Cosmopolitan named 2015 as “the year the period went public”.
Newsweek declared 2016 as “the year of menstrual change”.
In 2019, a film about periods won an Oscar.
Taboos are being healed, shame is dissolving. A new movement, the menstruality movement is going global…
Whether you’re new to cycle awareness or you’re a leader in this field, our new weekly podcast will inspire you to activate your vitality, creativity and leadership through the magic of menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause.
Whether you’re new to cycle awareness or you’re a leader in this field, our *brand new* weekly podcast will inspire you to activate your vitality, creativity and leadership through the magic of menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause.
to develop 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 warmly welcome you to join us as we speak with the pioneers, troublemakers and culture-shifters who are leading the menstruality movement.
We’ll release a new episode every Thursday and you can subscribe today wherever you listen to podcasts.
Recent Episodes
Today we’re in conversation with the brilliant community gathered around this work and podcast in our part two episode about how to work with menstrual cycle awareness as our own in-built energy management system.
This conversation is for you if you struggle to follow the impulses of your cycle around the modern-life juggle of responsibilities, or if you’re dealing with low energy levels and you’re not sure why. It’s also for you if you’re feeling good, but want tips to work with your cycle to enahcen your vitality and feel even better.
It’s for you if you’re new to cycle awareness - it will help you get set-up with the foundations for setting up your cyclical rhythm of sustainability. And it’s also for you if you’ve been practising for a good while as we get into many of the nuances of the practice, including how to get the limitations of your inner seasons working for you, how to navigate your energy through your crossover days in between the seasons, and how to set cyclical boundaries.
We’re experiencing an epidemic of chronic fatigue and burnout, especially for women, and people with marginalised identities. It’s part of our modern day polycrisis, and in many ways the exhaustion we’re experiencing in our individual bodies mirrors the environmental challenges that are ravaging our earth, our larger body. We’re driving both to the very edges of their capacity.
Beautifully, the practice of menstrual cycle awareness can help us to live in alignment with our natural rhythms, to embrace rest and prevent overwhelm and burnout. We can connect with the four phases of the menstrual cycle as our own personal energy management system.
And when we listen for and cooperate with the natural ebb and flow of our inner seasons, we rebel against the subtle but pervasive messaging that we should be more, bigger, better, faster. We feel better, we’re more creative, more powerful and we model the much-needed art of sustainable living.
When we enter the autumn of our menstruation years in our 40s and start to experience what many call perimenopause, we can easily think we should keep pushing through even though our bodies, minds and emotional landscape are transforming profoundly.
(Alexandra and Sjanie, the co-founders or Red School call this phase the Quickening, or the autumn of our menstruating years).
Our guest today specialises in helping women in midlife recover from burnout so they can rise stronger and thrive longer. Jolinda Johnson is the author of Resilience: 10 Ways to Recover from Burnout and Exhaustion, and works as a Life and Health Coach, as well as a Menopause Coaching Specialist.
In today’s conversation we explore the four phases of burnout; from feeling wired and tired, to health challenges to full-on exhaustion, all the way to an official burn out diagnosis and major life changes. Jolinda explains how tracking these phases offer us many opportunities for course correction before we find ourselves flat on our back. So this one is for you especially if you’re in perimenopause, but it relevant to anyone experiencing burnout in any life phase.
Today we’re continuing our exploration around the fundamentals of the practice of menstrual cycle awareness, through the lens of some of the frequently asked questions from our community, such as what to do if your menstrual cycle doesn’t look like the archetypal cycle, how to track your cycle if you have menstrual health challenges, and how to talk about cycle awareness with your loved ones.
The golden thread running through every response from Sjanie and Alexandra is the one and only rule of Menstrual Cycle Awareness which we call the Big Red Rule: that your own unique experience of your menstrual cycle is the most important thing, with all its quirks, strangeness and challenges. As Alexandra shares in the conversation, your job as a student of your cycle is to stay loyal to exactly what you’re experiencing.
In other words, there are no ‘shoulds’ with menstrual cycle awareness, and there is no perfect cycle to achieve. The practice of menstrual cycle awareness is a homecoming to yourself, in a world that conditions us to look outside of ourselves for the answers. The power of the cycle rests in you experiencing your own cycle, and trusting your experience of your unique strengths, vulnerabilities and needs, exactly as they are on each cycle day.
In our forties, many of us hit a wall. It can be a time when our responsibilities are at an all time high, just when our bodies are telling us - sometimes very loudly - that it’s time to change the way we’ve been living and working so far.
Our guest today, renowned visionary, coach and catalyst Dr Joanna Martin helps us understand how to navigate this phase of life which is often called perimenopause, and which Red School founders Alexandra and Sjanie call the Quickening, through the lens of the archetype of ‘superwoman’.
As the founder of One of many, Jo’s organisation has supported over 70,000 grassroots women leaders to have a greater impact without burnout. She recently published her book, Superwoman - Escaping The Myth and in our conversation today we explore how the superwoman archetype shows up in our lives, as well as how to step out of superwoman mode, embrace community and get your needs met, even with all the responsibilities you hold.
This conversation is for you if you’re in your forties and looking for ways to show up without burning out. We speak a lot about parenting, so it’s especially for you if this is your path. However, it’s also for you in any phase of your life, if you recognise that you have a tendency to try to push through and do too much, and you want to work cyclically to honour your needs.
When people hear about menstrual cycle awareness, they’re often surprised, confused and baffled by the idea that there could be a connection between the menstrual cycle and your creativity, power and wisdom. It’s no surprise given current cultural attitudes around the menstrual cycle and menopause, which are largely ignored or dismissed.
So today’s episode is designed to both build a bridge for you if you’re new to the practice as well as offer a refresher for you if you’ve been tracking for years and want to rediscover the fundamentals of tracking your cycle, as your unique rhythm of power.
As you may know, Alexandra developed the early prototype of this practice as she worked to heal her own menstrual pain over forty years ago, when she dared to listen to her body and began resting at menstruation. The practice evolved over many years working with groups, then Alexandra and Sjanie founded Red School to teach it, and wrote about the practice in their book Wild Power, and now guide thousands of students to deepen their practice through their Cycle Power course, as well as teaching next level cycle awareness on their Menstruality Leadership Programme.
In many indigenous communities across the world, people have long honoured menstruation as a sacred time. Today we’re lucky to be exploring the beauty and wisdom of the ancestral moontime medicine of the Andean people, and our guest is Dr Cynthia Ingar, who is an anthropologist and Andean keeper of Woman Medicine wisdom living in the Sacred Valley in Peru.
In her late twenties, Cynthia was guided by a mentor to do thirteen traditional Andean moontime retreats where she was in silence and eating a special diet for four days and four nights while she menstruated.
Cynthia has dedicated her life to teaching a woman-centered approach to women's health, to traditional midwifery and to revitalizing Andean Woman Medicine including menstrual cycle and the Andean Moontime traditional practices. In this rich, magical conversation, we explore how her moontime retreats prepared her to live her calling, both as a keeper of this Woman Medicine and as a mother to her children.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Today we’re sharing a conversation we had a couple of years back at the close of the year and it’s all about what cycle awareness can teach us about all of life’s endings; the smaller, more surface level ones like the end of the year we have coming up, and the bigger more profound ones, like ending relationships, moving house, all the way to the deep grief of losing loved ones.
For those of us with menstrual cycles, each month we have an opportunity to practice ending the cycle well, aligning with the deep intelligences at work within us as we descend towards menstruation. (Or the dark moon if you’re tracking with the lunar cycle).
And, as quite often happens, Alexandra and Sjanie have totally different ways of approaching endings - which we chat about in-depth!
Today we’re sharing one of our most popular episodes from the archives - to tune into the outer winter here in the northern hemisphere… it’s all about how the inner winter of the menstrual cycle awakens feminine leadership…
So the thing that originally inspired this conversation was that Sjanie’s period came very early the month before we spoke. She suddenly found herself bleeding on day 12 and she sad that the experience was akin to a zen meditation master slapping their student on the back when they’ve momentarily gone unconscious.
She said was reminded that there is a wild intelligence within her that was outside of her control. This is one way that menstruation offers us a way into a radical kind of leadership. The reality that we don’t control it reminds us that we belong to something greater.
So, in today’s conversation we explore inner winter as a gateway to leadership and why giving time to yourself at menstruation is positively dangerous! It will change your consciousness - and I think maybe that’s why this conversation has been so widely shared and enjoyed. It’s all about how menstruation can wake you up to what life wants from you.
Guided by the wisdom of deep rest at menstruation, Alexandra and Sjanie do a 'Big Bleed' retreat for Red School every year, a kind of short sabbatical. Even though Red School is a big eco-system, with a community of 1000s of people and a whole team taking care of many different pieces, they take the bold leadership move of pressing pause on it all, to allow for deep rest, and new inspiration.
In last year’s winter Big Bleed, they had a big realisation - that they are both feeling called to take a much longer sabbatical, for three reasons. Firstly, because Sjanie is heading towards the end of her menstruating years and wants to plan for a year of menopause sabbatical.
Secondly, because Alexandra is heading towards her mid-seventies and is ready to change the pace after the intense creativity of the past few years, and lastly because they want to start passing on the legacy of the menstruality work they teach at Red School.
So today we explore the inspiration behind this sabbatical, how they are preparing for it, the impact it is going to have for Red School, and how you can take your own sabbatical too.
In Chinese Medicine, life progresses in seven-year cycles for female bodies, and each of these phases correlates to one of the five elements; water, wood, fire, earth and metal.
Today Chinese Medicine Practitioner, Kris Gonzalez describes what it means for us to move from the earth element in our 30s to the metal element in our 40s, and what this transition can teach us about how to create more health and wellness in perimenopause, or The Quickening as Alexandra and Sjanie call it.
Kris shares how by the age of 35, which marks the beginning of the fifth cycle, our bodies become less forgiving of unhealthy choices, and habits that once had little impact in our 20s may no longer be tolerated by our body, mind, and spirit, and she shares a wealth of practical guidance about how to take care of ourselves, with a special focus on the three major organs that come into play in perimenopause; the kidneys, the spleen and the liver.
But I especially appreciated her wisdom around how Chinese medicine gives us a map to explore what is happening beyond our hormonal changes in perimenopause - and dive into the spiritual dimension of this rite of passage.
Today we’d love to invite you to dream with us for a moment… Imagine we could look ahead twenty years, to a world which fully honours the power and magic of the menstrual cycle and menopause… a world where the menstrual taboo has lifted fully, and the menstrual cycle is honoured as the sacred source of life for us humans.
As you may well know, there’s a powerful menstrual revolution at work in the world… and today we’re exploring how it’s going to impact every aspect of life in the years to come, and how we each have a role to play.
(And if you’d like to explore your role in this revolution, how you can channel your passion for cyclical living into your life, your work, and all the roles you play, we also share an invitation to join us for a free event on December 10th: What Could Your Menstruality Leadership - and Career - Look Like?)
Menstrual cycle awareness has the capacity to create meaningful change in all areas of life, and today we’re exploring an aspect of our collective human experience which isn’t talked about enough...
In a couple of days, it will be the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and today our guest is Tamsin Fagan who has been doing the difficult, courageous work of ending violence against women and girls since she was 19.
Tamsin is a women's safety advocate, womb medicine woman, a menstruality leadership programme graduate and ceremonialist and today, she shares her personal story of domestic violence in her childhood, how she is applying menstrual cycle awareness in her activism, and how she has worked with her own cycle to heal her trauma.
In a world that can overly prioritise the linear and rational, so many of us long to connect with and express our instinctive, intuitive knowing, and today we’re exploring how the practice of menstrual cycle awareness can help us to hone the art of intuitive living.
Alexandra and Sjanie unpack how the first half of the cycle has an outer-focused thrust which takes you out into the world (it almost takes you out of yourself if you’re not careful) where your rational mind is at its peak. And then the tide turns, and in the second half of the cycle, your energies contract and you’re naturally drawn back into yourself, and the instinctual, intuitive, psychic knowing within each of us.
Then, at menstruation your intuition can reach its greatest expression. The left brain retreats, your capacity for rational thinking goes offline, and you’re opened up to a much more holistic way of knowing, sensing, and feeling. Your subtle senses are blown open, you have access to something way beyond yourself… and you can feel the deep meaning of your own life.
What do we do when we’re experiencing significant changes physically, emotionally and spiritually in the years running up to menopause, all we want to do is run far, far away, but we still have kids at home who need our care and support?
This question is coming up a lot in our community and that’s why I’m so grateful to be talking with Matrescence expert, journalist and coach, Amy Taylor Kabbaz, who also happens to be smack in the middle of perimenopause, with three children at home.
Over the past decade, Amy has interviewed hundreds of authors, maternal health experts, and teachers, trying to decipher why so many mothers feel burnt out, overwhelmed, and addicted to being busy. Over the past year she’s been exploring how we can support ourselves through the huge transition of perimenopause, and she shares the fruits with us today.
Through their decades of sitting with women and people undergoing the menopause initiation, Alexandra and Sjanie have seen that no part of your life remains untouched by menopause, including your relationships with your loved ones and community. Everything needs to undergo a shift, however subtle, as you move into a greater sense of authority with clearer parameters about yourself. As Alexandra says, it’s called The Change for a reason.
Today we’re speaking to a guest who knows this to be true firsthand, and is generously sharing her experiences with us. Autumn Saunders is post-menopausal Menstruality and Menopause mentor at Red School and holds space on our Menopause: The Great Awakener course.
Autumn is a mother, a healing artist, and embodied feminine leadership guide and the creatrix behind the Rhythmic Life Circle & MotherArts Sanctuary for Creativity & Wellbeing. Today we walk through the five phases of menopause that Alexandra and Sjanie teach in the Menopause: The Great Awakener course, exploring how all of her relationships transformed during her menopause.
Menopause, and the years running up to it, can be a time of real challenge and transformation. Without wise guidance and a framework to understand what’s happening, we can be left feeling lost, alone and crazy.
Luckily, there are those who can serve as guides, like our guest today, Dr Danielle Arabena, who brings her extensive experience as a medical doctor and a shamanic healer to stand at what she calls the “crossroads and altars we stand before as women” including menstruation, birth, menopause, death, and our topics for today: perimenopause.
Dr Danielle is a descendant of the Meriam Mer peoples in the Torres Strait. She is a GP and healer whose nurturing approach integrates evidence-based medical care with the profound wisdom of 'women's business' as seen through her Indigenous Knowledge lens.
It’s world menopause month, and we’re continuing the menopause conversation we began two weeks ago, where we explored how to navigate the dark night of the soul of the menopause process (it’s episode 166), and we’re continuing by looking at the powers that the menopause initiation can awaken in us, if we refuse to abandon ourselves during this betrayal phase of menopause.
In their book, Wise Power, Alexandra and Sjanie talk about menopause as being a pHd in power. When it is respected, honoured and dignified, the initiation of menopause can bring you to a place of deep peace within yourself. And even more than that, the menopause process can actually help you to grow new capacities, powers, and kinds of intelligence. It’s a huge learning curve - a massive upgrade in your skills, ready for your life’s third act.
In today’s conversation we’re looking at how these powers can change us personally, and through us, how they can change the world.
Today on the podcast we’re exploring how menopause can be an initiation into greater self-love, self-compassion and self-mothering. This is our third conversation with Chameli Gad, the founder of Awakening Women. Each year she’s come back here to generously share her menopause process, which unfolded throughout the pandemic and included the death of her son, and her divorce.
In our chat today, she explores the fruits of her menopause process, from the other side, and she is as honest about her current peace, ease and ecstasy as she was with her mid-initiation pain and suffering.
Chameli is a mystic and Goddess Wisdom Keeper. Rooted in earth honoring, devotional women’s spirituality and goddess-centered tantric yoga, she is especially appreciated for her love of mythology and storytelling as a key to spiritual awakening and embodiment.
Many of us are turning up at menopause stressed, exhausted, overworked and under-nourished, often managing multiple care and work roles simultaneously. And then we hit the “death” moment of the menopause initiatory death and rebirth process.
The challenges of the menopause initiation can often be compounded by key relationships ending, bereavement, or other extreme life changes. It can all form a kind of perfect storm that leaves us feeling shipwrecked.
Alexandra and Sjanie refer to this as “Betrayal”, the first of five phases in the psychospiritual process of menopause which they’ll explore in their upcoming course, Menopause: The Great Awakener. Today we unpack how the challenge here is to meet this great betrayal, this great dark night of the soul, and let yourself be undone without annihilating or abandoning yourself.
What do you do when you’ve discovered the incredible power of menstrual cycle awareness, and you’re keen to share it with your loved ones, colleagues and community, but whenever you try to talk about it, you receive reactions that range from disinterest to disgust?
The truth is that menstrual shame is real, it is pervasive and overcoming it is a key part of restoring the power, beauty and magic of the menstrual cycle at the heart of our world. Luckily we are standing on the shoulders of giants here, like the menstrual trailblazer, Jane Bennett, who has been busting through the menstrual taboo for 40 years.
Jane Bennett is social worker, researcher, writer and educator as well as the founder of the Chalice Foundation. In our first Menstruality podcast episode with Jane, we explored how to navigate create a positive menstrual culture, and what she learned from gathering the stories of over 3000 women and girls about current attitudes to the menstrual cycle to write her book About Bloody Time: The Menstrual Revolution We Have to Have.
Menstrual Cycle Awareness gives us a direct line to our deep selves, to what we’re here for and what we most deeply love.
As Alexandra and Sjanie say in Wild Power: “The journey to realizing your Calling, or purpose, is made possible by the process of initiation, which is encoded in your menstrual cycle. Initiatory change happens through the archetypal pattern of death and rebirth – which is exactly what we experience each month at Menstruation.”
Today’s conversation feels like a wild safari into the messy day to day reality of how the menstrual cycle helps us to live our Callings, with a woman who knows a thing or two about archetypal patterns.
Grace Winteringham is the co-founder of Patternity, a conscious Creative Organisation dedicated to sharing the positive power of pattern with the world. Along with her co-founder Anna Murray, she was named one of Evening Standard’s 1000 most influential people. She’s also a graduate of the Red School Menstruality Leadership Programme, and is currently immersed in a process of accelerated transformation as she navigates her own quest to follow her calling.
Have you ever had to show up in a big way on day one of your cycle and felt exposed, then - like me - totally exhausted afterwards? Today we’re exploring how menstrual cycle awareness can help you step up when you’re on your period; whether you have to do a big presentation at work, a speech at your best friend’s wedding, host a PTA meeting, or be visible in another way.
A few days before we recorded this, Alexandra and Sjanie presented a menopause workshop at a festival, and Sjanie’s menstrual cycle set it up perfectly so that she would start her bleed late, on day 29, on that very morning.
Are you (or your friends or the people you work with) struggling with menstrual health challenges like irregular cycles, spotting or heavy bleeding, menstrual pain, PCOS and intense mood changes in the premenstrual phase? Would you love to understand how you could work with food and dietary shifts to create menstrual health?
Our guest today is Lisa Hendrickson-Jack, the author of The Fifth Vital Sign, and teaches women’s health professionals to use the menstrual cycle as a vital sign in their practices, so they can empower their clients to optimize their hormones, menstrual cycles.
She is the co-author of Real Food for Fertility with Lily Nichols, which contains a wealth of information about how food can support cycle health and in today’s conversation Lisa shares her top tips for healing menstrual health challenges.
Have you ever noticed that your intuitive sense of knowing is heightened when you are premenstrual? Today we’re exploring the radical honesty that can be invoked in inner autumn, asking the question: what if our unadulterated, fierce, premenstrual truth speaking is actually exactly the medicine our world needs at this time?
My guest is Maya Luna, an artist, channel and creator of The Venus Path™, a modern adaptation of an ancient Fertility Goddess Spiritual Path that works with Sensuality, The Body, The Deep Heart, Passionate Energy and the Incarnate Human Experience.
Today she shares how she navigates what she calls the dark goddess truth serum that pulses through her in her premenstrual phase, and how she is learning to skillfully and artfully share it in the world.
Today we’re exploring Black cyclical wisdom through the lens of the life story of an extraordinary woman who left a profound legacy of cyclical heart and body intelligence, with Dr Cre Dye, who serves as the Menstruality Justice and Inclusion Educator at Red School.
Dr. Cre has served her local, national, and international communities with heart, mind and body activism for over 25 years as a mental health therapist, yoga teacher/trainer and university professor.
This is part two of a series of conversations with Cre about the cyclical wisdom she received from her Grandmothers. In episode 138: Indigenous Cycle Wisdom and Menstrual Rituals, we heard the story of Cre’s first nations Granny, and today we’re hearing what she received from Mama, her Black grandmother.
We hear how Mama grew up picking cotton in Mississippi, was widowed young, then left an abusive relationship and travelled alone in the 1960s with her eight children all the way to Missouri, to go on to foster over 60 children and become a force of love in her community. And how, through every single moment of adversity she faced as a Black woman, she found her way to claim rest, rise up and embody hope in the face of hate.
How do you feel about inner summer, or the ovulatory phase of the cycle? For many in our community, it’s the easiest and most joyful part of the cycle, but many also find it to be challenging and confronting.
Today Alexandra and Sjnaie respond to your questions about inner summer and ovulation, including; how to approach physical symptoms around ovulation, such as headaches / migraines, acne and nausea, how to stay grounded and focused amidst the big energy of ovulation and why you should never put your inner summer self in charge of your schedule!
We explore:
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.
Jules is 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.
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, we have a remedy we 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.
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.
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.
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".
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
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.
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.
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.
In our upcoming Cycle Power six-week online course we’ll be exploring this inner autumn self care practice, along with the rest of the inner seasons - we’re starting on June 21st and you can find out all about it at redschool.net/cyclepower
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.
Is there a particular point of your menstrual (or lunar) cycle where you tend to fall into a metaphorical ‘hole’? For many it’s day 5/6, coming out of the bleed or day 19/20 as you transition to inner autumn.
These are two of the four ‘crossover days’ of the cycle. We like to think of these days as mini gaps in the fabric of life, or the ground giving way under you.
Whatever metaphor works for you - and in this week’s podcast episode we laughed ourselves silly coming up with at least 20 metaphors - your crossover days are a little-known key to bringing the powers of the inner seasons of your menstrual cycle - or the lunar cycle if that’s how you track - to life. Today we go one by one, exploring today’s the gifts and challenges of each of the four crossovers, through the lens of your stories and questions.
(A note for you, if you have irregular cycles and you find it hard to track your inner seasons, let alone the transitions between them, you’re not alone, and Sjanie speaks beautifully about how to work with this cycle awareness challenge.)
Many of us in the Red School community have an intuitive longing to connect to the archetypal force of the 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 re-wild 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:
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.
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.
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, Jyoti Rani, 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 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.
Do you have a menstrual cycle that doesn’t fit within the archetypal menstrual cycle maps? And are you - or someone you know - wondering how to practice cycle awareness when you have unpredictable, irregular cycles and are never sure when your period is going to arrive?
When cycles become unpredictable it’s natural to feel uprooted, frustrated, powerless, confused, and even experience a sense of betrayal from your body.
Today, Alexandra & Sjanie explores the three main reasons why cycles become irregular, how Menstrual Cycle Awareness invites us to exercise the muscles of inner listening, sensing and knowing, so that new kinds of embodied, cyclical intelligence can be revealed within us, and importantly, how to actually practice cycle awareness when you are off all the usual maps.
How easy do you find it to express your truth? On the podcast today, we’re exploring the connection between the womb and the voice, why so many of us feel blocked in our expression, and how we can literally talk and sing our way back to our power, so that we can use our voices to create the world we want for ourselves and future generations.
Our guest is Alycia Camacho - a spoken word artist who is passionate about supporting people to activate their own voices. She’s also a Hormonal Health Coach and the founder of Embracing Cycles and has taken a long, challenging and ultimately liberating healing journey with emotionally and physically painful cycles for the past decade.
Alycia shares what has supported her to transform from being the shy kid who didn’t believe she had anything of value to say, to becoming an artist with a powerful impact today - as you’ll hear for yourself from the excerpts of Alycia’s spoken word art we share throughout the episode.
Trigger warning: We talk about Alycia’s abortion experience in depth in the first half of the conversation, so take care of yourself if that isn’t a topic that is good for you to connect with at this time.
We’ve all been there at some point. A shocking challenge disrupts our lives - a loss, a health crisis, a great disappointment - and we become the caterpillar in the cocoon (ie: we turn to mush).
But - as those of you who have been through it may well attest to (!) - nothing turns us into primordial goop like the initiation of menopause.
Today I have the rare honour of speaking with a guest who is not only mid-menopause-initiation but has also been deeply involved in the menstrual movement for two decades, and can therefore share a transmission from the leading edge of this work.
Psychotherapist, author, activist, and ordained Priestess, Elayne Kalila Doughty, has been negotiating the transition of menopause for a fifth of her life - the past ten years… today she shares the story of her menopause ‘reckoning’ - the core-wound truth she was forced to face when she was hospitalised in October last year, and began an intense inner and outer healing process.
Today we’re tackling two taboo topics at once. Firstly, sex - an area which many people find charged, challenging, confusing and sometimes shameful and we’re pairing it with menstrual cycle awareness - another topic so often shrouded in shame.
Our guest and brilliant guide is Alexa Bowditch - the founder of sexandlove.co and a cycle aware woman who has a gift for welcoming people into their sexual expression so that sex can feel more safe, intimate, fulfilling and even epic.
We look at the sex challenges that can arise in each inner season of the cycle, and how to work with them to cultivate more intimacy with yourself, and your lover and move towards the kind of sexual experiences you’re longing for.
We start by exploring how Alexa’s personal journey to becoming a sex coach who is now widely known and celebrated as That Sex Chick - and how she’s actually having less sex now than ever before, largely due to her current pregnancy, and how she’s navigating this with her husband...
Our first period - or our ‘menarche’ - is a big initiatory moment, which sets us on the path of menstruality - the path of awakening to our Calling.
During menarche we are each birthed from the ‘womb of our family’, into the womb of our menstruating years. We’re coming into the holding, guidance and wisdom of our menstrual cycle, month after month.
In today’s conversation we unpack what menarche means, why it is such a pivotal life transition, and how we can re-write our own experience of the chasm of unknownness and exposure that we must each navigate as we make this transition of menarche, so we can each claim our uniqueness and honour our true nature.
When Dr Cre Dye was in her early 20s, she began to feel called to explore the power of her cycle - or as she describes it, her moon, flowers and power.
Over our series of two conversations, we’re exploring the cycle wisdom she has learned, unearthed and received over the last three decades through the lens of her relationships with her two Grandmothers; today her Granny of hidden First Nations descent, and in part two, her African American Mama.
Dr Cre Dye has served her local, national, and international communities with heart, mind and body activism for over 25 years as a mental health therapist, yoga teacher / trainer and university professor. She is also part of the Red School team as our Menstruality Justice and Inclusion Educator, facilitating inner change for social change on our Menstruality Leadership Programme, supporting us all to work with the power of the cycle in a way that is just and inclusive.
We’re thrilled to be welcoming mythologist and author, Dr Sharon Blackie back to the podcast today, to take another journey into the mythic imagination together.
We explore how the ancient myths of our land weave us into connection with ourselves as natural, cyclical creatures, to our place in the world, and to the wisdom of our ancestral lineage.
Many of you will have read and loved Sharon’s 2016 book, ‘If Women Rose Rooted’, and today we look at three of the ancient stories through a menstrual cycle awareness / conscious menopause lens, including;
Today we're having a frank and feisty chat about one of the hot topics in our community - premenstrual and menopausal rage.
Have you ever been driving in your car and felt compelled to wind the windows up and actually roar because you felt so wildly angry on day 24? Or, if you’re navigating menopause, have you experienced your own ‘burn-the-house-down’ moment when your fury threatened to destroy everything you’ve built so far in your life?
What is going on with this rage? Why are so many of us feeling it? And what is it trying to tell us?
- Anger as an indignation of soul, bringing us closer to our essence.
- Sjanie, Alexandra & Sophie's personal journeys with rage.
- How to work with rage in the menstrual cycle by practising the menstruality Leadership skill of 'holding the tension'.
Today we’re actually replaying Dr Lara Briden's first episode with us, How to Feel Better in Perimenopause, because it’s the most popular episode we’ve ever shared, listened over 3500 times, and shared widely, and because we receive more questions about perimenopause than anything else.
In the conversation Lara demystifies this major transition that happens in our bodies in the years that lead up to menopause, when many people are left wondering if they’re going crazy, experience symptoms which can seem to come out of nowhere; including anxiety, depression, irregular cycles, insomnia, night sweats, hot flushes, migraines and more.
Lara is a naturopathic doctor and the author of The Hormone Repair Manual, Every Woman's Guide to Healthy Hormones After 40, a practical guide to navigating the change of perimenopause and relieve symptoms with natural treatments such as diet, nutritional supplements, and bioidentical hormone therapy.
What causes menstrual pain? Why do periods go missing? Why do we get PMS and how can we treat it naturally? What is happening in our bodies when we're on the pill? What is a good alternative to the pill?
We hear questions like these all the time from our community, and in today’s episode we’re talking with a great ally of Red School, Dr Lara Briden who answers all of these questions and more. The conversation is an amazing resource, and one that we hope you’ll share with your friends who may be experiencing challenges in these areas.
Our guest, Dr Lara Briden is the author of the Period Repair Manual: Natural Treatment for Better Hormones and Better Periods. She’s also the author of a second book - the Hormone Repair Manual: Every Woman’s Guide to Healthy Hormones after 40.
She has treated 1000s of women with menstrual health symptoms, and has a wealth of wisdom and experience as well as an amazing capacity to make complex health topics and challenges seem simple.
Around 20 years ago, in London, Sjanie was living her life with great abandon. Bold, confident and out there…she was invulnerable.
But she had no menstrual cycle - she had been on the contraceptive injection for seven years.It was only when she started to have intense pain after orgasm that she suddenly sensed something was missing and that she needed to get her cycle back… and today we hear the amazing story of what happened once her cycles returned.
We also hear the full story of how the menstrual cycle also changed everything for Alexandra, including her long journey to heal debilitating menstrual pain, and the immense gifts she received along the way, by surrendering to the power of menstruation.
Today's episode is for you if you’re curious about how to maintain healthy boundaries when you are working to create change for a cause that you deeply care about. It’s especially for you if you self-identify as a highly sensitive person.
Many people come to cycle awareness because they are feeling burnt out from a system that pushes them beyond their natural limits. Our guest today, Dorcas Cheng-Tozen is someone who knows burnout intimately, and - luckily for us - has devoted herself to a study of how we sensitives can find our way to contribute to creating a more just and beautiful world, which doesn’t break us in the process.
Dorcas Cheng-Tozen is an award-winning writer, editor, speaker, and communications consultant whose work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal and today we’re diving into her brilliant new book: Social Justice for the Sensitive Soul: How to Change the World in Quiet Ways.
We explore:
From finding oneself again through perimenopause, to helping to move through depression, to transforming communication with loved ones, today we’re exploring real life stories of how menstrual cycle awareness has changed the lives of our listeners.
It walks us home to our own natural rhythms. It keeps us close to what truly matters to us. It’s a innate self esteem builder. It even prepares us for menopause…
Menstrual (and lunar) cycle awareness are a huge game-changer, and powerful spiritual practices for our wild times. But the truth is that most of us live in cultures that value productivity over rest and profit over health - so we all need inspiration to stay committed to our personal cyclical rebellion.
That’s why today’s Menstruality Podcast episode is devoted to all the ways that menstrual cycle awareness can transform our lives. (And ok, we may not have quite reached 100, but we easily could have given a couple more hours!)
Welcome to the final episode in our Wild Power Bonus series - today we're creating a new life-affirming menstrual story.
It’s time now for each of us to fully reclaim the power of our menstrual cycle. To do that we have to get smart in a world that doesn’t yet recognise or celebrate it. In this episode we share some of our key Red School cycle savvy tips and strategies for restoring the cycle’s wisdom and creating a new life affirming menstrual story.
In this episode you will:
- Get to know your four undercover agents for a cycle savvy life
- Learn practical ways to create a cycle centred life
- Hear us talk about the crucialness of women and all people who menstruate gathering together to change the world.
Our guest today, Lazola MaDuka lives a homesteading life on a biodynamic farm amongst giant mountains and trees in South Africa. Her life is utterly wedded to the land, the weather and the seasons - her land tells her what it needs and when.
Lazola is also a Period + Menstrual Cycle Embodiment Coach, a Red Tent Facilitator and a certified Menstruality Mentor - she’s a graduate of the Red School Menstruality Leadership Programme. So, in our conversation today, she connects the dots between her relationship to the seasonal landscape around her, and her relationship to the cyclical landscape within her own body.
Along the way she illuminates how menstrual cycle awareness can be a pathway home to our body’s ever-changing needs, as well as to creating sustainable ways of living personally and collectively on our earth.
Welcome to our penultimate Wild Power conversation series. These ‘round-the-kitchen-table’ chats with Alexandra and Sjanie were first released when we published Wild Power: Discover the Magic of the Menstrual Cycle and Awaken the Feminine Path to Power. They unpack the book’s teachings through powerful, practical and funny real-life stories and examples.
Episode seven is about how to enter what we call the ‘Temple’ of Menstruation. Inside each of us lies a hidden ‘temple’, a place of bliss, love and deep belonging and today we reveal how your menstrual cycle prepares you to enter this ‘temple’ each month at menstruation.
Our guest today is Kimberly Ann Johnson, who has been working hands on in integrative women’s health and trauma recovery for a decade with 1000s of women, as a Somatic Experiencing™ Practitioner, sexological body worker, educator, and author.
She’s the author of many books including The Call of The Wild, and her work has been featured in the NY Times, Forbes and Vogue. She’s a sought-after teacher it feels like an extra special treat that she opened up and shared generously about her journey to understand the impact of her own trauma experiences in her body.
We explore the teachings of Call of the Wild book, about what we can all learn about the healthy predator expression of the jaguar in the journey to heal trauma. As Kimberley says on her website, “if you can learn to speak your body’s language, and transmute trauma into positive, reparative experiences in the present, if you can make the shift into acting from a stance of your deepest, truest self … everything changes.”
Welcome to our sixth Wild Power conversation. These ‘round-the-kitchen-table’ chats with Alexandra and Sjanie were first released in 2017 when we published Wild Power: Discover the Magic of the Menstrual Cycle and Awaken the Feminine Path to Power.
They unpack the book’s teachings through powerful, practical and funny real-life stories and examples.
Episode six is all about the inner seasons of your menstrual cycle - where the initiatory action takes place. We call it the workhorse of your journey to come home to your Wild Power.
Happy New Year from all of us at Red School 🥳 May your entry into 2024 be full of everything you most long for.
This conversation with Alexandra and Sjanie today is especially for you if you’re very much in inner winter mode, we’re exploring a topic which we’ve been wanting to since the podcast began, which is the deep spiritual power of menstruation, and how it unfolds in five distinct phases.
Alexandra starts by sharing how she came to understand the five chambers of menstruation starting with a story with a lover in Stockholm, then together with Sjanie they map out the profound gifts of these chambers as a gateway to the 'inner temple' of menstruation.
We just passed the darkest night of the year here in the northern hemisphere - the dark moon before the solstice, and it feels like a good moment to explore how cycle awareness can hold us during dark times; personally, collectively, and seasonally.
Like many of you, we’re grieving the suffering and conflict in the world, and doing what we can to educate ourselves, take meaningful action and contribute to building peace.
So, as Sjanie says beautifully in this episode, the menstrual cycle is such a profound teacher in the mystery and the darkness - and if you’re going through a dark night of the soul personally at the moment, or are needing sustenance as we navigate these dark times collectively, we hope this episode is balm for your heart.
Welcome to number five of our bonus Wild Power series. These ‘round-the-kitchen-table’ chats with Alexandra and Sjanie were first released when we published Wild Power: Discover the Magic of the Menstrual Cycle and Awaken the Feminine Path to Power. They unpack the book’s teachings through powerful, practical and funny real-life stories and examples.
Today we're diving deep into an exploration of the "cosmos" inside you. We reveal the basic pattern of this cosmos - the two energy dynamics (the way of the Feminine and the way of the Masculine) - that form the underpining of your cyclical life journey.
This is our fourth bonus Wild Power conversation. These ‘round-the-kitchen-table’ chats with Alexandra and Sjanie were first released when we published Wild Power: Discover the Magic of the Menstrual Cycle and Awaken the Feminine Path to Power. They unpack the book’s teachings through powerful, practical and funny real-life stories and examples.
In the fourth installment of the series, we explore the initiatory process that is unfolding from menarche to menopause, leading you ever deeper into embracing your Wild Power. We illuminate how this initiatory path is working you - an amazing hidden intelligence that is leading you Home.
Chloe Isidora is the creator of My Moon Power, a set of essential oils to help you connect to yourself and your menstrual cycle process through the inner seasons. She is also the author of 'Sacred self-care: everyday rituals for a more joyful and meaningful life' and has worked with women and womb-bearers for almost two decades to restore their connection with their womb space, encourage self-care and teach practices that heal, empower and enhance lives.
She’s a graduate of our Menstruality Leadership Programme and has a deeply devoted practice of menstrual cycle awareness. We invited her to the podcast to explore her creative process over the past several years, through a cycle-aware lens. It’s a beautiful, inspiring and very relatable journey from self doubt, uncertainty and low self esteem, through a series of unexpected twists and turns to a life where she is living her Calling through the My Moon Power project.
Today we're excited to share our third bonus Wild Power conversation. These ‘round-the-kitchen-table’ chats with Alexandra and Sjanie were first released when we published Wild Power: Discover the Magic of the Menstrual Cycle and Awaken the Feminine Path to Power. They unpack the book’s teachings through powerful, practical and funny real-life stories and examples.
Five years ago, when women’s educator, storyteller and songstress, Tara Brading was burnt out from the hustle culture of the non-profit world, she dropped everything and went on a pilgrimage to Ireland to connect with her Irish ancestral lineage. This trip changed her life, setting her on a path of studying mythology and honoring the earth based feminine wisdom left in her blood and bones.
This episode is for you if you feel a call to reclaim the wisdom of your ancestors, to return to a way of living on earth which is balanced, to heed the call to the wild that you perhaps (like me) hear each cycle month when you bleed or during your menopause process…
It’s also for you if you are committed to decolonising your mind and your life as part of your leadership path. I’ve been lucky to have had conversations with several Black and Indigenous educators for the podcast who have clarified the connection between reclaiming the cyclical wisdom of our wombs and bodies, and dismantling colonial systems of oppression (such as Latham Thomas in episode 77, Asha Frost in episode 63 and Hinewai Waitoa in episode 87). With Tara, I explore how, particularly as white women of European descent, reconnecting to our ancestral lineage goes hand in hand with the journey of decolonisation.
While there are many wonderful spiritual practices available today, the one thing we are not taught is that we have our own unique way or practice encoded in our being that changes everything. In this episode we restore menstrual cycle awareness as the original spiritual practice, and how it can support each of us to evolve, every day.
This 2nd bonus episode in our Wild Power series was recorded when Red School founders, Alexandra & Sjanie first launched their Wild Power book - and have a buy one get one free offer on the Wild Power book until 21st December, if you’d like to buy one and get one for a friend or as a gift for a loved one over the holidays.
(We’re also running the offer for our menopause book, Wise Power).See below for the link to get your free copy.
At the heart of the menstruality leadership path is the power and wisdom of menstruation. Slowly over time, bleed by bleed, we have the opportunity to experience a profound kind of homecoming when we menstruate - we remember who we are and what we’re about. This sense of purpose and meaning can fuel us up for another cycle of leading with heart, power and courage in our lives.
In today’s conversation we look at three secrets for successful leadership that can emerge from conscious, rested menstruation (however much we’re able to do that within the structures of our world and the responsibilities of our lives) through our own personal stories, menstrual dreams and trying to articulate the often wordless and deeply mysterious knowings we’ve experienced during our bleed time.
For centuries we’ve been taught our menstrual cycle is a liability, something we must ignore or reject. In this special bonus episode we’re going to upend that old story and celebrate the power of loving your cycle or at least making tentative steps towards befriending it, and the inner resources you unlock when you do that.
This conversation was recorded when we first launched our Wild Power book - and have a buy one get one free offer on the Wild Power book until 21st December, if you’d like to buy one and get one for a friend or as a gift for a loved one over the holidays. (We’re also running the offer for our menopause book, Wise Power). See below for the link to get your free copy.
Today’s episode is for you if - like me - you long to feel more calm, rested, peaceful and grounded throughout your days. Both because it feels better, but also because you know the gold that lies in this state of restedness; for your health, your relationships, your worklife, and your leadership.
Our guest is Tracee Stanley, the author of the bestselling book Radiant Rest, and the recently published The Luminous Self. She is a post-lineage yoga teacher, inspired by more than 20 years of study, and she’s devoted to sharing the wisdom of yoga nidra, rest, meditation, self-inquiry, nature as a teacher, and ancestor reverence.
We chat about how to set up a practice that allows for rest inside a mainstream culture that says we’re not worthy unless you’re pushing through; whether that’s pushing through grief, illness, exhaustion or menstruation and menopause. Through it all, Tracee illuminates how deep rest, peace and truth are our birthright.
When Alexandra began to experience monthly outrageous period pain in her 30s, she made a radical decision. She thought “my body is talking to me, and I’m going to listen”. On the podcast today she reflects on this moment as a pivotal step into leadership… one that led to the development of everything that Red School has created.
The pain forced her to give space to her bleed time, which allowed her to slowly, cycle-by-cycle discover the spiritual powers of menstruation, and cycle awareness as a pathway to
It was the starting point for many of the cycle-inspired leadership skills that we now teach on our Menstruality Leadership Programme - it’s exciting because the doors for 2024 are opening again later this month - and through our conversation, we illuminate how the menstrual cycle and menopause can awaken us to a new (timeless) kind of consciousness which inspires a way of living and leading that is life-affirming, inclusive, and rooted in belonging.
Menopause awakens us to the vulnerability of our humanity. The structures that have long held us safe begin to crack, and we lose the mechanisms we’ve used to hold ourselves in place; our bodies change, our shifting hormones rewire our psyches, our long held identities are shaken.
It’s no wonder we can start to feel that we’re “losing it” - all the layers of certainty that we’ve come to depend on are being deconstructed; from our health, to our careers, to our marriages, to even the deep meaning of our lives.
The radical idea we explore in today’s conversation, is that this process of ‘losing it’ is a necessary - albeit very challenging - part of the menopause spiritual initiation. If you’re in the middle of this messy process, may this episode offer some supportive context, meaning and even solace to you today.
Today we’re carrying on a conversation about the initiatory power of menopause which we’ve been having with Chameli Ardagh, the founder of Awakening Women, since the beginning of her menopause process.
Last year she emerged from her challenging process of descent and is sharing the fruits of her brutal, yet beautiful menopause underworld journey; which included divorce, the reshaping of her Calling, and the death of her son.Chameli Ardagh is a yogini, mystic and Goddess Wisdom Keeper. Her work is rooted in earth honoring, devotional women’s spirituality and goddess centered tantric yoga.
One of the things I most love about her is her gift for storytelling and ability to bring ancient myths alive for our modern world.
Our guest today, Lisa Schrader is the founder of Awakening Shakti and the author of Getting Started with Tantra and has impacted the lives of thousands of women for over a decade as a workshop leader, author, speaker and coach.
She joined us for our live menopause course - Menopause: The Great Awakener - last year… (the doors just opened yesterday, and the early bird is available until Oct 25th - more about that later).
Today, she shares how the course supported her through the 3-year post menopause dismantling-shedding-rebuilding re-birthing she’s currently emerging from. It’s been a deep process of dismantling old identities and recovering from a lifetime of over-achieving, pressure, performance, and people pleasing, to awaken the Queen archetype and a new kind of sovereignty.
My guest today is one of many people who felt like she was losing her mind as she entered menopause.
Dr. Arianna Sholes-Douglas is an integrative healthcare practitioner and visionary in the field of women’s health. She has practiced medicine for three decades and is the author of The Menopause Myth: What Your Mother, Doctor, and Friends Haven’t Told You about Life after 35
The menopause was intense for her, and inspired her to reassess everything in her life, including her long career in medicine, eventually making the decision to transform her work life and start a practice supporting women in menopause with an integrative, holistic approach.
- We walk through Dr Arianna's 'signs you’re healing in menopause' and how they showed up for her personally, including the patterns that she broke through menopause, how to find our way to self forgiveness, and how to set boundaries.
- How our brain chemistry changes in menopause and how this is reflected in the shift from people pleasing to ‘what do I need?’.
- Dr Arianna's 'Jewels for the Journey' and the sacred role of menopause in our lives.
There's lots of confusion about how to define menopause and the years running up to it, making it difficult for people to clarify where they're at in their menopause process.
At Red School, we stand for a reclamation of our cyclical experience in a world which denies and demonises our cyclicity. We see this menopause confusion as a symptom of the way we have been shut out of our true experience as cyclical beings. In order for us to reclaim the place we’re in, both in our menstrual cycles and the larger cycles of our lives, we need to be able to feel, name and claim our own experience, as well as having a dignified and meaningful context for it.
So, in today’s episode Alexandra and Sjanie walk through the Red School way of contextualising menopause, through the lens of the seasons of your menstruating years—including the autumn of your menstruating years (‘The Quickening’), the Menopause Hinterland in the approach to menopause, and the long inner winter of the five phases of the spiritual initiation of menopause.
Those of us who are passionate about the power of menstrual cycle awareness can feel a little crazy in our world. Not only does our culture overlook the power of the menstrual cycle, but it continues to perpetuate an atmosphere of shame around all things menstrual.
That’s why I love meeting women like Jasmine Alicia Carter.
Jasmine is a Menstrual Artist and Feminine Empowerment Mentor. She’s been painting with her period blood since 2016. It’s become a sacred art and ritual that has changed her life and the lives of thousands of women across the globe, through the budding Menstrual Art Movement!
When Lucy Pearce published her book about the power of the menstrual cycle, Moon Time: Harness the ever-changing energy of your menstrual cycle 11 years ago, she was one of very few people talking about periods, and it was one of the first books in print to speak about the Red Tent movement.
Over the past decade her loyalty to her cycle has helped her as a multi-passionate creatrix to write twelve books, found Womancraft - a paradigm-shifting publishing house, edit and publish over 50 books, teach courses, create beautiful art and parent three children.
Five years ago she received an autism diagnosis, and in our conversation today we explore how this had helped her to understand herself far better, have tools to care for herself and manage her life as a cycle-aware creative in an all-too-linear world.
Today I’m speaking with someone who knows in a very embodied way how to ride the creative waves of cyclical living… mainly because she knows how to ride actual ocean waves, and in some cases we’re talking 30 foot waves.
Easkey Britton spearheaded women’s big-wave surfing in Ireland and is a five time national champion surfer as well as being a marine scientist, holding a Doctorate in Environment and Society and an activist - she was named an ‘Agent of Change’ by Surfer magazine.
She’s the author of two beautiful books about our interconnection with water, Saltwater in the Blood and Ebb and Flow. She was writing her first book when she joined Alexandra and Sjanie for the Menstruality Leadership Programme and it is woven throughout with celebration of her own bodily cycles.
We explore how water supports Easkey through the cyclicality of her creative process, including...
Today on the podcast we’re chatting about a tried-and tested antidote to the biggest creative challenge most of us face, a challenge which came through in dozens of versions of this question in our inbox during our summer creativity series…How can I make space for my creative expression when there’s so much else going on in my life?
Do you relate? Perhaps you find yourself making exciting creative plans, only to get caught up in the flurry of day-to-day life and never really get started? Maybe you are wary of diving fully into a creative project—amidst everything else you’re caring for in your life—out of fear that you’ll burn out (again)?
Today’s podcast explores the deep, underground magic of cycle awareness, and how it helps us to understand everything we experience in our lives as part of the biggest creative act of all—being an ever-evolving human in an often-challenging world.
What to do when you find yourself in a creative void, either because life has thrown you a curve ball, or you find yourself feeling totally uninspired? Our cycles teach us to trust the fallow times, but that’s a tall order in a world that celebrates productivity above all else.
Our guest today is author, Rebecca Campbell and she’s a great person to have this conversation for many reasons, but especially because she’s personally navigated many periods of creative void in order to bring forth creations which have touched the lives of 100s of 1000s of people, including several books, courses, a new podcast and a mystery school.
The deeper reason for the richness of this conversation is that Rebecca is a being who fully embraces the mystery. She defines herself as a mystic, and her calling is to weave the sacred back into everyday life.
As cycle-aware leaders, nurturers and creatives we have a unique opportunity at our fingertips. We have access to an amazing inner technology for managing our inner critic.
(You know… that ever-present and frankly infuriating voice inside that likes to remind you that you’re not good enough, that freezes you into analysis paralysis, and that shames you into playing small.)
In today’s podcast we explore how to restore this inner critic to its natural home in the cycle - the pre-menstruum - and work to put boundaries in place to contain it. Because, when it’s in its rightful place, the inner critic can actually become a creative ally.
Today we’re talking about womb healing and leadership with Tumelo Moreri who is a Spiritual Healer, Womb Medicine Woman and Embodied Leadership Guide based in Botswana. Her work is anchored in her training in leadership and integrative coaching as well as African Spirituality.
It’s a far-reaching conversation, rich in story and sprinkled all throughout with embodied feminine wisdom.
Today we’re picking up an important thread we’ve been weaving through the podcast since the beginning - Queer Menstruality.
I'm back with Red School Leadership Mentor, Abi Denyer-Bewick and this time we're in conversation with the brilliant Lottie Randomly who graduated from the Red School Menstruality Leadership Programme in 2012.
Lottie is a facilitator, educator, activist, writer and mentor with a background in mental health work and resilience building. They’re also a ceremonialist, with a special interest in funerals, and they’re especially drawn to the inner landscapes that people often fear passing through, such as menstruation and menopause as well as death and grief.
In our conversation to day we’re looking to expand the concepts around menstruality to include all people who menstruate - as well as people who don’t - all in the name of belonging, which is at the heart of this work.
- How the practice of menstrual cycle awareness naturally brings up questions and personal exploration around the identities we hold.
- How to expand the conversation around menstruality expands to include the experiences of all people with menstrual cycles, including non-binary and gender-expansive folks.
- “Menstrunormativity” and the harmful impacts around the unsaid assumptions about the menstrual cycle and menopause.
Today we’re talking about menopause and creativity. In Alexandra and Sjanie’s menopause book, Wise Power, they speak about there being an ‘altar’ at the heart of the inner sanctum of menopause, “the point of deepest dark in which you experience the hot breath of your inner critic on the back of your neck, and you turn to fully face it.”
They go on to speak about how this powerful moment forges a new level of authority, a kind of authority that can be incredibly fertile ground for your creative process.
This has been true for my guest Elena Brower. She is prolifically creative; the author of several books, a new volume of poetry, and the creator of yoga programmes, paintings and more, alongside running a successful business.
She’s also passionate about re-writing the cultural menopause story (she recently interviewed Alexandra and Sjanie for an exciting menopause upcoming event - more about that soon…).
- How she’s experiencing a kind of creative re-birth a year and a half after her last period - a new kind of harmony happening, which is allowing her to think and make things that she’s never considered before.
- Why older women believe in themselves more and care less about what others think and how it feels to be catching glimpses of a full acceptance of herself in this phase of life.
- Her current greatest creative challenges, and how she’s navigating them.
What happens when two people go through the spiritual initiation of menopause as a couple? Today we’re exploring the challenges and power of the menopause transition through the lens of intimate relationship, with our guests, anthropologist, facilitator, writer and mother Sophia Style and meditation teacher, pilgrim, and death doula Gemma Polo.
This conversation is a precious gift - Gemma and Sophia are generous and courageous enough to invite us into some of their most intimate moments of challenge, conflict and connection from the past eight years, since they met, fell in love, and built a life together in Spain, co-parenting their children, and more recently navigating the five phases of menopause alongside each other.
What if there is a direct connection between your pleasure and your power? And what if harnessing the magic of inner summer of the menstrual cycle - the ovulation phase - is the key to unleashing a deeply pleasurable, full expression of who you are in the world?
We believe that both of these statements are true, but - as we explore in this podcast - a profound reclamation of the true power of inner summer is necessary, in a world which demands us to be in an endlessly productive summer-mode all of the time.
As a result of all the societal projections created by hustle and beauty culture, the power of summer is much misunderstood, and many people struggle with it. Today we share ideas for how we can free ourselves from the narrow band of experience within which we’re told to operate, so that our unique magnetism and authenticity can be fully inhabited.
What helps you to navigate the tender process of bringing your tender, intimate dreams and visions into reality?
In our episode today - which is the next in our creativity series - we hear from Joni, Jenny and Chloe, three of the people in our community who have shared their current greatest creative challenges. They are all currently negotiating the beginning of their creative process of birthing a new body of work, expressing big ideas through writing, and creating a community event respectively.
Alexandra and Sjanie bring wisdom from The Creative Cycle - the blueprint for creative fulfillment that they have unearthed from their decades of menstrual cycle work to explore challenges like: “I’m good at exploring but not so good at putting pen to paper.”, “I feel frustrated with myself as the ‘always dreaming big but never actually doing anything’ person.” and “The size of the vision is overwhelming and I'm not sure where to start.”
We explore:
to develop 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.
For this podcast, we’ve sought out the ground-breaking pioneers and creatives who are changing the conversation about the menstrual cycle and menopause, and modelling a new way that is cyclical, relational and organic.
We’ll also be joined often by Red School’s founders, and the authors of Wild Power, Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer.
Together we’ll explore how you can unashamedly claim the power of the menstrual cycle to activate your unique form of leadership, for yourself, your community, and the world.
has been in love with her cycle since her inner critic guided her to change country, relationship and career a decade ago. She’s currently channelling her cycle wisdom into the white-knuckle ride of new motherhood.
Sophie is the Communications Director at Red School brings a decade of experience in the field of women’s activism and leadership to her podcast conversations with Alexandra, Sjanie and our incredible guests.
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