151: What if your Menopause Symptoms were your Wake-up Call to Transformation? with Sharon Pendlington

At things tend not to get better without changing anything. So something needs to change. And you know, if we don't address the root of what is causing this discomfort for you, it's going to stay there. It will show up in other ways, even if the exact symptoms that you're experiencing change. But what I would invite is perhaps a bit more compassion for yourself. And this truly can be your wake up call that, no, now it's time to prioritize my style. And this is a message my body is giving me that something needs to change. So what needs to change? By listening to the Coherence Code podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice, to treat any medical condition, either in yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guests or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to the Coherence Code podcast, where we explore how the mind and body work together, so you can move from stress and inter conflict to clarity, calm, and alignment. My name is Lauren Brown. I'm a Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine and a Clinical at the Therapist. And through my work, I've seen that healing happens when we remove what gets in the way, and allow the body and the nervous system to do what they're designed to do to heal. Welcome to the Coherence Code podcast. Today, I have a colleague in my own city on with me today, Sharon Pendlington. Now, this is going to be talk around Pairing Menopause and Menopause. And I'm really excited to have this conversation because I think we're really aligned with our approach to supporting women through the midlife stages. So I'd like to give you a formal introduction. So today, Sharon, she's a health and well-being coach. She spent the past decade helping women navigate menopause with less stress, more confidence, which we all want need. And she specializes in supporting midlife women to restore their sleep, stabilize their mood, and rebuild their energy and relationships with matter most. And I think also BrainFog 2 is one of those symptoms of women seek out Sharon for. Now, she's the founder of the 90-day stress to serenity program. And it's a group coaching experience for women in Pairing Menopause and beyond. And these are for women who are ready to break free from that stress from those symptoms and really shift from surviving to thriving in this Pairing Menopause stage of their life. And if you've ever been feeling overwhelmed by midlife changes, I'm hoping this conversation that I'm going to have with Sharon will show you a path forward. Sharon, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. Now, let's just dive right in here. Like, I see in my practice when you and I kind of met for breaking some bread and chatting. You were sharing how you're seeing a lot of women who are experiencing haw flashes in Somnia. Hopefully you'll share your own experiences with Somnia, BrainFog, and kind of those mood swings that are happening to women in that Pairing Menopause, who in their 40s and beyond. Now, a lot of people see this as these symptoms. I got to fix it. But I noticed you see them differently. And I was hoping you can share what these symptoms might actually be trying to tell us and really what lens do you see this through? I mean, I can share personally that I was definitely seeing these symptoms as a problem that needed to be fixed when I experienced them myself. For 20 years, I didn't sleep. Many of those years, 20 minutes a night. And I was. Wait, wait, wait. You said that so simply. 20 years within Somnia. Yes. We don't realize Pairing Menopause can start in our mid 30s. The average age of menopause is 51. I know many women still menstruating in their early 60s. So yeah, it can be 15 years, 20 years for some of us. That tells you the degree that I wasn't listening to myself. Just go on for 20 years. But I was trying to fix it. That was my hoping mechanism was I will fix this, right? I became a yoga teacher because that was a little bit helpful. I became a nutritionist. Well, maybe there's some food or supplements I can take that will help. I started working out of women's clinic. Maybe hormone therapy will help. I saw a sleep specialist. I did it all. Truly, it wasn't until I became more mindful and was able to notice that, "Ah, this is your way of coping with stress, is to control. Everything could be perfect. I could fix everything that happened that day. I ended all out for the next day. If everything was all lined up, then I would be safe." And I could let go of stress. Of course, that was just keeping me up in the middle of the night. That was interfering with my sleep. So now, when it wasn't just sleep, it was I was having incredible memory issues. Like, to the point my husband would have to, if we went for a walk, he would have to say, "This is our next-door neighbor. I could not recognize them anymore." These are people that I've been, you know, I've seen every day for 10 years. I'm kind of sure because this is a common complaint I see. And a lot of women don't realize this could be connected to this paramanopause and menopause phase, where they can't remember things like they have this severe brain fog or memory. Like, almost feel like they're developing dementia. And so you have that, you experience that. Yes, and it can be scary because I mean, two-thirds of people with Alzheimer's are women. We often have it in our family history. Dimension, I mean, my mom passed recently with dementia. And so it can be scary, right? I went and I had an assessment done. Do I have early on-set dementia? Because it felt so extreme to me that I was forgetting, I could forget my husband's name. And I was like, "Whoa, what's his name again?" Yes, very common. The cognitive changes, right? Memory loss, even changes to our ability to be organized, to learn. ADHD symptoms will often pop up in this transition or be worse at this time. What was managed previously with medication maybe is no longer managed. So it is important to kind of differentiate, are these cognitive changes, are they indicative of something else that's happening or is this part of the hormone changes that can happen in midlife? I want to unpack something or at least emphasize. So you talked about all the things you tried to do. You looked at dietary changes and you actually got trained in. You and I are similar that way. I don't like just to read about things. I'm a kinesthetic learner. So I usually go and get certified in something. So you might get certified in yoga, get certified in nutrition. My style is bidirectional. We got to dress the physical and we got to dress the emotional, mental, spiritual. What I like about your approach where I really excited to have talk to you now is, I think there's a missing link. Like I'm not saying I don't think you are. You ignore that the physical. Like we see in our clinic, we use diet because the anti-flammatory diet is helpful. We'll use supplements. We'll use sometimes menopause hormone therapy as well. There's a place and time for that as well. The missing link for me is this stress response or trauma in the cells, which I think is the missing link in giving this kind of relief. And this seems to be your lens or your approach. So I thought maybe you could, could you start to talk a bit about the stress part? We're not saying don't do the diet, the lifestyle, the supplements or the hormone therapy. But it's already getting a lot of attention right now online and everywhere. What's not getting, I think, enough attention is this aspect that you come to come to it from. And I'd love to hear more about that. Yeah, I absolutely agree. And this is the place where this is why I think that the midlife and menopause transition is actually a time of empowerment because this is what we actually have control over in addition to our diet, right? And our lifestyle is how, and I want to explain the reason, like the physiology behind it briefly. So as our hormones are changing, our neurotransmitters are also changing. So we have less GABA, less serotonin, less dopamine. So this is our calming hormone, our happy hormone, our feel good hormone. These are all changing too. As our progesterone and estrogen changes, those receptors in our brain are trying to adapt to lower hormone levels. And the neurotransmitter levels are changing. And it's just this time of brain restructuring. Like when we talk about changes to thermal regulation, insomnia, sleep disruption, mood, cognition, these are brain changes. And we're simply, the brain is simply trying to adapt to different levels than what it's used to. As our ovaries are producing less hormones, we do have a backed up hormone system. So this is what I could just share with everyone as often as I can. Is the adrenal glands are meant to produce some of our hormones for us as our ovarian production declines, which can help stabilize some of these symptoms. It just allows us more time to adapt better to those changing levels. Now, the adrenal glands can produce DHA, which gets converted into testosterone and estrogen. It also produces our stress hormones. And you better believe if you're under stress, your body's going to prioritize producing cortisol and adrenaline, not your reproductive hormones. So this is where emotional stress, mental stress, and managing it can be super helpful. And I often use my understand or like how explain it is, when you have a lot of these stress hormones, like you talked about these adrenal hormones and a lot of stress, it's like noise in the system. So you may have your regular, you know, like you talked about the feel good hormones and your sex hormones like estrogen and progesterone. But there's noise and it causes kind of like this dysregulation and the hypothalamus, pituitary ovarian and adrenal axis. And that's why sometimes even your blood tests may seem okay. But yet you have all this extra noise of inflammation, oxidative stress, coming from the stress side, this negative self-talk and this stuff, this line. Whenever Dr. Amy was on, whenever episode 124 talks about the biology of trauma and she, we had a little geek out about how this is probably impacting our period of menopause and menopause. So as you shared, you have all these feel good hormones but when you're under a lot of stress, the way you describe this competition going on, I call it just a lot of noise and your body just becomes dysregulated and now you're like, what's my name? You know, why can't I sleep? Your body's just, everything kind of goes out of whack. It loses its homeostasis balance. - We're late, yes. And keep in mind, some of the complaints we have during the menopause transition are very similar to what we would experience when we're under stress, right? If we're, if we find something stressful, heart palpitations, we get hot, sweaty, right? Red in the face, our blood pressure goes up, our blood sugar goes up. This is what women are experiencing in the menopause transition, right? Our blood sugar levels, cholesterol levels, all of a sudden elevated, they weren't before, leading to weight gain around the midsection. The elevated blood pressure were at higher risk for cardiovascular disease. So these are all very similar to stress reactions. And stress isn't a problem. There's, you know, there's good stress. We're meant to experience stress and then go back into homeostasis. You know, deal with stress, go back into homeostasis. We've just lost that regulation. - You know, I've been seeing more women in clinic saying to me, "I do not feel like myself." They're sharing that their sleep is off. They have brain fog. Their mood or anxiety feels really different. And even things like joint pain and itchy ears are showing up. And they're wondering, "Is this just stress?" or something more. If you're in your 40s or early 50s, this could be the paramedic-pause phase for you. And it often comes with no clear explanation. And that's why acu-balance is hosting the M-Factor 2 Speaker Summit. It's an online event on Tuesday, June 16th. We'll be screening the M-Factor 2, followed by a panelist, consisting of naturopathic doctors, Chinese medicine doctors, a medical doctor, a pharmacist, a fitness and nutrition expert, and pelvic floor therapist. And I'll be moderating. So if you've been wondering what's going on with your body, and more importantly wanting to get real answers, please go to acu-balance.ca and register for this online event. All right. Let's get back to the conversation of this podcast. I want to bring in, if I may, a little TCM understanding of this process as well. Because I think it ties in nicely to your, what we're going to hopefully get into about your approach as well. So first of all, these symptoms, like you said earlier, like you know, you try to fix these symptoms. And you choose to make these or perceive this now as a wake-up call, if you chance for transformation. I will share that nobody wants these symptoms. And I would never want anybody to suffer with these symptoms. So you have the right to address them, right? I think what we're sharing here is there is a missing link, which we talked about. And we're going to get into that mind-body aspect. But here's how Chinese medicine views this idea. My understanding of from being trained in Chinese medicine. It is a natural survival mechanism for the woman at this stage of her life because to have an opportunity to conceive and carry baby every month requires a lot of resources from the body. And during this menopause time when you stop menstruating, what is happening in Chinese medicine is these resources or energy is being diverted from the uterus, the old reason the uterus. And it gets redirected up to the heart center. And so just physiologically from a Chinese medicine perspective, women in their late 40s and beyond, become the matriarchs of their community. And they have this extra wisdom to share, to be that great mother for their community. And also the survival mechanism is to be able to live well and long you need the resources because we're aging. And so they're diverting energy from certain systems, reproduction, and now going to the heart center. So it's not a disease in Chinese medicine. It's a natural process. Now if you get symptoms in menopause or paramanopause or menopause, then that shows you there's an imbalance going on that we have to address. The part that I want to share is kind of my angle to this and how I work in my practice. And again, we're lying to this. It's the underlying cause is not the changing hormones. So every woman, if she gets to live long enough, will experience erratic changes in estrogen. So it fluctuates into the paramanopause with a declining progesterone. And then every woman will have a decline in estrogen and progesterone compared to her earlier years. But not every woman has the same symptoms and not every woman has symptoms. If it was because of fluctuating estrogen and declining progesterone with a long term decline in estrogen 2, then everybody should suffer and have symptoms, but they don't. And this is what ties into your adrenal talk in Chinese medicine, how we understand it and from the conscious work hypnosis perspective is, you've lost your, you don't have the resilience and the adaptability to deal with change. Like you said, it's not this stressor. It's how your body perceives it. And if your body for whatever reason, whether it's inherited or through how you lived your life, whether by choice or imposed upon you, when you have hormonal changing, which is a normal transformational process at that stage, your body perceives it as change. And if it doesn't have the resilience, if it doesn't have the ability to adapt, you suffer. And if you have the resilience and the ability to adapt, then you don't even notice it. And our approach here is to rebuild the resilience and support the adaptability so you can go with the change. Now I want you to kind of go more into your adrenals and what you're sharing with this. This, the, like if you can tie this into, as I shared this biology in your trauma houses, this stress as it's almost like festering in your cells, that's causing all these, your body not able to have the resilience or to adapt to these changes. So I'm so glad you shared your perspective, because I think it's one of the most beautiful lenses of seeing menopause as coming up to the heart. And this is where, this is where we really come into ourselves in my mind. And how can we support ourselves to me? It always comes back. How do I support myself, whether that's with hormones or supplements or nervous system regulation techniques? How do I support myself? Now in terms of stress, you mentioned, how does it, how does it kind of faster? Did you, I've heard you say something about a stress spiral that was really curious for you to unpack that. Yeah, so I'm thinking the best way to share that might be with an example. So imagine you're driving in in the car, this has happened to me all the time. So this is why I'm sharing it. You're driving in your car with your partner. Your partner's driving and you get, you get stuck in traffic. And for me, I would be, okay, telling my partner, well, you should turn right up here and get, get onto the side street and I bring out my Google maps and I figured out a detour to get us through this, this traffic and I'd be trying to fix it. My partner is coming along to the radio at the same time. So we are both same difficult event. I'm in the stress response. My partner is not right. So this, this comes down to what were the messages we received often at a younger age, whether it was verbally or just modeled for us. I was taught and took it on as a belief you are not late. Like being late was a big deal. So of course, I'm going to go into the stress response about it. My partner's not, he was never modeled that. So the trick is how do we get out of the stress response quickly. So we start and we need to start to become aware that I'm even in the stress response. Because it becomes our habitual pattern, when I'm late, I try to fix it. That's what I do. Right. This is neuroscience. You get really good at what you practice. You're going to get really good at roomination. If you practice anxiety or over worry, you get really good at that. So we just need to start tuning into ourselves to become aware that we're even in this stress response. How do we do that? We got to get out of our heads and into our bodies. And most of us are not used to being in our physical bodies. That's one way of doing that. And then we need to regulate. So what can I do to regulate my nervous system? I now know that. Yeah, being late causes me to be in the stress response. I feel it in my body. My heart starts beating faster. Okay. So now I can get off that stress spiral. does require some mindfulness, some awareness. - I love this and I don't think you and I've had a chance to go into a deep dive on my NAAC process to shift old belief patterns. But I gotta share it 'cause our listeners who've been listening hear about this, I wanna try this to what you said. You gotta notice, you gotta notice your trigger that you're in this old program. And through awareness, you didn't exactly say this, but basically you said you make the unconscious conscious. And then I say in the NAAC process, you can bring in many tools. And so here I see where mindfulness becomes a tool in the accepting phase. In the accepting phase, we lean into the uncomfortable feelings, we accept them. It doesn't mean we like them, doesn't mean we're resigned to them. We just are authentic saying, right now, this is how I'm feeling. And we get really practice at observing it. There's a notice except and then the choose again is, how do you wanna be in this world or practice and gratitude? 'Cause once you drop the resistance, 'cause fighting with the feeling of reality is what amplifies it creates more noise. And when you accept it, again, it doesn't mean you like it, you're not doing spiritual bypass, it's really a tool of surrender, which lowers the resistance where the nervous system goes from sympathetic into parasympathetic, right? And now you start to metabolize. You go from that reptilian brain to whole brain. And now you get creative ideas to solve your problems. So very similar and I have to say, why I love your work? One day came a parent to me that everybody's doing noticing, accepting, choose again. And you just shared your thing for the first time me hearing it this way and I was like, there it is. Which is why I would say what Sharon does works because I see this map, this process and everybody's work that's causing transformation for individuals and groups. - Thank you. And I love that you mentioned the except piece 'cause this is the really challenging piece. There's a reason that it took me 20 years to notice that I was trying to control things. Of course people would say that. Of course my partner would say Sharon, you need to let go of this or you're trying to control this because I didn't have the self-compassion piece. Like we can, I practiced meditation for 18 years, did not hold my sleep. Why? No self-compassion. None. I would, my mind would wander. I would say, oh, I don't got this yet. Was that getting the out of the stress response? No. So women are generally very compassionate with others. I mean, most of us are. Women, men, all of us are compassionate with others. A lot more difficult to offer that to ourselves. So that's part of the exceptance piece where I was finally in a place of safety where I could, it could feel safer for me to look at that about myself. I, I, what, I think Lister's always like to hear this. Like, and I'm curious, what was it 20 years you said you had insomnia? Can you kind of share what that was like for you? And what did you do? And how did this shape what you're doing now for women? Because you know, you, you know, there's one thing to be able to teach it and facilitate. That's me. I don't go, I will not go through perimenopause and menopause. We, men, we have our own issues. Well, that's another episode. But I won't have that experience. I don't have, I will never have the experience that you're, you got. And so I would like to hear what was your experience with insomnia and what you did, what didn't work. And how did it, how did you come to be where you are now? And I, people always love a little bit of hope. Do you have insomnia now? No, yeah, I sleep great now. So I sleep nine hours and I view it a flea. Like, there's going to be occasional nights if, you know, my kids are out late and I wake up because I don't know if they're home yet. That's going to happen occasionally. But I have great sleep now. And it was a long road and hopefully, you know, no one else has to struggle for 20 years with this. It's interesting because I had a colleague at the time, like about 15 years in. A colleague said to me, I was working at a yoga studio teaching part time and she said, I'm going to take a week or two off. And I said, oh, are you going to win it? She said, no, I'm going to be sleeping while the last three or four days. So I'm just going to take some time off. And I was like, that was such a wake up call for me. I thought, I haven't been sleeping 20 minutes or night for like almost 15 years. And not once did I think I need to change something. Like, no, it didn't even cross my mind. I was running on cortisol, right? Like if people would say, are you not tired? I'm like, no, I have tons of energy. I would just go and push myself and keep going. Of course, keeping myself in that stress spiral, keeping myself spitting out cortisol in the middle of the night instead of making my D-A-T-A. So what truly, like I said, I tried all the things. All of it somewhat helpful. What a-- I ended up getting introduced to mindfulness-based stress reduction just organically, actually, through the clinic that I was working at. And it was interesting because I started changing how I was working with patients. Because I would often talk about, we make some small children, oh, well, let's reduce your caffeine. And we talk about small changes. And what I would often receive was, I don't have five minutes. So I don't have five minutes. And I started to realize, no, we don't need to be talking about caffeine. We need to be talking about you prioritizing yourself. This is a much bigger issue. So I just decided to create this program because it's based on mindfulness-based stress reduction. It was me being in that safe place with a safe group, with a mentor that could guide this process. And I was able to notice, oh, you're trying to control things. Yeah, it takes what it takes. Hopping to take 20 years for me. If you were to do it again, because my approach always would be, look for the offending things that create the noise, so inflammation, and aggravate the resilience adaptability. So we have a diet that's free on my website at acubound. And lormbrown.com that says, it's called the longevity diet. So it's an anti-inflammatory diet, anti-aging diet. Because I would imagine all the things that you did lean up to the mind body work, the mindfulness work, supports that. Because, as I said, bi-directional. So I want to give the physical body some help and support. So it can deal with the emotional stuff that it may need to deal with. Because this is, as you shared, a wake up call for many. So if you could do it all over again, how would you do it differently? Would you go right into the mind body? Would you ignore coffee, alcohol, like saying, it doesn't matter what you do physically. If you could go back to your earlier version of yourself that was not sleeping before the 20-year period happens, say you're three months into insomnia. What would you tell our regards based on both the men until the conscious, subconscious work and the physical work? How would you do it? And I'm wondering, is that how you're doing it now in your programs? Yes. Well, yes it is how I'm doing it now in the program. Because the emotional wellness piece takes time. This is a whole new way of being for a lot of us. Knowing how to resource ourselves, learning to be mindful. This is not something we practice in everyday life. We're not taught this, particularly in the West. We're not taught how to be mindful. And it takes some time. So I would suggest start there. That's what I wish I'd done. Start there. And then support yourself the way you need to, whether it's with hormones, supplements, that herbal adaptogens, herbal treatments that help support your body to just help you get ahead of it. Then you feel motivated. You start to notice changes, right? You have an anti-inflammatory diet. Yeah, you start noticing you have more energy. You feel good, your joints don't hurt. Now I can exercise. Well, that helps my mood. So all of these pieces are helpful. I would say the longest piece. And probably why my program is a three month program is it takes some time to rewire the brain, to know how to regulate our nervous system. So start there first. Like it's often when I'm working with people, the first thing, okay, let's give you something to regulate your nervous system. And start tuning into yourself. Like just take pauses throughout the day. What's happening? Do I have the capacity to do the next task? And if I do it, because there's a difference between our capability and our capacity. So I know I can do it, but what's my capacity gonna be like after I do this next task? If I'm gonna be exhausted or depleted, it's too much. And there's that resilience factor, right? 'Cause you have the capacity, 'cause if you're overdoing it, then you lose the resilience and the capacity to regulate, to adapt, and now you struggle, you suffer. And remembering just from that TCM idea, it's a survival mechanism because just the fact of living this long, your resources change. You don't have the energy you had as a 20 year old, as you do as a 50 year old. And so if you try to live and work like you did in your 20s, based on your genetic predisposition, you may tap those reserves, and now your body's gonna tell you through insomnia, through hot flashes, through night sweats, through high blood pressure, through forgetting what your partner's name is. (laughing) So yeah, it's kinda, it's just feedback. I call it feedback. It's just feedback. From whatever you don't get mad at yourself, "Oh, you overdid it, you're like, "Oh, I just got some feedback." That was a little too much for this biology for my body. - Yeah, no, and but that takes some time to learn for some of us. We are so accustomed. Right? These patterns that we have are habitual patterns of dealing with challenges is in very ingrained. So it takes some time to do that and to give ourselves permission to rest before we're exhausted because that's not our normal go to. I want to give our listeners a few tips. I'll share my style in my practice is we will use acupuncture in Chinese herbal medicine, me and a friend who's also nutritionist Michelle be taught I've been working on this program idea with body types for menopause. So it's easier for them to kind of find their herbal formula and go find a practitioner. So herbal form so my stuff somebody comes in it's like twice a week for three to four weeks with acupuncture to give them the sleep, reduce the anxiety, just to give that right away symptomly leaf and changing the underlying cause while doing the herbal medicine. And then in a short period of time, hopefully by four weeks they cut back their acupuncture quite a bit because the herbal medicine is taking over some of my favorite supplements because again, your background is Christian. And again, I just know our listeners always like a few things do talk to your healthcare provider. This is not me giving you healthcare advice. I'm just giving you information that you go talk to somebody about, but we often will use for people that have in this stage, period menopause menopause, a lot of anxiety and insomnia will use B6 usually take that during the day and then magnesium usually a bisclisonate as a version. All there's a couple of versions depending on on your unique body type and touring and sometimes even glycine. But touring B6, magnesium is kind of a common thing we'll use for that. So just to let our listeners know if you're struggling with insomnia, anxiety, talk to your healthcare provider for that. And then if you have somebody in your area that does acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, anecdotally and some of the research out there, I think it's great. And then we also will use sometimes hormone replacement therapy if necessary as well. There's lots of options. Obviously you're making change in your dying stuff. The piece that I think is missing that I do in my conscious work and his ecology, what Sharon offers is that changing those unconscious programs. But what would you say then? Somebody comes to you and says, I went to my doctor and they said, you're just going to have to suffer through it for 10 to 15 years or maybe they say, you know, look, this is just menopause and I just need to get through it. How would you like to respond to our listeners? They're like, I just got to get through it. Or my doctor said, it's just normal. I'm doing ear quotes. Everybody normal doesn't mean healthy, but normal as in a lot of people struggle with this. What's your message for that? I don't know. So this is a very common experience and it's dismissive. It's dismissive by the physician and it's you dismissing yourself as well by just accepting that this is okay. Whether it's a year, six months or 15 years, it's not okay. And things tend not to get better without changing anything. What I would invite is perhaps a bit more impassioned for yourself. So if you had a sister, a daughter, a best friend going through this and they said, I'm just going to muscle my way through this for another year or two. What would you say to them? Because you would likely say something very different to them than what you would say to yourself. And I like this idea and I want to clarify something there. To me, it's an invitation to set the intention to be compassionate for yourself. And I like how you said this. How would you say this to a young child, a daughter or a family member? How would you, what would you do? I find though that you need to learn sometimes the skill to be compassionate for yourself. Like it's one thing to say, I want to be compassionate, but then all of a sudden that habitual negative self-talk comes on. So do you agree then like we do need to learn the skill of being compassionate for ourselves? First we have to set the intention, but it's not just you set the intention that happens naturally. It wasn't my experience for myself when I went through this kind of work. I'm just curious if you wanted to share a little bit about that as well. Absolutely. I mean, the way that you work with changing our beliefs can be so effective too. But yes, this takes time, developing self-compassion is, you know, takes some time. So it does require some tools and learning and just always holding ourselves with compassion and friendliness. And honestly, if you're practicing mindfulness, if you're doing it properly, it includes friendliness. It includes befriending yourself and all the experiences that are arising from moment to moment. So that's something that is helpful in learning mindfulness, but you may also want to learn mindful self-compassion. Like there are entire eight week programs devoted to learning self-compassion. I like this. And I'll clarify as well. It's not narcissism. Like it's kindness, but there's still accountability. There's still responsibility. You're creating awareness. You're creating kindness towards self. But it's because you know in the New Age movement, some of this compassion kindness is turned into spiritual narcissism. That's not what you're saying either. Not at all. Just what you were referring to earlier around the acceptance piece, like notice what's here. And then just acknowledge, yeah, this is hard. And I'm human. And it helps us be more compassionate with others if we can offer ourselves compassion. That's key. I love it. The compassion part. I love to share where they can learn more about you because this idea, what I heard you say and again, I see in my practice the dismissiveness. I thought it was great when you said to yourself, because you are dismissing yourself when you say I'm going to push through it, but the physicians. And by the way, some people would imagine, oh, it's the male doctor doing this. I've had female physicians say the same thing to the women I see where they say, just suffer through it, right? And you're saying, and I'm saying, absolutely, you do not have to wait this out. There are so many things available to you. Diet supplements can support you hormone therapy can support you acupuncture herbal medicine. And then the missing link is to really replenish and give you the capacity for your body to handle and work with the changing hormones because it's a normal process. It is not a disease. It is an overprocess. By the way, in Chinese medicine, they call it the second spring, meaning it's the second puberty for a woman. So that's where you can have more compassion for yourself. And then you will have more compassion for your daughter and your house as well. I joke a little. Sharon, what do you offer for people like if they want to connect with you? Is there a way to come in and have like a discovery call with you? And where can they find you? What's your website? And I'll put these in the show notes as well. Perfect. So Lisa, my website is my name at Sharon penlington.com. There's all the details about my 90 day stress to serenity programs. So this is where we meet every week for about an hour and a half in a small group setting. And we start learning these tools. We start learning self-compassion. We start learning how to be in our body and tune into our inner wisdom. And you practice those skills between sessions just in your everyday life. So you're using those tools in real time. It also includes a day long retreat, which I love because we're resourcing ourselves in the middle of that program. And it also includes some one to one by bit coaching with me as well. And yes, you can absolutely book a clarity call through my website. And that's just a complimentary 30 minute call for us to just chat about what you're hoping for. The program is a good fit for you. And if not, I'll certainly direct you to another resource that might be more appropriate. Sharon, I really enjoyed this. I look forward to more conversations with you. Me too. Thank you so much, Lauren. Thank you for spending this time with us on the coherence code podcast. I'm Dr. Lauren Brown. And I will see you next week for another conversation on coherence and healing. If this conversation resonated with you, please like, subscribe, or follow the show and also share it with someone who might benefit from it as well. Remember to take a moment to breathe, reflect, and stay connected. You know, I've been seeing more women in clinic saying to me, I do not feel like myself. They're sharing that their sleep is off. They have brain fog. And they're wondering, is this just stress or something more? If you're in your 40s or early 50s, this could be the paramedicod's face for you and it often comes with no clear explanation. And that's why AccuBalance is hosting the MFactor2 speaker summit. We'll be screening the MFactor2 followed by a pair of panelists, insisting on naturopathic doctors, Chinese medicine doctors, a medical doctor, a pharmacist, a fitness and nutrition expert, and pelvic floor therapist, and I'll be moderating. So if you've been wondering what's going on with your body and more importantly wanting to get real answers, please go to acuballance.ca and register for this online event. Alright, let's get back to the conversation of this podcast.