ACTIVE SHAKTI

I sat down to record this episode and my mind went completely blank. Nothing. I'd been thinking about it for days, I had things to say, and then the moment I pressed record — nothing. I sat with that for a few minutes before I started speaking. And then I realised: that blank feeling is the whole episode. Because you know it. The moment you sit down to do the thing you've been meaning to do, and your brain tells you something must be wrong with you.

Perimenopause does not arrive as one thing. It arrives as many things at once — anxiety that seems to come from nowhere, unexplained weight changes, sleep disruptions, a sudden intolerance for stimulation that you used to absorb without blinking. And for women who have built their lives around high output and high capacity, it can feel like the ground has shifted.

Somatics is a word that appears increasingly in wellness and coaching spaces, often without much precision about what it actually means. Korina Tsipoura, a somatic and energy coach who works under the name Amorphous Being, offers a definition that I find both useful and grounding: somatics is the technology already built into the body for communicating, storing, and releasing. It is not something applied from the outside.

You cannot build sustainable performance on top of a chronically activated nervous system. Recovery isn't optional. It's the work.