CAMILLE ELIZABETH

For quite a while I’d been an admirer from afar of Camille Elizabeth, so when I saw her name pop up in my new Member notifications I was so excited! To me, Camille is a rare example of someone truly carving out her own, individual middle years path and walking her talk - and I was delighted when she accepted my invitation to be a regular guest contributor to Middle Years Monday.

Camille runs truly delicious monthly Deep Relaxation sessions for MYM - these are open to Members and non-Members and I can’t recommend them highly enough. Each month I invite everyone on my MYM email list - which you can subscribe to receive here - to join us for these beautifully nourishing 45-minute events.

Our Members have also had the pleasure of being led by Camille through a workshop on Practical Mindfulness and some extended Deep Relaxation sessions, including a couple of half-day retreats.

In Camille’s words:

“I’m a meditation teacher and mindful living guide. I discovered meditation twenty years ago, when I joined a local Zen Buddhist community. Since then, I’ve been meditating daily, and attend a silent retreat at least once a year.

Several years ago, after waving my kids off to college, I travelled to Bali to teach yoga and meditation at the Gedong Gandhi Ashram. It was there that I fully connected with the art of living gently. I returned to the UK determined to bring that slow, gentle pace into my life back at home. 

For the past five years I’ve hosted classes and retreats for individuals wanting to explore and cultivate the practice of meditation and mindful living. In particular, I help people find ways to slow down and connect to sources of tranquility in their lives, so they can discover a happier, healthier way of living.

These days you’ll find me parked up in my campervan home, which I share with my rescue dog Eric, somewhere along the south coast of England.”

Camille is currently taking a break from Instagram (I told you that she walks the talk!) but you can find her here: @camilleslowingdown

PENNY MCKINLEY-RODGERS

Penny McKinley-Rodgers is a soul-centred wellbeing guide and qigong teacher supporting women in their middle years with self-cultivation practices that help unite and balance body, heart, mind and spirit. She lives in New South Wales Australia with her husband and their dog, Steve (surely the best dog name ever?!).

Together with her Qigong teachings, as a qualified clinical aromatherapist and integrative women's health coach, Pen is passionate about empowering women to embody their innate wisdom through a deeper connection with their body and psyche. Pen tells us: “I believe we are all beautiful and unique individuals where there isn't a one-size fits all approach to our health and wellbeing, and we have a responsibility to advocate for ourselves by accessing our inner knowing. I share practices that help you connect with your intuition so that they can be intimately weaved into your own personal story. Because we are our own best teachers.”

Pen radiates a gentle, warm energy and she has been a lovely source of nourishment for this community. Pen played a key role in establishing our fortnightly book group and she has led oodles of wonderful live sessions for us on topics as diverse as Tarot, Essential Oils, Qigong, Breast Health - and all of that goodness remains in the Members Library. Her workshop, Tarot for Wellbeing, resulted in an excitable flurry of tarot deck purchases amongst us and was one of the most popular live sessions MYM has ever run!!

Pen returned to full-time employment in 2022, which meant that her time became much less spacious than it was. So, after the huge pleasure of having Pen’s involvement in Middle Years Monday for a couple of years, in early 2023 she stepped down from her position as one of my righthand women. I have deeply appreciated Pen’s supportive presence, she leaves a warm glow behind and her magic is forever woven into the tapestry of Middle Years Monday. One of the things I will always be grateful to Pen for is her immense belief in me and in Middle Years Monday - her generous feedback and encouragement helped to carry me through some of the inevitable wobbles that accompanied the early days of my journey as the Founder of MYM.

If you'd like to know more about Pen, on Instagram she is @qibythesea.

Lisa Congdon

In this fabulous session Lisa Congdon - Artist, Illustrator, Author, Activist and Middle Years Icon - was in conversation with brilliant interviewer Katie Treggiden. We were all left feeling so hopeful and inspired. Lisa is a self-described late bloomer. Her stellar illustration career did not begin until she was 40, her first book was published at the age of 44 and she married her wife when she was 45. Lisa and Katie talked candidly about the gains and the losses of this life stage; about changing paths later in life; the challenges and rewards of being self-taught and following a less direct route to success; about how Lisa deals with creative fatigue; what inspires her; and how she's learnt the most powerful word is sometimes a simple 'no'.

NICOLA HAGGETT

Body Liberation Mentor and professionally trained Life Coach (CTI), Nicola Haggett, brought expertise, warmth and insight into this session called Coming Home to Our Bodies. This was a wonderfully compassionate and hope-filled 90 minutes in which Nicola helped us to explore our experiences of embodiment across these 5 dimensions: Body comfort + connection; Attuned self-care; Desires; Resisting; Objectification; and Agency. No matter where we are on your own personal body journey this session resonated with us all.

KATHY ABERNETHY

Past Chair of the British Menopause Society, Kathy has extensive clinical expertise as a Menopause Specialist and she is the author of Menopause: The One Stop Guide, a book which aims to help women make informed decisions about all aspects of menopausal health. In this warm and illuminating session Kathy talked to us about all things Perimenopause and Menopause including: what is and isn’t normal; what we can do to help ourselves; and HRT - the benefits, the risks and the alternatives.

Sam Baker

Sam Baker is an acclaimed fiction writer and menopause memoirist, journalist, past editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan and Red Magazines and co-founder of The Pool - and she talked to us generously and openly about the themes covered in her menopause memoir The Shift. Ultimately The Shift is a story of hope and this session reflected that. Just like the book, it didn’t pull punches, it didn’t gloss over the shit bits of life and the shit bits of perimenopause. But it also made our post menopause years sound like something to look forward to and reminded us of the control we may not realise we have, of the possibility of reauthoring some of the stories dished out to us – and it made it clear that it is never too late to shine a light into some of the darkest recesses of our beings to attend to the parts of ourselves which we may have written off as irreversibly broken.

MARY FENWICK

Agony Aunt for Psychologies magazine; business coach; divorced and widowed by the age of 45; mother to four young adults - these are just some of the elements of Mary’s story.

Mary has shared her wisdom and expertise with us on several occasions.

She has an unusually rich well of experience and as well as teaching us all about the positive psychology approach to journaling for happiness and how to give and receive advice, she has also talked to us about the events she has survived and the ways in which she has managed to thrive.

She has shared with us some of the resources that have helped her - and those that she wishes she’d known about during the periods of intense adversity that she has lived through.

Mary is a powerful example of what can happen when you keep on keeping on.

Professor SONJA LYUBOMIRSKY

Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky is a distinguished professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, has been an associate editor of the Journal of Positive Psychology, is highly decorated in the scientific world and is the author of two acclaimed books The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want and The Myths of Happiness. In truth, I can’t quite believe that Sonja said yes to my invitation to speak to us - a few weeks before our interview she was on the Larry King Show and the morning of the day we spoke she’d been interviewed by the Washington Post! She was a gracious and generous guest and interviewing her about the what, why and how of Happiness was an inspiration and a joy - as well as containing lots of practical and actionable advice.

Natalie Lue

This energising talk ‘How to Break your People-Pleaser Habit’ with Natalie Lue, Author, Podcaster + Speaker spoke to us all. Do you often feel overwhelmed, anxious, burdened, overcommitted, guilty, frustrated, resentful, low and more? Natalie spoke to us about how these are some of the side-effects of people-pleasing. Often misunderstood to the point where we might see it as a badge of honour or mistake ourselves for a doormat, Natalie spoke of how cutting back on people-pleasing doesn’t just improve our sense of self and wellbeing but brings us more fulfilling relationship and career experiences too. If you become a Member do watch the recording of this energetic and inspirational talk. It will leave you feeling confident that you can break your people-pleasing habit - and armed with the tools you’ll need to start making changes.

Dr Grace Alexander

In this session Dr Grace Alexander, consultant psychologist (and seed merchant!) talked to us about her belief that our lives are split into three acts and she shared with us her wisdom and expertise about how we can move through these life stages. During Act 1 we tend to live according to the expectations of others; in Act 2 we often experience a shattering of assumptions or a sense that things are just not quite OK with us as a result of internal or external, small or seismic ‘Disruptors’; and during Act 3 we can become ‘The Changed Self’ through living with more intention and choice and acting in line with the callings of our heart and soul. This was one of our most well-received and well-attended sessions ever - and for good reason!