The Wisdom Of Flowers

At a particular time each year, our driveway - which you can see in the pic above - is awash with pink camellia petals. 

It looks spectacular. 

This beautiful hedge, tall and robust, bursts forth and is abundant and beautiful, filling me up with a deep and resounding joy. The feeling is indescribable. And it's a feeling that is often missing for women over 40 who have really experienced CPTSD or PTSD in their background.

Flowers and plants give me this incredible feeling. And once upon a time they didn't. 

Flowers are like jewels....

Resilience Building for Career Women over 40

Just recently...well several months ago actually...I was talking to a coaching client* about how she really feels on a daily basis. 

"I can't feel or see the flowers, Camilla," she said. "I can't get a sense of them being beautiful anymore."

Kahlia is 49 and has been working with me for about a year now. She's based in the USA. She's a good woman...a single mother with an extremely good salary. She has a law degree and is working full time on an advisory body, working in with policy makers and both government and NGO's and using her background and practical experience of the legal system to elicit and inspire change in high density urban areas where there are some REALLY heavy problems going on.

And while she's outwardly successful, she says she simply can't feel good about life anymore. 

"It's as if the impact of trauma has robbed me of my joy. It's like that Lucinda Williams song "you took my joy and I want it back," she quips with a half smile and downcast eyes. 

And this is how it is for many of you - many well to do and maybe not so well to do women, who have trauma in your past.

Like Kahlia, you might really struggle to feel joy. You might also struggle with:

• depression
• relationships
• communication
• anger outbursts and stress
• insomnia
• screenscrolling
• finding balance
• and the list goes on and on...

"Kahlia," I said, and I looked at her very clearly and kindly, "you're telling me you can't feel joy. But do you really want to do something about it?"

"Of course, I'm here working with you aren't I? We check in every week on zoom and you give me a tonne of guidance and you and I discuss and create new paths and possibilities and it's going really well." 

"Kahlia, it's going really well...and it also starts again right here right now, with flowers."

"Flowers?" she quipped. "Bloody flowers?"

"Yep. Flowers. This next week you want to be picking or buying flowers."

The truth is, Kahlia's coaching relationship with me had been going well. Really well.

She'd increased her income and salary and knew this was related to the work we'd done on esteem and the power of request.

She'd also improved relationships with her son and daughter, who she'd been feeling disconnected from because of her work hours.

And she'd even changed her diet because of the systemic strategies we use that really help women over 40 with anxiety and CPTSD shift deep-seated behaviours you think are entrenched for good!

The session finally finished, and you know what?

She came back the next week and said, "I get it...about the joy and feeling it or not feeling it. I get it. So there's more you and I can do, isn't there, and there's more for me to learn about how to really feel it. and act it. How to live in a place where I feel really joyful about my life, even with the history I've had...."

"Absolutely," I grinned. 

And that very Zoom session we began.

We began to do some key work together, moving beyond externals and into territory and material that has been fun, fascinating and mood and life-changing. 

And it started...but has by no means finished yet...with flowers. 

Jewel Moments and External Mindfulness for Women with Trauma

Small moments are important. They curtail the struggle you can feel around change, dynamism, stress, life pressure and decisions beyond your control. These are all areas often impacted by adversity/trauma. And the reasons for that are neurophysiological. They link in with your brain and your body.

So small moments can also be opportunities for "external mindfulness." They are a visual reprieve at times when you are pulled off-centre. 

Flowers…like little jewel moments that stabilise you. Like a shimmer of love. 

And these little "shimmers of love'  are important for women over 40 with an adversity or trauma history. While these little micro-experiences can seem inconsequential, (and if you're steeped in a stress mindset - even pithy,) the truth is they go a very long way to helping you build resilience as a core component of life change post-adversity. 

And…for me too, as a lived-experience life coach/mentor and guide; as a busy professional woman, writer, farm owner and artist...at that time of year when the camellia hedge blossoms, when the ground swims in a sea of pink and a carpet of carmine beauty, I do them too. Willingly. I make time for those times! In fact I often duck out in the morning in between Zoom client sessions, just to delight in that carpet of pink petals. Immerse myself. Drown in it. Sink into it visually. 

And I use it as an opportunity for visual mindfulness, focusing on an external point that creates joy. Simple. Free. Important. 

Change and a Trauma History

Just recently however, that hedge - the hedge in the photo above - was vigorously trimmed. It’s now reduced in height. It's shorter than me and I'm not tall. It’s barren and is missing leaves. The pink petals are gone. 

The driveway is looking different.

And with all the changes along that area my summer dahlias are gone too, making way for a new area and changes garden border. I’m still missing the way it all was, in much the same way I miss how a lot of things once were or might have been in life. 

And at times… I’m not even sure if it's the right way to go. 

But…that’s life and that’s reality. 

Certainty can be a foe of great change. Certainty is great. Great for goals and all that masculinised "drivenness" that is encapsulated as the success-pill of the western world. And it's a wonderful experience and way of approaching work, life and career. 

But it's only a part of the wisdom and healing equation. 

The professional woman over 40 with an adversity history is often steeped in that energy already, and are suffering its consequences externally and internally. Many come to me, seeking an approach and a considered communication that is more more inclusive, incorporating my embodies praxis™️ approach and being-doing,™️ that encompasses a new life shaping and sensibility. 

It also involves mystery. (You cannot make a life or make changes without taking risk. Without a very disquieting state of not-knowing.) 

So about the flowers gone from the gardens...and the hedgeline?

I have some interesting feelings swimming around. And I have the fecund experience of disquiet and not-knowing, which is right where I want to be. Because that means real growth and real change. It means power and love and joy and accomplishment.

Each and every decision can contain this interplay. And that means I, we, Kahlia too and you and me - as human beings - will endure and hopefully learn to embrace both “regret and hope,” and both "certainty and uncertainty."

We make a decision and in so doing, lose other possibilities while at the same time gaining new ones. It’s change. The decisions we make hopefully involve gains and will also contain risks. And they often contain loss and regret too. 

It can be gruelling AND IT CAN BE like living in a sea of dust sparkles.

Like breathing stars! 

This process can be tough for women over 40 when healing from deep trauma or adversity. It's tough for all human beings at times, but it's extra tough if you have had adversity in your background.

And this is why so many human beings get stuck.

That breathing stars part? It requires learning and guidance and deep work, and it can be woven into your daily practices with us here at Camilla Slater Coaching too. 

What Might Have Been Different?

Women who work with me - women like Kahlia -  often arrive at a question early on in trauma-informed life coaching.

They begin at times by asking, "what might my life have been like, if that trauma hadn't happened? How might my life have been different? 

What might have been? 

How different might it all have been, if the solid stability and love had been there, if, if if there had been a loving rejoice of ALL YOU ARE.

Women with adversity histories often wonder about this. What might it have been like? 

A Fresh Start and A New Path 

What I do know is a very spiritual and practically grounded approach to your healing (beyond the old adversity) is important and there's a few very clear approaches you can take to transform the way you perceive what happened.

You want to learn to make meaning out of what happened.

Deep meaning. Spiritual meaning. Searching meaning. Real meaning. 

Creating meaning in this way is rather extraordinary.

We use various strategies that help you to:

• ReStory your experiences
• Create new life actions in the direction you want to go
• Work with you mystically, so that you can re-orient yourself in a culture and world that often "doesn't understand you or what you've been through"
• Use a variety of creative tools to support you to self-explore 
• Help you with secondary and tertiary issues impacted indirectly and directly by your trauma  symptoms (love, money, intimacy, career)
• Resolve patterns and behaviours that are self-defeating.

 So the choice is there. You can wonder...endlessly about what might have been?

And in all honesty, who knows?  

Or you can make a decision and make change. You can make a free online appointment with an extremely experienced coach and mentor to many "successful" women over 40+ with trauma and adversity in their past.

Absolutely, if you are still feeling the pain, as beautiful Kahlia was, there's a great deal you and I can do in dialogue and coaching work, together.  It can change.

It really can.

And there will be a time, after the winter, when the new growth appears and the green shoots burst; after the frosts finish, and the chill winds leave for grand ocean sweeps and Pacific times, and the pink petals WILL bloom again - for you.

I promise you that. 

Because they certainly have for Kahlia, just as they have for me.

And they keep blooming for Kahlia...again and again and again. 

AND THEY CAN FOR YOU. 

Love from Camilla x

You can book in for your free mentoring session with Camilla here

If you're ready to start one to one sessions, book in for your elite coaching here. 

Group settings and coaching with discussion, you can join Heroine's Journey group coaching programme here. 

* permission to share this story was given by the client. Names have been changed.