Beyond Managing Symptoms: The Four Pillars of Radiance | 002

You're listening to the Sacred She Reset podcast.

If you're a woman in midlife who's done doing this alone and

ready for real conversations, real wisdom, and real radiance,

you're exactly where you need to be. I'm your host Sharia Shana.

Your path to radiance starts here. Welcome, welcome,

beautiful sisters, back to Sacred She Reset, awakening your

radiant wisdom. I'm your host Sharia Shana, and in the first

episode, I shared the story that brought me here: the years of

surgery, hormone treatments, early menopause, and the slow

process of learning that my body was something-not something to

override, manage, or hand over entirely to other people. You

can check out that episode if you haven't heard that one. I

think you'll find it quite interesting, and I'm sure some

of you will be able to relate. And so I went through the long,

arduous process of learning to listen to my body and to

understand this language and the language it was speaking, and

how to translate that language. And so today I want to share

with you the framework that grew from my journey, and I've called

that the four pillars of radiance: health, healing,

happiness, and heart. And it's primarily what I talk about in

my latest book, Sacred She Reset. And these pillars became

a way for me to understand something I had experienced for

years, but I just didn't have a language for. And so, try this

on for size.

I just I wrote this little piece about you know not understanding

the language or how when we go to say a doctor or somewhere we

go that we're not treated as a holistic or a whole person, and

so I wrote this little piece here, and I feel like a lot of

you will resonate with this. A woman cannot be separated into

neat little pieces. Her physical health affects her emotions. Her

emotions affect her relationships. Her relationships

affect her nervous system. Her nervous system affects her

energy. Her energy affects her creativity, confidence, desire,

and ability to make decisions. And yet, women are so often

offered an isolated solution to one isolated part of themselves,

a supplement for the symptoms, a strategy for the mindset, a

meditation for the stress, a morning routine for the

exhaustion, and each of those have value, but the woman

herself can disappear between all the separate solutions. And

so, today, beautiful women, I offer you the four pillars of

radiance to bring you back to center. And I felt it was really

important that I share with you why these are so important and

how they fit together, because like setting the foundation with

the story, now the beautiful framework that came from that

amazing journey, you can get to see how everything overlaps and

how you can start to maybe in your own life have a look at

this and see where you can make some changes.

So over the years, we women came into my one-on-one sessions

carrying many different stories. Some were navigating physical

symptoms, exhaustion, grieving. Some felt disconnected from

their bodies. Others had reached a point where they could no

longer clearly answer the question, "What do I need? And

I'm sure some of you can relate to this. It's like we get when

we're in that. There's we're on the cusp of a big

transformation, right on the cusp, and it almost it feels

like everything comes to a head at that time, and it's we

literally almost lose ourselves in what's happening, and it's

like we. I know for me in the past, I've had many times when I

haven't been able to answer that question of like, what do I

actually need right now? And I've noticed that even for

myself, that when we start to travel into perimenopause, this

is often the question: is like, what do I even need? So there

was a similar moment that happened again and again. A

woman would arrive. Looking as though she had been holding

herself together all day, all week, perhaps for years.

Sometimes the tears would come before we had even properly

begun, and this is my experience with working with people, mainly

women, one on one, in body work and situations like that, and

working with them with herbalism and different sessions over the

over the years, and it's not because anything terrible had

happened in the room, because she had finally entered a space

where she did not have to perform competence, and she did

not have to hold everyone else, and she did not have to say she

was fine, and so using practices such as sound, gentle touch,

flower essences, breath, reflection, and body awareness,

embodied and body awareness, I would hold a space where she

could slow down enough to feel herself again, and this is

literally what I did for myself over all these decades. I

learned how to hold a container for myself where I could

self-soothe and come back into balance and be able to give

myself what what we call embodied self care, and so by

the end of the session, the there was a lot of change. There

was not always wasn't always dramatic, but there was always

this Openness and expansiveness that was happening in that

space. So it might have been just their breath had deepened.

They were able to breathe deeper into the belly, or there was a

softening of the shoulders, or their face looked different, and

she could finally name what she was feeling, and so when we

we're constantly in this override and constantly in this

space of not giving ourselves what we need, we disconnect from

how we're really feeling, and so some of these women would say,

"I feel as though I've come back into my body, and doing this

work is such a such a privilege and an honor to be able to hold

space for other women where they feel safe in a container where

they can let go, and so their reflections have stayed with me

now, but often stayed with me and lingered for a while,

because a lot of the time it was a mirror being held up in front

of me of my own journey as well, and so there's this longing to

return to the woman who can, you know, this beneath the demands

and the responsibilities and the years of override. There's this

woman who is wanting to come forward and to feel again, and

so the four pillars of radiance. It's not a the the the work.

Everything I offer is is not about rigidity or more

checklists or more things to do. It's very embodied.

You can you can integrate it into your life, and it's very

subtle work. It's very subtle, and it's very it's very powerful

because it has this way to penetrate into your life in a

way where it starts to cultivate deep change, and so they

are-they are more like gateways. I mention it as being more of a

spiral of something that you can return back to over and over

again, and you may come. You'll go round, and you'll go through

the gateways of health, healing, happiness, and heart, and come

back. And there's another layer, and so you meet it. You come

back to that first gateway, not being the same woman that you

were, and coming in at a different level, at a different

frequency. Of okay, what's next? So, pillar one. Let's start with

pillar one here. And before, actually, before I start, I want

to just mention how that this again coming back to the word of

holistic. What is holistic? It comes back to that bit about not

not looking at our looking at ourselves in pieces. You know,

need to fix that part or that part. This is about embodiment.

This is about bringing it into the whole woman, the holistic

space of. Who you are, and how that then ripples out into the

rest of your life, and so pillar one, health. It's where we

start. It's the ground beneath our feet. We need to we need to

have a relationship with our physical body.

We need to understand what it means to be grounded in in our

physical form and in this human existence and this life that

we're living on planet Earth, and this pillar includes

everything, like it's around nourishment, movement, sleep,

hormones, digestion, energy, the nervous system, and the many

rhythms that we support on a daily basis, but little caveat

it's not about creating a perfect body or this idea of

this. We see this image of a perfect body. It's it's more

than that. It's about relationship. How are we in

relationship to ourselves? How we're interacting with the

world, and bringing that bringing that into balance, and

we need to start here. We need to know this Earth suit before

we can move forward. And so, questions like, can you notice

when your body is tired before she collapses. Can you recognize

hunger, tension, overwhelm, or pain without immediately

dismissing it? Can you seek appropriate professional care

while still remaining connected to your own experience?

Can you ask questions? Can you become a participant rather than

feeling like a passive observer of your own health? And so, for

years, I would often only listen when my body became loud enough

for me to stop. And I know a lot of you can relate to this is

this, oh, it's gone into chaos, and now I'm going to listen. And

it's that doing something almost when it's too late. And so many

of us live in a way where we wait for the migraine, or we the

insomnia, or the panic, hot flushes, injury. Injury is a big

one. Complete exhaustion, and if some of you have been through

that out there, I know for me exhaustion was has been a huge

one in my life, and I won't go into it in this episode, but I

might dedicate a whole episode to just speaking about

exhaustion, and we wait until, so we wait until our bodies are

roaring and no longer whispering. And I know you can

relate to this. It's like we just wait till it's loud enough.

But there's been a lot of signs and and little little signals

along the way that we've been ignoring, so health pillar

invites us to begin listening earlier, not fearfully, just

curiously. And your body is not a problem requiring constant

surveillance. She is a relationship requiring

attention, and I like to reframe it in that way, because you know

we talk about our relationship with our partners and our loved

ones and all the things, but how is our relationship with

ourselves? And our relationship-this is this is

actually I'm thinking here another episode all on its own

as well.

Our relationship with ourselves-how we how are we in

communication with ourselves? How are we, you know, with it

with ourselves? Because it tells us a lot about how we are with

the external world. So pillar two is healing, and healing is

the water of transformation, and it's what allows movement where

something has become stuck. Many women arrive in midlife carrying

far more than they realize: old grief, unspoken anger, trauma,

disappointment, resentment, the emotional weight of being the

dependable one, and I'm sure a lot of you going, yeah, that's

that's me. The stories you've learnt about that is what a good

woman should tolerate, forgive, or remain silent about. And so,

healing does not mean endlessly analyzing ourselves. We got to

give ourselves a break, ladies. Once in a while, it does not

mean turning every feeling into a project, and it does not mean

pretending that our physical symptoms are caused by emotions.

Healing means. Creating space and just feel into this. Healing

means creating space for what has been carried to be

acknowledged. Sometimes that involves therapy, medical

support, and grief work because more often than not, beneath all

of this is a deep grief that we're carrying, and sometimes it

means movement, breath, sound, art, ritual, nature, or simply

telling the truth in a room where it feels safe to do so,

and so it can mean all of the above. And the healing pillar

asks, "What have I been holding that I no longer want to carry

in the same way? It also asks, "What part of me needs

compassion rather than correction? And I am like

highlighting this here on my notes. It's like that was a

massive one for me.

It's like the self judgment, and you know, for you ladies that

are listening out there, if you're in the sacred she resets

circle on Facebook, you know, I might pop this one up as a

question because it's big. I think it's big for a lot of us

where we're not offering ourselves enough compassion, and

we're rather overcorrecting ourselves all the time and

judging ourselves all the time because we like feel like we it

needs to be a certain way, but it's calling for softness. So

many women have tried to heal themselves through criticism.

Yeah, I know that was me. They speak to themselves with

harshness, and and this is the bit I was talking about before

about relationship. How are you in relationship to yourself? And

that goes with how are you speaking to yourself? What is

the self talk that's happening as well? And if you're speaking

to yourself with harshness, would you speak to another woman

like that?

So, this-it's all about safety, and instead of bracing and

opening to allowing whatever is there to to move and to shift,

and so the healing begins when we stop treating ourselves like

the enemy. And pillar three is happiness, and happiness is the

song of the soul. I just love that because that really

resonated with me when I was bringing all this together

because I just I love singing and love bringing women together

in the singing circles that I do, and it just cultivates such

a beautiful positive energy. And in this pillar, it really calls

for this song of the soul to come forward, and it's it's a

space of playfulness of where you you start to begin to feel

pleasure and joy and your creativity again, and so I don't

mean smiling through grief or pretending everything is

wonderful because that's that's it's not sincere, it's not

authentic. Happiness, as I understand it, is our capacity

for aliveness, joy, pleasure, curiosity, creativity, play,

desire, expression, and those small moments that remind us

that we are not here to manage, achieve, or endure. And so, for

many women, happiness has become conditional. They will allow

themselves to enjoy life when the work is finished, when

everyone else is settled, when the house is organized, when the

body changes, when they've earned it. But there will always

be another task, ladies. There will always be things to do, and

joy cannot survive forever as a prize waiting at the end of this

endless to-do list. How how many of you know this one so well?

And joy is not a reward for perfect performance. It is a

natural expression of alignment.

The happiness pillar invites a woman to ask, "What makes me

feel alive? Hallelujah! And as I'm sitting here and I'm just

looking at my notes, I'm going to be popping a lot of these

questions up into the group, so this opens up the conversation

around around the pillars, but also the questions here are

really powerful. So, what makes you feel live, beautiful woman

out there listening, and what have you stopped doing because

it did not seem useful? So, what part of yourself? You know, what

part of yourself have you been waiting for permission to play,

to create, to sing, to dance, to travel, to laugh, and to begin

again? It tells us where life is still moving, and so can you, as

we we're about to come into the fourth pillar, and so I just

want to take a moment to just notice how these pillars one

builds on top of the next, and how they come into harmony with

one another. And I'm sure some of you are answering these

questions, going, "Oh my God, yes! Oh wow, these questions are

hitting hitting me in the heart. They're actually resonating, and

some of them may be triggering you a little bit, and that's

okay. That's okay. So, yeah, you can see how these start to

gently layer up and to to build on the next. And in pillar four,

we have the heart. Heart is the gateway to grace. It connects us

to love, meaning, compassion, belonging, and the wisdom that

exists beneath constant mental noise. Well, the heart pillar is

not only about romantic love; it's about the way we relate to

ourselves, to other people, to nature, community, and whatever

where we experience as sacred.

And many many women spend years loving others through service.

They anticipate needs, hold families together, support

partners, care for parents, guide teams, remember birthdays,

carry emotional atmospheres, but they may struggle to receive.

And I see this a lot, and I do feel like this is a big part of

why when women used to come into session with me, they would come

in, and everything would let go straight away. I give them a

hug, and the tears would come because they're like, I'm in my

safe place. I can let net go now, and I can receive. And so

they would hold all this so tightly together, like a

combustion oven. And then it's like all it was was me with a

little needle popping the balloon. See me, how are you?

With open arms, and then they would, they would just burst

open. But we do, as women, we we struggle. And I know this is

like I'm not speaking from the other side of this, right? This

this work I'm doing all the time, and I want you to

understand that I'm not speaking to you as a guru. I'm not

speaking to you as a someone who knows what she's doing here, but

I am along the journey enough to know, to see, to have worked

through a lot of this stuff, and to be able to hold that space

for you now to share these conversations because they're

really, really important. And so, learning to receive is a big

one.

So, you know, it's about you know they may offer

understanding to everyone except themselves, right? They may

belong to many people while no longer feeling that they belong

to themselves, and this is this is what happens. We come to

midlife. We come to perimenopause when the rugs

totally pulled out from under our our feet, and everything is

just it just goes tits up, and everything's all the balls are

up in the air, and we're like everything just needs to change,

and we suddenly feel different. We want to start listening to

what we need and empowering ourselves again, and so this can

come. This can feel really like rough territory. It can feel

really prickly, and so the pillar, the heart pillar, asks

Can can you remain open without abandoning your

boundaries. Wow, I mean it's big work. It's big work. It's not

for you know you can't take this on. It's not lighthearted. It's

this is deep work. These questions open up can open up

big caverns in some people. And can you love without

disappearing? Can you receive without guilt? Can I trust that

my needs are also part of the relationship? And these are

huge. These like this work here, just on this pillar. Alone, you

can sit in this pillar for a while. So, oof, I'm feeling the

energy, baby.

Feeling the energy, sisters. So the heart does not ask us to

become softer in ways that make us easier to use. It asks us to

become truthful enough that love no longer requires self erasure.

It's it's amazing. It really is. I feel so blessed that this I've

been able to bring this together, this framework.

Because if you're sort of struggling to to find a way, or

just look for a bit of a launching pad of where to begin

and where to start, like where to leap from. This this gives

you some really beautiful, soft, soft blankets to land on. To

know that you're held and you are not alone. A woman may begin

by saying, "I need more energy. So this is when you be going

like, "Why, why, why the framework works? Right? I need

more energy. But as she listens more deeply, she may realize she

has she exhaust is exhausted because she has no boundaries,

or she may say, "I need to feel happier, but beneath the

flatness, maybe grief that has never been given space. She may

think her problem is discipline, that perhaps her body has been

living in chronic survival mode. She may think she needs another

productivity strategy, but perhaps she needs to stop

constructing a life that only works when she overrides

herself. So these four pillars help us move beneath the surface

without dismissing the surface. Physical symptoms deserve

appropriate care. Emotional pain deserves support. Relationships

deserve honest examination. Joy deserves space, and meaning

deserves attention.

Nothing has to be paused. Nothing has to be pushed or

paused aside in order for another part to matter. I think

that's really important to understand because we can often

think that we have to do this work and then we have to push

something else aside or pause something. But or even when it

comes to, you know, oh, I've got a symptom over here, but I need

to do this. It's hard to hold both. This this container and

this framework helps you to to hold it all and to be able to

hold whatever is present in this moment and what is alive and

important. So many many different approaches miss and

focus on one aspect of a woman, and it's like I said earlier on

in this episode, they may focus on hormones, habits, thoughts,

diets, productivity, trauma, relationship, and each of those

are important. And and it's it's absolutely we need to sometimes

we need to just focus on one at a time, But I really want to

reiterate the importance of working as a whole and working

holistically, and knowing that all of these can work together.

So when the pieces are never brought back together, and

that's often what happens, we get a bit disjointed.

As women, we become-it's like we've got a list of problems to

solve. And yes, it can become too much, and then we go, "Oh,

it's just all too much, and then we let it go. And that-that's

what I experienced for many years. It just all became too

much, and I just handed the responsibility over to the

professionals. So for years, it was for me. It was like one

symptom, one specialist, one procedure, one recovery, and it

was just this long, drawn out journey and cycle of 111, and

often felt like one step forward, four or five steps

back, but the problem continued to return. It still came back.

So, what changed for me was beginning to ask a different

question. Not only how do I make this symptom go away, but what

does my whole self need in order to feel supported, and so we've

got to start asking just different questions, ladies. The

question does not replace medical or professional care.

Want to get that clear? It expands the conversation, and as

long as we remain open. To what is here for us, we will always

be moving into a greater space of transformation and awareness.

So, one of the most important lessons I learned was that I

could not outwill my body forever. I'd spent years

believing that strength meant getting back up as quickly as

possible. After surgeries, I would recover, return to work,

return to travel, and continue.

My ability to keep going became part of my identity, but the

body is not impressed by identity. Sheep responds to what

is actually happening, and so when my bleeding stopped

completely at 38, I entered early menopause. Yet even then,

my experience did not follow the usual script. The symptoms

people spoke about did not all arrive immediately. Some

appeared years later, and even now in my 50s, it's different

again. The landscape's completely different now. Some

arrived quietly; they kind of sanaka behind me. Some look

nothing like what I expected. That taught me that there is no

single version of menopause, no universal timeline, no perfect

template, and the four pillars allows us to respond to the

woman who is actually here, rather than forcing her into

someone else's experience. And that, for me, right there, is

like boom. We are kind of placed into this cookie cutter model of

how we should receive our menopause, and yes, there is a

rhythm and a flow and the phases, absolutely. But I mean,

this is not one size fits all, ladies. This this is the.

anyway. This is another episode completely going on right here.

The four pillars, bringing it back, keeping it clean.

The four pillars allows us to respond to the woman who is here

now, and this is why this is really powerful, and it it

brings us again into this container of being able to have

a little bit of a map, and not everybody's territory is the

same, but it gives us a little bit of a map to adapt this map

to how our life is and how midlife is for us, and you can

apply these these pillars to parts of your life. If you're

going through a huge life crisis right now, you might not be in

midlife, so you can apply these pillars to to whatever you're

doing. They're all adaptable, and so you do not have to work

on all four pillars at once. That would rather defeat the

purpose by turning radiance into another exhausting assignment,

don't you think? You know this. Like I said at the beginning,

this is not another to-do list or another like action plan or

another like I got a goal here. We're not we're not making

masculinizing it. I can't even get that word out, but masculize

the action, like inaction. This is really asking us to go

within. So you begin with the the pillar that feels most

neglected, and I I have some ways to help you kind of work

this out as well, ladies. I remember this is just a this is

just a introduction to a little bit of information about you

know the baseline of my my work and what I'm doing here. So you

begin with the one that feels most neglected.

Perhaps your body is asking for attention, and quite often the

body is asking for attention first. That's hence why it comes

number one, and perhaps it's grief that's been waiting.

Perhaps joy feels like it's a distant memory. Perhaps your

heart is tired from belonging everywhere except to yourself,

and so I would be saying like you just stop and pause, and

you'd be asking this question of like, which pillar is calling me

now? Which pillar is calling me now? And you can just do that

with a few quiet breaths, and then choose one small act of

return from for health, it might be making an appointment that

you have postponed. For healing, it might be acknowledging a

feeling without trying to fix it. For happiness, it might be

doing something purely because it brings you pleasure. And for

heart, it might be asking for support or telling one honest

truth. Radiance rarely returns through one dramatic act; it

returns through the places where you begin choosing yourself

again. And so, I've got a reflection for you.

Let's let's bring this back down. Take a breath. And

sometimes this is a lot to take in, but it's. I hope you're

feeling the transmission of what I'm, what I'm rippling out here,

and the importance of this work. So just taking a breath and ask

yourself which of the four pillars feels strongest in my

life right now, and which one has been waiting for you. And I

want you to not judge the answer, ladies. I know we can

get in our heads. This is a a felt sense thing, breathing to

that beautiful body of of yours. The neglected pillar is not

evidence that you have failed. I want to really bring this in

here because this is this is really important. There is no

failure. You've not done anything wrong. It is

information. It is an opportunity and an invitation

that there is always more for you. So to wrap this episode up,

if you would like to explore the four pillars more deeply, they

are at the heart of my book Sacred She Reset. You can also

join the Sacred She Reset community on Facebook, where we

continue these conversations together, and when you enter the

group, share which pillar is calling you most strongly right

health, healing, happiness. Perhaps it's heart. You will

find the links in the show notes. I'm Sharia Shana, and

this is Sacred She Reset: Awakening your radiant wisdom.

Your radiance is not something to create; it is something to

return to. Bye for now.