Rooted In Presence

Sixteen beanbags. Eight people. Absolute chaos.

Carly ran an exercise recently with a workplace wellbeing team, and what happened when she told them only four of the beanbags mattered says a lot about how most of us are living.

This episode is about what you're keeping in the air, and the difference between dropping something and putting it down on purpose. With a well-known metaphor about glass and rubber balls, and Carly’s take that might just make it make sense for a busy, stressed out midlifer.

If you can see there's too mu...

You've been somewhere lovely. A retreat, a wedding, a holiday, a weekend with people you adore. You felt open and warm and more like yourself than you have in ages.

And then it's Tuesday, and you're flat.

Not depressed. Not upset. Just oddly deflated, with the washing still there and nothing actually wrong. And then the unhelpful thought arrives: what is wrong with me, I've just had this beautiful thing.

This episode is about the drop, and why almost nobody warns you about it. What the psychology actually says, why the peak was...

What does ice cream have to do with breathwork aftercare?

Integration is a word that gets used a lot, and usually what people mean by it is a glass of water and five minutes of journaling. Tick. Done.

But after a recent retreat at the studio, run by Carly's breathwork mentors The Exhale Awakening, the group ended up going for ice cream and a Wonder Walk together. And that may well have been better integration than any amount of journaling would have managed that day.

This one is about what happens...

Carly asked for a pink iced donut. She got a pink iced donut. It just wasn't the one she meant.

When weight comes off and nothing really changes. 

The promotion arrives and the fulfilment doesn't. 

Everything looks fine on paper and something still feels off. 

In this episode Carly shares her thoughts about why that happens, why it doesn't make you ungrateful, and three things that help when you can't name what you actually need (and what a doughnut has got to do with it).

Also, a thank you. The...

Carly used to want everything to stay the same. Change felt sudden, big and destabilising, no matter how much notice she got.

This episode looks at why change can feel so hard for the nervous system, and a few things that really help. Including the bit that often gets missed in wellness spaces: the difference between resting to restore yourself and resting to endure something you don't need to stay in.

If you'd like someone alongside you while things are shifting, that's what the Embodied Strength Profile is for. We pull the threads together and...

What if your health was never meant to be the main event of your life, but the thing that makes your life possible?

Carly shares a Wonder Walk that turned into sea shanties, a pirate ship tour and a local play, none of it planned, and what it revealed about availability. Then a client story about the chocolate eaten in the car before walking through the front door, and what happened when the food noise finally quietened.

A gentle content note: this episode touches on a difficult relationship with food, including restriction and overeating. Nothing...

There's a message doing the rounds every September. Only so many weeks left of the year, so let's finish strong, make them count, don't waste the last stretch.

And there's something real in it. Autumn can bring genuine energy. But that message tends to be delivered as though it applies to everyone equally, and we are heading into autumn and then winter, not spring. 

In this episode, Carly offers a gentler alternative to cramming everything into the final months. Not fifteen things. One thing, chosen well, with enough room left over for the commitments, the s...

Does your fitness tracker tell you off? Poor recovery again. Stress high again. HRV dropped again, even though you're doing all the things.

If that sounds familiar, this episode is for you. Carly explains what heart rate variability actually is, why it's a measure of your adaptability rather than your calm, and what genuinely happens to it in perimenopause and menopause. Because your watch may well be picking up something real, it just has no idea that you had a hot flush at two in the morning.

There's a lovely bit of physiology, ans a...

What are you really longing for when you wish you could get back to who you used to be? It's almost never about the old body or the old energy. It's about wanting a different relationship with your life, and that's found ahead of you, not behind.

In this milestone one hundred and fiftieth episode, and the final part of a three-part series, Carly explores why the strategies that got you here won't necessarily carry you forward, why the grief of midlife deserves to be honoured before we rush to the reframe, and the idea, drawn from...

When you look at your life, your health, your body, does it feel like such a tangled mess that you don't even know where to begin? The sleep, the energy, the eating, the stress, the aches, the hormones, the mood, and on, and on, and on.

Faced with all of it, most of us either freeze and do nothing, or try to overhaul everything at once and crash within days. In the second of a three-part series, Carly offers a gentler third way: not another plan, but the clarity to know where to actually begin.

...

You've tried harder. You've been stricter, more disciplined, more consistent. You've read the books and listened to the podcasts. So why doesn't anything seem to stick anymore, and why have you started to wonder whether the problem is you?

In the first of a three-part series, Carly shares a shift that changes everything: what if your body was never the problem? What if it isn't fighting you or letting you down, but quietly trying to protect you all along?

Drawing on fifteen years of supporting women through menopause, burnout, chronic illness and every kind of...

Feeling behind on your goals now the year's more than half gone? 

This episode offers a gentler truth. Carly explores Lughnasadh, the Celtic festival of the first harvest, and what it can teach us about midlife, menopause, and our relationship with time. 

Rather than buying into the cultural pressure to "finish the year strong," she invites a kinder reframe. Some things in us are ripe and ready to gather, while others are still quietly becoming, and that's exactly as it should be. 

Drawing on her own reflections from the past year, what's ripened, wha...

You're tired, but somehow also wired. Rest doesn't quite rest you. You can't seem to switch off.

This episode explains why, and it's genuinely not your fault. You have an ancient, beautifully designed scanning system doing its best in a modern world that almost never gives it the all clear it's waiting for, where an email could be wonderful, neutral or awful, and they all look exactly the same.

But here's the twist: the answer isn't only more calm. I share why a permanently calm nervous system isn't actually the goal… and what tu...

Three clients, in three separate conversations this week, said a version of the same thing  and when something knocks three times, I pay attention.

They'd each realised they were spending huge amounts of energy not on doing a thing, but on repeatedly deciding whether to do it. And when they decided once, instead of over and over, something opened up. More got done  and they felt lighter.

This is a practical episode about decision fatigue, open loops, and a beautifully simple, well-evidenced tool for closing them. It's not about more willpower or hustle... it's the op...

On a recent Wonder Walk down by the Hull marina, I spotted a boat with a name painted on the side, which became the inspiration for this week’s episode.

The words that get stuck to us when we're small, and the surprisingly expensive project of trying to outrun them. 

I share the true cost of the labels we are often given without our consent and the one question that might just flip your perspective: what if the thing you were told was wrong with you was never a defect at all?

Are you...

Content note: this episode gently touches on restrictive and disordered eating. Nothing graphic, and held with care  but please look after yourself and come back another time if that feels kinder today.

This week I had a photo taken that, completely by chance, mirrored one from my very first photoshoot five years ago. Same pose. Same kind of setting. Two very different women; or rather, the same woman, with far more of herself available to bring to the moment.

This episode is about what our reflection really shows us, and why, especially in m...

A shorter, gentler one about choice; not the tidy 'take control of your life' kind, but the honest kind. 

The choices we don't realise we're making, the ones we only spot after they've passed, and why 'I get to' doesn't always feel true when life is hard. If you've been feeling stuck lately, come and sit with this one.

Interested in exploring your life choices more deeply? Get in touch at carlykillen.com

Thanks for listening to Rooted In Presence

If you’d like to get in touch with a question abo...

We've just passed the summer solstice; the peak of the light, and the precise moment it begins, very gently, to turn. It got me thinking about the thresholds we meet in midlife, and one in particular: strength.

In this episode I share a story about the heaviest weight I ever lifted on a competition platform and what happened next.

We get into the actual physiology of strength and ageing, why the cliff-edge narrative is wrong, and what genuinely changes whether you've trained for decades, are noticing a dip, or have never picked up a weight...

We so often treat joy as a destination, something we'll get to once everything is sorted, healed, achieved or resolved. I'll be happy when. I'll relax when. I'll feel free when.

But what if joy was never meant to be a finish line? What if it's already here, quietly woven through the ordinary moments we're moving too fast to notice?

In this episode I share a moment from a recent Wonder Walk that caught me completely off guard, a card about an egg that gave me permission to stop interpreting everything, and a gentle invitation...

In this week's episode, Carly explores a very specific kind of grief: one that doesn't come from losing something, but from finally finding it. The 'why didn't I start sooner' feeling. The ache that can show up right alongside a genuine awakening.

It's something I've lived through more than once. And it's something I sit with my clients through regularly.

Come and have a listen. I think you might recognise yourself in this one.

In this episode:

— The grief of arrival — what it is and why it matters

— My own lo...

If you're in a season of big change; menopause, midlife, or just that feeling of not quite knowing who you are anymore, this episode is for you. We close with a simple breath awareness practice that you can use anywhere, any time things feel like too much.

This week I learned something about butterflies that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar doesn't just change. It dissolves. Almost completely.

And yet, one thing survives. Intact. Through all of it. 

Come and have a listen. I t...

Something kept coming up across Carly’s client sessions this week. A composite thread running through different conversations with different clients all trying to figure out how to make their self-care and routines actually stick.

And the question that kept arising was this: could you plan your downtime as much as you plan your workout time?

In episode 137, Carly explores why scheduling the decompression first, before adding anything new, is often the missing piece. 

She introduces the continue, stop, start framework for creating space before scheduling, explores the two kinds of imb...

What happens when your old routines stop fitting? When the life you’ve built no longer belongs to the person you’re becoming?

This week Carly is talking about something she’s been sitting with personally and hearing from clients — what consistency really means when life has fundamentally shifted. After burnout. Through menopause. When the woman you were and the woman you’re becoming don’t quite match yet.

This isn’t an episode about pushing through. It’s about rebuilding differently. Staying in conversation with who you are now, not who you used to be. And trusting...

This is a Mental Health Awareness Week episode. But it's not a fix-it episode, and it's not a think-positive episode. It's an honest conversation about wonder — the small, quiet, always-available kind and why reclaiming it might be one of the most quietly radical things you can do.

Carly explores glimmers, soft fascination and Attention Restoration Theory, the difference between childlike and childish, why joy has been quietly monetised and turned into something that needs to be productive, and what it actually looks like when women reclaim their capacity for wonder, on holiday, dancing, with the people they lo...

In this episode Carly explores why rest feels so radical for midlife women, the science behind rest in strength training and the nervous system, the neuroscience of silence and neurogenesis, and introduces The Restorer; one of four archetypes from the Midlife Presence system. 

Also included... a sneak peek of an upcoming offering at Still Space Hull.

Take the MIDLIFE PRESENCE ARCHETYPE QUIZ here

Thanks for listening to Rooted In Presence

If you’d like to get in touch with a question about today’s episode or find out how I...

Are you drowning in conflicting health advice, trends and opinions?

In this episode, Carly explores what it really means to trust yourself more than any plan, programme, or process, inspired by a powerful post from a former client, the Barbie movie, and and Indigo Girls song.

She also explores how strength training and Breathwork are doorways to self-knowledge, and why midlife (and perimenopause especially) is a profound invitation to finally stop looking outside yourself for answers.

This one is for every woman who's followed all the rules and still felt like something was...

Are you losing bone when you can’t do as much? 

It’s the question Carly left hanging at the end of part two and this week she answers it. 

In the final episode of the Lead With Your Bones series, Carly goes wider. 

Nutrition, stress, sleep, breath, circulation, and the emotional landscape that either nourishes or depletes your skeleton over time. 

Because bone health isn’t just about what you lift. It’s how you live.

She explains why cortisol, the stress hormone so many midlife women are swimming in...

What does a decade working in an NHS hospital have to do with why you should be lifting weights?

In part two of the Lead With Your Bones series, Carly draws on ten years as a clinical dietitian to explain why the patients who came in with more muscle on their bodies consistently did better.

Because building bone and muscle isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about reserves. It’s about having a foundation to fall back on when life throws something at you, illness, surgery, grief, burnout, the relentlessness of midlife. Your bone bank and yo...

When you picture your bones, what do you see? Most of us imagine something rigid and inert, a coat hanger, a Halloween skeleton. Something that just hangs there in the dark while the rest of us gets on with living.

But that picture is wrong. 

And in this episode,the first of a three-part series called Lead With Your Bones, Carly is here to change it.

In this episode Carly explains the science of living bone in plain, language, including why oestrogen matters so much to bone health, what changes during perimenopause and m...

The clocks went forward last weekend. And the night before, Carly did something she does every year without thinking, she left her kitchen clock on the old time. Just as a quiet check. A way to hold both times at once while the world shifted overnight.

She couldn't help thinking... isn't that exactly what menopause feels like?

In this episode, Carly explores what it means to stay rooted in yourself when your body, your hormones, your sleep, your emotions and your sense of self are all quietly (or not so quietly) shifting. 

She t...

What if the small things you're already doing are quietly setting you up for the moments that matter most?

In this episode, Carly shares a client story that stopped her in her tracks this week and gets personal about  hospital, how a bare-bones approach to fitness kept her in the game through years of hospital visits and what happened when life gave her a bit of breathing space.

This episode is for you if you've ever looked at what you're managing and thought: is this even enough? Spoiler: it is. You're raising your floor.

This week I did something a little outside my usual world I went to an aerial silks and hoop class. And what I didn't expect was how much it would bring up.

Body stuff. Beginner feelings. And for the first time in a long time... an unexpected thought about my age.

In this short personal episode I'm sharing what the experience taught me about showing up as a beginner and why I think it matters so much, especially when it comes to walking into any new space that asks you to be vulnerable. Whether that's...

In this episode, I'm exploring a shift in language that I think matters more than it might first appear... the difference between nervous system regulation and nervous system care.

We've all heard 'regulate your nervous system.' But what if that framing is quietly telling us that activated states are problems to fix... even when they're actually appropriate?

In this episode:

→ Why 'regulation' language can become a sophisticated form of suppression

→ When your activation is actually your body doing its job correctly

→ What nervous system care looks like instead

→...

TW: Fawn response, trauma response discussion.

It's International Women's Day week, and this year's theme is "Give to Gain." But what if you're already depleted? What if you're already giving everything you have?

In this episode of Rooted in Presence, we explore the complicated tension in this year's IWD theme and what sustainable generosity actually requires.

Host Carly Killen breaks down the difference between generous giving (from overflow) and obligatory giving (from depletion), and why knowing the difference matters for your capacity, your boundaries, and your wellbeing.

You'll discover:

This week’s episode is a little different.

I was invited onto Matt Robinson’s podcast Fitness Business Insights to talk about my journey, from NHS dietitian… to commercial gym PT… to burnout… to building Still Space Hull.

We explore:

This conversation isn’t just about business.

It’s about alignment.
 It’...

Tired but can't switch off? 

Wired but exhausted? 

Feel like you don't have time to relax and when you do, it leaves you foggy instead of restored?

You're not alone. And the answer might not be what you think.

In this episode of Rooted in Presence, we explore why relaxation isn't always the goal and why coherence might be the missing piece for busy midlife women.

Host Carly Killen breaks down the neuroscience behind three different states: relaxation, coherence, and alignment. You'll discover why they're not the same thing, an...

Are you still looking for self love?

You've done the affirmations. You've tried to "love yourself more." Maybe you've even achieved the body, the goals, the external validation you thought would make you feel enough.

But you're still holding your breath. Still monitoring yourself. Still performing acceptability even when you're alone.

In this Valentine's Day episode of Rooted in Presence, we explore why self-love isn't enough and what self-belonging actually means.

Host Carly Killen shares her journey of holding her stomach in even when no one was watching, the exhausting work...

Forgetfulness, difficulty finding words, reduced focus, and that unsettling sense of mental “fuzziness” are common in midlife but they’re not a personal failing.

In this episode of Rooted in Presence, Carly Killen explores menopause brain fog through a nervous system lens, helping you understand what’s actually happening in the brain and body as hormones begin to shift.

You’ll learn:

What if many of your "menopause symptoms" are actually nervous system signals?

In this episode of Rooted in Presence, we explore why anxiety, sleep issues, emotional sensitivity, and overwhelm intensify during menopause—and how your nervous system plays a bigger role than you might realize.

Host Carly Killen breaks down the science in plain language: how oestrogen supports your stress response, why your HPA axis becomes more sensitive in midlife, and what it means when your nervous system loses its natural buffers.

You'll discover:

We're often told to "take up space" to be bold, visible, and unapologetic. But what if the real work isn't about being louder... but about learning to hold space?

In this episode of Rooted in Presence, we explore the difference between taking up space (which can trigger your nervous system) and holding space (which requires deep presence and vulnerability).

Host Carly Killen shares her own journey of learning that shining her light came more from her inward journey into quiet presence than from traditional visibility ever did. She breaks down what holding space actually looks...