The Women's Midlife Journey: What Yoga Teachers Need To Know

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... to be here with you all today. Thank you. I'm so happy to see some old friends here and so many new friends. welcome. My name is Daniela. I'm an autoimmune and a functional wellness consultant and I'm also a yoga and Qigong teacher trainer. So, I have a masters in health education and I co-founded a school with my husband, Great Energy. and I'm also the founder of the Autoimmune Recovery Method as well as the Midlife Radiance Course. So, first things first, if you're a notetaker, yay. Yay, take notes. And you are completely welcome to just put your pens down because and just receive because we're going to make sure that you have a replay, a written transcript. You're going to have a free handout that summarizes everything that I'm going to share. because we're going to go to Paris and back and then down to New Zealand. And it'll also have a short list of questions that you can start using with your students and really for yourself. Okay? So, please know that like my intention for this hour is that you just get to receive and I we will do all the organizing for you. So, grab your water, some tea and just let this land in your body instead of on the notepad.

This what I want to tell you is a story probably of many of your students and it's very likely the story of one in six women in every room you teach and for some of you it may turn out to be part of your story too. Now, like many of you, what sometimes what we teach, right, we've learned the hard way. And what I've learned the hard way, I can spare some of you and some of the women that you serve potentially years of unnecessary suffering. So, let's begin there. actually, let me start with four sentences and listen for whether or not you've heard any version of these with one of your students or clients either in a session or after class. I just don't feel like myself anymore. Or I just I don't know. I don't like care like I used to and that that worries me. or oh, I'm tired literally no matter how much I sleep or it takes so much more effort now to do the things that I used to do easily. So, if you're someone here that teaches yoga or you lead breath work or sound bath, maybe you practice Reiki or energy work, if you're a coach, you sit with clients or maybe as a therapist and you hold some kind of healing space, women may have said some version of these exact sentences to you. Let me know in the chat like thumbs up or like a bullseye. Have you heard? Yeah. Okay.

Thank you. Sometimes we hear sometimes we've been saying them. Sometimes they or we say them quietly when they're rolling up their mat almost as if it's an apology like we're like we're confessing something that that we should also be able to fix ourselves, right? And so often women that are saying things like that are in perimenopause and they may not know it and you may not know it but the body is already beginning a shift and you know I know as yoga practitioners and teachers no one here is someone who overlooks the body. You're body people and you may know the body better than almost anyone else in your student's life because things you're attuned to. You all can see when the breath is being held. You can see a guarded hip or like a bracing of the shoulders. You can feel a nervous system that's stuck in survival or and you can you're all very perceptive. You can feel an energy shift in a room. you know how to read that body that moves and breathes and holds and feels. And a lot of people don't have that skill set that you have.

But here's the part that really changes things. There is another whole body underneath the body that as yoga practitioners and teachers and some of us teacher trainers, there's another body underneath the one that we were trained to read. There's a body for all of us that's made of iron. thyroid hormones, cortisol, estrogen, and a gut lining. There's the cellular body and the biochemical body. And we can't see that body from the front of the room when we're teaching. We can't see her someone's [clears throat] ferritin, a student's ferritin levels and how she moves. We can't feel her thyroid in her breath and we can't read her hormones in the energy she carries. So that body, the one that we can't see, is driving so much of what our students are bringing to class. And this is the one dimension of the body that we weren't trained to read. We weren't trained in our 200 hour training and our 300 hour and not even in my trainings and or in my masters in health. Okay? I was even trained this. I had to learn it the hard way. We were taught to work with the body that we can see and feel, but we weren't taught to read the body that we can't. So, let's be clear. Today is about not turning us into doctors. It's not about diagnosing anyone. It's simply about recognizing what you already may be sensing in the room and knowing the next question you can ask your student if they come to you and say some of these things. So the next time someone says I do not feel like myself, we don't we don't necessarily reach for another practice to offer them. We may ask them whether something in their body or something in the body underneath the body may be the real reason. So we can

Ask them a question instead of offering another practice. And that single shift, that moment with you can literally change the course of a woman's midlife journey. So, let me tell you a little bit about how I learned all this the hard way. For about seven to 10 years, I was told by my very kind, well-meaning, insurance covering doctors I was fine. They looked at my labs and they said, 'Your labs are normal.' But I kept feeling sicker. I had this fatigue and this was by my early 40s. I had this fatigue that wouldn't lift no matter how much I slept. I had brain fog that was coming on in waves that one night when I couldn't sleep. I'm googling early symptoms of early onset dementia. Okay. I had joint pain that was coming and going. I noticed when I would wash my hair in the shower, there was more hair in the drain. There was more hair in my brush. And it just kept increasing. And let me tell you, when your hair starts falling out, like it doesn't fall out in a cute bob, okay? It's not how it goes. I had bloating after I would eat.

I'd wake up in the morning like just feeling regular, and then by my first meal of the day, then my second, then even by my third, just this bloating that wouldn't like would not go away. So, I was now living in a body in my early 40s that absolutely didn't feel like mine anymore. And underneath this I notice now in hindsight there was this low background hum of tension. I can see now that this was a my nervous system very alert because it was it was trying to manage a whole bunch of other things that I wasn't aware of. And if you had asked me back then Daniela do you have anxiety or do you live in chronic stress? Absolutely. I wouldn't have had to contempl I wouldn't have had to think about that question or contemplate. I've been like, 'No, I never thought of myself as an anxious person.' But I know that when the now I know when the body is trying to heal so many things at once, it's the nervous system that pays the price. And not because something was emotionally wrong, not because of unprocessed trauma, but because my body was working over time to hold together basically a system under siege. And like many other women in midlife, guess what I did?

I adapted. I kept functioning. I kept working. I kept mothering. I kept wifing. I kept running a household and showing up for everyone and everything that needed me. But the body quietly does everything it can to hold itself together. And in our culture, we call this normal. Now, I also want to add that I spent about half of my life I'm almost 54. I spent about half my life vegan and it was a path that I chose with care. And all the all this while I'm feeling these things, I'm thinking, I should be able to fix this. I have trainings. I am an Ayurvedic practitioner. I eat kitchari. And yet, if it takes me years to do my gut healing, so be it. I am equipped to navigate this. And what I didn't know was that none of this was a willpower mindset or a spiritual issue. It was a cascade going on in my body due to midlife changes. And in the season of my life where for many women, one in six women, this is where autoimmune can also reveal itself. And that's what happened for me. Now in the cascade of autoimmune again one in six women is navigating autoimmune.

Autoimmune begins in the gut. So our gut lining is only one cell thick. It's so thin. This is the barrier between the food in your gut and your bloodstream. One cell thick. And it is the most vulnerable barrier in the body. Now how does this one cell thick layer get damaged? It gets damaged by chronic stress, inflammatory foods, environmental toxins, and estrogen levels that start dropping. What this does is it creates little gaps in the cell wall that start to open up. So undigested food particles bacteria toxins they start to leak into the bloodstream. This is a huge contributor to inflammation in our system. And now the immune system which runs about 80% of all activity in the gut creates an attack. So in this all this physiological confusion the body starts to mistake its own tissue as a foreign invader. And that's really what autoimmune means. So when we hear phrases like autoimmune is about the body attacking itself, it's because it lost the ability to tell the difference between the self and the invaders that are leaking out into our body. So that's what was happening for me. And it's happening, I'm going to keep saying this to one in six women.

That's one in six women here in this group right now of 173 people. That's one in six women that's in your classes. Now, in addition to autoimmune, and this is so common, was something else that nobody often talks about. Many of us will be eating these really healthy meals, but our body can't absorb the nutrients because along with a lot of these midlife changes, stomach acid oftentimes reduces. So, we have low stomach acid, but there's not any there's not really obvious symptoms of it. So, we tend to often think in our culture, I've got too much stomach acid, but [clears throat] most of us in midlife don't have enough. So, if you don't have enough stomach acid, here's what happens. Your protein doesn't get broken down, your iron doesn't get absorbed, B12 doesn't get absorbed, and minerals stay locked up and unavailable to be used. So again, we can be eating these genuinely nourishing foods and meals and still be profoundly nutrient deficient because the body can't access what it's being given. Now, a lot of women in midlife, your many of your students are being told that they're anemic. Now, more often than not, it's not classic anemia. more often it is a poor iron absorption driven by low stomach acid and a damaged gut lining.

So now on top of this then I had this thing called SIBO. I'd never even heard of SIBO. This is called small intestinal bacteria overgrowth. This was creating all the bloating that I was experiencing. But guess what we don't talk about in our culture? How bloated we are. So small intestinal bacteria overgrowth is where bacteria are growing where they shouldn't be. And this even further damages the gut lining. More bloating, more fog, and more inflammation. So now all of this combined, right, a perfect storm, again, one in six, led to Hashimoto hypothyroidism. Now, nutrient deficiencies that my body couldn't correct, no matter what I ate, depleted hormones, and a nervous system trying to hold together this body that really felt like I was falling apart. I spent two of these years barely able to function and I was still being told by my doctors that I was fine. Friends, this is one in six. So now what finally changed for me was finding practitioners that could read my lab work through a different lens through what's called a functional medicine framework. What they do is they look at optimal ranges for your lab results instead of looking at normal ranges. Right? when you get your lab work back, your little dot is in the green zone. It's like normal. Well, functional medicine has a different a different standard, so to speak. and so with the right support, it took me about two years, two full years to make my way back. And here's the thing, I didn't get the old me back. I actually got a version of myself that I hadn't met yet. So, here I am now in my 50s. I get to live caffeine-free under 10 grams of sugar a day and I have more energy and clarity now in my 50s than I actually had in my 30s and my 40s. Okay?

And why I do caffeine-free and low sugar is because it's important to me to always know what is my honest energy, right? because as part of my survival strategy when I didn't know what was going on, that extra cup of tea or that extra cup of mate or like a handful of, you know, like healthy candy or whatever. it's important that we know our own energy levels truthfully. And so that's really what has what brings me here today. Now, I want to share something with you that you can each use for yourself and your students immediately. You know this, your body's always talking to you and it talks to you through the phrases you may hear yourself saying. So listen deeply to the things you say aloud to your friends that you trust. Listen to just phrases that your students say. when I was feeling at my worst, I would walk around the field with my husband Christopher and we would take the dogs out and I would say to him with like these big tired eyes, 'Do you think we do you think when we die we get to rest? Do you do we sleep when we die?' And you know, the phrase my body kept offering me, it was trying to tell me that I was so tired, something was off. I do this practice called somatic vocal healing where you make the sound of the moment.

It really helps you kind of tune into what's going on for you. And I got so sick of this practice because every time I like, okay, what's the sound of the moment? Here's what would come out. Like, now in somatic vocal healing, you're not trying to sound like an angel. But what does that sound like? I even would say to myself, G, I am like tired down to my cells. So, these weren't like dramatic expressions. This these this was my body trying to tell me there's something going on, but I was used to the same culture you all live in. You just keep going. My inner dialogue would counter it with don't be a baby. Half the world is tired. Keep going. So, you know, one time I had a client say to me, I just I found myself needing to eat. Like something inside of me couldn't be satisfied. Well, guess what? she turned out to have going on for her. She had parasites. Her body was telling her through language something in is in here and it's hungry. So when a woman says, 'I don't feel like myself or I just don't care anymore and I'm tired to my bones,' we want to get curious because her body is trying to tell her and you something that's true. Now, let me zoom way out. Let's go to Paris for a moment.

What is actually at stake here if we if we just keep pushing through? Well, like many of you here, yogis love the world of soul and spirit. I gave my life to teaching about soul, the soul and spirit decades. And what I learned that by giving all of my attention, most of my attention to soul and spirit and skipping over what's going on in the physiology of a of the midlife journey, it has a cost. And here's the cost that's important that we know. See, our independence in our 80s is built in our 40s and our 50s. Our cognitive clarity at 75 is literally built in our 40s. and how a woman navigates perimenopause and menopause is one of the strongest predictors of her risk for dementia and Alzheimer's later. Muscle mass. This is one of the single strongest predictors of longevity and independence in older adults. It's a predictor of whether she'll fracture a hip. And 20 to 30% of people who fracture a hip in old age do not survive that first year. So, this is a conversation about whether the women that we serve get to recognize the faces of the people that they love when they're 75. whether we can get up off the floor, off the toilet, on our own when we or our students are 80 and whether we and our students get to live the last third of their lives feeling fully alive or feeling like they're slowly disappearing.

You know, and I want to say something to the incredible yoga teachers here in the room who are younger, maybe in your 20s and 30s. What we're talking about now isn't a someday conversation because how you treat your body in your 20 and 30s is a deposit and midlife is when you find out what you saved. So this is for you too. This is for every younger woman who trusts you to guide her. And you know again the number I keep repeating is one in six women midlife women is living with an autoimmune condition. Many don't know. So, Hashimoto, which is what I live with, is the most common one. So, you want to know that. And the vast majority of the women who have it have no idea because nobody checked. So, if you're teaching a room of 12 women, two are navigating some form of autoimmune right now. Now, here's another statistic that I want you to remember. One in four women is on a psychotropic medication, an anti-depressant or an anti-anxiety drug. Many women get these prescriptions without anyone having checked their sex hormones, their thyroid, their ferritin, their vitamin D or their cortisol.

You see all sometimes what we're doing is covering up the smoke and not looking for the fire. And the story that I'm telling you is their story. So, now let's zoom in a little bit more in on the cell, the level of the cell. I've mentioned the word inflammation, and let's be clear about what it is and what drives it. and nobody's going to love the first the first part of what drives it, and it's sugar. The American Heart Association says that for women, ideal to not exceed 25 grams of sugar for day per day. Now, the body doesn't distinguish the difference between added sugar from natural sugar when it comes to the insulin response. So, one cup of orange juice, fresh-squeezed, right out of the gates, has 23 of your 25 g. So, that healthy glass of juice is nearly the whole day's worth. Now, the second driver of inflammation is processed foods. And I want to say this gently because you'll get it. Just because food comes from Trader Joe's sprouts and Whole Foods doesn't make all of it food. Okay, this was me. The cauliflower crackers in the box. Still a little bit of a Franken food.

And it's still processed. I loved those. but so here's the simple rule. If your great-g grandandmother wouldn't recognize it, it's probably not food. Now, the third driver of chronic inflammation is stress. And this is really the one that got me. And I didn't know it. Cortisol is our is your stress hormone. Now, one of its jobs is to instruct the body to release glucose into the bloodstream. So when we are chronically stressed, we have chronically elevated blood sugar from the inside regardless of what we eat. Now again, if you had asked me, Daniela, do you live under chronic stress? I would have said no, which is hilarious and horrifying. Now, I had no idea, not a clue. I had normalized my life so completely that I didn't I it was just normal. And that's the point. A chronically stressed woman can eat a clean diet, still run high blood sugar all day from her own cortisol. And then there's the fourth driver, and this hits us right in midlife, and that's hormone changes. You see, estrogen is not only a reproductive hormone. Estrogen is an anti-inflammatory. It helps keep inflammation in check. So as our estrogen declines through perimenopause and menopause that natural break on inflammation that comes off and friends perimenopause for many women begins at age 35.

So this very season of midlife when everything else is shifting this is also the season when the body loses its best built-in protections against inflammation. So this is simply the chemistry of midlife. So now let's see how all this connects. Okay, sugar, processed foods, chronic stress and the hormone changes. Sugar, processed food and stress drive insulin resistance and the drop off in estrogen takes the brakes off. So inflammation now climbs higher. Inflammation damages the gut lining and the damaged gut lining has a name. It's called leaky gut. This damaged gut lining now leaks particles into the blood and the immune system gets confused and starts attacking its own body tissue and that is what lands this is the domino effect of what lands to autoimmunity for women in midlife and this is why I always tell people that most thyroid issues are ultimately a gut issue the thyroid is downstream the gut is the upstream part so if we only are chasing the thyroid and never tend to the gut you're going to forever mop the floor with the faucet still running, so to speak. So, these are not five separate problems, these issues. This is one cascade that begins decades before anybody gets a diagnosis. And inflammation does not stop at autoimmune. It drives cognitive decline.

It drives hormone disruption and it contributes to the like to the increased likelihood of cancer. One cascade. So, the last thing I want to say about inflammation about is really what does it look like? Because when I first started learning about inflammation, I kind of pictured something like red and hot and swollen, right? Like the swelling and I just narrowly assumed, well, I knew what inflammation symptoms looked like. What I didn't realize was that inflammation is a lot bigger and has more vast symptoms than that. Inflammation can be the cold or the virus that lingers for weeks. Inflammation can be sinus headaches, migraines. Inflammation can create constipation, bloating, a gut that's never quite right. Inflammation can l itself to hair loss, fatigue, and brain fog. Inflammation can be allergies that come out of nowhere. Right? So many women hear inflammation and think, well, that must be for someone else because my digestion feels okay. And this is exactly how inflammation can hide in plain sight. So this is all what I've been talking about now is simply the physical layer.

And the midlife journey, as you know, doesn't just happen in one layer. It happens on the physical, mental, emotional, energetic, and spiritual layer all at once. So today I just wanted to give you the a foundation which is the physical because everything else then sits on top of that. okay let me jump ahead now. Let me share a few other numbers and these are from reputable sources CDC NIH peer-reviewed research and functional medicine has even more I would say dramatic numbers. Only one and only 12% friends of American adults are what are considered metabolically healthy. That means healthy at the level of the cells which means 88% have at least one marker of metabolic dysfunction. Now in our culture 53% of the calories that adult adults eat come from ultrarocessed foods. For children right now it's 62%. And only one and only 24% of US adults meets basic physical activity guidelines. So that means 76 are not moving enough or at all. So let's in the context of your classes, your yoga classes, nearly nine out of 10 people in your class are metabolically dysfunctional. So, in plain English, that means their bodies no longer handle blood sugar, energy, and fat storage the way that a healthy body should. The engine is running rough, even when, you know, nothing has officially been diagnosed yet. And more than half of what we're eating is factory-made.

Three-quarters of them are not moving enough outside of your class. And so we wonder why women in midlife are exhausted, inflamed, and feel not like themselves. It's because they're swimming upstream in a system that's really making us sick. Now, let me hone in on hormones a little bit, okay? And just talk about this in very practical language because the hormones are what's happening for women between 35 and 60 underneath everything. perimenopause, like I said, can start as early as age 35 and menopause averages around 52. So, this is a 17-year window of hormonal shifting, often without any warning and very definitely for most women without adequate support. now I'm almost 54 and I'm still only in my late permenopause. So, let me just go over the hormones really quickly because hormones always deserve a much deeper conversation, but let's just go let's just skim the surface. So, first we have progesterone. Progesterone, I want you to think of as the hormone for calm. It's the hormone of deep sleep and of nervous system settling. It's often the very first one to decline, sometimes in their late 30s and often a full decade before menopause.

So, a woman with low progesterone is going to automatically feel an increase in the sensations of anxiousness, restless, and oftentimes wired at night. Wide awake at 3:00 in the morning with like what I would call my moonpie eyes. And this is what's happening. She then becomes one in the four women who might be put on an anti-anxiety medication and nobody looked at her progesterone first. So, of course, she's going to feel anxious. Of course, she can't sleep. Her calming hormone is literally running out. So, this doesn't need an inquiry practice. This doesn't necessarily need a sound bath. It has other roots. Now, second is estrogen. Estrogen protects the brain, our bone density, and the cardiovascular system. Now, there's a window of opportunity in early perimenopause where some kind of support can be deeply protective for the brain. the direct line, if nothing is addressed, runs from years of estrogen decline to osteopenia, osteoporosis to hip fracture. Now, third, we have testosterone. And this surprises people.

Actually, women make more testosterone than estrogen. And we tend to think of it as a male hormone. And we t we tend to like label it as the libido hormone. But here's what testosterone does even more important than our libido. It's our drive. It's our motivation. It's our strength. It's our mental sharpness. And here's the biggie, it's our zest for life. It's our joy of our aliveness. So when mine tanked, I walked around thinking I really I don't care. A or B, me, I don't care. And I have always been an enthusiast for life. And suddenly my enthusiasm that I loved is just gone. So it can feel like depression. It can feel like a spiritual crisis, but it was literally biochemistry. And it is so important that we know the difference for ourselves and to be able to perhap perhaps help guide our students in the right direction so they can get these answers for themselves. you know because we there was nothing that I could do. I couldn't I couldn't do morian yoga. I couldn't do pranayyam to raise my testosterone levels. Now there's an engine that's underneath all three. Progesterone, estrogen, testosterone. It's a master hormone called, I love this word, pregnenolone. She's like the queen.

Think of it as the raw material your body uses to make estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. But under chronic stress, the body diverts the raw material toward making cortisol instead. And this is called the pregnenolone steel. So chronic stress literally steals the building blocks of the very hormones that are protecting your brain, bones, heart, and immune system. And now cortisol has its own rhythms. Cortisol is ideally highest in the morning to wake you up and lowest at night so you can sleep. In midlife, for many women, it oftentimes flips. wired and tired at night because cortisol keeps spikes when it should be low and the morning can feel brutal like we're dragging because our cortisol is flat when it's supposed to be rising. So for me, years of high cortisol, this is what happens if you're if your cortisol is too high too long, eventually it's just like I give up and it totally flatlines. And when that that's called adrenal crisis. When that happens, it really does take a couple of years to bring it back up slowly. So, I want to be really clear. I'm not here to promote any pathway about, you know, hormone replacement therapy or any or anything like that. I just want to tell you that hormone changes are real. They are measurable and they are workable with the right practitioner.

Okay. The last most practical thing that I can give you today is to is to just speak to again I want to go back to when you get lab results. You're just like, 'Oh, I'm not feeling right. I'm going to go see my doctor.' Right? Daniela said like all these things I resonated with. I'm going to go see my doctor. And there's a difference between normal lab ranges and optimal. And this changes everything. So here's one client that I worked with recently. She had been to her primary doctor. She had seen a naturopath and everybody said, 'Your labs are fine.' And she came to me exhausted, so fatigued after a short walk that she had to spend the rest of the day on the couch, fog so bad she felt like she was losing her mind. And her on her labs, it said your ferritin is 17. Now, ferritin is your iron storage. Think of it as a reserve tank. So if we when we go to our doctors that take our insurance, the normal range for ferritin runs from 15 to 200. So hers was 17. So technically normal. However, functional medicine says that any ferritin below 70, you are not even going to feel functional. So, she was walking around with a ferritin of 17 and literally being told by someone she trusts that she's fine. Now, here's why this happens. Normal ranges are built on the averages of a sick population. It's what we look like when we're not well.

So, normal really actually means, are you sick enough to treat yet? Optimal ranges ask a different question. Where do your numbers need to be for you to feel like you are thriving? Okay, so this is the same blood, same woman, two completely different questions. And this is why this conversation matters. And it also goes the other direction, too. At one point, my own ferritin was up in the 300s. And so, at first, I thought, 'Woohoo! Look at me. My tank is so full. I have no problems.' But when you're off the scale, that also is an indicator of inflammation. And so, so that's that was that was what I learned. So, there is a range that you do want to land in, not too low and not too high. And I want to be fair to all of our doctors. I have to be honest, I've never met any doctor that a hasn't been doing the genuine best inside of a system that gives them 15 minutes and a normal range chart. Even my own primary care doctor, when I brought her my hormone labs, thank goodness she was honest and said, you know, I am honestly not equipped to do anything with these. I was so grateful. Thank you. because that honesty is a whole lot better than a confident guess. And for many of us and for our students, even their OB/GYNs are not skilled at women's hormones. So, you know, when we're between 40 and 60, every single one of us here should, I'm not a fan of the word should, it's appropriate here, should be able to rattle off the following numbers and know your numbers. Where are your vitamin D levels? Where are your B12 levels? Where's your iron? Where's your ferritin? And to have a full thyroid panel done. This is not a ridiculous ask when you're asking to get labs done for yourself.

And you want to be able to gently invite your students if they're telling if they're presenting with all kinds of things. You can say things like, you know, have you ever had your labs done? Again, we're not trying to be doctors here. That's outside of our scope and range of practice. But there are some simple questions that I'm going to close out this conversation with that you can five questions that you can ask yourself and your students. so I oftentimes hear people say,'Well, what if my doctor won't run these?' First, you can find a functional medicine practitioner. There are also teaalth options. Now, you can look the following up online and you're going to get this transcri transcription and a PDF. So there's Midi Health online, Paloma Health, Parsley Health, FEMx, right? You can even many of these places take insurance and they help women with their midlife changes. and they're built for exactly this for women's hormones to get labs that will really give you insight into what you're experiencing and what your students may be experiencing. Now, you also, a lot of people don't know this, you can also order your own labs. You can go through Labcorp, Quest, Ulta, they all offer self-order. And here's the crazy part. When you sometimes pay out of pocket, oftentimes it's way cheaper than the insurance rate. I've seen labs that the insurance system bills out at thousands of dollars that you can self-order for a couple hundred.

So just don't assume that doing it even yourself is out of reach because very often it's the opposite. now let me just share the last piece what I call the mimics. And this is going to make a difference when you're talking with your students. The mimics are where something gets hidden. The root gets hidden underneath. So low ferritin will look and act like depression. When ferritin is in the teens, 20s, and 30s, you're it's going to feel like everything you're doing is a constant push. No matter how much rest you get and the light can feel like it's going out in your eyes. I love Ram Dass. He always called the light in the eyes the liquid luminosity. And I saw my own light in my eyes dim as my ferritin wildly went from in the 300s down into like severely depleted. Now, low progesterone can look and act like anxiety because it's the hormone of calm. Hashimoto and low thyroid can look and act like burnout. Low estrogen can look and act like brain fog or early dementia.

High cortisol can look and act like anxiety, insomnia, weight gain that won't budge even when what we eat changes. And thyroid dysfunction can literally look like everything that I've just mentioned. So, you want to picture the student that lingers after class that may say, 'I'm just so tired. I cannot get going.' Or, 'God, I just don't feel like myself.' Right? We're not diagnosing our students ever. But we don't have to assume it's just stress, it's just age, or that we need to push harder. We can recognize that maybe what we're seeing and what they're saying could possibly have a physical route that hasn't been explored and you can pointer to finding out. let's talk for a minute about the emotional changes that happen. You know, for a lot of women in midlife, do you know that this is the highest divorce rate and the highest rate of suicide among women? It's in the midlife years. A lot of times things these things unfold because of unadressed biochemistry. Libido drops and you don't know why. Connection drops, patience drops, everything that requires a nervous system capacity drops because there's like there isn't capacity left. It's all being spent holding the body together.

So, a question that often can really haunt a woman in this season is not a spacious one. It's not a who am I in my well-being. It's who am I now in my weight gain, my hair loss, my fatigue, my overwhelm, my bloat, this inner tension, this distance in my intimate love relationships. This is a brutal place to live. And so when a woman in our classes maybe seems checked out or irritable or like the light has gone out in her, we don't want to assume that we're looking at someone's personality. We very well may be looking at a nervous system with nothing left in the tank and that deserves for ourselves the greatest compassion and for our students, you know. known as yoga teachers, we all talk about prana, about life force and the quality of someone's energy. You know, a woman can't generate clean, steady prana out of a depleted body. Not when her ferritin's on the floor, not when her c not when their cortisol has flatlined. Not when the gut is inflamed or the energy body has run so thin. Everything that women are giving to their families and work and practice now may feel like it's costing more than more than it should. So when we talk about raising our energy, we want to remember that energy has a physical foundation and we can't ever pour from an empty vessel.

So we've covered a lot so far today. and let me let me let me share something in closing. The last piece of the soul and the spirit. I have never each of us is meeting our students and our practices that we offer our students can only meet the student at the level that it can meet them. Right? So remember when the body is depleted when a foundation is missing even our best practices in midlife can sometimes feel like treading water practices. They can keep us afloat. They can keep us from feeling like we're going under, but they can't always get us to the shore, so to speak. So, I just remember the following. Sound baths can't raise ferritin if that's what's needed. Yin yoga can't resolve anxiety that is in that is thyroid induced or because of low progesterone. Our breath work practices can't stabilize blood sugar while cortisol is dumping glucose into the bloodstream. And our meditation practices aren't going to clear brain fog if a thyroid is barely working and nobody has checked their antibodies. You know, so many of our students are doing this constant nervous system regulation and they're constantly treading water. these are practices that can feel so frustrating for ourselves even and our students when after they go home after class that baseline of exhaustion returns, right? Because our practice does make us feel better in the moment, but then we go home and we're there's that fatigue or there's that overwhelm, there's that burnout. And the last layer that can sometimes feel like a real heartache for women in midlife is what happens on the spiritual layer. You see, when my system was really inflamed and

Disregulated, all of a sudden, I felt a density and a separateness in my body that I didn't used to. What used to be my own direct experience of feeling in this to be in this intimate relationship with source or with God, with spirit. It started to feel like a memory. I couldn't remember. I couldn't feel divinity settle into me anymore. And that was a bit of a heartbreak because, you know, we can't relax into our transcendent nature when our mitochondria are running on fumes. We can't feel what Joseph Campbell would call the rapture of being alive, when our nervous system is locked for survival. And but when and when the body is resourced when the vagus nerve tones and the breath slows without effort the system can finally feel safe and in that safety when our bodies are resourced that's when the transcendent is felt it's experienced in ourselves. So the question you know in midlife often times shifts from who am I in my weight gain in my weight gain and my hair loss and my fatigue to who am I in my well-being. This is the opportunity that's here. You know the body is isn't a like a footnote to our spiritual life. Our body is our spiritual life.

So lastly, here are the five questions that you can ask yourself and your students. you can ask this of yourself, your sister, your girlfriends. This isn't again, we're not being doctors here at all. The first question you can ask yourself and or a student if they express, you know, fatigue and overwhelm, bloating, things like that, you can say, 'Have you had a full thyroid panel run?' Not just TSH. We're looking for free T3. And you're going to get this in the PDF, these five questions. Free T3, free T4, reverse T3, and then two thyroid antibodies called TPO, TgAb. This is a very simple ask, and sometimes there'll be push back even on this very simple ask. Okay. number two, you can always ask yourself and a student, do you happen to know what your ferritin levels are? Not just your iron, but your ferritin levels. Remember, normal l ranges are going to say between 15 and 220 is fine. But truth be told, if your ferritin is under 70, you're going to feel like you're dragging. Hair loss doesn't stop until your ferritin's at 40.

And hair regrowth doesn't happen until your ferritin at least 70. Number three, has anyone checked your sex hormones? Even just the basics, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone. Number four, have you ever had your cortisol mapped across the day? This is a very simple saliva test. You literally spit in four vials at four different times during the day and you submit it to get analyzed. And number five, has anyone ever looked at your labs through functional optimal ranges, not just the normal ranges? And then I think this one sentence can make a difference. You know, Sarah, what you're describing could actually have a physiological route. You may want to explore finding a practitioner that can help you to look at the full picture. And that's the whole job, friends, for us to simply recognize there may be a different conversation and to point the way. So that's it really. That is the map that I have for you today from the cell to the soul to the spirit. And there's just two things before I before we say goodbye for now. First, there's a free handout that Christopher is going to share in the chat. And that's a four-page PDF that you're welcome to use for yourself, have in your studio. It has the five questions. It has it has a summary of literally everything that I went over all in four pages. Okay? So, that's going to be in the chat. and it'll be emailed to you. so you can print it out, keep it in your studio, and the next time a student hangs out after class, you'll know what you can ask. And second, if something opened up for you today, please know that this was the fastest, shortest version that I could possibly deliver to you,

Covering, you know, going to Paris and New Zealand back. And on July 5th, my co-teer Kim Beekman and I, we go all the way through everything. we have a three-hour workshop that's $47 if you'd like to take this much more slowly and unpack it. we'll share a link with you so that you can check that out. That may be it may be a really good use of your time and we'll have an hour of Q&A just in that in that workshop. So, here's what I just want to leave you with, friends. I have it that we come to earth with three tokens, three coins. Okay. By 25, we have spent the first token on this game of life. By 50, we've spent two. And then we have that last one token. From 50 to 75 or 90 and beyond. And remember, how we treat our bodies in our 30s and 40s and 50s really decides how we get to spend that last token. And if there's anything I could leave you with, remember the following. Always know that the quality of your energy, it's always going to determine the quality of the experience of your life. So that's why it matters. The quality of our energy matters so much.

And to us, to Christopher and I from Great Energy, this is what Great Energy really means, you know. And on the other side of all this, friends, I didn't get my old life back. Everything I went through was a wrecking ball to my life. But I did get something better. I got a much more resourced, authentic version of myself. And that is what only and always what I wish for every single one of you is that you feel so at home in yourself. That your system be one that's so resourced that you can feel the transcendent settle sweetly inside of you. And that you I just want to thank all of you h so much for the light that you are in your students lives. For many of your students you are the light in their life truly and you are the spaceholder and the champion for their well-being and for their for their coming home to themselves. they that experience is something they get in classes with you. So, I thank you with all of my heart for your care and your attention today and just thank you for the honor to be here with you. Thank you.

Hi Daniela, thank you so much for such an amazing and impactful session. We're getting so much great feedback in the chat. If you want to take a look at all of these amazing comments from our viewers, thank you to our viewers as well for being here and for being here for this session. We really appreciate it. thank you. And anything I can do, friends, you can always reach out. We'll get the transcript, PDF, all the things. however we can be useful to you and come, you know, if you want to unpack this slower and more thoroughly, just come hang out with us on July 5th. It's a three-hour workshop. And B Yogi, I just want to thank you all. we are so grateful to the service that you provide to so many yoga teachers. We are privileged to partner with you and thank you for the difference that you make in our professional lives and in the lives of our yoga and our Qigong students and teachers. We thank you. what an incredible service you are in the world. I could say the same about you, Daniela. We're very appreciative of you as well and for being here and giving your knowledge and your time for everyone. and we're honored to be able to provide this service for our wellness practitioners, our yogis, our students, and everyone out there. So, thank you so much. U, we do have a few minutes for Q&A. I know we have some really great questions, so we'll just kind of jump in if that's okay.

Yeah, I see two at the end I just want to address because they're logistical, but yes, there are CEU credits for the workshop on July 5th. So, absolutely. Yes. And we in the workshop we do cover ways to address the different issues. I saw I saw questions like how do I raise my fair and I God help me if I paused because we would have then went to a different continent you know so yes we will speak to that and I just want to say this that if you discover you have very low or very high ferritin or your students that's often not the root issue. It's information and there are other things that we would look at to see how do we now address this and so we can go into all those details of the workshop. Yeah. over to you Shannon you may see some different questions that Awesome. [clears throat] Yeah. I wanted to go through so there was a great question. What are good ways to boost ferritin levels? [sighs and gasps] So, if we're talking about supporting already existing healthy levels, some of you may not like this answer. Nutrientdense animal protein is a really easeful way to keep our ferritin levels from fluctuating.

Bone broth. sometimes people enjoy taking enjoy supplementing with liver supplements that can help for people who have ferritin levels that kind of fluctuate between 40 and 70 and you need a band-aid. I have no affiliation whatsoever with the following brand. There is a brand of iron. It's a hem iron and it's by a sweet little company called Three Arrows. they have a red bottle and a blue bottle. Very matrixy, right? The red the red b the blue bottle is simp is called simple and it's heem iron that can help bring your ferritin up or keep it steady while you're exploring why is it dropping. The red bottle has additional B12 in it as well as I forget. It's got B12 and something. So you could look that up, but that's a pro that's a product that can serve as a band-aid while you go find a practitioner to help you to understand, well, why is my ferritin fluctuating so much or dipping? so those that's what I would say for natural ways. And oh gosh, some of you are really not going to like the following, but organ meats are a fantastic way to help. And a little can go a long way. And fun fact, muscles are an organ meat. So for those of you that are like liver, like I'm that way.

Or muscles, if you know, you can make curry muscles, something that that can really help getting organ meats. Again, I was a vegan for 20 years, friends. I loved being a vegan. And I got myself in a jam, not because of veganism. There was a whole cascade of things that happened, but I couldn't heal my gut on a vegan diet. Great. Yeah, we did have a question around your veganism and someone did ask, did your diet change from vegan due to these changes that you were going through when I learned? Yes. So, I did stool testing that showed exactly what was going on in my gut. I like data. Okay. because somebody I could have sat in a presentation and I would be like hm I'd like some data. So there are tests there's a company called Tiny Health. They you can you can self- test a gut. It's a poop test and you mail your poop in and it gives you a very long report. It tells do you have candida, fungus, parasites, H pylori, bacteria, leaky gut. It gives you a lot of data and I like data. I needed to know what's going on. If I was ever going to guide others through their journey, I needed to be able to see my numbers as a baseline, which were very terrible. I needed to apply the intervention for several years and rememeasure the results. And it was right there in the numbers, black and white, of course, along with how I felt.

So, I did the gut testing. And what I learned about healing the gut is nutri nutrient-dense animal protein has, let's call it, ingredients that help the gut heal, whereas beans, legumes, grains are inflammatory where you have a compromised gut. So that's not to say beans, legumes, rice are bad things, right? My husband Christopher guts like steel. No. no inflammation, no gut issues whatsoever, he can eat chickpea curry and rice and he's fine. But if we have a compromised one cell thick gut lining, these beans, rice, I was eating them, they were further poking holes, so to speak, in my gut and making it worse. So, I couldn't heal my gut on a diet that I preferred. I had to go with the science of what creates gut healing. Now, I lead people through this kind of gut healing one-on-one in and in groups. I have a course coming up. It's the Autoimmune Recovery Method where I walk people through a 90-day gut healing. You then after 90 days reintroduce very methodically and very scientifically to see if your body's ready for that. So, it does it's not a life sentence for a lot of people after you do gut healing that you forever have to eat muscles. Okay? like I'd love to never eat meat again, but it is part of what my bo what my body needs in order to heal. Yeah.

Thank you, Daniela. We have time for a couple more questions. question from Nirvana. so much great information, but it sounds like I can't do anything in practice to help except tell someone to check their labs. What can I do to help other people than just be aware? I think simply having conversations with your students about midlife, sharing facts about what's going on, weaving that into your class topics, you know, at the beginning of class, at the end of class, during Q&A, because for many women, ask yourself, where were you taught all of this before you were taught? Who put it on your radar? So in my world, awareness is our greatest superpower. Awareness equals choice. So just these conversations acknowledging that gray divorce in midlife is a thing. That suicide rates are the highest for women in midlife. Conversations that talk about do you know there are other reasons for anxiety and depression other than anxiety and depression. Right? So just starting the conversation is I think one of the most empowering gifts you we can give our students because if they're not hearing it from you they're where are they hearing it? They're likely you would think we're hearing this from our doctors. We're not. You would think we'd hear this from our OBGYn. You would think who has a nutritionist that's saying let's talk about this the one cell thick gut lining and do you have these symptoms of inflammation? who's having these conversations with them.

So, I think holding workshops in our studios, just having bringing dropping nuggets in our classes does far more than we may initially give credit for it doing. I hope that that's I hope that's useful. Thank you, Daniela. Well, we're going to go ahead and wrap up. I know there were a couple questions that weren't answered, but we will be providing Daniela's email in the follow-up email. so you can reach out to her directly and of course we will be including the women's midlife journey link to that free downloadable. So that will be included as well as some workshop information. so all these questions can be answered in more depth there. Shannon, can friends forward their replay to others? I see Beverly is asking if she can share the webinar with others. Will it work if they simply send? Yeah, so they can forward it. we will also be posting this webinar on our webinars page on our Bogi website. So on the menu at the top there's a drop down and it has the webinars and it has all of our past webinars as a library and a tool for everyone that is available to the public and it'll also be on our YouTube channel. So there's a lot of great avenues. So, yes, you can forward it. but it will be on our website and our YouTube as well. Oh, awesome. Awesome. Awesome. And friends, I'm on Facebook. You can look me up on Facebook. Daniela Hes friend, send me a friend request and I can just answer any further questions or email. I do, but it's, you know, do you all love email?

Like, so reach out however you like or on our website. Awesome. Thank you so much, Daniela. I really appreciate it. And we'll be talking very soon. And thanks everyone for being here. Have a great afternoon. Thank you.