The Golden Buddha, Walking Away From 23 Years and Starting Over at 60 with Janine Isaacs
What happens when you spend decades building a life that doesn't fit - and decide to tear it all down at 60?
There is a story about a golden Buddha. For centuries, it sat hidden inside a clay casing - protection built up layer by layer over time, each coat applied in response to fear, circumstance, and the need to survive. The gold was always there. It was just buried.
Janine Isaacs, a 61-year-old transformative life coach, uses this metaphor at the centre of everything she does - and it is no coincidence that it maps so precisely onto her own life.
Janine spent decades operating at the highest levels of medical negligence law, representing clients through some of the most devastating circumstances imaginable: brain-damaged babies, life-altering accidents, families whose entire trajectory had been permanently redirected. In her words, that work taught her humility, people skills, and above all, an unshakeable sense of gratitude. When your daily professional world involves sitting with that depth of human suffering, perspective arrives whether you want it or not.
Janine left the courtroom and moved onto a career in property alongside her partner of 23-years. It was here that Janine was building her own clay casing - in relationship that had steadily, and almost imperceptibly made her smaller. A life that looked entirely functional from the outside - and felt increasingly suffocating from within.
The Avalanche
Janine describes being in the relationship as an avalanche - not a metaphor for destruction, but for complete, disorienting chaos. When the life you have built around yourself suddenly dissolves, you don't know which way is up. You are claustrophobic, buried, and every instinct tells you to do something, anything, to dig your way out.
The Night the Walls Came In
There was one night that changed everything.
"I really felt like I was going to go to bed that night and I might not wake up," Janine tells Bethany. "Whatever happens, I am never spending another night in this house. These walls are coming in on me."
It wasn't a dramatic confrontation. There was no single catastrophic event. It was something more insidious: the gradual, cumulative weight of being told what she couldn't do, making herself small to avoid confrontation, people-pleasing her way through decades of her own life. As Janine reflects: "slowly and slowly and slowly you just lose yourself."
That night, she left. And everything that came next was both terrifying and, ultimately, the making of her.
Finding the stillness
Janine found through yoga, breathing and meditation practice - and this is the counterintuitive heart of her work - that doing is precisely the wrong response.
"Find the stillness," she says. "It's so counterintuitive. You feel like you've got to do, you've got to do, you've got to do. You don't. Stop doing, start being. Start being still. Start getting curious about who you are and what you want. You can't think your way out of this. Breathe."
For a woman who had built an entire career on intellectual precision and relentless forward motion, stillness was not instinctive. It was a skill she had to learn - and it became the foundation of everything she now teaches.
Starting Over at 60 — and Why the Timing Is No Coincidence
At an age when society sends women very clear messages about fading into the background, Janine retrained, started a business, and stepped into one of the most visible and vulnerable roles imaginable: coaching other women through the exact kind of collapse she had just survived herself.
She is candid about her initial fears. Looking around at training cohorts full of people younger than her. Thinking: they're faster. Their brains aren't carrying all of this. But here is what Janine has come to understand - and what she offers back to the women she works with - her years are not a disadvantage. They are a qualification.
Every difficult case she sat with as a lawyer. Every conversation with a builder. Every year she navigated the complexity of high-stakes legal or property development work. Every layer of clay she built up, and then chose to dismantle. All of it feeds directly into the quality of the space she now holds for others.
"Slow down, you move too fast," she reflects - a line she returns to again and again. "I am so much more productive if I've had a slow start to my morning. I've got to be calm, I've got to be clear, I've got to be centred, grounded, balanced." It's the kind of hard-won wisdom that can't be learned from a textbook. It comes only from having lived through the alternative.
Finding the Gold
Janine's philosophy rests on one simple but profound premise: underneath every layer of fear, people-pleasing, and self-erasure, there is gold. Her job is to help women find it.
"By overcoming adversity and facing fears, the only way that you can do that is dig through the fears and find the gold that's underneath. And the gold that is underneath is love."
In her own life, that gold has taken the form of a business she built from the ground up in her seventh decade. A clearer, more grounded sense of who she actually is. And the deep, earned confidence that comes not from having avoided difficulty - but from having walked directly through it.
For anyone who has ever felt the walls of a life closing in. For anyone who has mistaken the clay for the self. For anyone who has been told - by a relationship, by society, or by the voice inside their own head - that now is not the right time.
Janine Isaacs's story is a reminder that the gold was always there. You just have to be willing to dig.
Listen to the Full Conversation with Janine Isaacs on Notes from The Not There Yet Project
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