Muscle, Movement & Menopause: A Living Conversation

Muscle, Movement & Menopause: A Living Conversation

by | Apr 5, 2026 | Blog, Body Intelligence, Changing the story, Menopause, Nervous System Health

During menopause, as estrogen and progesterone decline, the body begins to change both hormonally and also in how strength, tone, and responsiveness are experienced. Strength may feel less present, and the body may ask for more rest between activities, sometimes needing shorter periods of activation.

Your muscles and your sense of responsiveness

We all carry two main muscle fibre types—slow-twitch and fast-twitch. Slow fibres support endurance and steady effort, while fast-twitch fibres are responsible for quick response, power, and reflex. During menopause, as hormonal regulation shifts, these fast-twitch fibres often become less readily available. These are the fibres that help you catch yourself, respond with ease, and feel agile and alive in your body.

Estrogen and progesterone also play supportive roles in the background of muscle health. Estrogen helps the body repair and recover after effort, while progesterone supports the body’s ability to soften and release tension by lowering muscle tone. As hormonal levels shift, recovery can take more time, and tension may linger more easily in the system.

Why you may feel your energy differently now

There is another layer underneath this: the small energy systems inside your cells, called your mitochondria. Muscle tissue holds many of them. When muscle mass decreases, there is also a reduction in overall energy availability. This can be felt as less stamina, less ease in sustained effort, or a system that depletes more quickly.

Muscles are part of a lively conversation between internal movement, organs, energy systems, the nervous system, and emotions. When muscles are functioning well and in balance, there is a greater sense of vitality, clarity, and inner steadiness. When they decline, the whole system feels it as reduced ease, capacity, and safety.

This shift in muscular capacity also influences how the nervous system organizes safety, regulation, and response.

When the body feels less strong or responsive, the nervous system can shift into a more protective mode. Through the HPA axis—the body’s stress regulation system—stress hormones such as cortisol may rise more easily, and the system can become more alert, sensitive, or on edge. Without the same hormonal cushioning and with less felt capacity to recover, the body may interpret everyday demands as requiring more effort than before

You may feel less trust in yourself and doubt yourself more. What was present can get amplified when the system is under strain. The inner critic may roar more strongly: you are not enough. You may feel more easily overwhelmed, or less able to meet what life asks of you.

In this way, your psyche follows the messages of the body: as internal capacity shifts, so does your sense of self and your perception of the world.

This can also shape how life is met. When internal capacity feels reduced, engagement with the world becomes less spontaneous—more careful, more effortful, less fluid. The system naturally prioritizes protection over openness, as if it is saying: I need more support to stay safe and steady.

Meeting your system where it is

As you begin to meet your system where it is, through your attention, movement choices, and how you are with your body, capacity can be restored.

As strength, coordination, and vitality improve, the nervous system begins to shift to: I can respond. I can be flexible. I can embrace life as it comes.

Movement that supports your system in different ways helps restore capacity. To meet life with resilience and vitality, the body and nervous system need movement variation. This allows them to reorganise, adapt, maintain muscle mass and healthy flow. This becomes especially important during menopause.

How my movement practices fit into this conversation

In my retreats, movement plays an important role in meeting your body, your nervous system, and opening to the many facets of who you are. Movement here is guiding, nourishing, and explorative across all layers of your being.

NIA Move to Heal naturally supports embodied vitality. It offers a variety of movement that nourishes strength, agility, flexibility, mobility, and coordination, while also supporting nervous system responsiveness and emotional regulation. It includes short, well-dosed bursts of strength and resistance, supporting the faster, more responsive muscle fibres that benefit from clear, focused activation.

The Feldenkrais Method refines how movement is organized through the nervous system. It improves coordination between muscles, so that unnecessary effort is reduced and movement becomes smoother, more integrated, and less effortful.

Together, these practices help restore communication between the nervous system, muscles, skeleton, senses, and emotions. Energy is used more efficiently, and movement becomes more fluid, responsive, and attuned to what your system needs in each moment.

Movement becomes a way of coming back into relationship with yourself and life, moment by moment. In this ongoing conversation, there is more listening, responsiveness, and room to simply be in your body with trust and ease and experience a more lived vitality.

Your Biology Speaks: Are You Listening?

Your Biology Speaks: Are You Listening?

by | Apr 5, 2026 | Blog, Body Intelligence, Menopause, Somatic Wisdom

Your body is always communicating through sensation, emotion, energy, and perception. It is constantly giving you information about safety, capacity, and overwhelm within your system.

During menopause, this communication becomes harder to ignore. As ovarian hormone production begins to shift, the body enters a phase of deep physiological adaptation. The nervous system, stress regulation, and hormonal rhythms all begin to reorganize around a new internal baseline.

This change engages the whole system. Your biology is constantly adjusting how it maintains balance, energy, and resilience in response to both internal shifts and external demands.

When life is already shaped by ongoing stress, pressure, and without enough time for the system to really rest, restore, and reset, this transition can feel more intense. The system has less room to adapt and therefore becomes more sensitive, signalling overwhelm, fatigue, or activation more quickly.

Hormones & Stress Regulation

Estrogen and progesterone are not only reproductive hormones. They also play an important role in regulating the body´s  stress system. They support hormonal regulation of the central stress-response system (HPA axis), helping to soften the body’s response to stress and support recovery afterwards, creating more room for regulation and rest

Estrogen influences how the nervous system interprets and responds to stress signals, while progesterone has a naturally soothing and regulating effect on the body. Together, they support emotional regulation, flexibility, and a natural return to balance after activation.

As these hormones shift during menopause, this internal support changes. The body´s stress system itself has less hormonal support around it. Everyday stressors may therefore feel more intense, and it can take longer for the system to settle again.

In this context, the body’s stress system -the HPA axis- which coordinates cortisol and adrenaline responses, can become more easily activated.

When the system has been under long-term pressure, cortisol may remain more consistently elevated. This can lead to higher states of arousal, experienced as internal intensity, hyperalertness, emotional sensitivity, or a sense of being “on edge.”

This can also influence your sense of self and your perception of the world.

You may feel less trust or doubt yourself more. Thoughts and feelings that have been lingering in the background can become more intense when your system is under strain. In this way, your psyche follows the messages of the body as internal capacity shifts.

This is an adaptive response of your system, designed to keep you safe in demanding conditions.

However, when this state continues for too long, and as hormonal regulation shifts during menopause, the system has less capacity to return to rest. Patterns that were once helpful can begin to feel like fatigue, restlessness, or emotional overwhelm.

This is your system’s way of communicating a temporary limit in capacity. A need for more regulation. More recovery. More space.

A Whole-System Reorganization

Menopause is not a passive process in the background. Your system is responding to internal changes, moment by moment, to seek a new equilibrium.

It is a reorganization across systems  -hormonal, nervous, metabolic, and emotional, to name a few- shaping a new balance as the body adapts.

An ongoing process that shapes how you meet life, moment by moment.

In my retreat for women transitioning through menopause, we support this reorganisation from two complementary directions.

In the mornings, we work with the body and the nervous system: through movement, dance, nervous system awareness, and somatic practices that help reduce inner intensity, and restore capacity, coordination, and felt safety in the system.

In the afternoons, we turn toward the inner landscape: meeting old patterns, beliefs, emotional imprints, and self-images that may no longer fit who you are becoming. Through dance and embodied creativity, these patterns are invited to loosen their grip, creating space for something more aligned to emerge.

More about the relationship between body, brain and behaviour

More about the relationship between body, brain and behaviour

by | Mar 4, 2026 | Ignite your sparkle, Nervous System Health

How do you attend to yourself and your body?

In the previous two blog posts, I discussed the law of reciprocity, the social principle whereby an action is repaid in kind, and how this also exists internally between our mind and body. And how the body mirrors the way we treat it, how we care for it, and how we think about ourselves through specialized brain cells called mirror neurons.

How you think about yourself and what you tell yourself about your body, your wellbeing, your needs and how you take care of yourself is largely reflected in the way you pay attention to your body's messages, the way you move, eat, rest and the daily structure and routines you create for yourself. How you do anything is how you do everything.

When your body and nervous system often feel not heard in their feedback, your biology responds with a protective reaction, a defence mechanism. It may happen that the increase in intensity exceeds the bandwidth of your nervous system and body to process, resulting in your system becoming stuck in its defense mechanism. It does not feel safe with the incoming information arising from your movements, actions, and efforts. It reacts by shielding itself, closing itself off, contracting, freezing its capacity for moving...

This has a direct effect on how your system subsequently interprets signals from your external environment. Your movements influence the perceptions of your senses and your interaction with your environment. This can be experienced as feelings of tension, heaviness, or through increasing hyper vigilance, shadow breathing and emotions of fear, frustration, anger, sadness, a harsh inner critic chattering, limiting beliefs surfacing, and feelings of fatigue, low energy, and even sadness. Overtime this tension patterns can lead to little capacity to digest life, anxiety, chronic physical tension, immune disorders, tightness, gut stress, and low energy. Not cool! Happily you can help your system un-freeze.

We can help heal our neurobiology from habits of fear and hypervigilance by changing how we move and attend to sensations.

Here is what you need to know...

Your nervous system will only tell your muscles to release their contractions when it feels safe. Less is more here. It's like talking to an animal or a baby. Instead of yelling at a little one, we whisper little messages in a soft, friendly, calm, rhythmic, and gentle tone. Your conscious movements are like that tone of voice. Small, gentle, slow, and smooth movements tell the autonomic nervous system that the body is safe, that it will not be hurt. They tell the nervous system that it is being listened to and that its pace, rhythm, and capacity are being honored. They evoke sensations of pleasure and ease that are sent to the central nervous system, inviting it to give the signal to let go. And when the tension in the body is released, our emotional inner landscape and mental landscapes also change, as does our perception of the outside world.  A softer body and a relaxed nervous system look out into the world with openness, trust, and curiosity instead of hypervigilance, distrust, and fear.

Changing the response of our neurobiology does not happen through forcing ourselves or taking big leaps. It happens in the subtle interaction between intention and action. The moments when we pause and listen to the impulses our system gives us to feel better.

It comes down to moving slowly and attentively, while listening to the feedback from our body. This includes the way you eat and engage in daily action. And as you explore the roadmap of movement choices, you help your nervous system by paying attention to the sensory and emotional signals of pleasure and ease. Because through combining our actions with sensations of pleasure, and ease, we do exactly what our nervous system needs to rewire deep-rooted patterns of tension, vigilance, overwhelm, and fear. That is, we help it to change its attention pattern to sensations of pleasure, ease, and expansion so that it can rebuild trust in spontaneous interactions with its environment. This way you will soon no longer move through life with the brakes on, but can truly enjoy the experience of aliveness. That is what I call rekindling your inner Sparkle.

How about your inner Sparkle?

In the retreats from "Freeze to Flow" and "Pause, Listen, Reconnect with your Body", I guide you to help your system feel safe again and meet life with trust and joy.

The law of reciprocity in self care

The law of reciprocity in self care

by | Mar 4, 2026 | Changing the story, Ignite your sparkle

What you give to your body is what your body gives back to you.

In both psychology and neuroscience, the law of reciprocity teaches us that our inner attitude and how we behave toward our bodies and ourselves is reflected back to us by our bodies by creating a feedback loop between our behavior and our biological well-being.

If you are often hard on your body, speak harshly to it, neglect its needs, or if you lack understanding of your body´s way and force it beyond its capacity, Your body can respond to this with tension, stiffness, contraction or fatigue, to name but a few sensations.

When this is a recurring pattern, it may even happen that the increase in intensity exceeds the bandwidth of your nervous system and body to digest life. resulting in your system becoming stuck in its defense mechanism. Your body may respond by becoming chronically tense, which can lead to hypervigilant attention habits, a limited ability to process life, anxiety, physical tension, constriction, gut stress, and low energy levels.

Why?

This response of your system has a direct effect on how it interprets signals from your external environment. Your movements are connected to your sensory perception and your interaction with your environment.

We are often unaware that we are acting out of tune with the subtle needs and desires of our biology. Many of us learned from a very young age that it is normal to force ourselves to do more than our body and nervous system can handle. We have learned not to live in harmony with our body and its rhythms by controlling and forcing it. We have learned that our body's reaction to our demands is a fault of our body. We have learned to silence those body's messages through quick fixes and external interventions. This behavior often leads to ways of holding ourselves, moving, expressing, breathing, or eating that are not in alignment with the nature and needs of our bodies.

And that is where the law of reciprocity can teach us to make a different move.  The law says that when you use effort, friction, and force to make your body do something against its will, your biology and nervous system respond with equal friction, tension, contraction, and an increasing intensity of negative sensations, emotions, images, and thought streams. On the other hand, when you follow your body's way and attune to its needs, your body and nervous system respond with a corresponding expansion, pleasant sensations and emotions, growth, ease, and fluidity.

And the needs of your body and nervous system are very down-to-earth. They need ongoing sensory contact with the outside world, and a reciprocal relationship with gravity. They need to follow their natural pace and rhythm. They need energy-efficient ways to go through life, which translates into sufficient rest, calm eating and digestion, and efficient, effortless movements, guided by feelings of ease, pleasure, and flow.

Would you like to bring more ease, pleasure, and flow back into your body and life?

All my neuro-somatic retreats are designed to help you reconnect with the needs and desires of your system and experience a lasting sense of wholeness and well-being.

Mirror, mirror on the wall 

Mirror, mirror on the wall 

by | Mar 4, 2026 | Body Intelligence, Changing the story, Nervous System Health

Your body reflects your beliefs and images about yourself and the world.

The law of reciprocity, the social principle whereby an action is repaid in kind, also exists internally between our mind and body. The body mirrors the way we treat it, how we care for it, and how we think about ourselves through specialized brain cells called mirror neurons. Those neurons fire when we perform an action related to ourselves or our environment, and when we observe someone else´s action. They connect action to sensation and emotion, the language of your biology. Your brain does not distinguish between someone else's actions and your own actions. Your brain ‘mirrors’ those actions as if they come from a force outside yourself.

If you are often hard on your body, speak harsh words to yourself, neglect the needs of your body and soul, or if you do not understand your body's way and overburden it, your mirror neurons mimic that stress.
On the other hand, being kind to your body through care, appreciation, good nutrition, compassionate thoughts, and moving in tune with your body's natural pace, rhythm, and capacity can create a “mirror” that reflects a self-organizing system that radiates joy, vitality, inner peace, self-confidence, and self-compassion.

Here is the thing. We are often unaware that we are unkind to our bodies and behave in ways that are not in tune with them. We have unconscious beliefs and expectations, embedded in our culture, that we have grown up with and that have conditioned us not only in how and who we have to be but also in how we use and perceive our bodies and their rich language of emotions, sensations, and movement.  We may have internalised cultural beliefs that we are not good enough, that we must prove our worth by working hard, sacrificing our needs for others, dimming our light, or suppressing undesired emotions. Our body keeps that score. And here is the catch. This internal cycle of expectations and perceptions in your brain defines selfhood. How you “see” yourself in your mind determines how your body tries to look and organise itself to match your mental image.

What do you tell yourself?

Would you like to move those inner stories that are not serving your body and life?

My 7 Day dance healing retreat "Reclaim your Inner Freedom" is designed to help you move those stories that dim your sparkle and experience a lasting sense of wholeness and well-being again.

Reclaim your self-wise: your own Wise

Reclaim your self-wise: your own Wise

by | Aug 28, 2025 | Blog, Somatic Wisdom

´Self-wise, or own-wise; a word that can be interpreted in many ways.

As a child, I was often told, “Don't be so self-wise!” when I did something my own way, differently from how my parents or teachers would have done it. Especially when my way of experimenting showed me how not to do something. Over the years, I silenced my inner ´Self Wise` voice to be the girl who didn't make mistakes and lived up to the expectations of those around me.

By the time I was on my own feet, I had no idea what I really wanted or needed, let alone knowing my deeper why and meaning in life. I had become reactive instead of responsive. It resulted in feeling empty, uncertain, self-doubting, and meaningless.
I went through life with emotional stress and often had tense and tight muscles and a chronic condition of IBS with no apparent medical cause. Doctors called it psychosomatic. These symptoms disappeared when I welcomed my Self Wise back and began to relax into living my own life, on my terms.

Self- wise... what a beautiful and powerful word that is when you think about it more deeply. Our very own inner wisdom, our own way, our own style, our own inner knowing, our own perception of the world, our own body telling us what we need emotionally and physically, our own truth, our own unique connection to spirituality, collective wisdom, and consciousness...

Our ´Self Wise` is intelligent and complex; I see it as an ingenious interweaving of our neurobiology, our body, our soul, our mind, and our spirit. Our ´Self Wise` awakens in the seed of our life. The moment we enter into a relationship with all layers of life in and around us. It learns to express itself through its interaction with its physical environment and the force field around it (e.g., gravity, upward forces, and pressure).

The first self-expression of our ´Self Wise` is movement.

Through movement, we learn about ourselves and the world in our first months and years, and we make our first contacts with other people and beings. Our first explorations of movement help our own ´Wise´ to learn about life. It acquires the basic sensational, emotional wisdom to set its inner compass to growth and vitality. It learns how to organize itself neurobiologically to create sustainable, thriving relationships in the complex system of cells, bones, joints, connective tissue, muscles, and organs. Neurobiology as a mirror for the system of body, soul, mind, and spirit that works together in harmony with each other, embedded in the greater environment of which it is an intrinsic part. We notice this, for example, because movement feels effortless, enjoyable, and fluid, and we feel deeply alive, connected, and energetic. We experience a felt sense of meaning in life.

The core patterns that emerge from these first explorations of movement with the force field around us and within, also form the basis for the further development of our brain, mind, emotional-social behavior, and deeper self-expression.

Without our ´Self Wise´, we lack our compass for life

Then things happen in our lives that hurt us physically or emotionally. And these experiences influence the basic layout we lay in the early years of our lives. One of those experiences is the encounter of our ´Self Wise` with society, our caregivers, and teachers. For many people, that felt like an unpleasant and 'self-confidence undermining' clash. The first moment we begin to doubt our ´Self Wise`.

Our society is not a nurturing place for our own Wise. Many people have already silenced their own Wise by the time they get out of elementary school.

Many of us gradually put our well-being in the hands of others who tell us how to move, think, or feel. Many people let others tell them what to do with their lives. Many people depend on others to know what is good for them. How they should answer their needs, how they should look, what is expected of them, how they should behave, and express themselves to belong and be successful by society's standards. I was there too.

Our ´Self Wise` shows us the way to our own path, our soul’s purpose, our own way, our own signature in expression and movement, our own meaning, our own needs, and our own why.

Moving through life without our ´Self Wise´ is like sailing a boat without a rudder.

It is therefore not surprising that so many people are experiencing fear, uncertainty, and doubt. For many, the body has become a place of emptiness, discomfort, pain, and tension.
Many people feel lost within themselves, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. Being truly yourself is a difficult challenge in this society, when it should actually be completely natural.

Our ´Self Wise´ knows how to dance through life and with life; physically, emotionally, and spiritually. It has the talent to perceive the world from the heart, to nurture itself with the beauty inside and outside, and to live passionately. To tap into the wisdom that our far ancestors already had about life. Wisdom about ourselves that can't be found in books. Wisdom about ourselves that we only unlock when we start to perceive and feel life in ourselves and around us again. Wisdom about how to heal, blossom, and grow.

The wisdom that we can access again when we stop pigeonholing the body, mind, soul, and spirit and instead think in wholeness, relationship, and connection. And that connection resides in our embodied self, which is always in a lively exchange with all life and energy around it.

The body breathes our spirit and expresses our soul. And for these reasons, it is so important to come home to your body and embrace and befriend your Self Wise again.

The somatic movement adventures in my retreats will give you the space to discover yourself again, trust your own way again, and put yourself at the helm of your life. So that you can move confidently and passionated in your skin again.