If you are on this page, you may long to contribute. And now that you are at this massive threshold of midlife, you are refining your priorities, and new steps and actions need to be taken.
I ongoingly talk to many courageous women navigating the challenges of midlife. Some care for an ageing parent or their children and can’t stick to a healthy routine because they are burdened with tasks, to-do lists and responsibilities and barely keep their heads above the water.
Other women struggle with chronic illness or some old, unintegrated trauma and childhood stuff that suddenly comes back to the surface, leaving them overwhelmed and paralysed.
Some are accepting they will not become mothers in this lifetime.
Many are entirely re-evaluating their life: navigating midlife feels like the end of everything they have known!
Most of the women I speak to need to slow down, stop the addiction to being busy and trust the process of being in the unknown. They are cultivating a different kind of fire that needs to be tended inside versus acted out in the form of doing that leads to burnout. From this place, new gifts will be offered to the world.
These women know that there is a lot at stake if they don’t do it and don’t get out of the way of their own transformative process. They know what is at stake. Some told me that caring for themselves is a matter of life and death.
Entering midlife may be challenging and uncomfortable.
In a big moment of transition, the light at the end of the tunnel may seem very far.
If you are here, you as well can sense this time of your life is preparing you for some greater inner and outer work, or perhaps you have been preparing for this for a very long time, in fact, maybe for a lifetime. The time may be ripe to dive into the oceanic and mysterious depths of your being, harvest your medicine and embrace your inner healer.
But even if you already worked very hard to be where you are, and if you can hear ‘your call’ that inspires you and get over your fear and do it, usually these times of transition and initiation come with big questions. “Will I make it during this storm?” “What am I becoming?” “What am I going to create in the next chapter of my life?”
Nothing is certain but you are realising that…
To make the changes you know you need…
- Self-care and commitment to yourself are no longer negotiable. This includes prioritising loving yourself profoundly and your body, accepting who you are, and giving yourself plenty of time to rest, relax, play, have fun and experience guilt-free pleasure. You need to learn the joy of saying ‘no’.
- The old hurts, toxic shame and guilt and doubt need to be dealt with. Old wounds and toxic patterns need to be looked at, integrated, alchemised, and released. Time to let go of toxic shame, guilt, criticism and self-doubt. Time to embrace yourself, to be comfortable in your own skin and at home in your body. Stop playing small to please others.
- New steps and a new level of support may be needed to allow yourself to embrace more of yourself. You may need to make significant changes in your life (e.g. changing job or career, leaving a relationship, establishing new boundaries with an abusive parent, exploring your sexuality in a new way).
- To allow yourself to receive support. You can’t do this alone. You, like many others, are longing for meaning and connection. There is great strength in welcoming your needs and wants and recognising that it is important to receive support, being witnessed, mirrored, validated and held in a safe and nurturing container.
I see so many women navigating midlife and beyond who long profoundly to be alongside sisters, elders and mentors, so they can connect intentionally to this time as a rite of passage and make it sacred and meaningful. But our contemporary society still needs maps to support women on this journey. And that is where I come in.
So you may be wondering why would you be working with me, and who am I to be supporting you through all this?
I am Laura Valenti, a Midlife Mentor, movement, nervous system, embodiment specialist, and ritualist.
My work is dedicated to midlife women who want to navigate midlife in a dignified, liberating and empowering way so they can radically embrace themselves and the natural wild intelligence and wisdom of this life cycle.
I was born in Italy, where I lived until my late twenties. Throughout my life, I have struggled with self-hatred, depression, shame, despair, addiction to drugs, alcohol, dysfunctional relationships and suicidal thoughts. I often put myself in situations that have endangered my life. And one day, when I was 33 years old, just a year younger than my mum when she died, I was diagnosed with cancer. I got Non-Hodgkin lymphoma and luckily recovered from it. That wake-up call led me to explore my dark night of the soul and heroine’s journey.
When I entered premature menopause (likely because of chemotherapy treatment), I embarked on another wild adventure that sometimes left me on my knees and often in despair and ‘without skin’. I then started another exploration to reclaim lost pieces of my soul and rejected parts of myself. Consequently, I embraced even more somatic and nervous system healing practices and learned to practice radical self-acceptance.
As I have been on a self discovery and healing journey through most of my life, I solidified my passion for supporting other women facing adversities and challenges while embracing their midlife transition.
Let’s connect!
There are a few ways that you and I can work together.
The Radical Wise Wild Women Circle is a 7 week online group programme. It is a Somatic, Movement Medicine, Voice and Ritual-Based journey for midlife women. The waitlist is open.
Or, if you want to get really deep and personal, you could check out my 1:1 Offering to see if it’s a good fit.
And, if you can’t afford all the above, I also have Mini Packages. You can check it out here.
I offer the Rite of the Womb on a donation basis. You can read more about it here.
And if none of the above is speaking to you right now, you’re free to stick around and make the most of the free content I offer here, in my bi-monthly newsletters and in my Midlife Soul Sisters group on Facebook.
Fancy knowing a bit more about me before we connect?
I’m sure I have more new chapters in my life yet to come so I’m still a work in progress. I am definitely NOT perfect!
- I swear a lot. (Mostly in my native Italian language, but also in Spanish and English)
- Sometimes I take myself too seriously. (So I found a partner that makes me laugh and melts my resistance.)
- I LOVE to eat and prepare food for friends.
- My first teacher was my dog. (She taught me to love and take care of myself, while caring for her.)
- My favourite way to relieve stress from my body is to go bananas to music. By the age of six I was dancing madly to heavy metal and I danced my socks off while having cancer (I also took a stab at playing the drums but dancing is still my go-to.)
- I lived, travelled and worked in Italy, Hungary, Spain, UK, Peru, California, Ecuador and shared my passion for dance and voice work also with indigenous communities, people in drug and alcohol rehabilitation, women victims of domestic violence, refugees and vulnerable adults and children.
- As I value the principle of reciprocity and giving back, I offer my work as a volunteer regularly in my local community or online to those who can’t afford it. I contribute monthly to the TreeSisters, whose goal is to reforest the tropics and plant 1 billion trees annually.
- My favourite project EVER has been dancing with the children living in a dormitory in the High Andes.
- I walked on fire, slept under the stars, and bathed in ice-cold lakes above 4500 mt.
- For seven years, I attended the Movement Medicine Long Dance dance ceremony, where we fasted, slept very little and danced for about 72 hours while raising money for charities.
As for my professional history and official bio…
My hunger for meaning led me to extensive training, certificates and to be a life learner. I study regularly because I value high professional standards, excellence and holding a safe container.
I began my career in law, supporting women who were victims of trafficking into prostitution or domestic violence. Over two decades, I studied formally and informally many healing, creative and transformational modalities, including Physical Theatre, Clowning, Laughter Yoga, Theta Healing, and Polarity Therapy.
I have worked with groups and individuals in person and online for over a decade.
I am a certified Movement Medicine teacher and facilitator (I completed 4 Advanced pieces of training with the School of Movement Medicine: 1: Working With The Heart and SEER – Systemic Essential Energy Retrieval, 2: Ritual & Ceremony, 3: Soul Retrieval and the Phoenix Process, 4: Initiation- Dancing With Life Cycles, from Birth to Death), and I am a qualified sound & Holistic Voice therapist with the British Academy of Sound Therapy. I am completing my professional certificate to qualify as a Somatic Stress Release Practitioner with the Embody Lab and Dr Scott Lyon. I trained professionally as a coach with the International Coach Academy (I have ACC credentials from the International Coaching Federation), attended the Integrative Somatic Trauma Training Certification Programme with the Embody Lab, the Power of Embodied Transformation Certification Programme with Coaches Rising, and the Embodied Leadership Programme with the Strozzi Institute. I recently gained my Level 2 EFT practitioner certification from the EFT and Matrix Reimprinting Academy.
I am a Moon dancer, a student of Gurdjieff Sacred dances and a professional mentor for the School Of Movement Medicine. I have been an apprentice to medicine people in the Andes.
My studies also included ancestral healing, ritual and animism with Dr Daniel Foor. Moreover, my work is massively influenced by the Internal Family System compassionate model.
I will embark on the journey to train as a Somatic Experiencing practitioner soon.
I weave together diverse practices and powerful modalities, bridging contemporary therapeutic wisdom with ancestral knowledge, tailoring the different elements to your needs and helping you move through your midlife transition with more intention, care and self-acceptance. My approach is holistic and down to earth and can support you in befriending your body, nervous system and natural rhythms.
My time with Laura was an eye-opening and blissful experience. Her approach is thorough and allowed me to tune in more with my feelings and with what was right for me; as a result of that I was able to make a very important decision in relation to my work and I felt a weight off my shoulders. I wholeheartedly recommend you speak to Laura if you want to feel better through a holistic approach.
While this kind of work was new to me, Laura took her time and patiently guided me through it, explaining the steps to me along the way. Her gentle approach helped me to let go of any anxiety and worries that came up during the process. She created a safe space, without any pressure where I felt seen and I could open up…Now I have practical tools that I can use daily to be more confident, calm and relaxed.
Working with Laura was very inspiring and a great opportunity to remind myself of my direction and priorities. She supported me to identify recurrent themes and this enabled me to have a better understanding of my own process and also to discover tools and simple daily rituals to help me feel more confident, present and aware.
Special Thanks
All of this wouldn’t have been possible without the humour, patience and love of my partner and the steady presence of my teachers, Susannah and Ya’Acov Darling Khan, who brought into my life the amazing gift of community, held me with kindness when I was broken and supported me wholeheartedly when I was ready to fly.
