The Menstruality Podcast

When she was in her mid-forties, Indigenous Medicine Woman Asha Frost’s feet started to painfully cramp and freeze at night, and no one could figure out what was wrong. Having lived with Lupus since she was seventeen, Asha was no stranger to chronic health challenges, but this one didn’t flare-up and subside - it continued for months, and then years, and propelled her into a prolonged inner winter. 

At the same time Asha was writing her second book, as well sharing her work in big ways, travelling to share teachings and doing keynotes on big stages. So, today we speak about how to navigate the different seasons of being a ‘wintering one’ who is in a dark night of the soul, and is still active in the world. 

Asha is a member of Chippewas of Nawash First Nation with a background in psychology and homeopathic medicine, and in today’s conversation she weaves together Indigenous wisdom, ceremony, and the healing practices she shares in her new book, The Inner Winter.

We explore:

• What it means to be a ‘wintering one’ and all of the different ways that winter shows up in our lives, including chronic illness, loss and grief, burnout, post-partum, and neurodivergence.
  
  
• What Bear medicine has taught Asha about how to stand your ground in winter, as well as the importance of expressing our growl, especially in perimenopause.
  
  
• The film that supported Asha to move into the summer of her wintering times, Come See Me In The Good Light, with the brilliant late poet Andrea Gibson. 

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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
Asha Frost: @asha.frost - https://www.instagram.com/asha.frost

Today we’re continuing our series about the limits of the four inner seasons of the menstrual cycle, and exploring these limits less as a problem that needs to be fixed, and more as a gateway to accessing the power of each cycle phase.

So far we’ve discussed the pre-ovulation and ovulation phases - inner spring and summer - and it’s time for us to get into the premenstrual phase, which is a cycle hotspot for many of us. 

Alexandra and Sjanie describe their own experience of the core limit of inner autumn, the reduction in energy and capacity, which can create a kind of reactive, hyper-critical sharpness in our minds and we become attuned to what isn’t working around us. In other words, everything becomes so annoying, and it’s very hard not to tell everyone around us just how annoying they are. 

We explore how, when we slow down in ourselves and honour this natural limit, we’re more able to access the benefit of this mental sharpness, in the form of a profound kind of discerning truth-telling and intuitive knowing. 

We explore:

• How to reframe your premenstrual irritability from a problem to endure, into a potent invitation into a vital sense of connection with your deep self, and your human needs.
• The necessity of allowing and feeling the intense emotions that can rise up in the second half of the cycle - even amidst the busyness of life - and how to hold ourselves if old trauma arises. 
• How, in the premenstrual phase, we become lightning conductors releasing the charge in the field around us; for our children, our families, our communities or our workplace - and what to do when our disruption triggers people around us. 

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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

Today we’re talking about the reality of the grittiness of the forties; the physical health challenges, the emotional intensity, the responsibilities, the overwhelm, the stress. And we also explore how the forties are also a meaningful preparation for the great spiritual awakening and initiation of menopause. 

Sjanie and Sophie share their personal stories from this life phase, which we call the Quickening at Red School, and we explore how to practically navigate the challenges that come up including; how to manage our energy, find nervous system regulation inside the fullness of life, hold the tension with intense reactivity and grow the emotional muscles to be inside the many mini death-and-rebirth moments of perimenopause.

We explore:

• How to work with the uncertainty that can come from shifting menstrual cycles in your forties, and what to do when you find yourself outside of the map of the inner seasons.
• Sophie’s story of working with perimenopause rage, and how we can all re-write the stories we’ve been telling ourselves about ourselves, and claim fuller responsibility for our lives.
• The importance of finding ways to slow everything down, even if it’s just inside yourself, when you’re navigating the edges of perimenopause. 

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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

Over the past week, I’ve been sitting with women going through or on the other side of menopause hearing their profound insights about the spiritual gifts of their menopause process for our Spiritual Power of Menopause series.

And today we’re sharing one of our conversations here on the podcast - with internationally-acclaimed yoga teacher, author, and public speaker, Seane Corn. Seane has been at the forefront of yoga, activism, and community service for over thirty years. She’s now dedicated to challenging cultural narratives about menopause, reframing it from a physical decline to a sacred spiritual initiation and rebirth.

We explore:

• How Seane confronted internalised misogyny around midlife and aging
  
  
• How her Yoga practice supported her to do the menopause shadow work of releasing outgrown identities
  
  
• How the alchemy of the menopause process awakens our intuition so that we can step into new levels of leadership.

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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
Seane Corn: @seanecorn - https://www.instagram.com/seanecorn

It’s world menopause awareness month and today we’re sharing a conversation that Alexandra and Sjanie had with the brilliant writer, international speaker and transformational coach Bethany Webster a couple of Octobers ago for the Wise Power retreat, all about healing the ‘Motherwound’ in menopause. 

At Red School we’re busy preparing our Spiritual Power of Menopause conversation series which is starting next week, as well as Alexandra and Sjanie’s popular free three-day menopause event: How to Awaken The Power of Menopause, which will also serve as an introduction to the Menopause: The Great Awakener course. It all starts on October 12th and you can register for free at redschoolmenopause.com.

Bethany sat down with me and very generously shared her story of perimenopause healing and transformation for the upcoming Spiritual Power of Menopause series, and her conversation is coming up on day five, called: Perimenopause - A Defiance in Service to Love… 

But for now, let’s hear from her about how her personal understanding of the Motherwound impacted her in the approach to menopause, how menopause can help us to make peace with our mothers, and how to cultivate a meaningful inner mothering practice.

We explore:

• How Bethany's personal understanding of the Motherwound is impacting her in the approach to menopause, inspiring her to negotiate a new relationship with power and truth. 
  
  
• How menopause can help us to make peace with our mothers and release the residues of the messages we unconsciously received from them.
  
  
• How to start the work of healing the Motherwound at menopause, and cultivate a meaningful inner mothering practice.

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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
Bethany Webster: @themotherwound - https://www.instagram.com/themotherwound

It’s the first day of world menopause month, and we’re continuing to re-write the cultural narrative around menopause, by exploring the connection between psycho-spiritual initiation of menopause and leadership. Especially the kind of emergent, relational, responsive leadership that is needed in our world today. 

In Alexandra and Sjanie’s book, Wise Power, they share that menopause is a training ground in power, where we can learn how to lead from a place of vulnerable humility, holding the tension with complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity. What could be more needed in the coming decade which will demand new levels of creativity, courage and leadership from us all? 

We explore:

• The menopause shadow work that enables us to fully face our inner critics, so that we can own our strengths and our blind spots. 
  
  
• How to navigate the dark night of the soul that can come in menopause without getting lost to bitterness and resentment, and whilst staying open to life in all it’s messy fullness.
  
  
• How menopause ultimately helps us to unashamedly love what we’re good at, recognize our limits and blind spots and liberate ourselves to live and share our unique gifts

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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

Today we’re flipping the script and replaying an interview from a couple of years ago where Sjanie interviewed Sophie about her experience of bringing cycle awareness to the world of business. 

When she’s not hosting this podcast, Sophie is a business coach and strategist. She brings two decades of business experience as a Yoga teacher, filmmaker, non-profit communications director and women’s network founder to support business leaders to thrive. 

Today she shares how her own menstrual cycle awareness practice transformed all aspects of her life, including her approach to work, and how she weaves cyclical wisdom into her strategy work. She shares the three core challenges that she sees entrepreneurs facing, and cyclical approaches to experiencing more ease, confidence, creativity and aligned expansion in business.

We explore:

• The wild night of pre-menstrual rage that changed everything for Sophie; her career, her country of residence and her relationship.
• What late night breast-feeding dreaming taught Sophie about how to run a thriving, sustainable, impactful business.
• Why we all need to connect more to the 99.9% of life on earth that is cyclical, rather than the 0.01% of human culture that is largely governed by an all-too-linear and rational  linear obsession with non-stop productivity. 

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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

Last week we gathered in person with twenty-eight of the graduates of the Menstruality Leadership Programme for an in-person retreat, where we focused on healing our experiences of menarche - our first periods. 

In today’s conversation I asked Alexandra and Sjanie to share one of the powerful teachings from the retreat, which is a new way of understanding menstrual cycle awareness as a spiritual life path, by seeing the different key experiences in the menstruality life arc as sacred sites.

We explore how the key initiatory experiences of menstruality - menarche, menstruation, matrescence (if we’re able to or choose to have children) and menopause - as sacred sites which have been desecrated by hundreds of years of the menstrual cycle being denigrated, ignored, dismissed and shamed. And we take a metaphorical walk through each site, dreaming into how we can each re-sanctify them in our own lives, and how this ripples out into the world.

We explore:

• Menstrual cycle awareness as the key way to resanctify the sacred site of menstruation.
• The conversation that each of us must have with our wise selves in menopause, as a way to declare the sacredness and meaning within our experience.
• Healing your menarche experience, by finding the grit in the oyster shell of your experience around your first period, and tracking how it has become the pearl of your calling. 

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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

When Lella Sá was seven years old, she learned to meditate with her grandmother, which was the beginning of a spiritual journey that has guided her through multiple expressions of her calling; from modeling, to event management, to biographical counselling, to motherhood, to running a Waldorf school. She now serves  as a culture change and productivity consultant focused on what she calls Matrifocial Leadership. 

Today we explore how Lella’s in-depth practice of menstrual cycle awareness influences and inspires her work supporting women to lead through Maitrifocal practices that honour life. We chat about what could become possible if we all embodied this life-affirming form of leadership, personally and collectively, as well as some of the obstacles that get in the way. 

We explore:

• How to work in sync with our biology, our biography and our responsibility as humans living in this epoch, by embodying the wisdom of ‘life before performance’.
• How cycle awareness and aligning with natural rhythms helps us to cultivate a new, healthy relationship with time, by using our bodies as leadership infrastructure.
• How indigenous cyclical wisdom can teach us about the practice of sufficiency, which is vital to putting life at the centre of our work, and to work through stewardship and collaboration instead of domination and competition. 

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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
Lella Sà: @lellasa - https://www.instagram.com/lellasa

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 conversation today we explore what’s at the root of these metabolic challenges, how they are impacting us - particularly when it comes to menstrual challenges and menopause - and most importantly, why it’s not our fault.

Lara speaks to the systemic issues that have given birth to this health crisis, and some practical ways to create lifestyle shifts to move towards better metabolic health, as well as turn the ship around collectively when it comes to our food systems, endocrine disrupting ‘forever’ chemicals and ultra-processed food. These shifts are especially important for those dealing with menstrual health challenges, or navigating the life transitions of perimenopause and menopause, as well as pregnancy and post-partum if they are part of our path.

We explore:

• The complex interplay of insulin resistance and women’s health, particularly for those experiencing PMOS (previously known as PCOS), PMDD and other premenstrual mood challenges, and perimenopause.
  
  
• We break down terms like metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance, as well as defining ultra-processed food, and how it’s contributing to menstrual and menopausal health challenges.
  
  
• Disconnecting metabolic health from body shape and size, and the importance of not comparing yourself to others when it comes to reversing insulin resistance and moving towards metabolic health.

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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
Lara Briden - @larabriden - https://www.instagram.com/larabriden/