desire

The Difference Between a Feeling and a Belief

Why this distinction quietly changes everything in the healing process

Many people use the words feeling, emotion, and belief interchangeably. Yet in the inner world, they describe very different phenomena. Learning to discern between them is one of the most quietly revolutionary steps on a healing path, because it returns us to the truth of what belongs to the body, what belongs to the mind, and what belongs to conditioned identity.

At the most fundamental level, a feeling is a direct physiological sensation.
It is simple.
It is immediate.
It is present-moment.

“I am hungry.”
“I am tired.”
“I am cold.”
“I am hot.”
“I am tense.”
“I feel pressure in my chest.”

These are not interpretations, but raw sensory information arising from the nervous system. They do not comment on who we are and do not describe our worth. They do not assign meaning, but simply report the state of the person.

In contrast, statements such as:

“I am unlovable.”
“I am unsafe.”
“I am unwanted.”
“I am broken.”
“I am too much.”

are not feelings. They are beliefs.

They may arrive with emotional charge, but their structure is cognitive and are conclusions. Stories and identity statements that formed over time in response to lived experience.

This distinction matters because the body and the psyche speak different languages.

The body speaks in sensation, and the psyche speaks in narrative.

When early experiences overwhelm a child’s capacity to process—such as neglect, emotional abandonment, violence, or inconsistent caregiving—the nervous system records what happened as sensation, but the mind tries to make sense of it through meaning-making. A young child does not think, “My caregiver is dysregulated and lacks capacity.” The child thinks, “It must be me.”

From this moment, a belief is born.

Not because it is true. Not because it reflects the essence, but because it provides coherence in chaos.

Over time, these beliefs can feel indistinguishable from identity. They present themselves as facts. Yet they are closer to adaptive strategies than truths. They were brilliant survival responses designed to maintain attachment, belonging, and continuity of relationship.

This is why trauma-informed healing places such emphasis on separating sensation from story.

When someone says,
“I feel rejected,”
what is often more accurate is:
“I feel a tightening in my chest and my mind is generating the belief that I am being rejected.”

This is not semantic. It is structural.

The moment we recognise that the sensation is real but the interpretation is optional, something begins to soften. We step out of unconscious identification and into conscious relationship.

We move from:

“I am unlovable.” to “A wave of sadness is moving through me, and a familiar belief about unlovability is being activated.”

This shift restores choice.

  • Feelings move.
  • Sensations rise and fall.
  • Beliefs repeat.

This alone tells us something important.

What repeats is not truth, and what repeats is conditioning.

Gabor Maté’s body of work consistently points toward this terrain: that much of what we call “personality” is actually wound structure, and much of what we call “self” is a patchwork of coping adaptations layered on top of original innocence.

Strongly held beliefs often form precisely where original self-connection was interrupted.

In this light, healing is not about becoming someone new but about releasing what we were never meant to carry.

When we re-anchor awareness in the body, we return to a more honest data stream. Sensation tells us what is happening now. Beliefs tell us what happened then.

Both deserve compassion, and neither defines essence.

This understanding also dissolves a common misconception: that intense emotional pain means something is wrong with us. In reality, intense emotion often signals that an old belief is being brushed against, not that the belief is true.

You can experience sadness without being broken, feel fear without being unsafe.
And you can feel loneliness without being unlovable.

Sensation is experience, and belief is interpretation.

Learning to pause, feel, and inquire gently:

“What is the sensation?”
“What is the story?”
“Which one is actually me?”

becomes a sacred practice of self-empowerment. Over time, something subtle but profound occurs.

The body becomes a trusted ally, the mind becomes a curious observer, and identity loosens its grip.

And beneath the layers of story, what quietly reveals itself is not deficiency, not damage, not lack—but presence. awareness. life itself, moving.

This is not a destination; it is a remembering.

A remembering that who you are has always existed prior to every belief you ever learned to carry.

And that is very good news.

Heart To Heart, Elizabeth

THE CHANGE – Your body was never the problem

THE C H A N G E (Menopause): The Ultimate Permission Slip to Be Yourself

For many women, The Change (menopause) is framed as a loss, a fading of youth, fertility, or energy. But what if we shifted the lens? What if The Change wasn’t an ending, but a powerful beginning?

The Change (menopause) is one of the most transformative permission slips a woman can ever receive. It’s the moment in life when society’s relentless expectations and the boxes we’ve been placed in, the roles we’ve been told to play, the ways we’re supposed to look and act, start to lose their grip.

No longer are we required to shrink our voices to make others comfortable, to please everyone around us, or to fit into impossible ideals of beauty or behaviour. The Change offers a rare freedom: the chance to reclaim your authentic power.

Reclaiming Your Authentic Self

This season invites you to explore what truly matters to you. It asks you to honour your needs, set clear boundaries, and lead from wisdom rather than obligation. The truth is that the expectations placed on women for decades, if not a lifetime, often come at a cost: stress, exhaustion, and even declining health.

When we stop conforming and start embracing who we really are, remarkable things happen. Our health improves, our confidence grows, and our inner power rises. Science supports this, too: women who engage in self-compassion, prioritise their own needs, and cultivate a meaningful sense of purpose often experience better mental health, a lower risk of chronic disease, and greater life satisfaction during midlife and beyond.

Leading From Wisdom

The Change (menopause) is also a leadership moment, not in the corporate sense, but in the personal, cultural, and even spiritual sense. By leaning into your own wisdom, rather than society’s expectations, you show others, especially younger women, that authenticity is possible. You decide to lead by example, not by obligation.

This doesn’t mean The Change is easy. Hot flashes, mood changes, and sleep disruptions are very real for many women. But the opportunity here is profound: a chance to step fully into yourself, with clarity, confidence, and purpose.

The Power of Permission

The Change gives you permission to live unapologetically and to say no without guilt. To speak your truth without shrinking. To embrace your body, your voice, and your life exactly as they are. When women claim this freedom, something remarkable happens: health, confidence, and power rise together. Life in this season is no longer about survival, but rather about thriving.

The Change is not the end of your story. It’s the point where you finally get to write it on your own terms. It’s time to put on your Crone Crown with dignity and devotion.

Heart to Heart, Elizabeth

Embracing the archetype of the Exalted Elder

It’s quiet at first, then powerfully undeniable.

When your body begins to shift from one role into another. I call it “The Change,” and there is something affectionate in that phrase, because it captures a transformation far deeper than a biological transition. It marks a threshold, a crossing, a gentle unravelling of an old identity shaped not only by your physiology but by the expectations of a world that once defined your worth through youth, reproduction, and compliance.

For many years, you were measured subtly or openly by how seamlessly you cared for others while remaining pretty, youthful, agreeable, and ever-giving. You learned to tuck your own needs beneath the surface. 

When The Change arrives, that entire narrative begins to change. 

The cycles you once relied on shift. The hormones that guided your body begin to re-pattern themselves. You might feel unmoored not because you are losing power, but because you are stepping into a power the world has forgotten how to honour.

In modern culture, there’s rarely a genuinley sacred place for the female archetype of the Exalted Elder.

It appears there is no ceremonial seat awaiting you. No stole was placed upon your shoulders to acknowledge your arrival into this sacred wisdom. 

Instead, the culture often looks past you, as though your visibility were fading even as your inner light intensified. Perhaps the root of this is a deep, lingering misogyny, subtle yet persistent, that praises youth while ignoring the brilliance of maturity. You may feel dismissed, misunderstood, or even mocked. Not because you lack value, but because society has lost the memory of how to exalt or recognise it.

During this transition, when your words tangle or your brain fogs with the shifting of hormones, you may feel suddenly unsteady in conversations that once felt effortless. And you’re too often laughed at, pitied, or quietly sidelined, as though this momentary haze is a sign of decline, rather than transformation. Yet this fog is not a failing; it is the dissolving of an older identity you spent a lifetime building. You once moved through the world with a familiar confidence, anchored in roles and cycles you understood. 

As that identity dismantles and reforms itself into something new, more spacious, and more authentic, there can be a profound disorientation. Your brain is not malfunctioning; it is searching for new pathways, new language, and a new centre of gravity. And because communication is one of the places where you express intellect, creativity, and presence, any interruption can feel like a loss of footing. Especially when speaking with younger people, who have not yet witnessed this metamorphosis and may not recognise the wisdom emerging beneath the surface. 

But this temporary uncertainty is not a weakness. It is a profound rewiring and reorientation, a tuning of your inner frequencies to a more expansive bandwidth. Beneath this mystical fog, something luminous is awakening in your heart and mind: intuition is sharpening, ancestral memory is rising, and embodied knowing is anchoring itself. 

The threshold is not about diminishing; it is an initiation into a deeper version of yourself. 

The Change reveals a different truth: your body is done performing as it once did. It refuses to uphold expectations that reduce your essence. It begins to shed what no longer fits the woman that is emerging. The armour may feel tight, not because you are failing, but because you are expanding beyond the confines of an old narrative.

Dear one, you are not meant to walk this path alone. You belong to a collective rising, a body of women moving together through this threshold, each one rediscovering her ground, her voice, and her radiance. You are not here to fight your weight, but to understand the deeper weight you have carried: the weight of invisibility, of misinterpretation, of holding yourself in contorted shapes to be accepted.

As you stand in this transition, you are stepping into a lineage of Exalted Elders reclaiming their place, not through defiance, but through presence, not through argument, but through embodiment. 

Your wisdom is not diminishing; it is ripening. 

Your intuition is not fading; it is emerging even sharper. 

Your voice is not weakening; it is resonating from your deeper chambers of truth.

This transition is not a tale of blame; it’s your story of remembering, your inherent value, the power that lives in your lived experience and the ancestral wisdom that flows through you.

And as you remember, the world slowly begins to remember, too.

In that remembrance, a new space opens wide, honest, and luminous, where you can finally take your place and claim your space.

Heart to Heart, Elizabeth

When women enter The Change – Part Three

When you listen closely to the language of women across generations, you begin to hear a kind of quiet poetry. Long before medicine named and measured it, women spoke of The Change. Not as a diagnosis, not as a defect, but as a passage. A threshold and a new season that arrived in its own time and asked to be met with patience, humour, and deep knowing.

The phrase “the change’ emerged in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when menopause was neither openly discussed nor clinically understood as it is today. In many Western cultures, it became a respectful coy term, partly shaped by modesty, yes, but also by reverence. It acknowledged that something fundamental was shifting without reducing it to symptoms alone. Hormones were not the centre of the story; the woman was.

What was understood intuitively, and often spoken about in kitchens, gardens, and women’s circles, was that this was not an ending. It was a reorientation; a woman was changing her relationship to time, energy, creativity, and authority. Monthly cycles softened or ceased, and with that came a subtle but profound redistribution of life force. The body was no longer organised around reproduction, but around wisdom, discernment, truth-telling and storytelling.

Anthropologists and historians have since noted that in many traditional societies, women who moved beyond their bleeding years were granted increased social and spiritual authority. They became advisers, storytellers, healers, and guardians of memory. Freed from fertility, they were seen as holding a broader view and less tethered to the immediate demands of survival, more attuned to the long arc of life. In this context, the change was not something to endure, but something to grow into.

The modern medical term menopause, from the Greek men (month) and pausis (pause), is precise but narrow. It names the cessation of menstruation, not the expansion of consciousness that often accompanies it. It only speaks to what stops, rather than what begins. And perhaps this is why so many women today feel a quiet inappropriateness. Their lived experience is far richer, more complex, and more transformative than the language often allows.

In my opinion, the return to the change is not to reject science or progress, but actually to widen the lens. To recognise that this phase is as much psychological, emotional, and spiritual as it is biological. It is a recalibration of identity, a new type of shedding, of those roles that no longer fit. A deep invitation to inhabit the self more fully, more honestly, with more sovereignly.

My mother, my nana, and my great-grandmother were not being vague when they used those words “The Change” They were being specific in a different way and were naming a truth that lives beyond charts and timelines. A truth that understands a woman’s life as cyclical, full of physical and spiritual initiations, and meaning at every stage.

Perhaps the quiet wisdom of the change is something we are ready to reclaim now, not as nostalgia, but as remembrance. 

The Collective Archetype of “The Change“

And for me, with my strong sense of the archetypal world, it feels perfect to give homage to all stages of womanhood, from the cradle to the tomb, we are WOMAN…

We start as a Child at the breast, to a Maiden in bloom. We change again as the Sacred Mother and caretaker, and experience a rush of our magical, re-productive energy as the Enchantress. And then the Wise Woman, the Alchemist and the Queen fuse and become one as our “Change” finds a new beginning.

Queen
Alchemist
Wise Woman

Again, a reminder that this passage of The Change is not a problem to be fixed, but a turning of the inner archetypal forces. And like all true archetypal changes, they carry within them the promise of becoming more fully who we already are.

Heart to Heart, Elizabeth

When women enter The Change – Part Two

You may be wondering why I am speaking so openly about bodies, hormones, sleep, hunger, stiffness, and fatigue, especially when my work, and this space, is devoted to purpose, living attributes, and archetypes.

At first glance, it may seem left-field.

Yet for me, it sits at the very centre of a woman’s evolution.

The Living Attributes Codex is not just an abstract philosophy. It is something we feel and grow our way into, something we embody. And embodiment, especially for women, is inseparable from the seasons of the body. Purpose cannot fully anchor itself in a nervous system that feels unsafe, misunderstood, or at war with its own rhythms.

Perimenopause and post-menopause are not detours from a woman’s path. They are very important thresholds.

For many women, this is the first time in their lives that their body demands to be truly listened to rather than overridden. The first time productivity gives way to pure presence, and the first time in our lives, the old strategies stop working. This is not a failure of will; it’s a summoning into your deeper intelligence.

Over the past decade, and especially in the last five years, much has been revealed. 

Experiences once dismissed as anxiety, depression, lack of motivation, or loss of relevance are now being understood through a clearer lens. We are finally naming what women have felt in silence for generations. The fog, the exhaustion, the sudden shifts in weight, mood, sleep, and loss of identity. These were not personal shortcomings; they were misread transitions.

Our ancestors knew this; in many cultures, menopause was not medicated or considered just old age. It marked a woman’s elevation, her movement into the council, the circle of decision-making, the role of seer, strategist, and guide. Her energy was no longer siphoned outward. It was consolidated inward. The body changed because the role changed.

Seen through this lens, practices such as gentle fasting are not about fixing the body. They are about supporting the extended initiation. About helping the body reorganise itself so that one’s renewal of purpose can land cleanly, without distortion or depletion.

And that is why I speak about these things here. I am 67 this year, so this has indeed been my own experience, and I’m now well into post menopause, but I prefer not to call it that anymore. My mother, her mother and her mother all referred to it as “The Change”, and I am going to continue that tradition. I think it is a wonderful reminder of what is actually happening. 

A reminder that empowerment without change and embodiment is simply a construct or performance, and purpose without physiological support can become a strain.

The Living Attributes Codex asks a woman to live in coherence, between her values, her nervous system, her metabolism, her intuition, her attributes, her archetypes and her choices. When the body is honoured during this transition, clarity returns. 

Discernment sharpens, boundaries strengthen, and a woman no longer needs to push herself to be purposeful; she knows she is. Purpose rises naturally, as a consequence of internal alignment with the Sacred Mirroring Spiral.

The Change (perimenopause and post-menopause) is not a problem to be solved. It’s just a developmental phase that has been misunderstood, under-resourced, and historically silenced. 

When we meet The Change with education, reverence, self-trust, and self-love, it becomes deeply empowering; it is not a story of loss, but rather a story of recalibration. One of authority moving inward, and of women reclaiming their rightful centre and place in their family and community.

Your body is not broken, your purpose has not faded, you are simply entering the years where the two finally meet… You can’t have a purpose without a body, and your body knows it needs a purpose. My new mantra is LOVE MY BODY FIRST

I am very excited, I hope you are, too

Heart to Heart, Elizabeth

When women enter The Change – Part One

Today I am talking about something very close to my heart…

There is a quiet reckoning that arrives for many women in perimenopause and postmenopause. I prefer to give it back its original title, The Change, which is actually much more appropriate.

It is not always named aloud, yet it is deeply felt.

A shift occurs in the relationship we have with our bodies; sometimes it feels foreign and strange, sometimes it fills us with disappointment or even grief. Loathing may be too harsh a word, yet for many, something like loathing or estrangement does seem to take place. The body that once moved easily, responded predictably, or mirrored familiar cycles begins to speak a different language.

Hormones change, brain chemistry begins to recalibrate, joints stiffen, sleep becomes fragmented, and muscles seem to weaken. And the belly, for many women, thickens not as a failure of their diet but as a biological response to a profound internal transformation.

Yet we live in a culture that has not learned how to honour this passage. Instead of being welcomed as a rite of initiation, it is often framed as a decline. And so, without meaning to, women may turn against the very body that is carrying them into their next and most significant role.

This is the quiet danger of this stage in life; not the physical changes themselves, but the erosion of self-love that can accompany them.

Because beneath the surface of these changes, something extraordinary is occurring. Neurologically, hormonally, psychologically, women are moving into a phase of greater integration, perspective, and inner authority. The urgency to please softens, and the tolerance for the superficial thins. What emerges is discernment, clarity, and power. Not power as dominance, but the power of coherence and the kind that does not need permission.

And yet, when a woman stands before the mirror and sees only what has been lost, like tone, youth, familiarity, she may unconsciously confirm the very narratives the world has long projected onto her: that she is becoming less visible, less desirable, less relevant. This internalised story quietly undermines the sacred truth of what is actually unfolding.

Self-rejection at this stage is not neutral; it shapes how a woman speaks, how she occupies space, and how willing she is to be seen. When love and respect for the body diminish, the voice often follows. Confidence contracts and visibility feels risky. The woman who is meant to step forward as an Elder, a Matriarch, a cultural carrier of wisdom, instead learns to shrink.

Beautiful wisdom weavers of our world, our body is not betraying us; it is initiating us.

The softening belly is not a flaw; it is a centre of gravity shifting inward. Muscle loss is not a sentence; it is an invitation to move differently, to listen more closely, rest more, breathe into the change that you are living through. Find your strength with some gentle intention rather than force. What if your stiffness is asking for compassion, not judgment, because these changes are signals of real change, not punishments?

To love the body during this transition is a radical act, and it requires a new gaze; one that does not measure worth by tightness, speed, or compliance with outdated ideals. It asks us to see our bodies as allies in evolution, not objects to be corrected.

If women are to rise into visibility as Elders and Matriarchs, not just symbolic roles, but living their true presences in families, communities, and culture, self-love must become fundamental, not performative self-love and not affirmation layered over resentment. But a grounded, embodied reverence for the body as it is, here, now, in its wisdom phase.

Because how we treat our bodies becomes the template for how the world treats us.

When a woman loves and honours her body, she stands differently. She speaks with gravity; she no longer negotiates her worth, and her presence communicates something bolder and older than fashion and deeper than trend. She becomes a stabilising force, a witness, a keeper of perspective in a world addicted to a false beauty, the need for more and urgency.

This stage of life is not an ending; it is a threshold.

And it is our body, with its changing, demanding, and revealing, that is the doorway through which we pass. To meet it with love is not indulgent; it is necessary. It is how women reclaim their authentic leadership and step forward, not apologetically, but deliberately, into the role they were always meant to inhabit.

Just a reminder, don’t wallow in the weeds for too long, let the Sun in your heart shine through because dear one, you have done the hard yards, now it is time to fully Be You.

You Are Truly Amazing!

Heart to heart, Elizabeth

If this resonates with you, this book may also interest you. I have found it extremely valuable.