Today we’re continuing our exploration around the fundamentals of the practice of menstrual cycle awareness, through the lens of some of the frequently asked questions from our community, such as what to do if your menstrual cycle doesn’t look like the archetypal cycle, how to track your cycle if you have menstrual health challenges, and how to talk about cycle awareness with your loved ones. The golden thread running through every response from Sjanie and Alexandra is the one and only rule of Menstrual Cycle Awareness which we call the Big Red Rule: that your own unique experience of your menstrual cycle is the most important thing, with all its quirks, strangeness and challenges. As Alexandra shares in the conversation, your job as a student of your cycle is to stay loyal to exactly what you’re experiencing. In other words, there are no ‘shoulds’ with menstrual cycle awareness, and there is no perfect cycle to achieve. The practice of menstrual cycle awareness is a homecoming to yourself, in a world that conditions us to look outside of ourselves for the answers. The power of the cycle rests in you experiencing your own cycle, and trusting your experience of your unique  strengths, vulnerabilities and needs, exactly as they are on each cycle day. We explore:The ‘crossover days’ - the shift from one inner season (menstrual cycle phase) to another and how to track and manage the disturbance that can arise, particularly between inner summer (ovulation) and inner autumn (the premenstruum).How to practice menstrual cycle awareness when you have menstrual health challenges like irregular cycles, period pain, endometriosis, PCOS, PMS or PMDD, infertility challenges or other issues, and how your cycle awareness practice can be integral to your healing journey.What it can look like to share your menstrual cycle awareness practice with your partner, family, friends and even your work colleagues. ---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.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

In our forties, many of us hit a wall. It can be a time when our responsibilities are at an all time high, just when our bodies are telling us - sometimes very loudly - that it’s time to change the way we’ve been living and working so far. Our guest today, renowned visionary, coach and catalyst Dr Joanna Martin helps us understand how to navigate this phase of life which is often called perimenopause, and which Red School founders Alexandra and Sjanie call the Quickening, through the lens of the archetype of ‘superwoman’.As the founder of One of many, Jo’s organisation has supported over 70,000 grassroots women leaders to have a greater impact without burnout. She recently published her book, Superwoman - Escaping The Myth and in our conversation today we explore how the superwoman archetype shows up in our lives, as well as how to step out of superwoman mode, embrace community and get your needs met, even with all the responsibilities you hold. This conversation is for you if you’re in your forties and looking for ways to show up without burning out. We speak a lot about parenting, so it’s especially for you if this is your path. However, it’s also for you in any phase of your life, if you recognise that you have a tendency to try to push through and do too much, and you want to work cyclically to honour your needs.We explore:The origins of the superwoman myth, and why it drives some of us to embody anti-superwoman, which means we don’t activate our impact potential.Why we can only burn out if we’re not in our body and Jo’s practical approach to get your needs met - the 'Needs Creed'. Jo’s personal Quickening story of meeting her increased need for sleep and alone time, and navigating big emotions as she journeys into perimenopause. ---Join our free online course - Love Your Cycle: Discover the power of menstrual cycle awareness to revolutionise your life here: 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.schoolJoanna Martin: @drjoannamartin - https://www.instagram.com/drjoannamartinOne of Many: @oneofmanywomen https://www.instagram.com/oneofmanywomen

When people hear about menstrual cycle awareness, they’re often surprised, confused and baffled by the idea that there could be a connection between the menstrual cycle and your creativity, power and wisdom. It’s no surprise given current cultural attitudes around the menstrual cycle and menopause, which are largely ignored or dismissed.So today’s episode is designed to both build a bridge for you if you’re new to the practice as well as offer a refresher for you if you’ve been tracking for years and want to rediscover the fundamentals of tracking your cycle, as your unique rhythm of power. As you may know, Alexandra developed the early prototype of this practice as she worked to heal her own menstrual pain over forty years ago, when she dared to listen to her body and began resting at menstruation. The practice evolved over many years working with groups, then Alexandra and Sjanie founded Red School to teach it, and wrote about the practice in their book Wild Power, and now guide thousands of students to deepen their practice through their Cycle Power course, as well as teaching next level cycle awareness on their Menstruality Leadership Programme. We explore:Some frequently asked questions, including the difference between fertility awareness and menstrual cycle awareness, how to listen to your body if you’re more used to paying attention to your mind, and how to respond to what you discover in your cycle check-ins.A demonstration of how to actually do a daily cycle check-in, including listening for your physical sensations, your emotions, and your thoughts. And for those who are postmenopausal (or don’t have a menstrual cycle for another reason), Alexandra shares how she works with the moon in her lunar cycle check-in. Other cyclical elements you might want to pay attention to, including your dreams, your habits, your sexual energy and even the arguments you tend to always have at certain times of the cycle month. ---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.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

In many indigenous communities across the world, people have long honoured menstruation as a sacred time. Today we’re lucky to be exploring the beauty and wisdom of the ancestral moontime medicine of the Andean people, and our guest is Dr Cynthia Ingar, who is an anthropologist and Andean keeper of Woman Medicine wisdom living in the Sacred Valley in Peru. In her late twenties, Cynthia was guided by a mentor to do thirteen traditional Andean moontime retreats where she was in silence and eating a special diet for four days and four nights while she menstruated.Cynthia has dedicated her life to teaching a woman-centered approach to women's health, to traditional midwifery and to revitalizing Andean Woman Medicine including menstrual cycle and the Andean Moontime traditional practices. In this rich, magical conversation, we explore how her moontime retreats prepared her to live her calling, both as a keeper of this Woman Medicine and as a mother to her children. We explore:How we travel to the ‘Ukupacha’ when we bleed, which is the realm related to the Feminine, where we perceive life differently, experience altered states of consciousness, and receive insights and wisdom.How Cynthia works with the ancestral Andean practice of praying with her menstrual blood, as an offering to Pachamama, to mother earth. What she has learned from grandmother mentors about how they worked with the ancient menstrual practices to give them inspiration and guidance in their work as the keepers of ceremony and the rituals of life for the community.  ---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.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardyDr Cynthia Ingar: @hampiwarmi - https://www.instagram.com/hampiwarmi

Befriending our menstrual cycles and wombs and coming home to the root of our body, and to our pelvic bowls often means negotiating any trauma that we’ve experienced in that part of our bodies, or other traumas that we hold in this part of our bodies. As our guest today, the brilliant Dr Jeevan Singh shares, the pelvic bowl is an organ of relationship that has the capacity to guide our personal and collective. Jeevan’s locates itself at the intersections of mindfulness-based somatics and mental health, traditional earth-based medicines, personal and collective liberation and the pelvic bowl. She is a lifelong student of traditional East Asian medicine, has a masters in integrative mental health and an advanced training in the Hakomi method of mindfulness-based somatic psychotherapy. She founded Womb School and the Somatic Womb Path together with Kris Gonzalez (who was a guest on our podcast on episode 175) and Marissa Coreia. In times that can feel very destabilising, Jeevan brings a deeply grounding presence, and I hope this conversation soothes you as much as it did me. We explore:How Jeevan navigated a series of three traumatic experiences after her Saturn return in her late 20s, and how the the trauma healing that followed catapulted her into her body. The womb as a guide out of the rugged individualism we see in our world. It is an organ of relationship - the first relationship we all ever experienced was in the womb of the mother, the person who birthed us. The earth as an attachment figure, and how we can work with trees and other bodies in nature as a partner in nervous system regulation and how we can co-regulate with the ocean as we co-regulated with the salty waters of the womb in utero. ---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.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardyJeevan Singh: @dr.jeevansingh - https://www.instagram.com/dr.jeevansinghWomb School: @womb.school - https://www.instagram.com/womb.school

Spring is just beginning here where Alexandra, Sjanie and I are in the UK, and due to popular demand, this time two years ago we rode off the springtime momentum to create a couple of podcast episodes all about the inner spring - the preovulatory phase of the cycle.Many of you have been sharing questions about this pre-ovulatory phase of the cycle (which correlates to the waxing moon phase if you’re lunar tracking), so we thought we’d share this episode as a replay today. This one is especially for you if you find it challenging to plug back into the world after your bleed, if you can tend to feel overwhelmed and stretched in this cycle phase, or you start to lose touch with yourself as you feel the rising energy of inner spring.We explore:What are the gifts of the inner spring for our leadership? What is needed to access the power of the inner spring? Leadership calls for us to stretch, and often to be more vulnerable and public - how we can hold ourselves in this stretch through the dark art of pacing and trust our own timingHow inner spring can help us to meet the urgency of the world and bring us back to our medicine and our unique way of contributing to the world---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.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

Today we’re exploring the immense capacities that open up to us as we move through menopause, and it’s a special episode as Alexandra, the co-founder of Red School is your host, and it’s our next Wise Power series conversation...The Wise Power series began with our Wise Power retreat when S+A’s book Wise Power was published and Alexandra is continuing to have sporadic conversations about what menopause awakens and reveals within us all.  Today her guest is Prune Harris, an energy expert, a consciousness educator, and soul activist, who has trained with healers, elders, and wisdom holders throughout the world. Prune shares her personal experience of navigating the great threshold of menopause, and how it can collectively awaken a new, immense capacity to reclaim our deep worth as human beings, beyond concepts of gender and status, but as a lifeforce that is part of the great web of life. We explore:The different cycles that Prune is tracking now post-menopause, and how our life force moves into different expressions of wisdom once we’re no longer being held in monthly cycles. Menopause as an identity death process which brings us face to face with our inner soothsayer, to hear deep truths about ourselves, our relationships and the world, so we can choose the new identities we want to embody in our third act. How menopause is helping to meet the modern day crisis of separation and call us home to our essential place of belonging, so we can radiate it into our lives and into the world. ---Order our menopause book - Wise Power: Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause to Awaken Authority, Purpose and Belonging here: https://www.wisepowerbook.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.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardyPrune Harris: @pruneharris - https://www.instagram.com/pruneharris

In our 40s, many of us begin to experience a variety of health symptoms and challenges, as well as emotional and psychological shifts. Some call this perimenopause. At Red School, Alexandra and Sjanie call it, The Quickening…  So for today’s podcast episode - we’re re-sharing a conversation from a couple of years ago - one of the most listened to and shared episodes ever on the podcast. It was the fourth in our menopause summer series when we were launching S+A’s Wise Power book and it’s called perimenopause - what’s going on?!We look at how this life phase in the run up to our menopause process is slowly awakening new levels of power within us, and how to navigate all this can bring up for us, and beautifully, Sjanie shares generously about how she is negotiating this transition personally. 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!---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.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

As many of you will know, Uma Dinsmore Tuli has been a powerful force for good in many fields for decades, including Yoga, Menstruality, and women’s health. She describes herself as a writer, an educator, a Hyperactive Yoginī, a mother of three and a devotee to the Dark Mother. Today we chat about the cycles that guide Uma’s life, from the planets, to the moon, to her early relationship with her cycle and how it led her to develop Womb Yoga and write the best known of her six books, Yoni Shakti, a feminist retelling of yoga. All the way to Uma’s menopause process, which happened during the crucible of Covid and being silenced due to a legal battle, and the unstoppable flow of creativity power it awakened within her. The golden thread we track throughout the conversation is how we can experience our blood, our orgasms, our pregnancy and pregnancy losses, our lactation, and our menopause as extraordinary portals to power, but only if we’re conscious of them, and if we respect them. We explore:What happened when Uma showed up to her yoga sessions, as a new mother, with a postpartum body, how the practices - as they were being taught - didn’t meet the needs of her bleeding, lactating and how this inspired her to write the book that she needed: Yoni Shakti. The healing power of circling as women as a radical act of resistance to patriarchal and colonial oppression, and as a pathway to recultivating our trust in each other.Why we need to decolonise our sleep - as a way to recover our menstrual and menopause health - which is one of the reasons why Uma wrote her new book, Nidra Shakti: the Power of Rest - an illustrated, decolonial encyclopedia of Yoga Nidra. ---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 info@redschool.net---Social media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardyUma Dinsmore Tuli: @umadinsmoretuli - https://www.instagram.com/umadinsmoretuli

Many of us feel more intuitive and connected to the mystical and the magical in the second half of the menstrual cycle and today I’m directly exploring the connection between menstrual cycle awareness, witchcraft and psychic capacities.Our guest is Mimi Young, a Taiwanese-Canadian, Daoist, animist, spirit worker and medium, who serves her community through ancient Chinese esoteric practices, dream interpretations, unconventional tea ceremonies, and occult education with her witches coven community. Mimi first experienced her intuitive and psychic gifts as a child, but they went underground until five months of bed rest while pregnant with her second child. And together we share a very unfiltered, raw and wild conversation about how Mimi works with the different skills and capacities that awaken in the four phases of the menstrual cycle in her divination and spellwork.We explore:Why you can’t work with spellcraft or psychic gifts without being fully present and connected with your body, and how menstrual cycle awareness supports this. How to work more consciously with the premenstrual phase of the cycle as a gateway to your intuitive, psychic, magical and shadow work capacities. Mimi’s animist approach to building a relationship to your menstrual blood as a conscious, alive, intelligence, and some ideas for working with our blood in magical ways. ---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.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardyMimi Young: @shopceremonie - https://www.instagram.com/shopceremonieYou can explore Mimi's work on her website here: https://shopceremonie.com/