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What do we do when we’re experiencing significant changes physically, emotionally and spiritually in the years running up to menopause, all we want to do is run far, far away, but we still have kids at home who need our care and support?
This question is coming up a lot in our community and that’s why I’m so grateful to be talking with Matrescence expert, journalist and coach, Amy Taylor Kabbaz, who also happens to be smack in the middle of perimenopause, with three children at home.
Over the past decade, Amy has interviewed hundreds of authors, maternal health experts, and teachers, trying to decipher why so many mothers feel burnt out, overwhelmed, and addicted to being busy. Over the past year she’s been exploring how we can support ourselves through the huge transition of perimenopause, and she shares the fruits with us today.
We explore:
How the ‘fork in the road’ of perimenopause is helping Amy to change deep patterns, including shifting her old go-to approach of “give me the pill, I’ve got sh*t to do”.
Perimenopause as a kind of ‘pregnancy’ which prepares us for the rebirth of ourselves through the spiritual initiation of menopause.
How to manage perimenopause symptoms including exhaustion, irritability and anger, brain fog and the often overwhelming ‘motherload’ of care and responsibility, and still show up for our kids.---
Find out more about the Red School Menstruality Leadership programme: www.menstrualityleadership.com
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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
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Social media:
Red School: @red.school - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Amy Taylor Kabbaz: @amytaylorkabbaz - https://www.instagram.com/amytaylorkabbaz -
Through their decades of sitting with women and people undergoing the menopause initiation, Alexandra and Sjanie have seen that no part of your life remains untouched by menopause, including your relationships with your loved ones and community. Everything needs to undergo a shift, however subtle, as you move into a greater sense of authority with clearer parameters about yourself. As Alexandra says, it’s called The Change for a reason.
Today we’re speaking to a guest who knows this to be true firsthand, and is generously sharing her experiences with us. Autumn Saunders is post-menopausal Menstruality and Menopause mentor at Red School and holds space on our Menopause: The Great Awakener course.
Autumn is a mother, a healing artist, and embodied feminine leadership guide and the creatrix behind the Rhythmic Life Circle & MotherArts Sanctuary for Creativity & Wellbeing. Today we walk through the five phases of menopause that Alexandra and Sjanie teach in the Menopause: The Great Awakener course, exploring how all of her relationships transformed during her menopause.
The hardest parts of the first phase of menopause, Betrayal, in her intimate relationship, the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously deeply questioning her relationship whilst also enjoying it, and the core practice that saved her relationship
We explore:
How old traumas resurfaced throughout her menopause process, including understanding how Autumn’s relationship with her partner reflected her relationship with her father, and how they found her way back to trusting him, receiving his support and allowing him to protect her.
Autumn’s keys to creating flow between her and her kids through menopause.---
Join us for a our Menopause: The Great Awakener course - 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 [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Autumn Saunders: @wisewomanspirit - https://www.instagram.com/wisewomanspirit -
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Menopause, and the years running up to it, can be a time of real challenge and transformation. Without wise guidance and a framework to understand what’s happening, we can be left feeling lost, alone and crazy.
Luckily, there are those who can serve as guides, like our guest today, Dr Danielle Arabena, who brings her extensive experience as a medical doctor and a shamanic healer to stand at what she calls the “crossroads and altars we stand before as women” including menstruation, birth, menopause, death, and our topics for today: perimenopause.
Dr Danielle is a descendant of the Meriam Mer peoples in the Torres Strait. She is a GP and healer whose nurturing approach integrates evidence-based medical care with the profound wisdom of 'women's business' as seen through her Indigenous Knowledge lens.
How Danielle was guided as a young girl to give her blood back to the earth (which back then looked like soaking tampons in a bucket and pouring it onto her suburban garden).
We explore:
How women who have had ACES (adverse childhood experiences) have a more challenging experience of menopause and how to ride the deep initiations to meet our shadow selves.
Perimenopause and menopause as a reorganising process where we are clarifying our legacy for future generations; whether that’s making the world a better and safer place, tending to our relationships with our kin, or doing quieter, more intimate, inner work.---
Join us for our Menopause: The Great Awakener course - www.redschool.net/menopause
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Dr Danielle Arabena: @drdaniellearabena - https://www.instagram.com/drdaniellearabena/ -
It’s world menopause month, and we’re continuing the menopause conversation we began two weeks ago, where we explored how to navigate the dark night of the soul of the menopause process (it’s episode 166), and we’re continuing by looking at the powers that the menopause initiation can awaken in us, if we refuse to abandon ourselves during this betrayal phase of menopause.
How the current conversation about menopause is unfolding in the world, why there is so much suffering and what is missing.
In their book, Wise Power, Alexandra and Sjanie talk about menopause as being a pHd in power. When it is respected, honoured and dignified, the initiation of menopause can bring you to a place of deep peace within yourself. And even more than that, the menopause process can actually help you to grow new capacities, powers, and kinds of intelligence. It’s a huge learning curve - a massive upgrade in your skills, ready for your life’s third act.
In today’s conversation we’re looking at how these powers can change us personally, and through us, how they can change the world, including;
How to work with shifting energy levels in menopause, as a gateway to more discernment, empathy and authority.
How menopause enhances your imagination and intentional capacities as well as supporting you to potentise all that you do.---
Join our free event: 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 [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy -
Today on the podcast we’re exploring how menopause can be an initiation into greater self-love, self-compassion and self-mothering. This is our third conversation with Chameli Gad, the founder of Awakening Women. Each year she’s come back here to generously share her menopause process, which unfolded throughout the pandemic and included the death of her son, and her divorce.
In our chat today, she explores the fruits of her menopause process, from the other side, and she is as honest about her current peace, ease and ecstasy as she was with her mid-initiation pain and suffering.
Chameli is a mystic and Goddess Wisdom Keeper. Rooted in earth honoring, devotional women’s spirituality and goddess-centered tantric yoga, she is especially appreciated for her love of mythology and storytelling as a key to spiritual awakening and embodiment.
What it means to ensure that your inner “mama is in the house” in menopause, in three different aspects: the witnessing mother, the nurturing mother and the guardian mother.
We explore:
Chameli’s ‘baby dolphin’ menopause dream and how it has radically transformed her capacity for self-compassion.
What Chameli learned about boundaries in menopause, and how she moved from using boundaries as a way to control others, and instead as an act of leadership that arises from within us.---
Join our free online event: Awaken The Power of Menopause - Oct 21st-23rd 2024 - www.redschoolmenopause.com
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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Chameli: @chameligad - https://www.instagram.com/chameligad -
Many of us are turning up at menopause stressed, exhausted, overworked and under-nourished, often managing multiple care and work roles simultaneously. And then we hit the “death” moment of the menopause initiatory death and rebirth process.
The challenges of the menopause initiation can often be compounded by key relationships ending, bereavement, or other extreme life changes. It can all form a kind of perfect storm that leaves us feeling shipwrecked.
Alexandra and Sjanie refer to this as “Betrayal”, the first of five phases in the psychospiritual process of menopause which they’ll explore in their upcoming course, Menopause: The Great Awakener. Today we unpack how the challenge here is to meet this great betrayal, this great dark night of the soul, and let yourself be undone without annihilating or abandoning yourself.
We explore:
How your main task during this dark night is to dare to trust that the complicated messiness and the imperfections of the life you’ve lived to date is somehow the perfect alchemical mix for really stepping into who you are.
The big question that is being asked of you here: are you going to abandon yourself? When you find your way to stay with yourself, you can turn this process into a radical opening of self-acceptance and self-responsibility.
The key self care practice to bring into the forefront of your life at this phase of menopause: saying no to others, and yes to yourself.---
Join us for a free even on October 23rd: How Menopause Awakens Your Power - 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 [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy -
What do you do when you’ve discovered the incredible power of menstrual cycle awareness, and you’re keen to share it with your loved ones, colleagues and community, but whenever you try to talk about it, you receive reactions that range from disinterest to disgust?
The historical roots of menstrual shame in a patriarchal society, and the compassionate, smart ways that Jane overcomes it in her educational work.
The truth is that menstrual shame is real, it is pervasive and overcoming it is a key part of restoring the power, beauty and magic of the menstrual cycle at the heart of our world. Luckily we are standing on the shoulders of giants here, like the menstrual trailblazer, Jane Bennett, who has been busting through the menstrual taboo for 40 years.
Jane Bennett is social worker, researcher, writer and educator as well as the founder of the Chalice Foundation. In our first Menstruality podcast episode with Jane, we explored how to navigate create a positive menstrual culture, and what she learned from gathering the stories of over 3000 women and girls about current attitudes to the menstrual cycle to write her book About Bloody Time: The Menstrual Revolution We Have to Have.
Today, we explore:
How Jane works with Brene Brown’s guidance around cultivating shame resilience, and the importance of loving presence and curiosity in the face of menstrual shame.
Jane’s top tips for how to support your loved ones to have an aha moment about the menstrual cycle so they can get onside and support you with your menstrual cycle awareness practice.---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @red.school (https://www.instagram.com/red.school)
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Jane Bennett: @chalicefoundation (https://www.instagram.com/chalicefoundation) -
Menstrual Cycle Awareness gives us a direct line to our deep selves, to what we’re here for and what we most deeply love.
As Alexandra and Sjanie say in Wild Power: “The journey to realizing your Calling, or purpose, is made possible by the process of initiation, which is encoded in your menstrual cycle. Initiatory change happens through the archetypal pattern of death and rebirth – which is exactly what we experience each month at Menstruation.”
Today’s conversation feels like a wild safari into the messy day-to-day reality of how the menstrual cycle helps us to live our Callings, with a woman who knows a thing or two about archetypal patterns.
Grace Winteringham is the co-founder of Patternity, a conscious Creative Organisation dedicated to sharing the positive power of pattern with the world. Along with her co-founder Anna Murray, she was named one of Evening Standard’s 1000 most influential people. She’s also a graduate of the Red School Menstruality Leadership Programme, and is currently immersed in a process of accelerated transformation as she navigates her own quest to follow her calling.
Grace’s journey from premenstrual rage and depression to feeling most at home in her inner autumn.
We explore:
The menstrual cycle as the fundamental pattern we live by.
How cycle awareness holds us through the natural process of the ebb and flow as we ‘learn to live by our own code’, and Grace’s story of navigating a confronting sense of deep uncertainty when she stepped back from Patternity after a recent experience of burnout.---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Grace Winteringham @grace_winteringham - https://www.instagram.com/grace_winteringham -
Have you ever had to show up in a big way on day one of your cycle and felt exposed, then - like me - totally exhausted afterwards? Today we’re exploring how menstrual cycle awareness can help you step up when you’re on your period; whether you have to do a big presentation at work, a speech at your best friend’s wedding, host a PTA meeting, or be visible in another way.
A few days before we recorded this, Alexandra and Sjanie presented a menopause workshop at a festival, and Sjanie’s menstrual cycle set it up perfectly so that she would start her bleed late, on day 29, on that very morning.
We explore:
How Sjanie prepared for the event beforehand by creating space, calling in support and recognising the power of the creative and pre-bleed void.
The pre-bleed, void superpowers that Sjanie channelled; including heightened intuition, trusting emergence, being in the unknown,
The one thing that Alexandra and Sjanie prioritise more than anything else, in all their creative work.---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy -
Are you (or your friends or the people you work with) struggling with menstrual health challenges like irregular cycles, spotting or heavy bleeding, menstrual pain, PCOS and intense mood changes in the premenstrual phase? Would you love to understand how you could work with food and dietary shifts to create menstrual health?
Our guest today is Lisa Hendrickson-Jack, the author of The Fifth Vital Sign, and teaches women’s health professionals to use the menstrual cycle as a vital sign in their practices, so they can empower their clients to optimize their hormones, menstrual cycles.
She is the co-author of Real Food for Fertility with Lily Nichols, which contains a wealth of information about how food can support cycle health and in today’s conversation Lisa shares her top tips for healing menstrual health challenges.
The dietary changes helped Lisa heal her period pain from fibroids, including a simple switch with her dairy consumption, reducing inflammatory foods and increasing green leafy vegetables.
We explore:
Why balancing our macronutrients (protein, fat and carbohydrates) is key to hormonal health, and how the calorie counting, breakfast-skipping culture hasn’t done any of us any favours.
The foods to include, eat more of, or go easy on if you’re experiencing intense mood changes in the premenstrual phase (hint: a real game changer for PMS is ensuring you’re having enough protein).---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Lisa Hendrickson Jack: @fertilityfriday - https://www.instagram.com/fertilityfriday -
Have you ever noticed that your intuitive sense of knowing is heightened when you are premenstrual? Today we’re exploring the radical honesty that can be invoked in inner autumn, asking the question: what if our unadulterated, fierce, premenstrual truth speaking is actually exactly the medicine our world needs at this time?
My guest is Maya Luna, an artist, channel and creator of The Venus Path™, a modern adaptation of an ancient Fertility Goddess Spiritual Path that works with Sensuality, The Body, The Deep Heart, Passionate Energy and the Incarnate Human Experience.
Today she shares how she navigates what she calls the 'dark goddess truth serum' that pulses through her in her premenstrual phase, and how she is learning to skillfully and artfully share it in the world.
We explore:
How we can feel truth or untruth in our bodies and somehow “smell dishonesty” when we’re in premenstrual truth-telling mode.
The 40s as the inner autumn of our menstruating years, where our premenstrual powers can come online even more, and how the world can react when women stop playing nice and being “good girls” and start bringing the power of our sacred truth in this life phase
The toxic femininity we see in our culture and ourselves today; the fawning, people pleasing, being a doormat, not speaking up, letting people use and abuse us, and how our premenstrual capacity to see through bullshit is a powerful antidote.---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Maya Luna: @thevenuspath - https://www.instagram.com/thevenuspath -
Today we’re exploring Black cyclical wisdom through the lens of the life story of an extraordinary woman who left a profound legacy of cyclical heart and body intelligence, with Dr Cre Dye, who serves as the Menstruality Justice and Inclusion Educator at Red School.
Dr. Cre has served her local, national, and international communities with heart, mind and body activism for over 25 years as a mental health therapist, yoga teacher/trainer and university professor.
This is part two of a series of conversations with Cre about the cyclical wisdom she received from her Grandmothers. In episode 138: Indigenous Cycle Wisdom and Menstrual Rituals, we heard the story of Cre’s first nations Granny, and today we’re hearing what she received from Mama, her Black grandmother.
We hear how Mama grew up picking cotton in Mississippi, was widowed young, then left an abusive relationship and travelled alone in the 1960s with her eight children all the way to Missouri, to go on to foster over 60 children and become a force of love in her community. And how, through every single moment of adversity she faced as a Black woman, she found her way to claim rest, rise up and embody hope in the face of hate.
Menstrual Cycle Awareness as the “sacred study of me”, how we are all sacred texts, and our cyclical wisdom is the words on the page.
We explore:
What Cre learned from her interviews series with Black women and their menstrual cycles, about how we can all reclaim the cyclical wisdom that we’ve known all along.
The ongoing medical racism that Black women and Women of Colour face, including the myth that Black women have higher pain thresholds, why Black women are two to three times more likely to develop fibroids, and 50% less likely to be diagnosed with endometriosis than white women, and what we can all do about it.---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Dr Cre Dye: @credyeyoga - https://www.instagram.com/credyeyoga -
How do you feel about inner summer, or the ovulatory phase of the cycle? For many in our community, it’s the easiest and most joyful part of the cycle, but many also find it to be challenging and confronting.
Today Alexandra and Sjnaie respond to your questions about inner summer and ovulation, including; how to approach physical symptoms around ovulation, such as headaches / migraines, acne and nausea, how to stay grounded and focused amidst the big energy of ovulation and why you should never put your inner summer self in charge of your schedule!
We explore:
How to know when you’re in inner summer, how long ‘should’ it last (and why there are no shoulds when it comes to cycle tracking).
The connection between rest at menstruation and fulfillment at ovulation, and how inner winter restedness unlocks inner summer powers.
How to manage a sense of disconnection from yourself in inner summer, particularly if you’re doing a lot of caring roles or mothering in your life.---
Receive Red School's free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy -
For a decade, our guest, birth doula, menstrual coach Jules Alma has been mapping her Yoni. It’s soothed and regulated her nervous system, healed her pain during sex and brings her back to her centre. She even uses it after she has attended a birth to regulate after all the beauty and intensity of the experience.
Yoni is the sanskrit word referring to our vaginas and vulvas, and in our conversation we track the history of the practice of yoni mapping, from Taoism in ancient China, to Tantra in ancient India to modern day pelvic physiotherapy.
Jules explains how healing it can be, on all levels, to create an intimate relationship with this part of our bodies and live what Jules calls a 'yoni-led' life.She’s also a graduate of the Red School Menstruality Leadership Programme and it was wonderful to hear how the course has supported her to live into her calling to guide women to find healing and joy through the way they bleed, birth, pleasure, and nourish their bodies.
We explore:
The shame, trauma and collective wounding that prevents many of us from cultivating a relationship with our vulvas and vaginas, and the powerful healing that can take place when we reconnect to this sacred part of our bodies.
How Jules was at war with her body and her yoni for years, blowing past boundaries, experiencing health symptoms and feeling pain during sex, before she began to reclaim her rites of passage as a woman, and learned how to map her yoni.
A step-by-step guide to beginning your own yoni mapping practice, as well as how Jules used the practice to soothe menstrual cramps.---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Jules Alma: @jules____alma - https://www.instagram.com/jules____alma -
As you may know, we often talk about the amazing powers available to us when we’re able to rest at menstruation. But in a world that likes to see us active 24/7, how do we create the time and space to truly fulfill this glorious potential?
Well, Alexandra and Sjanie have a remedy they call The Big Bleed. Essentially, this means giving yourself a one-off ultimate menstrual experience. Because this is likely to blow your socks off, leaving you full of revelations, and inspiration to plan another Big Bleed as soon as possible.
How to do a Big Bleed retreat; where to do it, what to bring, and what to do (hint: nothing!) as well as how to manage the challenges that can come up when we try to carve out pockets for deep rest.
We explore:
Sjanie’s recent magical Big Bleed experience; how she managed to pull it off, what she discovered about herself and her leadership, and why it mattered that every time she checked the clock it said 11.11.
How Alexandra and Sjanie do a creative Big Bleed ritual retreat for Red School twice a year, in August and December, to allow the organisation to have an inner winter, and receive visions for the months to come.
---Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy -
How can you practice cycle awareness in your relationship? We get asked this question all the time, so we’re especially grateful to our guests today, Lucy Peach and Richard Berney for being willing to invite us right into the heart of their cycle-aware relationship.
The strategies Lucy and Richard use to honour Lucy’s cyclical rhythm in their relationship, from practical details like how they use a shared google calendar to how they both work with the same acupuncturist, to how they’re navigating a long fertility journey.
Lucy Peach is a period preacher, author, and folksinger. She’s a graduate of our Menstruality Leadership Programme, the author of Period Queen, and a long-time champion of the power of the menstrual cycle. Her theatre show, My Greatest Period Ever has educated and empowered thousands of people to shift the period narrative in our culture from one of shame to one of pride.
Her husband Richard Berney is a creative director and co-performer in the show alongside Lucy, with his amazing live illustration. They were just about to begin a 25 show run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival when they sat down with me to speak about the joys and challenges of practicing cycle awareness in their relationship.
We explore:
How Richard embraced Lucy’s menstrual cycle awareness practice as a new language - like a weather forecast! - that has helped him to get more perspective during tough moments between them.
How they collaborated to create My Greatest Period Ever - Lucy’s award-winning theatre show.---
Registration is open for our 2025 Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can check it out here: https://www.redschool.net/menstruality-leadership-programme
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Lucy Peach: @lucyspeaches - https://www.instagram.com/lucyspeaches -
24% of women and people who bleed in the UK suffer from chronic pelvic pain, it’s 1 in 5 in Australia where our guest today, gynecologist Dr Peta Wright lives and works.
Dr Peta wrote her book Healing Pelvic Pain: transforming the trauma of period pain, endometriosis and chronic pelvic distress to explore a wide range of treatments which often aren’t prescribed, including lifestyle changes, stress management and particularly therapeutic work focused on locating trauma in the body.
Because, over years of extensive research and working with women and menstruators with pelvic pain, she she’s seen a huge correlation between nervous system dysregulation, early childhood trauma, chronic stress and chronic pain.
She says, “as I began to see more and more women through this more holistic lens, I realised that time, care and love were just as important as drugs, surgery and physiotherapy - if not more so. This is, in essence, the first part of establishing safety and stability for the traumatised nervous system - which nearly every patient with chronic pain has".We explore:
A brief history of period and pelvic pain - from ancient female healers like Hildegard von Bingen and the wise women of Egypt, and how the mind-body dualism birthed with Descarte's “I think therefore I am” philosophy impacts the way we understand pelvic pain today. (Including modern medical racism where Black women’s pain is regularly dismissed).
How the nervous system acts as a mind-body bridge in the healing process. As Dr Peta says “your pelvic pain is not simply the result of a lesion or all in your head. We need to learn to listen and uncover the missing pieces that live in the space between mind and body”.
The research that documents the connection between pelvic pain and trauma, starting with the famous ACEs study from the 1990s, all the way to the latest cutting edge science including polyvagal theory and how our perception of danger effects how we experience pain (as well as every other system in our bodies).---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Dr Peta Wright: @verawellness.com.au - https://www.instagram.com/verawellness.com.au -
For many of us, the inner autumn can be a provocative, messy and painful part of the menstrual cycle, where old traumas and wounds can surface, and for some this becomes deeply debilitating and disruptive.
PMDD as a signal of our power awakening.
Our guest today, Menstrual Cycle Support founder Kate Shepherd Cohen, shares generously about her personal experience of PMDD (Pre-Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder) and how menstrual cycle awareness gave her the skills to manage the fear, rage and meaninglessness that can arise in the premenstruum, so she could find the power within them.
This is part-two of my conversation with Kate who is a graduate of our Menstruality Leadership Programme and the founder of a ground-breaking programme which is bringing menstrual cycle awareness to thousands of people on social prescription via the NHS.
We explore:
Approaches to support ourselves through challenging premenstrual times, including how rest at menstruation is key to accessing our premenstrual power and the importance of practicing the art of ‘holding the tension’.
How Kate redirected her rage into her calling to change the world and end the injustice of menstrual suffering for all (and the interesting nudges she is receiving from her calling these days).---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
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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
Kate Shepherd Cohen: @menstrualcyclesupport - https://www.instagram.com/menstrualcyclesupport/ -
Speaking about the menstrual cycle and menopause is becoming less and less taboo. You can see it everywhere you look; Instagram is wonderfully full of women teaching cycle tracking for health and fertility. Our recent podcast guest Dr Lara Owen is busy co-creating international menstrual and workplace policies. You can buy menstrual cups in supermarkets. This podcast has been listened to 246,235 times!
Menstrual cycle and menopause career possibilities including menstrual cycle coaching, doctors and psychotherapists specialising in all aspects of cycle health, people helping tweens with their first periods, creating cycle-aware products like journals and self care tools, as well as menstrually inspired authors, artists and activists.
And this surge in the menstruality movement is ushering in a whole new wave of career possibilities for those of us who feel drawn to the power and wisdom of menstrual cycle. In today’s podcast we explore many of them, through the lens of some of our Menstruality Leadership Programme graduates and the brilliant careers they have gone on to create.
The doors for our 2025 MLP have just opened, and we’d love to have you with us for this - world’s first - leadership training rooted in menstruality. You can find out more at www.menstrualityleadership.com.
We explore:
Some of the myriad ways that our graduates infuse menstruality into their existing careers, including; in business, crafting, Yoga, school teaching and even sailing.
How menstruality can also inform the often invisible and (frustratingly) unpaid caring, earth-ending and energetic work that so many of us do, which weaves this world together.---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy -
Today we’re delighted to welcome one of the original menstruality trailblazers, Dr Lara Owen back to the podcast. We’re exploring a topic which comes up regularly in the Red School community - how to practice menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause at work, and how to create workplaces which honour our cyclical needs, particularly during menstruation and menopause.
How the Covid pandemic - and the normalisation of working from home - ushered in the exciting new British Standards Institute Menstrual and Menopause workplace policy - a 40 page document with guidelines for employers and management for how to accommodate the menstrual cycle and menopause in the workplace.
Dr. Lara Owen is recognised internationally for her pioneering and continuing work on menstruation. She is the author of the ground-breaking book, Her Blood Is Gold, holds a PhD in menstrual organization, and is a founding member of the Menstruation Research Network (UK).
As we explore today, she recently helped to birth the new British Standards Institute Menstrual and Menopause workplace policies which are going to have a huge impact, and will soon be rolled out internationally.
Her new book, Reorganising Menstruation explores what happens when menstrual stigma starts to be disrupted in a mainstream way, and I left this conversation feeling so much hope for the truly cycle-aware world that is on it’s way - I hope you inspires you too.
We explore:
How menstrual cycle awareness can become a way to optimise or ‘hack’ our energy in the workplace and the importance of asking ourselves if we’re unconsciously supporting commodified materialistic worldview or helping to create a world where we can menstruate in the way we want to at work.
The power of ‘post-menopause zest’ at work.---
Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Lara Owen: @drlaraowen - https://www.instagram.com/drlaraowen - もっと表示する
