How can menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause enhance your health, creativity and leadership? That's the question we'll explore together in the Menstruality Podcast, brought to you by Red School, where we’re training the menstruality leaders of the future. Your host, Sophie Jane Hardy will be joined often by Red School’s founders, Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer, as well as pioneering thought leaders, troublemakers and culture-shifters to discover how you can unashamedly claim the power of the menstrual cycle to activate your unique form of leadership; for yourself, your community, and the world.
Just like our physical, emotional and mental energy, our erotic energy also ebbs and flows through the menstrual cycle month. Today we’ve invited the brilliant psychotherapist and somatic sex therapist Carly Mountain back to the podcast to explore the connection between the womb and our erotic cycles. Today Carly guides us on a journey through the inner seasons of the menstrual cycle to explore the erotic challenges and gifts of each phase. Carly has recently released a new book called Untamed Pleasure, which is a treasure trove for anyone wanting to experience more sexual freedom and pleasure. We chat about many of the beautiful teachings from the book , including; how to manage protective parts that come up around around sex, how we can’t produce sex hormones and stress hormones at the same time, the power and sensitivity of the cervix, perimenopause sex, untamed aging and how to access more pleasure in every stage of life. We explore: Why it can really help to take orgasm off the table, and focus instead on sensation and pleasure to relieve pressure and change the erotic landscape we’re exploring. How to cultivate your connection to your cervix, to deepen the sensation, move through numbness, and awaken more pleasure, and why it’s vital to move slowly and take our time. How the experience of eros can shift as we enter midlife. --- 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 Carly Mountain: @carly_mountain - https://www.instagram.com/carly_mountain
Today we’re having a fascinating conversation with the woman who pioneered the role of intimacy co-ordinator in TV, film, opera and theatre. Ita O’Brien has worked on numerous high-profile productions including Sex Education on Netflix, and I May Destroy You on the BBC, and is the founder of the Intimacy on Set guidelines which have been widely adopted across the industry, advocating for safe, fair and dignified work. Ita recently took all of her learnings and experience, and she’s shared them in her brilliant book, Intimacy: A field guide to finding connection and feeling your deep desires. Today we explore the vital role that an intimacy co-ordinator plays, and why safe, honouring and real-life depictions of sex on screen are so vital. We also draw on Ita’s wisdom around listening to our bodies in order to create deeper intimacy with ourselves and others, the need for all of us to understand the cyclical anatomy of female arousal and why we need more women writers creating truthful intimate scenes for women and people who menstruate. We explore: Ita’s experience of being an intimacy co-ordinator on trailblazing scenes involving period sex in Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You. The importance of true consent, and how to access the power of no in intimacy, so that we can find our true yes. The archetype of the enchantress and how she can support our intimacy explorations as we approach, move through and enter our third act post menopause. --- 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. W e 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 Ita O’Brien: @itaobrien_intimacycoordinator : https://www.instagram.com/itaobrien_intimacycoordinator/
Although the inner summer of the menstrual cycle has a reputation for being easy-breezy, for some of us, this can be a real hotspot in the cycle month. So, this episode is for you if the ovulatory cycle phase is intense or overwhelming, or you feel a sense of pressure to show up and ‘get shit done’ inside an already over-full life. It’s also for you if inner summer brings a sense of being all dressed up for the party, with nowhere to go if you have lots of creative, sexual or social energy but you don’t know where to direct it, or if ovulation brings disconnection and grief due to challenges with trying to conceive. Through our personal stories as well as generous shares from the Red School community, we explore the challenges of inner summer, and how to reframe them as meaningful limits that support us to access the power of the ovulatory phase. We also explore the cyclical self care practice which can support us to claim and show ourselves exactly as we are in inner summer. We explore: Sjanie’s ongoing journey with visibility in inner summer What Alexandra has discovered about the libratory power of limits, as a post-menopausal women. How to grow the emotional muscles of allowing more and more of yourself to exist and be seen in the world, as you truely are. --- 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
238. The Spiritual Power of the Womb (Chantal Blake)
The spiritual power of the cycle and the womb is core to Red School’s teachings and offerings, and we’ve explored this topic on the podcast through the lens of many different faith, spiritual, traditional and indigenous traditions including; Maori womb wisdom with Hinewai Waitoa, Andean womb wisdom teachings with Dr Cynthia Ingar, Anishinabe cyclical wisdom with Asha Frost, and ancient African womb and birth technologies with Latham Thomas, as well as a conversation with Meggan Watterson about relevant mystical christian texts. Today we’re exploring how the Islamic faith reveres the womb, with Holistic Menstrual Health Educator, Womb Steaming Therapist, and author of ‘Peaceful Periods: Holistic Womb Care for Teens’, Chantal Blake. Chantal recently gave a learning session in Red School’s graduate community, The Hive, and at the start of this session, she asked a question which moved me deeply; “how does your womb impact your spiritual reality and practice?” Many of the community said that no one had ever asked them that before, and perhaps the same is true for you? So, as an extension of Chantal’s beautiful question, this conversation is an invitation to you and participants of all faith and cultural backgrounds to contemplate the wisdom of the womb as sacred. We explore: The ancient, worldwide history of womb steaming and how it can support womb and pelvic health. The Arabic word raḥim —meaning womb—shares its root with raḥma , or mercy, and in Islam, the womb is honored not only as a physical center of creation, but as a symbol of divine compassion and relationality and a vessel of divine mystery. How our wombs support us to gestate our creative ideas, and Chantal’s experience of working with her womb to birth her work projects, including her book. --- 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 Chantal Blake: @honouredwomb - https://www.instagram.com/honoredwomb
The Menstruality podcast is devoted to restoring cyclical intelligence at the heart of our world, and we center our conversation on the menstrual cycle as a teacher, guide and ally in this quest. But what do you do if you encounter this work after you’ve been through menopause and no longer have a menstrual cycle? We receive many questions from post-menopause women and folks in our community who are curious about how to practice cycle awareness, such as; what cycles should I track now? Should I track with the moon, and how do I do that? And importantly, what do I do with the regret, grief and anger I feel at missing out on menstrual cycle awareness earlier? So, in today’s conversation, we weave stories from some of the post-menopause women in the Red School community with Alexandra’s personal experience from many years of tracking with the lunar cycle to share practical guidance and inspiration for how you can bring cyclical wisdom into your life in your third act. We explore: What to do when you feel grief and / or rage about not having had access to the wisdom and power of the menstrual cycle during your menstruating years. How to work with the lunar cycle phases to recover menstrual cycle wisdom and embody it, and especially how the new moon can give you permission to rest when you no longer bleed. The ‘quiet medicine’ of post-menopause cycle awareness, and how it can support your healing processes and repair work, particularly trauma healing. --- 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 exploring how to bring cycle awareness to psychotherapy and mental healthcare. Our guest is MaryClaire Decker (known as MC) who is a Registered Psychologist. MC created Mindful Cycles after seeing a gap in mental health care, and after her own struggles with chronic menstrual migraines reinforced the need for an approach that works with our cycles, not against them. At Mindful Cycles, she combines evidence-based therapy with an understanding of cyclical health to help women and people with menstrual cycles navigate their mental well-being with greater self-awareness and resilience. We talk about how menstrual health symptoms change across the cycle, the neurological and hormonal shifts that cause mental health symptoms to worsen in the second half of the cycle, how to adapt therapeutic approaches based on the phases of the menstrual cycle, and the incredible impact of cycle-informed trauma therapy. We explore: Three reasons why mental health care hasn’t been cycle-informed so far; menstrual stigma, the patriarchal, colonial historical context of psychotherapy and the huge gap in research when it comes to women and people with menstrual cycles. Why we risk pathologising people’s experiences, or even misdiagnosing them when we don’t take the fluctuations of the menstrual cycle into account, for example; 25% of people who eventually get diagnosed with PMDD are misdiagnosed with bi-polar disorder first . The beneficial impact of cycle-informed therapy for anxiety, depression, PTSD and trauma, addictions and other mental health challenges. --- 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 MC Decker: @themenstrualpsych - https://www.instagram.com/themenstrualpsych
1 in 2 girls in the U.S. say they feel embarrassed or ashamed about their period and only 22% of U.S parents feel “very comfortable” talking to their kids about puberty. We need to rewrite this script, and our guest today, menstrual educator Amy Wilding, has written a book to do just that. Amy has supported hundreds of families through her Period of Change programs, helping them reclaim menarche as a sacred and empowered transition. She’s also a queer and inclusive author, and today we’re chatting about her latest book, Period Of Change: Welcoming Your Daughter’s Period with Care and Confidence. As Amy says, this is not just a practical guide to puberty and periods. It is a call to reclaim what is our birthright: an understanding of our bodies and the framework for seeing the power and wisdom of our cyclical nature. Our chat today is full of practical guidance and tips to support the teens and tweens in your life through their menarche and beyond - my favourite were the conversation starters, especially when Amy shared the most important thing to say (and not say) to your child when they get their period for the first time. We explore: How to throw a Red Party for your child, and all kinds of ideas for how to celebrate together in big and small ways. The importance of how we speak about our bodies in front of our kids, and affirmations to help your daughter move through generations of cultural shame, silence and discomfort, and model how to honour our bodies and cycles. Amy’s journey supporting her trans kid and guidance for how to show up as a supportive parent and maintain a connection of trust with trans kids when they’re starting their periods. --- 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 Amy Wilding: @amywildingofficial - https://www.instagram.com/amywildingofficial/
Today we’re sharing a replay of one of our most listened to podcasts ever - and it’s all about how getting to know your cycle can be a vital foundation for mental and emotional health. Alexandra and Sjanie, the co-founders of Red School are both retired therapists, and today they share their learnings from their own personal cycle awareness practice (as well as working with thousands of students over several decades) about how mental and emotional health rests on us knowing ourselves, feeling our value and worth, and understanding the nature of cyclicity. All of which are skills we learn from connecting to our cycles. We also explore how the root of much of our collective menstrual and emotional turmoil as women and people who have, or have had cycles is the cultural denial, shutting down, ignoring, belittling, and suppression of our cyclical nature. We explore: Alexandra’s personal journey with dissolving the shame of her early years and claiming her worth through cycle awareness and menopause, so that now she is emotionally resilient to the extent that she is immune to toxic shame. The two stable poles of the menstrual cycle, and the two transitional phases and how to work with them all to understand ourselves better and create emotional and psychological wellbeing. How following the call to stop and rest at menstruation is medicinal for us emotionally and psychologically. --- 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 it’s our great pleasure to be joined by Chloé Zhao. Chloé is an academy award winning filmmaker, and amongst many accolades, Chloé is the first Woman of Colour to have won an academy award for best director for her film Nomadland. In this conversation, Chloé chats with Alexandra and Sjanie about how menstrual cycle awareness has shaped her creative process, including how she worked with the wisdom of her menstrual cycle to create and direct her most recent film, Hamnet, which received eight Oscar nominations. When Chloé turned thirty seven years old, she started to get menstrual cramps for the first time. Although it wasn’t comfortable, she felt something important was coming to life within her. This coincided with what she lovingly calls a ‘midlife crisis’ that ultimately led her to discover the practice of menstrual cycle awareness, which she says helped her to learn a language that her body had forgotten to speak. We explore: Intuition as our greatest currency, and how becoming more aware of our menstrual cycles prepares the body to be a vessel to receive deep intuitive knowing. The cyclical advice that Chloe has for all young filmmakers about the importance of wintering, and the power of seemingly non-productive work of rest, tending to your inner soil, and composting (even in the middle of a film set!). How the premenstrual and menstrual phases of the cycle have taught Chloe to embody creative death and rebirth, and how this played out in the creation of Hamnet. --- 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 Chloé Zhao: @chloezhao - https://www.instagram.com/chloezhao
As we enter our early forties, we step into a new life phase with a very different atmosphere and tone. We’re shifting into a new paradigm, often accompanied by changes in our menstrual cycles and ourselves, some of which may be startling or very tricky to manage. Brain fog, memory issues, irregular cycles, heavy periods - the list goes on. You might notice that you have less tolerance for stress, tire more easily, and that your trusty sleep pattern isn’t quite so trusty anymore. Today I’m chatting with Alexandra and Sjanie about how the practice of menstrual cycle awareness can be a vital source of support as we navigate these challenging years. Sjanie shares generously about her own experience of perimenopause, or as she calls it, the autumn of the menstruating years; from experiencing new levels of love, to reckoning with childhood trauma, and how her recommitment to the fundamentals of cycle awareness has supported her. Whether you’re experiencing the psycho‐spiritual shift in the years running up to menopause, or you’re supporting women and folks in the thick of it - perhaps your clients, family members. friends or colleagues - we hope this conversation helps to plug you into the practice of menstrual cycle awareness as a vital perimenopause resource. We explore: How to practice menstrual cycle awareness when your cycle is very irregular and how to claim your rest, even when you don’t know when your next period is coming. What is at work on the psycho-spiritual level in the forties, and how the lens of the ‘quickening’ can help to make sense of the challenges of these years. How Sjanie has navigated her trauma healing process in perimenopause, and the importance of community support in this life phase. --- 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 replaying one of our most popular episodes - a frank and feisty chat about one of the hot topics in our community - premenstrual and menopausal RAGE. Have you ever been driving in your car and felt compelled to wind the windows up and actually roar because you felt so wildly angry on day 24? Or, if you’re navigating menopause, have you experienced your own ‘burn-the-house-down’ moment when your fury threatened to destroy everything you’ve built so far in your life? What is going on with this rage? Why are so many of us feeling it? And what is it trying to tell us? --- 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
This episode is the first of a four-part series exploring the common challenges of each of the four cycle phases or inner seasons of the menstrual cycle, and Alexandra and Sjanie are going to reframe these challenges as meaningful limits that support us to access the power of each phase. This first episode in the series is the inner spring, preovulation cycle phase and we’re looking at the challenge of anxiety, overwhelm, and scattered focus. And as the outer seasons unfold here in the UK, we’ll we continue with an exploration of the limits and challenges of the inner summer, autumn and winter. Through our personal challenges, and stories from the community, we explore how the limits of inner spring help you to access the big powers of this cycle phase, including play, innocence and enthusiasm. Above all, this series is an exploration of how the challenges you experience in your menstrual cycle aren't necessarily problems to fix, but can also be seen as meaningful boundaries that actually enable the transformative work of each cycle phase. We explore: The key practice to support inner spring challenges: making space and time when you’re coming out of menstruation to cherish your sensitive nature. The deep river at work in the menstrual cycle each month as our energy rises towards ovulation and descends as we head towards menstruation, and how this gives rise to the limits of each cycle phase. What the challenges and limits of inner spring can teach us about what we need at the beginning of everything; relationships, jobs, creative projects and anything new we’re embarking on. --- 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 exploring how the practice of menstrual cycle awareness can help us to stay engaged, resilient and resourced as we meet the challenges of today’s world. Our guest is the brilliant Dr. Cre Dye who is the Menstruality Justice and Inclusion Educator at Red School. Cre has served her local, national, and international communities with heart, mind and body activism for over twenty-five years as a mental health therapist, yoga teacher/trainer and university professor. Together we practiced deep listening to a now-famous speech from one of the most powerful voices of love in our world today , the Sikh activist and lawyer Valarie Kaur. In the speech she asks: what if this darkness isn’t the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? In the emergent and far-reaching conversation that followed, we chatted about what it means to sit within the generative darkness of the womb, Valarie’s birthing and labour analogies and how they can guide us in dark times, and how the different phases - especially the premenstrual phase - of the menstrual cycle can grow our capacity to be with discomfort. We explore: The importance of using our imagination to romanticise, and how the menstrual, inner winter cycle phase can support us to rest and restore ourselves, so that we can step back into action with renewed energy and vision. How our premenstrual cycle phase shows us that we heal where we are loved, how to grow our capacity to be with discomfort, and how to hold the tension where there is challenge and difference. What we can learn from Black feminists like Toni Morrison, bell hooks and Audre Lourde about how to cultivate resilience in times of crisis, and how white women have a particular role to play in meeting the challenges at play in the world. --- 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 Cre Dye - @credyeyoga - https://www.instagram.com/credyeyoga
Historically, trauma research has been done primarily on men, and then applied to women’s bodies as if it’s going to work in the same way. But as our guest today, Somatic Emotional Processing facilitator Veronica Rottman, shares, women currently suffer from twice the rate of anxiety and depression, make up 80% of the population with autoimmune disease and are much more likely to experience burnout. Veronica is the founder of Soma School and has devoted over 40,000 hours over the past seventeen years to trauma resolution. In the conversation today she explores the female nervous systems; including how women and those socialised as female experience trauma differently inside a patriarchal culture, why the female nervous system is more prone to the freeze response and and why it’s important to think carefully about how we use the term ‘regulation’ when it comes to trauma resolution and our nervous systems. Veronica also has her own personal trauma healing journey from complex post-traumatic stress and in her earlier life, she experienced PMDD, menstrual pain and other symptoms, which she describes as her body revolting against the patriarchy. After practicing menstrual cycle awareness for many years, she now no longer has pelvic pain and today she shares how the practice has helped her to have a more embodied relationship to her pelvis, and to understand her cycle through sensations. We explore: The fact that Veronica hasn’t encountered a woman or person experiencing PMDD who doesn’t have a history of trauma whether it’s more subtle, low-level and chronic, or more extreme experiences. Why somatics and wellness need to be less focused on regulation for women, and more about being with and softening into what’s happening in our cyclical bodies. The role of oxytocin in the trauma response, why women experience trauma relationally, and the importance of cuddle puddles. --- 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 Veronica Rottman: @wakingwomb - https://www.instagram.com/wakingwomb
After being guided by her doctor to take the pill for twenty years to manage painful periods, breathwork practitioner Harriette Wight was still dealing with challenging bleeds and decided to try something different. She was guided by a friend to try seed cycling, then learned how to track her menstrual cycle and then - via her Yoga teacher - she discovered breathwork. The combination of breathwork and cycle awareness changed everything for her. Breathwork, as Harriette defines it, is the practice of using the breath to consciously change how we feel physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. And today in our conversation we explore the ancient roots of breathwork and the modern day expression, and why it is such a powerful tool for health and wellbeing, particularly when it’s used in combination with menstrual cycle awareness. Harriette is a graduate of Red School’s Menstruality Leadership Programme, and through her own intimacy with her cycle, she’s created a body of work designed around specific breathwork practices to support each of the inner seasons of the menstrual cycle. In our chat today, she shares her MLP experience including how it changed how she sees herself, how she wants to show up in the world, and how she delivers her work. We explore: How the inhale and exhale correspond to the two movements of energy within the menstrual cycle, which Alexandra and Sjanie have named: the via positiva and the via negativa. Simple breathwork practices to support you to rest when you bleed, manage the rising energy in your inner spring, to help you feel confident in your inner summer A ‘recovery breath’ practice to manage premenstrual emotional reactivity. --- 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 Harriette Wight: @yourfriendlybreathingcoach - https://www.instagram.com/yourfriendlybreathingcoach/
One of the most beautiful and practical gifts of menstrual cycle awareness is how it awakens a newfound capacity to know and assert our boundaries. As we track our shifting emotions, mental state and energy levels through the cycle month, we get to know our unique strengths and our limits. This helps to build confidence in ourselves and our nature, so that when we become aware of a boundary that has been crossed, we’re more able to find a skillful way to use the power of NO. So today we’re exploring the power of menstrual cycle awareness for setting boundaries, especially when you’re highly sensitive, in the premenstrual phase of your cycle, and in the years running up to and during menopause, and how this is potentially a life-changing and even world-changing act. We explore: How to work with the inner critic voice that invariably wakes up when we decide to claim a boundary and take care of ourselves. How the initiatory times in our menstruality life arc; like matressense, perimenopause, menopause, illness, loss require even stronger boundaries to hold ourselves through liminal times. Why we all need to re-write the story of the emotional messages of inner autumn as boundary signals rather than irrational outbursts. --- 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
To help you ease into 2026 purposefully, we’re talking about how the cycle helps you to live in your zone of genius today, which is to say, how practising menstrual cycle awareness helps you to know your own nature and stay close to what you’re really great at. We go through the inner seasons of the cycle one by one, sharing how each one can help us to do the courageous, radical act of claiming ourselves and what we love in a world that celebrates constant productivity over joy. We get practical too by sharing a specific zone of genius practice to each cycle phase - enjoy! We explore: The power of doing absolutely nothing in your inner winter at menstruation, or the dark moon, and how it anchors you into connection to your purpose. Why it’s so vital to have periods of time where you can experiment in inner spring, to be messy with no inner critic allowed. How to work with your premenstrual discerning energy to take stock and to reflect on what is working and what isn't in your life, so you can stay close to yourself and your zone of genius. --- 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
Happy New Year! We have a gift for you to help you start your 2026 infused in cyclical wisdom. Everything that Alexandra and Sjanie create at Red School is focused on inspiring us to connect to the power that lives within our cyclical nature, so that we can know and claim our own leadership roles in our lives. So, in service of this, today Alexandra and Sjanie do a power card reading with the Red School power cards, to help you choose a menstrual cycle power to guide your leadership this year. And by leadership they mean what you’re built for, your gift for the world. And as Sjanie says in this conversation - your unique way of leading in your life is sourced in your connection to your menstrual cycle. Alexandra added a beautiful visual, saying that it’s like an umbilical chord to the source of your being, to the mothership of you. We had so much fun doing this, and our hope is that you feel like we’re all sitting together round the kitchen table playing! There are three cards to choose from… which one will be your menstrual cycle power ally for the year to come? We explore: How the menstrual cycle helps us to live our own unique leadership (including Sjanie’s latest premenstrual example of how her cycle is helping to grow her up through her journey with self-responsibility). How the menstrual cycle holds us in a sustainable rhythm of self-care, particularly through inviting us to stop and drop our bundles The Red School power cards as a tool for understanding the different menstrual cycle powers that live inside the four inner seasons of the cycle - and you’ll have an opportunity to choose one to guide your year ahead. --- 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
The moon is a big topic of conversation within the Red School community. Many who aren’t menstruating practice lunar tracking in place of menstrual cycle awareness, and those who have a menstrual cycle often bring moon-inspired questions, such as: ‘should I bleed on the full moon or the new moon?’ And ‘what to do when I’m bleeding but the moon is full and I feel pulled in two directions?’. So today we’re exploring how cultivating a connection with the moon can support us to enter circular and cyclical time. Our guest today is visual artist and mother April McMurtry. April has been lunar tracking for twelve years, and describes herself as a guide for repairing our relationship with the cyclical nature of time by attuning to the moon. In today’s conversation we explore how following the ebb and flow of the moon can help us to transform our habits of overriding of our cyclical nature, as well as break free from the myth and tyranny of consistency. We explore: April's fascinating response to the question of whether we should bleed on the full moon or the new moon (and it might be different to what you think). How motherhood brought April to burnout, which led her to step back from teaching and lean into the wisdom of the moon as a way to get grounded in rhythms, rest and stillness. The beauty that can be found in darkness, and how the end of all cycles deconstructs, dissolves and empties us out in preparation for the new. --- 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 April McMurtry: @themoonismycalendar - https://www.instagram.com/themoonismycalendar
When you practice menstrual cycle awareness, you start to feel more connected to yourself. This process of remembering and embodying more of who you truly are means that you may come into contact with parts of yourself that have been disowned, or that you’ve been shamed out of claiming. Our conversation today is especially designed to support you if you’ve been encountering or unearthing memories or experiences related to trauma as you track your emotional, physical and spiritual ebb and flow throughout the cycle month. Whether you’ve experienced acute trauma, developmental trauma, ancestral trauma or collective trauma caused by sexism, racism, homophobia, ableism and other forms of othering, discrimination or prejudice, Alexandra and Sjanie explore how cycle awareness can create a grounding of presence and self care to support trauma healing, through the lens of Sjanie’s trauma healing journey, as well as stories from the Red School community, We explore: How the dismissal, suppression and denial of the menstrual cycle, and our cyclical nature is a form of subtle gaslighting that in itself is a form of trauma. Why certain phases of the cycle, such as the premenstrual phase, as well as perimenopause and menopause, open you to your shadow side and your trauma. Some practical steps to get started with working with your cycle to support trauma healing. --- 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
