We have been handed the story of the peak: the good age, the clarity, the knowing who you are. But no one speaks to what lives underneath: the exhaustion that won't stop, the race with no visible finish line, the distance between what is seen and what is felt.

This episode is about that gap.

In this episode: a letter written from the middle · the path to external arrival and what it required · four women, four shapes of the same distance · what anchoring actually is · an invitation to look in the mirror without apology.

This is not a resolution. It is a permission to stop pretending the gap doesn't exist and to say thank you for having lived.

This episode moves alongside conversations with Jenny McGrath (Ep. 02), Anca Damerell (Ep. 04), Cynthia Hansen (Ep. 06), and Robyn Davie (Ep. 05).

(0:00) Welcome (1:46) A letter from the middle (7:52) Four shapes of the same distance (16:35) Not from a distance (20:15) Look in the mirror

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Anna Teresa is an anthropologist, experience designer, somatic trauma-informed facilitator, and storykeeper based in Geneva, Switzerland. She works with women leaders navigating the midlife crunch — supporting them back into the intelligence of their bodies, their cycles, and their stories. YINtentions is where those stories are held.*

Subscribe to the YINtentions newsletter: https://bit.ly/yintentionsnewsletter

Cynthia Hansen carries her home in her body. A Korean woman adopted by white American parents, she has lived everywhere and belonged to no fixed geography and she has spent her career building systems that leave no human being at the edges. In this conversation, we move through three generations of women - a grandmother whose unlived potential still travels forward, a daughter of 16 saying things in a school speech her mother didn't know she was carrying, a woman navigating menopause without anyone in her bloodline who has been there before. Through the body as the only geography that never moved. Through what it costs to hold teenagers, aging parents, and yourself: all at once, all from a distance. Through what it means to think of an ending as a beginning.

Storykeeper: Cynthia Hansen is the Director of the Adecco Group Innovation Foundation, a global foundation working on workforce transformation and what it means to build economic systems that do not leave human beings at the edges.

Connect with Cynthia: linkedin.com/in/cynthiahansen https://www.adeccogroup.com/innovationfoundation

Resources mentioned

• Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women's Health Book Collective
• 5Rhythms movement practice
• All Fours (among others) by Miranda July

(0:00) Welcome (5:25) The Women that Came Before - What was Given and What had to be Invented (19:09) The Only Geography that Never Moved (27:22) What it Costs to Hold Everyone (39:55) When the Living System is also the Body (52:03) Who Do I Get to Be

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Hosted by Anna Teresa: an anthropologist, experience designer, somatic trauma-informed facilitator, and storykeeper based in Geneva, Switzerland. She works with women leaders navigating the midlife crunch, supporting them back into the intelligence of their bodies, their cycles, and their stories. YINtentions is where those stories are held.

Subscribe to YINtentions newsletter: https://bit.ly/yintentionsnewsletter

Robyn Davie wears color in a grayscale world. Not as aesthetics. As practice. After years of making herself smaller, of being told to be less, she chose more. We move through the women who came before her: a grandmother who had a hysterectomy at 32, complete hormone shutdown, devastating silence. Through 20 years on the pill and the paradox of exploring cyclical wisdom while suppressing your cycle. Through the collapse that comes when your identity dissolves, when the CEO title is gone and you're left with an empty page. Through rock bottom, empty bank accounts, and the absurdity of tapping plastic on plastic for food. Through placing hands on your body with love instead of hate. Through being told to be less to find a partner and refusing. Through what lingering teaches us when the culture demands we move fast and conclude quickly.

Storykeeper: Robyn Davie is a regenerative brand strategist and former CEO who ran a 15-person creative studio in South Africa for 12 years before walking away and moving to Hamburg, Germany. She is turning 40, learning about her body in ways she was never taught, and teaching from the middle of the mess.

Connect with Robyn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robyn-davie/

https://robyndavie.com/

https://www.instagram.com/robyndavie

Resources mentioned:

• Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
• Alexandra Pope & Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer, Wild Power
• Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not an Apology
• Diary of a CEO podcast (Steven Bartlett)

(0:00) Welcome (5:25) The Women Who Came Before - the Silence that Shaped Us (11:55) Twenty Years on the Pill - A Paradox We're Not Talking About (20:02) Reclaiming What You've Been Taught to Hate (27:28) When Identity Collapsed (42:13) Women Teaching Women - Feminine Wisdom Over Hustle Culture (53:11) Being Told to Be Less & Choosing to Be More (1:00:09) What Lingering Teaches Us - Closing

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Hosted by Anna Teresa

Subscribe to Yin Rhythms newsletter: https://bit.ly/yintentionsnewsletter

Anca Damerell opens a conversation about what gets lost when women move from the farm to the institution, from the freedom of climbing trees and reaching for fruit to a life organized around productivity, caregiving, and the quiet suppression of what the body knows. We move through the women who came before her and the wings and constraints they carried. Through a body dismissed twice by specialists, still telling its own story. Through the moment care met the machine, when a human request for menopause support returned as administrative language. Through the question that stayed with her: what would it mean if love were not decorative in our institutions, but foundational.

Storykeeper: Anca Damerell is a Director at Unearthodox, an organization navigating complex nature-society challenges by examining root problems. She is a published researcher, systems thinker, and a woman at the beginning of her own embodied journey.

Connect with Anca: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anca-damerell

https://unearthodox.org/

Resources mentioned:

• Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway
• Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
• Bayo Akomolafe, The Emergence Network
• Anca Damerell, projects led and written forwards:
• Voices of Regeneration: Cycles of Hope
• Nurturing innovation
• The Anthology on regenerative futures

(0:00) Welcome (5:25) The women who came before — wings and constraints (22:37) From the farm to the institution — how the body got lost (32:40) What if these experiences are signals, not disruptions (41:45) When care meets the machine (54:53) The ingredients are already here

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Hosted by Anna Teresa

Subscribe to Yin Rhythms newsletter: https://bit.ly/yintentionsnewsletter

Most women I know are living somewhere between those scripts, without a name for where they actually are.

This episode names the terrain.

In this episode: the three distinct stages collapsed into one word and why it matters · the nine-stage framework Christine Marie Mason draws in The Nine Lives of Woman · the two cultural stories that abandon women in different ways · and the frontier no one is mapping yet > late motherhood and perimenopause, simultaneously.

Welcome. Come as you are.

Resources mentioned:

Christine Marie Mason's book : The Nine Lives of Woman: Sensual, Sexual and Reproductive Stages from Birth to 100

(0:00) Welcome (1:47) The story and the map (6:44) The long runway : perimenopause (10:12) Metamorphosis: menopause (11:25) The rest of our life: postmenopause (13:25) The stories that abandon women (18:15) What's emerging (23:36) Closing

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Anna Teresa is an anthropologist, experience designer, somatic trauma-informed facilitator, and storykeeper based in Geneva, Switzerland. She works with women leaders navigating the midlife crunch — supporting them back into the intelligence of their bodies, their cycles, and their stories. YINtentions is where those stories are held.

Subscribe to the YINtentions newsletter: https://bit.ly/yintentionsnewsletter

Jenny McGrath opens doors into the places where purity culture, sexual trauma, and religious shame live in women's bodies. In this conversation, we move through modesty checks and closets of shame. Through sexual assault and the confusion of pleasure and pain. Through years as a missionary in Uganda, treating her body like a machine until Acholi dancing gave her body back. Through the psoas muscle as an archive of intergenerational fear.

Content Note: This episode includes discussion of childhood corporal punishment, sexual assault, and religious trauma. Listen when your body is ready.

Storykeeper: Jenny McGrath is a mental health counselor, Somatic Experiencing® practitioner, and researcher. Her work reveals how missionary work became a way for white women to feel their own pain through the pain of others.

Connect with Jenny:

https://www.indwellmovement.com/

https://www.instagram.com/indwell_movement/

Resources mentioned:

• adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism
• Liz Koch, The Psoas Book
• Angela Chen on consent
• Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score

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Anna Teresa is an anthropologist, experience designer, somatic trauma-informed facilitator, and storykeeper based in Geneva, Switzerland. She works with women leaders navigating the midlife crunch - supporting them back into the intelligence of their bodies, their cycles, and their stories. YINtentions is where those stories are held.

Subscribe to YINtentions newsletter: https://bit.ly/yintentionsnewsletter

But there is a landscape we rarely discover.

Not because it isn't remarkable, precious and filled with gifts. Quite the opposite. We don't discover it because we've been told to stay away from it. No one said - this territory exists, and it belongs to you, and you are allowed to go there.

This is an invitation to that landscape. Your body.

In this first episode, I share what YINtentions is about the facets of the landscape that is our body's intelligence, and the invitation to traverse the stories women carry within them. We tell the stories we were told not to tell. We explore what becomes possible when a woman finally says the thing she was never supposed to say and trusts her body.

Welcome. Come as you are.

~~~

Anna Teresa is an anthropologist, experience designer, somatic trauma-informed facilitator, and storykeeper based in Geneva, Switzerland. She works with women leaders navigating the midlife crunch - supporting them back into the intelligence of their bodies, their cycles, and their stories. YINtentions is where those stories are held.

Subscribe to YINtentions newsletter: https://bit.ly/yintentionsnewsletter

We don't fix anything here. We simply are with.

Hosted by Anna Teresa. New episodes biweekly from Spring Equinox 2026.