Afleveringen
-
What do you do when you’ve discovered the incredible power of menstrual cycle awareness, and you’re keen to share it with your loved ones, colleagues and community, but whenever you try to talk about it, you receive reactions that range from disinterest to disgust?
The historical roots of menstrual shame in a patriarchal society, and the compassionate, smart ways that Jane overcomes it in her educational work.
The truth is that menstrual shame is real, it is pervasive and overcoming it is a key part of restoring the power, beauty and magic of the menstrual cycle at the heart of our world. Luckily we are standing on the shoulders of giants here, like the menstrual trailblazer, Jane Bennett, who has been busting through the menstrual taboo for 40 years.
Jane Bennett is social worker, researcher, writer and educator as well as the founder of the Chalice Foundation. In our first Menstruality podcast episode with Jane, we explored how to navigate create a positive menstrual culture, and what she learned from gathering the stories of over 3000 women and girls about current attitudes to the menstrual cycle to write her book About Bloody Time: The Menstrual Revolution We Have to Have.
Today, we explore:
How Jane works with Brene Brown’s guidance around cultivating shame resilience, and the importance of loving presence and curiosity in the face of menstrual shame.
Jane’s top tips for how to support your loved ones to have an aha moment about the menstrual cycle so they can get onside and support you with your menstrual cycle awareness practice.---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @red.school (https://www.instagram.com/red.school)
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Jane Bennett: @chalicefoundation (https://www.instagram.com/chalicefoundation) -
Menstrual Cycle Awareness gives us a direct line to our deep selves, to what we’re here for and what we most deeply love.
As Alexandra and Sjanie say in Wild Power: “The journey to realizing your Calling, or purpose, is made possible by the process of initiation, which is encoded in your menstrual cycle. Initiatory change happens through the archetypal pattern of death and rebirth – which is exactly what we experience each month at Menstruation.”
Today’s conversation feels like a wild safari into the messy day-to-day reality of how the menstrual cycle helps us to live our Callings, with a woman who knows a thing or two about archetypal patterns.
Grace Winteringham is the co-founder of Patternity, a conscious Creative Organisation dedicated to sharing the positive power of pattern with the world. Along with her co-founder Anna Murray, she was named one of Evening Standard’s 1000 most influential people. She’s also a graduate of the Red School Menstruality Leadership Programme, and is currently immersed in a process of accelerated transformation as she navigates her own quest to follow her calling.
Grace’s journey from premenstrual rage and depression to feeling most at home in her inner autumn.
We explore:
The menstrual cycle as the fundamental pattern we live by.
How cycle awareness holds us through the natural process of the ebb and flow as we ‘learn to live by our own code’, and Grace’s story of navigating a confronting sense of deep uncertainty when she stepped back from Patternity after a recent experience of burnout.---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Grace Winteringham @grace_winteringham - https://www.instagram.com/grace_winteringham -
Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
-
Have you ever had to show up in a big way on day one of your cycle and felt exposed, then - like me - totally exhausted afterwards? Today we’re exploring how menstrual cycle awareness can help you step up when you’re on your period; whether you have to do a big presentation at work, a speech at your best friend’s wedding, host a PTA meeting, or be visible in another way.
A few days before we recorded this, Alexandra and Sjanie presented a menopause workshop at a festival, and Sjanie’s menstrual cycle set it up perfectly so that she would start her bleed late, on day 29, on that very morning.
We explore:
How Sjanie prepared for the event beforehand by creating space, calling in support and recognising the power of the creative and pre-bleed void.
The pre-bleed, void superpowers that Sjanie channelled; including heightened intuition, trusting emergence, being in the unknown,
The one thing that Alexandra and Sjanie prioritise more than anything else, in all their creative work.---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy -
Are you (or your friends or the people you work with) struggling with menstrual health challenges like irregular cycles, spotting or heavy bleeding, menstrual pain, PCOS and intense mood changes in the premenstrual phase? Would you love to understand how you could work with food and dietary shifts to create menstrual health?
Our guest today is Lisa Hendrickson-Jack, the author of The Fifth Vital Sign, and teaches women’s health professionals to use the menstrual cycle as a vital sign in their practices, so they can empower their clients to optimize their hormones, menstrual cycles.
She is the co-author of Real Food for Fertility with Lily Nichols, which contains a wealth of information about how food can support cycle health and in today’s conversation Lisa shares her top tips for healing menstrual health challenges.
The dietary changes helped Lisa heal her period pain from fibroids, including a simple switch with her dairy consumption, reducing inflammatory foods and increasing green leafy vegetables.
We explore:
Why balancing our macronutrients (protein, fat and carbohydrates) is key to hormonal health, and how the calorie counting, breakfast-skipping culture hasn’t done any of us any favours.
The foods to include, eat more of, or go easy on if you’re experiencing intense mood changes in the premenstrual phase (hint: a real game changer for PMS is ensuring you’re having enough protein).---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Lisa Hendrickson Jack: @fertilityfriday - https://www.instagram.com/fertilityfriday -
Have you ever noticed that your intuitive sense of knowing is heightened when you are premenstrual? Today we’re exploring the radical honesty that can be invoked in inner autumn, asking the question: what if our unadulterated, fierce, premenstrual truth speaking is actually exactly the medicine our world needs at this time?
My guest is Maya Luna, an artist, channel and creator of The Venus Path™, a modern adaptation of an ancient Fertility Goddess Spiritual Path that works with Sensuality, The Body, The Deep Heart, Passionate Energy and the Incarnate Human Experience.
Today she shares how she navigates what she calls the 'dark goddess truth serum' that pulses through her in her premenstrual phase, and how she is learning to skillfully and artfully share it in the world.
We explore:
How we can feel truth or untruth in our bodies and somehow “smell dishonesty” when we’re in premenstrual truth-telling mode.
The 40s as the inner autumn of our menstruating years, where our premenstrual powers can come online even more, and how the world can react when women stop playing nice and being “good girls” and start bringing the power of our sacred truth in this life phase
The toxic femininity we see in our culture and ourselves today; the fawning, people pleasing, being a doormat, not speaking up, letting people use and abuse us, and how our premenstrual capacity to see through bullshit is a powerful antidote.---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Maya Luna: @thevenuspath - https://www.instagram.com/thevenuspath -
Today we’re exploring Black cyclical wisdom through the lens of the life story of an extraordinary woman who left a profound legacy of cyclical heart and body intelligence, with Dr Cre Dye, who serves as the Menstruality Justice and Inclusion Educator at Red School.
Dr. Cre has served her local, national, and international communities with heart, mind and body activism for over 25 years as a mental health therapist, yoga teacher/trainer and university professor.
This is part two of a series of conversations with Cre about the cyclical wisdom she received from her Grandmothers. In episode 138: Indigenous Cycle Wisdom and Menstrual Rituals, we heard the story of Cre’s first nations Granny, and today we’re hearing what she received from Mama, her Black grandmother.
We hear how Mama grew up picking cotton in Mississippi, was widowed young, then left an abusive relationship and travelled alone in the 1960s with her eight children all the way to Missouri, to go on to foster over 60 children and become a force of love in her community. And how, through every single moment of adversity she faced as a Black woman, she found her way to claim rest, rise up and embody hope in the face of hate.
Menstrual Cycle Awareness as the “sacred study of me”, how we are all sacred texts, and our cyclical wisdom is the words on the page.
We explore:
What Cre learned from her interviews series with Black women and their menstrual cycles, about how we can all reclaim the cyclical wisdom that we’ve known all along.
The ongoing medical racism that Black women and Women of Colour face, including the myth that Black women have higher pain thresholds, why Black women are two to three times more likely to develop fibroids, and 50% less likely to be diagnosed with endometriosis than white women, and what we can all do about it.---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Dr Cre Dye: @credyeyoga - https://www.instagram.com/credyeyoga -
How do you feel about inner summer, or the ovulatory phase of the cycle? For many in our community, it’s the easiest and most joyful part of the cycle, but many also find it to be challenging and confronting.
Today Alexandra and Sjnaie respond to your questions about inner summer and ovulation, including; how to approach physical symptoms around ovulation, such as headaches / migraines, acne and nausea, how to stay grounded and focused amidst the big energy of ovulation and why you should never put your inner summer self in charge of your schedule!
We explore:
How to know when you’re in inner summer, how long ‘should’ it last (and why there are no shoulds when it comes to cycle tracking).
The connection between rest at menstruation and fulfillment at ovulation, and how inner winter restedness unlocks inner summer powers.
How to manage a sense of disconnection from yourself in inner summer, particularly if you’re doing a lot of caring roles or mothering in your life.---
Receive Red School's free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy -
For a decade, our guest, birth doula, menstrual coach Jules Alma has been mapping her Yoni. It’s soothed and regulated her nervous system, healed her pain during sex and brings her back to her centre. She even uses it after she has attended a birth to regulate after all the beauty and intensity of the experience.
Yoni is the sanskrit word referring to our vaginas and vulvas, and in our conversation we track the history of the practice of yoni mapping, from Taoism in ancient China, to Tantra in ancient India to modern day pelvic physiotherapy.
Jules explains how healing it can be, on all levels, to create an intimate relationship with this part of our bodies and live what Jules calls a 'yoni-led' life.She’s also a graduate of the Red School Menstruality Leadership Programme and it was wonderful to hear how the course has supported her to live into her calling to guide women to find healing and joy through the way they bleed, birth, pleasure, and nourish their bodies.
We explore:
The shame, trauma and collective wounding that prevents many of us from cultivating a relationship with our vulvas and vaginas, and the powerful healing that can take place when we reconnect to this sacred part of our bodies.
How Jules was at war with her body and her yoni for years, blowing past boundaries, experiencing health symptoms and feeling pain during sex, before she began to reclaim her rites of passage as a woman, and learned how to map her yoni.
A step-by-step guide to beginning your own yoni mapping practice, as well as how Jules used the practice to soothe menstrual cramps.---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Jules Alma: @jules____alma - https://www.instagram.com/jules____alma -
As you may know, we often talk about the amazing powers available to us when we’re able to rest at menstruation. But in a world that likes to see us active 24/7, how do we create the time and space to truly fulfill this glorious potential?
Well, Alexandra and Sjanie have a remedy they call The Big Bleed. Essentially, this means giving yourself a one-off ultimate menstrual experience. Because this is likely to blow your socks off, leaving you full of revelations, and inspiration to plan another Big Bleed as soon as possible.
How to do a Big Bleed retreat; where to do it, what to bring, and what to do (hint: nothing!) as well as how to manage the challenges that can come up when we try to carve out pockets for deep rest.
We explore:
Sjanie’s recent magical Big Bleed experience; how she managed to pull it off, what she discovered about herself and her leadership, and why it mattered that every time she checked the clock it said 11.11.
How Alexandra and Sjanie do a creative Big Bleed ritual retreat for Red School twice a year, in August and December, to allow the organisation to have an inner winter, and receive visions for the months to come.
---Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy -
How can you practice cycle awareness in your relationship? We get asked this question all the time, so we’re especially grateful to our guests today, Lucy Peach and Richard Berney for being willing to invite us right into the heart of their cycle-aware relationship.
The strategies Lucy and Richard use to honour Lucy’s cyclical rhythm in their relationship, from practical details like how they use a shared google calendar to how they both work with the same acupuncturist, to how they’re navigating a long fertility journey.
Lucy Peach is a period preacher, author, and folksinger. She’s a graduate of our Menstruality Leadership Programme, the author of Period Queen, and a long-time champion of the power of the menstrual cycle. Her theatre show, My Greatest Period Ever has educated and empowered thousands of people to shift the period narrative in our culture from one of shame to one of pride.
Her husband Richard Berney is a creative director and co-performer in the show alongside Lucy, with his amazing live illustration. They were just about to begin a 25 show run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival when they sat down with me to speak about the joys and challenges of practicing cycle awareness in their relationship.
We explore:
How Richard embraced Lucy’s menstrual cycle awareness practice as a new language - like a weather forecast! - that has helped him to get more perspective during tough moments between them.
How they collaborated to create My Greatest Period Ever - Lucy’s award-winning theatre show.---
Registration is open for our 2025 Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can check it out here: https://www.redschool.net/menstruality-leadership-programme
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Lucy Peach: @lucyspeaches - https://www.instagram.com/lucyspeaches -
24% of women and people who bleed in the UK suffer from chronic pelvic pain, it’s 1 in 5 in Australia where our guest today, gynecologist Dr Peta Wright lives and works.
Dr Peta wrote her book Healing Pelvic Pain: transforming the trauma of period pain, endometriosis and chronic pelvic distress to explore a wide range of treatments which often aren’t prescribed, including lifestyle changes, stress management and particularly therapeutic work focused on locating trauma in the body.
Because, over years of extensive research and working with women and menstruators with pelvic pain, she she’s seen a huge correlation between nervous system dysregulation, early childhood trauma, chronic stress and chronic pain.
She says, “as I began to see more and more women through this more holistic lens, I realised that time, care and love were just as important as drugs, surgery and physiotherapy - if not more so. This is, in essence, the first part of establishing safety and stability for the traumatised nervous system - which nearly every patient with chronic pain has".We explore:
A brief history of period and pelvic pain - from ancient female healers like Hildegard von Bingen and the wise women of Egypt, and how the mind-body dualism birthed with Descarte's “I think therefore I am” philosophy impacts the way we understand pelvic pain today. (Including modern medical racism where Black women’s pain is regularly dismissed).
How the nervous system acts as a mind-body bridge in the healing process. As Dr Peta says “your pelvic pain is not simply the result of a lesion or all in your head. We need to learn to listen and uncover the missing pieces that live in the space between mind and body”.
The research that documents the connection between pelvic pain and trauma, starting with the famous ACEs study from the 1990s, all the way to the latest cutting edge science including polyvagal theory and how our perception of danger effects how we experience pain (as well as every other system in our bodies).---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Dr Peta Wright: @verawellness.com.au - https://www.instagram.com/verawellness.com.au -
For many of us, the inner autumn can be a provocative, messy and painful part of the menstrual cycle, where old traumas and wounds can surface, and for some this becomes deeply debilitating and disruptive.
PMDD as a signal of our power awakening.
Our guest today, Menstrual Cycle Support founder Kate Shepherd Cohen, shares generously about her personal experience of PMDD (Pre-Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder) and how menstrual cycle awareness gave her the skills to manage the fear, rage and meaninglessness that can arise in the premenstruum, so she could find the power within them.
This is part-two of my conversation with Kate who is a graduate of our Menstruality Leadership Programme and the founder of a ground-breaking programme which is bringing menstrual cycle awareness to thousands of people on social prescription via the NHS.
We explore:
Approaches to support ourselves through challenging premenstrual times, including how rest at menstruation is key to accessing our premenstrual power and the importance of practicing the art of ‘holding the tension’.
How Kate redirected her rage into her calling to change the world and end the injustice of menstrual suffering for all (and the interesting nudges she is receiving from her calling these days).---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Kate Shepherd Cohen: @menstrualcyclesupport - https://www.instagram.com/menstrualcyclesupport/ -
Speaking about the menstrual cycle and menopause is becoming less and less taboo. You can see it everywhere you look; Instagram is wonderfully full of women teaching cycle tracking for health and fertility. Our recent podcast guest Dr Lara Owen is busy co-creating international menstrual and workplace policies. You can buy menstrual cups in supermarkets. This podcast has been listened to 246,235 times!
Menstrual cycle and menopause career possibilities including menstrual cycle coaching, doctors and psychotherapists specialising in all aspects of cycle health, people helping tweens with their first periods, creating cycle-aware products like journals and self care tools, as well as menstrually inspired authors, artists and activists.
And this surge in the menstruality movement is ushering in a whole new wave of career possibilities for those of us who feel drawn to the power and wisdom of menstrual cycle. In today’s podcast we explore many of them, through the lens of some of our Menstruality Leadership Programme graduates and the brilliant careers they have gone on to create.
The doors for our 2025 MLP have just opened, and we’d love to have you with us for this - world’s first - leadership training rooted in menstruality. You can find out more at www.menstrualityleadership.com.
We explore:
Some of the myriad ways that our graduates infuse menstruality into their existing careers, including; in business, crafting, Yoga, school teaching and even sailing.
How menstruality can also inform the often invisible and (frustratingly) unpaid caring, earth-ending and energetic work that so many of us do, which weaves this world together.---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy -
Today we’re delighted to welcome one of the original menstruality trailblazers, Dr Lara Owen back to the podcast. We’re exploring a topic which comes up regularly in the Red School community - how to practice menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause at work, and how to create workplaces which honour our cyclical needs, particularly during menstruation and menopause.
How the Covid pandemic - and the normalisation of working from home - ushered in the exciting new British Standards Institute Menstrual and Menopause workplace policy - a 40 page document with guidelines for employers and management for how to accommodate the menstrual cycle and menopause in the workplace.
Dr. Lara Owen is recognised internationally for her pioneering and continuing work on menstruation. She is the author of the ground-breaking book, Her Blood Is Gold, holds a PhD in menstrual organization, and is a founding member of the Menstruation Research Network (UK).
As we explore today, she recently helped to birth the new British Standards Institute Menstrual and Menopause workplace policies which are going to have a huge impact, and will soon be rolled out internationally.
Her new book, Reorganising Menstruation explores what happens when menstrual stigma starts to be disrupted in a mainstream way, and I left this conversation feeling so much hope for the truly cycle-aware world that is on it’s way - I hope you inspires you too.
We explore:
How menstrual cycle awareness can become a way to optimise or ‘hack’ our energy in the workplace and the importance of asking ourselves if we’re unconsciously supporting commodified materialistic worldview or helping to create a world where we can menstruate in the way we want to at work.
The power of ‘post-menopause zest’ at work.---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Lara Owen: @drlaraowen - https://www.instagram.com/drlaraowen -
In February 2016 our guest today, author and teacher Sara Avant Stover was coming out of a season of intense creativity and output and was preparing to enter into a cycle of rest and recovery, when one evening she received shattering news. Her former fiance came home one evening and confessed that he had been cheating on her, with many people, for many years.
This turned out to be the first of many serial heartbreaks that Sara experienced over the coming five years. Ironically she had just published a book about the heroine’s journey, which described the necessity of cycles of death and rebirth when we enter the underworld, just as she was personally thrown into this great descent.
Sara’s work integrates Buddhism, embodiment, and psychology and has uplifted the lives of countless women worldwide. She has transmuted her heartbreak into her new book, Handbook for the Heartbroken: A Woman's Path from Devastation to Rebirth, which we explore today.
Sara’s heartbreak stories; including abortion, relationship breakdown and a financial crash and how they have prepared her for what we have experienced collectively over the past four years, and particularly the pandemic.
We explore:
The core action that Sara took to heal from the gas-lighting experience of long-term infidelity.
Guidance for you if you’re currently negotiating heartbreak, or are still healing heartbreaks of the past.---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Sara Avant Stover: @saraavantstover - https://www.instagram.com/saraavantstover/ -
As with your early years of cycling, your later years of cycling are a transitional time.
Your 20s and 30s are all about discovering your rhythm and firming up your sense of self. But from your 40s onwards, the focus begins to shift. Subtly, you start to feel that you're stepping up to a bigger game. It's as though the clock on your life is now ticking. That's why Alexandra and Sjanie call this life phase "the Quickening".
You may start to find that your inner autumn, premenstrual energies seem to dominate more of your whole cycle experience, and as challenging as this may feel, something powerful is being worked within you.
That’s exactly what we’re talking about today - the inner autumn powers that wake up in your 40s and the potent self care practice that helps you to channel them into your life.
How to hold ourselves when the anesthetic wears off in our 40s (just like in the premenstruum), so that we can invite in greater depth and self-responsibility.
We explore:
How the inner autumn in the cycle and our lives calls us home to our natural authority and power
Why the practice of ‘gearing down’ is vital in the Quickening and how to do it in a world which wants to keep us hustling.---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy -
Do you catch yourself measuring your worth by how much you do, and how much what you do benefits others? If you do, you’re not alone. And, as our guest today, Tamu Thomas, says - it’s not your fault.
In her groundbreaking new book, Women Who Work Too Much: Break Free from Toxic Productivity, Tamu challenges the societal norms that glorify relentless productivity and burnout, shedding light on the systemic, emotional and psychological factors that keep women trapped in a never-ending cycle of productivity.
In our conversation today, she shares practical strategies for liberation, centering cycle awareness as a way to resist the drive to do-do-do, and instead reclaim and honour our natural rhythms.
How cycle awareness has enabled Tamu to find freedom from her inner critic (whilst allowing her to channel the power of her premenstrual analysis to offer critique of the systems that oppress us).
We explore:
What Tamu learned from her Auntie Aminatta, a Sierra Leonian international business woman about how to create a life where - as Tracee Ellis Ross says - “my life is mine”.
The profound spiritual, primal breakdown and breakthrough that happened in 2017, when Tamu’s body reclaimed her energy back from what she calls the ‘oppressive trinity’ of white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism.---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Tamu Thomas: @tamu.thomas - https://www.instagram.com/tamu.thomas -
Is there a particular point of your menstrual (or lunar) cycle where you tend to fall into a metaphorical ‘hole’? For many it’s day 5/6, coming out of the bleed or day 19/20 as you transition to inner autumn.
These are two of the four ‘crossover days’ of the cycle. We like to think of these days as mini gaps in the fabric of life, or the ground giving way under you.
Whatever metaphor works for you - and in this week’s podcast episode we laughed ourselves silly coming up with at least 20 metaphors - your crossover days are a little-known key to bringing the powers of the inner seasons of your menstrual cycle - or the lunar cycle if that’s how you track - to life.
Today we go one by one, exploring today’s the gifts and challenges of each of the four crossovers, through the lens of your stories and questions.
(A note for you, if you have irregular cycles and you find it hard to track your inner seasons, let alone the transitions between them, you’re not alone, and Sjanie speaks beautifully about how to work with this cycle awareness challenge.)
We explore:
- How to hold the power of your menstrual insights as you crossover from inner winter into the rising energy of inner spring.
- The one crucial task for you to do as you move into your ovulatory energy in inner summer to ensure you don’t spin off out of orbit and get frazzled by the heady heights of the metaphorical sunlight!
- How slowing down and taking time for self-recognition and celebration as you enter the premenstrual phase of your cycle in inner autumn prepare you to meet your critic.
---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy -
Many of us in the Red School community have an intuitive longing to connect to the wild Feminine within us. As our guest today Michaela Boehm says in her book, The Wild Woman’s Way, we’re longing to connect to “the ancient part of us that knows the rising of the moon, and the movement of the tides. The instinctual, deeply connected aspects in each of us that has survived and thrived in the wilderness for many 1000s of years”.
The story of Michaela’s childhood longing to become a witch, her early years apprenticing with her mentor, and how she eventually became the holder of an ancient, female held, tantric lineage.
Today we’re exploring how to rewild ourselves, how to come back to body and pleasure, and how to move from doing to being, amidst the challenges of modern life. Our guide is the wise and wonderful Michaela who is known for her work with high-performing individuals, including Oscar-winning actors, and Grammy-winning musicians.
She’s the founder of The Non-Linear Movement Method®, a powerful somatic release modality. Her work has recently been featured in Gwyneth Paltrow’s Netflix Show “Sex, Love & goop” and Will Smith’s bestselling memoir ‘Will’.
We explore:
Why we need to be able to access both our ‘Go’ mode and ‘Flow’ mode as women living in our modern world.
The embodiment practices that enable Michaela to live a huge, wildly creative life without burning out.
---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Michaela Boehm: @micboehm77 - https://www.instagram.com/micboehm77 -
Today we’re talking about power, and it’s a word that comes up a lot at Red School. It features in both of Alexandra and Sjanie’s book titles, as well as the title of our new course coming up in June - Cycle Power. But what exactly do we mean by power?
Alexandra’s lifelong fascination with power, her current experience of power as an elder who has lived a lifetime of cycle-awareness, and her current power-edge; undefendedness.
In our conversation, we explore how Alexandra and Sjanie define and understand power, why so many of us feel scared, confused or suspicious about power, and how the menstrual cycle wakes us up to our power.
So, if you’re longing to feel more agency and power in your life, if you notice yourself suppressing your power, and if you’re curious how menstrual cycle awareness can help you to claim your power and live it, this one is for you.
We explore:
Vulnerability as a gateway to healthy expressions of power; it allows us to feel, to know ourselves, to empathise and to move towards ‘power with’ rather than ‘power over’.
The importance of acknowledging and claiming the power that we do have, exactly where we are, and how the practice of menstrual cycle awareness helps us to notice and lean into this innate power.---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy - Laat meer zien
