The Menstruality Podcast

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

Menstrual cycle expert Alexandra and lunar cycle specialist Sjanie discuss the importance of crossover days in the cycle, exploring transitions between inner seasons. They delve into navigating emotional shifts, embracing community support, and the significance of self-awareness during delicate phases. The podcast emphasizes the value of recognizing and preparing for these crossover days to promote personal growth and creativity.

Many of us in the Red School community have an intuitive longing to connect to the wild Feminine within us. As our guest today Michaela Boehm says in her book, The Wild Woman’s Way, we’re longing to connect to “the ancient part of us that knows the rising of the moon, and the movement of the tides. The instinctual, deeply connected aspects in each of us that has survived and thrived in the wilderness for many 1000s of years”. Today we’re exploring how to rewild ourselves, how to come back to body and pleasure, and how to move from doing to being, amidst the challenges of modern life. Our guide is the wise and wonderful Michaela who is known for her work with high-performing individuals, including Oscar-winning actors, and Grammy-winning musicians. She’s the founder of The Non-Linear Movement Method®, a powerful somatic release modality. Her work has recently been featured in Gwyneth Paltrow’s Netflix Show “Sex, Love & goop” and Will Smith’s bestselling memoir ‘Will’.We explore:The story of Michaela’s childhood longing to become a witch, her early years apprenticing with her mentor, and how she eventually became the holder of an ancient, female held, tantric lineage.Why we need to be able to access both our ‘Go’ mode and ‘Flow’ mode as women living in our modern world. The embodiment practices that enable Michaela to live a huge, wildly creative life without burning out. ---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.hardyMichaela Boehm: @micboehm77 - https://www.instagram.com/micboehm77

Today we’re talking about power, and it’s a word that comes up a lot at Red School. It features in both of Alexandra and Sjanie’s book titles, as well as the title of our new course coming up in June - Cycle Power. But what exactly do we mean by power?In our conversation, we explore how Alexandra and Sjanie define and understand power, why so many of us feel scared, confused or suspicious about power, and how the menstrual cycle wakes us up to our power.So, if you’re longing to feel more agency and power in your life, if you notice yourself suppressing your power, and if you’re curious how menstrual cycle awareness can help you to claim your power and live it, this one is for you.We explore:Alexandra’s lifelong fascination with power, her current experience of power as an elder who has lived a lifetime of cycle-awareness, and her current power-edge; undefendedness. Vulnerability as a gateway to healthy expressions of power; it allows us to feel, to know ourselves, to empathise and to move towards ‘power with’ rather than ‘power over’.The importance of acknowledging and claiming the power that we do have, exactly where we are, and how the practice of menstrual cycle awareness helps us to notice and lean into this innate power. ---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

The deeper we go with our menstrual cycle awareness practice, the more it can resource us as we heal our deepest wounds. Cycle by cycle, we step into deeper intimacy with our needs, which in turn enables us to take clumsy steps towards clarifying healthy boundaries. Today we’re speaking about a core wound which effects all of us, with the woman who first comprehensively defined the term a decade ago, Bethany Webster and the Mother Wound. As Bethany says, the Mother Wound is the place inside us where we compulsively cause ourselves to be small, self-sacrificing and silent as a means of loyalty and love and approval with other people. Today we explore how, if we’re persistent and committed on both the path of menstrual cycle awareness (or conscious menopause), and working with the Mother Wound, we can create boundaries which can help us to feel less disconnected and more like we belong to this messy, old life. We explore:How your deep ‘why’ can help you to hold clear boundaries when you face criticism.Bethany’s three tips for holding strong boundaries with challenging family members. How menstrual cycle can help us to discover what we really want (rather than what we’re making ourselves do) so that we can ride off the power of these desires to courageously set necessary boundaries. ---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.hardyBethany Webster: @themotherwound - https://www.instagram.com/themotherwound/

Today we’re exploring a vital topic to all of us who are looking to evolve, wake up and live in a way which is honouring and life-affirming - decolonisation.When you look at the modern wellness industry in western countries, you can see that it borrows heavily from the ancient traditions of cultures from around the globe - from turmeric lattes, to cacao ceremonies, to yoga classes, to burning sage.There’s an important, growing, decolonisation movement which is asking all of us to look more deeply and critically into our own practices, and to ask ourselves how we may be causing harm, and to work to correct it.Our guest today is at the leading edge of this movement, and in our conversation she shares generously about her personal decolonising journey with us, so that we can all work towards - as she says in the intro to her brilliant ‘Decolonising Wellness’ podcast - appreciating, not appropriating.Jyoti Rani is a Menstrual Cycle Coach who practices, teaches and embodies a decolonised approach to wellness - rooted in inclusivity, diversity and an honouring of indigenous wisdom.She is also a Yoga Teacher and a big part of her decolonising journey has been reclaiming her Indian heritage and the rich wisdom of Yoga and Ayurveda - “the knowledge of life”, India’s ancient healing system - so as an added bonus, we begin and end the conversation learning about Ayurvedic menstrual health. We explore:Dozens of ways to begin decolonising your mind, your life and your wellness practices. How we can decolonise our menstrual cycle - by stepping away from cookie cutter templates of how our cycles ‘should look’ and instead cultivating an intimacy with the cycle we have.What Ayurveda recommends we eat on our period---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.hardyJyoti Rani: @_jyoti.rani_ - https://www.instagram.com/_jyoti.rani_