The Menstruality Podcast (Red School)

What if we already know what will help us through menopause? What if it’s the self care we overlook, or don’t do enough off? What if we don’t need an expert to give us a top ten list to surviving menopause? 

Instead of perpetuating the myth that we need to give our power to an outside authority in order to feel better, Kate Codrington, author of Second Spring: A Self Care Guide to Menopause wants to place the power firmly back in our hands as we enter the often disorientating, challenging menopause journey. 

In this liberating, culture-shifting conversation, we explore:

• What is our Second Spring? Who are we after menopause? And how can we harness the wisdom we’ve gained from previous cycles and transitions to navigate this shift?
  
  
• How menopause asks us, very intensely, to come into relationship with ourselves and keeps at us until we begin a more subtle kind self care that happens in small moments.
  
  
• Why we deeply need to re-write the menopause narrative, and colour in the vibrant, creative life that happens in our Second Spring. 

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Registration is open for our 2022 Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can check it out here. https://www.redschool.net/menstruality-leadership-programme-2022

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @red.school - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Kate Codrington: @kate.codrington - https://www.instagram.com/kate.codrington

What is the connection between your menstrual cycle and your purpose in life? Today we’re talking about the hidden agenda within the menstrual cycle. Each cycle month - if we’re paying attention - our cycles are bringing each of us home to our uniqueness, to our genius, to a life full of meaning.

In this episode, Alexandra and Sjanie, the founders of Red School, and authors of Wild Power, explore:

• What is our Calling? How can we recognise it? And how does our menstrual cycle awareness practice help us to cultivate an intimacy with it, track it and learn how to embody it?
  
  
• How the different phases of our life help us embody and realise our Calling, our ‘Wild Power’: starting with our first bleed at menarche, through our fertile years, and culminating at the great initiation of menopause.
  
  
• How to ‘dock in’ to your Calling at menstruation, receive guidance about your next best steps and get clear about how to make them manifest in the world. 

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Registration is open for our 2022 Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can check it out here: https://www.redschool.net/menstruality-leadership-programme-2022

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @red.school - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

In this episode, Red School founders Alexandra and Sjanie get real, honest and vulnerable about the inner critic: what it is, how it shows up, its deeper purpose, and how to handle this challenging force in our lives. 

Learning how to manage and harness the power of the inner critic is almost always a real game-changer for our Menstruality Leadership Programme participants. This powerful, inevitable character has the potential to paralyse us into inaction, whilst also being a key catalyst for profound growth and transformation… if we know how to negotiate it. 

And the good news is we’ve got the menstrual cycle on our side here. A key teaching we share today is how to restore your critic to its natural home - the pre menstruum, so you can get in on your side, receive it’s feedback and use it to live your calling.

In the episode we explore:

• What is the inner critic? How do we know when it has turned up? (ie: Unease, thoughts speeding up, clenched jaw, procrastination, addictive habits etc). And how can we track the inner critic through our body, thoughts and feeling state?
  
  
• Guidelines for handling your inner critic, such as; naming it when it shows up, taking your own side, using humour as an antidote, and importantly, seeking professional help where needed. 
  
  
• How the critic shows up in menopause - the winter of our soul’s journey. 
  
  
• Our upcoming Inner Critic online workshop on Monday 14th March. You can find out more and take your seat at redschool.net/podcast/critic

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Get your Inner Critic playlist! It's here -  in the shownotes: https://redschool.net/podcast/critic

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Registration is open for our 2022 Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can check it out here: https://www.redschool.net/menstruality-leadership-programme-2022

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

Infertility can be heart-breaking, anxiety-inducing and full of grief. Research has shown that people experiencing infertility have the same levels of anxiety and depression as those with cancer, heart disease and HIV. In this episode, Fertility coach Jennifer Robertson offers solace and guidance drawn from her own seven-year journey to motherhood. 

This one's for you if you’re looking for support, inspiration and friendship as you navigate infertility yourself, or if you’re working with people experiencing infertility, or since 1 in 6 people experience fertility challenges, if you’d like to play a supportive role for friends or family.

We explore:

• Jennifer’s seven-year journey to create her family; through the infertility rollercoaster, multiple rounds of IVF, miscarriage, a long and challenging surrogacy process, and finally, an unexpected, natural pregnancy.
  
  
• How each phase of the menstrual cycle presents different challenges on the journey through infertility, as well as different powers that can soothe and support us as we ride the rollercoaster.
  
  
• How to navigate baby-making sex, manage pre-menstrual rage at the unfairness of intertility, and support ourselves through the profound grief we may feel each month when we bleed. 

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Registration is open for our 2022 Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can check it out here. https://www.redschool.net/menstruality-leadership-programme-2022

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @red.school - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Jennifer Robertson: @msjenniferrobertson - https://www.instagram.com/msjenniferrobertson

Menopause is often portrayed as a disaster waiting to happen. Omisade Burney-Scott is a leading voice in the movement to change the conversation about menopause, as a powerful initiatory phase of life.

Omisade is the creator of the Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause, a multimedia project seeking to curate and share the stories and realities of Black women and femmes over 50. 

In today’s conversation, she discusses the menopause ‘remedies’ she’s learned through creating the guide; including the medicine of self-forgiveness, vision, self-acceptance, and living your passion.

We explore:

• How our identities can shift during menopause and how to navigate the shape-shifting process of our bodies, minds and souls. Omisade talks about how her depression in menopause was “her body trying to save her life”. 
  
  
• The power of taking a creative, menopause sabbatical to rest and renew your spirit. 
  
  
• How to include all people in the movement to normalise menopause, so we don’t engage in erasure and marginalisation, particularly for the LGBTQ+ community. 

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Registration is open for our 2022 Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can check it out here: https://www.redschool.net/menstruality-leadership-programme-2022---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:

Red School: @red.school - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Omisade Burney-Scott: @oshunsweetnsour - https://www.instagram.com/oshunsweetnsour

It’s incredible to witness the stigma around menstruation shifting in our world, with period policies in workplaces and more and more people practising menstrual cycle awareness. 

This de-shaming of the cycle, and especially our bleed, is opening up a gateway for an appreciation of the power of menstruation. 

In this episode, Alexandra and Sjanie share stories, insight and teachings drawn from their map of the five chambers of menstruation, which are a powerful guidebook for people wanting to access and discover and embody the power of our periods.

We explore:

• What gets in the way of us experiencing the ‘inner temple of menstruation’, and how can we support ourselves to manage life’s challenges so we can experience the power of our bleed.
  
  
• How to follow the clues our body gives us, and slow down in the pre-menstruum and prepare ourselves to receive the power of menstruation.
  
  
• Why it’s important to focus on receiving and surrender in menstruation, rather than taking action on your insights right there and then. 

You can read the shownotes here: https://redschool.net/podcast/28

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Registration is open for our 2022 Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can check it out here: https://www.redschool.net/menstruality-leadership-programme-2022

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

At the start of 2022, we invited you all to join us for a Year of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to enhance your vitality, creativity and leadership.

To inspire you on your journey, today we're sharing this story from Fertility Awareness Coach and Menstruality Leadership Programme graduate, Louise Ryder about how a year of menstrual cycle awareness transformed her love life, her work life... her ENTIRE life. 

This is a deeply personal episode and we're grateful to Louise for sharing so openly about her relationship breakdown, how her cycle awareness supported her grief journey, and how she came to understand her Calling - to bring cycle awareness into the workplace, globally. 

We explore:

- How to follow the instinctive nudges you receive from your cycle tracking to make big decisions in your life, even if they clash with your logical, rational mind. 

- How menstrual cycle awareness can support you to navigate periods of deep grief, and trust in a better future to come. 

- How a steady practice of menstrual cycle awareness cultivates a deep trust in ourselves, our knowing, our instincts and our purpose. 

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The doors for for our 2022 Menstruality Leadership Programme close on March 31st. You can check it out here. https://www.redschool.net/menstruality-leadership-programme-2022

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @red.school (https://www.instagram.com/red.school)

Period poverty has a huge impact on women, girls and people who menstruate all over the world. Too many people don’t have access to menstrual products, safe, hygienic spaces in which to use them. This isn’t just a potential health risk - it can also affect their education, well-being, and sometimes their entire lives.

One in 10 girls in Africa miss school because they don’t have access to menstrual products, or because there aren’t safe, private toilets to use at school. In India, approximately 12 percent of its 355 million menstruating people cannot afford menstrual products. In the US 23% of college students can’t afford to buy period products. 

Thankfully, brilliant, passionate people like Chelsea Von Chaz, the founder of Happy Period are working to end period Poverty. Happy Periods distributes free period products to support 100,000 periods a year, through over 40 cities in the US. 

We explore:

• Why period products should be provided for free in all public bathrooms, just like toilet paper or soap, and especially in schools.
  
  
• The long term effects of period poverty for women, girls and people with periods, and how this is amplified for Black, Indigenous and People of Colour as well as other marginalised people such as the LGBTQ+ community. 
  
  
• How we can all contribute to the movement to end period poverty and create menstrual equity, through education, improving access to period products, and advocacy for marginalised groups in need. 

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Registration is open for our 2022 Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can check it out here. https://www.redschool.net/menstruality-leadership-programme-2022

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:

Red School: @red.school - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Chelsea Von Chaz: @chelseavonchaz - https://www.instagram.com/chelseavonchaz/
Happy Period: @wearehappyperiod - https://www.instagram.com/wearehappyperiod

Ruby May, the founder of Know Your Flow is an earth-lover,  a truth-seeker, an edge-dweller and a mischief-maker passionate about how we can each midwife a culture of deeper connection – to our bodies, each other and our planet through menstrual cycle awareness.

She writes: "We’re tired of living in a culture in which our worth is measured around how productive we are and nothing ever feels like enough.

Where stress, numbing ourselves and bypassing our body’s symptoms are so normalized, and creativity and play feel like elusive luxuries.  And where intelligence is seen as something abstract in our heads, removed from the deep feeling, sensitivity and wisdom of our hearts and bellies.

We don’t want to be bystanders and continue the status quo.  And we’re ready to be part of the solution."

In this conversation we explore:

• How cultivating an intimacy with the rhythm and change of your menstrual cycle allows you to be an embodied activist - a change-maker who is rooted in cyclical intelligence.
  
  
• How to work with your menstrual cycle as a tool for identifying internalised oppression and how Capitalism lives in your body, for example; by being addicted to endless productivity, feeling rushed all the time, and prioritising your head over your body wisdom.
  
  
• The connection between revolution - or evolution - and community. As Ruby 'the world would be a better place if we tapped into the wisdom of our menstrual cycle' - don't create change. Bringing them into connection does.”

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Ruby May: @know.your.flow - https://www.instagram.com/know.your.flow

When author, Chloé Caldwell turned 31, her experience of her menstrual cycle changed. Her monthly outbursts of pre-menstrual rage and anxiety began to dominate her life and compromise her relationship.

Compelled to understand the truth of what was happening to her, Chloé researched menstruation throughout history, read everything she could about PMS and was eventually diagnosed with premenstrual dysphoric disorder, PMDD.

In this episode Chloé shares honestly, generously and vulnerably about her journey through PMDD, and how —along with proper treatment— the medicine of self-acceptance, self-compassion, and transcending shame were the ultimate keys to relief.

We explore:

- Chloé's searching, galvanizing memoir about PMDD and how we must bring a multi-layered approach to managing and healing PMDD.

- PMDD and relationships - including practical tools and approaches to navigate PMDD with your partner, children or other loved ones.

- The “Jekyll and Hyde” nature of PMDD, why it is referred to as werewolf week, and how cycle symptoms, including PMDD can be a gateway to knowing ourselves and accessing our wildness and ultimately, growing into a fuller version of ourselves.
 
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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Chloé Caldwell: @chloeeeecaldwell - https://www.instagram.com/chloeeeecaldwell

Our first period is a big event. Today we’re exploring why it’s so important to support girls and young menstruators through this transition, as well as how we can resource ourselves as parents, aunties and carers so we can meet our kids where they are at and celebrate them .

I’m talking with Emily Stewart, the founder of The Real Period Project. She's also a Celebration Day for Girls facilitator, and the creator of the Red School Mothering Your Daughter Through Menarche programme. Her dream is to see a world where the menstrual cycle is seen as an ally and teacher, and talking about it is a normal part of life.

We explore:

- How to practically prepare for guiding your child through their first period, including ways to resource yourself, as well as age-appropriate books and other resources.

- Why it’s important to start sharing about periods when your child is young and receptive to exploring ideas, and before the teenage phase kicks in.

- Our upcoming live round of our Mothering Your Daughter Through Menarche programme, how you can join, and how it will guide you step-by-step to nurture and nourish your child as they approach their puberty years and first period with curiosity, support and a readiness for the changes ahead.

Join us for a live round of our Mothering Your Daughter Through Menarche programme. We start at the beginning of May, and you can join us here: www.redschoolonline.net/p/mothering-your-daughter-through-menarche

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

Becoming a mother is a profound initiatory journey. Journalist and coach, Amy Taylor Kabbaz remembers exactly the moment when she split in two. Fifteen minutes after her child was born, she went from independent, ambitious, ABC journalist, career woman, to completely surrendered mother who would do anything for her child.

That moment changed everything for her, and took her on her own personal pilgrimage to understand how motherhood initiates us. 

She’s interviewed hundreds of authors, maternal health experts, and teachers. She’s been the anthropologist, in the trenches of early motherhood, trying to decipher why so many of us feel burnt out, overwhelmed, and addicted to being busy. And she’s emerged from that time knowing that matrescence is the missing link for truly understanding why women feel the way they do, and how we can revolutionise the way we think about and value motherhood.

We explore:

• The fact that we’re not mothers at birth. Mothering is a verb - it’s a learnt act. And it gives us daily - hourly! - invitations to move from control, to surrender, if we are supported to cultivate the ability to trust our intuition. 
  
  
• How to hold onto the thread of ourselves as we to navigate the deep reorganising of priorities that happens in matrescence.
  
  
• How to meet a world that doesn’t recognise the deep shifts that are happening within us, even as we’re inside this deep initiation of matrescence.

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Registration is open for our LIVE Mothering Your Daughter Through Menarche. We start on May 2nd. You can check it out here: https://redschoolonline.net/p/mothering-your-daughter-through-menarche

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @red.school - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Amy Taylor Kabbaz: @amytaylorkabbaz - https://www.instagram.com/amytaylorkabbaz

Why do we need to adapt the way we move and exercise throughout the cycle? In today’s conversation we explore the physical and mental health benefits of cycle-aware movement, and how to adjust the way we exercise throughout the cycle month.

Our guest, Le’Nise Brothers shares her own experience of  using diet, exercise and lifestyle changes to improve painful and heavy periods, anxiety, depression and irritable bowel syndrome.

Le’Nise is a yoga teacher, and Nutritionist, specialising in women's health, hormones and the menstrual cycle. She’s the host of the Period Story podcast, and the author of the new book, You Can Have a Better Period which came out in March - a practical guide to understanding your cycle and balancing your hormones with nutrition and yoga, for a calm and pain-free period.

We explore:

• How to move in each season of your cycle, including slow flow yoga in inner winter, strength training in inner spring, high energy exercise to channel your ovulatory surge in energy and mood stabilising exercise in inner autumn.
  
  
• How can we move to support ourselves through pre-menstrual anger and anxiety? 
  
  
• How can movement help us if we’re experiencing menstrual pain, endometriosis, heavy periods, including healing yoga poses and even how to use orgasms as a form of pain relief.

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Get your copy of Wild Power: Discover the Power of Your Menstrual Cycle and Awaken the Feminine Path to Power. It's here in the shownotes: https://redschool.net/podcast/35

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Le’Nise Brothers: @eatlovemove - https://www.instagram.com/eatlovemove

Are you currently working on a creative project that you’d love to infuse with your cyclical wisdom? Whether you’re writing a book, growing a garden, launching a business or making art, your cycle can be a profound anchor and resource.

In today’s episode, we talk with someone who knows a thing or two about the menstrual cycles and creativity. Lucy Peach is a period preacher, author, and folksinger. She’s a graduate of the Red School Menstruality Leadership Programme and she has written a book, created songs, produced an award-winning theatre show, delivered educational programmes for teens and even created a TED talk, all about the menstrual cycle. 

We explore how she has worked with her cycle to cultivate this epic creativity and shift the period narrative in our culture from one of shame to one of pride, including:

• Lucy’s take on the four phases or inner seasons of the cycle: Dream, Do, Give, Take, and how they each support our creative process.
  
  
• How Lucy’s cycle guides her creative collaboration with her husband, and how he experiences his own cyclical creativity, as well as how non-cycling men react to Lucy’s theatre show.
  
  
• How to work with dreams to access your creative power, especially in the void just before you bleed as a powerful creative resource - Lucy and Sophie both share what a recurring nightmare has taught them about their power and creativity.

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Have you listened to our free webinar replay about how to channel your cycle's creative powers as an entrepreneur? You can watch How Your Menstrual Cycle Can Help You Create A Thriving Business here : https://www.yourcyclicalbusiness.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Lucy Peach: @lucyspeaches - https://www.instagram.com/lucyspeaches/
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

The hidden agenda of the menstrual cycle is to help us become more fully ourselves. As we deepen our cycle awareness practice, it plugs us into our calling, our vision, our unique way of expressing our genius. The realising of this calling  requires an outer structure, which often looks like a business. The beautiful thing is that the menstrual cycle can resource us along the way. 

We’re in the middle of launching our brand new programme, Your Cyclical Business which is designed to support you if you’re a teacher, healer or creative, a freelancer, or a purpose-led entrepreneur to channel the wisdom of your menstrual cycle to create a thriving business.

So in our conversation today we want to invite you behind-the-scenes of Red School to see how we work with our cycles (and for Alexandra her post-menopause process) to run our cycle-aware business.

We explore:

• How resting and tending to your nervous system in inner winter is a key to managing overwhelm, and creating sustainable work rhythms without burning out.
  
  
• How each inner season of the cycle works in a particular way to help us move from self doubt and imposter syndrome to trust in ourselves and our creative process.
  
  
• How we bring the discerning energy of inner autumn to craft marketing strategies that allow Red School’s work to expand in an aligned way. 

Join us for our upcoming Your Cyclical Business free webinar: https://www.yourcyclicalbusiness.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie: @sophie.jane.hardy -  https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

Today, we’re looking at menstrual cycle awareness through a different lens… we’re exploring 10 surprising reasons to practice fertility awareness.

I’m talking with Health Coach and Natural Family Planning (NFP) teacher, Jaspreet Kaur who is a fresh, passionate voice in this field - she brings it down to earth and makes it accessible to everyone. We explore…

• What fertility awareness is, and the many surprising ways it can profoundly enhance our menstrual cycle awareness practice (whether you’re trying to prevent pregnancy or get pregnant, or neither), and how to get started today. 
  
  
• We bust many myths, including the myth of the ‘late period’, and why knowing when you ovulate is such a game-changer for anyone who wants to plan their life and workflow around their cycle.
  
  
• The importance of decolonising menstrual health and unravelling the legacy of menstrual shame that colonisation has created. 

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Registration is open for our Your Cyclical Business Programme. You can check it out here: https://www.yourcyclicalbusiness.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Jaspreet Kaur: @kaurhealth - https://www.instagram.com/kaurhealth

Menopause is an immense life event, a great initiation. Not only is it a complete hormonal shift in the landscape of your overall health, it’s also a psychological and emotional transformation. 

In today’s episode, we explore this incredible, initiatory power of menopause, and the great potential it awakens in us. 

This power has been an obsession for Alexandra and Sjanie for most of the past couple of years as they wrote their long-awaited menopause book, and today we have an exciting announcement - we’re revealing the title of the book!

Today, we break down the title and  explore:

• What the writing of the book taught Alexandra and Sjanie about the truth of menopause (and how it kicked them up the backside along the way). 
  
  
• The number one thing we each need to learn how to get through menopause.
  
  
• The liberating power of menopause… and how the book launch events we're dreaming into for September will invite us all into a meaningful experience of this power. 

Have you ever wondered what foods can support your cycle health as you move through the different inner seasons of the cycle month?

In this interview with Menstrual Cycle Coach, and food-lover Naam Bachmayer, we explore her ‘Cyclical Nourishment Principles’ and how they help us to welcome in hormonal health, more pleasure, less stress and a deeper intimacy with our cycle process.

This isn’t a ‘how-to’ episode or a set of rules. Naam is very aware of how food can be complex for many of us, as well as the harm that diet culture causes. Instead, Naam shares a wealth of ideas which you can adapt for you and your body, including a delicious recipe for each inner season. Bon appetit!

We explore:

- Naam’s ‘Cyclical Nourishment Principles’ including ‘eating the rainbow’, listening to your body, and reducing inflammatory foods.

- How to adapt our nutrition and cooking style in the four phases of your cycle - including a delicious, colourful, healthy recipe for each inner season.

- What to eat in inner winter, including iron rich foods like oats and chickpeas to support your body as you lose blood, watermelon and cucumber to up your water intake and why chocolate can help with cramps (yay!).

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Naam Bachmayer: @thecyclicalcoach - https://www.instagram.com/thecyclicalcoach

One of the beautifully challenging things about cultivating an intimacy with our menstrual cycles, or menopause process, is that it opens us up to the world.

To the beauty of life, and to the pain.

This quality of tender, unarmoured presence is real medicine for a world that can feel full of conflict, pretense, injustice and a lack of capacity to be with difference.

A devoted practice of cycle awareness helps us to see that we all belong; to ourselves, to the rhythm and flow of the natural world, and to each other.

Today we’re marking Pride Month, with a podcast episode about how menstrual cycle awareness can help us to be with difference, and create true cultures of belonging.

Our guest is Abi Denyer-Bewick, a queer menstuality educator and member of the Red School faculty. We chat about the menstruality learning session she recently offered our Menstruality Leadership Programme graduates on 'Inclusive menstruality', including:

- How to create a culture of belonging for women and everyone who menstruates.
- What life might look like for a trans, non-binary or gender expansive menstruator.
- How to work with the fear, trauma or other big emotions that may arise as we explore how to be with difference, together.

We also share some guidance for how to take this belonging and inclusion work deeper, from a range of brilliant LGBTQ+ educators.

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Abi Denyer Bewick - @abi.denyer.bewick - https://www.instagram.com/abi.denyer.bewick

It’s time to re-write the story of menopause.

What if the critical, provocative energy of menopause is actually a sign that you’re coming to your senses?

What if menopause isn’t a health condition we suffer from, but that people in menopause you’re actually suffering from is a lack of recognition, respect and support for the profound initiation you’re going through.

What if, post-menopause, you are more needed than ever.

This is the first of our menopause summer series, in the run up to the launch of our new book, Wise Power.

We explore:

- The four old stories of menopause, and the new stories that honour and dignify this transition.

- The ‘emperor has no clothes’ moment that happens in menopause.

- Why our impulse to ‘burn the house down’ in menopause is actually very sane, and an important part of this initiatory process.
 
You can now pre-order your copy of our new menopause book! Wise Power: Discover the liberating power of menopause to awaken authority, purpose and belonging here: https://www.wisepowerbook.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

One of the big initiatory moments along the menstruality journey from menarche (our first period) to menopause is pregnancy and childbirth, if that is our path in life.

In a world which has a lot to learn about how to support mothers and birthing people through this profound initiation, we need all the help we can get to prepare for and create a positive birth, or heal from a challenging or traumatic one. Enter menstrual cycle awareness - as a powerful tool to cultivate body sovereignty, guide us in the art of surrender, and teach us how to advocate for our needs.

Our guest today is pregnancy yoga teacher and mother of two, Tessa Sanderson. She’s a graduate of the Menstruality Leadership programme, as well as our Menstruality Medicine Circle training, and her insights today are based on hundreds of birth stories that she has received from her clients.

This is a big conversation, with lots of potentially triggering or stirring topics, so we invite you to take care of yourself as you listen, especially if you’re currently pregnant.

In this episode:

- We explore childbirth as a rite of passage, and how menstrual cycle awareness can prepare us for the inner journey and help to create a positive initiatory experience, however it unfolds.

- We define birth trauma - or perinatal trauma - and menstrual trauma, and explore how the two can be connected.

- We share our own birth stories and how cycle awareness helped us in these mother of all journeys, especially through the challenge of giving birth during lockdown.

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Tessa Sanderson: @tessa.venuti.sanderson - https://www.instagram.com/tessa.venuti.sanderson

When you find yourself in the thick of the menopause transition, there’s no maintaining life as normal. How can we support ourselves to manage the day to day realities of life amidst the huge initiation of menopause? In this episode we explore the six steps of our ‘menopause triage’ and how they help you to dignify and honour what you’re experiencing.

We explore:

• The power of accepting the fact that you’re in menopause, and that you have a ‘new normal’.
  
  
• The art of ‘snudging’ and why it’s the a key skill to cultivate in menopause.
  
  
• The menopause superpowers that can help you to put these triage steps into preactice, including the power of No. 

Pre-order your copy of Wise Power: Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause to Awaken Authority, Purpose and Belonging here: https://www.redschool.net/pre-order-wise-power

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

We want to create a world where everyone is in love with the menstrual cycle - not a perfect version of the cycle - but exactly the cycle you have.  Because this love affair revolutionises our lives (and the world!).

That’s why we’ve created our new FREE online course: Love Your Cycle: Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life where we explore the four phases or inner seasons of your cycle as a gateway to vitality, creativity, power and purpose.

Love Your Cycle is our invitation to you to get to know your cycle in more depth, to fall in love with your cycle, and to grow an intimacy with it that will transform your life - by amplifying your vitality, enhancing your creativity and activating your leadership.

In this episode we explore:

- Why falling in love with your cycle isn’t about having a ‘perfect’ menstrual cycle, but rather coming into relationship with the cycle you have (and how to actually do that.)

- How to make sense of cycle disturbances and hold ourselves as we heal menstrual pain and other health challenges. ‍

- Four specific cycle awareness practices to harness the power of each inner season of your cycle.

You can register for Love Your Cycle for FREE here: https://www.redschool.net/love

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

Do you suffer from menstrual pain, or other cycle challenges such as PMS, PMDD or managing irregular cycles?

In this episode we explore how the practice of menstrual cycle awareness creates a ground for healing, helps us to take stand for what we need, and supports us to create a new relationship with the challenges we face, and to trust that something meaningful is at work.

Alexandra shares her personal story with a decade of menstrual pain, and what supported her to heal and eventually become pain-free. Sophie describes what supported her to transform chronic pain and pre-menstrual rage into a new relationship with her power.

We explore:

- The connection between our personal suffering and what’s happening in the collective and on our planet.

- How cycle awareness helps us to manage chronic stress, which can be the foundation of so many health challenges, and awakens our faculties of knowing; our gut intelligence, our heart knowing, and our ‘pelvic brain’.

- How your cycle is - as Lisa Hendrickson Jack says - your ‘fifth vital sign’, giving you important information about your overall health and stress levels, and how to approach healing if you feel you’re in perimenopause.

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

In today’s conversation, we get practical, down-to-earth and real about the initiation of menopause and how on earth do we actually get through to the other side. Though,  as we explore, it’s much less about doing and much more about being. And we have five alchemical powers that can help us along the way. 

This is the in third our Wise Power series where Alexandra and Sjanie have been waxing lyrical, sometimes crying, and often laughing their way through the teachings of their new book Wise Power: Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause to Awaken Authority, Purpose and Belonging, coming out on September 20th. 

There’s a line in our new book, Wise Power: “Remember, it’s your birthright to have a dignifying and empowering menopause. Let’s begin to make that so.”

Let’s begin to make it so, together, here, right now… 

We explore:

- The five ‘alchemical powers’ that can help you navigate the menopause transition.

- How to actully find ways to rest, when you aren’t able to take a menopause sabbatical year (that we deeply wish everyone could have!)

- The post-menopause magic that can occur when you trust the creative arc of your life, where ‘life becomes your business partner’.
 
Pre-order your copy of Wise Power: Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause to awaken authority, purpose and belonging here: https://www.wisepowerbook.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

Across the ages women and birthing people have been invited by midwives and doulas to relax their jaw and throat to support the opening of the cervix in labour.

In today’s conversation we explore why this is so important, we explore the connection between our throats, our voices, and the emotional and physical health of our wombs. 

I’m talking with Shakirah Sabira who is a doula, African womb healing practitioner, and the founder of Barakha’s Doula. Shakirah began her career as a doula serving women in the Middle East and West Africa, including seven months working in a rural clinic supporting the local midwife in the Mauritanian desert, a trip which profoundly changed her life, and guided her to her calling.

Through Shakirah’s story, and the experiences with her teachers and clients, as well as Sophie's own womb healing experience, we look at what it means to give your womb a voice, how release stagnant energy, express yourself and find a profound source of healing within us. 

We explore:

• How Shakirah sang her period back, after her menstrual cycle stopped following a traumatic relationship breakup and divorce.
  
  
• The connection between trauma, the womb and the voice, and how speaking truth, singing and freeing up the throat can facilitate deep healing.
  
  
• Why women and people with periods need to share our stories, to release our shame, and support each other to heal, simply by no longer feeling alone.

Registration will open soon for our 2023 Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can register your interest here: https://www.menstrualityleadership.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:

Red School: @red.school https://www.instagram.com/red.school

Shakirah Sabira: @shakirahsabira https://www.instagram.com/shakirahsabira

Barakah’s Doula: @barakahsdoula https://www.instagram.com/barakahsdoula

In our 40s, many women and people with periods begin to experience a variety of health symptoms and challenges, as well as emotional and psychological shifts. Some call this perimenopause. At Red School we like to call it, the Quickening. 

In this episode - which is the fourth in our menopause summer series - we look at how the Quickening is slowly awakening new levels of power within us, and how to navigate this. Sjanie shares her personal experience of negotiating this transition over the past few years. 

We explore:

• How we receive a report card on the state of our health in our 40s, which is inviting us to up our self care and set ourselves up for a healthy post-menopause life.
  
  
• Why the power that is awakening in us in the Quickening requires deeper responsibility as well as deeper self care. 
  
  
• How to handle your new, increased critical capacites (cynicism, discernment, judgement) wisely and cleanly, rather than use it to annihilate and destroy!

You can pre-order your copy of Wise Power: Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause to awaken authority, purpose and belonging here: https://www.wisepowerbook.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email: info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

What is the connection between trauma, the nervous system and menstrual health? 

This week we’re speaking with Lisa De Jong, who shares in depth about her personal experience with a decade of chronic pain, an eventual endometriosis diagnosis, and her experience of trauma healing and nervous system regulation. 

Lisa is a graduate of our Menstruality Leadership Programme and has infused the teachings with ground-breaking science and created a brilliant body of work around trauma, pain, healing and the nervous system.

We explore:

• Why it’s harder to manage stress in the premenstrual phase (as well as perimenopause and menopause), and how our cyclical nature impacts our capacity to regulate our nervous systems.
  
  
• How unprocessed trauma and grief can contribute to menstrual health challenges like PMDD and endometriosis, and how to find agency in the face of collective trauma due to patriarchy, racism and other forms of systemic oppression.
  
  
• Nervous system regulation, polyvagal theory and what being in the ‘rest and digest’ mode of the nervous system can mean for healing and managing chronic pain, especially for highly sensitive people.

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You can now register your interest for our 2023 Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can check it out here: www.menstrualityleadership.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Lisa De Jong: @lisa_dejong_coach - https://www.instagram.com/lisa_dejong_coach

When you explore old European myths, it’s the elder women and grandmothers who run the world. In Greek mythology, there are the Fates - three elder women who make the world go round. In Eastern European mythology, the crone Baba Yaga initiates young people and facilitates transformation. In ancient Gallic mythology it is the Cailleach who created and shaped the land, from the beginning of time.

In today’s episode we explore the gold that these myths and archetypes hold for us as we navigate the initiation of menopause and enter the second half of our lives as elders, with the brilliant writer, psychologist and mythologist, Dr Sharon Blackie.

Sharon illuminates the magic and potential of menopause as a shape-shifting crucible, which strips away all that isn’t essential - so we may know ourselves, and our Calling in a new way. She shares how she envisioned herself inside an alchemical process at menopause, how the natural world served as an ally through this initiatory time, and why the world needs more feisty, older women now more than ever…

We explore:

• The Greek myth of the ‘Furies’, the sacred role of their rage, and the necessity of the comparable anger many of us feel in menopause.
  
  
• Why our world doesn’t allow us the time to ‘do menopause properly’ and the impact this has for us on a soul level.
  
  
• The Jungian archetype of the ‘Medial Woman’ who doesn’t define herself according to anyone else, is whole unto herself, and chooses to dive deeply into the mystery of the world.

You can now pre-order your copy of our new menopause book! Wise Power: Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause to Awaken Authority, Purpose and Belonging here: https://www.wisepowerbook.com

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Registration is now open for our live menopause course - Menopause: The Great Awakener. You can take your seat here: https://www.redschoolmenopause.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sharon Blackie: @sharonblackiemythmakings - https://www.instagram.com/sharonblackiemythmakings

There are a handful of trailblazers who have paved the way for the positive menstrual culture we’re beginning to see today, and Dr Lara Owen is one of them. She was researching and writing her book about the power of the menstrual cycle, Her Blood is Gold in the 1990’s, and it has been a game changer for thousands of women and menstruators. 

She’s now an expert on the culture, politics and organization of menstruation and menopause. She consults with global and local organizations; teaches in academic and general contexts and has created a first year masters level programme called Contemporary Menstrual Studies. 

In this far-reaching conversation we explore:

• A cultural and historical exploration of the stigmatisation of the menstrual cycle.
  
  
• What Lara learned from indigenous teachers raised in menstrually positive cultures.
  
  
• The wisdom of menstruation, and Lara’s personal experience of two years of deep menstrual retreat (including moments of powerful clairvoyance!)

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Registration is open for our FREE Love Your Cycle course. You can join for free here: https://www.redschool.net/love

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Lara’s website: laraowen.com

When teacher and activist Jewels Wingfield felt menopause calling, through intense physical symptoms, she knew she needed to take a deep retreat. In this conversation, we explore her 13 moon ‘conscious menopause sabbatical’ and how it transformed her health, her relationship to herself, her work in the world, and even her sex life.

Jewels is the founder of the EarthHeart project and on the other side of her sabbatical she is focusing on guiding women to explore their ‘nature-based feminine leadership’, with a particular focus on an ancient, Celtic approach to menstruality, and how the natural world can support our menopause ‘death-and-rebirth’ process.

In the conversation we explore:

• How to carve out space and time for retreat and menopause, even when we have big responsibilities and financial pressure, and the potentially beneficial impact.
  
  
• How to access the wisdom of the natural world as a powerful guide and ally during the initiation of menopause.
  
  
• Some good news about how sex can change in menopause, and practical (often surprising!) guidance to access new levels of sexual connection and desire in this phase of life.

You can now pre-order your copy of our new menopause book! Wise Power: Discover the liberating power of menopause to awaken authority, purpose and belonging here: https://www.wisepowerbook.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Jewels Wingfield: @jewelsatearthheart - https://www.instagram.com/jewelsatearthheart/

The menstruality journey begins at menarche with our first bleed, and ends as we go through the great initiation of menopause. For some, pregnancy, birth, and motherhood are a key part of their menstruating years, but for some people, parenting doesn’t happen, despite a deep desire to have children.

It's World Childless Week this week, and we've invited the brilliant Jody Day to share about the challenges of involuntary childlessness,  her work to honour and dignify childless women, and explore how to  how to find meaning and hope when looking towards a future without children.

Jody Day is the founder of Gateway Women, the support & advocacy network for childless women. She’s a psychotherapist, a global thought leader on female involuntary childlessness, and the author of what many professionals consider to be the ‘go-to’ book on the topic, ‘Living the Life Unexpected: How to Find Hope, Meaning and a Fulfilling Future Without Children’.

In the conversation we explore:

• Jody’s personal journey through grief, denial, hopelessness to real acceptance of her life as a childless woman.
  
  
• The creation of Gateway Women and Jody’s mission to make the world understand childless women, and help women who are childless-not-by-choice to understand themselves. 
  
  
• Jody's emerging Gateway Elderwomen project, exploring the uncharted path to becoming a conscious childless elder woman.

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Jody Day: @gatewaywomen - https://www.instagram.com/gatewaywomen

Today’s conversation follows a powerful idea that woke Alexandra up in the early hours a few days ago. It’s the idea that drives our new menopause book, Wise Power, and it’s an idea that’s almost totally missing in the global menopause conversation...

... We need to dignify menopause as a process of spiritual awakening. 

And it’s a very special episode, because it also marks the official release of Wise Power, which is now available wherever books are sold - you can get your copy at wisepowerbook.com.

We explore:

• The spiritual union, or coming home to yourself that is possible at menopause, when we honour and dignify every aspect of menopause; the rage, the confusion, the challenge and dare to believe it’s meaningful.
  
  
• The role that rage plays in the spiritual awakening of menopause, particularly in the initiatory times we’re living in as a global community.
  
  
• The five phases of the menopause spiritual awakening, and how perimenopause, or the ‘Quickening’ prepares us for this great homecoming to ourselves. 

 You can now pre-order our new book! Wise Power: Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause to Awaken Authority, Purpose and Belonging here: https://www.wisepowerbook.com

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Registration is now open for our live menopause course - Menopause: The Great Awakener. You can take your seat here: https://www.redschoolmenopause.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

Today we’re talking about a much misunderstood part of the body… the cervix. 

Olivia Bryant is the founder of Self:Cervix, an organisation dedicated to revolutionising the way the cervix is viewed by the medical profession, by science and sex educators. She says:

“As a sexologist and sex nerd, I know the cervix to be a powerful place of pleasure… For us, cervical orgasm is a thing worth exploring, just like Mars is for NASA”

We explore:

• The spectrum of cervical awakening, from healing trauma, to enhancing pleasure, to cultivating states of deeply loving consciousness.
  
  
• The cervix is the only organ in the body that connects to three major nerves and it’s wired to feel PLEASURE
  
  
• The connection between cervical orgasms and our capacity to relax into our naturalness, and receive support.

You can now pre-order our new book! Wise Power: Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause to Awaken Authority, Purpose and Belonging here: https://www.wisepowerbook.com

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Registration is now open for our live menopause course - Menopause: The Great Awakener. You can take your seat here: https://www.redschoolmenopause.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Self:Cervix: @selfcervix - https://www.instagram.com/selfcervix

Once you’re in menopause, you appear to be off all the usual maps. You're cast off from a familiar shoreline onto a dark ocean of unknownness, with only the stars and the moon – your instincts, feelings and intuitions – to guide you.

However, there is a map of sorts for the menopausal journey, a timeless archetypal pattern for transitioning this world between worlds, and it has an implicit order in five phases: Betrayal, Repair, Revelation, Visioning and Emergence.

In today's episode, we look at the meaning and purpose of each phase, including all that you may experience and what it means, as well as stories from some of the many people we’ve worked with over the years (and a good dose of humour to see you through). 

We explore:

• Phase one of the menopause initiation, ‘Betrayal’, which can be a real dark night of the soul, though it is necessary to access the ‘gold’ of your menopause journey.
  
  
• The sweet moment that you can reach in phase three, ‘Revelation’ where - often in the middle of daily life - you suddenly see yourself for who you truly are.
  
  
• How the final two phases set you up powerfully for your life post-menopause.

You can now pre-order our new book! Wise Power: Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause to Awaken Authority, Purpose and Belonging here: https://www.wisepowerbook.com

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Registration is now open for our live menopause course - Menopause: The Great Awakener. You can take your seat here: https://www.redschoolmenopause.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

The premenstrual phase of the menstrual cycle - or ‘inner autumn’ as we lovingly call it - is often the most uncomfortable phase emotionally, and it is definitely the most misunderstood. The symptoms that show up for many in this phase and the critical, disruptive fire that burns through us premenstrually are demonised in our world and inside ourselves. 

In this conversation we want to deshame and dignify the gifts of the premenstruum; the heightened sensitivity, the permeability, the way we show up as a disruptor of the peace. We want to transform the premenstrual script which so often makes us question “what’s wrong with me?” to “how can I hold myself through this?” and “what’s powers are at work here?”.

We explore:

• How the premenstruum gives us access to a different kind of intelligence - we know, without knowing how we know!
  
  
• Why we all deeply need the vulnerability of the premenstruum, and how it connects us to each other and to our humanity.
  
  
• How the powers of the premenstruum are the ones we’ll call on the most post menopause - they become the ground of the second half of our lives. 

Our new book is now available wherever books are sold -  Wise Power: Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause to Awaken Authority, Purpose and Belonging here: https://www.wisepowerbook.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

Dr Sonia Wright - aka The Midlife Sex Coach for Women - combines her natural ability to talk about uncomfortable topics with her medical knowledge, sexual counseling skills and life coaching tools to create a unique brand of sex coaching. In this conversation about sex in midlife and during menopause, we discuss sensitive issues with humour and heart.

We explore:

• The sex challenges that can arise in menopause, such as changing libido, the surfacing of body image issues and vaginal dryness and pain.
   
• Redefining what fulfillment means when it comes to sexual intimacy, why orgasm isn’t the goal, and how this changes the game around sex. 
  
  
• How to invite our partners into loving, generative dialogue around sex challenges, and the importance of having these brave conversations, especially since we may have 30-50+ years of good sex ahead of us. 

You can now pre-order our new book! Wise Power: Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause to Awaken Authority, Purpose and Belonging here: https://www.wisepowerbook.com

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Registration is now open for our live menopause course - Menopause: The Great Awakener. You can take your seat here: https://www.redschoolmenopause.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Dr Sonia Wright : @drsoniawright - https://www.instagram.com/drsoniawright

Today’s episode is about what it’s like when our experience is actually supported, honoured and dignified through menopause, and it’s also about relationship, and how to take care of ourselves through - and make sense of - times of great transformation.

Alexandra is your host today, because this is a continuation of our Wise Power Retreat series, which was an incredible journey, over 3500 of us gathered to explore the power of menopause.

She's talking with Susannah Darling Khan, a teacher, dancer, music maker, trainee pony whisperer, the co-director of The School of Movement Medicine, alongside her husband Ya'Acov Darling Khan. We explore:

• How Susannah’s sexual relationship expanded through menopause, and how, through him meeting her anger and fierceness (sometimes with actual boxing gloves!), they were able to maintain their sexual fire.
  
  
• How menopause was a fierce taskmaster, requiring her to slow down - very quickly! - commit to her own inner peace, and hone her embodied listening capacity, as well as embrace death as a reality and a teacher.
  
  
• The only two other mammals who go through menopause - and what evolutionary biology shows us about the vital role we play in our communities post-menopause, as wisdom-keepers for the next generations.
  
  

You can now order our new book! Wise Power: Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause to Awaken Authority, Purpose and Belonging here: https://www.wisepowerbook.com

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Registration is now open for our live menopause course - Menopause: The Great Awakener. You can take your seat here: https://www.redschoolmenopause.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Susannah Darling Khan: https://www.instagram.com/shamanyaacov/

Our menstrual cycles can be a profound ally in work and leadership. Today we do a deep dive on how to channel our cyclical wisdom as it shifts and changes throughout the cycle month, with someone who has an extraordinary amount of personal and professional experience in this realm. 

Dr Joanna Martin is a renowned visionary, coach and catalyst. As the founder of One of many, her organisation has supported over 60,000 grassroots women leaders to greater impact without burnout. 

The cycle is at the centre of her life and work, she’s overlaid the five archetypes over the phases of the cycle to harness their power and meet the challenges they present: The Lover, The Queen, The Warrioress, The Sorceress, The Mother.

We explore:

• How our inner winter awakens our ‘Sorceress’ phase, and how to harness the magic of menstruation at work. 
  
  
• Jo’s monthly ‘catastrophising day’ and how she manages it as the leader of a global organisation, by channelling her ‘Queen’ archetype.
  
  
• How to catch the shadow of over-giving in inner summer - ovulation - by being mindful of how our ‘Mother’ archetype is expressing itself. 

Join our free online course - Love Your Cycle: Discover the power of menstrual cycle awareness to revolutionise your life here: www.redschool.net/love

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Joanna Martin: @drjoannamartin - https://www.instagram.com/drjoannamartin
One of Many: @oneofmanywomen https://www.instagram.com/oneofmanywomen

Clare Dubois has given her life to reforesting the topics  as the founder of the not-for-profit, TreeSisters, but her menopause experience is demanding that she take a profound pause.

In this conversation Clare breaks down her real-time death and rebirth initiatory process of menopause, from the place she is currently in - the deeply uncomfortable, uncompromisingly thorough, ‘ego-death’ part of the initiation. 

She likens it to being carried downstream very fast - you either struggle against the flow or you let go and trust that the river knows where it’s taking you. She’s choosing trust, and hard as it may be, she is loving the ride.

Trigger warning: Clare talks in-depth about healing her childhood physical and sexual abuse.

We explore:

• How menopause is supporting her to process early trauma and heal the patterns of dissociation that ensued, so she can land in her body and be herself.
  
  
• The deep gift of menopause - how it is uprooting the patriarchy within her, especially in own work addiction and over-responsibility.
  
  
• What to do when we can’t ‘let go’ in the way Clare has been able to in her menopause sabbatical, and how we can manage the often chaotic menopause process in a world that doesn’t honour our initiations. 

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You can now pre-order our new book! Wise Power: Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause to Awaken Authority, Purpose and Belonging here: https://www.wisepowerbook.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Clare Dubois: @clare_dubois_treesister - https://m.facebook.com/clare.dubois.333

Asha Frost is an indigenous healer and author. She is an Anishinaabe, Ojibwe woman who was raised in a menstrually positive culture and in today’s episode we explore how her menstrual cycle inspires her work, her new book, ‘You are The Medicine: 13 Moons of Indigenous Wisdom, Ancestral Connection, and Animal Spirit Guidance’, and the connection she sees between cycle wisdom and the unique medicine we each hold.

‘You are The Medicine’ explores a lunar year of the 13 moons of the Ojibwe people, each moon aligned to particular powers and animal wisdom, and each one has profound and practical keys about how we can reach work to access more of a medicine.

We explore:

• How the animal medicine of Bear supports Asha to rest and integrate when she bleeds,  and the medicine of Dear supports her to bring gentleness to the premenstrual phase of her cycle.
  
  
• How to honour our sensitivity as a gift, as well as the wisdom of our bodies (particularly the fierce wisdom of the premenstruum!) in a patriarchal, capitalist, productivity-driven world.
  
  
• Why Asha’s letter, ‘Dear white woman who wants to be like me’ went viral in 2019, and why white listeners must acknowledge the incredible harm colonisation has created, and act in ways that respect Asha’s culture, and all indigenous cultures.
  
  

The doors will open soon for our 2023 Menstruality Leadership Programme, you can find our more and register your interest here: www.menstrualityleadership.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Asha Frost: @asha.frost - https://www.instagram.com/asha.frost

Have you ever “lost it” in the days running up to your bleed? Of course you have! We all have. Today we break down Sophie’s latest premenstrual losing it episode to find the gold inside it - the power that the premenstruum is awakening within us.

We explore:

• What’s going on in the irritability of the premenstruum? Why do we often feel so much more permeable at this time?
  
  
• The sacred role of premenstrual vulnerability in the process of stepping into our power.
  
  
• The biggest key when it comes to holding ourselves through premenstruum, and the self discipline we need to take responsibility for our own power. 

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Registration will open soon for our 2023 Menstruality Leadership Programme - you can find out more www.menstrualityleadership.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

In this electrifying conversation, visionary activist and author Lynne Twist tells a new story about the potency and power we can hold in post-menopause life. 

Lynne shares the story of how, when she was 50, she received a series of visions which profoundly altered the direction of her career - ultimately inspiring her transition from her life work of ending world hunger, to a new calling to steward the health of the rainforests alongside indigenous people. 

She hadn’t realised, until we did this interview, that she was in menopause at this time and that it was the menopause process that opened her up to receive these visions!

In this episode:

• How, post menopause, we are more relevant than ever before. Lynne loves her 70s, and feels more turned on, more fired up than ever - she’s not retiring, she’s re-firing.
  
  
• Menopause opened Lynne up from her personal mothering journey of her three children to a bigger, global understanding of mothering, serving the great mother, and the founding of the Pachamama Alliance, designed to restore the worlds rainforests by empowering indigenous people that protect them.
  
  
• Menopause opens our capacity to feel, often through deep pain, to prepare ourselves for this next major phase of our lives in post-menopause. 

Registration will open soon for our 2023 Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can take your seat here: https://www.menstrualityleadership.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Lynne Twist: @soulofmoney - https://www.instagram.com/soulofmoney

Today we’re continuing our inner autumn, premenstrual theme and sharing the last in a three-part series exploring the powers of the premenstruum, how to awaken these powers, and now a conversation about what this looks like in real life.

(And we’re excited to be trying something new today - weaving in comments and insights from the community of podcast listeners about your premenstrual experience.)

Our guest Natalie K Martin is a Menstrual Cycle and Feminine Embodiment Coach and author who made a powerful transition from corporate career in London to a career in yoga and now menstruality. Natalie graduated from our Menstruality Leadership Programme this year and is now contributing to the global menstruality movement with her FemmePowered podcast which she hosts alongside Guilietta Durante.

We explore:

• How Natalie, and you - the community of listeners - experience the challenges and powers of the premenstruum. We normalise the ‘losing it’, messy moments and celebrate the truth-telling awakenings.
  
  
• The premenstrual self care practices that Natalie uses to harness the powers of her inner autumn.
  
  
• What the Menstruality Leadership Programme taught Natalie about her limits, slowing down, and lightning her load as well as how it inspired a huge, premenstrual awakening one bleak, foggy day 22 morning…

Booking for our Menstruality Leadership Programme will open on Thursday 8th December. You can explore programme and apply here https://www.menstrualityleadership.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Natalie K Martin: @nataliekmartin - https://www.instagram.com/natalie.kmartin

Today we explore how menstrual cycle awareness schools us in endings.

Each month we have an opportunity to practice ending the cycle well, aligning with the deep intelligences at work within us. ..

In this episode we break down the different processes at work as we descend towards menstruation and what they can teach us about how to navigate all of life’s endings; the smaller, more surface level ones like the end of the year we have coming up, and the bigger more profound ones, like ending relationships, moving house, all the way to the deep grief of losing loved ones or miscarriage.

We explore:

• How conscious endings are actually what makes life sacred.
  
  
• The surprising gifts of the premenstruum when it comes to endings - how this phase of the cycle prepares and tenderises us to feel deeply and acknowledge what we love and treasure. 
  
  
• The end of the menstrual cycling years, menopause, and the deep wisdom alive in this death-and-rebirth ending.

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Registration is now open for our 2023 Menstruality Leadership Programme - you can apply here: www.menstrualityleadership.com

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

As we enter 2023, we explore what menstrual cycle awareness can teach us about how to begin things well.

We each share a bumpy beginning that we’re currently navigating, and how the deep intelligence within the cycle is guiding us through the highs and lows.

Whether you’re wanting to start the year with intention and a clear vision, you’re in the midst of a new beginning such as a new job, a new relationship or creative project or you’d like to learn how to work with your cycle as an ally for all the beginnings of your life, this episode has both deep insight and practical advice.

We explore:

• The implicate, deep intelligence at work in the cycle, and how it lays an the archetypal blueprint for all beginnings.
  
  
• How each of the five chambers of menstruation prepares us to start new things.
  
  
• Practical ways to look after yourself if you - like us - find beginnings challenging!

Join the waiting list for our 2023 Menstruality Leadership Programme - you can apply here: www.menstrualityleadership.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

For many years Karen, the founder of ‘Daring to Rest’ experienced severe panic attacks. It wasn’t until she started a deep rest practice that she learned how to meet her anxiety with grace and she hasn’t had a panic attack since. 

During her menopause process, this devoted practice of rest enabled her to clearly feel her ‘no’ and ‘yes’ in her body, process the rage arising and listen for what she needed to navigate this almighty transition. 

In our conversation today we explore:

• How rest at menopause helps us to manage the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual challenges that can show up in menopause, including hot flushes, insomnia, low energy, brain fog, anxiety, grief, and rage.
  
  
• How rest enables us to feel the ‘No’ of menopause in our bodies, so that we can pay attention to it, act on it, and in doing so, make way for our next level ‘yes’.
  
  
• Why rest is non-negotiable while we’re navigating the death and a rebirth initiation of menopause, and how to actually get it, even amidst the responsibilities of our lives (and the key is dropping any ideas of perfection). 

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Registration for our 2022 Menstruality Leadership Programme will open again soon. You can check it out and join the waiting list here: https://www.redschool.net/menstruality-leadership-programme-2022

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @red.school (https://www.instagram.com/red.school)
Karen Brody: @karen_brody (https://www.instagram.com/karen_brody)

Our guest today is someone we’ve been wanting to interview for a while. She has inspired 1000s of people to find their way of doing less inside a culture that so often pushes us to do more. 

Kate Northrup is an entrepreneur, mother and bestselling author of Do Less: A Revolutionary Approach to Time Management for Ambitious Women. Her book centers menstrual cycle awareness as a secret productivity superpower that’s always been there, but you just didn’t know you had...

After giving birth to her first child, Kate felt profoundly out of control for the first time in her life. Her period came back when she was 13 months old and she felt safe for the first time since her birth. It held her through post-partum anxiety and insomnia and her menstrual cycle served her as a life-raft that healed her in a profound way. 

In our conversation we explore:

• Kate’s Summer sabbatical, how she worked with the voices of doubt and the amazing fruits that it yielded (including her best year ever in business).
  
  
• The real necessity of lowering our standards (here’s to piles of laundry and dry shampoo) and asking for help (usually people feel honoured when we do) so that we can get the rest we need.
  
  
• How to get rest as a working mama, and source our enoughness from a deep well within us. Kate asks: “what if you didn’t need to do or earn another damn thing, in order to be the shit?!”

Registration is now open 2023 Menstruality Leadership Programme - you can apply here: www.menstrualityleadership.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Kate Northrup: @katenorthrup - https://www.instagram.com/katenorthrup/?hl=en

Sjanie’s period came very early last month. She suddenly found herself bleeding on day 12 and the experience was akin to a zen meditation master slapping their student on the back when they’ve momentarily gone unconscious.

She was reminded that there is a wild intelligence within her that was outside of her control, and was invited to dance with the mystery and yield to something bigger.

This is one way that the menstrual cycle offers us a way into a radical kind of leadership. The reality that we don’t control it reminds us that we belong to something greater. If we can receive this belonging, our bleed can fill us with goodness, love, and rightness - a source of great power. 

That’s why giving time to yourself at menstruation is positively dangerous! It will change your consciousness. It will awaken you to what life wants from you…

In this episode, we explore:

• How we understand the term Feminine Leadership, and how the menstrual cycle leads us to it.
  
  
• The specific leadership powers that awaken at menstruation, including clarity about our purpose, an embodied experience of love and belonging, as well as expanded states of consciousness.
  
  
• A key next step for you, if you want to activate more of the power of menstruation in your life. 

Earlybird registration is now open for our 2023 Menstruality Leadership Programme - you can apply here: www.menstrualityleadership.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

This bonus episode is the next in our ‘Wise Power Retreat’ series where Alexandra is interviewing people about what menopause revealed and awakened in them. 

Alexandra and Lara have been working alongside each other in this field for over 30 years. Dr Lara Owen is an author, teacher, researcher, consultant, mentor and an expert on the culture, politics and organisation of the menstrual cycle and menopause.

She wrote one of the first books to be published about the power of the menstrual cycle, Her Blood is Gold, and is one of the leading lights in the field of menstrual and menopause education, sharing from an incredible wealth of personal experience, as well as academic research. 

We explore:

• How Lara worked with her intuition in menopause (including following the impulse to move herself to the south of France for a three year menopause retreat!).
  
  
• How Lara moved with her menopausal grief at not having had children and how she made sense of her story, and embraced the gifts of her adventurous and creative life without children.
  
  
• How Lara’s radical educational and cultural work around the menstrual cycle and menopause evolved during her menopause transition, leading to her new masters-level course is designed to develop your understanding of menstruation today in the contexts of business, feminism, health, law, politics, popular culture, sustainability, spirituality, sport, technology, and wellbeing.

You can now order our new book! Wise Power: Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause to Awaken Authority, Purpose and Belonging here: https://www.wisepowerbook.com

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Registration is now open for our Menstruality Leadership Programme: menstrualityleadership.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Lara Owen: www.laraowen.com

This conversation moved me deeply. Teacher and writer Krista O’Reilly Davi-Digui explores what it is to be a brave and beautiful human in progress, particularly in the messy middle of life, and especially living inside a grief and trauma illiterate culture. 

In 2019, when Krista was in the midst of the ‘Quickening’ of perimenopause she lost her son Jairus to suicide. 

In this conversation, she shares generously about the inner winter of her grief journey, how it intersected with her menopause experience, and how she is now moving into the second spring of menopause, choosing to say yes to life in it’s fullness, not knowing what tomorrow holds…

We explore:

• How grief leaves no room for bullshit - particularly in the menopause, stripping away all pretence, people pleasing and masks. 
  
  
• How to make peace and develop resilience through the mess of heartache, struggle, and exhaustion of grief.
  
  
• The necessity of having our pain witnessed - Krista shares how to find the community you need to survive the darkest times of grief, sometimes in unexpected places. (And how to hold boundaries when your existing community isn’t offering the support you need). 

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You can now order our new book! Wise Power: Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause to Awaken Authority, Purpose and Belonging here: https://www.wisepowerbook.com

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Join the waiting list for our 2023 Menstruality Leadership Programme here: www.menstrualityleadership.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Krista O’Reilly Davi-Digui: @a_life_in_progress - https://www.instagram.com/a_life_in_progress

Menstruation and menopause awaken us to our deep selves, but to do that, they ask that we pull away from the world, stop and rest. The trouble is that rest can be a great challenge for most if us given the momentum at work in our world today. 

If you struggle to ‘just let go’ and rest when you bleed, or during the unfolding of your menopause process, this episode is for you.

We explore:

• How our inner critics get in the way of rest (come to our Harness Your Inner Critic workshop on Feb 14th if you need support with this).
  
  
• There are inner barriers to rest, and there are also cultural, systemic barriers, particularly for marginalised communities; including people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, and people living with a disability.
  
  
• Three powers of menstruality that can help us to get more rest: interoception and the art of restedness, and making small shifts. 

Join the waiting list for our 2023 Menstruality Leadership Programme - you can apply here: www.menstrualityleadership.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

We’re welcoming back Bethany Webster, the author of “Discovering The Inner Mother”.  She’s considered to be the global expert on healing the “Mother Wound” - something we all inherit to varying degrees living in a patriarchal society. 

Bethany was a guest at our Wise Power Retreat, where she spoke about healing the Mother Wound during menopause.

In our conversation today, we look at the Mother Wound through a menstrual cycle awareness lens, exploring how it shows up throughout our inner seasons, and how each phase of the cycle can support specific aspects of healing.

We explore:

• Why it’s so hard for us to take care of ourselves, the role the Mother Wound plays in this, and how inner spring (pre-ovulation) teaches us to mother ourselves and build trust with our inner child.
  
  
• What we learned from our mothers about whether it’s ok to shine and how inner summer (ovulation) can help us unravel our capacity to be seen and loved for who we really are. 
  
  
• The power of boundaries when it comes to healing the Mother Wound, and how our premenstrual power can support us to claim the honest truth about our limits and what we need. 

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Join the waiting list for our 2023 Menstruality Leadership Programme - you can apply here: www.menstrualityleadership.com

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Bethany Webster: @themotherwound - https://www.instagram.com/themotherwound

In today's episode Red School's founders, Sjanie an Alexandra reveal intimate stories about their current leadership edges and how their menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause is skilling them up to face them in a sustainable way.

The leadership challenges include;

- How to manage a sensitive nervous system when you have a demanding to do list.

- How to navigate the inner critic attacks that inevitable come when you have both big visions and human limitations.

- We also share about our upcoming free, online Menstruality Leadership Lab from March 7-10 - join us at: www.redschool.net/lab

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Our final wave of applications opens soon for our Menstruality Leadership Programme - the world’s first leadership training designed for trailblazers, change-makers, nurturers and creatives to realise your full authority and leadership through the power of the menstrual cycle.

You can explore the programme here: www.menstrualityleadership.com

We begin on March 31st. Applications close on March 22nd, and as a Leadership lab participant, you can save £200 when you apply before midnight on March 13th, using the code LEADERSHIP.

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

After giving birth to her son Fulano in 2003, Latham Thomas set out on a mission to help women reclaim birth. A graduate of Columbia University & The Institute for Integrative Nutrition, Latham is a maternity lifestyle maven, world renown wellness leader and master birth doula on the vanguard of transforming the wellness movement. She has been named one of Oprah’s Super Soul 100.

I experienced Latham as a weaver of profound threads of wisdom… we journeyed from her sacred menstrual practices, to exploring radical self care as a cultural act of resistance in a world that aims to turn us away from our bodies, to how she is supporting her doula students to reclaim their ancient, ancestral technologies and birth wisdom, and so much more.

We explore:

• The multiple layers of Latham’s menstrual cycle awareness through constant dialogue with her body and how she ‘insources’ solutions when she bleeds.
  
  
• How Latham’s ancestors appeared at her birth and what facilitated this deeply sacred moment, including the safe space created by her midwife, partner and best friend.
  
  
• How Latham is bringing forth her ancestral birth wisdom and helping her doula trainees to recall and reclaim the memory of their African ancestral technologies that are lodged in their tissues, so they can become wisdom keepers.

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Join us for our upcoming free, online Menstruality Leadership lab, March 7th - 10th: www.redschool.net/lab

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Our final waves of applications will open soon for our 2023 Menstruality Leadership Programme. Find out more at: www.menstrualityleadership.com

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Latham Thomas: @glowmaven - https://www.instagram.com/glowmaven

What does it really take to be a visionary leader? And how can menstrual cycle awareness support us to face the challenges and stretch that leadership always brings?

In today's episode we share excerpts from our Menstruality Leadership Lab - a free, four-day online leadership training exploring how the hidden powers of the menstrual cycle and menopause can help us lead sustainably, with heart, integrity and wisdom.

Red School co-founder Alexandra shares her biggest leadership challenge and how cycle awareness has helped her to cultivate one of many menstruality leadership skills to meet it: the art of pacing.

We also hear clips from Alexandra and Sjanie's conversations with our special guests, four women who have boldly stepped forward to live their Calling; medicine woman Asha Frost, author and activist Amisha Ghadiali, folk singer and period preacher Lucy Peach and School of Movement Medicine co-founder Susannah Darling Khan, including;

- How Asha handled critical feedback when her work went viral.
 
- How Amisha faces the faces the challenge of making a steady living as a visionary.

- What made Lucy become a period preacher

- How Susannah handled the most embarrassing moment of her leadership journey.

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Register for the Menstruality Leadership lab for free at: www.redschool.net/lab

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Registration is now open for our 2023 Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can take your seat here: www.menstrualityleadership.com

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Asha Frost: https://www.instagram.com/asha.frost
Amisha Ghadiali: https://www.instagram.com/amishaghadiali/
Lucy Peach: https://www.instagram.com/lucyspeaches/
Susannah Darling Khan: https://www.instagram.com/susannahdarlingkhan/

What are the gifts of the inner spring? How can inner spring help us step into leadership? What is needed to access the power of the inner spring? And how can we manages the challenges of this inner season?

So many of you have asked for an episode about inner spring and how we can harness it's strengths and manage its challenges, and here it is - the first of two episodes dedicated to pre-ovulatory phase of the cycle.

We explore:

• How to hold the charge of inner spring, manage the sense of overwhelm this inner season can bring, and stay in touch with ourselves.
  
  
• What inner spring can teach us about how to manage the stretch of leadership,  through the dark art of pacing and trust our own timing
  
  
• How inner spring can help us to stay grounded in the face of urgency and bring us back to our medicine - our unique way of contributing to the world

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Registration is now open for our Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can take your seat here: www.menstrualityleadership.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

The menstrual cycle is encoded with wisdom that can support us through life’s greatest challenges.

Learning to read and receive this wisdom is a lifelong process - and in today’s conversation with psychotherapist and author, Carly Mountain, we explore what one of our oldest goddess myths can teach us about embodying cyclical wisdom as we face all that life throws our way. 

Carly has worked in a cycle-inspired way for many years as a women’s initiatory guide. She has channelled her learnings into her new book Decent and Rising, which explores the ancient goddess myth of Innana and her descent into the underworld as a framework for how to manage grief, loss, illness and other dark night’s of the soul. 

In today’s conversations we look at each part of the myth through the lens of the inner seasons of the menstrual cycle, and how each cycle phase makes us more resilient, strong and wise, including:

• How the tenderising of the pre-menstruum helps us to contact the deeper, body knowings that live below our day-to-day consciousness.
  
  
• The physical and metaphorical shedding of menstruation - the death part of the death and rebirth - is exactly what makes way for the new shoots - the potential of inner spring.
  
  
• As we rise with the new momentum of inner spring, we rise rooted, deepened by the underworld of the menstruation process. 

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Carly Mountain: @carly_mountain - https://www.instagram.com/carly_mountain

Alexandra is your host today as this is the next in our Wise Power Retreat series,  where she is having conversations with thought leaders, teachers and change-makers about what menopause revealed and awakened in them.
 
Her guest is Lynne McTaggart - who is regularly voted in the top 100 of spiritual teachers for her work around the power of intention.

The arrival of Lynne's children birthed the first great work of her life, her magazine, What Doctors Don’t Tell You, and menopause heralded the birth of the work she is devoting the rest of her life to - exploring the human energy field and why spiritual healing works.

We explore:

• New ways to approach aging, and the truth that menopause isn't about losing faculties - more faculties are actually coming on line.
  
  
• How menopause kicked Lynne’s ‘disruptor gene’ into gear, and how it helped her to awaken to who she truly is. 
  
  
• Lynne's post menopausal zest, and how we can all embrace our third acts, move beyond the roles we have previously held, and instead ask  -'what else do I want to do with my life?'.

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You can now order our new book! Wise Power: Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause to Awaken Authority, Purpose and Belonging here: https://www.wisepowerbook.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Lynne McTaggart: @lynnemctaggartofficial - https://www.instagram.com/p/CqVaw_RMDbx

Our guest today, Shereen Oberg draws from a unique and rich mix of influences in her women’s empowerment work.

She is the author of The Law of Positivism, she’s a yoga teacher and acupuncturist, and alongside this she holds a business and economics degree, and has recently completed a Master's degree in Global Sexual and Reproductive health and rights. 

She comes from a long lineage of strong, Kurdish matriarchs and political, social rights activists who shared their natural birth stories with her, this inspired her to train both as a nurse and a doula. Today we chat about how all of these influences wove together in her recent thesis about how we need to change the way we approach infertility across the globe. 

We explore:

• How 186 million people are affected by infertility in the world today, and most are feeling a degree of loneliness and isolation.
  
  
• The three big themes that occur across the globe; the grief felt with each loss, a deep questioning of purpose and existence, and the feeling of being let down by the healthcare system.
  
  
• What ancient goddess myths can teach us about the initatory process of infertility. 

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Shereen: @lawofpositivism

We’re having an important, needed, hard conversation today about endometriosis. Luckily we are guided by an amazing guest who seems to be able to bring lightness and humour to even the darkest topics, author Emma Bolden. So we invite you to laugh, and cry with us.

Emma’s memoir, The Tiger and The Cage exploring her decades-long rollercoaster with endometriosis was recently featured by the brilliant production company, Shondaland who describe her as a “compelling voice” and her book as: “an outstretched hand inviting us to accompany her through the most intimate and important experiences of her life, and women’s collective experiences.”

Together we explore:

• The mystery that is endometriosis - even though the condition been documented since ancient Greece, and 176 million people suffer with it worldwide, we still don’t know exactly what it is, what causes it, or have comprehensive ways to successfully treat it.
  
  
• Emma’s personal experience, and what gave her the strength to not only manage symptoms that impacted every area of her life, but also to navigate a medical system that is all too often dismissive, dehumanising and at times, abusive.
  
  
• What writing her taught Emma about herself, her Calling and her future, and the healing power of each of us sharing our own stories. 

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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:

Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

Emma Bolden: @emmabold - https://www.instagram.com/emmabold/

Wild Power is five this month!

We love watching this book work its magic, and hearing what it’s waking up in readers across the globe. (We’re thrilled that it’s now available in 8 languages—French, Italian, Spanish, German, Korean, Dutch, Czech, Russian—with a couple more in the pipeline). 

Thank you to everyone who has been writing in or tagging us with your greatest takeaway from the book.

Here is one takeaway we adored:
“My greatest learning from Wild Power has been that my intuition will always be by my side and guide me whenever I need her. She lies within and when listening, she gives me all the answers I could ever ask for. Through practising deep cycle awareness I have regained the connection with her and ability to be true to myself.”
- Luna

In today’s episode Alexandra and Sjanie share five things they learned from writing Wild Power, including:

• How their personal relationship evolved through the writing process.
  
  
• What they learned about their creative processes—particularly what the book writing taught them about how to begin anything beautifully.
  
  
• That the world really is ready for menstruality—YES!

---

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 info@redschool.net

---

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 welcoming back Ruby May to the podcast, who is the new community leader here at Red School. Ruby is the founder of the Know Your Flow cycle awareness course and community - she’s an earth-lover, a truth-seeker, an edge-dweller and a mischief-maker passionate about how we can each midwife a culture of deeper connection – to our bodies, each other and our planet through menstrual cycle awareness.

I’ve been loving working with Ruby lately to co-create our new MLP grads community, The Hive, we’ve been riffing a lot about the power of cycle-aware friendship and community, and today Sjanie is joining us. 

So, if you ever feel lonely in your cycle awareness practice, or like you’re swimming upstream and would love some like-minded allies by your side, this one’s for you. I invite you to make a cup of something lovely and nestle into this conversation with us…

We explore:

• How lonely it can feel to practise cycle awareness in a world that often demands productivity and a focus on what is visible, rather than what is slow and unseen. 
  
  
• The harmony, creativity that love that emerges between people when we each authentically own the place they are truly in and can put the fullness of our humanity in the space - and how cycle awareness gives us access to that authentic expression. 
  
  
• How the premenstruum schools us in how to meet conflict as a creative ally within our friendships and communities. 

---

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 info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Ruby May: @know.your.flow - https://www.instagram.com/know.your.flow

Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

How do you experience the pre-ovulation phase of your cycle - your inner spring? Is it a time of ease and flow,  or perhaps anxiety and insecurity? Maybe  a mixture of both? 

Whatever your experience, we hope that today's episode will shed some light on the powers of inner spring for you. It's our first Q+A episode where Red School founders Alexandra and Sjanie will answer your questions about how to work with your cycle in the pre-ovulation phase.

We explore questions like:

- What to do if your experience of inner spring is different to many people, due to health challenges, and how to handle the shame that can arise?

- How to hold yourself when emotional vulnerabilities and wounds come up in inner spring.

- How to emerge tenderly from your bleed in a world that often doesn’t support that, and how to meet the rising energy of spring in a generative way, especially when it appears as anxiety and insecurity.

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Join our free online course, 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 info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

Hinewai Waitoa is doing powerful work to reclaim  Maori menstrual wisdom. In her words: “Colonisation took so much of what was magic about Maori culture when it came to things like menstruation practices. We are still reclaiming our sacred ways here in Aotearoa”.

Hinewai is a māmā to two unschooled mini beings and the creator of Waikuranuku Indigenous devoted to wholistic womb wellness, reclamation & womb sovereignty.

Her reclamation journey has unfolded over the past 15 years and she now lives her life purpose holding space for kōhine - girls, wāhine - women, tāne - men and whānau - families, to reconnect to and understand the natural rhythms and cycles of the womb,  heal inter-generational trauma and create a more nourishing connected loving earth for all living beings.

In our conversation we explore:

- How Hinewai is currently preparing her tamahine - her daughter - for her menarche rite of passage.

- What it means to “speak aroha” - love - into the centre of our beings, and how to work with it as a powerful menstrual practice, and an act of rebellion which creates deep, inner alignment.

- What is inside Hinewai’s ‘kete ikura” - her menstrual cycle basket - and how she uses it to keep her anchored into a real, lived honouring of her cycle.

---

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 info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Hinewai Waitoa: @waikuranuku.indigenous_cycles - https://www.instagram.com/waikuranuku.indigenous_cycles

How has your intimacy with your cycle (or your menopause process) changed you, and your life?

It’s an important question to ask, in quiet moments, perhaps in your inner winter. Cycle awareness offers many fruits, and they can easily be missed in a linear world that rarely—if ever—shines a spotlight on your cyclicity and what it is awakening in you.

On the podcast today, the tables are turned as Sjanie asks our host, Sophie this question and they explore what menstrual cycle awareness has taught Sophie over the past decade, particularly when it comes to living her calling and creating things of beauty in the world. 

They explore:

• The wild night of pre-menstrual rage that changed everything for Sophie; her career, her country of residence and her relationship.
  
  
• What late night breast-feeding dreaming taught Sophie about how to run a thriving, sustainable, impactful business.
  
  
• Why we all need to connect more to the 99.9% of life on earth that is cyclical, rather than the 0.01% of human culture that is largely made up of linear, productivity obsessed cultures. 

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Join us for a free webinar on May 25th: How Your Menstrual Cycle Can help you to Create a Thriving Business - www.yourcyclicalbusiness.com

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

At the beginning of the pandemic, Claire Baker released her first book, and went into a hyper-productive mode, galvanised by the new world we were all suddenly pushed into. At the end of 2020 she was depleted, suffering from critic attacks and her ambition completely dissolved. It’s only now in early 2023 that her creative energy is returning. 

In our conversation today we speak about the many ways that intimacy with our cycles manage our creative flow, our energy levels, our sense of confidence and purpose and our overall health.

We explore:

• How cycle awareness helps us to hold the tension during phases of creative ‘wintering’, and the deep value of fallow times.
  
  
• The reluctant, bittersweet gratitude both Claire and Sophie feel about the learnings they’ve received from chronic illness, and burnout, and how it’s preparing them for the inevitable changes to come as they head towards menopause, and boosting their inner reserves in readiness.
  
  
• How we can work with inner autumn and inner spring to manage our inner critic and make more space to play and mess up. 

---

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 info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Claire Baker: @_clairebaker_ - https://www.instagram.com/_clairebaker_/

Kim McCabe, the founder of Rites for Girls says that without puberty rites of passage, young people self-initiate. The media tells them how they should be and our youngsters create their own ways of proving their adulthood through feats, dares, and adventures. They try to appear like adults in what they do and how they look: using clothes, make-up, drink, cigarettes, cars, and sex.

According to Kim, we grown-ups can take back the role of initiating our children into adulthood, and “the children welcome it, we are fulfilled by it, and a transition that has become defined by its difficulty can become a joyous one.”

In our conversation today we explore how to take back the role of initiating our girls and young people into their menstruating lives.

We explore:

• How to begin speaking about menstruation, move through shame and support girls to have healthy relationships with their bodies.
  
  
• The importance of asking “what makes your heart sing?” and “what brings you joy?” to our girls, especially between age 10-12, so these threads are tended and their unique essence awakens.
  
  
• The profound impact of happens when you have regular “mother-daughter dates”…

---

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 info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Kim McCabe - Rites for Girls - https://www.instagram.com/ritesforgirls

Understanding how to dismantle racism is a charged and complex topic. So today we’re exploring how  menstrual cycle awareness can be a profound ally as we work to unravel our own unconscious bias, and find our way of deconstructing oppressive systems. 

My guest is Dr Sunshine Kamaloni who has a PhD in cultural studies and a deep cycle awareness practice. She shares from her own personal journey working with her inner seasons in her equity, inclusion, diversity and belonging work to unpack how the muscles that cycle awareness grow in us can help us to uncover our own personal race story.

We explore:

• What a race story is, how they underpin unconscious bias, and how they impact us differently depending on where we are in the structure of the system. 
  
  
• The blessings of inner winter as a time to rest, stop, ground and nourish as we take stock of who we are and how we sit with race, inside a safe container with less charge.
  
  
• How our own inner critic can actually be a supportive force as we uncover our race stories; as a truth-speaker showing us our blindspots and a guide in evaluating our progress. 

---

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 info@redschool.net

---

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 Sunshine Kamaloni: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sunshinekamaloni

When I first dreamed into the Menstruality Podcast, my guest today was one of the first people I knew I wanted to interview, and it’s taken a while, but boy, is it worth the wait!

Tami Lynn Kent is the author of Wild Feminine and the creator of Holistic Pelvic Care, and I’ve been lucky to study with her several times over the past decade - the results have been transformative for me. Today's far-reaching conversation explores the power and medicine we hold in our pelvic bowls and how we can resource ourselves as we 'work on the frontlines of the feminine'.

We explore:

• What could become possible if we continued the ancient indigenous practice of listening to the menstrual dreamers in our communities, as guides. 
  
  
• Why Tami came to be known as the Vagina Whisperer, and the shame that shifts when we are deeply honoured in this part of our bodies. 
  
  
• The funny, and deeply beautiful thing that happened when Tami taught her sons about the power of menstruation. 

---

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 info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Tami Lynn Kent: @tamilynnkent - https://www.instagram.com/tamilynnkent

“You cannot say how many cubic metres make up courage, or what kind of wires you need to construct freedom. What kind of lab do you go into to measure relationships between people?” ~ Minna Salami

When Minna, my guest today, said this, I got shivers up and down my spine (as I did many times, reading her brilliant book, Sensuous Knowledge) as a deeply intuitive woman raised in a hyper-rational world… or as Minna calls it, a world rooted in euro-patriarchal knowledge. 

Minna Salami is a Nigerian, Finnish, and Swedish feminist author and social critic. Her research focuses on Black feminist theory, contemporary African thought, and the politics of knowledge production, and today we’re exploring Sensuous Knowledge is a model of knowledge rooted in the dynamic landscape of Black feminist thought - one that empowers, enlivens, and liberates, through embodied insight.

We explore:

• How the menstrual cycle is a source of profound, disruptive different ways of knowing. 
  
  
• What happens in a world which only values that which can be quantified, measured and put into hierarchies, rather than honouring the knowledge that emerges from within our bodies and ourselves.
  
  
• The “kaleidoscopic method” and what rivers, trees and placentas can teach us about power and the nature of reality. 

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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 info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Minna Salami: @minnasalami_ - https://www.instagram.com/minnasalami_

Today I’m back with Alexandra & Sjanie and we’re kicking off a series which will unfold all the way through the summer - our Creativity series. Because these two powerhouse creative mavens have finally landed their teachings on creativity - born from the menstrual cycle and relevant to us all, whether you currently have a menstrual cycle or not. 

They’ll be sharing these teachings around what they call ‘The Creative Cycle’ for the first time ever this September in our new creativity course, and you can join us for our free webinar on July 12th to learn all about both The Creative Cycle and the course.

In today’s conversation we explore how we’re all innately creative, how The Creative Cycle can unleash our creative flow, and how Alexandra and Sjanie have worked with these teachings to make everything they’ve created at Red School…

We explore:

• The liberating power of The Creative Cycle, and how it can free us all up from self doubt, shame, procrastination and “too-many-ideas” overwhelm into a thriving, fulfilling creative life. 
  
  
• What the menstrual cycles have taught Alexandra and Sjanie about the cyclical nature of creativity, and how Red School has been a ‘laboratory’ to practice these teachings.
   
• Why - and how - we would LOVE to hear from YOU.

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Join our free webinar: How Menstruality Can Teach You to Live a Wildly Creative Life on July 12th - www.redschool.net/creativity

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

Six years ago dedicated imperfectionist and mushroom-foraging witch of business, Lucy Aitken Read moved her family from South London, UK to a yurt in the middle of nowhere in New Zealand where they share their off grid farm with another family and are all unschooling their kids.

She now writes and teaches about sustainable living, attachment parenting and living a life without school on her blog, youtube channel and in her courses.

Lucy is also passionate about cycle awareness and today we’re talking about how intimacy to our cycles is the best possible foundational for anything we’re creating, why we all need to be more mammal, and how to free ourselves from the structures that hold us back from creatively expressing ourselves - aka how we can each unschool our creativity.

We explore:

• The power of play, making mistakes and detaching from outcomes when it comes to embodying our creative flow (and how Lucy’s unschooled kids have taught her new ways to have fun and follow her instincts).
  
  
• The mini-death of menstruation and what it teaches us about surrendering to the creative process.
  
  
• The three steps to unschooling our creativity, and what becomes possible creatively when we unfurl out from the shape that institutionalised education shaped us and our thoughts into.

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Join our free webinar: How Menstruality Can Teach You to Live a Wildly Creative Life on July 12th - www.redschool.net/creativity

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Lucy Aitkin: @lucy_aitkenread - https://www.instagram.com/lucy_aitkenread

What helps you to navigate the tender process of bringing your tender, intimate dreams and visions into reality? 

In our episode today - which is the next in our creativity series - we hear from Joni, Jenny and Chloe, three of the people in our community who have shared their current greatest creative challenges. They are all currently negotiating the beginning of their creative process of birthing a new body of work, expressing big ideas through writing, and creating a community event respectively.

Alexandra and Sjanie bring wisdom from The Creative Cycle - the blueprint for creative fulfillment that they have unearthed from their decades of menstrual cycle work to explore challenges like: “I’m good at exploring but not so good at putting pen to paper.”, “I feel frustrated with myself as the ‘always dreaming big but never actually doing anything’ person.” and “The size of the vision is overwhelming and I'm not sure where to start.”

We explore:

• The power that comes when we embrace the clumsiness and uncertainty of the beginning of any creative endeavour.
  
  
• How menstruation holds us in a non-doing state which helps us resist the productivity-obsessed culture so we can receive our vision, learn how to acclimatize to the - often huge - creative charge of our dreams, and listen for the next simple step.
  
  
• A practical way to kick the inner critic out of the tender dreaming phase of a creative project, so we can feel fully plugged into ourselves and feel held by our innate creativity.

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The doors are now open for our Your Creative Power course, starting in September. You can find out more and take your seat here: www.redschool.net/creativity

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

What if there is a direct connection between your pleasure and your power? And what if harnessing the magic of inner summer of the menstrual cycle - the ovulation phase - is the key  to unleashing a deeply pleasurable, full expression of who you are in the world?

We believe that both of these statements are true, but - as we explore in this podcast - a profound reclamation of the true power of inner summer is necessary, in a world which demands us to be in an endlessly productive summer-mode all of the time. 

As a result of all the societal projections created by hustle and beauty culture, the power of summer is much misunderstood, and many people struggle with it. Today we share ideas for how we can free ourselves from the narrow band of experience within which we’re told to operate, so that our unique magnetism and authenticity can be fully inhabited.

We explore:

• The shadow-boxing that can take over inner summer when we live in a linear world which neglects our cyclicity.
  
  
• How being with the instinctual aliveness of our animal bodies helps us to unleash and express our power in the inner summer, as well as hold the charge of our Calling in the world. 
  
  
• The direct connection between dropping deeply at menstruation and the full claiming of our inner summer selves. 

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Join our *NEW* programme: Your Creative Power and receive £100 off before Sept 10th - www.redschool.net/creativity

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

What happens when two people go through the spiritual initiation of menopause as a couple? Today we’re exploring the challenges and power of the menopause transition through the lens of intimate relationship, with our guests, anthropologist, facilitator, writer and mother Sophia Style and meditation teacher, pilgrim, and death doula Gemma Polo. 

This conversation is a precious gift - Gemma and Sophia are generous and courageous enough to invite us into some of their most intimate moments of challenge, conflict and connection from the past eight years, since they met, fell in love, and built a life together in Spain, co-parenting their children, and more recently have begun navigating the five phases of menopause alongside each other.

We explore:

• The biggest challenges they’ve faced as they navigate being in a perpetual autumn in their menopause journeys (and how a chestnut has helped them get through it!)
  
  
• How they are managing to co-parent teenagers and make sense of the changes in their mothering roles in this phase of life.
  
  
• How menstrual cycle awareness has grounded them in a deeper level of understanding of each other’s shifting emotions, and creates a container of safety and depth through the rollercoaster

---

The doors are now open for our Your Creative Power course, starting in September. You can find out more and take your seat here: www.redschool.net/creativity

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---
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 talking about menopause and creativity. In Alexandra and Sjanie’s menopause book, Wise Power, they speak about there being an ‘altar’ at the heart of the inner sanctum of menopause, “the point of deepest dark in which you experience the hot breath of your inner critic on the back of your neck, and you turn to fully face it.”

They go on to speak about how this powerful moment forges a new level of authority, a kind of authority that can be incredibly fertile ground for your creative process. 

This has been true for my guest Elena Brower. She is prolifically creative; the author of several books, a new volume of poetry, and the creator of yoga programmes, paintings and more, alongside running a successful business.

She’s also passionate about re-writing the cultural menopause story (she recently interviewed Alexandra and Sjanie for an exciting menopause upcoming event - more about that soon…).

We explore:

- How she’s experiencing a kind of creative re-birth a year and a half after her last period - a new kind of harmony happening, which is allowing her to think and make things that she’s never considered before.

- Why older women believe in themselves more and care less about what others think and how it feels to be catching glimpses of a full acceptance of herself in this phase of life.

- Her current greatest creative challenges, and how she’s navigating them.

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The doors are now open for our Your Creative Power course, starting in September. You can find out more and take your seat here: www.redschool.net/creativity

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

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 picking up an important thread we’ve been weaving through the podcast since the beginning - Queer menstruality.

I'm back with Red School Leadership Mentor, Abi Denyer-Bewick and this time we're in conversation with the brilliant Lottie Randomly who graduated from the Red School Menstruality Leadership Programme in 2012.

Lottie is a facilitator, educator, activist, writer and mentor with a background in mental health work and resilience building. They’re also a ceremonialist, with a special interest in funerals, and they’re especially drawn to the inner landscapes that people often fear passing through, such as menstruation and menopause as well as death and grief.

In our conversation to day we’re looking to expand the concepts around menstruality to include all people who menstruate - as well as people who don’t - all in the name of belonging, which is at the heart of this work. We explore:

- How the practice of menstrual cycle awareness naturally brings up questions and personal exploration around the identities we hold.

- How to expand the conversation around menstruality expands to include the experiences of all people with menstrual cycles, including non-binary and gender-expansive folks.

- “Menstrunormativity” and the harmful impacts around the unsaid assumptions about the menstrual cycle and menopause.

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Abi Denyer Bewick @abi.denyer.bewick - https://www.instagram.com/abi.denyer.bewick/
Lottie Randomly: @lottie.randomly - https://www.instagram.com/lottie.randomly/

Today we’re talking about womb healing and leadership with Tumelo Moreri who is a Spiritual Healer, Womb Medicine Woman and Embodied Leadership Guide based in Botswana. Her work is anchored in her training in leadership and integrative coaching as well as African Spirituality.

It’s a far-reaching conversation, rich in story and sprinkled all throughout with embodied feminine wisdom.

We explore:

• How to follow your Calling, even when everything around you seems to be collapsing, and nobody around you seems to understand (and how your womb can guide you when you’re being cracked open).
  
  
• How connecting with your ancestors - an important part of Tumelo’s womb healing approach - can serve as an antidote to imposter syndrome (and how cycle awareness amplifies this)
  
  
• Our wombs as a gateway to the mother, the mystery our own unique medicine and how we can each work to ‘partner with our wombs’ as leaders. 

---

The doors are now open for our Your Creative Power course, starting in September. You can find out more and take your seat here: www.redschool.net/creativity

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Tumelo Moreri: @tumelomoreri - https://www.instagram.com/tumelomoreri/

As cycle-aware leaders, nurturers and creatives we have a unique opportunity at our fingertips. We have access to an amazing inner technology for managing our inner critic. 

(You know…  that ever-present and frankly infuriating voice inside that likes to remind you that you’re not good enough, that freezes you into analysis paralysis, and that shames you into playing small.) 

In today’s podcast we explore how to restore this inner critic to its natural home in the cycle - the pre-menstruum - and work to put boundaries in place to contain it. Because, when it’s in its rightful place, the inner critic can actually become a creative ally. 

We explore:

• The truth that your critic will never become your best friend. It absolutely won’t! But it can become a life-bringing force, when you know how to relate to it. 
  
  
• How to navigate the tricky terrain of your inner critic, and offer some guidelines for putting it back in its natural place, so you can experience its sacred role in your creative process. 
  
  
• Our upcoming Inner Critic workshop on September 14th: Your Inner Critic: Your Gateway to Your Creativity where we will learn how to relate to it in a more generative way, and liberate our creative energy. 

---

The doors are now open for our Your Creative Power course, starting in September. You can find out more and take your seat here: www.redschool.net/creativity

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

What to do when you find yourself in a creative void, either because life has thrown you a curve ball, or you find yourself feeling totally uninspired? Our cycles teach us to trust the fallow times, but that’s a tall order in a world that celebrates productivity above all else. 

Our guest today is author, Rebecca Campbell and she’s a great person to have this conversation for many reasons, but especially because she’s personally navigated many periods of creative void in order to bring forth creations which have touched the lives of 100s of 1000s of people, including several books, courses, a new podcast and a mystery school.

The deeper reason for the richness of this conversation is that Rebecca is a being who fully embraces the mystery. She defines herself as a mystic, and her calling is to weave the sacred back into everyday life. 

We explore: 

• Why it’s ok to suck at the beginning of any creative process, and how staying safe is an antidote to creativity. 
  
  
• How to hold ourselves through big creative leaps, like leaving your job, or starting something brand new.
  
  
• The journaling process that helps Rebecca move through imposter syndrome, and how trusting the mystery helps us to find the courage to share our voice.

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Join our new Your Creative Power online course and save £100 before Sep 10th: www.redschool.net/creativity

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

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 on the podcast we’re chatting about a tried-and tested antidote to the biggest creative challenge most of us face, a challenge which came through in dozens of versions of this question in our inbox during our summer creativity series…How can I make space for my creative expression when there’s so much else going on in my life?

Do you relate? Perhaps you find yourself making exciting creative plans, only to get caught up in the flurry of day-to-day life and never really get started? Maybe you are wary of diving fully into a creative project—amidst everything else you’re caring for in your life—out of fear that you’ll burn out (again)? 

Today’s podcast explores the deep, underground magic of cycle awareness, and how it helps us to understand everything we experience in our lives as part of the biggest creative act of all—being an ever-evolving human in an often-challenging world. 

We explore:

• The incredibly creative shift that happens when we dare to trust that everything in our life has meaning - even the things that feel that they’re getting in the way (the job, the caring role, the responsibilities etc)
  
  
• How cycle awareness grounds us in who we truly are, which helps us develop new emotional skills, inner discipline and physiological muscle for all the creative projects that will call us in the future.
  
  
• What Sjanie has learned from her many careers; from working in a potato factory to being a graphic designer, to being a hypnotherapist focused on fertility, to growing Red School.

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Join our new Your Creative Power online course and save £100 before Sep 10th: www.redschool.net/creativity

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

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 I’m speaking with someone who knows in a very embodied way how to ride the creative waves of cyclical living… mainly because she knows how to ride actual ocean waves, and in some cases we’re talking 30 foot waves. 

Easkey Britton spearheaded women’s big-wave surfing in Ireland and is a five time national champion surfer as well as being a marine scientist, holding a Doctorate in Environment and Society and an activist - she was named an ‘Agent of Change’ by Surfer magazine.

She’s the author of two beautiful books about our interconnection with water, Saltwater in the Blood and Ebb and Flow. She was writing her first book when she joined Alexandra and Sjanie for the Menstruality Leadership Programme and it is woven throughout with celebration of her own bodily cycles.

We explore how water supports Easkey through the cyclicality of her creative process including, 

• The importance of honouring the ebb, the out-breath, the inner winter. She interviews indigenous wisdom keepers throughout the book, and here she shares Lakota skier and activist Connor Ryan’s teachings about how it’s the ebb that allows us to tap into a state of flow.
  
  
• How the cycles of water in our world can anchor us in the natural cyclical wisdom that has been at pay since the beginning of life on earth. The water you drink today has always been present - it may have been drunk by a tyrannosaurus rex!
  
  
• What Easkey’s cycle has taught her about how to hold the tension as she wrote her second book, and how surfing in the ocean has helped her to trust the creative power of showing up, and being present. 

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Join our new Your Creative Power online course. We start on September 21st:  www.redschool.net/creativity

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Easkey Britton: @easkeysurf - https://www.instagram.com/easkeysurf

When Lucy Pearce published her book about the power of the menstrual cycle, Moon Time: Harness the ever-changing energy of your menstrual cycle 11 years ago, she was one of very few people talking about periods, and it was one of the first books in print to speak about the Red Tent movement. 

Over the past decade her loyalty to her cycle has helped her as a multi-passionate creatrix to write twelve books, found Womancraft - a paradigm-shifting publishing house, edit and publish over 50 books, teach courses, create beautiful art and parent three children.

Five years ago she received an autism diagnosis, and in our conversation today we explore how this had helped her to understand herself far better, have tools to care for herself and manage her life as a cycle-aware creative in an all-too-linear world.

We explore:

• How to process a neurodivergence diagnosis, renegotiate your life and relationships and create a protective bubble to safeguard yourself.
  
  
• How Lucy navigated years of crippling shame which shut down her creativity entirely, by saying yes to her creative expression in small ways.
  
  
• The truth that real creativity happens outside of our comfort zones, and how we can lean into the stretch to meet what is truly authentic, and unearth that which has been shut down within each of us. 

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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Lucy Pearce: @lucyhpearce - https://www.instagram.com/lucyhpearce
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

Those of us who are passionate about the power of menstrual cycle awareness can feel a little  crazy in our world. Not only does our culture overlook the power of the menstrual cycle, but it continues to perpetuate an atmosphere of shame around all things menstrual. 

That’s why I love meeting women like Jasmine Alicia Carter.

Jasmine is a Menstrual Artist and Feminine Empowerment Mentor. She’s been painting with her period blood since 2016. It’s become a sacred art and ritual that has changed her life and the lives of thousands of women across the globe, through the budding Menstrual Art Movement!

In our conversation we explore:

• How Jasmine paints with her blood, and the healing, de-shaming power of working creatively with your blood.
  
  
• What happened when Jasmine’s menstrual art went viral via an article in the daily mail - how she transformed the hate she received into fuel for her practice.
  
  
• The ripple effect of her menstrual art, for her son, partner, family and the wider community gathering around the menstrual art movement. 

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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 info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Jasmine Alicia Carter: @jasminealiciacarter - https://www.instagram.com/jasminealiciacarter

There's lots of confusion about how to define menopause and the years running up to it, making it difficult for people to clarify where they're at in their menopause process.

At Red School, we stand for a reclamation of our cyclical experience in a world which denies and demonises our cyclicity. We see this menopause confusion as a symptom of the way we have been shut out of our true experience as cyclical beings. In order for us to reclaim the place we’re in, both in our menstrual cycles and the larger cycles of our lives, we need to be able to feel, name and claim our own experience, as well as having a dignified and meaningful context for it.

So, in today’s episode Alexandra and Sjanie walk through the Red School way of contextualising menopause, through the lens of the seasons of your menstruating years—including the autumn of your menstruating years (‘The Quickening’), the Menopause Hinterland in the approach to menopause, and the long inner winter of the five phases of the spiritual initiation of menopause.

We explore:

• Some of the signs that you’ve arrived in menopause - including the increasing feeling that you’re living in a parallel universe!
  
  
• A different way to understand the cycle disturbances that can happen in our 40s - which many refer to as perimenopause (which itself has multiple definitions, depending on who you’re speaking to).
  
  
• How to navigate the tricky period when your cycles are unpredictable or breaking up - the menopause ‘hinterland’ - before you enter fully into the menopause initiatory journey, which has its own order or holding. 

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Join us on Instagram for 13 days of Menopause Power, starting Oct 5th  - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

My guest today is one of many people who felt like she was losing her mind as she entered menopause. 

Dr. Arianna Sholes-Douglas is an integrative healthcare practitioner and visionary in the field of women’s health. She has practiced medicine for three decades and is the author of  The Menopause Myth: What Your Mother, Doctor, and Friends Haven’t Told You about Life after 35

The menopause was intense for her, and inspired her to reassess everything in her life, including her long career in medicine, eventually making the decision to transform her work life and start a practice supporting women in menopause with an integrative, holistic approach.

In our conversation:

- We walk through Dr Arianna's 'signs you’re healing in menopause' and how they showed up for her personally, including the patterns that she broke through menopause, how to find our way to self forgiveness, and how to set boundaries.

- How our brain chemistry changes in menopause and how this is reflected in the shift from people pleasing to ‘what do I need?’.

- Dr Arianna's 'Jewels for the Journey' and the sacred role of menopause in our lives. 

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Join us for a free webinar on October 18th: How Menopause Awakens Your Power - www.redschoolmenopause.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

Our guest today, Lisa Schrader, is the founder of Awakening Shakti and the author of Getting Started with Tantra and has impacted the lives of thousands of women for over a decade as a workshop leader, author, speaker and coach.

She joined us for our live menopause course - Menopause: The Great Awakener -  last year and today, she shares how the course supported her through the 3-year post menopause dismantling-shedding-rebuilding re-birthing she’s currently emerging from.

It’s been a deep process of dismantling old identities and recovering from a lifetime of over-achieving, pressure, performance, and people pleasing, to awaken the Queen archetype and a new kind of sovereignty.

In our conversation we explore;

• Her long process of dismantling her inner “Overachiever” that was born when she was chosen to be the first Tantra and sacred sexuality teacher to appear on Oprah.
  
  
• How her garden has helped her reset her nervous system and attune to the new pace that menopause was inviting her into, slowing right down to reclaim her natural rhythm.
  
  
• What has helped her to navigate her body image demons, including how she is embracing pleasure and allowing her sensual connection with nature to guide her. 

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Registration is now open for our menopause online course: Menopause: The Great Awakener - the early bird price is available until Oct 25th here - www.redschoolmenopause.com.

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

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 Schrader: @awakeningshakti - https://www.instagram.com/awakeningshakti

Today we’re carrying on a conversation about the initiatory power of menopause which we’ve been having with Chameli Ardagh, the founder of Awakening Women, since the beginning of her menopause process.

Last year she emerged from her challenging process of descent and is sharing the fruits of her brutal, yet beautiful menopause underworld journey; which included divorce, the reshaping of her Calling, and the death of her son.

Chameli Ardagh is a yogini, mystic and Goddess Wisdom Keeper. Her work is rooted in earth honoring, devotional women’s spirituality and goddess centered tantric yoga. One of the things I most love about her is her gift for storytelling and ability to bring ancient myths alive for our modern world.

We explore: 

• How the dismantling and transformation of menopause demands that we break age-old contracts based on self-sacrifice and learn to set new boundaries, as well as how these shifts ripples forwards and backwards in time.
  
  
• How cultivating compassion with ourselves is not optional through the menopause process. It is needed to embrace even the parts of us that are totally out of alignment with who we want to be.
  
  
• What happened when Chameli took herself on a honeymoon with herself during her early menopause dismantling, to a wild Hawaiian beach with a pod of dolphins!
  
  

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Join us on for our Menopause: The Great Awakener course, starting Nov 3rd: https://www.redschoolmenopause.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Chameli Ardagh: @awakeningwomen - https://www.instagram.com/awakeningwomen/

Menopause awakens us to the vulnerability of our humanity. The structures that have long held us safe begin to crack, and we lose the mechanisms we’ve used to hold ourselves in place; our bodies change, our shifting hormones rewire our psyches, our long held identities are shaken.

It’s no wonder we can start to feel that we’re “losing it” - all the layers of certainty that we’ve come to depend on are being deconstructed; from our health, to our careers, to our marriages, to even the deep meaning of our lives. 

The radical idea we explore in today’s conversation, is that this process of ‘losing it’ is a necessary - albeit very challenging - part of the menopause spiritual initiation. If you’re in the middle of this messy process, may this episode offer some supportive context, meaning and even solace to you today.

We explore:

• Why your mind needs to be decommissioned for the spiritual awakening of menopause to happen. It’s not that you’re going mad, rather you’re finding a new kind of intelligence within you; a heart-mind knowing. 
  
  
• The fear that arises as our minds change in menopause - particularly living within a consensus culture that values the mind above all and is rooted in a millennia-old collective denial and suppression of our intuitive gifts.
  
  
• The punchline of menopause… and it’s not what you might expect…

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Join us for Menopause: The Great Awakener - an online course (with lifetime access) at www.redschool.net/menopause

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

When Alexandra began to experience monthly outrageous period pain in her 30s, she made a radical decision. She thought “my body is talking to me, and I’m going to listen”. On the podcast today she reflects on this moment as a pivotal step into leadership… one that led to the development of everything that Red School has created. 

The pain forced her to give space to her bleed time, which allowed her to slowly, cycle-by-cycle discover the spiritual powers of menstruation, and cycle awareness as a pathway to leadership. 

It was the starting point for many of the cycle-inspired leadership skills that we now teach on our Menstruality Leadership Programme - it’s exciting because the doors for 2024 are opening again later this month - and through our conversation, we illuminate how the menstrual cycle and menopause can awaken us to a new (timeless) kind of consciousness which inspires a way of living and leading that is life-affirming, inclusive, and rooted in belonging. 

We explore:

• How menstrual cycle awareness, matresscence and menopause are calling us home to our power, and the responsibility that comes with it - a responsibility to care for all of Life.
  
  
• The ‘ghost self’ that we each carry around with us - the ‘me I should be’, how it drains our power and how we can disengage from it, so that we can accept our humanity, our vulnerability and our messiness as a pathway to leadership.
   
• What we mean when we say that menstrual cycle awareness and consciousness menopause awaken a leadership which is in service to the feminine. 

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The doors for our 2024 Menstruality Leadership Programme will open later this month. If you're curious to learn more about it, please join us for a free introductory webinar:  How to Channel the Powers of Menstruality to Step into Your Leadership. You can register here: https://www.menstrualityleadership.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

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)

Today’s episode is for you if - like me - you long to feel more calm, rested, peaceful and grounded throughout your days. Both because it feels better, but also because you know the gold that lies in this state of restedness; for your health, your relationships, your worklife, and your leadership.

Our guest is Tracee Stanley, the author of the bestselling book Radiant Rest, and the recently published The Luminous Self. She is a post-lineage yoga teacher, inspired by more than 20 years of study, and she’s devoted to sharing the wisdom of yoga nidra, rest, meditation, self-inquiry, nature as a teacher, and ancestor reverence.

We chat about how to set up a practice that allows for rest inside a mainstream culture that says we’re not worthy unless you’re pushing through; whether that’s pushing through grief, illness, exhaustion or menstruation and menopause. Through it all, Tracee illuminates how deep rest, peace and truth are our birthright.

We explore:

• The importance of unveiling the messages we received about the value of rest from our parents and ancestral lineage; particularly for Black, Brown and Indigenous people.
  
  
• How the practice of Yoga Nidra is a way to know our true self,  as well as a powerful act of rebellion in a culture that wants us to keep endlessly grinding
  
  
• The story of Mataji - a female yoga teacher in her 90s, who was famous for never sleeping, and became one of the first people to teach the wisdom of yoga nidra. 

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Registration is opening tonight for our 2024 Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can explore the curriculum here: https://www.menstrualityleadership.com

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

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 centuries we’ve been taught our menstrual cycle is a liability, something we must ignore or reject.  In this special bonus episode we’re going to upend that old story and celebrate the power of loving your cycle or at least making tentative steps towards befriending it, and  the inner resources you unlock when you do that.

This conversation was recorded when we first launched our Wild Power book - and have a buy one get one free offer on the Wild Power book until 21st December, if you’d like to buy one and get one for a friend or as a gift for a loved one over the holidays. (We’re also running the offer for our menopause book, Wise Power). See below for the link to get your free copy.

In this episode you will:

• Learn how the menstrual cycle is our #1 resource for self-care
• Explore how it is your natural rhythm of power for living a wholesome, creative life
• How loving your cycle can lead you to loving yourself more

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Registration is now open for our 2024 Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can explore the curriculum here: https://www.menstrualityleadership.com

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To get a free copy of Wild Power to gift to a friend, we are offering a buy one, get one free until 21st December: https://www.redschool.net/product/wild-power-book-bogof 

(We’re also offering the same deal with our new menopause book, Wise Power: https://www.redschool.net/product/wise-power-book-bogof )

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

At the heart of the menstruality leadership path is the power and wisdom of menstruation. Slowly over time, bleed by bleed, we have the opportunity to experience a profound kind of homecoming when we menstruate - we remember who we are and what we’re about. This sense of purpose and meaning can fuel us up for another cycle of leading with heart, power and courage in our lives.

In today’s conversation we look at three secrets for successful leadership that can emerge from conscious, rested menstruation (however much we’re able to do that within the structures of our world and the responsibilities of our lives) through our own personal stories, menstrual dreams and trying to articulate the often wordless and deeply mysterious knowings we’ve experienced during our bleed time.

We explore: 

• How Alexandra’s menstrual pain in her 30s opened her up to her life’s purpose (and how orgasmic menstruation eventally became for her).
  
  
• Our favourite menstrual dreams and what they taught us about ourselves, our worth and our leadership.
  
  
• Why the first chamber of menstruation ‘separation’ is so key to accessing the leadership wisdom within menstruation; separating from the world, but also from what we have previously known ourselves to be, so that we can be fully available to encounter the mystery and infinite possibilities available to us. 

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Registration is now open for our 2024 Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can explore the curriculum here: https://www.menstrualityleadership.com

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To get a free copy of Wild Power to gift to a friend, we are offering a buy one, get one free until 21st December: https://www.redschool.net/product/wild-power-book-bogof 

(We’re also offering the same deal with our new menopause book, Wise Power: https://www.redschool.net/product/wise-power-book-bogof )

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

While there are many wonderful spiritual practices available today, the one thing we are not taught is that we have our own unique way or practice encoded in our being that changes everything.  In this episode we restore menstrual cycle awareness as the original spiritual practice, and how it can support each of us to evolve, every day.

This 2nd bonus episode in our Wild Power series was recorded when Red School founders, Alexandra & Sjanie first launched their Wild Power book - and have a buy one get one free offer on the Wild Power book until 21st December, if you’d like to buy one and get one for a friend or as a gift for a loved one over the holidays.

(We’re also running the offer for our menopause book, Wise Power).

See below for the link to get your free copy.

In this episode you’ll:

• Discover how our bodies come coded with our own original spiritual practice
• Learn how we came to discover the power of the female body
• And how you can begin to activate this uniquely Feminine practice

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Registration is now open for our 2024 Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can explore the curriculum here: https://www.menstrualityleadership.com

---

To get a free copy of Wild Power to gift to a friend, we are offering a buy one, get one free until 21st December: https://www.redschool.net/product/wild-power-book-bogof 

(We’re also offering the same deal with our new menopause book, Wise Power: https://www.redschool.net/product/wise-power-book-bogof )

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

Five years ago, when women’s educator, storyteller and songstress, Tara Brading was burnt out from the hustle culture of the non-profit world, she dropped everything and went on a pilgrimage to Ireland to connect with her Irish ancestral lineage. This trip changed her life, setting her on a path of studying mythology and honoring the earth based feminine wisdom left in her blood and bones.

This episode is for you if you feel a call to reclaim the wisdom of your ancestors, to return to a way of living on earth which is balanced, to heed the call to the wild that you perhaps (like me) hear each cycle month when you bleed or during your menopause process… 

It’s also for you if you are committed to decolonising your mind and your life as part of your leadership path. I’ve been lucky to have had conversations with several Black and Indigenous educators for the podcast who have clarified the connection between reclaiming the cyclical wisdom of our wombs and bodies, and dismantling colonial systems of oppression (such as Latham Thomas in episode 77, Asha Frost in episode 63 and Hinewai Waitoa in episode 87). With Tara, I explore how, particularly as white women of European descent, reconnecting to our ancestral lineage goes hand in hand with the journey of decolonisation. 

In our conversation we explore;

• What the ancient myths and stories of Ireland and England tell us about the connection between women’s bodies, and the earth, as well as the leadership role we claim when we recognise that we embody the land (and how our cyclical nature gives us a direct line to this remembrance).
  
  
• How to reconnect to the wisdom of your ancient, ancestral bloodlines when you menstruate. 
  
  
• The connection between our wombs and our voices and how to work with song as a way to connect with our ancestors. 

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Registration is now open for our 2024 Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can explore the curriculum here: https://www.menstrualityleadership.com

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To get a free copy of Wild Power to gift to a friend, we are offering a buy one, get one free until 21st December: https://www.redschool.net/product/wild-power-book-bogof 

(We’re also offering the same deal with our new menopause book, Wise Power: https://www.redschool.net/product/wise-power-book-bogof )

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

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 excited to share our third bonus Wild Power conversation. These ‘round-the-kitchen-table’ chats with Alexandra and Sjanie were first released when we published Wild Power: Discover the Magic of the Menstrual Cycle and Awaken the Feminine Path to Power. They unpack the book’s teachings through powerful, practical and funny real-life stories and examples. 

In this episode we dive into the detail of how to live menstrual cycle awareness as a spiritual practice - your path to power - on a day to day basis, and the magic that unfurls from that.

In this episode you’ll:

• Discover how to restore your cyclical inner ecology
  
  
• Learn the four steps to charting your cycle as your spiritual practice
  
  
• Understand how to harness the powers of your cycle to boost your health, increase your creativity and productivity and restore sacredness to your daily life

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Registration is now open for our 2024 Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can explore the curriculum here: https://www.menstrualityleadership.com

---

To get a free copy of Wild Power to gift to a friend, we are offering a buy one, get one free until 21st December: https://www.redschool.net/product/wild-power-book-bogof 

(We’re also offering the same deal with our new menopause book, Wise Power: https://www.redschool.net/product/wise-power-book-bogof )

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

Chloe Isidora is the creator of My Moon Power, a set of essential oils to help you connect to yourself and your inner seasons. She's also the author of 'Sacred self-care: everyday rituals for a more joyful and meaningful life' and is a graduate of our Menstruality Leadership Programme and has a deeply devoted practice of menstrual cycle awareness. 

We invited her to the podcast to explore her creative process over the past several years, through a cycle-aware lens. It’s a beautiful, inspiring and very relatable journey from self doubt, uncertainty and low self esteem, through a series of unexpected twists and turns to a wildly creative life.

We explore:

• The surprising underground spiritual influences that have sustained Chloe’s connection to herself, her womb wisdom and the soul of the project. 
  
  
• How to practice letting go into deep self-acceptance throughout the inner seasons, as a way to prepare for the great letting go at the bleed.
  
  
• How Chloe is navigating the bumpy, challenging ‘birthing’ moment of this project; including holding herself through increased visibility and staying true to the visions through moments of slower momentum.

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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Chloe Isidora: @chloeisidora - https://www.instagram.com/chloeisidora

This is our fourth bonus Wild Power conversation. These ‘round-the-kitchen-table’ chats with Alexandra and Sjanie were first released when we published Wild Power: Discover the Magic of the Menstrual Cycle and Awaken the Feminine Path to Power. They unpack the book’s teachings through powerful, practical and funny real-life stories and examples.

In the fourth installment of this bonus series, we explore the initiatory process that is unfolding from menarche to menopause, leading you ever deeper into embracing your Wild Power. We illuminate how this initiatory path is working you - an amazing hidden intelligence that is leading you Home.

In this episode you’ll:

• Learn about this initiatory journey takes us from ‘me’ consciousness to a participatory  ‘us’ consciousness.
• Find out how to reframe your experience of your first period (menarche), if it was slightly less that perfect.
• Discover the steps of this initiatory path that helps you to fully face yourself, understand your Calling and grow into new levels of maturity. 

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Registration is now open for our 2024 Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can explore the curriculum here: https://www.menstrualityleadership.com

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To get a free copy of Wild Power to gift to a friend, we are offering a buy one, get one free until 21st December: https://www.redschool.net/product/wild-power-book-bogof

(We’re also offering the same deal with our new menopause book, Wise Power: https://www.redschool.net/product/wise-power-book-bogof )

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

Welcome to number five of our bonus Wild Power series. These ‘round-the-kitchen-table’ chats with Alexandra and Sjanie were first released when we published Wild Power: Discover the Magic of the Menstrual Cycle and Awaken the Feminine Path to Power. They unpack the book’s teachings through powerful, practical and funny real-life stories and examples. 

Today we're diving deep into an exploration of the "cosmos" inside you. We reveal the basic pattern of this cosmos - the two energy dynamics (the way of the Feminine and the way of the Masculine) - that form the underpining of your cyclical life journey.

In this episode you’ll:

• Learn about the energy dynamic of the menstrual cycle
• Discover the two creating currents that underpin your initiatory journey through the menstrual cycle
• And how you can come into right relationship with both the Masculine and Feminine within you

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Registration is now open for our 2024 Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can explore the curriculum here: https://www.menstrualityleadership.com

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To get a free copy of Wild Power to gift to a friend, we are offering a buy one, get one free until 21st December: https://www.redschool.net/product/wild-power-book-bogof 

(We’re also offering the same deal with our new menopause book, Wise Power: https://www.redschool.net/product/wise-power-book-bogof )

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy