The Menstruality Podcast

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 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.hardyJules 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.We explore: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. 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 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

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. 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: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. 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 info@redschool.net---Social media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolLucy 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 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 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. 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:PMDD as a signal of our power awakening.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---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.hardyKate 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!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: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. 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---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 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. 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 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. 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 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.hardyLara Owen: @drlaraowen - https://www.instagram.com/drlaraowen

In February 2016 our guest today, author and teacher Sara Avant Stover was coming out of a season of intense creativity and output and was preparing to enter into a cycle of rest and recovery, when one evening she received shattering news. Her former fiance came home one evening and confessed that he had been cheating on her, with many people, for many years. This turned out to be the first of many serial heartbreaks that Sara experienced over the coming five years. Ironically she had just published a book about the heroine’s journey, which described the necessity of cycles of death and rebirth when we enter the underworld, just as she was personally thrown into this great descent. Sara’s work integrates Buddhism, embodiment, and psychology and has uplifted the lives of countless women worldwide. She has transmuted her heartbreak into her new book, Handbook for the Heartbroken: A Woman's Path from Devastation to Rebirth, which we explore today.We explore:Sara’s heartbreak stories; including abortion, relationship breakdown and a financial crash and how they have prepared her for what we have experienced collectively over the past four years, and particularly the pandemic.The core action that Sara took to heal from the gas-lighting experience of long-term infidelity. Guidance for you if you’re currently negotiating heartbreak, or are still healing heartbreaks of the past.---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.hardySara Avant Stover: @saraavantstover - https://www.instagram.com/saraavantstover/

As with your early years of cycling, your later years of cycling are a transitional time.Your 20s and 30s are all about discovering your rhythm and firming up your sense of self. But from your 40s onwards, the focus begins to shift. Subtly, you start to feel that you're stepping up to a bigger game. It's as though the clock on your life is now ticking. That's why Alexandra and Sjanie call this life phase "the Quickening".You may start to find that your inner autumn, premenstrual energies seem to dominate more of your whole cycle experience, and as challenging as this may feel, something powerful is being worked within you.That’s exactly what we’re talking about today - the inner autumn powers that wake up in your 40s and the potent self care practice that helps you to channel them into your life.We explore:How to hold ourselves when the anesthetic wears off in our 40s (just like in the premenstruum), so that we can invite in greater depth and self-responsibility. How the inner autumn in the cycle and our lives calls us home to our natural authority and powerWhy the practice of ‘gearing down’ is vital in the Quickening and how to do it in a world which wants to keep us hustling. ---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

Do you catch yourself measuring your worth by how much you do, and how much what you do benefits others? If you do, you’re not alone. And, as our guest today, Tamu Thomas, says - it’s not your fault. In her groundbreaking new book, Women Who Work Too Much: Break Free from Toxic Productivity, Tamu challenges the societal norms that glorify relentless productivity and burnout, shedding light on the systemic, emotional and psychological factors that keep women trapped in a never-ending cycle of productivity.In our conversation today, she shares practical strategies for liberation, centering cycle awareness as a way to resist the drive to do-do-do, and instead reclaim and honour our natural rhythms.We explore:How cycle awareness has enabled Tamu to find freedom from her inner critic (whilst allowing her to channel the power of her premenstrual analysis to offer critique of the systems that oppress us).What Tamu learned from her Auntie Aminatta, a Sierra Leonian international business woman about how to create a life where - as Tracee Ellis Ross says - “my life is mine”.The profound spiritual, primal breakdown and breakthrough that happened in 2017, when Tamu’s body reclaimed her energy back from what she calls the ‘oppressive trinity’ of white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism.---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.hardyTamu Thomas: @tamu.thomas - https://www.instagram.com/tamu.thomas