Ep #183: Midlife Is a Spiritual Shift - What Thecla Taught Me About Self-Trust

What if midlife is not a breakdown, but a return to the truth of who I really am? In this episode, I explore the story of Thecla and why her refusal to keep outsourcing her authority feels so powerful for women in midlife. I share how her story, along with other removed texts like the Gospel of Mary, has challenged me to ask a deeper question: not what I am supposed to believe, but what feels true.

I talk about why midlife is more than a hormonal or emotional transition. To me, it is also a spiritual shift. It is a season that asks me to slow down, get honest about what no longer fits, and begin building self-trust in small, consistent ways. This conversation is about listening to what is already rising inside of me and having the courage to live in alignment with it.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why midlife can be a spiritual awakening, not just a crisis

• What Thecla’s story teaches me about inner authority

• How self-trust is built through small, aligned choices

• Why the cost of ignoring myself can be greater than change

Resources Mentioned:

The Girl Who Baptized Herself by Meggan Watterson: https://www.megganwatterson.com/the-girl

If something in this episode resonates, I’d love for you to reach out and continue the conversation. Book a clarity call today... https://calendly.com/coachwithmikki/co-parent-breakthrough-call

Listen to the Full Episode:

Download the Episode Transcript Here

Full Episode Transcript:

What if the reason your life suddenly feels so misaligned in midlife isn't because something is going wrong, but because something inside of you is finally waking up? Well, welcome to Led from Within. I'm Mikki Gardner, and this is a podcast for women who are done outsourcing their authority and are ready to claim a life aligned with who they are today. Because midlife doesn't need to be a crisis. It can be a return to yourself, to clarity, to courage, and to inner authority. So let's begin.

What if the most dangerous thing a woman can do is trust what she already knows? This is the question that we're going to explore today, because there's something I've been sitting with for a while, and I've been wanting to bring it to you. And it might be a couple of episodes, but I want to start here, because for a lot of my life, I understood faith and spirituality through the lens that I was given, right? Through the church, through structure, and, um, through what I was taught to believe. But something shifted lately, and I started asking different questions. And it's because of what I'm learning, what I'm reading, what I'm being exposed to. But I'm not asking what am I supposed to believe, but it's more of, like, what actually feels true. And that's the question that sort of led me to studying a lot of different texts and stories that haven't been sort of centered in Christianity, haven't been centered in kind of the conversations that we're having. They were actually removed. And one of those stories has so profoundly impacted me. And learning about this woman, Thecla, has changed the way that I look at midlife and how I look at women.

And I really wanted to have that conversation because Thecla is a woman. We hear about her in the Gospel of Paul. And Thecla, which was removed from the Bible in the fifth century by Constantine. It's a different story for a different day. But she was a woman who heard the teachings of Jesus through Paul coming. And she sat listening, it says she sat in her window transfixed by what he was saying about the teachings of Jesus. And she sat still for three days and for three nights. And she allowed that truth to move through her so deeply that she ended up walking away from her life, from expectations, from society, from everything she knew. She said no to marriage. She said no to what it meant to be a daughter. She said no to the version of her that kept her. Her comfortable. She lived a very comfortable life, and she ended up being persecuted and almost, uh, killed for it because she refused to continue to look outside of herself for authority. The teachings of Jesus that she was taught her that she was her own inner authority because God lived within her. And she was so moved that she became a, uh, force that no one could take down. Her family, society, the government, nobody, the wild animals.

It is a wild story. And Thecla, through it all, believed so deeply in herself and in God and in their connection that she stopped at nothing. And so these texts that I've been reading about the Gospel of Mary, you know, where Mary Magdalene teaches that the connection to the divine is not through the institution, but actually through yourself, right? All of these different things have been erased intentionally so that we can be controlled. And the stories of Mary Magdalene and the story of Thecla is this just vibrant refusal to be controlled. And Thecla has really become something that has profoundly changed me and how I look at myself as a woman, as a mom, and how I look at midlife. And these voices are really important. And I wanted to start to share this not from a place of, uh, faith or deconstructing or making faith right or wrong, but because it mirrors something that I see in the women that I talk to every day. That moment of midlife, or maybe that moment after betrayal or after divorce or after grief, where the old ways of us living, they don't fit anymore. And our question has to shift.

Do I keep living this life that was handed to me, that I created, or do I trust what is actually rising inside of me? Because that's where everything begins to change. You know, I've always been a student of spirituality. In my early 20s, I wanted to learn about all the different religions. Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Hare Krishna temples. I sort of wanted to go to all of it because I wanted to understand. I think I've innately known that there is a through line, uh, between most religions, that God is the center, right? And there's God and truth. When we say God, when I say God, I mean truth with a capital T. I mean that source of energy from which everything flows, and that's the through line. And so I'm always looking for that in different stories, because I think each religion has a different take on the stories that they present. And it's kind of like what we're used to or what feels compelling is where we go. But midlife, to me, is a spiritual shift. It's not just hormonal. It's not just physical. It's not just emotional. It is a spiritual shift where we start really questioning and experiencing things differently, not because we're just simply curious, but because we actually are feeling the shift where things don't feel it anymore. And I think that's why it was so really profound when I found Thecla and the other voices that have been removed, because Thecla just demonstrated this power within, this blanket refusal. As soon as she saw the light, she could not look away. She couldn't look anywhere else.

And if you want to read her work, I am going to put a link in the show notes. There's different places that you can get it, but Megan Watterson in the Girl who Baptized Herself tells the story of Thecla in such detail and such academic wisdom, knowledge, and profound just love and care. It is that book, I really feel, like, shifted a lot of things for me. And so I hope you read it, because Thecla is this badass, just a badass. And she ignites in every woman around her the power that they already have. And that's the point. She sat in stillness for three days and three nights, right? Which she teaches that we have to be willing to be still to absorb the truth, because in that stillness, something shifts internally. And she was able to then say no to the life that was expected of her. She faced punishment, she faced persecution. She was almost killed a number of times. And her rebellion is not about breaking the rules. It's about listening to herself. It is about her holding the tension between external authority and her internal knowing.

That glove really is teaching us that we have a flame inside of ourselves. And when that little spark starts to gain more and more traction, when more oxygen is poured into it, right? That flame becomes unstoppable. And for me, that's what Thecla’s story did, is it just sort of blew all of this oxygen into the flame that was already lit. And there's other texts too, right? It's just not. It's just not Thecla’s story. There's the Gospel of Thomas, who emphasized that there is a direct knowing of God within ourselves. The Gospel of Philip talks about sacred union and, uh, interconnection with God. The Acts of Paul and Thecla is all about women reclaiming spiritual authority that they had all of these texts. And the Gospel of Mary and Mary Magdalene that teaches that the divine is accessible inside, that it's not a hierarchy or external authority. Right? But women's voices were dismissed when all of these texts were removed, and they were intentionally removed. So it's really important that when we start to understand this we can start to understand. Midlife is that time when we have a physical shift, an emotional unraveling. We start to really question identity, and there is a spiritual opening. It is all of these things at one time.

That's why midlife can feel like a crisis, right? Because so much is shifting. It's not just a life transition, it is a spiritual one. And that's where I think Thecla really near has a parallel for us in midlife, because she hears the truth and she knows. She feels in her bones, this can't be it. This cannot be it. And she sits in stillness, right? And that's where we have to really start to slow down and be willing to look at what's going on. Thecla says no. I mean, just a flat out loud no to everything. And I think it mirrors what we're being asked to do in midlife, which is that tension that we're feeling about disappointing others, about no longer playing the roles that we always have and what will that look like? And Thecla was persecuted, I mean, to near death. And I think so many of us, when we're going through these transitions, feel and fear loss and judgment and change. And I think the thing about midlife is the cost of listening to ourselves feels terrifying.

But the cost of not listening to ourself is our life. Midlife is a time we have to be willing to change and do things differently, to call out where we are overdoing and over functioning, where we are exhausted, where the roles are suffocating us, where we are people pleasing and it's not helping. The areas that we are just waiting for clarity, Waiting, waiting, waiting. But we're not moving. And we have to stop looking outside of ourselves for the answers that have already been inside of us. You already know, know what is true for you. But oftentimes, if you're anything like me or the other women that I talk to, we're afraid of what the cost will be if we listen. And this is where I think we have to come back to. Okay, well, then what do we do? And this is why the program that I've created within and this podcast is here, because there is a process that we need to start to walk through to integrate into our life. And when I say integrate, it's like where our insides start to mirror what's on the outside. We want to build a life that mirrors what we feel on the inside. And so we have to be really clear about what that is, otherwise we're going to have chaos on the outside. Right. That crisis.

And so we want to start to look at our life, what doesn't fit anymore. Asking that question, getting really clear about it, gaining the awareness of what you know to be true, and then starting to understand that you do have agency, you do have choice, even when it doesn't feel like it, because you can choose, even if it's uncomfortable. And then once we have looked at it, we become aware and we understand the choices. Well, then we can start to live in more alignment. Right. We can start to actually live in a way where that reflects what we know to be true on the inside, how we feel. And we can start to reflect that in our exterior life. And that's. We do that through self trust. Right. And self trust isn't something we just find one day. Uh, um, no. It's something we build by choosing ourselves in small and consistent ways. And that's what Thecla really teaches is she trusted herself once she started to know, hey, what's going on inside of me doesn't line up with what's going on the outside of me.

And she just stopped engaging with what was on the outside, what was expected, what she was being told. No matter what they did to her, she believed herself. She believed in her ability to stay connected to God and to move forward. And that's what she teaches us. That's why her story, I think, hit me so powerfully, because she helps us give us a mirror to ask better questions. Right? Where in our lives do we already know what's true for us? But we're not living that way. You know, what are we avoiding? What am I avoiding? Because I don't want to disrupt everything in my life or what truth keeps coming back no matter how much I try to override it. Oh my God, that one, right? It's like the patterns we see in ourselves, whether it's relational patterns that we're in, in our marriage, in our parenting, in our own self care, it's the things that we keep doing over and over that are not moving us in the direction that we want. But we refuse to look at them.

We have to look. The truth is, is that if and when we get still and quiet, what is going on the inside, we don't require any more external answers because we build that self trust. And I think this is why those stories like Beckless matter so much. Because her rebellion wasn't about being difficult or disappointing everybody. It wasn't about blowing her life up. It was about telling the truth, listening to what she already knew and choosing to live from that place, no matter what it cost her. And I think she offers us an invitation for all of us, especially here in midlife, not to abandon faith, not to reject everything we've been taught. I'm not talking about that either. But to come back into relationship with what is true, right? To, uh, reconnect to ourselves, to our body, to the divine, not as something outside of us, but to really come back, to embody the soul that God gave us, that planted us here on this earth, to have this experience in this human form so that we can really start to create a life and an existence and relationships that mirror the truth of who we are, which is God's children, God's daughter here in this planet.

And when we can start to connect to that and know that we have those answers already within ourselves and already inside of us, we start to stop outsourcing our authority and we start to live within it. You already have the answers, so I invite you to, whether that's reading, whether that's listening to this podcast, whether that's joining within, whether that's having conversations with your friends in a different way, but start to expand these questions, because that's what we're here to do in midlife. It's not rebellion for rebellion's sake, but it is about learning to live in a way that mirrors the truth of our inside, the truth about who we are at our core, at our soul, and starting to live that so that it is felt by every person that we come across. This is how we change ourselves.

This is how we change our children, the next generation, the legacy in the world. It's big stuff. So I'm grateful to Thecla for offering me a different perspective. I hope you check out Mega Zen Waterson's work. It is beautiful. She's been on so many podcasts, just Google her name. But I love Thecla. I think that this is going to be a conversation we have also in another episode, but I wanted to start it here and I hope that it was helpful. And no matter what, just remember you have the answers within. You already know, and I believe in you.

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I hope that it spoke to you and you found something useful to take away from it. If you did, I would be so grateful if you would take 2 seconds to subscribe to the show, which will help you because you won't miss another episode. And it would help me because you would never miss another episode. And if you are in the giving spirit and would take 30 seconds to rate and review this episode. It would do wonders for the show and for me. Thanks so much for being here and I can't wait to talk to you again next week.