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 community at Red School. Most recently she has been co-creating Sabia, a platform with a vision of menopause as a transformative life stage.

This conversation was born from my listening partnership with Ruby, where she shared a voice note which powerfully illuminated the many challenges of her menopause initiatory process, including the multiple emotional descents she’s taken, the rock bottom places she has hit, (particularly when she has had very little sleep) and how menopause has shone a light on all the parts of her that still want to be rescued, and validated.

We explore:

• The importance of having allies who mirror your goodness back to you, even in your darkest times, without having to sugarcoat anything or find the silver lining.
  
  
• How her menopause doula aka fairy godmother, Kate Codrington (a fellow Menstruality Leadership Programme graduate) is following the pulse of her journey alongside her, and how her ‘go-to-crone’ - a rabble-rousing rebellious healer - is offering her acute support in the moment.
  
  
• How Ruby is navigating her own journey around whether to get HRT, and what do we do when we’ve created a life that we no longer have capacity to live out?   

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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 [email protected]

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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
Ruby May: @_.ruby.may._ - https://www.instagram.com/_.ruby.may._

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 awareness has transformed her experience of her cycle and her body, as well as inspiring her to reassess and reorganise her entire life to remove stressors and give her body what it is asking for.

We explore:

• How women and folks with PCOS can feel excluded from the cycle awareness and cyclical living conversation, and why it’s vital for everyone working in the menstruality field to create belonging for all.
  
  
• How Shalize experiences her inner seasons, even with an unpredictable cycle, and what they have told her about what her body truly needs; rest and slowness.
  
  
• Her experience on the Menstruality Leadership Programme, and how it helped her get in touch with and process the childhood trauma, emotional suppression and parental neglect that was contributing to her PCOS challenges, as well as inspire her to start helping other women with PCOS to heal. 

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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 [email protected]

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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

Shalize Giane: @misstomadame_ - https://www.instagram.com/misstomadame_/

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 world’s religions, got a master degree in a comparative world religion view of the divine feminine.  As she says, our ideas about the divine and who gets to speak on behalf of the divine effect the status of women the world over, as well as our own relationship to our sense of spiritual authority and trusting the voice of love we hear inside of us. 

Meggan is also the Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author of Mary Magdalene revealed, and her new book, The Girl Who Baptised Herself, explores the erased story of one of the first female ministers in the pre-patriarchal, Christ movement, a girl named Thecla who reclaims her power from within her, inside a society which entirely denies her worth, so that she can ascend to the life that’s meant for her, and what her story can teach us all about how to claim our worth, and the lives that we desire.

We explore:

• Why Meggan often gets called a whore - as well as a lot of other colourful names - for teaching about the ancient gospels that were erased from the new testament by Constanine in the 400AD, so that the idea of male succession could have legitimacy.
  
  
• Writing as a spiritual practice, and how Meggan became the woman she needed to be to write this book.
  
  
• What Thecla’s story can teach us about how to honour the divine in a way that includes the female body, particularly in a world where the reproductive rights of women and people with wombs are being taken away. 

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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 [email protected]

---

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

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 help you if you experience extreme pre-menstrual disturbance, through the lens of some brilliant questions and stories that the community gathered around this podcast have sent to us. They include what to do if you’re in premenstrual hell right now, the most important practical actions to take that genuinely help with symptoms and why cycle-aware therapy or professional support is often essential, especially if you’ve experienced trauma.

We explore:

• The three menstruality ‘medicines’ which can help PMS and PMDD: cycle tracking, premenstrual power and rest at menstruation.
• The small, repeated acts of self-care and boundary-setting can shift everything; and we share our favourite personal examples like dealing with premenstrual rage by roaring out of the car window and smashing plates!
• The power of writing a love letter to yourself in your ‘good’ part of the 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

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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]

---

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

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 her doctors told her that she was unlikely to be able to have children. Having always wanted to be a mother, she responded by trying several holistic healing approaches to heal her heavy, painful periods, eventually committing to a two-year Yoga teacher training which supported the regulation of her hormones, and also included teachings about menstrual cycle awareness. 

Wonderfully, a year after she started tracking her menstrual cycle she had pain-free bleeds and six months later she was pregnant with her son. This led to her joining Red School’s Menstruality Leadership Programme, and since then, she has been applying the healing power of cycle awareness in a new way, using it to craft what she calls a rest-centred life, and guide others to do the same.

We explore:

• Today she shares the ten types of rest we all need, and how to access more of them, including; physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. 
  
  
• How Lou created her own map of self-care practices based on the inner seasons of her menstrual cycle, and it all started with the vital cycle awareness question; what do I need on this cycle day? 

• How Lou practices cycle awareness and lives the wisdom of her cycle as a single working mother.
  
  

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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 [email protected]

---

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

Lou Perham: @louperham - https://www.instagram.com/louperham/

What if there is a direct connection between your pleasure and your power? And what if harnessing the magic of inner summer of the menstrual cycle - the ovulation phase - is the key to unleashing a deeply pleasurable, full expression of who you are in the world?

We believe that both of these statements are true, but - as we explore in this podcast - a profound reclamation of the true power of inner summer is necessary, in a world which demands us to be in an endlessly productive summer-mode all of the time. 

As a result of all the societal projections created by hustle and beauty culture, the power of summer is much misunderstood, and many people struggle with it. In this replay of our popular episode from two years ago, we share ideas for how we can free ourselves from the narrow band of experience within which we’re told to operate, so that our unique magnetism and authenticity can be fully inhabited.

We explore:

• The shadow-boxing that can take over inner summer when we live in a linear world which neglects our cyclicity.

• How being with the instinctual aliveness of our animal bodies helps us to unleash and express our power in the inner summer, as well as hold the charge of our Calling in the world.
  
  
• The direct connection between dropping deeply at menstruation and the full claiming of our inner summer selves.
  
  

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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 [email protected]

---

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

Did you know that 3-8% of women and people with cycles experience PMDD, which stands for premenstrual dysphoric disorder? If you are one of these people, or you are close to or work with someone with PMDD, this episode is especially for you. It’s also for you, if you - like me - have experienced intense, debilitating, dark and challenging emotional disturbance in the premenstrual phase of your cycle, often known as PMS or premenstrual syndrome. 

Today Alexandra and Sjanie explore the inner autumn of the cycle as a gateway to our power. As they share, our premenstrual symptoms aren’t a design flaw, but can be better understood 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 all that needs to be healed in our world. 

Part of the challenge we all face here is that we live in a world that dismisses and denies our cyclical experience, which creates a disconnect with our cyclical wisdom. In other words, what if it’s not the menstrual cycle that is the problem, but rather it’s a culture that pathologises, shames and denies the power and value of our cycles, and especially the power of the premenstrual phase?

We explore:

• How the premenstrual phase of the cycle gives you feedback about your sensitivity and how to tend to it, so it can be in service to your power - because the world needs your depth of feeling.
  
  
• The emotional spirals that PMDD can evoke, where intense feelings arise, attack becomes your best defense, you lash out at others, and then, a couple of days later, often once your period has arrived, you have to pick up the pieces and negotiate the aftermath of self-hatred and shame.
  
  
• Why we all need to take what we feel in inner autumn more seriously. The premenstrual phase of the cycle is the emotional ‘novocaine’ wearing off, a time where you come to your senses, and you have heightened intuition and insight. 

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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 [email protected]

---

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

A few months ago, our guest today, the founder of Cycle Seeds Iris Josephina Verstappen, was hosting a retreat in a goddess temple in Malta when she began to miscarry. Having accompanied many women through pregnancy loss, both as a doula and a holistic hormone and cycle coach, she’s witnessed the storm of emotions that can arise with miscarriage, as well as the taboo surrounding it. So she decided to publicly share about her experience with her 60,000 followers, to be a permission slip for others, so that they don’t have to suffer in silence. 

In our conversation Iris shares generously and vulnerably about how she has navigated the grief, loneliness, confusion and earth-shaking fear that it could all happen again, as well as the paradoxical feelings of love, possibility, and gratitude for how the experience of pregnancy opened her up. Our hope is that if you’re one of the one in four women and people who experience pregnancy loss, this conversation helps you to feel less alone with whatever you’re feeling.

We explore:

• The imposter syndrome that arose for Iris when she tried to go back to work, and found herself questioning how this could have happened to her when she was doing everything “right”, especially as an educator in the field of cyclical living and women’s health, and how the antidote was simply to lie with her belly flat on the earth. 

• The lack of community support around grief and loss, but especially in the post-partum window after miscarriage where the body is still recovering from the pregnancy, and Iris offers some great ideas for how to support a friend going through this. 

• How Iris is navigating the identity crisis that comes with inhabiting the liminal space between maiden and mother, between becoming and unbecoming, as well as being in a body that looks and feels different after her pregnancy loss.

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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 [email protected]

---

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

If you’re curious to explore natural approaches to support menopause health symptoms today’s episode is for you. Our guest, Melinda McDougall, is a registered Medical Herbalist specialising in women's health and menopause. She combines the latest scientific research into botanical medicines with the traditional knowledge women have used for centuries to manage their health.

Melinda shares a treasure trove of herbal information about how to improve sleep and brain function, reduce stress, and help your body to feel better, as well as how herbal medicine supported her own healing process with erratic and incredibly heavy cycles in the years running up to menopause. 

One of my favourite parts was when Melinda described how our brains get totally re-shaped and remolded during menopause, as we wake up from the fog of estrogen people-pleasing hormone, drop into a different way of seeing the world, and become less inclined to put everyone else first. 

We explore:

• A powerful ayurvedic herb that helps your body adapt to stress and is very supportive for insomnia and sleep disturbances, as well as herbal medicine for night sweats and hot flushes.
  
  
• A variety of useful herbs for mental focus and brain function, if you’re experiencing brain fog, or feel like your brain isn’t working like it used to, as well as herbs to support you through the intense rage that we can experience during menopause,
  
  
• How to use herbal medicine as a viable alternative to HRT or as a way to support your body alongside HRT, like adaptogenic herbs, and herbs that support gut and liver health and can help to reduce side effects like headaches, weight gain and breakthrough bleeding. 

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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 [email protected]

---

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

Our guest today, energy expert Prune Harris sees the womb as the deepest house of wisdom that we have, and today we explore how to work energetically to cultivate womb health, as well as menstrual and menopause health. 

Since birth, Prune has been able to see energy - the energy of humans, animals, trees and the Earth, and she sees this energy as vibrations, colours, and connective patterns. She has trained with healers, elders, and wisdom holders throughout the world and for the past fifty years, she’s been tracking, understanding, and now translating this world of energy for us all to experience, as a consciousness educator, soul activist and author of her book, Your Radiant Soul - Understand Your Energy to Transform Your World.

Today we explore how to work with energy for menstrual, menopause and womb health, why pain tends to stem from congested energy, and practical energy work tools to help you to increase flow in your energy system to ease menstrual or menopause challenges you’re facing, starting today.

We explore:

• The spiralling energy of the womb, how to have a “wombgasm”, and how it can open us up to a tender, vulnerable kind of power.
  
  
• How to work energetically to help with the symptoms that can come with hormonal fluctuations, such as hormonal headaches.
  
  
• How Prune worked with her menopause hot flushes by guiding the heat to move horizontally through her energy system. 

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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 [email protected]

---

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