Are you in touch with you who truly ARE?
There’s a particular kind of conversation women start having in their forties:
I don’t know what’s wrong with me lately.
I should be grateful, but something feels… off.
I feel disconnected from myself.
And according to MEI of Alchemei Healing, that thought pattern may not be so out of the ordinary.
In her conversation on The Forties Formula podcast, Mei describes midlife not as a collapse, but as a reckoning - a season where the identities women have carefully constructed suddenly stop fitting quite right.
The Problem With Living From the Neck Up
Mei talks about how many modern women live almost entirely “from the neck up.”
Highly competent. Highly productive. Chronically disconnected.
“We’re not short on information these days,” she says. “But we are short on listening to our intuition.” And for many women—especially the high-functioning, capable kind—the strategy has always been to think harder, push harder, optimise harder.
Mei’s work sits at the intersection of embodiment, feminine energy, somatic healing, and intuition—but what makes her perspective interesting is that she talks about these ideas without drifting completely off the planet.
Your Body Is Not the Enemy
At one point in the conversation, Mei says something that stopped us cold: your body is your oracle, not your obstacle.
For women in midlife—particularly those navigating hormonal shifts, changing bodies, or decades of body criticism—that reframing feels radical. Because many women experience their bodies as problems to solve.
But Mei suggests the body is often trying to communicate long before it breaks down.
She speaks about anger being stored physically, about emotions becoming “stuck” when they’re suppressed, and about the cost of constantly overriding internal signals.
Not in a melodramatic way. In a very human way.
And whether you buy fully into somatics, spirituality, astrology, or none of the above, it’s hard to deny the central truth underneath it:
A lot of women have lost the ability to hear themselves clearly.
The Exhaustion of Constant Masculine Energy
The phrase feminine energy has become so internet-corrupted that it’s easy to recoil from it entirely.
Mei, to her credit, defines it differently.
She’s quick to point out that women need both masculine and feminine energies. The problem is that many women live permanently overclocked in “doing mode.”
“We’re hustling, proving, pushing all the time,” she says.
That line probably describes half the women reading this.
The ones answering emails at midnight. Training through exhaustion. Holding families together with sheer force of will. Feeling secretly guilty whenever they rest.
Mei argues that this imbalance disconnects women not only from their emotions, but from pleasure, creativity, intuition, and boundaries themselves.
And honestly? You don’t need to believe in astrology to recognise burnout.
The Real Midlife Work
What Mei describes throughout the episode is less about reinvention and more about remembering.
Remembering what you feel, what you need, and what your body has been trying to say underneath all the coping mechanisms.
Because maybe the forties aren’t asking women to become someone entirely new.
Maybe they’re asking them to stop abandoning who they truly have been, all along.
Want the full conversation?
🎧 Listen to the full episode with Mei from Alchemei Healing on The Forties Formula podcasr for a fascinating discussion on feminine energy, intuition, emotional healing, astrology, and why so many women feel strangely untethered in midlife.