What if your Menopause Symptoms were your Wake-up Call to Transformation? with Sharon Pendlington

Sharon Pendlington 

And things tend not to get better without changing anything. So something needs to change. And if we don’t address the root of what is causing this discomfort for you, it’s going to stay there. It will show up in other ways, even if the exact symptoms that you’re experiencing change. But what I would invite is perhaps a bit more compassion for yourself. And this truly can be your wake up call that no, now it’s time to prioritize myself. And this is a message my body is giving me that something needs to change. So what needs to change?

Lorne Brown 

By listening to the Coherence Code Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition, either in yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guests or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast, where we explore how the mind and body work together so you can move from stress and inner conflict to clarity, calm and alignment. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical epitherapist. And through my work, I’ve seen that healing happens when we remove what gets in the way and allow the body and the nervous system to do what they’re designed to do to heal. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.

Today I have a colleague in my own city with me today, Sharon Pendlington. Now, this is going to be a talk around perimenopause and menopause, and I’m really excited to have this conversation because I think we’re really aligned with our approach to supporting women through the midlife stages. So I’d like to give you a formal introduction. So today, Sharon, she’s a health and wellbeing coach. She spent the past decade helping women navigate menopause with less stress and more confidence, which we all want and need. And she specializes in supporting midlife women to restore their sleep, stabilize their mood, and rebuild their energy and relationships with matter most. And I think also brain fog too is one of those symptoms that women seek out Sharon for. Now, she’s the founder of the 90-day Stress to Serenity Program, and it’s a group coaching experience for women in perimenopause and beyond.

And these are for women who are ready to break free from that stress, from those symptoms, and really shift from surviving to thriving in this perimenopause, menopause stage of their life. And if you’ve ever been feeling overwhelmed by midlife changes, I’m hoping this conversation that I’m going to have with Sharon will show you a path forward. Sharon, welcome.

Sharon Pendlington

Thank you so much for having me.

Lorne Brown 

Now, let’s just dive right in here. I saw in my practice when you and I met for breaking some bread and chatting, you were sharing how you’re seeing a lot of women who are experiencing hot flashes, insomnia. Hopefully you’ll share your own experience with insomnia, brain fog, and those mood swings that are happening to women in that period, so in their 40s and beyond. Now, a lot of people see these as these symptoms, they have to fix it. But I’ve noticed you see them differently, and I was hoping you can share what these symptoms might actually be trying to tell us. And really, what lens do you see this through?

Sharon Pendlington 

I mean, I can share personally that I was definitely seeing these symptoms as a problem that needed to be fixed when I experienced them myself. For 20 years, I didn’t sleep many of those years, 20 minutes a night.

Lorne Brown 

20 years. Wait, wait, wait. You said that so simply, 20 years with insomnia.

Sharon Pendlington

Yes. We don’t realize perimenopause can start in our mid- 30s. The average age of menopause is 51. I know many women still menstruating in their early 60s. So yeah, it can be 15 years, 20 years for some of us. That tells you the degree that I wasn’t listening to myself. I’ll let this go on for 20 years. But I was trying to fix it. That was my coping mechanism. I will fix this. I became a yoga teacher because that was a little bit helpful. I became a nutritionist. Well, maybe there’s some food or supplements I can take that will help. I started working at a women’s clinic. Maybe hormone therapy will help. I saw a sleep specialist. I did it all. Truly, it wasn’t until I became more mindful and was able to notice that, ah, this is your way of coping with stress.

If everything could be perfect, I could fix everything that happened that day, plan it all out for the next day. If everything was all lined up, then I would be safe and I could let go of stress. Of course, that was just keeping me up in the middle of the night. That was interfering with my sleep.

So now, and it wasn’t just sleep, it was I was having incredible memory issues to the point my husband would have to … If we went for a walk, he would have to say, “This is our next door neighbor.” I could not recognize them anymore. These are people that I’d seen every day for 10 years, but things-

Lorne Brown 

I just want to share it because this is a common complaint I see, and a lot of women don’t realize this could be connected to this perimenopause and menopause phase where they can’t remember things. They have this severe brain fog or memory, almost feeling like they’re developing dementia. And so you had that, you experienced that.

Sharon Pendlington 

Yes. And it can be scary because I mean, two-thirds of people with Alzheimer’s are women. We often have it in our family history, dementia. I mean, my mom passed recently with dementia, and so it can be scary. I went and I had an assessment done. Do I have early onset dementia? Because it felt so extreme to me that I was forgetting. I could forget my husband’s name. And I was like, “Whoa, what’s his name again?” But yes, very common. The cognitive changes, memory loss, even changes to our ability to be organized, to learn. ADHD symptoms will often pop up in this transition or be worse at this time. What was managed previously with medication maybe is no longer managed. So it is important to differentiate. Are these cognitive changes? Are they indicative of something else that’s happening or is this part of the hormone changes that can happen in midlife?

Lorne Brown 

I want to unpack something or at least emphasize. So you talked about all the things you tried to do. You looked at dietary changes and actually you got trained and you and I are similar that way. I don’t like just to read about things. I’m a kinesthetic learner, so I usually go and get certified in something. So you went and got certified in yoga, and got certified in nutrition. And my style is bidirectional. We got to address the physical and we got to address the emotional, mental, spiritual. What I like about your approach where I’m really excited to have to talk to you now is I think there’s a missing link. I’m not saying, I don’t think you are, you ignore that, the physical. We see in our clinic, we use diet because the anti-flammatory diet’s helpful. We’ll use supplements. We’ll sometimes use menopause hormone therapy as well.

There’s a place and time for that as well. The missing link for me is this stress response or trauma in the cells, which I think is the missing link in giving this kind of relief. And this seems to be your lens or your approach. So I thought maybe you could, because you started to talk a bit about the stress part, we’re not saying don’t do the diet, the lifestyle, the supplements, or the hormone therapy, but it’s already getting a lot of attention right now online and everywhere. What’s not getting, I think, enough attention is this aspect that you come to it from, and I’d love to hear more about that.

Sharon Pendlington

Yeah, I absolutely agree. And this is why I think that the midlife and menopause transition is actually a time of empowerment because this is what we actually have control over in addition to our diet and our lifestyle is how … And I want to explain the reason behind it briefly. So as our hormones are changing, our neurotransmitters are also changing. So we have less GABA, less serotonin, less dopamine. So this is our calming hormone, our happy hormone, our feel good hormone. These are all changing too. As our progesterone and estrogen changes, those receptors in our brain are trying to adapt to lower hormone levels and the neurotransmitter levels are changing. And it’s just this time of brain restructuring. When we talk about changes to thermal regulation, insomnia, sleep disruption, mood, cognition, these are brain changes and the brain is simply trying to adapt to different levels than what it’s used to.

As our ovaries are producing less hormones, we do have a backup hormone system. So this is what I could just share with everyone as often as I can, as the adrenal glands are meant to produce some of our hormones for us as our ovarian production declines, which can help stabilize some of these symptoms. It just allows us more time to adapt better to those changing levels. Now, the adrenal glands can produce DHEA, which gets converted into testosterone and estrogen. It also produces our stress hormones. And you better believe if you’re under stress, your body’s going to prioritize producing cortisol and adrenaline, not your reproductive hormones. So this is where emotional stress, mental stress, and managing it can be super helpful.

Lorne Brown

And I often use … My understanding or how I explain it is when you have a lot of these stress hormones, like you talk about these adrenal hormones and a lot of stress, it’s like noise in the system. So you may have your regular, like you talked about the feel good hormones and your sex hormones like estrogen and progesterone, but there’s noise and it causes this dysregulation in the hypothalamus, pituitary ovarian and adrenal axis. And that’s why sometimes even your blood tests may seem okay, but yet you have all this extra noise of inflammation, oxygenated stress coming from the stress side, this negative self-talk and this stuff lying. One of our Dr. Amy, who was on one of our episodes 124, talks about the biology of trauma, and we had a little geek out about how this is probably impacting our perimenopause and menopause.

So as you shared, you have all these feel good hormones, but when you’re under a lot of stress, the way you described is this competition going on. I call it just a lot of noise and your body just becomes dysregulated. And now you’re like, what’s my name? Why can’t I sleep? Your body’s just, everything kind of goes out of whack. It loses its homeostasis, its balance.

Sharon Pendlington 

Right. Yes. And keep in mind, some of the complaints we have during the menopause transition are very similar to what we would experience when we’re under stress. If we find something stressful, heart palpitations, we get hot, sweaty, red in the face, our blood pressure goes up, our blood sugar goes up. This is what women are experiencing in the menopause transition. Our blood sugar levels, cholesterol levels all of a sudden elevated. They weren’t before, leading to weight gain around the midsection. With elevated blood pressure, we’re at higher risk for cardiovascular disease. So these are all very similar to stress reactions and stress isn’t a problem. There’s good stress. We’re meant to experience stress and then go back into homeostasis, deal with stress, go back into homeostasis. We’ve just lost that regulation.

Lorne Brown 

I want to bring in, if I may, a little TCM understanding of this process as well, because I think it ties in nicely to what we’re going to hopefully get into, but your approach as well. So first of all, these symptoms, like you said earlier, you try to fix these symptoms and you choose to make these or perceive this now as a wake-up call with a chance for transformation. I will share that nobody wants these symptoms and I would never want anybody to suffer with these symptoms. So you have the right to address them. I think what we’re sharing here is there is a missing link, which we talked about, and we’re going to get into that mind, body aspect. But here’s how Chinese medicine views this idea, my understanding from being trained in Chinese medicine. It is a natural survival mechanism for the woman at this stage of her life because to have an opportunity to conceive and carry a baby every month requires a lot of resources from the body.

And during this menopause time when you stop menstruating, what is happening in Chinese medicine is these resources or energy is being diverted from the uterus, the ovaries in the uterus, and it gets redirected up to the heart center. And so just physiologically from a Chinese medicine perspective, women in their late 40s and beyond become the matriarchs of their community. And they have this extra wisdom to share to be that great mother for their community. And also the survival mechanism is to be able to live well and long, you need the resources because we’re aging. And so they’re diverting energy from certain systems, reproduction, and now going to the heart center. So it’s not a disease in Chinese medicine, it’s a natural process. Now, if you get symptoms in menopause or perimenopause or menopause, then that shows you there’s an imbalance going on that we have to address.

The part that I want to share, it’s kind of my angle to this and how I work in my practice, and again, we’re aligned to this, the underlying cause is not the changing hormones. So every woman, if she gets to live long enough, will experience erratic changes in estrogen. So it fluctuates in the perimenopause with a decline in progesterone, and then every woman will have a decline in estrogen and progesterone compared to her earlier years, but not every woman has the same symptoms and not every woman has symptoms. If it was because of fluctuating estrogens and decline in progesterone with a long-term decline in estrogen too, then everybody should suffer and have symptoms, but they don’t. And this is what ties into your adrenal talk in Chinese medicine, how we understand it. And from the conscious work hypnosis perspective you don’t have the resilience and the adaptability to deal with change.

Like you said, it’s not the stressor, it’s how your body perceives it. And if your body, for whatever reason, whether it’s inherited or through how you lived your life, whether by choice or imposed upon you, when you have hormones changing, which is a normal transformational process at that stage, your body perceives that it’s changed. And if it doesn’t have the resilience, if it doesn’t have the ability to adapt, you suffer. And if you have the resilience and the ability to adapt, then you don’t even notice it. And our approach here is to rebuild the resilience and support the adaptability so you can go with the change. Now I want you to go more into your adrenals and what you’re sharing with this. If you can tie this into, as I shared this biology in your trauma, how’s this stress as it’s almost like festering in your cells that’s causing all these, your body not able to have the resilience or to adapt to these changes.

Sharon Pendlington 

So I’m so glad you shared your perspective because I think it’s one of the most beautiful lenses of seeing menopause as coming up to the heart. And this is where we really come into ourselves in my mind and how can we support ourselves? To me, it always comes back, how do I support myself, whether that’s with hormones or supplements or nervous system regulation techniques, how do I support myself? Now in terms of stress, you mentioned, how does it kind of fester? So-

Lorne Brown

I’ve heard you say something about a stress spiral, and I was really curious for you to unpack that.

Sharon Pendlington 

Yeah. So I’m thinking the best way to share that might be with an example. So imagine you’re driving in the car. This has happened to me all the time, so this is why I’m sharing it. You’re driving in your car with your partner and your partner’s driving and you get stuck in traffic. And for me, I would be, okay, telling my partner, well, you should turn right up here and get onto this side street. And I’d bring out my Google Maps and I figure out a detour to get us through this traffic and I’d be trying to fix it. My partner is humming along to the radio at the same time. So we are both experiencing the same difficult event. I’m in a stress response. My partner is not. So this comes down to what were the messages we received often at a younger age, whether it was verbally or just modeled for us.

I was taught and took it on as a belief, you are not late. Being late was a big deal. So of course, I’m going to go into the stress response about it. My partner’s not. He has never modeled that. So the trick is how do we get out of the stress response quickly? So we need to start to become aware that I’m even in the stress response because it becomes our habitual pattern. When I’m late, I try to fix it. That’s what I do. This is neuroscience. You get really good at what you practice. If you practice rumination, you’re going to get really good at rumination. If you practice anxiety or overworry, you get really good at that. So we just need to start tuning into ourselves to become aware that we’re even in this stress response. How do we do that? We got to get out of our heads and into our bodies.

And most of us are not used to being in our physical bodies. That’s one way of doing that. And then we need to regulate. So what can I do to regulate my nervous system? I now know that being late causes me to be in a stress response. I feel it in my body, my heart starts beating faster. So now I can get off that stress spiral. So it does require some mindfulness, some awareness.

Lorne Brown 

I love this. And I don’t think you and I’ve had a chance to go into a deep dive on my NAC process to shift old belief patterns, but I got to share it because our listeners who’ve been listening hear about this. I want to tie this to what you said. You got to notice. You said you got to notice your trigger that you’re in this old program. And through awareness, you didn’t exactly say this, but basically you said you make the unconscious conscious. And then I say in the NAC process, you can bring in many tools. And so here I see where mindfulness becomes a tool in the accepting phase. In the accepting phase, we lean into the uncomfortable feelings and we accept them. It doesn’t mean we like them, it doesn’t mean we resigned to them. We just are authentic saying, right now, this is how I’m feeling.

And we get really practiced at observing it. There’s a notice, accept and then the choose again is how do you want to be in this world or practice in gratitude? Because once you drop the resistance, because fighting with the feeling of reality is what amplifies it, creates more noise. And when you accept it, again, it doesn’t mean you like it. You’re not doing a spiritual bypass. It’s really a tool of surrender, which lowers the resistance where the nervous system goes from sympathetic into parasympathetic. And now you start to metabolize. You go from that reptilian brain to the whole brain, and now you get creative ideas to solve your problems. So very similar. And I have to say why I love your work. One day it came apparent to me that everybody’s noticing, accepting choose again. And you just shared your thing for the first time with me hearing it this way.

And I was like, there it is. Which is why I would say what Sharon does works because I see this map, this process, and everybody’s work that’s causing transformation for individuals and groups.

Sharon Pendlington 

Thank you. And I love that you mentioned the accept piece, because this is a really challenging piece. There’s a reason that it took me 20 years to notice that I was trying to control things. Of course, people would say that. Of course, my partner would say, Sharon, you need to let go of this, or you’re trying to control this because I didn’t have the self-compassion piece. I practiced meditation for 18 years, but it did not help my sleep. Why? No self-compassion. None. My mind would wander. I would say, “Oh, you haven’t got this yet.” Was that getting out of the stress response? No. So women are generally very compassionate with others. I mean, most of us are. Women, men, all of us are compassionate with others, it’s a lot more difficult to offer that to ourselves. So that’s part of the acceptance piece where I was finally in a place of safety where it could feel safer for me to look at that about myself.

Lorne Brown 

I think listeners always like to hear this, and I’m curious, what was it? 20 years you said you had insomnia. Can you share what that was like for you and what did you do and how did this shape what you’re doing now for women? Because there’s one thing to be able to teach it and facilitate it. That’s me. I will not go through perimenopause and menopause. Men, we have our own issues. That’s another episode, but I will never have the experience that you got. And so I would like to hear what was your experience with insomnia and what you did, what didn’t work, and how did you come to be where you are now? And people always love a little bit of hope. Do you have insomnia now?

Sharon Pendlington 

No. Yeah, I sleep great now. So I sleep nine hours a night beautifully. There’s going to be occasional nights if my kids are out late and I wake up because I don’t know if they’re home yet, that’s going to happen occasionally, but I have great sleep now. And it was a long road and hopefully no one else has to struggle for 20 years with this. It’s interesting because I had a colleague at the time, about 15 years in, a colleague said to me, I was working at a yoga studio teaching part-time, and she said, “I’m going to take a week or two off.” And I said, “Oh, are you going away?” She said, “No, I haven’t been sleeping well the last three or four days, so I’m just going to take some time off.” And that was such a wake-up call for me. I thought I haven’t been sleeping 20 minutes a night for almost 15 years, and not once did I think I needed to change something.

It didn’t even cross my mind. I was running on cortisol. People would say, “Are you not tired?” I’m like, “No, I have tons of energy.” I would just go and push myself and keep going. Of course, keeping myself in that stress spiral, keeping myself spitting out cortisol in the middle of the night instead of making my DHEA. So what truly, like I said, I tried all the things, all of it’s somewhat helpful. I ended up getting introduced to mindfulness-based stress reduction just organically actually through the clinic that I was working at. And it was interesting because I started changing how I was working with patients because I would often talk about, we’d make some small change, “Oh, well, let’s reduce your caffeine.” And we talk about small changes. And what I would often receive was, “I don’t have five minutes. I don’t have five minutes.” And I started to realize, no, we don’t need to be talking about caffeine.

We need to be talking about you prioritizing yourself. This is a much bigger issue. So I just decided to create this program because it’s based on mindfulness-based stress reduction. It was me being in that safe place with a safe group, with a mentor that could guide this process, and I was able to notice, “Oh, you’re trying to control things.” Yeah, it takes what it takes. It happened to take 20 years for me.

Lorne Brown 

If you were to do it again, my approach would always be to look for the offending things that create the noise, so inflammation and aggravate the resilience and adaptability. So we have a diet that’s free on my website at acubalance and Lornebrown.com that says, it’s called the Longevity Diet. So it’s an anti-inflammatory diet, an anti-aging diet. Because I would imagine all the things that you did leading up to the mind, body work, the mindfulness work supports that because as I said, bidirectional. So I want to give the physical body some help and support so it can deal with the emotional stuff that it may need to deal with because this is, as you shared, a wake-up call for many. So if you could do it all over again, how would you do it differently? Would you go right into the mind, body? Would you ignore coffee, alcohol, like saying it’s okay, it doesn’t matter what you do physically?

If you could go back to your earlier version of yourself that was not sleeping before the 20-year period happened, say you’re three months into insomnia, what would you tell her regards based on both the mental, the conscious subconscious work and the physical work? How would you do it? And I’m wondering, is that how you’re doing it now in your programs?

Sharon Pendlington 

Yes. Well, yes, it is how I’m doing it now.

Because the emotional wellness piece takes time. This is a whole new way of being for a lot of us. Knowing how to resource ourselves, learning to be mindful. This is not something we practice in everyday life. We’re not taught this, particularly in the West. We’re not taught how to be mindful, and it takes some time. So I would suggest starting there. That’s what I wish I’d done. Start there and then support yourself the way you need to, whether it’s with hormones, supplements, herbal adaptogens, herbal treatments that help support your body, to just help you get ahead of it. Then you feel motivated. You start to notice changes. You have an anti-inflammatory diet. Yeah, you start noticing, you have more energy, you feel good, your joints don’t hurt. Now I can exercise. Well, that helps my mood. So all of these pieces are helpful. I would say the longest piece, and probably why my program is a three-month program, is it takes some time to rewire the brain, to know how to regulate our nervous system. So start there first. It’s often when I’m working with people, the first thing, okay, let’s give you something to regulate your nervous system and start tuning into yourself. Just take pauses throughout the day. What’s happening? Do I have the capacity to do the next task? And if I do it, because there’s a difference between our capability and our capacity. So I know I can do it, but what’s my capacity going to be like after I do this next task? If I’m going to be exhausted or depleted, it’s too much.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah. And there’s that resilience factor because you have the capacity because if you’re overdoing it, then you lose the resilience and the capacity to regulate, to adapt, and now you struggle, you suffer. And remembering just from that TCM idea, it’s a survival mechanism because just the fact of living this long, your resources change. You don’t have the energy you had as a 20-year-old, as you do as a 50-year-old. And so if you try to live and work like you did in your 20s, based on your genetic predisposition, you may tap those reserves and now your body’s going to tell you through insomnia, through hot flashes, through night sweats, through high blood pressure, through forgetting what your partner’s name is. So yeah, it’s just feedback. I call it feedback. It’s just feedback. From what I heard, you don’t get mad at yourself. “Oh, you overdid it.

“You’re like, ” Oh, I just got some feedback. That was a little too much for this biology for my body.

Sharon Pendlington 

“Yeah. But that takes some time to learn for some of us. We are so accustomed. Absolutely. These patterns that we have are habitual patterns of dealing with challenges that are very ingrained. So it takes some time to do that and to give ourselves permission to rest before we’re exhausted because that’s not our normal go- to.

Lorne Brown 

I want to give our listeners a few tips. I’ll share my style and my practice. We’ll use acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine. Me and a friend who’s also a nutritionist, Michelle Biton, had been working on this program idea with body types for menopause. So it’s easier for them to find their herbal formula and go find a practitioner. So myself, somebody comes in, it’s like twice a week for three to four weeks with acupuncture to give them the sleep, reduce the anxiety, just to give that right away symptom relief and change the underlying cause while doing the herbal medicine. And then in a short period of time, hopefully by four weeks, they cut back their acupuncture quite a bit because the herbal medicine’s taking over. Some of my favorite supplements, because again, your background nutrition, and again, I just know our listeners always like a few things.

Do talk to your healthcare provider. This is not me giving you healthcare advice. I’m just giving you information that you can go talk to somebody about, but we often will use it for people that have, in this stage, perimenopause, menopause, a lot of anxiety and insomnia. We’ll use B6, usually you take that during the day. And then magnesium, usually a bisglycinate as a version, although’s a couple of versions depending on your unique body type and taurine and sometimes even glycine. But taurine B6, magnesium’s kind of a common thing we’ll use for that. So just to let our listeners know, if you’re struggling with insomnia, anxiety, talk to your healthcare provider for that. And then if you have somebody in your area that does acupuncture Chinese herbal medicine anecdotally and some of the research out there, I think it’s great. And then we also will sometimes use hormone replacement therapy if necessary as well.

There’s lots of options. Obviously you’re making changes in your dying stuff. The piece that I think is missing that I do in my conscious work, energy psychology, what Sharon offers is that changing those unconscious programs. But what would you say then? Somebody comes to you and says, “I went to my doctor and they said you’re just going to have to suffer through it for 10 to 15 years.” Or maybe they say, “Look, this is just menopause and I just need to get through it. ” How would you like to respond to our listeners that are like, “I just got to get through it. Or my doctor said it’s just normal. I’m doing air quotes everybody. Normal doesn’t mean healthy, but normal as in a lot of people struggle with this. ” What’s your message for them?

Sharon Pendlington 

So this is a very common experience and it’s dismissive. It’s dismissive of the physician and it’s you dismissing yourself as well by just accepting that this is okay. Whether it’s a year, six months or 15 years, it’s not okay. And things tend not to get better without changing anything. So something needs to change. And if we don’t address the root of what is causing this discomfort for you, it’s going to stay there. It will show up in other ways, even if the exact symptoms that you’re experiencing change. But what I would invite is perhaps a bit more compassion for yourself. So if you had a sister, a daughter, a best friend going through this and they said, “I’m just going to muscle my way through this for another year or two.” What would you say to them? Because you would likely say something very different to them than what you would say to yourself.

And this truly can be your wake-up call that no, now it’s time to prioritize myself. And this is a message my body is giving me that something needs to change. So what needs to change?

Lorne Brown 

And I like this idea and I want to clarify something. To me, it’s an invitation to set the intention to be compassionate for yourself. And I like how you said this. How would you say this to a young child, a daughter, or a family member? What would you do? I find though that you need to learn sometimes the skill to be compassionate for yourself. It’s one thing to say, I want to be compassionate, but then all of a sudden that habitual negative self-talk comes on. So do you agree that we do need to learn this skill of being compassionate for ourselves? First, we have to set the intention, but it’s not just you set the intention that happens naturally. It wasn’t my experience for myself when I went through this kind of work. I’m just curious if you wanted to share a little bit about that as well.

Sharon Pendlington 

Absolutely. I mean, the way that you work with changing our beliefs can be so effective too. But yes, this takes time. Developing self-compassion takes some time. So it does require some tools, some learning, and just always holding ourselves with compassion and friendliness. And honestly, if you’re practicing mindfulness, if you’re doing it properly, it includes friendliness. It includes befriending yourself and all the experiences that are arising from moment to moment. So that’s something that is helpful in learning mindfulness, but you may also want to learn mindful self-compassion. There are entire eight-week programs devoted to learning self-compassion.

Lorne Brown 

I like this. And I’ll clarify as well. It’s not narcissism. It’s kindness, but there’s still accountability, there’s still responsibility. You’re creating awareness, you’re creating kindness towards self, but because in the New Age Movement, some of this compassion, kindness has turned into spiritual narcissism. That’s not what you’re saying either.

Sharon Pendlington 

Not at all. Just what you were referring to earlier around the acceptance piece. Notice what’s here and then just acknowledge, yeah, this is hard. And I’m human, and it helps us be more compassionate with others if we can offer ourselves compassion.

Lorne Brown 

That’s key. No, I love it. The compassion part. And I would love to share where they can learn more about you because of this idea of what I heard you say, and again, I see it in my practice, the dismissiveness. I thought it was great when you said to yourself, because you are dismissing yourself when you say I’m going to push through it, but the physicians … And by the way, some people would imagine, oh, it’s the male doctor doing this. I’ve had female physicians say the same thing to the women I see where they say, “Just suffer through it. ” And you’re saying, and I’m saying, “Absolutely, you do not have to wait this out. There are so many things available to you. Diet supplements can support you. Hormone therapy can support you, acupuncture, herbal medicine.” And then the missing link is to really replenish and give you the capacity for your body to handle and work with the changing hormones, because it’s a normal process.

It is not a disease. It is a normal process. By the way, in Chinese medicine, they call it the second spring, meaning it’s the second puberty for a woman. So that’s where you can have more compassion for yourself, and then you will have more compassion for your daughter in your house as well. I joke a little. Sharon, what do you offer for people? If they want to connect with you, is there a way to come in and have a discovery call with you and where can they find you? What’s your website? And I’ll put these in the show notes as well.

Sharon Pendlington 

Perfect. Yeah, absolutely. So my website is my name. It’s sharonpendlington.com. There’s all the details about my 90-day Stress to Serenity program. So this is where we meet every week for about an hour and a half in a small group setting. And we start learning these tools. We start learning self-compassion. We start learning how to be in our body and tune into our inner wisdom. And you practice those skills between sessions just in your everyday life. So you’re using those tools in real time. It also includes a day-long retreat, which I love because we’re resourcing ourselves in the middle of that program. And it also includes some one-to-one private coaching with me as well. And yes, you can absolutely book a clarity call through my website, and that’s just a complimentary 30-minute call for us to just chat about what you’re hoping for, see if the program is a good fit for you.

And if not, I’ll certainly direct you to another resource that might be more appropriate.

Lorne Brown

Sharon, I really enjoyed this. I look forward to more conversations with you.

Sharon Pendlington 

Me too. Thank you so much, Lorne.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you for spending this time with us on the Coherence Co-Podcast. I’m Dr. Lorne Brown, and I will see you next week for another conversation on coherence and healing. If this conversation resonated with you, please like, subscribe, or follow the show, and also share it with someone who might benefit from it as well. Remember to take a moment to breathe, reflect, and stay connected. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.