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 explore:

• How to do a ‘movement’ cycle check-in to get an honest, unfiltered information, directly from your body about how your energy levels are on any given day (without your mind getting involved telling you all the things you should be feeling and doing).
  
  
• The core truth when it comes to managing your energy with cycle awareness: the way you bleed sets the tone for your whole cycle, and some tips for claiming menstrual rest (even in a world that is not at all interested in you claiming this).
  
  
• How slowing down is the secret to accessing the power of the premenstrual phase of the cycle, especially when we’re feeling exhausted and vulnerable. 

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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

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, faster. We feel better, we’re more creative, more powerful and we model the much-needed art of sustainable living. 

We explore:

• What Sjanie learned about sustainable, cyclical living from a fierce lioness she encountered in a dream.
  
  
• The creative power that opens up within us when we dare (and are able) to step out of hustle mode, stop producing and surrender into non-doing at menstruation. 
  
  
• Alexandra’s personal story of discovering the power of stopping, through years of intense menstrual pain, which she was eventually able to heal through the power of rest and listening to her body. 

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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

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.

We explore:

• Jolinda’s definition of burnout, which is chronic stress without recovery, is characterised by exhaustion, cynicism, and decreased capacity for your life roles. 
  
  
• What menstrual cycles changes, as well as other health symptoms can show us about our current levels of burnout. 
  
  
• Why we need to set better boundaries with ourselves, and how to do it. 

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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Jolinda Johnson: @coachjolinda - https://www.instagram.com/coachjolinda

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. 

We explore:

• The ‘crossover days’ - the shift from one inner season (menstrual cycle phase) to another and how to track and manage the disturbance that can arise, particularly between inner summer (ovulation) and inner autumn (the premenstruum).
  
  
• How to practice menstrual cycle awareness when you have menstrual health challenges like irregular cycles, period pain, endometriosis, PCOS, PMS or PMDD, infertility challenges or other issues, and how your cycle awareness practice can be integral to your healing journey.
  
  
• What it can look like to share your menstrual cycle awareness practice with your partner, family, friends and even your work colleagues. 

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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

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.

We explore:

• The origins of the superwoman myth, and why it drives some of us to embody anti-superwoman, which means we don’t activate our impact potential.
  
  
• Why we can only burn out if we’re not in our body and Jo’s practical approach to get your needs met - the 'Needs Creed'.
  
  
• Jo’s personal Quickening story of meeting her increased need for sleep and alone time, and navigating big emotions as she journeys into perimenopause. 

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Join our free online course - Love Your Cycle: Discover the power of menstrual cycle awareness to revolutionise your life here: www.redschool.net/love

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Joanna Martin: @drjoannamartin - https://www.instagram.com/drjoannamartin
One of Many: @oneofmanywomen https://www.instagram.com/oneofmanywomen

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. 

We explore:

• Some frequently asked questions, including the difference between fertility awareness and menstrual cycle awareness, how to listen to your body if you’re more used to paying attention to your mind, and how to respond to what you discover in your cycle check-ins.
  
  
• A demonstration of how to actually do a daily cycle check-in, including listening for your physical sensations, your emotions, and your thoughts. And for those who are postmenopausal (or don’t have a menstrual cycle for another reason), Alexandra shares how she works with the moon in her lunar cycle check-in.
  
  
• Other cyclical elements you might want to pay attention to, including your dreams, your habits, your sexual energy and even the arguments you tend to always have at certain times of the cycle month. 

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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

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.

We explore:

• How we travel to the ‘Ukupacha’ when we bleed, which is the realm related to the Feminine, where we perceive life differently, experience altered states of consciousness, and receive insights and wisdom.
  
  
• How Cynthia works with the ancestral Andean practice of praying with her menstrual blood, as an offering to Pachamama, to mother earth.
  
  
• What she has learned from grandmother mentors about how they worked with the ancient menstrual practices to give them inspiration and guidance in their work as the keepers of ceremony and the rituals of life for the community.  

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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Dr Cynthia Ingar: @hampiwarmi - https://www.instagram.com/hampiwarmi

Befriending our menstrual cycles and wombs and coming home to the root of our body, and to our pelvic bowls often means negotiating any trauma that we’ve experienced in that part of our bodies, or other traumas that we hold in this part of our bodies. As our guest today, the brilliant Dr Jeevan Singh shares, the pelvic bowl is an organ of relationship that has the capacity to guide our personal and collective. 

Jeevan’s locates itself at the intersections of mindfulness-based somatics and mental health, traditional earth-based medicines, personal and collective liberation and the pelvic bowl. She is a lifelong student of traditional East Asian medicine, has a masters in integrative mental health and an advanced training in the Hakomi method of mindfulness-based somatic psychotherapy. She founded Womb School and the Somatic Womb Path together with Kris Gonzalez (who was a guest on our podcast on episode 175) and Marissa Coreia. 

In times that can feel very destabilising, Jeevan brings a deeply grounding presence, and I hope this conversation soothes you as much as it did me.

We explore:

• How Jeevan navigated a series of three traumatic experiences after her Saturn return in her late 20s, and how the the trauma healing that followed catapulted her into her body.
  
  
• The womb as a guide out of the rugged individualism we see in our world. It is an organ of relationship - the first relationship we all ever experienced was in the womb of the mother, the person who birthed us.
  
  
• The earth as an attachment figure, and how we can work with trees and other bodies in nature as a partner in nervous system regulation and how we can co-regulate with the ocean as we co-regulated with the salty waters of the womb in utero. 

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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Jeevan Singh: @dr.jeevansingh - https://www.instagram.com/dr.jeevansingh
Womb School: @womb.school - https://www.instagram.com/womb.school

Spring is just beginning here where Alexandra, Sjanie and I are in the UK, and due to popular demand, this time two years ago we rode off the springtime momentum to create a couple of podcast episodes all about the inner spring - the preovulatory phase of the cycle.

Many of you have been sharing questions about this pre-ovulatory phase of the cycle (which correlates to the waxing moon phase if you’re lunar tracking), so we thought we’d share this episode as a replay today. 

This one is especially for you if you find it challenging to plug back into the world after your bleed, if you can tend to feel overwhelmed and stretched in this cycle phase, or you start to lose touch with yourself as you feel the rising energy of inner spring.

We explore:

• What are the gifts of the inner spring for our leadership? What is needed to access the power of the inner spring? 
  
  
• Leadership calls for us to stretch, and often to be more vulnerable and public - how we can hold ourselves in this stretch through the dark art of pacing and trust our own timing
  
  
• How inner spring can help us to meet the urgency of the world and bring us back to our medicine and our unique way of contributing to the world

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Join our free online course, Love Your Cycle discover the power of menstrual cycle awareness to revolutionise your life - www.redschool/net/love

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

Today we’re exploring the immense capacities that open up to us as we move through menopause, and it’s a special episode as Alexandra, the co-founder of Red School is your host, and it’s our next Wise Power series conversation...

The Wise Power series began with our Wise Power retreat when S+A’s book Wise Power was published and Alexandra is continuing to have sporadic conversations about what menopause awakens and reveals within us all.  

Today her guest is Prune Harris, an energy expert, a consciousness educator, and soul activist, who has trained with healers, elders, and wisdom holders throughout the world. 

Prune shares her personal experience of navigating the great threshold of menopause, and how it can collectively awaken a new, immense capacity to reclaim our deep worth as human beings, beyond concepts of gender and status, but as a lifeforce that is part of the great web of life. 

We explore:

• The different cycles that Prune is tracking now post-menopause, and how our life force moves into different expressions of wisdom once we’re no longer being held in monthly cycles.
  
  
• Menopause as an identity death process which brings us face to face with our inner soothsayer, to hear deep truths about ourselves, our relationships and the world, so we can choose the new identities we want to embody in our third act. 
  
  
• How menopause is helping to meet the modern day crisis of separation and call us home to our essential place of belonging, so we can radiate it into our lives and into the world. 

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Order our menopause book - Wise Power: Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause to Awaken Authority, Purpose and Belonging here: https://www.wisepowerbook.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Prune Harris: @pruneharris - https://www.instagram.com/pruneharris

In our 40s, many of us begin to experience a variety of health symptoms and challenges, as well as emotional and psychological shifts. Some call this perimenopause. At Red School, Alexandra and Sjanie call it, The Quickening…  

So for today’s podcast episode - we’re re-sharing a conversation from a couple of years ago - one of the most listened to and shared episodes ever on the podcast. It was the fourth in our menopause summer series when we were launching S+A’s Wise Power book and it’s called perimenopause - what’s going on?!

We look at how this life phase in the run up to our menopause process is slowly awakening new levels of power within us, and how to navigate all this can bring up for us, and beautifully, Sjanie shares generously about how she is negotiating this transition personally. 

We explore:

• How we receive a report card on the state of our health in our 40s, which is inviting us to up our self care and set ourselves up for a healthy post-menopause life.
  
  
• Why the power that is awakening in us in the Quickening requires deeper responsibility as well as deeper self care.
   
• How to handle your new, increased critical capacites (cynicism, discernment, judgement) wisely and cleanly, rather than use it to annihilate and destroy!

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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

As many of you will know, Uma Dinsmore Tuli has been a powerful force for good in many fields for decades, including Yoga, Menstruality, and women’s health. She describes herself as a writer, an educator, a Hyperactive Yoginī, a mother of three and a devotee to the Dark Mother.

Today we chat about the cycles that guide Uma’s life, from the planets, to the moon, to her early relationship with her cycle and how it led her to develop Womb Yoga and write the best known of her six books, Yoni Shakti, a feminist retelling of yoga. All the way to Uma’s menopause process, which happened during the crucible of Covid and being silenced due to a legal battle, and the unstoppable flow of creativity power it awakened within her. 

The golden thread we track throughout the conversation is how we can experience our blood, our orgasms, our pregnancy and pregnancy losses, our lactation, and our menopause as extraordinary portals to power, but only if we’re conscious of them, and if we respect them.

We explore:

• What happened when Uma showed up to her yoga sessions, as a new mother, with a postpartum body, how the practices - as they were being taught - didn’t meet the needs of her bleeding, lactating and how this inspired her to write the book that she needed: Yoni Shakti.
  
  
• The healing power of circling as women as a radical act of resistance to patriarchal and colonial oppression, and as a pathway to recultivating our trust in each other.
  
  
• Why we need to decolonise our sleep - as a way to recover our menstrual and menopause health - which is one of the reasons why Uma wrote her new book, Nidra Shakti: the Power of Rest - an illustrated, decolonial encyclopedia of Yoga Nidra. 

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Receive Red School's free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Uma Dinsmore Tuli: @umadinsmoretuli - https://www.instagram.com/umadinsmoretuli

Many of us feel more intuitive and connected to the mystical and the magical in the second half of the menstrual cycle and today I’m directly exploring the connection between menstrual cycle awareness, witchcraft and psychic capacities.

Our guest is Mimi Young, a Taiwanese-Canadian, Daoist, animist, spirit worker and medium, who serves her community through ancient Chinese esoteric practices, dream interpretations, unconventional tea ceremonies, and occult education with her witches coven community. 

Mimi first experienced her intuitive and psychic gifts as a child, but they went underground until five months of bed rest while pregnant with her second child. And together we share a very unfiltered, raw and wild conversation about how Mimi works with the different skills and capacities that awaken in the four phases of the menstrual cycle in her divination and spellwork.

We explore:

• Why you can’t work with spellcraft or psychic gifts without being fully present and connected with your body, and how menstrual cycle awareness supports this.
  
  
• How to work more consciously with the premenstrual phase of the cycle as a gateway to your intuitive, psychic, magical and shadow work capacities.
  
  
• Mimi’s animist approach to building a relationship to your menstrual blood as a conscious, alive, intelligence, and some ideas for working with our blood in magical ways. 

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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Mimi Young: @shopceremonie - https://www.instagram.com/shopceremonie

You can explore Mimi's work on her website here: https://shopceremonie.com/

When our guest today, Sarah Jenks was in her 20s, striving to get it all right, and be a good girl, she quickly found herself feeling exhausted, empty and struggling with emotional eating. One day, she stumbled upon sacred feminine ceremony and her life changed.

She was inspired to dig into the history of sacred feminine ceremony, where she discovered how it has been branded by the oppressive patriarchy as evil and untrustworthy, and she connected the dots with the way many modern women don’t trust our own magic, and are actually afraid of ourselves and our truth.  

Today, she shares the story of how she made it her mission to devote her life to get women into sacred feminine ceremony and weave the sacred feminine back into their everyday life.

She now leads a community of over 100,000 women as an ordained priestess, and we explore how Sarah connect with the cyclical intelligence of her menstrual cycle to guide her life, relationships and work. As she shares in our playful, joyful, enriching conversation today; “my menstrual cycle helps me to track my process of becoming more and more myself.”

We explore:

• Why Sarah doesn’t organise her life around her cycle, but rather gives herself radical permission to show up exactly how she is on every cycle day.
  
  
• How she sources energy differently in her inner seasons; from her body in the follicular phase, from her sensuality when she’s ovulating, from her wild, critical energy in her luteal phase, and from the earth and the deep feminine, in her bleed.
  
  
• What Sarah has learned from her study of ancient sacred feminine practices from many different traditions, with the moon and the menstrual cycle. 

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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Sarah Jenks: @sarahjenks - https://www.instagram.com/sarahjenks

We live in a world where we so often feel that we need to live like men, work like men, and push ourselves like men in order to be valued. When the truth is that we are more-or-less twenty eight different women each month, and there is immense power and magic in this innate ebb and flow.

As our guest today, Usha Anandi, the Founder of Womben Wellness says that women and people with cycles have four personalities every month, and each one has distinct spiritual gifts. Today we walk through the four inner seasons of the menstrual cycle, exploring the spiritual powers that become available to us as we move through the cycle month. 

Usha who is also known as Erin Foley, is a devoted Mother, holistic nutritionist, childbirth educator, full-spectrum doula, and herbalist committed to changing the status quo by alchemizing modern scientific information with ancient, energetic practices to serve the whole woman.

We explore:

• How Usha didn’t plan to work in this field, but her menstrual pain continually led her to her Calling to heal herself, and guide others to do the same.
  
  
• The importance of avoiding the capitalist, patriarchal traps of pushing ourselves in inner spring and summer by ‘bio-hacking’ our bodies to get the most out of them, and instead embrace our natural pre-ovulatory playfulness, and our innate ovulatory capacity to be at the centre of our family and community lives.
  
  
• How connecting to our inner autumn truth-speaking powers can school us in expressing our calling and taking a stand for what we most love. 

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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Womben Wellness: @wombenwellness - https://www.instagram.com/wombenwellness

Happy New Year! Today we’re back with our first live episode of 2025, and we’re trying out something new and fun - we hope you love it: a ‘power card’ reading for the year to come. 

Our theme for today is how menstrual cycle awareness can help us all to tap into our visions and dreams for the coming year, and how the daily practice of checking in with our cycle can help us to make them real. So we start by unpacking how the menstrual cycle - and especially menstruation - can help us tune into our deepest longings and dreams, and then how each inner season has different powers that help bring our dreams into reality.

And in the second half, Alexandra and Sjanie choose three different cards to offer you a menstrual power ally on your quest to apply your cyclical intelligence in 2025.

We explore:

• How our cycle can support us through the evolutionary process of bringing dreams to life. Our visions are big and they invite us to grow up and stretch into the new capacities we need to fulfill them - and our cycles can be our allies on this growth path
  
  
• How the menstrual cycle can be your ‘oracle’ - an invitation to commune with the deepest and wisest part of ourselves.
  
  
• Three different powers from inner autumn, inner summer and inner spring, to inspire and support you to bring your dreams to life this year, in a cycle-aware way. 

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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

As we enter 2025, we explore what menstrual cycle awareness can teach us about how to begin things well. This is an episode we recorded a couple of years ago, when we were each navigating a bumpy beginning to the year, and we used this as a lens to explore how the deep intelligence within the cycle is guides us through life’s highs and lows.

Whether you’re wanting to start the year with intention and a clear vision, you’re in the midst of a new beginning such as a new job, a new relationship or creative project or you’d like to learn how to work with your cycle as an ally for all the beginnings of your life, this episode has both deep insight and practical advice.

We explore:

• The implicate, deep intelligence at work in the cycle, and how it lays an the archetypal blueprint for all beginnings.
  
  
• How each of the five chambers of menstruation prepares us to start new things.
  
  
• Practical ways to look after yourself if you - like us - find beginnings challenging!

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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

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!

We explore:

• How conscious endings make all of life feel sacred.
  
  
• The surprising gifts of the premenstruum when it comes to endings - how this phase of the cycle prepares and tenderises us to feel deeply and acknowledge what we love and treasure. 
  
  
• The deep wisdom that lives in the ending of the menstrual cycling years - the death-and-rebirth of menopause - and how we can all weave it into our lives. 

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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

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.

In this episode, we explore:

• How we understand the term Feminine leadership, and how the menstrual cycle leads us to it. 
  
  
• The specific leadership powers that awaken at menstruation, including clarity about our purpose, an embodied experience of love and belonging, as well as expanded state of consciousness.
  
  
• A key next step for you, if you want to activate more of the power of menstruation in your life. 

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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

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. 

We explore:

• Alexandra’s passionate desire for each of us to make the most of every single bleed we have as a mini sabbatical where we have an opportunity to enter altered states of consciousness - and the sobering truth that we only each get on average 451 cycles in our lifetimes!
  
  
• Why we must be disruptive and carve out time for real rest, because relentless productivity is addictive, it’s celebrated and to our egos it’s much safer to stay the same and keep trucking along.
  
  
• How Sjanie feels as she plans for her menopause sabbatical, and the challenge of having no idea what she and her Calling will look and feel like on the other side. 

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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

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, 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. 

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. 

We explore:

• The “Three Golden Opportunities” for those of us with menstrual cycles (menstruation, postpartum and perimenopause) and why it’s so important to take care of ourselves during each one.
  
  
• How the metal of perimenopause gives us a metaphorical sword to cut away the overgrowth of the earthy years of our 30s, so we can see a clear picture of what truly matters to us, and where we want to use our energy. 
  
  
• The importance if replenishing your ‘jing’ essence, what happens to our jing in perimenopause, and why we all need to live a ‘jing-centred life’, especially in our 40s by resting when we bleed, nourishing ourselves well during ovulation and protecting our boundaries in the inner autumn. 

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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:

Red School: @red.school - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Kris Gonzalez: @thewayofyin - https://www.instagram.com/thewayofyin

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?)

We explore: 

• How Alexandra and Sjanie got started with this work, and went on to co-create their menstruality body of knowledge. 
  
  
• A potent vision for what a truly cycle aware world could look like, and all the different ways that cycle awareness can enhance different professions and life roles.
  
  
• The impact of a world that honours the cycle and menopause for ourselves, our communities, and our planet. 

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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

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. 

We explore:

• How working with the playful curiosity that comes naturally in inner spring has helped Tamsin to reclaim the lost, innocent play and exploration of her childhood.
  
  
• How cycle awareness can help to prevent violence, help women who are experiencing abuse, and support survivors to recover and heal their trauma.
  
  
• What all space-holders and  facilitators need to know about violence against women and girls, and how to create safety and belonging for a woman if she discloses violence or abuse.

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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

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.

We explore:

• How to follow the intuition instructions that your cycle is giving you. We need to pace the contracting energy in the premenstrual phase, and allow ourselves to adjust, slow down and allow a greater sensitivity to happen.
  
  
• The intuitive knowing that Alexandra and Sjanie received at their Big Bleed this year, and how it has totally changed the trajectory of Red School, bringing Menstruality to thousands of new people.
  
  
• The menstruality leadership skills which help us to hone our intuition, including intentionality and interoception, which are a key part of the curriculum on the Menstruality Leadership Programme. 

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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love

---

The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

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.  

We explore:

• How the ‘fork in the road’ of perimenopause is helping Amy to change deep patterns, including shifting her old go-to approach of “give me the pill, I’ve got sh*t to do”.
  
  
• Perimenopause as a kind of ‘pregnancy’ which prepares us for the rebirth of ourselves through the spiritual initiation of menopause.
  
  
• How to manage perimenopause symptoms  including exhaustion, irritability and anger, brain fog and the often overwhelming ‘motherload’ of care and responsibility, and still show up for our kids.

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Find out more about the Red School Menstruality Leadership programme: www.menstrualityleadership.com

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net

---

Social media:

Red School: @red.school - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Amy Taylor Kabbaz: @amytaylorkabbaz - https://www.instagram.com/amytaylorkabbaz