The Menstruality Podcast

How has your intimacy with your cycle (or your menopause process) changed you, and your life? It’s an important question to ask, in quiet moments, perhaps in your inner winter. Cycle awareness offers many fruits, and they can easily be missed in a linear world that rarely—if ever—shines a spotlight on your cyclicity and what it is awakening in you.On the podcast today, the tables are turned as Sjanie asks our host, Sophie this question and they explore what menstrual cycle awareness has taught Sophie over the past decade, particularly when it comes to living her calling and creating things of beauty in the world. They explore:The wild night of pre-menstrual rage that changed everything for Sophie; her career, her country of residence and her relationship. What late night breast-feeding dreaming taught Sophie about how to run a thriving, sustainable, impactful business.Why we all need to connect more to the 99.9% of life on earth that is cyclical, rather than the 0.01% of human culture that is largely made up of linear, productivity obsessed cultures. ---Join us for a free webinar on May 25th: How Your Menstrual Cycle Can help you to Create a Thriving Business - www.yourcyclicalbusiness.com---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net---Social media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

Hinewai Waitoa is doing powerful work to reclaim  Maori menstrual wisdom. In her words: “Colonisation took so much of what was magic about Maori culture when it came to things like menstruation practices. We are still reclaiming our sacred ways here in Aotearoa”.Hinewai is a māmā to two unschooled mini beings and the creator of Waikuranuku Indigenous devoted to wholistic womb wellness, reclamation & womb sovereignty. Her reclamation journey has unfolded over the past 15 years and she now lives her life purpose holding space for kōhine - girls, wāhine - women, tāne - men and whānau - families, to reconnect to and understand the natural rhythms and cycles of the womb,  heal inter-generational trauma and create a more nourishing connected loving earth for all living beings. In our conversation we explore:- How Hinewai is currently preparing her tamahine - her daughter - for her menarche rite of passage.- What it means to “speak aroha” - love - into the centre of our beings, and how to work with it as a powerful menstrual practice, and an act of rebellion which creates deep, inner alignment.- What is inside Hinewai’s ‘kete ikura” - her menstrual cycle basket - and how she uses it to keep her anchored into a real, lived honouring of her cycle. ---Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net---Social media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardyHinewai Waitoa: @waikuranuku.indigenous_cycles - https://www.instagram.com/waikuranuku.indigenous_cycles

How do you experience the pre-ovulation phase of your cycle - your inner spring? Is it a time of ease and flow,  or perhaps anxiety and insecurity? Maybe  a mixture of both?  Whatever your experience, we hope that today's episode will shed some light on the powers of inner spring for you. It's our first Q+A episode where Red School founders Alexandra and Sjanie will answer your questions about how to work with your cycle in the pre-ovulation phase. We explore questions like: - What to do if your experience of inner spring is different to many people, due to health challenges, and how to handle the shame that can arise?- How to hold yourself when emotional vulnerabilities and wounds come up in inner spring.- How to emerge tenderly from your bleed in a world that often doesn’t support that, and how to meet the rising energy of spring in a generative way, especially when it appears as anxiety and insecurity. ---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 welcoming back Ruby May to the podcast, who is the new community leader here at Red School. Ruby is the founder of the Know Your Flow cycle awareness course and community - she’s an earth-lover, a truth-seeker, an edge-dweller and a mischief-maker passionate about how we can each midwife a culture of deeper connection – to our bodies, each other and our planet through menstrual cycle awareness.I’ve been loving working with Ruby lately to co-create our new MLP grads community, The Hive, we’ve been riffing a lot about the power of cycle-aware friendship and community, and today Sjanie is joining us. So, if you ever feel lonely in your cycle awareness practice, or like you’re swimming upstream and would love some like-minded allies by your side, this one’s for you. I invite you to make a cup of something lovely and nestle into this conversation with us…We explore:How lonely it can feel to practise cycle awareness in a world that often demands productivity and a focus on what is visible, rather than what is slow and unseen. The harmony, creativity that love that emerges between people when we each authentically own the place they are truly in and can put the fullness of our humanity in the space - and how cycle awareness gives us access to that authentic expression. How the premenstruum schools us in how to meet conflict as a creative ally within our friendships and communities. ---Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net---Social media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolRuby May: @know.your.flow - https://www.instagram.com/know.your.flowSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

Wild Power is five this month!We love watching this book work its magic, and hearing what it’s waking up in readers across the globe. (We’re thrilled that it’s now available in 8 languages—French, Italian, Spanish, German, Korean, Dutch, Czech, Russian—with a couple more in the pipeline). Thank you to everyone who has been writing in or tagging us with your greatest takeaway from the book.Here is one takeaway we adored:“My greatest learning from Wild Power has been that my intuition will always be by my side and guide me whenever I need her. She lies within and when listening, she gives me all the answers I could ever ask for. Through practising deep cycle awareness I have regained the connection with her and ability to be true to myself.”- LunaIn today’s episode Alexandra and Sjanie share five things they learned from writing Wild Power, including:How their personal relationship evolved through the writing process.What they learned about their creative processes—particularly what the book writing taught them about how to begin anything beautifully. That the world really is ready for menstruality—YES!---Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net---Social media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

We’re having an important, needed, hard conversation today about endometriosis. Luckily we are guided by an amazing guest who seems to be able to bring lightness and humour to even the darkest topics, author Emma Bolden. So we invite you to laugh, and cry with us.Emma’s memoir, The Tiger and The Cage exploring her decades-long rollercoaster with endometriosis was recently featured by the brilliant production company, Shondaland who describe her as a “compelling voice” and her book as: “an outstretched hand inviting us to accompany her through the most intimate and important experiences of her life, and women’s collective experiences.”Together we explore:The mystery that is endometriosis - even though the condition been documented since ancient Greece, and 176 million people suffer with it worldwide, we still don’t know exactly what it is, what causes it, or have comprehensive ways to successfully treat it. Emma’s personal experience, and what gave her the strength to not only manage symptoms that impacted every area of her life, but also to navigate a medical system that is all too often dismissive, dehumanising and at times, abusive. What writing her taught Emma about herself, her Calling and her future, and the healing power of each of us sharing our own stories. ---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.hardyEmma Bolden: @emmabold - https://www.instagram.com/emmabold/

Our guest today, Shereen Oberg draws from a unique and rich mix of influences in her women’s empowerment work. She is the author of The Law of Positivism, she’s a yoga teacher and acupuncturist, and alongside this she holds a business and economics degree, and has recently completed a Master's degree in Global Sexual and Reproductive health and rights. She comes from a long lineage of strong, Kurdish matriarchs and political, social rights activists who shared their natural birth stories with her, this inspired her to train both as a nurse and a doula. Today we chat about how all of these influences wove together in her recent thesis about how we need to change the way we approach infertility across the globe. We explore:How 186 million people are affected by infertility in the world today, and most are feeling a degree of loneliness and isolation.The three big themes that occur across the globe; the grief felt with each loss, a deep questioning of purpose and existence, and the feeling of being let down by the healthcare system. What ancient goddess myths can teach us about the initatory process of infertility. ---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.schoolShereen: @lawofpositivism

Alexandra is your host today as this is the next in our Wise Power Retreat series,  where she is having conversations with thought leaders, teachers and change-makers about what menopause revealed and awakened in them.  Her guest is Lynne McTaggart - who is regularly voted in the top 100 of spiritual teachers for her work around the power of intention.The arrival of Lynne's children birthed the first great work of her life, her magazine, What Doctors Don’t Tell You, and menopause heralded the birth of the work she is devoting the rest of her life to - exploring the human energy field and why spiritual healing works.We explore:New ways to approach aging, and the truth that menopause isn't about losing faculties - more faculties are actually coming on line.How menopause kicked Lynne’s ‘disruptor gene’ into gear, and how it helped her to awaken to who she truly is. Lynne's post menopausal zest, and how we can all embrace our third acts, move beyond the roles we have previously held, and instead ask  -'what else do I want to do with my life?'.---You can now order our new book! Wise Power: Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause to Awaken Authority, Purpose and Belonging here: https://www.wisepowerbook.com---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.schoolLynne McTaggart: @lynnemctaggartofficial - https://www.instagram.com/p/CqVaw_RMDbx

The menstrual cycle is encoded with wisdom that can support us through life’s greatest challenges. Learning to read and receive this wisdom is a lifelong process - and in today’s conversation with psychotherapist and author, Carly Mountain, we explore what one of our oldest goddess myths can teach us about embodying cyclical wisdom as we face all that life throws our way. Carly has worked in a cycle-inspired way for many years as a women’s initiatory guide. She has channelled her learnings into her new book Decent and Rising, which explores the ancient goddess myth of Innana and her descent into the underworld as a framework for how to manage grief, loss, illness and other dark night’s of the soul. In today’s conversations we look at each part of the myth through the lens of the inner seasons of the menstrual cycle, and how each cycle phase makes us more resilient, strong and wise, including:How the tenderising of the pre-menstruum helps us to contact the deeper, body knowings that live below our day-to-day consciousness.The physical and metaphorical shedding of menstruation - the death part of the death and rebirth - is exactly what makes way for the new shoots - the potential of inner spring.As we rise with the new momentum of inner spring, we rise rooted, deepened by the underworld of the menstruation process. ---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.schoolCarly Mountain: @carly_mountain - https://www.instagram.com/carly_mountain

What are the gifts of the inner spring? How can inner spring help us step into leadership? What is needed to access the power of the inner spring? And how can we manages the challenges of this inner season?So many of you have asked for an episode about inner spring and how we can harness it's strengths and manage its challenges, and here it is - the first of two episodes dedicated to pre-ovulatory phase of the cycle. We explore:How to hold the charge of inner spring, manage the sense of overwhelm this inner season can bring, and stay in touch with ourselves.What inner spring can teach us about how to manage the stretch of leadership,  through the dark art of pacing and trust our own timingHow inner spring can help us to stay grounded in the face of urgency and bring us back to our medicine - our unique way of contributing to the world---Registration is now open for our Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can take your seat here: www.menstrualityleadership.com---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net---Social media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school