Rachel Schmidt, BSW, PLC
Rachel Schmidt, BSW, PLC
Beyond the Climb: Entering What’s Next
Most of us have spent decades climbing—building careers, raising families, and meeting expectations. But when that mountain peak no longer feels like home, we need a new way to navigate midlife transition and identity shift.
The Natural Life Design Method isn’t about “fixing” your life; it’s about listening to it. Using nature as our primary reference point, you will move through a four-stage process to help you reconnect with your inner rhythm and design what comes next.
The Natural Life Design Method for Women in Midlife
A nature-based and depth oriented approach to midlife transition, identity shift, and designing what comes next.
The Natural Life Design Method is not a rigid map, but a way of being with yourself as you change. It honours the truth that real transformation—much like the forest—does not happen in a straight line. It is cyclical, mirroring the way the earth breathes through seasons of shedding, resting, and eventually, new growth.
I invite you to move through these stages slowly and intuitively, following your own internal rhythm. There is no finish line here; you are welcome to return to these practices whenever your life calls for a moment of reflection or a deeper sense of direction.
This is a space to help you move through the quiet shift of transition—a place to stop forcing the climb and finally allow your next chapter to unfold from the inside out.
3. The
Unfolding
The Unfolding
How do I want to live moving forward?
Once clarity begins to emerge, we move into shaping what comes next. This is where your values, intuition, and lived experience begin to guide real-world change. It is an unfolding—a gradual opening toward a life that feels more aligned with who you have become.
The Intention:
To shape a daily life that reflects your true self, rather than one organised around expectations, obligations, or the patterns of the past.
The Path:
Through energy mapping and values-based choices, we explore intentional boundary setting. We look closely at how you live, work, and move through your days, ensuring your life reflects your current capacity, energy, and truth.
2. Listening
to the Quiet
Listening to the Quiet
Where am I now?
Before anything new can take shape, we begin by honestly looking at the landscape you are standing in. In midlife, this often feels like a threshold space—between what has been and what is not yet clear. This is where we slow down and tend the “forest floor” of your life: the experiences, changes, and endings that have shaped your story.
The Intention:
To move through life transitions—such as empty nesting, career shifts, grief, or aging—with meaning and awareness, honouring the space between chapters.
The Path:
We notice what is “fertile ground”—the wisdom and insight carried from your past—and what is beginning to emerge in quieter ways, taking shape beneath the surface.
1. Coming Home
to Yourself
Coming Home to Yourself
Who am I becoming in this next chapter?
In this first stage, we begin by reflecting on the layers you have lived. In midlife, it is common to realize you have been shaped by what you do for others, and by paths influenced more by expectation than inner alignment. Together, we ask: Who are you beneath the roles you’ve carried?
The Intention:
To gently separate your sense of self from the professional, relational, and parental identities that have shaped your life, creating space to simply be.
The Path:
Through reflective inquiry and “parts work,” we listen for the inner voices and long-held desires that may have been set aside during the years of striving, allowing them to be heard again.
4. Designing a
Natural Rhythm
Designing a Natural Rhythm
What is the natural world reflecting back to me?
In midlife, when familiar ways of thinking no longer offer clear answers, we bring our questions into the natural world. Here, we move beyond logic alone and reconnect with a deeper, embodied form of knowing—one that becomes easier to access in relationship with the land and the living world around us.
The Intention:
To cultivate a sense of belonging, steadiness, and inner peace that is no longer dependent on external achievement, productivity, or the roles you hold
.
The Path:
Through nature-based contemplative practices, creative expression, and movement, we reconnect with your own internal rhythm. These reflective practices support you in staying rooted in your truth through the changes of your life.
Jane's Story
I didn’t come to this work with Rachel because of a crisis. From the outside, my life looked steady, with a career, family, and a rhythm that worked. I knew how to keep going.
But in my late 40s, something shifted. Not dramatically, more like a quiet disinterest in the life I had been living. The goals that once drove me no longer felt compelling, and I couldn’t name what I wanted instead. I remember saying it felt like I was still climbing a mountain I no longer wanted to be on.
When I began, I expected answers, a plan and a clear direction. Instead, we slowed down.
Rather than rushing to fix things, I started noticing what my life was already showing me: where I felt depleted, where I felt alive, and the patterns I had been repeating. I realised how much I had been living in response to expectations, responsibilities, and what came next, without knowing how to live from anywhere else.
What changed everything was shifting from figuring it out to listening. Not just in my mind, but in my body, paying attention to what felt heavy, what felt open, and what was asking for space.
The natural world became a quiet teacher. Watching the seasons, I began to understand that endings are not failures, but part of a cycle. Time outdoors showed me that nothing forces its becoming, and yet everything unfolds. There are periods of growth, of dormancy, of unseen change, all necessary.
This shifted how I related to my own life. I stopped trying to push for clarity and began asking different questions:
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What is ending?
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What is no longer mine to carry?
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What is beginning to stir?