The Midst LA! September 18 with Justina Blakeney, Heidi Clements, and Mimi Ison
The Midst is a community bringing together women over 40 who play by their own rules together. As a collective, we’re in the midst of life pivots, career and relationship upgrades, building businesses, perimenopause, and other juicy stuff. Together, we’re shaping the messy middle into a time of growth, exploration, and possibility.
On September 18, women from around the U.S. will meet in Pasadena to connect with new friends, share their ideas and experiences, and learn from inspiring leaders. Many of us are professionals, creatives, parents, partners, and community builders who enjoy connecting with like-minded women. A growing number of women in The Midst community are building businesses, a second rodeo, a body of work, or life as a solopreneur or portfolio worker.
You’re invited to The Midst Los Angeles event on September 18, from 2–6 p.m.
- Justina Blakeney will join me in a conversation about how she’s grown The Jungalow from a one-person creative to an international design brand and beyond. She will also sign copies of GROW: Pathways to Passion, Purpose & Peace (available for purchase at the event).
- Heidi Clements and Mimi Ison will join Emily Wagner in a thought-provoking conversation about the modern midlife experience.
- You’re welcome to bring your business cards or promo cards! We’re setting up a display table for everyone to share info about their projects and services.
- Stay tuned for a soon-to-be-announced panel of more inspiring women founders and creators.
- $55 includes light refreshments
Heads-up! We anticipate tickets will sell out, so don’t wait until the last minute!
About Justina Blakeney
Justina Blakeney is a multidisciplinary designer, artist, and New York Times bestselling author whose work lives at the intersection of creativity, color, and culture. She’s best known as the founder of Jungalow, a pioneering lifestyle brand that began as a personal blog and blossomed into a global movement grounded in the belief that home should be a reflection of who we are: vibrant, layered, and alive.
Raised in California by a culturally blended family with roots and seeds scattered around the world, Justina’s perspective has always been expansive, drawing on nature, intuition, and pattern as tools for storytelling and self-expression. She helped crack open the design world, making space for color, culture, and personal story in a field long dominated by minimalism and sameness.
Whether she’s painting, designing, making, or writing, Justina’s creative practice is an ever-evolving multi-magical experiment. Her newest works include a body of fine artwork that explores themes of identity and regeneration and Grow: Pathways to Passion, Purpose, and Peace, a book and oracle deck co-authored with her mother, developmental psychologist Dr. Ronnie Blakeney.
Justina’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Vogue, Architectural Digest, and Elle Decor, and she was named to Architectural Digest’s AD100 list. She’s shared her insights on stages and podcasts including: SXSW, New York Times Live at Home, Unlocking Us with Brené Brown, and We Can Do Hard Things. Through her art, books, speaking engagements, social platforms (where she’s built a combined audience of over 3 million), she shares not only her vibrant aesthetic but the deeper philosophies that fuel her work: joy as resistance, nature as healer, and creativity as a vital force for both personal and planetary wellness.
She lives in Los Angeles with her husband Jason, their wildly creative kiddo Ida, two mystical, mischievous cats named Juju and Nova, and a lush indoor jungle that serves as both muse and mirror — for a life spiraling upward.
About Heidi Clements
Heidi Clements, 65, wants to change the way the world looks at women over 50. A former TV writer turned social media content creator, Heidi uses fashion and storytelling to help reframe the way people look at aging. Heidi has worked in both magazine news and entertainment news running shows like Entertainment Tonight, before moving into scripted television at 51.
After producing 100 episodes of Freeform’s Baby Daddy, Heidi decided to shift her script focus and decided to only write about women over 50. When those scripts never left her desk because no one is brave enough to make these shows she pivoted again to tiktok and Instagram to talk about the things that matter most to her — that aging is a privilege, that midlife is a new beginning and that the pursuit of happiness while crushing the patriarchy is a goal worth chasing.
About Mimi Ison, founder of Hey Middle Age
Mimi describes herself as “an amateur 63-year old and an aging person in training.” She founded Hey Middle Age as a place to ponder comfy and uncomfy midlife stuff, and along the way she added the mission to upend ageist beliefs. After all, you’re either old or future-old, she says.
In her words from her website: “I come from a positive, pro-aging perspective because let’s be real, there’s no lack of messaging that aging is gloomy and pessimistic, but in my experience growing older has been expansive. With time, I embraced the belief that age is age, not a limitation.
I’m a chatty introvert, world-class procrastinator working to release lifelong perfectionism, and a fitness junkie. Come join me on Instagram where I might motivate you to shuffle dance, box, pick up a kettlebell, or jump rope.”
About Emily Wagner, panel moderator
You’ll remember Emily from her role on ER as paramedic Doris Pickman — she’s done so much cool stuff since then.
Emily Wagner is a midlife health and wellness editor, writer, fitness trainer, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Groomed LA, where she covers wellness, fitness, aesthetics, menopause, and the realities of growing older through a smart, funny, and deeply personal lens.
For years, Emily has reported on the issues affecting women in midlife while also working directly with women as a trainer, helping them navigate changing bodies, strength, energy, confidence, and the often confusing flood of information surrounding this chapter. Her work brings together extensive editorial experience, firsthand knowledge, humor, and an understanding of what women are actually experiencing in their daily lives.
She is also the founder of Micropause, a line of daily wellness gummies made with functional mushrooms, adaptogens, and botanicals to support women through perimenopause and midlife. With products like Girls Gone Mild, So Mush Support, and All Glown Up, Micropause was one of the earliest midlife wellness brands to leave menopause beige behind and welcome women into their “Give Zero Fucks Era.”
A lifelong storyteller, Emily is currently creating Emily Is a Magnet for Miracles, a darkly funny short-form series launching on Instagram. The series explores what it means to arrive at midlife supposedly having everything figured out, only to feel completely lost, professionally invisible, and increasingly suspicious that everyone else received a script for adulthood that you somehow missed. Through comedy, it takes on reinvention, aging, online performance, self-worth, and the deeply human experience of still trying to become yourself while pretending you already know exactly who that is.
About the venue, Altadena Girls
Altadena Girls is a 501c3 charity and social movement to support teenage girls who lost their homes and belongings in the Eaton Canyon Fire. When you purchase a ticket to this Midst event, you are helping Altadena Girls provide teen girls with the essentials, emotional support, and community that they need to feel empowered, especially during times of crisis, recovery, and change.
Interested in sponsoring this event?
Email me at amy@the-midst.com for more information.
About me, your host
I’m Amy Schroeder, Founder of The Midst, a thriving community for women over 40. The Midst is part media, part community, and part entrepreneurial mastermind groups.
I’m a serial entrepreneur and founded my first business, a magazine called Venus, at 19 and sold the company before 30. I went on to lead content for Etsy, Minted, Writer AI, Unusual Ventures, and other organizations. In September 2026, I’m starting a role with Collaborative Fund.
Who’s attending The Midst LA?
Meet a handful of the ticket holders …
Mandy Wilde
Medium, astrologer (including The Midst’s astrologer!), and author of the forthcoming Oracular Mediumship
Lives in: Los Angeles, California
I feel fortunate to call the glorious city of Los Angeles home. Here, my work sits at the intersection of mediumship, astrology, and ancient devotional practice, and I hold each of these paths as sacred in a world that has turned so much into something fast and disposable.
I help people connect, in a mindful and respectful way, to spirit and to the helpful currents that move around all of us, whatever name or tradition you use to describe them. As a postmenopausal woman myself, I’ve come to see this stage of life as one of the most intuitively rich a woman can move through. I bring that lens into my work with clients navigating perimenopause and menopause of their own, trusting that the oldest paths, like the oldest texts, still hold the freshest medicine. My debut book Oracular Mediumship teaches the foundations of mediumship in an approachable and respectful way to those who are curious, whether they are just beginning or returning to a practice they’ve long felt called toward. My own work continues to live between the archive and the altar, honoring the discipline of study alongside the intimacy of the sacred.
I would love to meet: women building spiritual businesses and founders navigating their own reinvention, along with anyone exploring the sacred dimensions of midlife.
WildeMedium.com | Pre-order “Oracular Mediumship”
Regene P. Ross, MBA
Curator of Going & Seeing • Member of The Midst Founder network
Lives in: Houston, Texas and Milpitas, California
I’m an experience and community strategist whose career has taken me across healthcare, marketing, community engagement, and some of the world’s biggest events.
These days, I’m especially interested in what happens when women reach midlife and realize there’s still so much more to see, experience, create—and become. I’m building Let’s Go See, a series of curated small-group trips and experiences designed to get us off the scroll and back into the world.
I hope to meet: Women who are curious about what’s next—and interesting people who might inspire an adventure, collaboration, friendship, or idea I haven’t thought of yet.
Instagram @seennotscrolled55 and @rtimes2 • Linkedin
Sneha Villalva
Author, TEDx speaker, “Less is Not Loss”, communications consultant
Lives in: Los Angeles with my favorite (and only) husband and a steady supply of extra-dark chocolate
I’ve worked as the executive speechwriter for the UCLA chancellor and two Pomona College presidents and was previously a journalist with The Press-Enterprise in Southern California.
My book Cut to the Essence is an invitation to shed the weight of more, stop reflexively adding, and start discovering what remains when we subtract the excess and embrace what’s essential.
Who I hope to meet: Writers, readers, founders — any woman who is committed to living large — large in her purpose, large in her peace, large in her power, large in her presence. Not by having the loudest voice or the most prestigious title, but by living a life full of generosity and love.
snehav.com • Instagram @snehav_official • Read an excerpt of my book here on The Midst
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