum?

  Yep. No, it's, it's great because 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 phenomenon there. You don't know what is to come from the next iteration of you for, you know, and 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.

• 1:10:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:10:23André Duqum?

  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 it's like, just be with that and to be, you know, and to allow that to take up space as you're sharing.

• 1:10:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, sit with it is really important. 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 try on new things, look at things a little bit closer and go, no, 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.

• 1:11:15Speaker 00

  So I do think that there's something really profound about the in-between, the, about the liminal, the liminal space. The liminal, that word became something that I thought so much about and.

• 1:11:31Speaker 00

  You know, 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 had 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.

• 1:12:15Speaker 00

  And all of a sudden, once I accepted that, this was like a couple of months ago when they found him, I realized, "Okay, so then, how am I gonna live every day? What's the state I want to be in?" And the liminal space became possibility. All of a sudden, the liminal space didn't scare me because I don't know what's gonna 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.

• 1:12:59Speaker 00

  I'm exhausted." I did something really interesting the week of the fires. I was leading a water fest for 100,000 people that week. And when I was evacuating and on sunset, wondering if I'm gonna 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 to lead 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 gonna 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.

• 1:13:42Speaker 00

  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, blah, blah. And on the last day, I said something that it freed me, and I think could free all women, 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 gonna get okay, but I bet on myself to get okay. So I appreciate you all being here this week. I'm gonna

• 1:14:26Speaker 00

  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 woman after woman said, thank you for saying that. I'm not okay. So we can be invited into the liminal 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

• 1:15:08Speaker 00

  facing, just so that everybody thinks you're okay. And you let that go, you enter this liminal space, and it's crazy what appears there. It's crazy how life unfolds from there. I don't think I can ever see life different because of that.

• 1:15:26André Duqum?

  There's something so liberating about like the gift of that perspective and how you can carry it forward and future moments.

• 1:15:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:33André Duqum?

  Like how you relate to that liminal space moving forward now.

• 1:15:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:36André Duqum?

  As you're saying, like you look forward to it. And instead of what we can tend to, you know, what we can often do is like have fear of the uncertain future.

• 1:15:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:45André Duqum?

  And of course, past hurt is gonna 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.

• 1:15:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:58André Duqum?

  You know?

• 1:15:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. And that's resilience.

• 1:16:00André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:01Speaker 00

  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. 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.

• 1:16:36André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:38Speaker 00

  And that's wisdom to me.

• 1:16:41André Duqum?

  Talk to me about the journey for women getting up to that point. Because we talked about this like being a 10-year process.

• 1:16:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:47André Duqum?

  Perimenopause and for women that are whatever stage, 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.

• 1:17:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. So typically what happens is it 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 late 30s, 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. It's like, yes, yes, you're built to be erratic because estrogen's going on a wild

• 1:17:45Speaker 00

  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, acetylcholine, which is memory, oxytocin, which is connection, BDNF, which is brain fertilizer, GABA, glutamate, like 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."

• 1:18:31Speaker 00

  It'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, well, know that dopamine has gone down a little bit because estrogen left the building

• 1:19:15Speaker 00

  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 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,

• 1:20:00Speaker 00

  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 got the career." Maybe they've got the family, maybe they don't. 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 2, but I don't feel like going to the gym anymore.

• 1:20:41Speaker 00

  I know that I have a great relationship, but I don't really feel like connecting anymore. 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 gonna 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.

• 1:21:23Speaker 00

  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 gonna make melatonin is if you start to sink 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 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 phrase,

• 1:22:08Speaker 00

  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."

• 1:22:22André Duqum?

  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, what would that be?

• 1:22:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're going right into my, you're going right into my, my love language now. Here's, here's the interesting place I've landed with fasting and menopause. There's, it's been a very hot, really highly contested topic out in social media land. 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.

• 1:23:21Speaker 00

  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 ultra-processed foods. That is going to make your menopausal symptoms and your brain worse than ever. You might've been okay at 25 and 35, but you're not going, that is going to be an experience

• 1:24:06Speaker 00

  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. 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 hours, about 17 hours every single day. So those grandmothers are getting ketones all day long because that's the fuel source

• 1:24:49Speaker 00

  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 like the rushing woman who's doing too many things. They've been dieting, they've been exercising, 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 source called a ketone.

• 1:25:31Speaker 00

  And if you tap into those ketones, like today is a really interesting example. 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 have the best fuel source for my brain with you. And that's how we maneuver this as we go into these years. As opposed to my memory's going away, I can't remember anything, my brain fog, I have ADD. Like, again, that languaging is becoming a badge of honor for women.

• 1:26:08André Duqum?

  I like how you're 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?

• 1:26:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. So in my clinic, the last 10 years of my clinic, I would say 90% of what we were doing was detox. I have tested heavy metals on thousands of people. Most of them are Women and 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, 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.

• 1:27:14Speaker 00

  This is one of the things that we start to see that leads to osteoporosis is estrogen's up, she's down, and the more she has that wild ride, the more the body's like, I'm gonna go ahead and leach 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'd 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 other neuron. So it's like that stunted thought, what was I, shoot, what was I saying?

• 1:27:58Speaker 00

  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, there's tons of mercuries 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 can put a patch on that, 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.

• 1:28:43Speaker 00

  So you're not only getting the release of stored toxins, if you combine that with other toxins like your home environment, your food, your beauty products, now's the time to clean that up. You gotta clean that up because the stored stuff's coming out and if you're bringing more in, you are absolutely amplifying the symptoms that you don't want.

• 1:29:07André Duqum?

  Yeah, the beauty products is one especially that I think being a woman, because they're exposed to way more toxins via all the care, self-care products, right?

• 1:29:20André Duqum?

  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?

• 1:29:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, it's such a big topic. Have you done detox?

• 1:29:35André Duqum?

  Yeah, I've done different cleanses and fasts, but in terms of a topic on the podcast,

• 1:29:41André Duqum?

  not as a whole episode, but yeah, throughout many different conversations.

• 1:29:45Speaker 00

  So it's funny because it's one of those conversations that like, everybody's aware of, 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. And, you know, not to get political, but under this administration, 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,

• 1:30:27Speaker 00

  but 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 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. 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 its best.

• 1:31:10Speaker 00

  Grab a loofah, get on a, on a rebounder, move your body, sweat. And just get circulation going so that you can keep that lymph moving. 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 and chryella and like 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.

• 1:31:51Speaker 00

  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. So you can, there's a lot you can do without having to go to the big ones. If you go to the big ones, there's a whole scary world there and you can spend anywhere from a thousand dollars 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 because there's a lot-

• 1:32:27André Duqum?

  Total plasma exchange and all the different alternative things.

• 1:32:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. So have you tried TPE?

• 1:32:32André Duqum?

  No, no, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get my mom one when she comes out here because I think she could probably use it more than me.

• 1:32:39Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:32:40André Duqum?

  Especially because she like worked in a hair salon or like her own for so many, you know, I think.

• 1:32:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, please do.

• 1:32:46André Duqum?

  But what are your thoughts on it?

• 1:32:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I've done it.

• 1:32:49André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:50Speaker 00

  I stopped doing supplement detoxing once I discovered TPE because it's so efficient. So basically what they do is they put 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. And so they're putting the clean in, pulling the bad out. We have, I've done it four times now and we've done pre and post videos or blood work. And it's crazy what it's brought down. Cholesterol, big thing it'll bring down is cholesterol, mold, heavy metals, plastics, all the environmental toxins it brought down.

• 1:33:35Speaker 00

  Now, the question is, does it stay down? So that's why we keep retesting. So every time I go back, which is usually about three or four 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 skim off another load and then we do it again. What I notice as a human, the mental clarity is through the roof 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 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

• 1:34:20Speaker 00

  them, I feel so amazing afterwards.

• 1:34:24André Duqum?

  Cool.

• 1:34:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:24André Duqum?

  Yeah. It's fascinating how many cool innovative technologies are coming out and...

• 1:34:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:29André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:30Speaker 00

  It's really, like, I used to give people supplements and I'd say, it's gonna take like a year to get this out of you. And it might be a little bit bumpy.

• 1:34:41André Duqum?

  Ibuprofen, another great one.

• 1:34:42Speaker 00

  Ibuprofen was good. Yeah, Ibuprofen was good, too. My understanding of Ibuprofen is it's great for molds and candidas and Lyme.

• 1:34:49André Duqum?

  Yeah. E-B-O-O, for people that want to check that.

• 1:34:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's not as good for heavy metals as the last, you know, the kind of the way we looked at it for the last couple of years. And then TPE came around and it was the shiny new thing.

• 1:35:02André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 relates to healing trauma through holotropic breathwork, through EMDR, through assisted psychotherapy with MDMA and microdosing psilocybin. So take your pick of your favorite there.

• 1:35:25Speaker 00

  I've done them all.

• 1:35:27André Duqum?

  Fantastic.

• 1:35:28Speaker 00

  I've done them all. So let me think on what I want to say. Holotropic breathing was really interesting for me because I couldn't, 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. EMDR is, I think, phenomenal for getting into the subconscious and starting to re-pattern 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

• 1:36:10Speaker 00

  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. Microdosing psilocybin is really profound, and what I got really into understanding is psilocybin because it goes into the 5-HT2A 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 microdose in, as she's starting to lose estrogen, to get that happiness back. And I would say, most women that microdose

• 1:36:52Speaker 00

  appropriately, find that there is a mood lift to it. So it's, I think it's good for the everyday. MDMA is not for the faint at heart, but I say that with so much love, because what MDMA 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 volition. 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 MDMA's

• 1:37:35Speaker 00

  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?

• 1:38:21Speaker 00

  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 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 to start to become more your authentic self. Have you, have you done it?

• 1:38:48André Duqum?

  I've, out of all of those, I've done, only done holotropic breath work. I've done MDMA, not with a psychotherapist.

• 1:38:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, like in a, in a party setting.

• 1:38:57André Duqum?

  No, not even in a party. 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. 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.

• 1:39:22André Duqum?

  Incredibly powerful and potent medicine, for sure.

• 1:39:25Speaker 00

  And big, big psilocybin journeys, like hero's journeys and like a heavier dose. I think they improve neuroplasticity. 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. Start really understanding what a full spectrum brain would feel like.

• 1:39:56André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:56Speaker 00

  And that's a really cool experience.

• 1:39:58André Duqum?

  Yeah, I'm curious to experiment with microdosing. I've heard great things.

• 1:40:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think you even with microdosing, you having somebody along the journey with you. Because what these plant medicines do is they hold a mirror up to you. And then you get to decide if you like what you're seeing.

• 1:40:20André Duqum?

  Which you very well may not.

• 1:40:22Speaker 00

  That's right. That's why I say 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, three years ago, I wanted to write this book and we were going to call it microdosing menopause. Because I was like, there's these little things that women can do to make this experience 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 maybe too young to remember this, but I always say Nancy Reagan messed us all up. Nancy Reagan in the seventies and eighties used to have the, you know, she was like, just say no to drugs.

• 1:41:07Speaker 00

  And there was this 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 for some people to understand.

• 1:41:32André Duqum?

  Yeah, but it's also getting increasingly hard to ignore that in the right context, especially with therapists guiding the experience.

• 1:41:40Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:41:41André Duqum?

  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.

• 1:41:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, what are we doing is, is really a great question. Yeah.

• 1:41:58André Duqum?

  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 the partner?

• 1:42:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, 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, it's not personal. So her moods can be all over the place. You might be witnessing one day she's up, one day she's down. Don't try to control her 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.

• 1:42:55Speaker 00

  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. 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. I can't even imagine what that would be like, as opposed to, you're overreacting and it's going to pass, don't worry. Like, really sitting in the experience with her and making her feel seen and heard is

• 1:43:40Speaker 00

  really important. 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 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, I would tell him, I'm the butterfly version now. And in the butterfly 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

• 1:44:23Speaker 00

  trying to ground myself, 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, that all comes back. And so when you're angry now, I'm gonna 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 re-aggravated.

• 1:45:04Speaker 00

  You know, there, 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.

• 1:45:46Speaker 00

  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 an 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. Cause it's one thing to know it in your brain.

• 1:46:30Speaker 00

  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 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?

• 1:47:12Speaker 00

  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. 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.

• 1:47:44André Duqum?

  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 people?

• 1:48:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think where the menopause conversation is going right now is that everybody knows there's an emotional roller coaster. And so I just want to say that I think it's okay for women to start to say like, I'm overwhelmed right now. I've got a lot of emotions. 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, I'm hormonal. I think we say, it's just overwhelming 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.

• 1:48:44Speaker 00

  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 can be everybody in your life. That really I found helpful. 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. The whole point of this is turning us all into wise elders. People who have gone into the cocoon, have gone into the chrysalis, dissolved the goo and came out the other side.

• 1:49:26Speaker 00

  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 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 rite 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 of really close friends that when things got really muddled and dark,

• 1:50:11Speaker 00

  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 potentialists are there to show you what you're capable of. And, and what, what 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.

• 1:50:54Speaker 00

  Cause 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. I shut out some relatives. 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.

• 1:51:39André Duqum?

  Yeah. 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. Probably more anchors and potentialists and butterflies in our life or that we have access to one degree away that we could, you know, bring, bring into the picture.

• 1:52:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. You know, this is, 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 the 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 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.

• 1:52:47Speaker 00

  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. 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, what I learned is that it helped them as much as it helped me. So ask for help.

• 1:53:26André Duqum?

  So good. Mindy, one more question.

• 1:53:29Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:53:31André Duqum?

  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?

• 1:53:43Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:54:25Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:55:03André Duqum?

  I love the fire and passion you bring because this is like, 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. 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. And then the way that you interweave the science and what's happening in the biology alongside the psychology and the mythical

• 1:55:46André Duqum?

  and the archetypal ends just creates this package that I think is actually like really, really needed right now. So I'm just such a big proponent of you, Mindy, and your new book, Age Like a Girl, which people can find, link's in the description for. And that's it. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation.

• 1:56:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, thank you. I did too. I know. We should probably converse more outside of the podcast world because I love your brain.

• 1:56:08André Duqum?

  Yeah, we gotta hang.

• 1:56:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. If I lived here, that would be a lot easier. But yes, agreed, agreed. And thank you. No, and I really, I really appreciate the depth of connection that you bring and the thoughts that you bring because I think the world is asking us all to go vertical, to stop being in the horizontal. We gotta 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.

• 1:56:34André Duqum?

  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?

• 1:56:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of everywhere.

• 1:56:44André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:45Speaker 00

  YouTube is my passion project. I mean, if you're looking for more how tos, go check out my videos there. 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, our mom and pop bookstores and families livelihoods depend on us going there. So if you have a local independent bookstore, please go there. You can go to bookshop.org and order from there and it'll support an indie. 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.

• 1:57:19André Duqum?

  I love it. That'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 am 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.

• 1:57:50Speaker 00

  Thank you. Appreciate it.

• 1:57:52André Duqum?

  All right, we did it. Cheers.

• 1:57:53Speaker 00

  We did it. Yay.