How to Fully Engage with the Rest of Your Life (Sharon Blackie, PhD)

Pulling The Thread with Elise Loehnen

Lemonada Media

Education, Self-improvement

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 14 August 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“If we stop transforming, and we try to hold ourselves back, we’re effectively stagnating and killing the life that’s ahead,” says psychologist and author Sharon Blackie, PhD. Today, we talk about what Blackie has learned from studying myths and fairy tales, and working to reimagine the stories that currently define women’s lives. She shares a much-needed, wise, and beautiful perspective on the rebirth that can happen around menopause—when the layers that once defined us are peeled back, to reveal a deeper core, and a chance to transform once more. For the show notes, head over to ⁠my Substack⁠. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Lemonada.
0:05.7	Hi, it's Elise Loonen, host of Pulling the Thread.
0:09.4	Today I'm Here is today's guest, Sharon Blackie, on the opportunity to transform at midlife when we reach menopause.
0:55.0	To ask the question, when everything that once defined you is burned away, is stripped away.
1:04.0	And that happens at menopause. You can try to hold it off all you like, but it'll get you sooner or later. That happens. When it's all stripped
1:12.5	away, what's left? What is the core of you that's left? And how then do you use that core
1:20.3	to build the next part of the alchemical process, the next part of the transformation of your
1:26.7	life? And we're taught maybe if people even
1:29.9	think of it in our chemical terms it's like oh my god it's all gone it's all burnt away
1:34.5	bugger you know here i am and we're not really taught to take the metaphor on it's like okay
1:39.8	you're burnt back to the core for a reason so that you know who you are, so that you know
1:46.2	when all the structures that supported you are burned away, gone, the beauty, for example,
1:52.9	that you've been talking about the youth, the fertility, when everything that you thought
1:59.0	to find you is fading away, what's left, what's left that matters.
2:02.2	And that's the exciting bit to me. And that's what culturally we're not taught to look at.
2:07.7	Sharon Blackie is a psychologist whose work focuses on reimagining women's stories.
2:13.4	Throughout her extraordinary career, she has drawn connections between myths and fairy tales and the most pressing personal and cultural issues we face today.
2:22.6	She has written several books, including Hagatud, which is about reimagining the second half of women's lives and the powerful transformation and rebirth that can happen at menopause.
2:37.4	We get into that today, as well as themes from another one of Sharon's books called Wise Women, Myths and Stories for Midlife and Beyond.
2:43.4	I think Sharon's wise perspective is so needed, and for me, it's really the spiritual and emotional
2:48.6	thread that is missing from today's conversations on growing older.
2:53.2	As Sharon says, she wasn't interested in trying to hold on to, at all costs, a youth that she had already shed.
	...

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