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When I met Heli Murray for the first time, I couldn’t laugh too deeply – had to avoid the full-bodied joy that bends you from the middle – or I’d start having contractions. I was infinity months into the bedrest of a problematic pregnancy. I was bleeding a lot and unskilfully navigating scary medicalised territory I’d had no experience with. My mind pinballed between cumulous bliss and primal-survival-fight-or-flight. Except I couldn’t fight anything or flee anywhere. It was a game of mental fortitude.

We didn’t have family around – no elders to gift perspective. I was out of my depth and out of control. My situation was tricky because of the extra complications, but bringing a baby into the world is deeply challenging for almost everyone. It changes us inside and out – but it can be tough to see the shifts as they’re happening.

As a teacher of Calmbirth, Heli gave me some perspective, as she has for hundreds of local families. Heli is a mother of two and grandmother to two young ones. She’s also a renowned waterwoman in Byron Shire; a lifeguard, distance swimmer and deep-water paddler. She’s faced some tumultuous waters.

Our time together was brief – maybe 12 hours total – but she delivered me a toolkit to help navigate the wilderness of my worried mind. Sharing breathwork and excellent watery metaphor, she helped me train my focus. With her ocean eyes and warm smile lines, Heli taught me about pregnancy and birth not only as natural physiological experiences, but also as psychological and neurological ones.

Unlike males, biological female’s brains (those born with XX chromosomes) undergo three significant transformations over the course of a full life: puberty, pregnancy and perimenopause. These three hormonal upheavals are life changing events that we once associated primarily with the ovaries – what neuroscientist Dr. Lisa Mosconi calls “bikini medicine.” That is, the “historical medical approach that viewed women's health primarily through the lens of their reproductive organs, assuming that women's bodies and brains were fundamentally the same as men's except for the parts covered by a bikini.”

New science shows that each of the transformative “three P’s” involve changes to each of our body’s 12 systems: from the immune to the circulatory, reproductive to the digestive. In puberty, pregnancy and perimenopause, our brain dumps wiring that no longer serves it, to make space for the human becoming.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but as my brain was firing and rewiring into a new version of itself, Heli’s was, too. We were in parallel seasons of transformation, trying to work out how a new ‘self’ gels with the old one, or not.

In the years after our hours together, I surfed The Pass a lot and, more often than not, would see Heli’s bronzed muscles stroking through the line-up, returning from out-wide adventures: catching unbroken south swell lines on the biggest stormy days, or freestyling across the length of the bay in golden light. Alone and unmissable – her ski, swim cap or bathers all hot pink. And like the boldness of that colour, Heli is quick to admit that she’s been told she’s “Not everyone’s cup of tea” – which she takes as a compliment. She adds to that list, “Extreme, obsessed, intimidating, and disagreeable.”

What I have seen, year after year, is that she’s one of the only women over 50 I consistently see pushing her physical capabilities in strength and endurance – especially in wild ocean conditions. She’s showed me this pathway of ageing that I’ve rarely seen – not by talking about it, but by living it, showing up day after day in the place and in the ways that light her up. I’d watched both of my grandmas wither the last decades of their lives away in front of a TV. My mom and dad (separately) repeated the pattern.

“I don’t think I’m the stereotypical grandmother,” Heli says. “But I wonder if we asked, ‘Has society constructed a version of older women that is not accurate?’ Is it a version that aligns with a more patriarchal way of valuing women? After we’ve been hysterical, emotional, needy, the weaker sex, but still valued for appearance. Then when our physical beauty changes and reproductive potential has subsided, the implications of the image of the older woman: overweight, grey hair, discontent and knitting… well it kinda just bookends those outdated gender-based value differences. Now she’s old and useless. But really, in my daily life, I’m not operating from that place. I’m just doing my thing.”

I love Australia for its beach culture; even more so for the way elder folks are staples of the coves and bays they swim, paddle and run. Compared to the American model I was shown, ageing here is filled with life that I never really saw from my own elders.

If we think of the Australian continent’s southeast as a great peninsula – roughly between Wollongong and Adelaide – then Heli grew up in a small river town smack in the middle of that landlocked mass. On Yorta Yorta country in northern Victoria, the long-time local name means “meeting of the waters,” later called Echuca. Heli’s Murray River home waters engulf Australia’s largest inland port, also home to the world’s most extensive paddle steamer fleet.

“My childhood is studded with memories of floating down that big old brown river on Lilos and canoes, navigating the current and snakes to swim across into NSW and back, motorbike riding through the bush, campfire potatoes blackened with charcoal. Being outside, in the bush, and being active were always a part of my life, mainly promoted by my mum who loved nothing more than bushwalking or camping by the river.”

From early on, the bush and the water become sites of solace from the strife of home life: her parents’ relationship tension, divorce, and eventual deaths. “At 13 I discovered running as a way to gain a sense of control during the turmoil no one acknowledged as my parents divorced, my dad sunk into self-pity and my mother was diagnosed with cancer.”

“At 16, as part of my Melbourne boarding school’s Year 10 outdoor education program, I elected to go to Mittagundi, a centre in the Victorian high country, built literally by hand from salvaged timber and ‘cement’ of cow dung and mud. I chose Mittagundi thinking I could get a lot of exercise (my coping strategy), not knowing that beyond hiking, cross-country skiing, snow camping, abseiling, and white-water rafting, it would become a harbour of safety, connection, community and purpose, and influence my life’s direction.”

Heli went on to a bachelor’s degree in Outdoor Education, where she often led city kids on short stints in the bush – people who had never really been out of their urban comfort zones and were shocked by having to shit in a hole.

Searching for her own edges, Heli set off on long sea kayak trips: three months from Cairns to Thursday Island, then two months navigating Fiji and the Solomon Islands, then a month of mutton bird magic in the Bass Strait. After finding her sea legs, Heli went bush in the Blue Mountains “to pursue climbing and canyoning, but also to establish life roots in a place instead of my van, tent and sea kayak.”

That’s where she met her now ex-partner, which shifted her life profoundly. “As I became mother to my two beautiful sons, my awareness exploded, opening to a whole other portal of love, growth, purpose and meaning.”

But the cold was too much with little babies, so in 2002, they headed north and set up life in the warmer waters of Byron Shire.

In Australia, one in three marriages end in divorce. The median age for relationship breakdown is 47 for men, and 44 for women.

It’s a curious correlation, that age for women, as it marks the approximate entry into the perimenopausal years for most – sometimes a decade of tumultuous internal and external changes that make the selflessness that often defines the maternal years no longer feasible.

In 2016, the year before Heli and I met, the very first study of women’s brains before and after menopause was being conducted in New York. Neuroscientist Dr. Lisa Mosconi veered into examining the menopausal brain because of the lack of rigorous inquiry.

“We have shown that menopause is actually a neurologically active state. It's like a renovation project on the brain where a lot of different things happen. And there's a lot of different changes going on where the brain is in effect losing a little bit of volume, but also the connectivity is changing. Brain energy levels are changing. Blood flow to the brain is changing. So, it's a very complex state that can profoundly alter a woman's brain and mind all at once. And women can feel those changes and women report changes in their brains that we're really just starting to validate. ”

In other words, these are radical internal changes that often play out in parallel to women radically changing their lives.

Like so many, Heli’s 20-year partnership dissolved during this crucial life change. If emotions are energy in motion within our bodies, then maybe movement is the best medicine for the “stress, tension and fear” that can accompany upheaval. “I’d just been though such a grim and hard time,” recalls Heli, “and the water and movement were fundamental to my heart and mind’s survival. It was my therapy.”

And then one day, Mr. Younger-and-Handsome challenges her to a race and inadvertently challenges her to see herself differently. “I thought I was well and truly a nun… until that kiss. And all my juicy passions returned instantly… BOOM,” she laughs.

But it wasn’t just the kiss.

“He and I paddled a bit together. He’s a beautiful surfer but was unfamiliar with the kind of board I use. He asked, ‘What else can one do with these kinda boards?’”

I mentioned, “Oh, there’s a thing in Hawaii… but I’m too old for that.”

He replied, “No you’re not.”

“And that was the seed.”

The seed that made her ask new questions of herself. Like: was there still more for her to experience and accomplish?

There’s a definite cultural vibe toward women of a certain age – those who have grown beyond fertility. Something in the realm of greying puddle of irrelevance. Which makes sense in a culture that places little value in elders and has equated feminine worth with a mostly unattainable ideal of narrow, youthful beauty.

As we transition through perimenopause and into the menopausal years, many women find they – in a totally underappreciated and very punk rock kind of way – just don’t care about those systemic values any longer. Some women do evaporate into the obsession of what was, but many others choose to stay close to life and keep paddling, moving, evolving.

Feminist activist and icon Gloria Steinem proclaimed that “women may be the one group who grow more radical with age.” The new and emerging science is supporting that sentiment – tracing the changes of these women, inside and out.

As Heli was preparing me for birth, she, at 48, was training for the venerated Molokai to Oahu paddle – 52km across the gruelling Ka’iwi Channel, the “Channel of Bones”. In the Open Women category, she placed second overall amongst a cohort of primarily 18-to-28-year-olds.

“It was monumental,” Heli recalls. “I learned so much. My aim was to experience it, complete it and enjoy it. I definitely didn’t enjoy the whole thing but had moments of utter beauty and stillness. And the sense that something bigger than me was looking after me.”

Julius Ceasar quipped, "It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.”

Today, the latter is Heli’s wheelhouse. Besides wearing the red bikini as a lifeguard at The Pass and Main Beach, Heli has adapted the breathwork and inner monologues from her Calmbirth teachings into a course called ‘Surf Apnea’. She draws parallels between the mental skillset useful in both birthing and heavy water surfing.

“I think of legendary midwife Ina May Gaskin’s quote, ‘Yes, birth may be painful, but it won’t hurt you.’

“I think of the myriad adaptations the human body makes to conserve life when we hold our breath and submerge in water. The mammalian dive reflex is a series of adaptations that lower the heart rate, shunt blood from the periphery to the essential organs, even squeezes the spleen to push more oxygenated blood to the heart, lungs and brain, making us pee to keep blood pressure balanced. All this to conserve life.

“When we understand what’s happening, why the body-mind is doing what it’s doing, and that the discomfort that comes with these adaptations is simply that – uncomfortable – then we can comprehend that we are actually safe. Our bodies are protecting us, and the uncomfortable sensations are there to get our attention, and remind us to breathe, for example.

“These physiological adaptations and the opportunity to deliberately evoke them (through freediving, ocean immersion, surfing, birthing, even jumping in an ice bath) allow us to practice and develop a kind of inner connection which rests at the centre of a life of integrity and purpose that requires getting out of our comfort zone.

“We get to translate knowledge in the mind into action of the body, engaging both mind and body to remind ourselves that we are in fact safe, to stay calm and present, aware of our responses and acting from our deepest values.

“Simplified, it’s: ‘Feel the fear, and do it anyway.’”

The gift that Heli gave me was the awareness of creating a soft bubble between fear and safety where I can take refuge when life gets heavy. And it does.

Parallel to the useful information, it’s Heli’s calm, embodied presence that still makes me feel calm around her. She reminds me of the power and beauty in capability, even as our bodies age and hurt and those capabilities require us to adapt again.

Heli is a standout waterwoman and a pillar of our community, not only for her many accomplishments, but also because of the way she’s alchemised the shit things that have happened to her – loss and grief and pain – and made them useful to herself and to others.

That’s the real gold of wisdom in action.

This story featured in the Roaring Journals, Edition Two.