Top 3 Life Lessons Every Woman Needs to Hear Before Turning 60

I recently celebrated my big 60th and have been reflecting on the past decade. I've experienced significant growth in the last ten years, made a few big life transitions and I've learned a few life lessons along the way that I’ll share with you. My 50s were filled with raising four teenagers, caring for my elderly parents, navigating a divorce, writing a book, becoming a certified coach and somatic healer, and starting this podcast. I experienced so much personal growth and transformation that I never imagined was possible when I turned 50.

Today, I want to share three powerful lessons that helped me grow, embrace authenticity, and find more joy, freedom in life and I think they can help you too.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• How to stop compromising who you are to fit in, so you can start living a more authentic life.
• How to tend and regulate your nervous system daily in today's fast-paced, overstimulating world.
• Why yoga, meditation, and breathwork are the gateway practices to somatic practices and more embodiment.
• Three somatic practices that you can incorporate into your daily life to regulate your nervous system. 
• How not giving my loved ones unsolicited advice has changed my relationship with them and what an alternative suggestion is instead.

I’ll also touch on the importance of nurturing creativity, finding joy in the little things, and letting go of what’s out of your control. No matter where you are in life this episode is full of practical tips and inspiration to help you grow and thrive.

Cheers to finding more freedom and joy, 

Laurie

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Transcript

Hey, there free birds. Just a couple quick announcements before I get started on today's episode that you are going to love. First, I have two one on one openings coming up in the new year. I have a couple clients I've been working with for a while who are finishing up. So I wanted to make sure you knew that I had some availability in my schedule. Make sure you get on my email list, or you can email me directly through my website, if you are looking for somatic support in the new year. 

Second, if you are one of my local listeners, don't forget I have my annual vision board meditation day that is filled with all kinds of delicious food to keep your juices flowing. Really connected meditation to really tap into your vision, so you can tune into what's best for you in 2025 it's at a great price, $99 the link is in the show notes. And lastly, don't forget to grab my freebies. I have several, a couple guides on online dating and my very popular Beginner's Guide to somatic healing. You can click the link in the show notes to download those and enjoy this solo episode. I have on my top takeaways from my 50s that I am going to take into my 60s. 

Welcome to Confessions of a Freebird podcast. I'm your host, Laurie James, a mother, divorcee, recovering caregiver, the author of Sandwiched A Memoir of holding on and letting go. A therapy, junkie, relationship coach, somatic healer and now podcaster, I'm a free spirit, and here to lift you up on this podcast, I'll share soulful confessions and empowering conversations with influential experts so you can learn to spread your wings and make the most of your second half. So pop in those earbuds, turn up the volume, and let's get inspired, because my mission is to help you create your most joyful, purpose driven life, one confession at a time. 

Happy holidays, free birds. So if you are new here, I first want to just thank you for trusting me with your valuable time and for my loyal listeners, I want to thank you for continuing to trust me in guiding you so you can spread your wings and enjoy life just a little bit more. I've been doing a lot of reflecting over the last few weeks, mostly because I if you don't follow me on social media and you haven't listened to a couple of my recent podcasts, I celebrated my 60th birthday with my four daughters, all their significant others, And my partner, Jeff. We were down in the Caribbean, and it was a wonderful time together, and it really filled up my soul, my emotional tank, but that's not what I was going to talk about today. I may talk about that in the future, but I've also been reflecting on all that has changed for me in the last decade, and what have been the most important takeaways that I want to take into my 60s and beyond. 

As many of you know, I stayed home to raise my four daughters for close to 25 years, and in the last decade, I not only went through a divorce, I wrote a book, became a certified life coach, a somatic experiencing practitioner, and started this podcast. Wow, when I just say that out loud, that is a lot. And if you would have asked me when I turned 50, if you would have told me I was going to do all that, I would have laughed in your face. So that just goes to show you wherever you are at in your life. You don't know where you're going to be in five years or 10 years. And even though, when I was 50, I was not in a great place, my marriage was in turmoil. I was in the middle of taking care of my aging parents and managing caregivers who were unruly, raising teenagers. 

I have to sit here and say I'm going to give myself some credit and pat myself on the back for all the work that I've done and to be proud of myself for everything that I've created. Am I Oprah Winfrey or Mel Robbins? No, but to just be bold enough and to have the courage and strength to change something that wasn't working. It's hard, it's fucking hard, but we all have the ability to do it, and it just takes making small steps towards more joy, towards the light every single day. So today I'm going to share my top three tips that I've learned in the last decade and that I plan on bringing in to my 60s, which is going to help me continue to embrace each year that I get to spend on this planet.

So the first is, I stop compromising who I was and am to fit in with others. It doesn't matter whether that's family or a friend group or a marriage. Because if I'm honest with myself and you, I did that throughout my marriage, and I did that growing up. I did that in college. I didn't feel like I belonged in my family. That's partly because I'm adopted. I was the only girl, but I became a chameleon, and it really wasn't until my late 40s, into me turning 50, a decade ago, that I began to step into my own and to finally be willing to be authentically me. I was done suffering and being who everyone else needed me to be or wanted me to be. I slowly became the person I wanted to be. 

So why do we do that? Well as women, we are nurturers. We like to take care of people, but oftentimes this is a pattern that starts in childhood. Sometimes it can also start in a relationship later on, but maybe you did this because you were told as a child to act a certain way in front of others or to be polite or to hug somebody or to disregard your feelings, or maybe you had to do this and you needed to take care of other people's feelings and dismiss your own so that way you could feel safe. 

When we do this habitually for a long period of time, it can cause us to have difficulty to access a healthy fight response, somatically, a healthy fight response, and to set boundaries or to walk away from a situation or person, you can even feel a sense of powerlessness or even collapse in our body or freeze, and it may become a default with stress or fear, because in the past, it didn't feel safe to stand up for what we wanted or to ask for what we needed. What happens over time is we become people pleasers, until you build up so much anger and resentment that you feel like you want to explode. Well, at least that's what happened to me, or from a spiritual standpoint, you're lying in bed and you feel like your soul might wither away and die. 

Somatically, this is also the fawn response that we have, which is one of the five trauma responses, which is our fight, our flight, our freeze, our fawn or immobility when. We're in the fond response. We are typically people pleasers. We are agreeable because we want to avoid conflict, and we have a hard time setting boundaries. We feel insecure and ashamed, and we might feel if we set a boundary, somebody is going to walk away from us. It's a common reaction when we've had some complex trauma from our childhood and can cause a lot of confusion and guilt. The good thing is, we can change. You don't have to continue this pattern in your adult life. Understanding people, pleasing from a nervous system standpoint, helps you develop more awareness of your body responses, and helps you build self regulation skills. 

Some first steps around this is to notice what's happening in your body when you habitually might say yes, when you really want to say no, or you might want to speak up and have a need, but you feel like you are a burden to somebody. It all starts with the awareness of what sensations we're feeling inside. Do we feel the restriction? Do we feel a tightness in our throat? Do we feel heat coming up through our body? Might we have a little bit of perspiration, and then it's also about staying with those sensations and not trying to move away from that. When we can do this, it can help us, over time, learn how to set healthy boundaries, prioritize our needs, saying no when necessary, practicing kindness and self compassion. It also helps us over apologizing and learn how to embrace the discomfort that we might feel in the moment and over time, the more we do it, the more we will get comfortable with it, but we have to do it slowly and connect with our sensations and touch the edges of them slowly and then move more into it. 

Setting healthy boundaries doesn't only benefit you, though it also improves your relationship with others by fostering mutual respect and understanding. When we're not consistently trying to please everyone else at our own expense, and we can communicate openly about what works for both parties, you will end up finding a deeper connection. You will feel more authentic, and it won't feel like an obligation that you will then, potentially later resent. 

Hi, freebirds. I wanted to take a quick moment out of this episode and tell you about a friend and mentor of mine, Julie Reisler. She is a master coach and founder of Intuitive Life Designer Coach Academy certification program. She is starting her 12th cohort on january 30, 2025, and is offering early bird pricing if you sign up before December 31 I personally worked with Julie a year and a half ago, and I'm part of her monthly membership program called Sanctuary. I interviewed several master coaches and felt that Julie was in alignment with me and had my best interest at heart. She really helped me become the coach I am today, and I am so thankful for that. Also know that I don't endorse products or services I don't believe in or have tried myself. Her Intuitive Life Designer Coach Academy Certification Program is a very comprehensive four month program that I recommend this extensive and experiential, integrative life coach certification training will build your confidence, intuition, empower you with specific tools, methodology and proven steps you need to create a coaching practice that changes lives and enhances your spiritual connection. Even if you don't want to become a coach, it is an incredible healing experience in itself. Learn how you can become a transformative life coach, certified through the intuitive life designer coach Academy by clicking the link in the show notes. Now back to this episode.

Number two. I will continue to tend to my nervous system on a daily basis. I often work with women who do the work when they're triggered, or they do the work when they're traumatized over something or working through something, but they kind of forget to do the maintenance plan when it comes to our nervous system. And after, I felt very ill after my marriage that I have talked about several times on my podcast, I landed in the hospital twice, felt like I had stuck my finger in a light socket, and I started working with my SEP I have learned to embrace this practice and incorporate it into my daily life. It's kind of like exercising, going for my walk every day, going to the gym, eating healthy, I just include it, and now it just becomes part of my day. 

And you know, before I fell sick, and before I started working with a SEP, I did a lot of work. I took three years of an energy course. I was practicing yoga regularly. I was in talk therapy for five and a half years. I was doing breath work, meditation, and all of those things are great. I don't want to take anything away from those modalities, because they are all helpful. But it wasn't until I really started working with an SEP, a somatic experiencing practitioner, that I finally felt relief from that unease that I felt in my body, the anxiety, the DIS ease I constantly felt in my body that I know now I can catch sooner and know when I'm feeling overwhelmed and not allow it to continue on to the point where my body shuts down like it did. 

And here's the thing, this doesn't have to be hard, this doesn't have to feel overwhelming. This can be slowly integrated into your life. We live in such a fast paced world with so much information now being thrown at us, we are bombarded by endless emails and social media notifications. We Doom scroll and media and news that thrives on heated debates that in addition to just living our regular life and trying to manage family relationships, kids, significant others, extended family takes a toll on our nervous system, and I've said this before on past podcasts, but our Nervous System was actually created over 5 million years ago, and our nervous system has not caught up with our current world, with all of the sensory overload that we receive between our computers, phones, TV, etc. 

That constant stimulation can flood your nervous system with stress hormones like cortisol, over activating your amygdala, your brain's fear center, and leaving you feeling anxious, irritable and exhausted, which I have clients that often come to me feeling that way, the nervous system is our body's command center. Think of it as the command center that controls everything from breathing, your digestion, to learning to social bonding. It's made up of our central nervous system, which includes spinal cord and brain, the peripheral nervous system, which is connected to the central nervous system and then our autonomic nervous system, where vagus nerve lives. Regulating your nervous system regularly, can help you feel calm, reduce stress hormones like the cortisol and adrenaline that happens when our body moves up into more of a sympathetic state, which is what we it's activation. 

So one of the things that I would recommend that you can do, and I often talk to my clients about doing when I'm first working with them, is to set a timer three times a day. And you can even do it right now, if you have the time to stop for a moment, but just check in with yourself. If you're standing, notice where your feet are making contact with your shoes and where your shoes might be making contact with the floor. If you're sitting, notice the chair underneath you, notice your feet on the floor, and notice any sensations inside? I have a lot of tingling in my body. I've talked about I just noticed I took a deeper breath just now, I'm noticing I have ringing in my ears. 

I was working with a client earlier today who, for the first time, felt her heart beat. And she said she'd never felt her heart beat in that way before. She was never tuned in that much so as you do this, just notice if your shoulders dropped, if you took that natural breath, that's your nervous system regulating and coming down into a rest and digest. It doesn't mean that we want to stay there, but a healthy nervous system is going to come up and down, come up into activation, which is our sympathetic, and come down into our parasympathetic, which is rest and digest. And that's what we want as a healthy nervous system that can move up and down, up and down. We don't want to get stuck in any one place too long. 

What I've really learned is building this relationship with my nervous system. And I know my clients have responded or have given me feedback about this is when we build this relationship with our nervous nervous system when we can bring more awareness to and normalize what's happening in our body, it is so much better for our mental and emotional well being, and it is also so much healthier than popping a pill that only covers up our symptoms. And I don't want to say that taking medication doesn't have its time or place because it does, but let me give you an example. Let's think of a time when you were startled by somebody walking around the corner, and you didn't realize they were there. What happened to you? You your body and your muscles got tense, your throat restricted, probably your heart beat probably increased, and maybe you felt some warmth or perspiration. What if you stayed stuck like that and didn't come down and didn't allow your body to come down and rest and relax? That is what happens when we don't tend to our nervous system, especially living in our fast paced society. We get stuck up there, and our nervous system feels like we are in constant threat. We become hyper vigilant. We become anxious because we haven't taught ourselves how to come down into more of a rest and digest place. And one of the quotes that I love, that Peter Levine talks about, which is the founder of somatic experiencing and the program that I'm trained in, is trauma is a fact of life. It does not have to be a life sentence.

And on another note, one of the best, biggest misnomers that I want to share is that, learning these simple practices and incorporating them into your daily life isn't about always trying to be calm and peaceful. That's not the goal, and that's not the reality of life. What doing this work will do is to give you the tools that practices so that way you can learn to regulate your nervous system and move through those difficult situations by using the tools and exercises that I teach when working with one on one or working in groups with my clients, so that way you can move through. You can if you're feeling like you are down in a rest and digest and you need to come up. There are tools and exercises to help move your nervous system in up into activation and mobilization, but then also to bring you down into rest and digest. So then your nervous system learns to do it on its own. 

My third point is, and this is something that I learned from my mom, and sometimes I'm better at it than others, but I really do my best not to give other people advice, especially my children and close friends and my partner, Jeff. But again, sometimes I slip up. I have worked hard to encourage my girls to trust themselves and to trust their own intuition. And what do they desire? What is going to bring them joy? What is going to bring meaning in their life? Because what I want for them, it's going to be most likely different than what they want for them. And what better gift can we give our kids is the ability to trust themselves, the ability to trust their own nervous system, their own intuition. And here's the other thing, when we're with somebody who's in distress or having a hard day, most people just want to be heard and validated and not given advice. I know I don't like to be given advice, especially when I'm in this heightened state, when my nervous system is activated or I'm in a fight or flight response. Oftentimes I just want to vent and discharge and again. It doesn't mean that I don't do it. I found myself doing it in the kitchen. The day after Thanksgiving, Jeff was making dinner for his kids, and my oldest daughter and her fiance were going to be there. I was a sous chef, and I kept looking over his shoulders, no. And one of the things I said to him is when he was making eight pounds of meat for eight people, I said, Can I make a suggestion? And fortunately, he was open to it. I really try not to, and instead, I try to hold space for somebody. 

So going back to when somebody is having a hard time or in a difficult place, and somebody comes to me in vent, one of the things I will often ask them is, what do you need from me right now? Or how can I help? And often they'll say, I just need you to listen. And once I've just given them that time and space, then I might ask if I do have a suggestion at the end, can I make a suggestion? And then they can have the option of saying, No, I'm not really interested in hearing anything right now. And can you honor that? Or another really great tip is the 3h tip a guest on my podcast, Kathy Batista, a few months ago, shared this tip with me, and I have used it. Ask whoever you're with is, Do you need help? Do you need to be heard, or do you need a hug? And that gives them a choice. They can then share what they might need. 

I remember hearing many, many years ago, Oprah Winfrey talking about the fact that she has done over 35,000 interviews in her career. And oftentimes, as soon as the camera shuts off, the majority of the people, even the presidents, even Beyonce, even some of her top guests, would turn to her and say, Was that okay? Because in the end, we all want to be validated, and we all want to be understood. I'm also going to just list a few other takeaways that I might touch on next year. And if you do want to make any suggestions for podcast topics next year, I have a survey in my show notes that you can fill out, and I'd love to hear from you. I welcome both positive and negative feedback, but I won't get into the details of this, but some other takeaways as I was putting this together, that came up for me is see if you can continue to nurture your creative side. When we do this, we move into our right hemisphere, and it helps us to relieve anxiety, improve mental health and more self confidence. 

Another thing I really try to do is not resist what happens in life, even if I didn't expect it. When we resist it can cause us so much suffering, but if we can just allow it and accept it, it helps us move through the grieving process a little bit easier. I also allow myself to feel all the feelings that come up, whether it's a fogginess or a tiredness or what am I feeling when I'm feeling overwhelmed and have too much on my plate? Can I feel the joy? Can I feel the sadness?

Another one is letting go. Don't let the things that are out of your control ruin your experience. I also love to do things and spend time with people that bring me joy, not chaos. And last two, last ones, can we listen more than we talk, especially when it comes to our kids and our loved ones, and respond without judgment? And lastly, can we all try and savor those positive experiences? Savor that time with our kids, savor that time with our loved ones, and be as present as we can. 

So just to recap, yes, I've officially entered my 60s, and it's a new decade, and the top three things that I have learned that I am going to take into my 60s is I will no longer compromise who I am to fit in with others, that includes family, that includes my partner, that includes my friends, I will continue to tend to my nervous system daily. And if this is something that you're interested in, please reach out. As I said at the beginning, I have a couple one on ones that are opening up in the beginning of the new year, and I am working on a new monthly somatic offering membership that you can participate in. It's still a few months out, but I will be announcing that in the new year. And lastly, I really do my best not to give other people advice, especially when it comes to my children, close friends and partner. It does slip out sometimes I am human, but if we feel a need, ask them, Can I make a suggestion instead of just offering because most of the time, we all just want to be heard and validated and understood, quote from Oprah Winfrey, so I hope that helps you find just a little bit more freedom this holiday season, as we will all Be around family and friends a little bit more often, and I look forward to continuing this journey with you. And thank you again, so much for being here. 

Thank you for listening to this episode of Confessions of a Freebird. I'm grateful to be in your ears and hearts. If you're interested in becoming a freebird, I'd love to support you. Please check out my website at laurieejames.com to learn how we can work together, or to sign up for my newsletter so you can receive tips on how to date and relationship differently and ultimately find more freedom and joy in your life. If you found this podcast helpful, please follow or subscribe, rate and review and share it with friends so they can find more freedom in their second or third act also. Until next time.