[00:00:00] Lynne: Hello, and welcome to Frankly Speaking with Lynne Franks and Friends. I am Lynne Franks, your host. And in this episode, I am in conversation with one of my favorite people. Actor, director, writer, psychotherapist, community leader, and so much more, Stella Duffy.
[00:00:25] Stella is also, I have to say a member of my family and I'm a member of hers. So we think of ourselves as sisters and she is the aunt of my daughter-in-law. And my son and my daughter-in-law have given both of us, these five gorgeous children that we are very close to and brings a lot of joy. So listen to the Stella's story of how she has literally traveled the world and helped so many people realize that they can heal through art, through theater, through writing. She is the ultimate storyteller.
[00:00:58] So my wonderful guest, Stella Duffy. so thrilled to have you here is not only an award-winning author, actor, director, psychotherapist, yoga teacher, many, many more, all of which we're gonna found with fun palace are much, much more, which we're gonna talk about. And also her current passion, which happens to be mine too, which is talking about postmenopause and the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of women who are in that stage of their lives. Cause all we've been hearing lately is, is the menopause menopause, but their life does go on afterwards. Thank God. and gets better and better. But the big, big thing I must mention, which is why Stella and I are sisters, is that we share five gorgeous, gorgeous children between the ages of three and 13, who are the children of Stella's niece, Monique Duffy, and my son, Joshua Howie.
[00:01:57] Stella: you see? So that makes our sisters, because I'm the great aunt, you're the grandmother. We must be
[00:02:02] Lynne: We are. And we also have this incredible love and blessings of these children that are in our lives. So gorgeous, which I dunno about you, but I certainly don't see enough of, but
[00:02:13] Stella: Oh, well, I'm, I'm lucky enough to live slightly close than you
[00:02:15] Lynne: yeah, I live too far, but anyway, so we were all together the other day, having a lovely celebration of my oldest grandson Mordecai. Cause the other thing is that Stella and I are both practicing Buddhi you're still
[00:02:28] Stella: I, I am. Yes. We're both. We're both practicing, but us and the same
[00:02:32] Lynne: the same Buddism NAIA Herge co, which you've done for many years and I've been doing for over 40 years, but these delightful children, ours are actually being brought up as little Jewish children because my son and your niece who converted, chosen to take that path and it, and it's very moving when we get back into any cultural situation to see these traditions being kept up.
[00:02:52] Stella: it was, beautiful at the fer. I mean, and also because this synagogue was very inclusive. My, my wife and I did not feel like we didn't belong. We always felt like we belong with that family. And in fact of the five children Artie the second as our God and years ago, I think he was only about four or five, but he said to Mon Wendy, he said, I'm really Stella married, Shelly cause that means I get two godmothers. You see there, there's a reason for being queer. Give me two godmothers.
[00:03:20] Lynne: exactly. And of course, a lovely, wonderful Shelly much beloved wife is Jewish or was born Jewish. So we are two, we are Jewish, Buddhist, mishmash,
[00:03:31] Stella: We are we're we're
[00:03:32] Lynne: Kiwis, Kiwis, and everything else. And it's all really special, all special. So let's start off with your story still. Cuz you started off as an actor originally, didn't you? Because, but you were brought off in New Zealand. We, you were born in the UK and then went to New Zealand or what's the story?
[00:03:48] Stella: I'm the youngest of seven. Veronica who is my next up sister is Monique's mother. And when I was five years old, my mom and dad took the two youngest of us back to my dad's native New Zealand. So he'd come over during the war joined up in 1939 to fight fascism like a good 18 year old socialist astonishing.
[00:04:07] He was a prisoner war in Germany for four and a half years. Got together with my mom that had seven kids between them. And we are the youngest two. So there was a, there were five in one big chunk, and then there was a gap and then there was Veronica. And then my dad had cancer between her and me. And then there was another big gap between her and me.
[00:04:25] So I'm my biggest sister is 17 years older than me. She's 76. So I've always had this big stretch. And my, my youngest nephew was only five years younger than me. So I've always had this big stretch of generations all across, which has been really valuable. I think which means of course I have friends now in their twenties and eighties.
[00:04:46] Of course I do, because I grew up with this range of generations in my immediate family. Anyway, when we were five, when I was five, Veronica was 11. We moved back to New Zealand, but only the two youngest of us. My brother was in an apprenticeship. Two sisters were engaged. Two sisters were married. So the other five stayed in Britain.
[00:05:02] We moved to arterial and New Zealand where my dad grew up and we lived in a small timber town called Tokara, which even now is a town that people still drive through. It's it's, you know how people are rude. I know Croydon and Luton. And I don't know, I'm trying, I'm trying to think of the, the, the
[00:05:21] sunset equivalent for you, you know?
[00:05:24] Yes. Well, my small town is a, is the kind of town that people were rude about when I was a kid, it was 70%. Maorian Polynesian, which as older women, Lynn, you know, Mari pian cultures have a space for older women. The, in, in Maori, you, or I would be called EOFire w H a E a, which means auntie it's an honorific, you know, like G perhaps, and Hindi.
[00:05:51] And I grew up with, with oral storytelling cultures, like it was normal because most of my friends were Mari in Sam, Juan, particularly in my primary school. And as if growing older and having status as a woman was a good thing. And
[00:06:06] Lynne: is actually a lot in indigenous, in indigenous cultures. That's the norm. I mean, in certain north American tribes, it's the elder woman that makes a decision who the young kids are gonna be.
[00:06:18] Stella: Totally. And, and the same in Mari culture, you know, if an older woman would stand up at a meeting, an older Mari woman who would be called a EOFire auntie or Kuya queen, and say, ah, you guys have got that wrong. The men would sit down and listen to her outta respect for her age because she, because her age gave her respect. It granted her wisdom because she'd been sitting there listening to the blokes all along anyway. So I had the great, good fortune of, instead of moving to many New Zealand towns of very, very white, very, you know, they're colonizing people where I moved to that wasn't the case. So of course I, so I grew up a white minority. They a colonized nation. Absolutely. Let's not pretend it's not that, but where Mari tongue and Mari culture was not exotica to us, it was, it was the neighbors. It was my mates. It was the norm. Totally. So that was really fortunate for someone who, who wanted to be engaged in storytelling because, because Maori, Sam culture to new and Fiji and they all have storytelling as they call.
[00:07:20] Lynne: yes. And you are the storyteller and in my power of seven archetypes that I work with, the storyteller is one of the, and of course an incredibly important aspect of all parts of ourself, because that is how our traditions and our story. Well, obviously our stories, our myths and our beliefs continue from one generation to another.
[00:07:42] Certainly can't believe what we reading the newspapers that's for.
[00:07:45] Stella: and it's how we understand ourselves. When we tell the stories of ourselves, it's how we understand who we are. And the more we can begin to narrate and understand our story, the more, the more it makes sense to us.
[00:07:58] Lynne: Yes, absolutely. And, and understand each other. Of course. So having been brought up in this sounds absolutely idyllic
[00:08:08] Stella: it it wasn't, I mean, it was very poor. It was, it's still a, a sort of, you know, the kind of place that people are rude about, but I'm not certain that their rudeness isn't at least part racism. I moved, we, I moved to Wellington, which is where I went to university and I moved there about it was about six and a half hours drive away. I'm the first in all of my siblings to go to university. And I'm also the first to, to have the opportunity to finish high school. You know, there just wasn't money to stay for anyone else to stay at school. My siblings are all brilliant, bright, smart people. They didn't have any of the early, I mean, loads of made amazing use of opportunities later, but they didn't have any of the early opportunities I did. And so it's always been really clear to me that sure, we might, you know, one might be successful in, in this area or that area, but early opportunity makes a massive difference and we really need to acknowledge that privilege. And I, yeah, I did. I had the huge privilege of getting to go to university and play.
[00:09:03] We made up plays. We wrote stories. We, I mean, I did a very bad English literature degree that I wasn't very interested in and the marks proved it. But, but I got, I got to meet other misfits. I got to come out, I got to find my people, you know, find, find my tribe. And they were the queer people and the poorer people and the ones whose parents didn't have tons of money to pay for them to be at university. I mean, I remember I shared jobs with friends. One job was making sandwiches and a coffee shop. We started at six in the morning and the other job was doing the dishes in a restaurant. And we started at six at night and we'd, we'd a, and then in between we'd, you know, study a bit and party a lot and they were all the misfits and they are, some of those misfits are still my closest friends today.
[00:09:49] Lynne: I sadly missed out on university, but also grew up working hard in my dad's, but shop as a kid. And I think it, it doesn't do any harm to actually have that kind of back experience and background in actually having to work to, to live at an early age in a nice way. And I also parted a lot. So, uh, you came back to England obviously after university, I assume.
[00:10:13] Stella: I I, I, worked as an actor in, in New Zealand for three years. I was really lucky. I got my first acting job a month after I finished university. I was 20 years old and I got, I got a job in a touring theater company and we toured in a old fashioned Bedford transit, transit band, five of us. And we traveled to places and RTO and New Zealand that had, that was so distant from anywhere else. Sometimes it took a day to travel and one of them, you had to cross the beach at low tide to get there. There's another way to get there. So I got to see some amazing land and meet some phenomenal people. And for a year I toured in this company and we did a primary school show for primary school age in the morning. High school, age kids show in the afternoon, and then a community show in the evening. And in the community show, we rehearsed with local people. So it wasn't just us doing it for them. was doing it with them. Yeah. Brilliant.
[00:11:10] Lynne: of some of the things that you did years and years later with the fun policies,
[00:11:13] Stella: Absolutely. Totally. But the other thing that I did was I was, I was in new Zealand's first women's theater company. So because New Zealand had a ministry of women's affairs in 1985, while, you know, we're still going, maybe it would be a good idea to look at. Look at that. I dunno here, mind junior New Zealand to give the vote to women 20 years before Britain and not just to yeah. Yeah. New Zealand gave the vote to women in 1883 and Ah-huh, and not just white women. I know, and one of the reasons that happened was because Maori women were really engaged in the politics around that. And they had been from the beginning.
[00:11:52] Lynne: Cause some of those islands, not actually New Zealand, but Tonga and some of the others were matriarchal islands. They were run by their Queens. So that's whole south sea tradition of the matriarchy.
[00:12:03] Stella: And well, Polynesia has a full as actually does Micronesia Alania to some extent, a full matrilineal matriarchal understanding, and that got changed a lot with the colonizer who went up. God's a man and has to go through
[00:12:18] Lynne: Women go back in their
[00:12:19] Stella: Exactly. And in 19, the ministry of women's affairs. Put out a bed to say we'd like a women's theater company and me and a couple of other women got together and we created new Zealand's first women's theater company called Vital Statistics or in New Zealand, Vital Statistics and and we, we, again, we tour the country doing, we did three different shows that year shows about feminism shows about girls shows about opportunity, shows about possibility. It was. And we wrote, we wrote, we performed, we created the work entirely ourselves. It was brilliant.
[00:12:57] Lynne: wow. is it still going the theater company?
[00:12:59] Stella: No, that one's not, but a lot of the people who were off that company is still making amazing work. They're still mates,
[00:13:05] Lynne: I I'm sure that's how it goes. Isn't it. You plant the seeds and then the project continues and
[00:13:09] Stella: Absolutely. And it was after that, that I came to London. So I came back in 1986, thinking that I would stay for, I don't know, three years, five years meet the adult siblings who I hadn't, you know, I'd last seen when I was 11 and one of our sisters had died. So it was really important to me to, to get to know them again. Um, And found improvisation found performing that has the yes. At its core. And here I still am all those years later.
[00:13:43] Lynne: But I don't how, I can't remember how long Joshua and Monique have actually been together, obviously more than 13 years as their oldest is 13, but probably about 16, 17 years. And all the time I have known you. And for many, many years before I knew you you've had quite a change in careers, changing careers. I mean, one has led to another has led to another has led to another. And I guess if there was a thread, storytelling would be the thread. But a huge change. I mean, you are so prolific. We talked about that the other day when we saw each other, I mean, how many, seven, 17 novels, 70 short stories and 14 plays. That's an enormous amount of work.
[00:14:18] Stella: It is but I'm 59 and a half, and I started when I was in my mid twenties. So it's not like I've just done it in the last 10 years.
[00:14:25] Lynne: No, but you are very fast. I have asked you before, but I was one time fantasizing, the thought of writing fiction, you and I said, I haven't got the time. I haven't got the time. And you said, I'll never forget it. Get up early in the morning and write 500 words before you start the day. Write 500 words every day. I still don't do, but I I do, but I get on my computer and start doing
[00:14:44] Stella: yeah, well, exactly. It's the answering emails or they're looking at stuff online and, and getting your blood pressure up. 500 words a day. Monday to Friday, you get your weekends off, you take two weekend, two weeks off a year for holiday. You will have the first draft 90,000 words within a year.
[00:14:59] Lynne: Okay. You have inspired me.
[00:15:01] Stella: And until we finish a first, we dunno what's there. So, so story, I have a big theory about this. Story is made of two things. One is plot, you know, what happens? This leads to that leads to that. So it's you. And for example, But, but story is what's underneath. What do we really want the reader to understand? Not what do we want 'em to know, but what do we want 'em to feel when they read us, whether it's fiction or non-fiction, you know, we want people to be drawn in and you don't know what that is until you've done the first draft of any narrative fiction or not, which is full of plot. This happened, that happened. This reminds me of that happening underneath that is story. And then, then once we've written two or threes, then we can see what the real story is
[00:15:46] Lynne: Well, my next book is gonna be nonfiction. It has to be done. It may be by last book, nevermind. Name my next book. Cause I haven't done one for ages. You inspire me. Totally. I'm gonna get on it. That's my promise to myself. Not next week, the week after. Cause I'm traveling. I am starting my 500 words a day. Absolutely. Without question, I work better and I'm a fast writer. That's the thing, you know, when I do have to write, say an article for a magazine or newspaper, I whi it out and I edit it quickly and it's pretty cool.
[00:16:14] Stella: Then Lynn, pretend that's what you're doing. This is part the problem. I think that people have with books, they feel like they have to swallow the whole book in one go. A book is written paragraph by paragraph. It's not even written chapter by chapter. It's just paragraph by paragraph one step after the other. I mean, look at yours, look at your seed behind you. The, that, that, that logo is made of individual pets and the center, right? The hole is the flower, but you just start by pet.
[00:16:43] Lynne: Yes. Which is, and I use that actually as a metaphor, even when you're creating a business. So you have the, the business plan in the seed handbook was actually a daisy with number of pedals. And each pedal was different aspects of the business, which reminds me, I'm doing one right now. You know, it's.
[00:16:58] When you've been going for as long as I have, which is even longer than you have, you kind go through the doing certain things. And then if I forget that I've done them in the first place, and then I start trying to work on something that sounds familiar and search the recesses of my and find that something I'd written. Exactly.
[00:17:16] Stella: Exactly. because, because nothing is linear, it's all a spiral. Right. We just need to remember that it's a spiral. And then we, then we go down to this part, the spiral, we bring it up to make it more relevant for now. But it's still part of the spiral.
[00:17:28] Lynne: Yes. absolutely. Absolutely. Now to get back to your books, some of which I've read, but I definitely haven't done 17. Some of your plays, I have seen some not 14. They go over a wide range of subjects. I mean, you've done a lot of historical work, historical levels, which include, I gather, I assume, lots of research. And then sort of very, very contemporary stories too. I mean, and, and there was one of your books was made or if not more than one was made into a big TV series. If I
[00:17:53] Stella: No nearly I wished I, I have had nine books optioned for telly. One was option two, the Theodore novels, which are about the amazing Empress Theodore. They were optioned by HBO over five years for Martin Scorsese specifically, HBO wasn't optioning them for anyone else. They were only optioning them for him. That's what the contract says. If we had a downstairs bathroom, then this would be the kind of contract that we would have framed in the downstairs bathroom, those people who do do. So the contract said, this is a contract between Home Box Office who shall be called HBO and, and Stella Duffy, who shall be called, not even named and Martin Scorsese who shall be called Scorsese and it's, and it never happened. still, I, no, no, it's I still think it would make a great series. And there's a series that's been optioned at there's a potential series, been optioned at the moment. It looks like it might happen. Who knows? Who knows?
[00:18:46] Lynne: Namu myōhō renge kyō , that's what I say
[00:18:48] Stella: You give to the universe.
[00:18:49] Lynne: you do. So talk about Theodora because I did read that because it was one of them and it was
[00:18:54] Stella: Well, I, so some of my novels, some are historical, some are contemporary, some are more fiction, couple of magical realism and about five crime novels. So my novels did quite well in Italy, which was a,
[00:19:07] Lynne: I didn't even know you did crime novels. I gotta get, get, I gotta build up my seller Duffy collection, obviously.
[00:19:13] Stella: and I was Italy for a book festival in Ravenna. I could say Ravenna, but it doesn't sound anywhere near as pretty as Ravenna. And the Italians I was with and there was a band who used some of my words from a couple of my crime novels and made them into songs. And I, I was so cool. I got to do a gig with the band. The band was in a ex church that was now a theater venue and the band were playing and they were playing the couple of songs that were based on couple of my crime novels. And I was reading with a very bad Italian accent. My Italian friend, me off afterwards.
[00:19:48] And the Italians kept saying, have you seen the mosaica? And I'm like, I genuinely couldn't work out what the word was. The word was mosaics. Now in Ravenna, there is the Capella Sanal, which is a UNESCO world heritage site. And it's got the mosaics of Theodora and Justinian who were, depending on the way you read your history, either the last Empress and emperor of Rome or the first emperor and Empress of the, of the Byzantinum, Byzantine, based in Constantinople, Byzantine, that's it. Istanbul. Anyway, I had never heard of these people and I went to this church, this chapel and the mosaics are from 548 AD, Christian era, and they are amazing, but what is really amazing is you walk him and of course, Jesus is central. I mean, it's chapel right on his right hand side is the emperor and about 12 courts, of course, quite right. But on his left hand side and exactly the same size is the Empress and her 12 courtiers. In 548, they understood that the Empress Theodora was as important as the Emper Justinian. And I was like, wow, that's amazing. I've never heard of her, how incredible. And I bought this tiny wee booklet about her in English, in the chapel. And it said she'd been a dancer in the Hippodrome and her father had been killed probably by a bear. But they didn't know for sure, but he was the bear keys that's so probably and, but she ended up becoming the emperor and they changed the law for her. And I went, oh, this is amazing. There must be novels about her.
[00:21:22] And I came home. And the last that, there's, there's one by Jillian, Brad, that isn't really it's about her childhood. And then there's in Robert Graves mentions her S but there's almost nothing about her and she's Saint in the Eastern Orthodox church, but then I discovered why there's almost nothing about her. And it's because from a very young age, this is all based on hearsay, but it, there is research to make it seem very likely. Theodore was prostituted. She was a sex worker. As a child being a dance. When the Hippodrome also meant the backstage, you were a prostitute. She and her sisters were from a very poor family. They were also possibly of Northern African origin. So they were highly likely not as white as all the other Romans. So, you know, again, shut her down. When her and Justinian met, he changed the law to allow an ex dancer, which meant ex prostitute to become the Empress, to get married, ex dancers, ex prostitutes, weren't even allowed to get married. She instituted the first halfway house prostitutes because they couldn't do any other work. They were just, you know, left to bag once, once the patriarchy decided they didn't want to use their bodies anymore. They were sinners, it was horrendous. She also brought in the first anti rape laws and the first laws to make women be allowed to get back their dowry when they were divorced. And at this time Christianity wasn't against divorce, and Minka t summarily divorced their wives when they got fed up with them.
[00:22:48] So she was amazing. And when she died and there's loads of stories that say, oh, she, she en enticed him with her sexual wilds and she was awful and blah, blah. She was also massively religious had a huge religious conversion in the desert. And really faithful, just so interesting. And after she died in her late forties, Justinian visited her grave once a week for 20 years, he could have married anyone and he didn't. So not she phenomenal, but it was love.
[00:23:17] Lynne: such a fantastic story. If I ran Netflix, I or HBO, any of them I'd have it on there with Martin says or not. I mean, it's the most
[00:23:28] Stella: It is, it's a D story. I mean, the Scoresese story is interesting in that Gore Vidal apparently wrote a script about Justinian and Theodora for him decades ago. And it didn't get made because Scoresese got the money instead to make raging Bull. That's the story I was told. And so he'd always wanted to, and then HBO saw that this was available and so they, they option it.
[00:23:49] Lynne: Very, very annoyed. Well, let's just keep NAMI Haring on that ringer going on that one. And the plays that you've done I, I did go to see, I remember seeing some of them, I mean, they were more contemporary the plays.
[00:24:01] Stella: absolutely. So I've made quite a lot of work as an improviser and advisor, both as a performer, working with improbable theater who do improvised theater passed up for puppet stuff with music. It's a show that we did over 250 times in Britain at the national of the lyric ham Smith, traveling at the Tron in Glaser. And we interview people live on stage about their life, and then we perform the stories they tell us. So for example so delicious. So if you and I were doing life game now, and you'd just asked me about Theodora while I told the story of Theodora, as we listened me and the other performers sitting on the other side of the stage would start going, why don't we just be just in the Theodora? We'll just stand up and we'll be just the Theo. Say what you get, get visual or sound musicians, and sometimes sang songs of representation of the story you've told as you hearing it from the
[00:24:57] Lynne: It's that's incredible work. I mean, that is therapeutic work. I, it E almost even resonates a bit with family constellation work.
[00:25:04] Stella: It really does. And, and one of the, one of our favorite scenes is very much like systemic family therapy in that you would ask one, you'd ask the guest to describe a usual family meal. So, you know, not like Christmas dinner or, or, you know, Saturday night, but a usual family meal, you know, Saturday lunch or. Tuesday morning breakfast and we provide them with a bell and a horn. And then, you know, the six or seven actors would get up depending on how many people they were in the family. And the guest would give one note, just one note to each person. And so you'd sit around the table, you get one character note naturally to start writing. That's all you need. You want one character note characters, developers you go along. And the guests, we would just start talking as a family at dinner, playing, you know, each character with one note and the guests would go ding. Yeah, oh my goodness. My mother did always say that. Or ho the horn and go, oh no, my dad, my dad was never that nice. So my dad was never that mean what happens through that? And the audience begin to see it is that somebody watches their family and then the audience begin to dream in their families, into it and at the interval every single time. And you know, we, we did this off Broadway. We did it in San Diego. The, the guests would say, oh, I feel terrible, I'm just talking about myself and we'd have to say to them, you are, but actually the audience are thinking about their own stories. The audience heard you talk about your first kiss and they remembered their own first kiss. You know, and that's what you want from a story, right? You want, you want, you want, the audience, you want the reader to dream in their understanding.
[00:26:40] Lynne: Yes. And you are giving permission by talking about your own story for that space to be given to others. It's it's very powerful.
[00:26:48] Stella: and that show, I think really changed my writing as well. So I have an novel called the room of things and except where I live in the, between Briston and can world, very mixed ethnicities area, fairly poor at one end and deeply rich as it goes over the hill into Dollage at the other. And and our dry cleaner fi years ago. My cause Shelly, my wife is a playwright once said to the pair of us. He said, you should write about a dry cleaner. We know people's secrets. I was like, oh my god, I'm having that one and said, cuz his mother had had the shop before him. And over 40 years they had found such interesting things in people's pockets. Shopping lists, but also best man speeches. You know the speeches you read at a funeral because, because another shop you go in and you give dirty money for a clean item in a dry cleaners, you take in something you care about. You've worn it to a funeral. You've worn it to a party. You've worn it to a wedding. You know, it's, it's not your ordinary bit of clothing. You can just sling in the washing machine. It's something special. And the things that get left in those pockets and the stories that go with them. And clothing has such story attached to it. Anyway. And so that book, what I discovered from doing life game is that it's not always the big incidents in people's lives that resonate with us. Sometimes it's the tiny moments. And it's the tiny moments where you just go, oh yeah. I felt that when I was 16 two or yes, my mum said something like that the week before she died as well. But it's not about the big incident. It's about the little things.
[00:28:20] Lynne: absolutely. Did you write that book?
[00:28:22] Stella: Uh, I did write that book so that, that book's out. That's called the River of Lost Things, but
[00:28:26] Lynne: that was, that was, oh, I get it.
[00:28:28] Stella: here's a version of it, right, that happened in life game. And I didn't put this story in it, but I did put those tiny elements in, in the novel, Janice Long, the DJ who died only last year, this year, yeah, you very recently was a, a most amazing life game guest because she kind of got that her role was to just share stories so that other people could understand it. And she was asked, so McDermot, I think was the interviewer that day was shared interviewing and he said, have you ever lost anything? And sometimes people say, yeah, my wallet. Yeah, my keys. And she said, yes, a baby. And the, you know, you could feel it when the audience go, oh, okay. And want to hold the guests gently, you know, kindly.
[00:29:13] And said, you know, you don't have to talk about it. Do you wanna talk about it? It's up to you. She said, no, no. It's okay. So she sort of told the story of what it was like and how it was, but then the next question, rather than performing that, the next question was, so what happened afterwards? And she said, I dunno if they were married at the time, but my partner and I, we had a pop tent and we went camping. And it makes me sad. Even now, decades later to tell you, she said, and one morning we got up early and we just sat and watched the sunrise. And held hands. And so my friend, Neil, who's in the company and I, Shelly had miscarried by then, I'd lost five embryos, post chemo, when chemo made me Inver Neil and his previous partner had had loads of miscarriages. We both knew each other really well. And we knew that each other knew something of what she was telling us. All we did was sit on stage, hold hands, Colin gr who's an amazing lighting designer. Very slowly changed the lights so it was a sunrise. Actually, I can't even genuine. I can't remember a sunrise or sunset, but I know he did it beautifully. And no one said anything cause no one needed to. And the audience Janice saw her story, given respect and honor, we held that story and the audience held all of us. It was just a phenomenal moment.
[00:30:38] And in storytelling, those moments are just as important as the, and the wedding day was like this, you know, they're just as
[00:30:48] Lynne: Heart moments.
[00:30:50] Stella: Yeah, absolutely. Well, heart moments go all the way up and down. Right. That's full it's. Every part, every chakra.
[00:30:57] Lynne: Yeah. Every chakra. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And you mentioned chemo because of course you've, you've had breast cancer a couple of times. I don't say meant lightly. I mean, it's horrible, horrible illness.
[00:31:12] Stella: the first time was when I was 36, I, I was doing woman's hour and I was going to go and I I'd been asked to go and talk about the remake of the Charlie's Angels movie. I remember that very clearly. So that date, so it was, it was 2000 and I woke up and I literally had a lump under my right breast. Like it hadn't been there the day before. And it was a big lump because my tumor was a three centimeter tumor and it had come up overnight. As we found out later, the tumor there'd been an affection around the tumor, which is really fortunate, cuz otherwise I would never have found it until much later and it was bad enough when it was found and I went off and was just weirdest
[00:31:54] Lynne: Yeah, we do those things. Don't we, we carry on as if life is normal.
[00:31:59] Stella: Yes. Well, no I knowing in, in the core of me some that this wasn't just a cyst. I knew the minute I found it, I knew it was wrong. But I was only 36. We didn't have breast cancer in the family, but then neither a 70% of, of, of people with breast cancer. It is, even though we talk about it as being familial, the majority of them aren't familial. And meanwhile, Shelly, cuz she's good at this was on the phone to the GP getting me an appointment straight away and they looked, they went, oh, it's probably assessed, but you know, we'll, we'll get you seen. But of course then I had to wait a while. There was no, no one thought there was any urgency.
[00:32:32] So by the time it was diagnosed, it was already a grade three cancer. And it was exactly at the point where, and I, and our baby Brad were starting to try to have. We decided that we wanted to, we'd asked Brad to do it with us. He and his wife hadn't wanted children themselves. When we asked him, he said, ah, we've been waiting for you to ask for years. We thought we were the perfect and, and me, his wife said, well, of course I just, as long as I'm the fairy godmother. And we knew that there would be great people to, we wanted a father involved and we knew that there would be great people to bring, to have children with. and everything. I mean, literally it was ready to go. Shelly was going do the first in seven that week, and then everything had to get put on hold I, this is 20, 2000, so it's 22 years ago, the hospital would. Fine eventually, but difficult at first, they, there was none of the protocols now for being kind and inclusive for queer couples. She wasn't legally considered my next of king on the forms, which was so painful. And also there was no assumption that that gay women would want to have children. So when I was told that I, that they recom highly recommended chemotherapy because of the size of the tumor and the blood vessel involvement, I said to the oncologist, okay. But what's the chance of it making me infertile. And he said, well, 80% probably or more. And I was like, we're trying to have children. And, and it took him a good, probably a minute. I mean, seriously, there was a big pause in the room and they went, oh, no. Okay fine. And we'll sort of, we'll get you into the facility department. They can do an egg retrieval. We could do, you know, we'll do what we can.
[00:34:14] And they did. And I had five embryos made six eggs in the egg retrieval, five embryos made. But this was 22 years ago. And even now, I mean, you know, the IVF industry pretends that it's so successful and it's really not. And so many people are brutalized by trying and trying and trying and the cost to try and get pregnant because we live in a culture that devalues us where not parents, it undervalues parents at the same time of course. But while it's saying that you're not a proper woman, unless you're a mother, it's also saying that mothers are terrible and at right. You know, both think, women can't win. And we that's the protal culture we live in.
[00:34:56] And, and so we tried, you know, and it was, it was in many ways it was harder to become infer than it was to. To have cancer the first time around, because I knew I'd wanted kids. And I, I, because, because all of my siblings are so fertile, I'd assumed I would be too. And I was except I got cancer. And then Shelly tried and did get pregnant, but she miscarried and never got pregnant again. And because everything's joined up, she was miscarrying when we went to her oldest nephew's bat mitzvah, and the good thing is that her parents had taken nine and a half years to meet me, but they met me just before I was diagnosed. I'm not sure I would've believed that they were okay with us if I had ever only met them after diagnosis. And on that night of that SVA and my wife's family are uh, Iraqi origin, Indian Jews. And it's a small community. And the people who came here from Calcutta, which is where their community is, know each other very, very well. And they've grown up together and they've pretty much stayed together and. And my father-in-law because Shelly wasn't dancing because it was, she was miscarrying. And she was in pain and sitting there to be there for her nephew and for her sister, my father-in-law danced with me first at that bat mitzvah as a kind of, or community knew. But we were certainly the first gay people who who've been there out. Of course there were other gay people, but we were the first ones that, that had shown themselves in that community. And it was a really big deal, a really big deal.
[00:36:31] So they were vasty things those few years, but also they were amazing. And, and then I had cancer again, I, I went for a standard mammogram. I was going for mammograms every year because of it having been such a big tumor. And the year I turned 50, there was. Small, thankfully that time round, but signs of, of small cancers growing. And so I had a mastectomy that year which was the year that I also created Fun Palace, and made all these speeches 10 days after having surgery. And I'm just crazy things that I wouldn't do now. But then, but then first time around, I also the show in life game, we did off Broadway. The, when I just finished six months of chemotherapy and two months of radiotherapy, I did the show in San Diego taking a box of chemotherapy from the NHS. So I could pay through the nose for an American hospital to give me NHS drugs into my veins. So I could do the show that I was loving doing.
[00:37:36] Lynne: What, what, what was driving you? I remember, certainly when you started fun palace and I knew you'd been, you hadn't been well, and
[00:37:46] Stella: I, I love to work Lynne.
[00:37:48] Lynne: I get that cuz I do too.
[00:37:49] Stella: I am fortunate enough to love my work and to have work. That is a value I, you know, before I went to university, I, I worked in a, the plywood mill at the timber mill where my mom and dad worked that work easy, no way ever enjoyable. And it's, and it's toxic being, I'm literally toxic because it has to be 36 degrees the whole time. And there's the disgusting stink of a toxic glue. The world is full of people who do. My dad was a laborer from the age of 14 to 65 and died at 67. The world is of people who do not enjoy their work. I have great privilege. Yes, I work hard, but I love my work and I've loved all of my works, performing, writing, directing, Fun Palaces, now being a therapist. I, I love it.
[00:38:33] Lynne: Yeah, I totally get it because I love what I do. And there were times when I, my children are very quick to tell me I wasn't the best parent because I was so immersed in my work and I was, but I loved it too. I, I, I totally understand.
[00:38:46] Stella: And I think there are trade offs, right? I think that if we are trying to make the world, we want to make, we will make choices and they won't work for everybody. And, and the, in the end, they may not even work for us, but best we can do is make the authentic choice in the moment that suits the person we are at that time.
[00:39:09] Lynne: That's so beautiful. And, and thank you again for reminding me why I do the things because it's, we we don't either of us. And, and, and I don't think any of the women that I know pretty much or know well and, and care for are, are really doing what we do for the money or the power or the fame. We do it for the love and the contribution back into working with others and somehow creating a different kind of world.
[00:39:36] Stella: Absolutely. And the things we experience can become part of that. So really quite recently, my therapist, who is profoundly challenging, very good for me bloody hard work. I was, and, and to go back to things, being cycling spiral, I have experienced deep pain at not being a mother. I have hidden and pretended didn't exist. My envy, my resentment, my bitterness, my anger, my pissed offness at all those women who got pregnant really easily got the thing that I wanted so much I have because our culture doesn't want us ever to say, we're angry, jealous, better, or pissed off, particularly not women. Oh no. Don't you be doing that. You have to, you have to suck up every crappy thing that happens to you and be fine with it. And so for too long and far too soon, I swallowed down my upset about those things. And it has spiraled back many times. And really recently I allowed myself to feel the hurt, the pain, the rage, the, the jealousy that I'm not allowed to feel because jealousy's so mean.
[00:40:42] And it's so nasty. And why would you, because I'm human and having gone through that quite difficult periods, real soul searching, I have come back through to a much more useful place. And my therapist said to me, you know, I know this is gonna sound clumsy, but I'm glad those five embryos died in you. And he didn't get to have the children you wanted. And I knew what he was saying. And I was like, yeah, me too, because of where it's led me and where I am now. But end, I want to say I'm hard glad, you know, I, I, I'm not easy. Glad that's a hard won gladness.
[00:41:25] Lynne: but everything is a, it is, life is a journey and the things that happen to us at the time, which are so totally painful, do take us through the next stage of where we are going. It is
[00:41:38] Stella: they totally do. And I'm working now with a couple of younger women in their thirties whose cancer. Cause I I'm working with cancer patients as well as more general psychotherapy whose cancer has made them in fertile and who are really looking at, I mean, it's one thing to look at your, your mortality properly, which cancer does to you right in your face. Not someone else's mortality, your own. It's one thing to look at your infertility. There is no blood person after me. To have the two together is really difficult. And I am so glad that my personal experience now enables me to understand theirs. I do not have the same experience, but to understand theirs on a different level. And they have said that they, they also find it valuable. They found me
[00:42:25] Lynne: It has to be, it has to be. So I, I wanna talk about psychotherapy cuz as we, as we're talking through your story, it's very clear that becoming a psychotherapist at this point in your life is not only for other people, but also for your own healing
[00:42:38] Stella: totally. Totally.
[00:42:40] Lynne: makes
[00:42:40] Stella: I'm as wounded a
[00:42:44] Lynne: that says it. Let's just talk a little bit about fun palace though, because that was such an extraordinary one of your many extraordinary accomplishments. One minute we're sitting in Regent's park with all the kids running around the few times we have done that and you said, well, I'm starting this new project. I'm calling it Fun Palace. I said, well, that sounds interesting. Let me know if there's anything I can do before I even thought anymore about anything I could do. You'd done it. Set it up all over the country. Hundreds of thousands of people. How many years was it going? I've put
[00:43:12] Stella: Um, Well, it's still, it's still going. I left I left at the beginning of 2021. So in 2013 I thought, look, Jon was an amazing theater director. She really understood that theater belongs to everybody. She wasn't just about, you know, belonging to a cultural elite. She really believed that creativity was everybody's and this is after 10 years of austerity. And people being told, oh, well, you know, if, if, if you can't pull yourself up by your beat straps too bad. And and I thought what we need to do something journal with cent in 2014. And so I called a session with some people who were interested and outta that, we came up with having, somebody said, oh, I remember that there was this Fun Palace idea that never happened. And in the 1960s, Jon letter word, amazing theater director had wanted with set Price, the architect to create one, building, one building to house the wall, all the arts or the sciences, all forms of culture, but not just audience to sit and watch, but to participate, to learn. The word fun was there because it was about learning. And can we make learning fun? Can we make learning accessible? And the word palace was there, not for Buckingham, but to rename it as a people's palace. That, that arts culture, creativity and science belongs to everybody. And of course the 1960s people were like, no it doesn't. And even now, I mean, we really struggled in 20 13, 20 14 to get people to buy into it. Of course, local libraries understood it cause that's what local libraries are anyway.
[00:44:38] And, and then astonishingly and I, I was diagnosed in January of 2014 astonishingly by October, 2014, places around the country took part including places like the RSC and the Manchester Exchange and, and the South Bank, but also tiny little community groups, you know, little libraries that, that were only able to open one day a week saying we want to throw our doors open to the community, to come in and do what they want, to share their skills. So Fun Palaces at its core says everyone's B. Everyone's creative. Everyone's got great thoughts. Instead of saying to people, oh, you don't know because you, you know, you don't have the, the great, good fortune of training in this thing that I did. You don't know, so I'll teach you, it says, what can your neighbor teach you? And what can you teach your neighbor? How can you connect by sharing your skills?
[00:45:29] Lynne: it's all about community and the future is all about
[00:45:32] Stella: Exactly. It's a fully community hyperlocal and it says, look, it's, it could be really fun, connecting in this way and what we've discovered and because it then became an annual event and I had to very quickly learn how to be a producer, but marvelously in a way that, you know, so well, how to do. I asked one of my good women and friends who was a much better producer than I was ever going to be Sarah Jane Rawlins to come and do it with me. And she knew how to do all the stuff that I didn't. And, you know, I was, I was Sarah Jane for years. She's our psychotherapist too, because we're working with people in community and we're hearing people's stories and we just went, oh, maybe this is leading me there. But Sarah Jane used to say you know, we will Stella her out to make speeches. We will Stella her out talk abouts. And the reason she said it was because 10 days after I had an eight hour surgery for the mastectomy for my second breast cancer, I made a massive speech. Jude Kelly brilliantly asked me to at the South Bank as part of the Wow Festival about Fun Palaces.
[00:46:31] Lynne: I must have been there. I'm sure I was
[00:46:33] Stella: you may well have been there that got all these phenomenal women who were already doing great stuff in the community. You know, Fun Palaces never says this doesn't exist. It says this does exist. Can we help you shine a light on it? Would it be useful to use some of our resources? Not we'll tell you how to do it. You know how to do it? Can we get the posters printed for you? You know, if you've got no local support from your local council, can we encourage the local council to support you? So what Fun Palaces does now is it, and has done grown over this, this past nine, nearly 10 years is say, look, there's phenomenal stuff happening in every community. Let's shine a better light on it, and let's shine that nationwide. Cause then we can amplify each other's voice. That's why it matters.
[00:47:16] Lynne: It's making me think about my own little town where I live, which has, has number of creative things going on. All of which are disjointed. There's no community communications. When I have the time, I do look at it and say, look, come on guys. We should do something. But maybe Fun Palaces is the answer here too.
[00:47:31] Stella: Okay. Here's a really good example of why that's an answer. My local library up the road was being closed by, by the local council with cutbacks. This is in the first year 2014. They thought, okay, well was do well just, and it's hard for library. Cause I've got all this health sector. They've got all this brisk assessment form they genuinely have to fill in. But for three hours or four hours, they can truly let anyone in and anyone can run a little thing. It's okay. It's gonna be safe enough for a short amount of time. They invited all the local community groups into one space to come and share their stuff. And so it's kind of like a farmer's market, but for the community groups. And it's free. And so I sat there and watched, because I was sitting between them. I watched the local football club talk to the lady who was doing aromatherapy with, with herbs that she, she, you know, foraged for over the fields here in very, very urban areas. But parts parks are left to go wild in summer, which is fantastic. Get together to have a she up doing massages for the football cup. You see, they see that you cannot force that kind of community connection, but when you bring people physically together in a space that they wouldn't necessarily come together, otherwise they begin to have conversations themselves.
[00:48:43] Lynne: Yeah.
[00:48:44] Stella: making a space for people to talk to each
[00:48:46] Lynne: Yeah. It's it's, it's fantastic. It's absolutely fantastic. And of course you got the OBE round about that then for your work, with with the Fun Palaces and then, and then you, you came out of it a year ago. Trying to move on to, yes, another new, I a new career, but a new, new stage, a
[00:49:04] Stella: well, yeah, it is a, so basically, as it turns out every decade I've done something new. So in my twenties, I was mostly an actor in my thirties. I was mostly a writer and an actor in my forties. I was mostly a director who was writing, doing tiny bit of acting. And my fifties was mostly Fun Palaces, and my sixties is gonna be mostly psychotherapy. I dunno what my seventies is yet. I'm looking to finding out life will show me. And so I think it was partly my second cancer, which came as a big shock. It, I, I truly had felt like I'd made a pretty strong trade off. Okay. Yes. Chemotherapy sounds like it's gonna keep me alive. To do that, I'm gonna have to lose my fertility. That's a massive trade off. Presumably. Then I get away with it. It won't come back and it didn't come back for 14 years, which is amazing. But it did come back. So there was a, there was a pass of me that was like, I didn't get away with it. There was a pass of me. That was, oh, okay. This I have, I have to look at who I am. I have to look at me again. I, you know, not that I hadn't been, but I had really given so much of my life to Fun Palaces. I have to set back a little and see what I'm doing. And it wasn't that I don't love Fun Palaces and I'm not still really deeply proud to be the co-founder and all of that, but I never meant to be a producer. And I did mean to work more hands on with people. And as it turns out the cancer therapist that I was. Brilliantly allotted with eight, eight free sessions from the NHS was an existential therapist and I've never come across existential psychotherapy. The only existential work I knew was similar to both was the second sex .And existential psychotherapy is very much about what do we, what choices do we have? What choices have we not noticed that we've got, what choices have we taken and failed to admit that? Yep, that was a choice. I could tell you that life forced me into it, but it was also a choice. And where do I take responsibility for my choices? It's it can be pretty tough.
[00:51:11] Lynne: It's very tough. And it's, and again, going back to Buddhism, but taking responsibility for our actions, our calmer, the cause and effect.
[00:51:18] Stella: Exactly. There, there are several studies point out that Nietzsche and Kierkegaard considered that, you know, the co the co fathers of, of of existentialism, it was around the times that they were starting to write that the first European German, French translations of Buddhist texts were being shared. There is so much or existentialism that is Buddhist. So similar, both of our rights, it's not enough for me to will my freedom. I must will the freedom of others and take action. You know that I cannot just go, I'll look after myself without looking after everyone else without ex acknowledging my responsibility for everyone else. Which is the Buddhist concept of in of dependent origination. We are all joined up at all times. Existential psychotherapy and philosophy talk about intersubjectivity. It is impossible to consider myself just as an individual, because I'm always in relation to others. And so when I'm working with an individual client and they start talking about their mom, their dad, their sister, their wife, their husband, their partner, their child, those people are in the room. Of course they are. We carry our immediate communities, our past communities, our future communities with us at all times. And Buddhism knows that existential work knows that. And what it's.
[00:52:37] Lynne: Yes. It's all so extraordinary. It's it's so extraordinary. And, and of, I just wanna come back to your story because we, I wanna make sure we do talk about this. We could talk for hours and hours. But the fact that you've now been doing this, you also fitted in between that becoming a yoga teacher and teaching people how to do yoga and writing workshops, which sounds
[00:52:54] Stella: Yeah. Well, I only because I love embodied work and cause I love yoga. The only reason I became a yoga teacher, I I'm not, you know, there are plenty of brilliant yoga teachers, much better than me. I teach yoga for writing specifically yoga for writing. I do a workshop once a month online. I do few workshops in person. I'm doing one at the London library tomorrow morning.
[00:53:13] Lynne: Amazing. I dunno how you fitted in. I truly don't but anyway, so, so now you're in the third year of your doctorate uh, for psychotherapy. So you are actually you working with personal clients and of course, Monique lovely. Well, my daughter-in-law your niece. Our lovely Monique is also doing like a therapist working with children and it's just, life goes round and around here we are, but
[00:53:32] Stella: working with adults now, too. So maybe I'll end up working with children when I'm in my seventies. Maybe that's where I'm going.
[00:53:37] Lynne: Maybe maybe. So of course you're a campaigner, you're a social activist. You're one of the founders of the women's equality party, which I was also involved in. So, you know, our lives have gone round around each other. No question about that. You've worked for LGBTQ plus equality. I can never get the letters right. There needs to be another couple added on,
[00:53:56] Stella: for intersex and asexual, if you
[00:53:58] Lynne: oh, I never remember them all, but anyway, whatever it is, you're, you've worked for equality, sexual equality for many, many decades and have been a speaker on the subject all over the, all over the world. Really. And you're a member of the gateway women's childless elder women, which I've never heard of before, which is a NoMo Crohn's, which is also
[00:54:15] Stella: it's fantastic. It's a bunch of child, bunch of childless, older women talking about what it is like to be a postmenopausal woman and not be a grandmother in blood, but perhaps a grandmother in understanding
[00:54:29] Lynne: And love exactly. I realize that more and more, that that's what it's all about. Really. So now you are studying specifically the area of postmenopausal women. And we've talked briefly about that when we saw each other the other day. And, and, you know, there is so much conversation. I suddenly seems that every high profile woman from tV and media generally has suddenly reached the age of 50 to 52. And think they've discovered the menopause, the age I am, which is considerably older than you. I went through my menopause 20 odd years
[00:55:02] Stella: Well, I went right through my menopause after my first cancer, when I was 36, you know? It's great that it's getting more attention. Let's not deny that it's making a difference for many people who did feel and have felt like, like that they were silenced and they were ignored. However, this is what happened. Cyclically, 20 years ago, two other women were saying I'm menopausal notice mine. You know, we keep getting, we keep getting silence. And in my research on the embodied experience of postmenopause, what I've seen is they have people saying, oh no, never talks about menopause. I found papers from the 1950s where people are talking about menopause and there are plenty of papers that were written that aren't on the internet, but I can't find what I think might be slightly different is that at the moment, the conversation is purely, primarily being about HRT. And what I'm particularly interested in is not. Not to deny the, the medical possibilities around it, but menopause is not purely a medical experience. Menopause is a societal, cultural, psychological, emotional experience. It's a transition. And we trans we transition into post-menopause. Menopause itself technically only, only lasts the year between your last period. Yeah. And there is so little attention to what happens to us in the next 30 odd years of our lives.
[00:56:21] Lynne: And on a personal level, as somebody now who is 74, I have never been happier. I never more clear about who I am. I'm was prolific. I still have relationships. Everything is very, I still dance. I still go to festivals. I mean, it's it. And I, you know, and I've got all these lovely kids. I mean, it's life is good.
[00:56:40] Stella: Exactly. And one of the things I'm slightly concerned about the current tone of the menopause story is it's only negative.
[00:56:48] Lynne: Agree, agree.
[00:56:49] Stella: Now living with a wife. so so I have not only had my own s I've had I've experienced what it's like for the partner of a menopausal person, so I think I have a pretty useful perspective on this. I've also got, you know, five living sisters. Um, no, four living sisters, one dead. I, I, don't deny that for some people, but statistically, it's not that many, actually some of the symptoms experience primarily by Western women. And, and I'll explain that it symptoms are different in some cultures can be close to unbearable, like. Hot flushes and night sweats. Now, if we lived in a culture that didn't think it was embarrassing to have a hot flush, then it might stop being so unbearable. If people didn't feel they had to hide their hot flushes, it might stop being so unbearable. And when I went into an early menopause, the minute I started, the drugs became a therapy. My hot flushes were unbearable. I was getting them 40 times a minute uh, an hour sometimes. I it's not that I don't know, but of course there were no hormones I could take because I was having breast cancer treatment. I'm not saying because I went through it. Other people should either. But I am saying it's not the only experience there are. And those things are exacerbated by us living in a patriarchal and ages culture that denies that this happens.
[00:58:09] And what we've discovered from the global research is that in other cultures where it's not bad to be an older woman, women might have hot flushes, but a, they don't experience them as so. Painful horrible and shameful and b, they tend to describe having fewer. Now their diets aren't always so different to us. So it can't just be down to that,
[00:58:33] Lynne: that's of course the Asian diet was over years until they started eating some rubbish weeded. They didn't have a
[00:58:38] Stella: there's also a very interesting study that Japanese women never, never had hot flushes. They only had cold chills. They didn't have any of the other things. We call symptoms and they had aching shoulders because they weren't any longer holding a baby. That was the story about it. As soon as HRT was introduced in Japan, when this started having hot flushes,
[00:58:58] Lynne: Well, there was no word for, in Japanese for the menopause. Is There
[00:59:02] Stella: no. There were Really, well, there is a word, but it means not grandmother. It means something like not, not you
[00:59:08] Lynne: It's not a
[00:59:08] Stella: children's.
[00:59:09] Yes. And highland Mayan, Guatemalan women not only hav the same osteoporotic bones as north American privilege, white eating well, blah, blah, blah, women, but they don't have the same practices, higher Mayan, Guatemala and women. You could there's a brilliant study. Looking at bone density. It's x-rays it's it's MRIs. It's, it's a full on academic scientific study. The bone density is the same. They are officially women with osteoporosis, but no fractures show up. And the belief they understand the scientific understanding is that a they're getting really high calcium when they diet from water and not from milk products as children. So it is a diet thing from childhood, but B they are exercising well into their late seventies because they have to carry water two hours a day to, and from the crops. And we are telling women to be more sedentary. Our lifestyle sitting at computers are more sedentary. We are encouraging us to perceive our old age as something to be sh shame ashamed about and put away and not to get out there in our flabby armed Glor. We are being encouraged to hide back and not take up space. And we've been encouraged to do that since we were little girls
[01:00:31] Lynne: and this whole thing about being invisible because so many women got some menopause and feel they're invisible, which is
[01:00:37] Stella: well,
[01:00:37] Lynne: no sense, but it makes sense in the current world, but it shouldn't be
[01:00:41] Stella: Well, it shouldn't be making sense. Although the cloak of invisibility can be awfully useful sometimes. Cause it means that we can sneak in and, and pull out the underpinnings from underneath. So I, I I'll take it and I'll leave it, but I don't wanna have, I wanna choice about that. I don't wanna have it forced upon me. That's part of the problem. So, what we know from mass, I mean, seriously, massive global studies, systematic studies that look at hundreds of studies across the world is that menopause has experienced differently in different cultures, and it has experienced differently within different cultures. There is no universal menopause. Therefore there is no universal post-menopause. Part of the problem at the moment is we are talking about it as its the same for every human being who experiences it. And it's just not. And we ignoring these other 30 years.
[01:01:32] Lynne: Yeah, Yeah, absolutely. Wow. Well, this is, this is, this is gonna be in a very interesting space to examine in more detail. And I know you are gonna come up with some brilliant, brilliant concept, if you haven't already.
[01:01:46] Stella: Well, I haven't, but I've done my first interview with my first participant and her experience has, has just filled me with so much more knowledge. So I've got seven more really in depth interviews to do.
[01:01:59] Lynne: So we, talked about this as well, because this is your thesis, but it will also be a book or your doctorate. It will be a book. I can see it as a play. I can see it as an interactive play, where we come and talk about their experiences and then they're active by other people. And I can, and then I can see that as a community event and I can see you bring you all together, all the many brilliant, brilliant things you've done and, and really focusing on this area. Because there's an awful lot of us out there. And we've got quite a lot of years to go, and we've got a lot to give.
[01:02:26] Stella: And we've got the wisdom, you know, I, I, you know, I look at you what, 15 years older than me, I look at my older sisters. I, and I think, yes, there are some women who are, who are in that spotlight and, and the work that you've done to, to make a light, to share stuff. But there are so many that that just are not being heard, who also have wisdom and knowledge and, and we are losing information.
[01:02:51] Lynne: and these are the women in communities who really can take the role of the wise woman. And I I've started working with teenagers here once one day a week. And I think that there's so much connection between the, the, the 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 year old young woman and the 60 plus woman. And we so much to give each other. And I see that as well. That's something I am already working on, but I think that's the thing is it's all very well being a wise woman sitting on the top of a mountain, contemplating our S or we are the wise woman, as we all wish to be in community.
[01:03:25] Stella: in community inter subjectively, inter relatively in community.
[01:03:29] Lynne: Absolutely. Oh, it's gonna be an exciting time ahead. We will speak again. Thank you. So, so much, so much, so much to say so much to do. I've really enjoyed it and learning even more about my sister here, my sister Stella. So thank you. Thank you so much.
[01:03:45] our seed exercise this week is based on the very good advice I've had from stellar over the years about how to write my next book. She has said to me, if I write 500 words a day, Monday to Friday in just a few months, I'll have the outline. And of course, she's right. So why don't you think this week about the book, the story of your life, a story you'd like to tell and just write 500 words. A day for five days and see what you've got at the end of it. It is a very, very powerful and very simple exercise to do.
[01:04:19] thank you so much for listening and taking part. Remember, we will be putting up more episodes every few weeks and we do hope you'll come back and join us again. If you like what you hear and want to learn more practical methods to help you plant the seeds in your own empowerment journey, then please subscribe to this podcast, rate it and review.
[01:04:44] Also do make sure to join our seed network. If you haven't already and together with thousands of like-minded women, you can make friends promote your business and share your stories. Visit seed network.com to find out more. And until then, I'll see you next time.