The Menstruality Podcast

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/

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