We've spent over 10,000 hours developing a radical new approach to health, creativity, leadership and spiritual life. And the best bit? It’s rooted in the bloody, wild, radical power of the menstrual cycle.
We want to invite you into the adventure of a lifetime - into the heart of the Inner Intelligence that is activated at a your first bleed, deepened through your menstruating years and culminating in the great awakening of menopause.
It has the power to lead you Home to Yourself. And to bring our world to balance. These teachings will initiate you into your full authority and dignity. They’ll reveal your ‘Inner Seasons’ as your own personal self-care coach. You’ll be able to better pace your energy, calm your nervous system, channel spiritual forces…and most of all...achieve a deep sense of belonging to Life itself.
If you allow it, they will coax you into a psychological death and rebirth process to ever more expanded levels of consciousness. The result? The emergence of a passionate, wild and fully alive you - one that is ready to create a new power story for yourself and for our world.
Read more about our role in the global menstruality movement and our own menstruality stories HERE.
They are deeply experienced cycle awareness practitioners and guides. They’ve all been training and contributing to Red School for five to ten years. They’ve completed the in-person Menstruality Leadership Programme, are Menstruality Medicine Circle Facilitators and have been well worked by their cycles.
Their role is to support and mentor participants in our live programmes, offer one-to-one Menstruality coaching sessions, support trainee MMC Facilitators and speak / lead workshops on behalf of Red School.
Many graduates of our Menstruality Leadership Programme have gone on to do our Menstruality Medicine Circle Training and are qualified to facilitate Menstruality Medicine Circles™ (MMC). The MMC is a unique imaginal process, developed by Red School to support you to tap you into and restore your inner ecology – the natural energetic, psycho-spiritual ‘flow’ or order of your menstrual cycle.
Book a Session
The Red School Menstruality Mentors are a collection of incredible creatives, leaders, teachers and nurturers who have all graduated from our Menstruality Leadership Programme. They each offer a unique range of cycle-centric services and offerings which we heartily recommend. You can explore their work by clicking the button below.
Our role in the Global Menstruality Movement
More and more brilliant people - like you - are waking up to the magic that lives within the menstrual cycle. We are here to uplift, educate and inspire the leaders of this movement. Our vision: to place menstrual cycle awareness in the heart of every boardroom, classroom and dinner-table discussion on the planet.
We’ve been around for a while. We combine our four decades of experience in the fields of psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, coaching, movement practices, and teaching, to hold space for the emergence of this new menstruality consciousness, with liberal doses of irreverent humour and chocolate, of course!
This is a co-creative experiment. If you spend time here exploring these practices (and using them in your life) you’ll join the thousands of people whose direct experiences have already shaped the collective wisdom of our teachings.
We love writing (check out our Hay House book, Wild Power) and speaking (hear our favourite talks and podcasts here), and serving the awakening of Menstruality in the heart of the world.
Our Menstruality Stories
In the beginning
From our very first periods our deep instinctual selves ‘knew’ something significant was at work but we had no language to name it. Mainstream consciousness distracted us with the message to keep quiet about the fact of the cycle and menstruation itself and we were both temporarily seduced by the apparent liberation of hormonal contraception.
Thankfully our deep instinctual knowing broke through that illusion and each in our own ways found fertility awareness in our 20s, the first conscious step of awakening into the power of menstruality.
From pain to power
At thirty one Alexandra was seized by the most outrageous menstrual pain that was to return for 3-4 days each menstrual month. In an attempt to heal her body she decided to give space to menstruation whenever she could and feel into the pain rather than take drugs. It was profoundly challenging but in the wake of that pain came revelation and importantly healing.
Her perception of menstruation radically altered she began sharing with other women in workshops and her psychotherapy practice what she was discovering about the psychological and spiritual forces of the female body.
The more she taught the more she learnt. Women’s stories held the gold. When she stopped to listen, to follow the natural impulse of the cycle, it was as though a whole new world, a new cosmology revealed itself. The feminine cosmology, the power of menstruality.
A high definition life
When Sjanie came off hormonal contraception her feeling life exploded into glorious technicolour. She came alive in ways she had not known before, as though she were tasting herself for the first time.
From that day forth her fascination for the cycle grew and grew and lead her to study hypnotherapy and psychotherapy, and to develop an expertise in the area of fertility with women who are struggling to conceive. As the mother of two young girls she brings the menstruality consciousness to bear on the realities of child rearing, relationship and running a business.
The post menopause adventure
Alexandra has allowed herself to be well worked by the alchemical dynamic of menopause, and while she’s less enamoured of some aspects of getting older, she’s absolutely loving the liberation and authority that the post menopause life bestows, and the deep sense of belonging or ‘place’ in the world that she has arrived at.
A collaborative project
This work has evolved in the company of many other. Each time we gather together we gather in more of the possibilities of our menstruality power.
All the maps and teachings we share are original to Red School, including The Map of the Vias, The Inner Seasons of the menstrual cycle, The Five Chambers of Menstruation, The ‘Void’, the inner critic having a natural home in the cycle - the inner autumn, Menstrual Cycle Awareness (MCA), the Big Bleed, the Bleed On It Method and the Big Buff Up, The Creative Cycle, The Five Phases of Menopause and The Menstruality Medicine Circle (MMC).
This work is also made possible by our Faculty and Menstruality Mentors. These are people who have completed our Menstruality Leadership Programme, the purpose of which is to help others find their own authority, or ‘voice’, in the field of menstruality. They have really worked and continue to work deeply with their cycle, experienced challenges, let themselves be touched and weathered by the process, and are able to offer you heartfelt support.
Menstruality is a term coined by Jane Catherine Severn, pointing to a woman’s Inner Intelligence or organising principle that is working her from her first bleed at menarche, throughout her menstruating years and menopause and into her post-menopause years. It is leading her Home to Herself.
Menstruality is an initiatory journey to power (a process of maturation): a psychological death and rebirth process that unfolds over each menstrual month leading to ever more expanded levels of consciousness. Menstruality is the knowledge, knowing and consciousness that accumulates in a woman through the lived experience of this repeated initiation, month after month; and what she simultaneously generates in her community.
Menstruality is both a consciousness and a new professional field which has not previously existed. Our Menstruality Leadership Programme is a one-of-a-kind opportunity to be a forerunner in this new emerging field within health, creativity, spirituality and leadership.
We envision a world in which the cycles of life are revered and respected as quiet orchestrators of our lives – instilling a deep reverence for the planet and everything on it. The menstrual cycle is understood as the heartbeat of that Great Orchestration, and most crucially, honoured as the sacred source of life for us humans.
At Red School, we are committed to creating a 'spiritually fulfilling, socially just, environmentally sustainable world'*. We are passionate about actively dismantling systems of oppression that cause suffering to marginalised people, and we have big philanthropic goals.
*we are grateful to the Pachamama Alliance for this statement
We see Menstruality as a spiritual path in its own right, and Menstrual Cycle Awareness as a potent spiritual practice. It is both immensely pragmatic and gloriously ecstatic-making, opening us to the most blissful, visionary and holy places without effort.
While many spiritual practices are worthy and great, they can sometimes miss the mark for women. They were largely evolved by men and meet the needs and psychology of men, but not the needs of a menstruating being.
For centuries within our culture the menstrual cycle has been denied, demonised and rejected. We’ve been led to believe it’s a limitation or a weakness we must overcome in order to succeed. We challenge all that, and unveil the extraordinary truth that your menstrual cycle is in fact a highly potent, potentially liberating process. It’s your custom-made initiatory path to awakening and to power.
When approached with appropriate consciousness and time, the menstrual cycle initiates us into a deep intimacy with ourselves, our sense of Place in the world and union with the Divine. It awakens new forms of intelligence and knowing. It is our ultimate ally to befriending ourselves, and utterly relishing our authority. What is important about the spiritual path of menstruality is that it practices us. We don’t have to ‘do’ anything, rather, through a deeply felt engagement with and honouring of the changing rhythms of our cycle, we are led or brought into the spiritual dimension.
Scientists are now clear that we have only a decade to mitigate climate change - it’s time for radical action. What role can our menstrual cycle awareness play in this? We passionately believe that menstruality can transform our relationship to the earth. (Yes, it’s a bold statement! But we’re living in tumultuous times, and fortune favours the bold.)
Cycle awareness re-creates our relationship to nature and earth by bringing us into contact with the full spectrum of who we are. It awakens our animal nature and invites us to be in the ground of our body, alive to the fullness of this life force moving through us.
As you work with this cyclical consciousness within yourself, you restore cyclical consciousness for those around you, and for the world at large. You reignite a responsiveness to life, and a pacing that allows a sense of spaciousness. This is powerful medicine in a world that lives in a 24/7 top-gear mode.
Cycle awareness restores a sense of belonging to life, and belonging to earth. It is what’s needed in the world, to both thrive, and indeed, survive at this crucial time.How affirming to know that each time you connect to your cycle, you’re committing to a powerful re-awakening of the Feminine - relational, co-creative and interdependent - a consciousness calling us home, into balance with the natural world.
At Red School, we share the collective grief about the systems of oppression that hurt BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and other marginalised people across the globe. We are committed to doing the lifelong work it takes to actively dismantle systemic racism, transphobia, heteronormativity and ableism, within ourselves, and in the world.
Our vision is to create a world where everyone with a menstrual cycle has equal access to the sacred practice of menstrual cycle awareness. We long deeply for all who menstruate to have the same rights, safety, resources, and justice afforded to us as white, cis-gender, hetero women so that, together, we can all harness the healing power of cycle awareness to fully reinstate the Feminine in our world. We believe menstrual cycle awareness has a powerful role to play in social justice movements.
Beyond dismantling period poverty across the globe, cycle awareness awakens an inner aliveness that fuels sacred activism. It keeps us sensing and feeling, and allows us to stay awake to the world, which in turn inspires care, love and action for all aspects of humanity.
Loyalty to the cycle awakens us to the ineffable, to that which is mysterious, and to a sense of life-affirming rhythm and flow from which truly fresh and creative responses to our current social justice crises can emerge.
How we are making this practice more widely available:
In 2020 Alexandra and Sjanie founded the Menstruality Foundation, one of the main aims of the foundation is to bring the practice of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to more people and to support the reach and impact of menstruality education world wide.
Read our inclusivity statement here
How we give back to the earth:
We plant trees through TreeSisters. Our ‘Menstruality Forest’ in the tropics now totals 21,732 trees, and we aim to plant a million or more in our lifetimes.
How we work towards social justice and inclusion:
~ Educating ourselves about social justice issues, to dismantle unconscious bias within ourselves, and become allies to marginalised peoples.
~ Developing a long-term plan to ensure we're an inclusive organisation, and to increase the diversity of our team and community.
~ Amplifying the voices of women of colour, LGBTQ+ and other marginalised people in the menstruality community through our social media platforms.
Imagine that knowledge of the full spectrum and power of the menstrual cycle is commonplace, and we all feel the utter rightness of having this experience within us. Imagine a world in which the menstrual cycle is respected as our spiritual practice. Imagine young people growing up in this menstrual-affirming world.
Imagine a world in which menopause is recognized as a healthy, organic step in one's evolutionary journey stepping into the vital and powerful role of serving your community and the world. Imagine knowing that you’ll be profoundly met in the dignity and power of this new place you stand in post menopause.
May we all trust our menstrual cycle and reclaim the spiritual significance of Menopause as the path to instate our full sovereignty. May we all recognise and relish our entitlement, dignity and authority to be channels for Menstruality and the Divine Feminine on the planet.