Community
Find Your People
A holistic wellness community for women in midlife led by a Licensed Professional Counselor. Built on the belief that you shouldn't walk this season alone.
There's a version of midlife the culture sells us: decline, decoration, disappearance. Get smaller. Get quieter. Get used to it.
We're building the other version.
Muscles & Readers is a community for women navigating perimenopause, menopause, and the wider midlife reinvention that comes with them — women who refuse to white-knuckle their way through this passage alone, and who suspect there's something on the other side of it worth showing up for.
We gather in two spaces. One is free. One is for the women who are ready to go deeper. Both are honest, unhurried, and built around the conversations that aren't happening anywhere else.
Community & Courses
01 - Meet Us on The Front Porch
Start where every woman starts: in our free community. Introduce yourself, settle in, and meet other women in the same season. Read the Monthly Theme. Drop into the Weekly Open Thread when you have a minute. Show up for Porch Talk live once a month, or catch the replay. No pressure, no pitch. Just an honest first look at what this community feels like.
02 - Have a Seat in The Living Room
This is where you belong, pull up a seat and let’s connect. Step inside for our interest forums, monthly teaching themes to support you, member celebrations, weekly Q&A, and live large-group gatherings where the real conversations happen. As a paying member of Muscles & Readers, you will access to in-person meetups too. The Living Room is your everyday space to connect, learn, and be fully seen by women who understand exactly what you're navigating — led by a licensed therapist who's walking it too.
03 - Live Cohorts (Circles)
When you want to do the deeper work in a smaller circle, our live cohorts are waiting. A curriculum (think a topic you need the most: anxiety, relationships, cognitive support, self-confidence, etc.) a season, a small group of women moving through it together. This is where transformation accelerates — not because the work is harder, but because the company is close and you all are working towards the same goal.
04 - Quarterly Area Meetups & Annual Retreat
Ready to mingle, ready to meet your people? Join us for big city dinners. Paying members of Muscles & Readers can fly or drive in for a group dinner where you get to eat, connect, and have some talk time with a designated facilitator. Easy, intimate, and takes your relationships you are making online to the next level.
Circle members also have the opportunity to sign up for the annual retreat where we gather in person — somewhere restful, somewhere intentional — to do the deeper work in real life over a weekend. Honest conversation. Real rest. Movement, meals, and unhurried hours with women who get it. You leave with a softer nervous system, a fuller notebook, and a community that knew you before you walked in.
Courses/Circles
Women who want live, guided support in a small cohort of 8–10 women, focused on the topics that matter most in this season of life over 4 months. Sample topics below:
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Addressing anxiety as very real symptom in midlife. Tools to manage, support including strategies to reduce triggers, emotional regulation, with body and breath work.
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Addressing anger as very real symptom in midlife. Tools to manage, support including strategies to reduce triggers, emotional regulation, with body and breath work.
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This season also brings questions of finding one’s purpose after kids are grown or work stressors increase. We will identify and create a path for you on what is next.
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Probably one of the biggest topics in my counseling sessions with clients is the goal of trying to find their joy again. Let’s identify what’s missing and create a plan for you to immerse yourself in joy.
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We will work hard to facilitate how to love one’s body in this season. You are not broken. You will find your strength and connect it to showing up to love yourself. I will teach you how!
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I find that women are either rocking this season with a supportive tribe or they’re swinging towards the opposite direction and they are extremely lonely. Their relationship with their spouse, their kids, their friends just doesn’t feel the same. We will address this and work to empower you with tools and connection.
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Learn the power of breathwork and meditation to help you create a sense of calm, reduce triggers, lower cortisol, and maintain personal homeostasis.
Your Major Pain Points
Increased Anger/Decreased Patience?
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I Don’t Know My Body Anymore…
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Short-Term Memory is Suffering….
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I Need to Know I am not ALONE.
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Course (Circles) Includes
This 14 week live cohort is designed to help you dive deep in an intimate setting with other likeminded women that are ready for answers—they are ready for CHANGE.
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16 HOURS OF SMALL GROUP TEACHING TIME
Two meetings a month with your live cohort group over 4 months tackling the topics you need most. These are the women you will bond with and have an opportunity to meet in person at the quarterly live gathering.
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1-1 COACHING SESSION WITH DAWN
Let’s get to know you, set some goals, and make this investment the best possible experience with you.
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PRIVATE COMMUNITY GROUP
As a Circles member, you have access to all the components of the Living Room plus private, small group coaching and in-person meetups.
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DOWNLOADABLE WORKSHEETS
You will have access to downloadable worksheets to help you capture important information during the Circles session to maximize learning and reference later.
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GROUP Q&A CALLS
Get ready to have some of your burning, situational questions answered. Dawn is here to help!
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ONE MONTHLY INTENSIVE CHALLENGE
We will have a monthly theme (open to all members) where you will be challenged to take what you learn and apply. We will have space to share your efforts-your success in our WINS meetings.
About
I’m Dawn: a therapist, a married mom of three in my own perimenospousal journey. Despite that, I have stepped into my the most empowered chapter of my life. Let me show you how…
I didn't set out to build a midlife community.
I set out to be a counselor. I trained, I credentialed, I opened The Mend, and I sat across from women — wives, mothers, professionals, high achievers, exhausted everythings — and listened to them try to put words around what they were going through.
And then perimenopause came for me too.
The strange thing wasn't that it was hard. The strange thing was that we were all having the same conversation. Different women, different lives, different zip codes — and yet the same sleepless nights, the same identity quake, the same grief over a body that suddenly required a new language, the same quiet question underneath everything: Is this just how it is now?
We were living parallel lives. None of us knew it.
I started doing the work on myself the way I'd ask any client to — paying attention to my body, my mind, my faith, my relationships, my anger, my joy. I learned what worked for me. Slowly, then less slowly, something shifted. I didn't just survive my way through perimenopause. I stepped into what is now, genuinely, the most empowered season of my life.
And I thought: every woman in my practice deserves this. Every woman I'll never meet in my practice deserves this. And none of us should have to figure it out alone, in the dark, at 2 a.m., with a search bar.
Muscles & Readers is what I built so we don't have to.
It's the community I wished existed when I was Googling at 2 a.m. It's the conversation my clients were already having one chair at a time, now gathered into one room. It's the framework that worked for me, the women I trust, the resources I've vetted, and the honest, unhurried company of other women in the same season.
I'm still in it. I'm not writing to you from the other side. I'm writing to you from inside the same passage — just a few steps ahead, carrying the lantern, calling back to say the path is here, and it's better when we walk it together.