The Menstruality Podcast
How can menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause enhance your health, creativity and leadership? That's the question we'll explore together in the Menstruality Podcast, brought to you by Red School, where we’re training the menstruality leaders of the future. Your host, Sophie Jane Hardy will be joined often by Red School’s founders, Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer, as well as pioneering thought leaders, troublemakers and culture-shifters to discover how you can unashamedly claim the power of the menstrual cycle to activate your unique form of leadership; for yourself, your community, and the world.
196. How to Connect to the Cyclical Wisdom of Your Dreams (Toko-Pa Turner)
When Toko-pa Turner first started to experience signs of perimenopause, she was simultaneously diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called rheumatoid arthritis, and the combination led to severe insomnia. Sleep deprivation is challenging for all of us, but in Toko-pa’s case it was especially disorientating because for over twenty-five years she has been working with dreams in a mythopoetic way to answer life’s deep soul questions.
Sometimes called a Midwife of the Psyche, Toko-pa is the author of The Dreaming Way, and her work focuses on belonging, restoring the feminine, reconciling paradox, elev...
195. Part Two: How Cycle Awareness Helps you to Manage your Energy (Q+A w/ Alexandra & Sjanie)
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 ev...
194: How Menstrual Cycle Awareness Helps you to Manage your Energy (Alexandra & Sjanie)
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 phas...
193. Cultivating Resilience and Preventing Burnout in Perimenopause (Jolinda Johnson)
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 Bu...
192. Part Two: Beginner’s Guide to Menstrual Cycle Awareness (Q&A with Alexandra & Sjanie)
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...
191. How to Retire Superwoman and Honour Your Needs in Perimenopause (Dr Joanna Martin)
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 arche...
190. A Beginner’s Guide to Menstrual Cycle Awareness (Alexandra & Sjanie)
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 fundamenta...
189. The Wisdom of Indigenous Andean Moontime Practices & Woman Medicine (Dr Cynthia Ingar)
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 nig...
188. The Womb as a Portal to Personal, Collective and Ancestral Trauma Healing (Dr Jeevan Singh)
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 colle...
187. How Inner Spring Evolves our Leadership Skills - Replay (Alexandra & Sjanie)
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 y...
