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/

When our guest today, Sarah Jenks was in her 20s, striving to get it all right, and be a good girl, she quickly found herself feeling exhausted, empty and struggling with emotional eating. One day, she stumbled upon sacred feminine ceremony and her life changed. She was inspired to dig into the history of sacred feminine ceremony, where she discovered how it has been branded by the oppressive patriarchy as evil and untrustworthy, and she connected the dots with the way many modern women don’t trust our own magic, and are actually afraid of ourselves and our truth.  Today, she shares the story of how she made it her mission to devote her life to get women into sacred feminine ceremony and weave the sacred feminine back into their everyday life. She now leads a community of over 100,000 women as an ordained priestess, and we explore how Sarah connect with the cyclical intelligence of her menstrual cycle to guide her life, relationships and work. As she shares in our playful, joyful, enriching conversation today; “my menstrual cycle helps me to track my process of becoming more and more myself.” We explore:Why Sarah doesn’t organise her life around her cycle, but rather gives herself radical permission to show up exactly how she is on every cycle day. How she sources energy differently in her inner seasons; from her body in the follicular phase, from her sensuality when she’s ovulating, from her wild, critical energy in her luteal phase, and from the earth and the deep feminine, in her bleed.What Sarah has learned from her study of ancient sacred feminine practices from many different traditions, with the moon and the menstrual cycle. ---Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net---Social media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardySarah Jenks: @sarahjenks - https://www.instagram.com/sarahjenks

We live in a world where we so often feel that we need to live like men, work like men, and push ourselves like men in order to be valued. When the truth is that we are more-or-less twenty eight different women each month, and there is immense power and magic in this innate ebb and flow. As our guest today, Usha Anandi, the Founder of Womben Wellness says that women and people with cycles have four personalities every month, and each one has distinct spiritual gifts. Today we walk through the four inner seasons of the menstrual cycle, exploring the spiritual powers that become available to us as we move through the cycle month. Usha who is also known as Erin Foley, is a devoted Mother, holistic nutritionist, childbirth educator, full-spectrum doula, and herbalist committed to changing the status quo by alchemizing modern scientific information with ancient, energetic practices to serve the whole woman.We explore:How Usha didn’t plan to work in this field, but her menstrual pain continually led her to her Calling to heal herself, and guide others to do the same.The importance of avoiding the capitalist, patriarchal traps of pushing ourselves in inner spring and summer by ‘bio-hacking’ our bodies to get the most out of them, and instead embrace our natural pre-ovulatory playfulness, and our innate ovulatory capacity to be at the centre of our family and community lives. How connecting to our inner autumn truth-speaking powers can school us in expressing our calling and taking a stand for what we most love. ---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.hardyWomben Wellness: @wombenwellness - https://www.instagram.com/wombenwellness

Happy New Year! Today we’re back with our first live episode of 2025, and we’re trying out something new and fun - we hope you love it: a ‘power card’ reading for the year to come. Our theme for today is how menstrual cycle awareness can help us all to tap into our visions and dreams for the coming year, and how the daily practice of checking in with our cycle can help us to make them real. So we start by unpacking how the menstrual cycle - and especially menstruation - can help us tune into our deepest longings and dreams, and then how each inner season has different powers that help bring our dreams into reality.And in the second half, Alexandra and Sjanie choose three different cards to offer you a menstrual power ally on your quest to apply your cyclical intelligence in 2025. We explore:How our cycle can support us through the evolutionary process of bringing dreams to life. Our visions are big and they invite us to grow up and stretch into the new capacities we need to fulfill them - and our cycles can be our allies on this growth pathHow the menstrual cycle can be your ‘oracle’ - an invitation to commune with the deepest and wisest part of ourselves.Three different powers from inner autumn, inner summer and inner spring, to inspire and support you to bring your dreams to life this year, in a cycle-aware way. ---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 we enter 2025, we explore what menstrual cycle awareness can teach us about how to begin things well. This is an episode we recorded a couple of years ago, when we were each navigating a bumpy beginning to the year, and we used this as a lens to explore how the deep intelligence within the cycle is guides us through life’s highs and lows.Whether you’re wanting to start the year with intention and a clear vision, you’re in the midst of a new beginning such as a new job, a new relationship or creative project or you’d like to learn how to work with your cycle as an ally for all the beginnings of your life, this episode has both deep insight and practical advice. We explore:The implicate, deep intelligence at work in the cycle, and how it lays an the archetypal blueprint for all beginnings. How each of the five chambers of menstruation prepares us to start new things.Practical ways to look after yourself if you - like us - find beginnings challenging!---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

Today we’re sharing a conversation we had a couple of years back at the close of the year and it’s all about what cycle awareness can teach us about all of life’s endings; the smaller, more surface level ones like the end of the year we have coming up, and the bigger more profound ones, like ending relationships, moving house, all the way to the deep grief of losing loved ones.For those of us with menstrual cycles, each month we have an opportunity to practice ending the cycle well, aligning with the deep intelligences at work within us as we descend towards menstruation. (Or the dark moon if you’re tracking with the lunar cycle). And, as quite often happens, Alexandra and Sjanie have totally different ways of approaching endings - which we chat about in-depth!We explore:How conscious endings make all of life feel sacred.The surprising gifts of the premenstruum when it comes to endings - how this phase of the cycle prepares and tenderises us to feel deeply and acknowledge what we love and treasure. The deep wisdom that lives in the ending of the menstrual cycling years - the death-and-rebirth of menopause - and how we can all weave it into our lives. ---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

Today we’re sharing one of our most popular episodes from the archives - to tune into the outer winter here in the northern hemisphere… it’s all about how the inner winter of the menstrual cycle awakens feminine leadership…So the thing that originally inspired this conversation was that Sjanie’s period came very early the month before we spoke. She suddenly found herself bleeding on day 12 and she sad that the experience was akin to a zen meditation master slapping their student on the back when they’ve momentarily gone unconscious.She said was reminded that there is a wild intelligence within her that was outside of her control. This is one way that menstruation offers us a way into a radical kind of leadership. The reality that we don’t control it reminds us that we belong to something greater. So, in today’s conversation we explore inner winter as a gateway to leadership and why giving time to yourself at menstruation is positively dangerous! It will change your consciousness - and I think maybe that’s why this conversation has been so widely shared and enjoyed. It’s all about how menstruation can wake you up to what life wants from you.In this episode, we explore:How we understand the term Feminine leadership, and how the menstrual cycle leads us to it. The specific leadership powers that awaken at menstruation, including clarity about our purpose, an embodied experience of love and belonging, as well as expanded state of consciousness.A key next step for you, if you want to activate more of the power of menstruation in your life. ---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