The Menstruality Podcast

Menstrual cycle awareness has the capacity to create meaningful change in all areas of life, and today we’re exploring an aspect of our collective human experience which isn’t talked about enough...

In a couple of days, it will be the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and today our guest is Tamsin Fagan who has been doing the difficult, courageous work of ending violence against women and girls since she was 19. 

Tamsin is a women's safety advocate, womb medicine woman, a menstruality leadership programme graduate and ceremonialist and today, she shares her personal story of domestic violence in her childhood, how she is applying menstrual cycle awareness in her activism, and how she has worked with her own cycle to heal her trauma. 

We explore:

• How working with the playful curiosity that comes naturally in inner spring has helped Tamsin to reclaim the lost, innocent play and exploration of her childhood.
  
  
• How cycle awareness can help to prevent violence, help women who are experiencing abuse, and support survivors to recover and heal their trauma.
  
  
• What all space-holders and  facilitators need to know about violence against women and girls, and how to create safety and belonging for a woman if she discloses violence or abuse.

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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

In a world that can overly prioritise the linear and rational, so many of us long to connect with and express our instinctive, intuitive knowing, and today we’re exploring how the practice of menstrual cycle awareness can help us to hone the art of intuitive living.

Alexandra and Sjanie unpack how the first half of the cycle has an outer-focused thrust which takes you out into the world (it almost takes you out of yourself if you’re not careful) where your rational mind is at its peak. And then the tide turns, and in the second half of the cycle, your energies contract and you’re naturally drawn back into yourself, and the instinctual, intuitive, psychic knowing within each of us. 

Then, at menstruation your intuition can reach its greatest expression. The left brain retreats, your capacity for rational thinking goes offline, and you’re opened up to a much more holistic way of knowing, sensing, and feeling. Your subtle senses are blown open, you have access to something way beyond yourself… and you can feel the deep meaning of your own life.

We explore:

• How to follow the intuition instructions that your cycle is giving you. We need to pace the contracting energy in the premenstrual phase, and allow ourselves to adjust, slow down and allow a greater sensitivity to happen.
  
  
• The intuitive knowing that Alexandra and Sjanie received at their Big Bleed this year, and how it has totally changed the trajectory of Red School, bringing Menstruality to thousands of new people.
  
  
• The menstruality leadership skills which help us to hone our intuition, including intentionality and interoception, which are a key part of the curriculum on the Menstruality Leadership Programme. 

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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

What do we do when we’re experiencing significant changes physically, emotionally and spiritually in the years running up to menopause, all we want to do is run far, far away, but we still have kids at home who need our care and support?

This question is coming up a lot in our community and that’s why I’m so grateful to be talking with Matrescence expert, journalist and coach, Amy Taylor Kabbaz, who also happens to be smack in the middle of perimenopause, with three children at home. 

Over the past decade, Amy has interviewed hundreds of authors, maternal health experts, and teachers, trying to decipher why so many mothers feel burnt out, overwhelmed, and addicted to being busy. Over the past year she’s been exploring how we can support ourselves through the huge transition of perimenopause, and she shares the fruits with us today.  

We explore:

• How the ‘fork in the road’ of perimenopause is helping Amy to change deep patterns, including shifting her old go-to approach of “give me the pill, I’ve got sh*t to do”.
  
  
• Perimenopause as a kind of ‘pregnancy’ which prepares us for the rebirth of ourselves through the spiritual initiation of menopause.
  
  
• How to manage perimenopause symptoms  including exhaustion, irritability and anger, brain fog and the often overwhelming ‘motherload’ of care and responsibility, and still show up for our kids.

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Find out more about the Red School Menstruality Leadership programme: www.menstrualityleadership.com

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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: @red.school - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Amy Taylor Kabbaz: @amytaylorkabbaz - https://www.instagram.com/amytaylorkabbaz

Through their decades of sitting with women and people undergoing the menopause initiation, Alexandra and Sjanie have seen that no part of your life remains untouched by menopause, including your relationships with your loved ones and community. Everything needs to undergo a shift, however subtle, as you move into a greater sense of authority with clearer parameters about yourself. As Alexandra says, it’s called The Change for a reason.

Today we’re speaking to a guest who knows this to be true firsthand, and is generously sharing her experiences with us. Autumn Saunders is post-menopausal Menstruality and Menopause mentor at Red School and holds space on our Menopause: The Great Awakener course. 

Autumn is a mother, a healing artist, and embodied feminine leadership guide and the creatrix behind the Rhythmic Life Circle & MotherArts Sanctuary for Creativity & Wellbeing. Today we walk through the five phases of menopause that Alexandra and Sjanie teach in the Menopause: The Great Awakener course, exploring how all of her relationships transformed during her menopause.

We explore:

• The hardest parts of the first phase of menopause, Betrayal, in her intimate relationship, the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously deeply questioning her relationship whilst also enjoying it, and the core practice that saved her relationship
  
  
• How old traumas resurfaced throughout her menopause process, including understanding how Autumn’s relationship with her partner reflected her relationship with her father, and how they found her way back to trusting him, receiving his support and allowing him to protect her.
  
  
• Autumn’s keys to creating flow between her and her kids through menopause. 

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Join us for a our Menopause: The Great Awakener course - www.redschool.net/menopause

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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
Autumn Saunders: @wisewomanspirit - https://www.instagram.com/wisewomanspirit

Menopause, and the years running up to it, can be a time of real challenge and transformation. Without wise guidance and a framework to understand what’s happening, we can be left feeling lost, alone and crazy. 

Luckily, there are those who can serve as guides, like our guest today, Dr Danielle Arabena, who brings her extensive experience as a medical doctor and a shamanic healer to stand at what she calls the “crossroads and altars we stand before as women” including menstruation, birth, menopause, death, and our topics for today: perimenopause. 

Dr Danielle is a descendant of the Meriam Mer peoples in the Torres Strait. She is a GP and healer whose nurturing approach integrates evidence-based medical care with the profound wisdom of 'women's business' as seen through her Indigenous Knowledge lens.

We explore:

• How Danielle was guided as a young girl to give her blood back to the earth (which back then looked like soaking tampons in a bucket and pouring it onto her suburban garden).
  
  
• How women who have had ACES (adverse childhood experiences) have a more challenging experience of menopause and how to ride the deep initiations to meet our shadow selves.
  
  
• Perimenopause and menopause as a reorganising process where we are clarifying our legacy for future generations; whether that’s making the world a better and safer place, tending to our relationships with our kin, or doing quieter, more intimate, inner work. 

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Join us for our Menopause: The Great Awakener course - www.redschool.net/menopause

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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
Dr Danielle Arabena: @drdaniellearabena - https://www.instagram.com/drdaniellearabena/

It’s world menopause month, and we’re continuing the menopause conversation we began two weeks ago, where we explored how to navigate the dark night of the soul of the menopause process (it’s episode 166), and we’re continuing by looking at the powers that the menopause initiation can awaken in us, if we refuse to abandon ourselves during this betrayal phase of menopause.

In their book, Wise Power, Alexandra and Sjanie talk about menopause as being a pHd in power. When it is respected, honoured and dignified, the initiation of menopause can bring you to a place of deep peace within yourself. And even more than that, the menopause process can actually help you to grow new capacities, powers, and kinds of intelligence. It’s a huge learning curve - a massive upgrade in your skills, ready for your life’s third act.

In today’s conversation we’re looking at how these powers can change us personally, and through us, how they can change the world, including;

• How the current conversation about menopause is unfolding in the world, why there is so much suffering and what is missing.
  
  
• How to work with shifting energy levels in menopause, as a gateway to more discernment, empathy and authority. 
  
  
• How menopause enhances your imagination and intentional capacities as well as supporting you to potentise all that you do. 

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Join our free event: How Menopause Awakens Your Power - www.redschoolmenopause.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

Today on the podcast we’re exploring how menopause can be an initiation into greater self-love, self-compassion and self-mothering. This is our third conversation with  Chameli Gad, the founder of Awakening Women. Each year she’s come back here to generously share her menopause process, which unfolded throughout the pandemic and included the death of her son, and her divorce.

In our chat today, she explores the fruits of her menopause process, from the other side, and she is as honest about her current peace, ease and ecstasy as she was with her mid-initiation pain and suffering.

Chameli is a mystic and Goddess Wisdom Keeper. Rooted in earth honoring, devotional women’s spirituality and goddess-centered tantric yoga, she is especially appreciated for her love of mythology and storytelling as a key to spiritual awakening and embodiment.

We explore:

• What it means to ensure that your inner “mama is in the house” in menopause, in three different aspects: the witnessing mother, the nurturing mother and the guardian mother.
  
  
• Chameli’s ‘baby dolphin’ menopause dream and how it has radically transformed her capacity for self-compassion.
  
  
• What Chameli learned about boundaries in menopause, and how she moved from using boundaries as a way to control others, and instead as an act of leadership that arises from within us. 

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Join our free online event: Awaken The Power of Menopause - Oct 21st-23rd 2024 - www.redschoolmenopause.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
Chameli: @chameligad - https://www.instagram.com/chameligad

Many of us are turning up at menopause stressed, exhausted, overworked and under-nourished, often managing multiple care and work roles simultaneously. And then we hit the “death” moment of the menopause initiatory death and rebirth process. 

The challenges of the menopause initiation can often be compounded by key relationships ending, bereavement, or other extreme life changes. It can all form a kind of perfect storm that leaves us feeling shipwrecked.

Alexandra and Sjanie refer to this as “Betrayal”, the first of five phases in the psychospiritual process of menopause which they’ll explore in their upcoming course, Menopause: The Great Awakener. Today we unpack how the challenge here is to meet this great betrayal, this great dark night of the soul, and let yourself be undone without annihilating or abandoning yourself.

We explore:

• How your main task during this dark night is to dare to trust that the complicated messiness and the imperfections of the life you’ve lived to date is somehow the perfect alchemical mix for really stepping into who you are. 
  
  
• The big question that is being asked of you here: are you going to abandon yourself? When you find your way to stay with yourself, you can turn this process into a radical opening of self-acceptance and self-responsibility.
  
  
• The key self care practice to bring into the forefront of your life at this phase of menopause: saying no to others, and yes to yourself. 

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Join us for a free even on October 23rd: How Menopause Awakens Your Power - www.redschool.net/menopause

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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

What do you do when you’ve discovered the incredible power of menstrual cycle awareness, and you’re keen to share it with your loved ones, colleagues and community, but whenever you try to talk about it, you receive reactions that range from disinterest to disgust?

The truth is that menstrual shame is real, it is pervasive and overcoming it is a key part of restoring the power, beauty and magic of the menstrual cycle at the heart of our world. Luckily we are standing on the shoulders of giants here, like the menstrual trailblazer, Jane Bennett, who has been busting through the menstrual taboo for 40 years. 

Jane Bennett is social worker, researcher, writer and educator as well as the founder of the Chalice Foundation. In our first Menstruality podcast episode with Jane, we explored how to navigate create a positive menstrual culture, and what she  learned from gathering the stories of over 3000 women and girls about current attitudes to the menstrual cycle to write her book About Bloody Time: The Menstrual Revolution We Have to Have.

Today, we explore:

• The historical roots of menstrual shame in a patriarchal society, and the compassionate, smart ways that Jane overcomes it in her educational work.
  
  
• How Jane works with Brene Brown’s guidance around cultivating shame resilience, and the importance of loving presence and curiosity in the face of menstrual shame. 
  
  
• Jane’s top tips for how to support your loved ones to have an aha moment about the menstrual cycle so they can get onside and support you with your menstrual cycle awareness 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: @red.school (https://www.instagram.com/red.school)
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Jane Bennett: @chalicefoundation (https://www.instagram.com/chalicefoundation)

Menstrual Cycle Awareness gives us a direct line to our deep selves, to what we’re here for and what we most deeply love. 

As Alexandra and Sjanie say in Wild Power: “The journey to realizing your Calling, or purpose, is made possible by the process of initiation, which is encoded in your menstrual cycle. Initiatory change happens through the archetypal pattern of death and rebirth – which is exactly what we experience each month at Menstruation.”

Today’s conversation feels like a wild safari into the messy day-to-day reality of how the menstrual cycle helps us to live our Callings, with a woman who knows a thing or two about archetypal patterns.

Grace Winteringham is the co-founder of Patternity, a conscious Creative Organisation dedicated to sharing the positive power of pattern with the world. Along with her co-founder Anna Murray, she was named one of Evening Standard’s 1000 most influential people. She’s also a graduate of the Red School Menstruality Leadership Programme, and is currently immersed in a process of accelerated transformation as she navigates her own quest to follow her calling.

We explore:

• Grace’s journey from premenstrual rage and depression to feeling most at home in her inner autumn.
  
  
• The menstrual cycle as the fundamental pattern we live by. 
  
  
• How cycle awareness holds us through the natural process of the ebb and flow as we ‘learn to live by our own code’, and Grace’s story of navigating a confronting sense of deep uncertainty when she stepped back from Patternity after a recent experience of burnout. 

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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
Grace Winteringham @grace_winteringham - https://www.instagram.com/grace_winteringham