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.
243. The Menstrual Cycle, Midlife and Metabolic Health (Lara Briden)
Today we’re welcoming back our most popular guest on the Menstruality podcast, naturopathic doctor, Lara Briden, who has previously offered holistic health guidance for menstrual, perimenopause and menopause health challenges which has helped thousands of our listeners. Today we’re geeking out about a vitally important, but often misunderstood aspect of our physical and mental health.
As Lara describes, we’re experiencing a global crisis in metabolic health on the planet today, with over 40% of people in many countries living with insulin resistance, which has serious health implications throughout the body. In our co...
242. Your Womb is a Temple: African Matrilineal Womb Wisdom (Chanana McGarry)
Today we’re continuing our journey into traditional and indigenous womb wisdom, by exploring African earth-based teachings about the womb as a temple. Our guest and guide is Chanana McGarry, who is a Medicine Woman as well as a certified Fertility Awareness & Sexual Health Educator. She’s been exploring how to bridge ancient wisdom and modern science for two decades, helping people to navigate their sexual health with clarity, sovereignty, and reverence for their body’s innate wisdom and power.
Chanana is a direct descendant of South African Mujaji Rain Queens, and her ground...
241. Cyclical Sex Through Your Inner Seasons and Life Cycles (Carly Mountain)
Just like our physical, emotional and mental energy, our erotic energy also ebbs and flows through the menstrual cycle month. Today we’ve invited the brilliant psychotherapist and somatic sex therapist Carly Mountain back to the podcast to explore the connection between the womb and our erotic cycles. Today Carly guides us on a journey through the inner seasons of the menstrual cycle to explore the erotic challenges and gifts of each phase.
Carly has recently released a new book called Untamed Pleasure, which is a treasure trove for anyone wanting to experience mor...
240. Sex, Intimacy, and Listening to our Cyclical Bodies (Ita O'Brien)
Today we’re having a fascinating conversation with the woman who pioneered the role of intimacy co-ordinator in TV, film, opera and theatre. Ita O’Brien has worked on numerous high-profile productions including Sex Education on Netflix, and I May Destroy You on the BBC, and is the founder of the Intimacy on Set guidelines which have been widely adopted across the industry, advocating for safe, fair and dignified work.
Ita recently took all of her learnings and experience, and she’s shared them in her brilliant book, Intimacy: A field guide to findin...
239. How to Manage Overwhelm, Intensity and Disconnection in Your Inner Summer (Alexandra & Sjanie)
Although the inner summer of the menstrual cycle has a reputation for being easy-breezy, for some of us, this can be a real hotspot in the cycle month.
So, this episode is for you if the ovulatory cycle phase is intense or overwhelming, or you feel a sense of pressure to show up and ‘get shit done’ inside an already over-full life. It’s also for you if inner summer brings a sense of being all dressed up for the party, with nowhere to go if you have lots of creative, sexual or social...
238. The Spiritual Power of the Womb (Chantal Blake)
The spiritual power of the cycle and the womb is core to Red School’s teachings and offerings, and we’ve explored this topic on the podcast through the lens of many different faith, spiritual, traditional and indigenous traditions including; Maori womb wisdom with Hinewai Waitoa, Andean womb wisdom teachings with Dr Cynthia Ingar, Anishinabe cyclical wisdom with Asha Frost, and ancient African womb and birth technologies with Latham Thomas, as well as a conversation with Meggan Watterson about relevant mystical christian texts.
Today we’re exploring how the Islamic faith reveres the womb, with...
237. How to Practice Cycle Awareness After Menopause (Alexandra and Sjanie)
The Menstruality podcast is devoted to restoring cyclical intelligence at the heart of our world, and we center our conversation on the menstrual cycle as a teacher, guide and ally in this quest. But what do you do if you encounter this work after you’ve been through menopause and no longer have a menstrual cycle?
We receive many questions from post-menopause women and folks in our community who are curious about how to practice cycle awareness, such as; what cycles should I track now? Should I track with the moon, and how do I d...
236. The Power of Cycle Aware Psychotherapy and Mental Health Care (Mary-Claire Decker)
Today we’re exploring how to bring cycle awareness to psychotherapy and mental healthcare.
Our guest is MaryClaire Decker (known as MC) who is a Registered Psychologist. MC created Mindful Cycles after seeing a gap in mental health care, and after her own struggles with chronic menstrual migraines reinforced the need for an approach that works with our cycles, not against them.
At Mindful Cycles, she combines evidence-based therapy with an understanding of cyclical health to help women and people with menstrual cycles navigate their mental well-being with greater self...
235. How to Support Your Child Through Puberty, First Periods and Beyond (Amy Wilding)
1 in 2 girls in the U.S. say they feel embarrassed or ashamed about their period and only 22% of U.S parents feel “very comfortable” talking to their kids about puberty. We need to rewrite this script, and our guest today, menstrual educator Amy Wilding, has written a book to do just that.
Amy has supported hundreds of families through her Period of Change programs, helping them reclaim menarche as a sacred and empowered transition. She’s also a queer and inclusive author, and today we’re chatting about her latest book, Period Of Change: W...
234. REPLAY: The Connection between Your Menstrual Cycle and Your Mental & Emotional Health (Alexandra & Sjanie)
Today we’re sharing a replay of one of our most listened to podcasts ever - and it’s all about how getting to know your cycle can be a vital foundation for mental and emotional health.
Alexandra and Sjanie, the co-founders of Red School are both retired therapists, and today they share their learnings from their own personal cycle awareness practice (as well as working with thousands of students over several decades) about how mental and emotional health rests on us knowing ourselves, feeling our value and worth, and understanding the nature of c...
233. How Menstrual Cycle Awareness has Shaped my Creative Process (Chloé Zhao)
Today it’s our great pleasure to be joined by Chloé Zhao. Chloé is an academy award winning filmmaker, and amongst many accolades, Chloé is the first Woman of Colour to have won an academy award for best director for her film Nomadland.
In this conversation, Chloé chats with Alexandra and Sjanie about how menstrual cycle awareness has shaped her creative process, including how she worked with the wisdom of her menstrual cycle to create and direct her most recent film, Hamnet, which received eight Oscar nominations.
When Chloé turned thirty...
232. How Menstrual Cycle Awareness Can Support You in Perimenopause (Alexandra and Sjanie)
As we enter our early forties, we step into a new life phase with a very different atmosphere and tone. We’re shifting into a new paradigm, often accompanied by changes in our menstrual cycles and ourselves, some of which may be startling or very tricky to manage.
Brain fog, memory issues, irregular cycles, heavy periods - the list goes on. You might notice that you have less tolerance for stress, tire more easily, and that your trusty sleep pattern isn’t quite so trusty anymore.
Today I’m chatting with A...
231. REPLAY: What’s Going on with Pre-Menstrual and Menopause Rage? (Alexandra & Sjanie)
Today we’re replaying one of our most popular episodes - a frank and feisty chat about one of the hot topics in our community - premenstrual and menopausal RAGE.
Have you ever been driving in your car and felt compelled to wind the windows up and actually roar because you felt so wildly angry on day 24?
Or, if you’re navigating menopause, have you experienced your own ‘burn-the-house-down’ moment when your fury threatened to destroy everything you’ve built so far in your life?
What is going on with this rage? Why are so many...
230: How to Manage Anxiety and Overwhelm in Inner Spring (Alexandra & Sjanie)
This episode is the first of a four-part series exploring the common challenges of each of the four cycle phases or inner seasons of the menstrual cycle, and Alexandra and Sjanie are going to reframe these challenges as meaningful limits that support us to access the power of each phase.
This first episode in the series is the inner spring, preovulation cycle phase and we’re looking at the challenge of anxiety, overwhelm, and scattered focus. And as the outer seasons unfold here in the UK, we’ll we continue with an exploration of t...
229. How Menstrual Cycle Awareness Can Help us Stay Engaged, Resilient and Resourced (Dr Cre Dye)
Today we’re exploring how the practice of menstrual cycle awareness can help us to stay engaged, resilient and resourced as we meet the challenges of today’s world.
Our guest is the brilliant Dr. Cre Dye who is the Menstruality Justice and Inclusion Educator at Red School. Cre has served her local, national, and international communities with heart, mind and body activism for over twenty-five years as a mental health therapist, yoga teacher/trainer and university professor.
Together we practiced deep listening to a now-famous speech from one of the m...
228: The Menstrual Cycle and the Female Nervous System (Veronica Rottman)
Historically, trauma research has been done primarily on men, and then applied to women’s bodies as if it’s going to work in the same way. But as our guest today, Somatic Emotional Processing facilitator Veronica Rottman, shares, women currently suffer from twice the rate of anxiety and depression, make up 80% of the population with autoimmune disease and are much more likely to experience burnout.
Veronica is the founder of Soma School and has devoted over 40,000 hours over the past seventeen years to trauma resolution. In the conversation today she explores the femal...
227. The Connection Between Breathwork and Your Menstrual Cycle (Harriette Wight)
After being guided by her doctor to take the pill for twenty years to manage painful periods, breathwork practitioner Harriette Wight was still dealing with challenging bleeds and decided to try something different. She was guided by a friend to try seed cycling, then learned how to track her menstrual cycle and then - via her Yoga teacher - she discovered breathwork. The combination of breathwork and cycle awareness changed everything for her.
Breathwork, as Harriette defines it, is the practice of using the breath to consciously change how we feel physically, emotionally, m...
226. The Power of No: Menstrual Cycle Awareness and Boundaries (Alexandra & Sjanie)
One of the most beautiful and practical gifts of menstrual cycle awareness is how it awakens a newfound capacity to know and assert our boundaries.
As we track our shifting emotions, mental state and energy levels through the cycle month, we get to know our unique strengths and our limits. This helps to build confidence in ourselves and our nature, so that when we become aware of a boundary that has been crossed, we’re more able to find a skillful way to use the power of NO.
So today we’r...
225. The Courage of Genius (and What Your Cycle Has to Do With It) with Alexandra & Sjanie
To help you ease into 2026 purposefully, we’re talking about how the cycle helps you to live in your zone of genius today, which is to say, how practising menstrual cycle awareness helps you to know your own nature and stay close to what you’re really great at.
We go through the inner seasons of the cycle one by one, sharing how each one can help us to do the courageous, radical act of claiming ourselves and what we love in a world that celebrates constant productivity over joy. We get practical too b...
224: Choose Your Menstrual Cycle Leadership Power for 2026 (Alexandra & Sjanie)
Happy New Year! We have a gift for you to help you start your 2026 infused in cyclical wisdom.
Everything that Alexandra and Sjanie create at Red School is focused on inspiring us to connect to the power that lives within our cyclical nature, so that we can know and claim our own leadership roles in our lives. So, in service of this, today Alexandra and Sjanie do a power card reading with the Red School power cards, to help you choose a menstrual cycle power to guide your leadership this year.
And...
223. How to Work with the Moon as Your Calendar (April McMurtry)
The moon is a big topic of conversation within the Red School community. Many who aren’t menstruating practice lunar tracking in place of menstrual cycle awareness, and those who have a menstrual cycle often bring moon-inspired questions, such as: ‘should I bleed on the full moon or the new moon?’ And ‘what to do when I’m bleeding but the moon is full and I feel pulled in two directions?’.
So today we’re exploring how cultivating a connection with the moon can support us to enter circular and cyclical time. Our guest today is...
222. Menstrual Cycle Awareness and Trauma Healing (Alexandra & Sjanie)
When you practice menstrual cycle awareness, you start to feel more connected to yourself. This process of remembering and embodying more of who you truly are means that you may come into contact with parts of yourself that have been disowned, or that you’ve been shamed out of claiming.
Our conversation today is especially designed to support you if you’ve been encountering or unearthing memories or experiences related to trauma as you track your emotional, physical and spiritual ebb and flow throughout the cycle month.
Whether you’ve experie...
221. How Cycle Awareness Helps You to Have Difficult Conversations (Sarah Rozenthuler)
Whether it’s at work, in our relationships, as parents or carers, or in our interaction with our community, life regularly invites us to summon up the courage to have difficult conversations. Today we’re chatting about how cultivating an intimacy with our cyclical nature can support us to show up with skillful expression and heart.
Our guest today is Sarah Rozenthuler is a world-renowned speaker, chartered psychologist, leadership coach, and the author of many books, including ‘Now We’re Talking‘. Sarah first discovered menstrual cycle awareness over two decades ago when she read Alexa...
220. How Cycle Awareness Frees Your Voice and True Expression (Alexandra and Sjanie)
One of the questions that comes up again and again in the Red School community is this: how can I free up my voice and share my truth? So many of us, particularly women and those socialised as female feel stuck, silenced or disconnected from our true expression, so today we’re exploring how the practice of checking in every day with your menstrual cycle and how it’s influencing your energy and mood can support you on this quest.
Through our personal stories as well as stories from the community, we explore how m...
219. The Rage, Grace and Alchemy of Menopause (Tanya Forgan)
For many of us menopause announces itself in our lives through some kind of betrayal. For today’s podcast guest, that betrayal came in the form of a dismantling of identity that provoked one particular emotion on a whole new level - rage.
Our guest today is the brilliant trauma-informed embodiment guide, facilitator, and heart activist Tanya Forgan. She explores menopause as a series of portals which show us where we’re holding power and where we’re not. Her initial ‘betrayal’ phase of menopause rocked her to her core, coinciding with the pandemic an...
218. Passing Through the Veils: Perimenopause as Sacred Preparation (Alexandra & Sjanie)
As we enter our forties, many of us start to experience signals from our body that show us that we can’t override ourselves anymore. We become more permeable, our energy levels shift, and we tend to have less capacity. If we don’t clock these changes and find ways to adapt our lives, we’ll start to experience trouble inside ourselves often in the form of stress, overwhelm and other physical, emotional and mental symptoms.
Alexandra and Sjanie call these years the “autumn” of our menstruating years, or the Quickening, and in the collect...
217. How to Navigate The Heat of Menopause with Water Medicine (Tamu Mosley)
Our guest today is Tamu Mosley, who is a student of Alexandra and Sjanie’s Menopause: The Great Awakener course, and is an initiated Sacred Woman, wholistic wellness facilitator, teacher, and mama. Tamu was guided by her mum to track her cycles from her very first bleed, and now, a few years post menopause, she sees how cycle awareness guided her through her menopause initiation.
When Tamu was entering perimenopause she was studying with the world renowned spiritual teacher from Burkina Faso, Sobonfu Some, who said that when a woman enters menopause, she be...
216. How to Manage the Emotional Heat of Menopause (Alexandra & Sjanie)
Menopause is an immense life event, a great initiation. Not only is it a complete hormonal shift in the landscape of your overall health, it’s also a psycho-spiritual transformation, which can bring with it a huge emotional rollercoaster.
Rage, grief, emptiness, exposure, hurt, anxiety - they can all create a sense of groundlessness in menopause, to the extent that many of us feel that we simply don’t know ourselves any more. This emotional heat can include a sense of despair - you had a sense of what you were about, who you...
215. Replay: How to Mother Yourself Through Menopause (Chameli Gad)
It’s world menopause day later this month, and throughout October we’ll be sharing on social media about how we can rewrite the cultural narrative of menopause. On October 21st - 23rd, Alexandra and Sjanie would like to invite you to join them for their free three-day online menopause event: How Menopause Awakens Your Power. And their online course, menopause the Great Awakener starts on October 31st - you can register for the free event and find out more about the course at redschoolmenopause.com
Today’s bonus episode is a replay of a deli...
214. Replay: How Yoga Nidra can Support Menstrual and Menopause Rest (Tracee Stanley)
It’s world menopause day later this month, and throughout October we’ll be sharing on social media about how we can rewrite the cultural narrative of menopause. On October 21st - 23rd, Alexandra and Sjanie would like to invite you to join them for their free three-day online menopause event: How Menopause Awakens Your Power. And their online course, menopause the Great Awakener starts on October 31st - you can register for the free event and find out more about the course at redschoolmenopause.com
Today’s bonus episode is for you if - like...
213. Replay: Menopause as a Gateway to Magnificence and Knowing Our Worth (Prune Harris)
It’s world menopause day later this month, and throughout October we’ll be sharing on social media about how we can rewrite the cultural narrative of menopause. On October 21st - 23rd, Alexandra and Sjanie would like to invite you to join them for their free three-day online menopause event: How Menopause Awakens Your Power. And their online course, menopause the Great Awakener starts on October 31st - you can register for the free event and find out more about the course at redschoolmenopause.com
In today’s bonus episode, we’re exploring the imme...
212. Replay: The Myth, Magic and Metamorphosis of Menopause (Dr Sharon Blackie)
It’s world menopause day later this month, and throughout October we’ll be sharing on social media about how we can rewrite the cultural narrative of menopause. On October 21st - 23rd, Alexandra and Sjanie would like to invite you to join them for their free three-day online menopause event: How Menopause Awakens Your Power. And their online course, menopause the Great Awakener starts on October 31st - you can register for the free event and find out more about the course at redschoolmenopause.com
Today’s bonus episode is a replay of my con...
211. Replay: The Transformation of Menopause: Stepping into our Responsibility to Life (Jane Hardwicke Collings)
It’s world menopause day later this month, and throughout October we’ll be sharing on social media about how we can rewrite the cultural narrative of menopause. On October 21st - 23rd, Alexandra and Sjanie would like to invite you to join them for their free three-day online menopause event: How Menopause Awakens Your Power.
Their online course, Menopause: The Great Awakener starts on October 31st - you can register for the free event and find out more about the course at redschoolmenopause.com
Today’s bonus episode is a replay of Jane...
210. How to Claim Your Sacred Rest (Octavia Raheem)
In a world which is moving too fast, we have to claim our rest, which is why I’m delighted to share this conversation with an incredible woman who sees herself as a Chief Operating Daydreaming Officer and Dream Keeper. Octavia Raheem is an award-winning author, rest coach, a yoga and meditation teacher, and speaker. Yoga Journal magazine has recognized Octavia as one of fifteen experienced yoga professionals who have elevated and changed the field on a global scale.
Today we chat about her most recent book - Rest is Sacred, and Octavia sha...
209. The Future of Leadership is Menstrual: A Revolution in Power (Alexandra & Sjanie)
In a world where fast-paced technology and artificial intelligence are on the rise, where each day brings fresh news of global injustice and conflict and where radical shifts are needed to create a sustainable future on earth, it’s no wonder that we can find ourselves overwhelmed and numb.
But, the daily practice of menstrual cycle awareness can serve as a powerful antidote, and today we’re exploring how cycle awareness can create a ground of connection to ourselves and our sense of agency and power in challenging times. They also illuminate menstrual cycle...
208. The Messy Middle of Menopause (Ruby May)
As we’ve explored a lot on the podcast with the women and folks who have shared their own menopause stories, it can be a disorientating, deeply challenging, and very messy process. And today we’re hearing from a woman who is generously sharing right from the messy middle of her menopause journey.
Ruby May is a coach, facilitator and community weaver, passionate about midwifing a culture grounded in the wisdom of the body. She is also a Red School Menstruality Leadership Programme graduate and is the community catalyst of the Hive graduate commu...
207. How Cycle Awareness Can Help You to Navigate PCOS and Irregular Cycles (Shalize Giane)
What do you do when your experience of the cycle doesn’t match the archetypal description of the inner seasons? Many women and folks with cycles experience sporadic, irregular cycles which are very challenging to track, particularly if they’re dealing with health challenges like PCOS, Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome.
Our guest today is Menstruality Leadership Programme graduate Shalize Giane, who shares generously about her two decades of dealing with PCOS, and the infertility challenges that have accompanied it. We explore her long and winding journey to getting a diagnosis, and how practising cycle aware...
206: Listening to Your Body, Reclaiming Your Power and Knowing Your Worth (Meggan Watterson)
Today’s conversation is an exploration of what happens when women’s stories and voices are suppressed, and how we reclaim our power in a world which has historically denied our worth. It’s the story beneath the story of menstruality, the foundation for all we’re reclaiming with menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause. Our guide in Harvard-trained feminist theologian, Meggan Watterson.
When Meggan first encountered the new testament she broke out in hives. For years she studied the female saints, gurus, poets and mystics throughout history in all the...
205. How to Work With PMS and PMDD Using Menstrual Cycle Awareness (Alexandra & Sjanie)
Today we’re sharing part two of our conversation about PMS - premenstrual syndrome - and PMDD - Premenstrual dysphoria disorder. We began this exploration in episode 202, How Menstrual Cycle Awareness Can Transform PMS and PMDD, where we discussed the premenstrual phase of the cycle as a gateway to our power, and premenstrual symptoms as a truth-telling signal or a warning sign from the deepest part of ourselves about all that needs to be healed within us, and in our world.
In part two we get practical and look at how menstrual cycle awareness can...
204. How Cycle Awareness Helps to Create a Rest-Centred Life (Lou Perham)
I don’t know about you, but rest can be an elusive thing for me. I know I need it, I know I want it, but how do I actually get it? Enter Lou Perham who is rest-obsessed and has devoted her recent years as a Cyclical Living Mentor to helping people, and especially women get more rest.
Today we start by exploring Lou’s powerful personal story of the healing power of cycle awareness. When Lou was diagnosed with PCOS - polycystic ovarian syndrome - in her late 20s, she was crushed when...
