Conscious Living with Lucy
Through this podcast I engage in dialogue with spiritual practitioners, therapists, coaches, mental health and wellbeing professionals to support my mission in guiding people to live consciously in relationships with themselves, others and the world.
This podcast provides a platform to share the work of many wonderful souls working in service, offering their work to support people in discovering themselves and supporting them on their spiritual, healing and transformative journey.
Conscious Living with Lucy
Embracing Feminine Wisdom Through Conscious Menstruality: The Femenome® – how understanding the menstrual cycle can support us in living consciously in relationships with ourselves, others and the world.
Join us for a heartfelt celebration of the cyclical nature of the menstrual cycle as a powerful tool for self-awareness, personal growth, transformation and for supporting women to live consciously in relationships with themselves, others and the world.
Discover the transformative power of embracing feminine wisdom with our extraordinary guest, Jane Catherine Severn. A psychotherapist, author, and creator of the Femenome® Jane Catherine shares her journey from disliking her menstrual cycle to uncovering its deep connection with the moon. Her inspiring story sheds light on the elegant and purposeful design of women's cycles, and how understanding these natural rhythms can lead to living more harmoniously and consciously.
Included in the podcast at the start is a mindful exercise, encouraging listeners to reconnect with their inner wisdom and the natural world. Skip this if you wish to dive straight into the podcast.
My conversation with Jane Catherine dives into the complex relationship between female hormonal cycles and cultural attitudes towards menstruation and menopause. We examine the historical suppression of these natural processes and discuss the evolving acceptance in modern society. Jane Catherine passionately advocates for a deeper understanding of female hormones, challenging the predominantly male-oriented societal structure and promoting the integration of feminine energy and wisdom.
The episode culminates in an exploration of the emotional intensity experienced during the menstrual cycle and the importance of acknowledging and integrating these emotions for a balanced life. Jane Catherine emphasises the enriching practice of meditation and the value of community among women.
For more information regarding Jane Catherine Severn's work or to contact her please visit https://www.lunahouse.co.nz/
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Podcast Music created by Vitaliy Dominichenko
Title: Long Road Trip
To hear the full track and others from Vitaliy please visit https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=iuOM-gVaUgQ&list=OLAK5uy_lQQ7YHnzEbywBY3y4SOiPITLFqrXymtJo
Welcome. I'm Lucy, host of Conscious Living with Lucy podcast. In this episode, I speak to Jane Catherine Seven, psychotherapist, author and creator of the Feminine and Wise Woman. Jane Catherine and I discuss her work supporting others, women in particular, which is something I am very passionate about. We hear about Jane Catherine's background and what led her to start the work she does and how her work can support people to live consciously in relationships with themselves, others and the world. I'm so excited and deeply honoured to be speaking to Jane Catherine today.
Speaker 1:I met Jane Catherine through an organization I worked with and, following this feeling so inspired, I contacted Jane Catherine and had a one-to-one session with her, which, I must say, was very profound and beneficial to me in so many ways. I'm truly inspired by Jane Catherine's work and the energy she brings to it and a realm that she connects people to. She is a deeply spiritual and wise lady. So, before we hear from Jane Catherine, I would like to just take a moment to unite us all with a short practice to establish connection to ourselves, others and the world.
Speaker 1:So take a moment, close your eyes and breathe normally, feel your feet connected to the earth and your head connecting to the sky, take three conscious breaths and, as you exhale, feel the breath moving through your connection to the sky, through your head, and as you exhale again back down to the air, place your hands on your heart, breathe and feel gratitude for yourself. Extend this feeling of gratitude to people around you in your life. Breathe and feel gratitude for yourself. Extend this feeling of gratitude to people around you in your life, anyone who comes to mind and imagine from your heart centre that you are connected to everyone tuned into this podcast, including Jane, catherine and the wonderful message that you will receive. And extend that feeling of connection out to the wider world, to nature, all the things you can sense and feel animals, trees, the river, oceans, just anywhere. Just extend that feeling out to nature and draw that wonderful energy from nature into your heart and give thanks.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:So before I hand over to Jane Catherine, I would like to just give you a little bit of info about her. Jane Catherine Seven is a practicing psychotherapist, fascia therapist, writer and menstruality educator in New Zealand. Having realised in her mid-twenties that there is much more to know than we have ever been told about why female hormones behave in the ways they do, jane Catherine embarked on her lifelong mission of offering women a new view of themselves and the intricate, elegant and supremely purposeful design of their monthly and midlife changes. 43 years of studying women's lives from the intimate perspective of her therapy practice, combined with her deep respect for the ways of nature and absolute faith in the integrity of the female design, gave birth to the unique and inspiring body of knowledge she calls conscious menstruality and her original model, the feminine.
Speaker 1:In 2005, jane Catherine created Lunar House as an educational and therapeutic speciality service, and I will include a link to Jane Catherine's website with her bio at the end. So thank you Wonderful to be here. As I said, a deep, deep honor. I'm so grateful and, jane Catherine, love to hear from you now. So maybe we can just begin with hearing a bit about your work, and I have just obviously mentioned what led you to it, but anything you would like to add to expand on that.
Speaker 2:Okay. So it is intriguing, isn't it, how the different threads of a life come together and lead up. We don't know where to as we're going through it, but all the time that one thing is leading to another, we are weaving the thread of our work. So for me, it all began with really disliking my own menstrual cycle a lot. I hated it and I found it embarrassing and unwelcome and no redeeming features, really. Until one particular day I randomly discovered in a book I didn't even want to open, that menstrual cycles match the moon. I'm sure most women know that these days, but I had not ever been given that piece of precious information. And I looked up into the moon that night and, realizing how the moon is different every single night, I thought, oh wow, just like a woman is different every day of her month. So if the moon can get away with that, why can't we? So I realized that every day of the menstrual cycle must be significant and meaningful in its own right. Also, just looking at the moon and feeling that electrifying feeling that women's relationship to the moon, it's not just mythical, it's not just poetical, not just symbolic, it's not just archetypal, it's a real thing. It's a real thing, it's physically real. And to me that meant that if we match the cycles of the moon, if we match something in nature that precisely, we must match many things in nature that precisely.
Speaker 2:So I realized there must be a lot more knowledge to find about why women are made the way they are, why their design is as it is. I was determined to find out some more of that knowledge. I felt as if I'd just found a tiny little corner of something very big. So I set about a mission of looking for the rest of that knowledge and I looked everywhere that you look in search of knowledge. We didn't have the internet in those days, but I looked in books and libraries and consulted medical people and did everything I could think of to find where's the rest of this knowledge, where are the women who know this stuff?
Speaker 2:And couldn't find anything except the usual scary kind of suggestions about what might go wrong and what remedies and medications we'd need to cope with it all. And what remedies and medications we'd need to cope with it all. I was not prepared to accept that women are designed to suffer or that we're the faulty model, so I thought, no, I'm not settling for that. There must be more to it than I've found yet. So I thought oh, I know what I'll do. I'll go and train to be a therapist, because therapy knows the meaning of life. That must be where the knowledge is. Surely I'll learn it there. So I went off to therapy school and learned some very distressing stuff from Freud, a woman poorly adapted to their roles.
Speaker 1:But that is definitely not what I'm looking for. I definitely didn't find it there.
Speaker 2:I did not find it there. So anyway, I did qualify as a therapist and I realised that there's only one place left to look now and that is to put down everything I've ever been told about women and their hormones and how crazy they make us and how sick they make us, how troublesome they are. Put all of that down and just inquire into the thing itself, just observe it, as if I'm learning to read it in its own language. And I had a therapy practice for women, so I had lots of women to observe. I had my own cycle, I had my friends who all got very closely scrutinized, and as I learned to look in that way and to ask the feminine herself to teach me, it was quite amazing what emerged in front of my eyes. I observed all these women it's kind of looking at.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you ever looked into I think they were called magic eye books in the 1990s.
Speaker 2:We look at a pattern and if you look in a particular way, if you believe there's a hidden image in there, there's a hidden image in there and you're inviting yourself to see it it does emerge out of the pattern, an image that was in there all along, but you couldn't see it at first, and it was exactly like that.
Speaker 2:Looking into the design of menstrual cycles, and then we noticed that there were older women as well, presenting with all sorts of hormonal things that seemed really bizarre and weird at first glance. I thought, oh, I wonder if they make sense in some way as well. This design emerged where it all fell into place. Design emerged where it all fell into place why women's women do what they do, what they're trying to create for us, and how they make nature. So that became the basis for me of, I felt my mission was. I was certainly not creating knowledge, but I was discerning knowledge and finding a way to articulate it and wanting to give it back to its rightful owners, which is every woman and girl in the world. So that's what became first, menstruality, and I now call it the Femina.
Speaker 1:Amazing and we are so grateful that you really found a way to tap into this wisdom and feminine wisdom and trusting your own inner wisdom, which is what all of the great teachers and if you look into many spiritual traditions, they often say you know, you can read scriptures and books and and do all these practices and, you know, follow a guru, as it were, for some time. But the real teaching is, is within or it's, or it's there or it's within the body of knowledge. So it's, yeah, I can see why. You know, going down the kind of main, you know Western approach to these things, you know, didn't work in the end and it led you to, you know, a deeply spiritual, to a route into this which is just amazing. And you know, it's very interesting to hear you talk about, um, you know, noting the cycles of the moon, because that's something that happened to me and I kind of had that aha moment when I discovered your work because, also, for many years I've practiced well, I still do Ashtanga yoga and obviously with traditions of Ashtanga we very much rest on the full moon and the new moon. So you start to become, you know, a bit more aware of the kind of cycles of the moon and where it is, and also for the first three days of menstruation, women traditionally would take rest.
Speaker 1:So I used to observe these practices as well and I also started to notice, like the cycles of the moon, and also I seem to go through similar patterns every month. There'll be a time of the month when I felt, oh, I want to move, I want to travel, or I want to sit still, or my energy is really low, I feel creative, or I just need to eat salt, and then nothing else will help. It has to be. You know, I try to find some other things, but it's just not nurturing that kind of inner feeling or whatever it is that's stirring. And I thought, these same patterns, you know, or feeling like, oh, I want to relieve a relationship, but it seemed to happen a similar time and I started to think is this the moon like? Does it have this impact?
Speaker 1:And I I tried to track it and I wasn't as successful as you because I just felt I was very busy at the time lots of other things and trying to make a note every day how's my mood, where's the moon? It became a little bit kind of burdensome, a bit of a chore. So I kind of felt there's something. But I kind of just then said, okay, I can't really understand this, it feels too complex to me. So then when I stumbled across your work, I was like, ah, that's it. So, yeah, amazing, amazing, amazing work and just all of that time it must have taken you as well to really study and and tap into that that energy. And, amazing, you had a practice with women so they could be you know your case studies and help you kind of intuit that knowledge.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, well, I've been deeply immersed in this now for 43 years and you know, I'm still learning it. I'm still discovering more and more and more and more of what it resonates with and what it taps into and what it maps onto and what it's holographic with it's just phenomenal and it's boundraphic with. It's just phenomenal and it's boundless, I think.
Speaker 1:And have you. I mean, I don't know about the women you work with, but just what's coming to mind at the moment as well, so many threads of things you've said and I feel, oh, I could go this way, that way. So much to ask you. So I'm just trying to focus on one thing at a time. But just as you were saying that, I was wondering also have you noticed anything different in different women culturally I don't know about the cultural backgrounds or also in a younger generation? Is anything shifting or has it seemed to stay constant? Or is it just kind of similar throughout women generally, or are there some kind of distinctions, as I say, between cultures or the younger generations? That's coming through there are distinctions.
Speaker 2:Yes, different cultures have different, more or less, resistances to the design of women, held differently, taught differently overt, covert Gosh there's so much in your question and I have noticed differences in the generations, like in my generation I'm 68 now differences in the generations, like in my generation I'm 68 now. So we were raised that you absolutely hide it. You would never dream of letting anyone know where you are in your cycle or that you're menopausal. All of these things were so steeped in shame that you would feel just absolutely mortified if anybody suspected or mentioned and just that really sounds like you know again suppressing female energy and the female spirit, you know.
Speaker 2:Yes, shame is the greatest suppressor, because shame causes us to do the suppressing ourselves, and that's the most effective form of oppression you can ever apply Absolutely. They're pressed to do it to themselves and that was very thoroughly done over thousands of years actually, so that we've all analyzed that very deeply, and while younger people these days are much more open about talking about it it's just becoming mentionable I still feel that that we don't fully even those generations don't fully understand. So campaigns are more tending to be about which is wonderful. They're more tending to be about how to provide equipment and menstrual leave and support women, and we're allowed to say now that women do menstruate and women do go through menopause. There's wonderful inquiries into how we can support it more.
Speaker 2:But I still feel that there's a great acceptance across much of the world that these things shouldn't interfere with normal life, that we should be able to get on with it as if they weren't happening. So there are all sorts of technologies and medications to enable us to live as if these things weren't happening and while I can really understand that approach in many ways, it breaks my heart that there isn't inquiry into but why do these things happen and what would a female way of life, be that would live according to these hormonal events rather than as if they weren't there, and when that comes we will know we've really got feminine.
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely, and also, as you were saying that, I was just thinking about feminine energy and maybe the power in that and the potential, and you know, giving things that suppress that energy.
Speaker 2:indeed, that, because maybe there's that wisdom, actually that consciousness is an even better word. It's a consciousness that is unique and different from the masculine, necessarily, and it's nowhere to be seen because we're all busy, you know, trying to live as if we can join men in their consciousness, from their design of life, and that's a great cost to us absolutely, and often you see where people might support or try to advocate for females to have, you know, similar opportunities.
Speaker 1:It's just again putting it into that male energy. So females also then still working with a male energy not bringing female energy and wisdom, and I wonder about, because it's something we don't really see and we're not able to embrace.
Speaker 2:I wonder what that energy would really look like if we saw a separating and my sense of it is that it's absolutely wired into us through our hormones. I really want to put in a pitch for hormones because they get such a bad rap. Most people you speak to, most women especially well, you'll see a certain expression on their face if you even say the word hormone.
Speaker 1:Yes or it's always the phrase hormone, you know a bit, yes, or it's always the phrase oh yeah, or oh, she's very hormonal at the moment, or yes, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's quite demeaning, it's a bad thing yeah, because our hormone, given that they are designed to make us female, they do disrupt the status quo. Given that they are designed to make us female, they do disrupt the status quo, given that status quo is male. So they've very unfairly got a bad rap. But what I like to point out to women is that the hormones that govern our menarche, menstrual cycles, menopause, mature life sequence, right through life, boa, located in the base of our brain, right in the center here, which of course we know is the third eye chakra, so this is known as the seat of the soul, the chakra of intuitive knowing. This anatomy seems in itself to indicate that those very hormones, that design is soul-guided, is soul guided. It's in our spiritual chakras.
Speaker 2:So what if the hormone and the counterculture ways in which they operate are actually designed to make us female and therefore make us different from what's come to be known as normal? And what if we would get curious about what that unique design actually is, how it's designed to function? How it's designed to function? My studies have shown me that the way those hormones operate, under their own logic and laws, is that, even though we call them symptoms and we medicate them away, they're actually catalysts of consciousness, designed the most cunning and clever way to disrupt the adapted life that we're trying to live and bring other things to our awareness. The design just blows me away. Yeah, how clever it is, how complete it is, how beautiful it is.
Speaker 1:And how powerful. Also, there's just a real power in that, but not the kind of power you would associate with a negative term. There's like a magic, it's a potency, absolutely 's yep, the better term for it. And if we can really create space to unleash that, well, yeah, what's a magical world we might create?
Speaker 2:yeah, it will shut the balance in the way that's so so, so needed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and also you were talking I think I don't want to go down that route in this conversation, necessarily but also some other yoga practices and traditional spiritual practices that help us to balance the female and the male and the pineal gland, and all of those things that you're referring to. And I also like to think of the third eye as another point of consciousness as well.
Speaker 2:So that's where our hormonal sequence is governed. It's where the control towers, or whatever we want to call it. You know, it's quite an important thing to know.
Speaker 1:It's very important to know so there's no question about your work and what you've discovered in my mind or view anyway but just trying to consider this, this approach, and how we can really utilize it in our lives as well. To support first, always, we need to start with ourselves. That has the ripple effect out to others, and then also then how that will help you in your relationships with other people and just being in the world, really, yeah. So just if you could just unpack that a little bit or give a bit more of an example so people can understand that in a more practical sense, yeah, as well such a big subject.
Speaker 2:So, as we all know, for the menstrual cycle, part of the feminine, which is just one part of it, but we go through. Fundamentally, there are four energies of the feminine nature and our cycle takes us through those four. We know that we feel different at different times of the month and one example that holds true for most women seems to be that our emotional lens of experience is amped up at premenstruation. It holds true for most women. None of this is prescriptive, it's just I'm describing what I've observed almost Now. We might ask why on earth would a cycle that's supposed to be about making baby create such an emotional intensity at a particular time of the month? Mum and I believe that we're trained to be very rational and to trust our mind more than our feelings, to sort things out in sensible ways and to take ourselves in hand if we begin to feel too emotional. So in Western cultures, at least in notions, we're not encouraged to trust the beauty. We often think that they are a bit wild or unreliable, and I've heard many women say that they wouldn't trust any decisions they make at the premenstrual time of the month. They make at the premenstrual time of the month, but in the teaching of the feminine or conscious menstruality, say there's an issue in our relationship. And when we're ovulating we might just say, oh, I just want to make love and it's all going to be all right. If I can just not be so demanding, we'll all live happily ever after. Be all right. If I can just not be so demanding, we'll all live happily ever after.
Speaker 2:Then the month ticks on and, uh-oh, we start to feel it really does matter and we really can't stand it. It won't do and maybe we won't even stay in the relationship. It all feels so big and so intense. Then the month ticks along and we come out of that phase and we think, oh, what was wrong with me? It's all gone away now. But actually it's not what was wrong with me. It was that our cycle is asking us to really feel what matters. We know that it does matter. It's much easier to bury it at other times of the month, but when we're premenstrual it's all that buffer zone thinned by our hormones and we really feel things.
Speaker 2:I would just say also that often the intensity of feeling at premenstrual time is a lot of that reaction to the scary sensations of feeling big feeling, a lot of the kind of upsetness and that feeling of everything being out of control. That's not the actual feeling. That's reactivity to the feelings. So it takes a bit of skill to learn how to handle it. But fundamentally, feelings come to the fore at one time of the month so that we can believe ourself about what really matters and what really does need our attention. Move on through the month. We come to our menstrual time.
Speaker 2:Most women feel more inward, more dreamy, more intuitive. We can possibly take a bit more of a spiritual view of the thing, like, oh, how do I feel about it now? What can I see? Matters to me now, and it's a good time to pay attention to our dreams, daydreams at night dreams and to just ponder things quietly, because our cycle will take us around again to a new time of the month where our mind becomes a lot clearer.
Speaker 2:You know that feeling after your period where everything felt muddly and vague and then suddenly it's gone. Now that makes sense. Now I can see what I need to do. It's a lovely time, the pre-organisational time. Then we can see it from that point of view. Well, what's a step I can take? What do I need to say to my partner about this. Now that I'm feeling a bit calmer and a bit clearer, I can put it into work, back into the ovulation time again, where things are more expansive, and so we end up we've got four different perspectives. Now we don't have to choose which one's right and which one's wrong. We put them all into the mandala the mandala of the menstrual cycle and we let them all contribute to our understanding of this issue. Why it matters, what about it matters what needs to happen. So we've kind of got four aspects of ourselves working for us around them.
Speaker 1:So really being aware of that can really help us to live a bit more in harmony with ourselves, to to get to the heart of what it is that really matters to us and also, if possible, with our busy life, to take to know that. Okay, I'm going to now be in this cycle. I need to make sure I create some space in my life so I can tune into this, or, you know, this is a time when I can be near people. This is a time when I can feel brave to have those conversations I've been avoiding. And yeah, and also I I wonder about um with with all of this as well, and I know you say you have the four areas and they can all help you to tap into the overall picture, but also just the present moment, and each moment in itself is probably also it's okay if it then changes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, each one is barely valuable in its own right. I think we are so clever as women. We create a coherent life, even though it's ever-changing, yes. So change ability needs a hyphen in it. It's an amazing ability to maintain that constantly changing rhythmic life in balance. So the clever hormonal design is to ensure that we develop all of our aspects equally. Otherwise the culture would say no, come on, just do mind and body, because they're the ones that we can trust. Don't get into that female intuition or emotionality. We don't trust those ones. So the cycle say oh, yes, we do. We are fully conscious, fully available to ourselves, to each other, to the world, when we have all of ourselves, when we know how to use and respond to the four at once Beautiful.
Speaker 1:And then, naturally, these things, as you say, they just then help us in our relationships with others and the world and also, if we can be quite honest about it and have those open conversations and dialogues, people know where we're at, and that's. You know part of what you're saying about the suppression.
Speaker 2:It's suppressed, so we don't know, and yeah, so yeah really we always at war with ourselves because we're trying to be normal, which means only being a little part of ourselves instead of the whole. I'm not trying to pretend this is easy. I mean it's not for nothing that we're in our menstrual cycle for 30 or 40 years. It takes that long to become a debt in each of the four energies, because then we're going to be asked to graduate at menopause. That means we don't leave anything behind, but we put all those four that we've been practicing separately into the blender and whisk them all up so they all let out and get to us at once. Wonderful. We go through many courses and then there's a new curriculum to learn, yeah, without being feminine.
Speaker 1:I think that might be another conversation because I think there's so much to unpack in there too. So, yes, wonderful. I just want to touch briefly, actually just very briefly. You've also trained as a passion therapist, which also from what I've heard about it, it really helps. The approach helps us to tap into our intuition and emotions. So I just wonder about how the two kind of relate, or how the principles and practices of passion therapy inform the rest of your work really, yes, well, they are very harmonious.
Speaker 2:I was, um, I'd already formulated or discerned the feminine before I came across Parsha therapy and trained in it, and it's helped me so much to have faith in what I had discerned about the feminine, because Parsha therapy is an intuitive therapy. So, rather than seeking to understand by means of theories or intellectual interpretations of how we're made to function, posh therapy guides and assists a person to attune to their inner guidance, as you were giving me about before, the wisdom that's already inside of us, which is expressed through feeling. That's how our soul speaks, in a deeper way than words can. We can learn to listen to ourselves through understanding and knowing how to respond to feeling and how to use the energy of our feelings to take steps when we need to. So it is an intuitive, it's a soul-guided therapy rather than a theory-guided one than a theory-guided one, and it's helped me also to make the feminine into a therapy modality and anxiety.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can see the harmony between those and you bringing that approach through. I know that the feminine is something in its own right, but also I can see how it's complementary to kind of set that within the other framework.
Speaker 2:Part of therapy really helped me to refine and articulate the feelings, part of conscious menstruality, so that's as we were talking about, the premenstrual phase of the cycle and certainly the heightened emotions many women experience through menopause as well. So it really pays to have a way of knowing how to work with very strong feelings rather than be thrown around by them or frightened by them.
Speaker 1:Quite an art? Yeah, absolutely. I'm getting close to that stage, so I definitely need to learn much more about it. So I think I'm probably almost into the perimenopausal phase, thank you. So there's much to learn and embrace. There is. I'd like to hear more about that at some point too. So, also just with passion, therapy also, again a very feminine approach, which, again, traditional therapy is not. It's very patriarchal. So, again, another wonderful practice available to us. You mentioned earlier about your faith in the laws of nature, which I'm totally agreeing with you about that. But, just for our listeners as well, I wonder if you could just expand on that a little bit and how you utilise it really to help people connect with their purpose and to nature, which, of course, we're taking a non-dualistic view, which is one I have, you know, we're not separate from nature, we are part of it. Yeah, so I guess also, yeah, how you utilize your connection to it and how you can help other people.
Speaker 2:Gosh, it's been so significant to me. I did grow up in a church, but as I reached my 20th, religion wasn't for me, and in my cathedral is nature for sure, because I see, I love that expression.
Speaker 1:Sorry, I haven't actually heard that. That's great.
Speaker 2:We'll use that as well, so often nature just stops me in my tracks. I've spent a lot of time in the mountains, and here in New Zealand we have wonderful, exquisite mountain scenery, and you know, if you just wonder what is light or what is water, or what is birdsong or what is fragrance, I've run out of words. These things, I feel, are just the manifestation of the divine All around us Colour, wind, everything. When you stop and just experience it for what it is, how could you not be ecstatic? And so, if we want to understand how life works, life knows how to do life, and I think that we humans have made a drastic mistake, or some of the cultures of humanity have made a drastic mistake, so that, for example, with us women, when the things we experience hormonally seem to give us physical or emotional discomfort or not fit in the way culture has set things up, we think, okay, this is not good. How can we fix this up? How can we make it go away, so that that person can be normal again? We don't ask what is this life form doing out of its own wisdom? What would its purpose be for being like this, remain ignorant of how we're designed to actually function optimally, which is a whole lot more fulsome than how we are so far in our own country. So nature will always show us how life is designed to work, and nature is always twofold.
Speaker 2:Nature, life is a pulsation. It's not a straight line, it's always a pulsation. Everything pulses light and dark, summer and winter, four elements, four phases of plant cycles. Everything opens and closes all of our bodily system, planets, orbits. It's like the fractal. The holograph of life is on our menstrual cycle, within our whole life cycle. Both are in the same shape, which teaches us that our energy too will expand and contract. It's not a disaster when it contracts, it's a turning inward, because all of nature knows we need to pause, otherwise life can't be sustained. So just everything being holographic is, in a way, it's all the information we need to know, because it will make sense of everything.
Speaker 1:Exactly, exactly, beautiful. And yeah, just paying attention to your menstrual cycle, you are really tuning in to the laws of nature and the wisdom of nature and the kind of microcosm level which really is a way of people to connect to it.
Speaker 2:Yes, to trust the movement of things and not resist it. All the distress we have comes from resistance within the system. We know from the way electricity works that resistance slows energy down. That's what happens when we culturally resist what our energy is trying to do. We just create difficulty for ourselves. Definitely it's not our fault. We're absolutely compelled to do it but it's not helpful.
Speaker 1:It's not helpful at all. And yeah, I'm also with you about just the awe and wonder in nature. And the other day I was just outside a building and I was observing a I don't know. It just caught my attention a bee flew into a flower, pollinating a flower, and I just stopped and I was like, oh, nature is just so amazing and the process that helps to produce our food and you know, we're all part of it, we all have our place, we all all these wonderful energies and these things that just happen. But I really just yeah, I always get caught in little moments like this things just happen. Or hear some bird song or see something or a certain tree and I look at it and I'm like, wow.
Speaker 2:So yes, we have to ask what are we really made of and how are we really made to function optimally? Yeah, and science can give us, can tell us how systems function mechanically. But what activates the?
Speaker 1:system and we need to really move out of this having mode and just being, being being observing, um, not just having and putting our impressions on things. And yeah, so you probably touched on it in a lot of what you've just said. But just to really kind of hone in on that a little bit more, I mean to me you're clearly a deeply spiritual person. What does being spiritual mean to you and what practices do you engage in? I mean, I heard some of that in what you just spoke about. You said you go to the mountains, you see nature, you know.
Speaker 2:But just if there's anything else you'd like to add, Spirituality is such a hard thing to define in words, isn't?
Speaker 1:it.
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely. Where would you even begin to define in words, isn't it? Yes, absolutely, where would you even begin? But yes, those things you know, just the ecstatic form of trees or plants. They're always like that. Why can you not be ecstatic when you're outside? So as well as that for me, or they go together.
Speaker 2:Meditation is an essential to just connect with the flow of divinity and love through the world, through us, through our relationships, with everything you know. You see light streaming down and you see green leaves catching it and turning it into food for us. If we all light-fed, to me light and love would be absolutely one and the same thing. So meditation, outside often, or inside, all different forms of it I don't have a discipline or practice to do it out of sheer love of it. It nourishes me, it brings insight to me. A lot of what has now become the feminine it's come to me in meditation or in dreams or sleep in state, or by observing nature, I think there's so much more for us to receive and enjoy on this planet we should even mention Absolutely and we can't even see it all, can we?
Speaker 1:There's probably much more that's there that we just are unable to tap into. Yeah, yeah, wonderful, thank you. Unable to tap into. So, yeah, yeah, wonderful, thank you. So there's so much here, so much richness in this conversation and your experience and so many things I could ask you and so many threads. You mentioned three at the start. I can think of hundreds weaving all of these threads together, um, and probably a future conversation. So, yeah, so just really to um, as we're kind of drawing to a kind of close with our conversation, I would just like to ask you if someone wanted to sign up for one of your sessions, a feminine session, for example, what could they expect? How do you approach it? Or you know people it's not accessible, for whatever reason, to sign up to actually have a one-to-one session or a training or something. If they were to purchase your book, are there tools they could use from the book to support them? Lots of questions in one.
Speaker 2:I have a tendency to do that sorry, just respond to whatever feels yes, because that is important, because the sessions and the workshops and courses and the book, they're all quite different in their functions. So thank you for that. Let's start. And the book they're all quite different in their functions. So thank you for that. Let's start with the book. So the book was the smallest nutshell I could make.
Speaker 2:The book that's already published, the World Within Women, that's just the menstrual cycle's part of the knowledge. There'll be other books for the other life stages, the knowledge. There'll be other books for the other life stages, but the book will give readers an overall sense of the knowledge about female design in a generic kind of way. It's absolutely packed full of exercises and reflection and meditations so that you can apply the knowledge to your particular self, your cycle, your experiences. And those exercises and the information in the book are designed so that a woman can just go through it herself at her own pace, at her own time, in her own way. Or it could be a great fun thing for a woman's group to do the exercises together, and that's a particularly lovely way to learn the knowledge, because then the women support each other in how you all, and similarly but uniquely, will apply it to your own cycles, because every woman is different and every cycle is different. So none of it's kind of standard, but I hope that the exercise in the book make it applicable to people's individual experiences.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we are obviously much more disconnected these days as well. So I imagine lots of women will find that they will have to kind of process it on their own. And, as you were saying, all of that, I had the vision of kind of just imagining women when we lived more in community and in connection with the land and just exploring this together, always, naturally.
Speaker 2:But to now have something as a guide for when we are, you know, on our own is great, but also, yeah, if women can come together, amazing too I think so when I was writing some of the exercise like I could just feel how they could be used by groups in a really rich and really supportive way.
Speaker 2:So I hope that will be happening. And so Feminine Therapy is actually a therapy. So it's different from the teaching. It's a different kind of way of using the knowledge, and people can have consultations either if they're having an experience in their cycle or in their menopause that they want help with. They want support with. It can be used in that way. Or Feminine Therapy can be helpful for any issue that someone might want therapy on, and it means that I'm looking through the lens of well, where's this woman in her hormonal life and how might that be affecting this issue or how might aspects of that support her with this issue. So feminine therapy or consultations can be used in any way at all, just as with any therapy, but knowing that you will get that specific feminine perspective Wonderful.
Speaker 1:Very exciting, very exciting, very rich and very powerful, but in a gentle way.
Speaker 2:I've had some extraordinary experiences working with women in this way, where their cycle or their menopause has created growth and development and freedom for them in ways that are quite mind-blowing. So I'm really excited for the future for women. We can have this, yes and getting we're getting a piece that's particularly catering for us?
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely. And if we can spread the word about this as much as possible and get women together, practicing through the book or, you know, attending sessions and being able to offer it to others, yeah, yeah, be truly transformational and what we need, so, yes, so I'm just very conscious of time and I could talk to you all, day and night and all week. So I think, yeah, I just yeah. I think we should probably begin to draw our conversation to a close on this occasion, not forever, just in this moment. So, yeah, I really hope that our listeners have enjoyed hearing from you today. I have immensely. I've learned even more, I'm inspired even more. I'm inspired even more.
Speaker 1:I definitely want to do more with this and, if anyone is interested, you offer professional development, training in your therapy modality, feminine therapy and your psycho-spiritual perspective of your courses and workshops offers a genuine and empowering alternative to our accustomed medical approach. So I hope lots of people do make contact with you to explore ways they can connect with this practice and work. And if people are interested in your book the first one, the World Within Women, the Feminine Guide to your Mental Cycle it's available through your website, the shop on your website, which is wwwlunahouseconz. And your second book is on its way. Hopefully it will be with us soon. And your second book is on its way. Hopefully it will be with us soon. Hopefully in time for my menopause.
Speaker 2:Anyway, I'll give it, Hopefully by before the end of this year. The second book.
Speaker 1:Great and, as I say, it's been truly amazing talking to you. I'm so grateful for your time, your knowledge and your wisdom. You, I'm so grateful for your, your time, your knowledge and your wisdom. And, yeah, before we end, I would just like to ask you all to reconnect back to the energy we opened with, so just closing your eyes, feeling from within yourself expansion out to the world around you, to nature, the trees, the birds, the sky, flowers, anything in nature you sense and feel, and bring your attention back into your relationships with other people, all the energy you draw it back in into yourself To others in this session, including the conversation we've just had, and just take an inhale and exhale back through down to the earth.
Speaker 1:Thank you. So, jane Catherine I don't know if you have any words you'd like to close with or any other practice you would like us to do before we go Anything you would like to say?
Speaker 2:I'm sure you've heard enough from me, but I would just like to say to listeners you're carrying such a treasure, you carry the whole universe inside you. Trust it, trust yourself.
Speaker 1:Beautiful. Thank you so much Thank you, Lucy, for your interest. Thank you. Thank you, lucy, for your interest. Thank you.