Amusing Conversations For photos and scribblings https://substack.com/@charisselouw <br/><br/><a href="https://charisselouw.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">charisselouw.substack.com</a>
Musings Podcast
Claim This Podcastby Charisse
5.0(2 reviews)
14 episodes
Updated Bi-weekly
Accepts GuestsHas SponsorsLocation 🇬🇧
41
Podcast Authority
BetaFairBased on show quality, social media presence, reviews, charts, and more
Quality58
Social0
YouTube0
Engagement60
Podcast Overview
Amusing Conversations For photos and scribblings https://substack.com/@charisselouw <br/><br/><a href="https://charisselouw.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">charisselouw.substack.com</a>
Language
🇺🇲
Publishing Since
4/18/2024
Unlock The Full Podcast Authority Score Report
See how your podcast performs across key metrics
41
Podcast Authority
BetaFairBased on show quality, social media presence, reviews, charts, and more
Quality58
Social0
YouTube0
Engagement60
7
Excellent Areas
2
Good Performance
10
Growth Opportunities
excellent
Episode Length
2 minutes
Performing excellently!
good
Episode GUID Consistency
60%
Recommendations available
Unlock the full report to see detailed tips
needs improvement
Publishing Consistency
Every 25 days
Recommendations available
Unlock the full report to see detailed tips
+16 More Metrics
Unlock comprehensive insights including:
- • YouTube presence analysis
- • Social media reach metrics
- • RSS compliance scoring
- • Podcast 2.0 features
- • Technical standards
What's Included in Your Full Report
Detailed Analytics
- Complete breakdown of all 19 authority metrics
- Personalized recommendations for each metric
- Industry benchmarks and comparisons
- Technical RSS feed analysis and compliance scoring
Growth Strategies
- Step-by-step action plans for improvement
- Quick wins to boost your score immediately
- Pro tips from successful podcasters
Get your free podcast insights report
See how your show performs across every key metric
Instant delivery
No spam
Attract Better Guests
High authority scores make your podcast more attractive to industry leaders and influencers who want to appear on credible shows.
Secure Sponsorships
Sponsors look for podcasts with proven authority and engagement. Your score demonstrates your podcast's value to potential partners.
Grow Your Audience
Understanding your strengths and weaknesses helps you make data-driven decisions to expand your listener base effectively.
1 verified contact email on file for Musings Podcast
Pitch yourself as a guest, propose sponsorships, or reach out directly to the host.
Recent Episodes
May 7, 2026
Read Between the Covers
<p>I had the profound honour of being invited to converse with the very keen mind of <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/431601833-mfundo-mpepuka">Mfundo Mpepuka</a> on his podcast Read Between the Covers about some of what is preoccupying me at the moment. </p><p>In this conversation we reflect on African cinema, ancestral presence, elemental world-making and forms of knowledge that survive despite attempts to erase them.</p><p>So much gratitude to my magnificent supervisor <a target="_blank" href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=C2M4rY8AAAAJ&hl=en">Prof Lize Van Robbroeck</a> who set me on this path with her life changing course on New Materialisms. </p><p>And my work wife <a target="_blank" href="https://researcherprofiles.sun.ac.za/11741-stella-viljoen">Prof Stella Viljoen</a> for gifting me carte blanche over many years to follow my creative impulses in the classroom, first at the University of Pretoria and now for many years at Stellenbosch University. This semester’s debut post-grad course on <a target="_blank" href="https://www.findingneema.online/afropresentism">Afropresentism</a> has been a particularly nourishing joy. </p><p>Our beautiful book, <a target="_blank" href="https://charisselouw.substack.com/p/spring-things?r=1ri2vx">Burning Down the House</a>, is available <a target="_blank" href="https://karavanpress.com/2025/08/20/karavan-press-title-burning-down-the-house-a-feminist-appraisal-of-space-edited-by-mbali-mazibuko-shakeelah-ismail-charisse-louw-ijeoma-chidi-opara-stella-viljoen/">here</a>. </p><p>Thanks to all my beloved students for their keen curiosity — it’s all for you. </p><p>The conversation is available on:🔗Apple Podcasts: <a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/safety/go/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flnkd%2Ein%2FdqXqMEq8&urlhash=A5An&mt=4ITsVEtq4TunQEll7z6jUQoDQH1Tu5uOEbk1YhVkapfiFsY_J8ol_gt6fqnH_MfaIEeTwnIRZYndDsl6riHTykq75161wzKdsTv172fpuZ0ODbe6qooYqfYT-Q&isSdui=true"><strong>https://lnkd.in/dqXqMEq8</strong></a>🔗Spotify: <a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/safety/go/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flnkd%2Ein%2FdKMVRJ_e&urlhash=LqI4&mt=_9LyP5vpCwnsm6EErVIl9V7ZHrLELBA8WVFzHFZfa-eSg5ukbPgvsai6gqCwRda-94zqjnbTr2w9RbUsyJKf2vnwiPnDBGjRNKJbDVJqSYRc5CZV_GyOLFwcNw&isSdui=true"><strong>https://lnkd.in/dKMVRJ_e</strong></a>🔗RSS Feed: <a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/safety/go/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flnkd%2Ein%2FdaVGGHA4&urlhash=gguJ&mt=T-IVTim07KlX9E5HjNFU4E-BgNu-rvny-t6DnPeEZAyjJjz_adaLMMAkQkTrQ4lok1Jh4aP8Q-wNnMYG9Vgrw5EJ9WYPvo5p1ZH9JvkDP-U8ej1xYSGri88ZgQ&isSdui=true"><strong>https://lnkd.in/daVGGHA4</strong></a></p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://charisselouw.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">charisselouw.substack.com</a>
November 30, 2025
Menopause We Didn’t Know Existed
<p>At 38, menopause arrived in my life like a crazy cyclone I didn’t yet have a name for.</p><p>I thought I was losing my mind — panic attacks, sleepless nights, wild anxiety —except none of it was ‘in my head.’ My body was speaking in a new dialect I had never been taught to understand. No one had prepared me for this particular curriculum of becoming. It was as though every fault-line in my life lit up at once, a crackling map of grief and transformation.</p><p></p><p><p>Thanks for reading Musings! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.</p></p><p>While medical professionals are trying their best and research is finally being done, they don’t really have the language for it either.</p><p>So I found my own: through endless solitary hikes, journaling, meditation, and basically cracking open over and over again. </p><p>Through rupture and revelation, a slow remembering took place… that my body is not a machine but kin.</p><p>Early menopause didn’t end me. But it definitely rewrote me. </p><p>This conversation is part confession, part guide. A way of making public what so many women endure privately. Because silence nearly cost me my life and it has cost generations of us more than we know.</p><p>Welcome to the conversation we were never invited into, but desperately need.</p><p><strong>The Silence Around Menopause is Loud</strong></p><p>We inherit silence. Our mothers whispered it; our grandmothers swallowed it. Menopause became the punchline to a joke shaped by patriarchy. It’s the moment (which isn’t a moment but a years long process) that a woman becomes less desirable, less fertile…less useful. In the biomedical gaze, menopause marks a ‘decline.’</p><p>But the truth is more complicated.And far more mystical.</p><p>Feminist new materialists like Karen Barad remind us that bodies are not fixed entities— they are intra-active, continually becoming in relation to the world. Rosi Braidotti calls midlife a ‘threshold of new subjectivity,’ a point of intense generativity. Indigenous cosmologies treat life transitions as portals, rather than failures.</p><p>Menopause is not an ending, but a crossing. </p><p>A shift in rhythm and a rearranging of the internal weather.It rewires perception, intuition, and truth.</p><p><strong>The Symptoms No One Talks About</strong></p><p>Before my cycle changed, my mind changed.</p><p>The panic was wild, anxiety feral and insomnia an endless trial.</p><p>Later I would learn these were hormonal surges — nighttime cortisol spikes, estrogen fluctuations — but at the time, it felt like an unravelling without a witness.</p><p>Research shows:</p><p>* Emotional and psychological symptoms often appear years before physical ones.</p><p>* Early menopause affects <strong>1 in 100 women globally</strong>.</p><p>* Many women are misdiagnosed with anxiety or depression for years.</p><p>* Women of colour face added layers of weathering— the cumulative impact of racism, trauma, and generational stress.</p><p>My body wasn’t betraying me.It was alerting me.</p><p>But without language, we often interpret these signals as failure instead of initiation.</p><p><strong>Myths We Must Release</strong></p><p>Here are the myths I’m burning down:</p><p><strong>Myth 1: Menopause is just hot flashes</strong></p><p>There are over 30 documented symptoms, including intense emotional, cognitive, and sensory ones.</p><p><strong>Myth 2: It only happens around 50</strong></p><p>Perimenopause often begins in your late 30s, and early menopause is real.</p><p><strong>Myth 3: Menopause = decline</strong></p><p>Anthropologist Kristen Hawkes suggests post-menopausal women were evolutionarily central to human survival. Many women feel more creative, courageous, and purposeful after the shift.</p><p>I’ve come to embrace the Crone archetype, not as a caricature of age, but as a rebellion against the capitalist anti-aging machine that feeds on our insecurities.</p><p><strong>Myth 4: Hormones tell the whole story</strong></p><p>Menopause is a biopsychosocial-spiritual transition.Trauma, race, stress, environment, ancestry… all shape the experience.</p><p><strong>Menopause as Portal</strong></p><p>Menopause forced me into a different relationship with my body ~ less control, more curiosity; less pushing, more listening; less performance, more presence.</p><p>Qigong, yoga, and mindful movement weren’t supplements to my life, they became survival strategies. Evidence-based, yes, but also deeply intuitive. The kind of knowledge our great-grandmothers would recognise.</p><p>Bayo Akomolafe writes,</p><p>‘The cracks are not where things break down, but where the world leaks through.’</p><p>Menopause cracked me open. And through the fissures came clarity, courage, and an unflinching honesty I had long postponed.</p><p><strong>What Helped (and Might Help You Too)</strong></p><p>From both research and lived experience:</p><p><strong>Movement</strong> – Qigong, yoga, walking, dancing, shaking out the stuckness<strong>Mindfulness</strong> – breathwork, sleep hygiene, slowing the nervous system<strong>Creativity</strong> – journaling, art-making, voice reclamation<strong>Community</strong> – shame-free circles, women speaking openly, daily validation<strong>Information</strong> – accurate, non-fear-based, not just HRT-centric<strong>Spiritual frameworks</strong> – rites of passage, thresholds, archetypes, ancestors</p><p>This transition asks us to stop asking,What’s wrong with me?and start asking,What is my body trying to teach me?</p><p><strong>What Women Need Most</strong></p><p>Evidence shows that community support dramatically reduces symptom burden. We need spaces without judgment, representation for younger women in menopause, alternatives for those who can’t or don’t want HRT; cultural, spiritual, and embodied interpretations; honesty, softness, and sisterhood.</p><p>The ‘good girl’ persona doesn’t survive menopause.And that’s a blessing.</p><p><strong>If Menopause Could Speak…</strong></p><p>She would say every so gently:</p><p>Slow down.Listen.Shed what no longer serves.Even if that means shedding entire personas.</p><p>You are not ending.Rather becoming… again, and again, and again.</p><p>Be humble in the face of this transformation.Be in awe of your own turning.</p><p><strong>An Invitation</strong></p><p>This is a beginning.</p><p>A way to break the inherited silence and make meaning together.Let’s hold this transition as a sacred, embodied shift,not a pathology or a decline, but a powerful re-becoming.</p><p>If you’ve moved through menopause, are moving through it, or suspect you’re standing at the threshold ~</p><p>You are not alone.Your story matters.Let’s un-silence and honour it.</p><p><p>Thanks for reading Musings! This post is public so feel free to share it.</p></p><p></p><p></p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://charisselouw.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">charisselouw.substack.com</a>
October 8, 2025
This is not a Burial
<p>This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection begins with a grave and ends with refusal.</p><p>I was invited to give this lecture by the lovely Prof Nick J Fox of the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/key-bsa-events/materiality-society-and-the-more-than-human-this-is-not-a-burial-griefwork-through-film-and-flesh-workshop/">BSA New Materialisms Study Group</a>, in collaboration with the BSA Death, Dying and Bereavement Study Group, and the Centre for Sociodigital Futures at Bristol University, with very special thanks to my fairy godmother Debbie Watson. </p><p>Let’s explore grief not as pathology, but as a methodology. A way of knowing-with the dead, the land, and the more-than-human world.</p><p><p>Thanks for reading Musings! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.</p></p><p>Through Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s haunting 2019 film, I trace how African cosmologies, New Materialisms, and somatic practice converge to form what I call a Zombie Methodology — an embodied, relational, affective response to collapse.</p><p>Mantoa, the film’s 80-year-old protagonist, prepares for death only to discover her village will be drowned by a dam. The graves of her ancestors, the umbilical cords buried in the soil, memory of kinship… all face erasure. Her grief becomes a form of governance, a refusal to let the living or the dead be dispossessed.</p><p>In Sesotho thought, seriti is the life-force, the invisible vitality that connects humans, minerals, ancestors, and soil in vibrational coexistence. As Mary Twala’s luminous performance reminds us, grief is not inert. It is a somatic relation. A threshold between body and world.</p><p>Drawing on thinkers such as Nina Lykke, Sophie Strand, and Bayo Akomolafe, I explore grief as vibrant, composting, generative. It opens the secure and the settled, inviting us to live-with ruin rather than rush toward repair.</p><p>As Akomolafe writes, “Grief is generative. She opens up things that were once bound up and secure… and therefore facilitates change.”</p><p>This lecture sits within a larger research project on African cinema, new materialisms, and Indigenous epistemologies. Together, they suggest that mourning can be a method, one that resists the “god of progress,” honours the dead as active matter, and reworlds from the ruins.</p><p>Please join the upcoming workshop (27 Oct, 4pm SAST, online). </p><p>Free but <a target="_blank" href="https://britsoc.co.uk/events/key-bsa-events/materiality-society-and-the-more-than-human-this-is-not-a-burial-griefwork-through-film-and-flesh-workshop/">registration </a>required. </p><p>If this resonated, share it or leave a reflection below. Your grief and your body is an archive. Together, we might compost something new.</p><p><p>Thanks for reading Musings! This post is public so feel free to share it.</p></p><p>PS If this tickles your fancy come along to a scintillating discussion on Afropositivism and Digital Culture at <a target="_blank" href="https://woordfees.co.za/en/program/ongehoord-digitale-kultuur-afro-optimisme/">Woordfees</a>, Thursday 16 October at 9:30am. Free, so just rock up at the lovely <a target="_blank" href="https://oudeleeskamer.org/">Oude Leeskamer</a> in Stellenbosch. </p><p>I’m also <strong>very </strong>delighted to be part of this Afro-presentist Assembly on Tuesday 28 October at 1pm… rsvp to graduateschool@sun.ac.za — </p><p>Free, online and irl … with lunch… who said there’s no such thing as a free lunch? </p><p>And let’s not forget a chance to hang out with the tremendously cool contributors of <a target="_blank" href="https://booklounge.co.za/product/burning-down-the-house/">Burning Down the House</a> at the Book Lounge Book Club on Wednesday 29 October at 5:30pm.</p><p>See you there! </p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://charisselouw.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">charisselouw.substack.com</a>
14 total episodes available
Deep-dive analytics for Musings Podcast
Frequently asked questions
Have a different question and can't find the answer you're looking for? Reach out to our support team by sending us an email and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.
- What is Musings Podcast?
- How often does this podcast release new episodes?
This podcast updates bi-weekly.
- Where can I listen to this podcast?
This podcast is available on 6 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
- Does this podcast accept guests?
Yes, this podcast regularly features guests.
Legal Disclaimer
Pod Engine is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or officially connected with any of the podcasts displayed on this platform. We operate independently as a podcast discovery and analytics service.
All podcast artwork, thumbnails, and content displayed on this page are the property of their respective owners and are protected by applicable copyright laws. This includes, but is not limited to, podcast cover art, episode artwork, show descriptions, episode titles, transcripts, audio snippets, and any other content originating from the podcast creators or their licensors.
We display this content under fair use principles and/or implied license for the purpose of podcast discovery, information, and commentary. We make no claim of ownership over any podcast content, artwork, or related materials shown on this platform. All trademarks, service marks, and trade names are the property of their respective owners.
While we strive to ensure all content usage is properly authorized, if you are a rights holder and believe your content is being used inappropriately or without proper authorization, please contact us immediately at hey@podengine.ai for prompt review and appropriate action, which may include content removal or proper attribution.
By accessing and using this platform, you acknowledge and agree to respect all applicable copyright laws and intellectual property rights of content owners. Any unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or commercial use of the content displayed on this platform is strictly prohibited.