Midlife Butterfly: Self-Discovery, Women Empowerment & Life Transitions

#26 Feminine Awakening Through Peri/Menopause with Luce Beaulieu

• Kena Siu • Episode 26

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Hey beautiful,

What if menopause wasn’t an ending... but your wild, sacred rebirth?

This week’s conversation is an initiation into that very truth. I’m joined by the magnetic and deeply embodied Luce Beaulieu, a midlife priestess, feminist powerhouse, and coach guiding women through the holy fire of menopause. Together, we dismantle outdated beliefs around aging, sex, and desire—and open the door to something much juicier: pleasure as power, intimacy as liberation, and aging as your erotic awakening.

If you’ve ever felt like your midlife body was betraying you, or your libido was fading—this episode is the love letter (and the permission slip) your soul’s been craving.

You’ll walk away remembering that this season of your life isn’t about shrinking—it’s about deepening. Let’s go there.


In This Episode, You’ll Hear:

  • How menopause is a sacred, feminine initiation—not a decline, but a descent into your deepest power
  • What tantra really means (spoiler: it’s not just about sex), and how it can become a lifestyle of embodied aliveness
  • Simple, delicious ways to reconnect with your pleasure—solo or partnered—without shame or performance
  • The truth about libido in midlife (and why your vagina might just be trying to tell you something)
  • Why so many midlife divorces are actually a sign of awakening—and not a failure


Reflection Questions:

  • What myths or beliefs about midlife or menopause are you ready to release right now?
  • What parts of your body are longing to be seen, touched, loved... by you?
  • Where in your life are you being invited to descend into the “underworld” to rediscover your power?



Find Luce:

- - - - -

You can find all the podcast details right here: http://midlifebutterfly.ca/podcast

Download the Midlife Butterfly Guide with 5 Radical Practices to Heal, Take Your Power Back & Rise

Follow Kena on Instagram: @midlifebutterfly

Join the Midlife Butterfly Community: http://www.facebook.com/groups/midlifebutterfly

For Coaching, Courses & More Visit Kena's Website: http://midlifebutterfly.ca/workwithme

Request a Free Empowered Call with Kena if you're interested in working with her: https://midlifebutterfly.ca/empoweredsession


Song: Reborn by Alexander Nakarada

Kena Siu:

I believe that menopause is an initiation into power.

Kena Siu:

Midlife butterfly, a woman in the sacred in between. She's not who she once was and not quite who she's becoming yet. She's unraveling, awakening, remembering. She's navigating life transitions divorce loss, reinvasion moves with a burning desire for freedom. Divorce loss, reinvasion moves, with a burning desire for freedom, joy and solid living. She feels the pull to rise, to fly. She's no longer afraid of her own wings.

Kena Siu:

I believe that menopause is an initiation into power. Those are the words of our dear guest today, luz Bolu. She is a transformational powerhouse guiding women through the sacred portal of menopause. She is a certified coach, social transformation specialist, feminist and innovator. Luz brings her lived wisdom to the table with heart and heat, and I am proof of that. Now, at 52, she's on the other side of the menopause transition and she's here to tell the truth. It's not the end, it's a rebirth. Her journey through marriage, divorce, motherhood and awakening in a deeply satisfying and hot love life has shaped her mission to help women move through perimenopause with dignity, empowerment and joy. For loose menopause crack her open not just physically but spiritually. It became a getaway to wisdom, deeper intimacy, conscious love, financial and meaningful work. She now helps women embrace this rite of passage as a powerful initiation into their most authentic, embodied selves. It's such a pleasure to have you here, sister.

Luce Beaulieu:

Thank you so much, sister.

Kena Siu:

thank you so much, sister. Well, first of all I want you to add something else to that bio that I just read, if you want to tell a little bit about your story, where you are now, what was before, what you are now, before we dive in into more about the topics of tantra and sexuality in midlife.

Luce Beaulieu:

Yeah, so I realized that the bio that I wrote was actually before my 53rd birthday, so I'm actually 53. Okay, so I'm two and a half years post menopause and my menopause transition was a real initiation. And the initiation how can I put it? Blueprint for women.

Luce Beaulieu:

The feminine initiation, in other words, is about really going deep. So if anybody's looking at us, or if you're not, actually not looking at us, it's a U-shaped shape. So you basically go down and then you go up, so you have to go down before you go up again, whereas the hero's journey, so which is more masculine is going on a quest and discovering yourself through hardships and things like that. But for us it's this U-shaped where we go really, really deep in the underworld. We die, we have some kind of an identity, death, and once we rebirth, we reawaken, then we can become transformed and we can have another identity. So that was my case with my menopause initiation, which was about three years ago, and ever since then, when I have reemerged, completely transformed, I realized that my mission was really to help women in midlife reawaken, rediscover their true feminine power.

Kena Siu:

Yes, we are all here for empowerment, that's for sure. I love that. I love that because I think, because of the patriarchy is considered something bad between quotes, and, as you said, I do believe it's a rebirth and it's so fucking powerful because we know ourselves better as midlife. So, having the knowledge that you have, that's what I want you to share more in here. It's being actually more powerful as a woman. Yes, yeah, absolutely yeah. Okay, let's start with what is actually tantra.

Luce Beaulieu:

What is Tantra? The eternal question. Tantra is basically a spiritual path that was originally developed for everyday people, so it's a spiritual path for the people who are not the renunciates. So the renunciates were the people who chose to be priests or priestesses or nuns or monks or you know all of these things. And Tantra, of course, in India, was the path for the everyday man or woman, right, and so Tantra could be done as a person who is married, with children being in life, and so this is really the essence, and what I love about Tantra is that everything is included, right Dark and light, anger and joy, ecstasy and horrific pain, and everything in between these different poles as well.

Luce Beaulieu:

And so the practice, because I don't consider myself a tantrica. I'm not trained enough to say I'm a tantrica, but I approach life and I definitely approach guiding and coaching women with a tantric approach, and so what that means is that, and also a shamanic approach to life, to midlife, to relationships, to self-love, to sexuality, to the body, to all these things, and so what that means essentially is that it's important to become intimate with the things that we experience. So if I'm experiencing something like shame, then how can I meet shame and how can I get intimate with shame? And then how can I feel shame to be able to process it, to go through it, instead of resisting and hiding myself from it. So it's about getting intimate with every single emotion, every single part of us, so that we can experience all of life because, again, all is included.

Luce Beaulieu:

And if we go a little bit deeper into tantric tools or tantric approaches, there's different pillars to tantra. The first one is presence. So to be fully present is a very, you know, tantric thing to do, especially in intimacy with a partner. Then the breath is absolutely fundamental. Energy as well is fundamental. And then what we call life force, energy, even more specifically, when we're talking about, you know, sexuality and orgasm, and what we also call eros is also, you know, all of it is energy.

Kena Siu:

Right, and you know, yeah, sorry, yeah, because I think, at least me, I related more only with that life force, energy that you're saying, with sexuality, when, when we hear about tantra, I don't know what's the perception of other people, but at least how I have perceived it is usually just focused on that and now that you're saying it has pillars, it presents breath and energy, then I can say I'm in the tantric part, the last part, we get in there, but eventually.

Kena Siu:

But okay, so thank you for specifying that, because it's I mean, as you said, it involves everything and it can become a lifestyle for what I understand that you are saying.

Luce Beaulieu:

Absolutely, and it's. It's something that can infuse every single part of life, whether it's sexuality or doing the dishes, or how you wake up in the morning, how you choose, what you choose to cultivate, what you pay attention to. So, again, you know presence, what you, what you cultivate in terms of the energy, the thoughts, the emotions. You know that can be tantric, it can also be very shamanic, um, and essentially it all boils down to anything that is very close to the earth. So, like earth-based spirituality, yeah okay, that makes sense.

Kena Siu:

I mean, you're very grounded and I know you're super, you know you love the nature, the elements and all here. So it makes sense that, uh, that's a good combination of knowledge that you have. Ah, gain, because, yeah, that's you, thank you. Um, so, in a way of the tantra, again coming back to that, if we dive a little bit more into that life, life force, energy, how can women connect to their own pleasure without well, it could be with a partner and without having a partner?

Luce Beaulieu:

and I'm guessing like specifically women in midlife going through perimenopause menopause yeah exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Luce Beaulieu:

That's an excellent, excellent, very, very big question. Um, which could be, you know, three days of of courses and workshops. Uh, the short answer, I think, is in any way that's available, right? So that can mean, um, I close my eyes and I connect to my breath for five minutes. It can be I'm just going to turn around and look at my plant for 30 seconds, just to have like a little bit of a pause and to feel into my body. The most, I would say the most important thing is to start feeling into what is below the neck, because we live very in our heads yes, Right, yeah, I love you specifying that because, yeah, that's so true.

Kena Siu:

We live in our heads.

Luce Beaulieu:

Yeah, we live in our heads and also we live in front and in our screens. Yeah, and in our screens, yeah. So, in fact, if, if, if we are kind of, if we were to draw a picture of how we live, it's like one millimeter deep in front of our face and from the neck, from the chin up. That is so sad. Right, it is, yeah, and yet there's so much more. There's the body. There's all the somatic sensations inside of the body. That is life force, energy.

Luce Beaulieu:

So when women come to me like you know new clients, and they're like I don't know about this somatic thing, I'm not really good with my body, like I don't know how this works, and they feel intimidated and I just breathe because you are being breathed Literally, you don't have to decide anything. Your body is breathing you every single day. And when we close our eyes and we just connect with this thought like my body is breathing me, my heart is breathing me, my heart is breathing me Right, like that is a thought that brings so much calm, yes, and so much connection to below the neck, and suddenly we can feel like the inside of our body has three dimensions and that we are a vessel. What do you?

Kena Siu:

mean with has three dimensions and that we are a vessel. What do you mean with those three dimensions? If we are not that connected to our bodies, we might not know.

Luce Beaulieu:

Exactly Comparatively to this very thin veal of, you know, awareness that we have. That's in front of our screen and it's like very, very thin, yeah. We can suddenly feel the full vessel of our body, our body, mind, yeah. And so that's a very simple way. And then there are more advanced practices, like advanced breath work. There's like energy cultivation in the Taoist tradition, for example. There can be, you know, of course, pleasure practices that can be very sensual, you know, like with the skin. It could be like sexual practices as well, where we touch the genitals and we can even go towards orgasm. But that is just a slice of the full spectrum of what is life force, energy.

Kena Siu:

Yeah, can you explain a bit more what is somatic, what is somatic work, because that word has become very famous, if I can put it that way. You know lately, so if you can go, yeah, if you can explain us what does that mean?

Luce Beaulieu:

Absolutely so. Somatic refers to the soma, and the soma is the body-mind body-mind in one word, because in recent science there is literally no difference between the body and the mind. But we've been sort of taught to believe and in this culture there's this idea that the mind should be controlling, should be above the body, right? This Judeo-Christian way of you know thinking, of thinking, way of you know thinking, yeah, it's coming from, you know, hundreds of years ago, where there was this colonization of people, but also the colonization of bodies and the mind. You know, we can see it as the leader of the body.

Luce Beaulieu:

We can also see it as the oppressor of the body, because if we're having certain thoughts, these thoughts are going to create biology, it's going to create chemistry in our body, it's going to create hormones and we have hormone receptors all over our bodies.

Luce Beaulieu:

It's going to create a chemical, like a chemical mix in our body that's going to be either conducive to life force, energy and pleasure or not. It's going to be toxic for us. So it's going to be either conducive to life force, energy and pleasure or not. It's going to be toxic for us. So it's going to be like stressful thoughts, for example, things like that and so all that to say that in the most recent scientific um publications, there is no difference between the body, mind, and so for some people who, for example, want to go in that direction, of there's no separation. They call it the Soma, and the Soma is the body, mind together. And so when we talk about somatic approaches, we talk about approaches that include the body and also include the mind, for example, you know, as opposed to things like cognitive behavioral therapy, which is really just mind based mind, uh-huh right and so one famous area, you know, area of expertise, of practice, is called somatic experiencing and that is a really famous area of you know that I really love that.

Luce Beaulieu:

I harvest a lot of wisdom from that was started by Peter Levine, and so in somatic experiencing we really include the nervous system, we include the body into the unfurling of trauma, for example, of trauma, for example. So we go into the body's wisdom to really try and see like what are the unresolved patterns or the unresolved trauma that the body-mind needs to work through to become whole, to become healthy again.

Kena Siu:

Oh, wow, it's very deep. It is, yeah, and, as you said, because it's amazing how we actually think, or we have been programmed to faster than our mind, even when we're going to take a decision, when we, you know, when we get that intuition between quotes, it's actually our body telling us to react to something that is off.

Luce Beaulieu:

Absolutely. And I don't know if you know the HeartMath Institute. It's an amazing scientific and practical institute. They did a bunch of research and they discovered that the heart knows before the mind when something is going to happen. Wow, like literal seconds and seconds is a lot, yeah. Seconds before the mind is like, oh, this is going to happen. The heart already knows.

Kena Siu:

Wow, that gave me chills, just to hear you saying that. Yeah, but then we leave with our minds. So then we're going to listen to the mind and we're not going to listen to what our body is telling us. Yeah, exactly it's telling us. Yeah exactly what has been one of the more I don't know like relevant or blown my experience that you have had when connecting more with your body.

Luce Beaulieu:

Great question when to start. Okay, I'm just gonna talk about one, but there's been like so, so, so, so many, especially with breathwork. A breathwork has been like a real eye and body opener, like for me over the last three years. But the the thing that, the experience I would say that it was about a little less than a year and a half ago.

Luce Beaulieu:

I was doing some practices that were about feeling energy and then moving energy in the body and then moving energy outside of the body, and I started doing the practice it's a guided practice and I was like, okay, sure, energy, I don't know whatever, a little bit like that. And I really got into the guidance. I was really like, okay, I'm going to go into it. And I really started feeling this ball of energy moving through me and I could actually move it in my body, in my arms, in my legs, and eventually I felt that it was around me, that I could direct it, that I could orient it. Yeah, that it was, it had a consciousness and that it was in connection with me.

Luce Beaulieu:

And it was totally mind blown, like I was completely shocked by having had this experience and and for me it was really foundational foundational because it's from that point that I was then really able to go into the finer Taoist practices. One of them, which is really amazing for midlife women, actually is called the microcosmic orbit, and so what you do is that you start cultivating and feeling and visualizing this orbit of energy in your perineum, your root chakra, and then it's like a specific breath work where it circulates in the back of your body. It goes until the crown and then you circulate it to the front of the body, back down to the root chakra, and then again and again, and it's a beautiful, beautiful, very powerful practice for life force energy. And it was hard for me to do before that experience, but when I had that experience of moving energy, then it was so easy to be doing that specific practice and other ones as well.

Kena Siu:

Oh, wow, can you describe, if you can like, how did you feel that energy that it has like a, like a color, like a I don't know, like a texture or how? How could you feel that energy?

Luce Beaulieu:

Great question, and I and I know that that is different for every person, but for me it it definitely felt like an orb of white, of white, going on gold light and I could feel it kind of tingling as it was circulating and my eyes were closed, but I could see it. I could feel it and see it at the same time, yeah. And I could see that it could expand or retract very, very easily, very fluidly. Yeah, okay.

Kena Siu:

I think, at least for me, has been, as you said, like when we talk about energy. I know everything is energy, us, every material being, everything on earth is energy and it's difficult to recognize it. What is not in physical form? Right like in here in front of me, it's the laptop, it's, you know, it's been a sofa, so all that is also energy, but it's in a, in a dense form, in a physical form. But recognize it like the way you experience it, and probably that's why you said at the beginning I bought it. I bought it.

Kena Siu:

I probably would have stayed the same, like, oh yeah, let's do this energy, let's see what it is right, yeah, but I have also have a few experience with feeling energy and it's what we really can understand oh my god, it's really there, it exists that we until we experience it. My question is because you talk about the microcosmic orbit If we do this practice of breath, you know, as you said, like imagining that we're breathing through our first chakra all the way back up and back through our back and then forward, uh down again, uh down to the first chakra, like what kind of benefits can we experience by doing that? I mean, I know it energizes more, we feel more, you know more vitality. But then, if we put it in the material world, more. But how can we experience? Oh, how can have you experienced it?

Luce Beaulieu:

uh, like that I have, um, it's part of I have like a vast array of morning practices and every morning, you know, or most mornings, I should say, uh, I choose two to four, depending on how much time I actually have. So the microcosmic orbit is one of them, breast massage is another one, and I've never. So I can't answer you in terms of like I haven't done only microcosmic orbit for 15 days to the you know and nothing else.

Luce Beaulieu:

So I can't say this is specifically what it does. But that practice that I do do regularly, and others as well in the same range what I feel like is that it refines and it dissolves the things that might be stuck in each of my chakras. That's like on the energy level. And if you go into Taoist knowledge, what they say is that there's also, so there's glands at every single chakra. There's a major gland in our body. Okay, so I feel like and I have no way of proving this but I feel like it also really helps the gland to have more life force, energy in the physical sense, and when our glands have energy or functioning properly, are nourished in, you know, in other words, then our whole body functions amazingly and in harmony.

Luce Beaulieu:

And this is one of the things for, specifically for midlife women. That's very, very important is that once our progesterone and estradiol starts to, to, to be modified and to start, you know, going down, to be modified and and to start, you know, going down, uh, our whole body actually starts experiencing imbalance. So, not just the ovaries, all of our glands, yeah, because, because all of our glands are in one vessel and they're it's as if they're all friends, they're a group of friends, right. So when one friend is not feeling well, is dysregulated, is struggling, then all of the friends are affected, right? So we can also imagine that it's nourishing, that it's dissolving anything that is in the way of each gland working in an optimal way and in that way, as mid midlife women, it can contribute to our overall balance, our overall health. It can help our energy during the day, it can help our sleep during the night. It's a really, really beautiful harmonizing practice.

Kena Siu:

Yeah, it sounds delicious. Which other practices so besides this one? Or say you, you do so many well, some more. And because you are the expert in here, uh, I know a lot of women in this period, during perimenopause, as you said, because there are a lot of hormone imbalances, then they, I mean they don't feel good, they don't function well. And I cannot express yet because I haven't arrived there yet, but I know just by hearing it, you know, the loss of memory, the flashes, all this. What other practices we can do that it doesn't have to do with medication.

Luce Beaulieu:

Yeah, great question. And for so many women, they can't take medication for various reasons or they don't want to, and so that's a great question. And there's so many, so many things that women can do for themselves. That is not hormonal replacement therapy, that is not medication, that isn't anti-anxiety meds, for example, things like that. So breathwork is absolutely an amazing, amazing tool. Whether we're feeling really fatigued and we need that burst of energy, there's lots of breathwork. That is what we call up-regulating.

Luce Beaulieu:

So if our and I'm going to get a little geeky here, I'm going to talk about the autonomic nervous system, and so the autonomic nervous system, when we are in late, specifically in late perimenopause and the menopause transition, our autonomic nervous system is has. We have like very narrow capacity, which means that we can spill over in what is called a sympathetic state very easily, sympathetic being activated and it can go all the way to dysregulation. And what we want to regain our calm is we want to go back into safe parasympathetic mode because they're safe, threatened, and so there's threatened parasympathetic mode because they're safe, threatened, and so there's threatened parasympathetic and there's safe parasympathetic. So what we want, with breathwork, is to go back into safe parasympathetic. And so all that to say, if we are in a parasympathetic that is fatigued, collapsed, you know, anxiety, we're a bit frozen. We, you know, we're having all these anxious thoughts. We're more like in the threatened parasympathetic. And what we want is we want to create a little bit of energy to go dip into the parasympathetic, but in a way that is going to be nourishing and energizing. And then we want to follow that up with another practice. For example, it can be um? Um a pleasure practice.

Luce Beaulieu:

I personally always go back to pleasure, because pleasure overrides everything, literally pleasure and orgasms. It overrides food, nutrition, um, any kind of other practice that we can hope to do. Pleasure overrides it all. So, for example, one of the things with women who are very fatigued in perimenopause is they don't have enough nitric oxide in their bloodstream, and so what brings a lot of nitric oxide is orgasms. Okay.

Luce Beaulieu:

So if you're fatigued and there's many other things like you want to check your, your iron levels, you want to check if you have enough vitamin B, these this is more like on the physiological side of things you want to check if you have any kind of underlying thyroid condition, for example.

Luce Beaulieu:

You do want to check all of that, and there's tons of really great supplements you can take, and nitric oxide is a free chemical that you can create for yourself when you have pleasure and orgasm or when you're cuddling with somebody or when you're doing something that is just really pleasurable. So all that to say that to shortcut all of that and make it into a quick practice is you can do that little bit of upregulating breath work and then you can go into some pleasure. And pleasure can take many forms, and one of the things that I love is breast massage, because our breasts are filled is breast massage, because our breasts are filled, just so filled with beautiful pleasure receptors and creators, and so when we take a little bit of oil, or it can be also above our clothing- and we start loving our breasts and massaging our breasts and there's a specific way in the Taoist tradition to do it but even just massaging, just to love them and to open our heart, that's a great way to create a lot of oxytocin upregulating breath work.

Luce Beaulieu:

you do a little pause, you feel yourself and then you do a beautiful breast massage. Create that oxytocin, open your heart and I can guarantee that you're gonna have at least a few hours of energy.

Kena Siu:

Yeah oh yeah, I want to specify to our listeners that when she was showing how to do the breast massage, it was basically doing circles around our breast, yeah, like from the outside to the inside, but I know we can also do it to the other side right, well, so let's get into it.

Luce Beaulieu:

So in the Taoist tradition, what we want to do is we want to go in that direction. First to clear the breasts of any stagnant energy, and you only want to do that if your breasts are healthy. So if you have any suspicion that you might have a cyst, or you know you might have something with your breasts, or definitely if you have breast cancer, you should probably avoid that part. And then the other part is to bring in the goodness, bring in the love. That's like the other rotation.

Kena Siu:

Okay, so first it's internal rotation and then it's external rotation.

Luce Beaulieu:

Exactly Okay, I'm sorry. Sorry. The other way around, actually. Oh, okay, external and then internal. External to clear and internal to bring in the goodness.

Kena Siu:

Okay, yeah, beautiful, yeah, and I love that because, as you said, it connects us back to our heart.

Luce Beaulieu:

Exactly and our heart, like for women. That's our positive pole. Our negative pole is our genitals in our pelvic bowl. And for men it's the contrary their positive pole is their genitals and their negative pole is their heart.

Kena Siu:

I didn't know that yeah, okay, hmm, okay, hmm. So my next question that I'm trying to make it up in my in my head, it will be because I remember once I did yeah with my mentor, sophia Tom, we, we will have this kind of exercise, a breathing exercise, where we would just go actually from our womb like imagining breathing from there up to our heart and then back to our womb. It was just a breath in there and that connection is so powerful powerful.

Luce Beaulieu:

Yes, yeah, absolutely. That's also a practice that I do when I want to connect my creativity, my creatrix, and I want to create from my heart. That's a beautiful practice, you know, especially in business, when we do that, you know, whether it's a meditation or breath work, it's a really beautiful practice to do before delivering a podcast or a teaching or, you know, creating a course or something like that. That womb heart connection is fundamental.

Kena Siu:

Yeah.

Kena Siu:

Yeah, because then we stay in our feminine to create and that's much more powerful that coming from our mind. Definitely.

Luce Beaulieu:

Absolutely Always from the neck down. Yeah.

Kena Siu:

I'm going to put that one somewhere so I can remember it.

Luce Beaulieu:

It's a pretty good mantra.

Kena Siu:

Yes, yeah, I love it. Okay, let's dive in more about sex.

Luce Beaulieu:

Okay, let's dig in.

Kena Siu:

What are some of the myths that you consider that happen about sex when we get into midlife and then towards perimenopause and then menopause Like what are kind of love of those meats?

Luce Beaulieu:

mm-hmm. Oh my god, so many. You lose your libido and your desire. You become dried up. You automatically have a general dryness or pain during intercourse. You're not sexy anymore. You're not gonna find a partner. Oh my god, so many.

Kena Siu:

So many things about, about sex yeah, well, it doesn't want to mention. We just gave me chills like it's yeah, and I mean, and the worst thing is that we consider them well, or at least a lot of us uh, bomb truths and, as you said, yeah or not, they're just meat absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, it's a cultural, it's a I call it a cultural syndrome yeah, is it probably a way to control or manipulate us mentally so they can put it, put us down?

Luce Beaulieu:

well, I, I would think so, whether it's conscious or unconscious. Or unconscious, yeah, definitely, because when we get to, you know menopause and then post-menopause, more particularly, we are not controlled by our hormones anymore, right? And the thing that is interesting with estradiol and progesterone is that progesterone is kind of like a mild sedative, so you're like a little tiny bit of sleep, and then estradiol is the hormone of caring and nurturing and self-sacrificing and people pleasing, you know, like getting along with others and things like that, right, yeah, if you think of these two hormones as a carpet, all of our deepest, let's say you know, deeper desires or deeper sense of self, our boundaries all of that is kind of like cushioned by these hormones start disappearing. Lo and behold, our anger can start coming up, our realize they are, awareness, our clarity about so many things that have been happening in our life can start emerging into our consciousness. And I don't think it's a it's.

Luce Beaulieu:

I think it's very significant that many divorces in long-term relationship between men and women occur in midlife, initiated by women. I think it's between 60 and 70% of divorce of long-term heterosexual relationships happen in between 45 and 55 initiated by women. So that's very significant. Wow, yeah, yeah. So to your point that you were alluding to, when we are not controlled by our own hormones. We are therefore uncontrolled. We are therefore much more in our own self, in our own empowerment Right, and that's when we start talking, and that's when we start speaking our truth, setting our boundaries, exactly Setting boundaries, being courageous, wanting to exercise our power, wanting to be known for our wisdom, known for work.

Luce Beaulieu:

And that's when we become these, you know, and that's why they call, called us the shrews and the witches and all these things, because they couldn't control us, because we're not. And so, yeah, it's absolutely because, when they can't control us with marriage or fertility or you know, saying like, oh, you're never gonna find a man, and you know, like what are they gonna control us with? They're gonna control us with you. Are you no more value? You should just disappear. You're irrelevant, your voice doesn't matter, all these things. And one of my mentors what she says is anything that the patriarchy throws at you and that you have embedded in your own consciousness. That's the medicine. That's what you have to work on dissolving, to free and liberate yourself. Very, very interesting work.

Kena Siu:

Yeah, wow, yeah, I've heard, I follow this guy. He's also kind of like a coach, mentor or whatever. He doesn't like um labels. He's from mexico and he talks about, yeah, women being the first one you know, setting up for a divorce and what you just said. It makes a lot of sense because it's when we start waking up really to who we are, I mean. And at that point we don't want to be the mom of the husband anymore, we don't want to have to deal with their vices or having to take care of all the financial stuff I mean, I don't have kids but just being in charge of the kids, even when this person can do it as well.

Kena Siu:

And yeah, I guess there is just a point that we just get so fed up that we, just as you said, we get out of control between quotes, because what I realized is us, as women, we don't take decisions radically. It has to be. We get signs. We get signs. We try to, you know, talk to the partner and give our point of view and then trying to put it in so many different ways and when they don't get it after so many months or years and I'm talking for my personal experience at one point. It's like this is it, this is it. But it was not yesterday that I took the decision. It has been gradually coming in, this decision, and for me it took me like two, three years. And what I realized for a lot of us women then is like, yeah, no, I'm done. There's not even a way that I want to be bad because I'm done.

Luce Beaulieu:

I tried to tell you with many ways and you just didn't pick up yeah, and what you're saying, like millions of hundreds of millions of people, I think, have gone through that. I've gone through that in, you know, my ex-marriage, um and I think that it comes with the territory of being nurturers, of being people who naturally, biologically, hormonally, we care about relationships. We care so much and we're built, we're wired I mean, all humans are but for us we have an extra layer of needing to be connected to others because, hormonally, estradiol is one of our dominant hormones and estradiol is the nurturing hormone.

Kena Siu:

Okay.

Luce Beaulieu:

Right. And so when that hormone starts fluctuating, that's when our brains start transforming, and that's when as start transforming, and that's when, as I was saying, like our fire, our boundaries, our clarity, our voice starts coming up as well yeah wow, okay.

Kena Siu:

So to our dear listeners who are in this realm of separation and divorce, here you have a huge answer to, probably, your feeling of guilt or of shame of taking the decision or leaving your relationship. Give it a dot, because you're not alone and it means that it's time for your awakening, it's time for the midlife butterfly to come out absolutely yeah, and there's, there's so much.

Luce Beaulieu:

I mean, it's such a rich topic and I think that the piece about desire and libido and sex is also incredibly, incredibly important and you alluded to it a couple of minutes ago. It's also a big, big sign for women, you know, anxiety also being another, there's many, but the, the desire in partnership, when you, when you have a sexual partner, um is also a very, very big sign that there is not only this modification of the hormones but the modification of our psyche, of our body again, of our som, of our body again, of our soma, of our body mind. And for a lot of women it can be very difficult, because you know some of my clients, for example. They come to me because they say, oh, I've had spontaneous desire and no problem orgasming and all these things for their whole lives.

Luce Beaulieu:

And then midlife happens, around 40, 45, 50. And suddenly things are very difficult and a part of their identity could have been woven in with this. You know, I'm a sexual woman, I'm a woman who orgasms easily, I'm a woman who loves pleasure, I'm a woman who loves my partner, and suddenly they don't have spontaneous desire. Sometimes their partner actually repels them like they're, like, don't even touch me. Even their breathing annoys them.

Luce Beaulieu:

You know, they're having a lot of what we call we shouldn't call it that but what is known as sexual dysfunction. But I think for me it's more like it's a sign that something needs to be transformed, and it can be very painful, very difficult.

Kena Siu:

Yeah, because, as you said, it's part of their identity and then, if it's shifting, there's some self-grief and some let go of that part of the person, right? Exactly, yeah, how can we as women and I include myself in here, because sex has been a taboo at home, like I never talk about sex with my parents, like never. It was like no conversation at all, and because of that, that created a lot of shame and guilt, right, and I know there's a lot of women also in that how can we release that guilt and that shame that we have been accumulated for decades?

Luce Beaulieu:

Beautiful question. So it's very common that around midlife, women start to have you know, again, I don't like the term sexual dysfunction, but these signs that sexually, something, something you know, needs a shift. It's going to be related to some kind of sexual healing that we need to be doing right. So, whether it's, in some cases it's going to be sexual violation, whether it's rape or whether it's, you know, an event that you didn't consent to in the past or a series of these kinds of events, you know, like cultural mindset about what is a woman a good woman, a good girl, as it relates to sexuality, as it relates to pleasure, as it relates to climaxing, orgasming, the number of partners that you might have had, the whether it's okay or not to self-pleasure.

Luce Beaulieu:

All of these things start coming up in midlife actually because, again, this beautiful carpet of hormones has been keeping a lot underneath it, so many things under the carpet, so when that carpet starts dissipating, all of these things start coming up in the sex piece really can play a number on us. And in my personal practice I know that for some of my clients, you know there's practices like you know inner child healing, inner reparenting, you know going back to certain events that might have happened and you know being guided through some self healing, whether it's through meditation or through pleasure practices or through you know, like I have a very specific orientation with that, whether it's changing the narrative that we have about certain things. I have like a really beautiful four session process actually to reclaim and then master one's sexual energy. It's like it's so beautiful, it's very somatic Again, it's like very body-based and the women I've taken through that particular four session, like all of them, have had amazing transformations.

Luce Beaulieu:

Or whether it's sexual dryness, like what is your vagina trying to tell you, right, like, why is it painful? Do you? What does that mean? And to really inquire, and again, what does she need? What does your clitoris need? What do your vaginal walls need? Do they need more nourishment? Do they need more energy? Do they need slowness? Do they need presence?

Luce Beaulieu:

Because, again, once our sex hormones start shifting, the urge or what we call spontaneous desire, can become responsive desire.

Luce Beaulieu:

We can shift from I really want sex, like actively, and I'm actively going to go and ask my partner, like let's have sex, to being very responsive, like it's not that you don't want it, it's that you would prefer the person to come to you or create the conditions under which sex can just blossom. Right, instead of being more of a yang sexuality, it becomes more of a yin sexuality. So what I always try to tell my clients is how can we just get curious about what this means, what this transformation like? What are the breadcrumbs, what are the signs that we can start connecting with? And again, it's like that tantric approach of let's connect, let's get intimate with these parts, with these pieces, and let's see what is their wisdom. Usually the vagina will relax as well and we go with, like a lot of slowness, a lot of presence, a lot of love of course, with, you know, energy nourishing these fragile, sometimes parts. There's just so much that we can do with this dimension of our life. That's so so important for women?

Kena Siu:

Oh wow, it is important and unfortunately, because of culture or for education, we tend to deny it or to ignore it.

Luce Beaulieu:

Unfortunately, Absolutely and even just not ignoring it anymore. Just that can be very healing to the body. More just that can be very healing to the body. Even just you know, engaging in, you know whether, whether it's coaching or whether it's um trying to find things for that you do for yourself, but just even putting attention and awareness and love and presence into that, even just that can be so, so healing yeah, I can't relate to.

Kena Siu:

That is when I started, when I started connecting to my womb, to my pussy. It's when things started shaking, shaking, shifting, sorry, and yeah, it's. Yeah, it created a big difference because there was something that I was ignoring. So, just by starting, putting attention, and then it's so wise, our womb, it is so wise.

Luce Beaulieu:

Yeah, she is. You know, our womb, all of our genitals and our womb. They hold the essence of our power as women. So when we start connecting to that part of our body also is when we start really reconnecting to that deep, deep, deep feminine power.

Kena Siu:

Beautiful. What a better way to finish this thing. With our pussies and knowing that our power is right there. Yes, yes, okay, dear Luz, what would you call this stage of your midlife?

Luce Beaulieu:

So, according to one of my mentors, mentors, jane Hardwick Cullings, who she teaches the women's wheel of life and the season, you know the women's seasons. I, of course, I'm in my autumn, in my fall, but because I'm in my early 50s and the autumn goes until the 70s, I am in the spring of my autumn, the spring of your autumn.

Kena Siu:

Okay, I love that. Oh, I can imagine like flowers with the colors of autumn. That could be so beautiful, exactly.

Luce Beaulieu:

Exactly.

Kena Siu:

Oh, that's great. What is a simple pleasure that you enjoy the most?

Luce Beaulieu:

Wow, I would say in the morning it's waking up and putting a hand over my vulva and really saying hello, good morning, I love you, and just feeling her pulsating oh my god, I love that.

Kena Siu:

And where can the listeners find you?

Luce Beaulieu:

listeners can find me on my website, emergenceco, my instagram handle, emergenceco, as well, and preferably my Facebook group. That is called menopause is your superpower. Welcome to the midlife temple, or midlife temple for short. That is where I do most of my teaching. I go live almost every day in that group. Most of my teaching.

Luce Beaulieu:

I go live almost every day in that group, and I have a beautiful program right now that is launched, because I think this is coming out in July and we're in June, so it's called Aging with Eros. So if anything I have said today is of any kind of interest, this is we're going to go much deeper into all of it during four months, so from August to November to, yes, november, with a live embodiment retreat that's going to be occurring October 2 to 5 in Ontario, and we're I'm so excited I'm co creating this with a colleague who she is in the winter of her autumn, so we are in both spectrums of the autumn. She's called Linda. She's amazing, and we are going to be holding this space together for four months, as well as the retreat for four months, as well as the retreat.

Kena Siu:

So, and just for your listeners, you get a special 15% off. Oh, wow, that is great. I think that would be a promo code or something. Yes, okay, I'm gonna put all that information in the show notes. Thank you so much. It has been such a nourishing, mind-opening for me and, hopefully, down to my neck, more experience from now on and thank you so much for being here. I love you so much my pleasure.

Luce Beaulieu:

I love you so much.

Kena Siu:

Thank you for tuning into Midlife Butterfly. If this episode lit a spark in you, hit that subscribe or follow button on Apple Podcasts, spotify or wherever you love to listen, so you'll never miss the magic. If you're feeling generous, drop a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps this empowering content reach more souls ready to transform their lives. And don't forget to take a photo of you while listening and share it on your socials. You can tag me at KenAsYou so I can celebrate you and your expansion. Until next time, keep spreading those wings and living in joy, growth and pleasure.

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