The Menstruality Podcast

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]

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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
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]

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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 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

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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
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

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

Have you ever had to show up in a big way on day one of your cycle and felt exposed, then - like me - totally exhausted afterwards? Today we’re exploring how menstrual cycle awareness can help you step up when you’re on your period; whether you have to do a big presentation at work, a speech at your best friend’s wedding, host a PTA meeting, or be visible in another way. 

A few days before we recorded this, Alexandra and Sjanie presented a menopause workshop at a festival, and Sjanie’s menstrual cycle set it up perfectly so that she would start her bleed late, on day 29, on that very morning.

We explore: 

• How Sjanie prepared for the event beforehand by creating space, calling in support and recognising the power of the creative and pre-bleed void.
  
  
• The pre-bleed, void superpowers that Sjanie channelled; including heightened intuition, trusting emergence, being in the unknown,
  
  
• The one thing that Alexandra and Sjanie prioritise more than anything else, in all their creative work. 

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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

Are you (or your friends or the people you work with) struggling with menstrual health challenges like irregular cycles, spotting or heavy bleeding, menstrual pain, PCOS and intense mood changes in the premenstrual phase? Would you love to understand how you could work with food and dietary shifts to create menstrual health?

Our guest today is Lisa Hendrickson-Jack, the author of The Fifth Vital Sign, and teaches women’s health professionals to use the menstrual cycle as a vital sign in their practices, so they can empower their clients to optimize their hormones, menstrual cycles. 

She is the co-author of Real Food for Fertility with Lily Nichols, which contains a wealth of information about how food can support cycle health and in today’s conversation Lisa shares her top tips for healing menstrual health challenges.

We explore:

• The dietary changes helped Lisa heal her period pain from fibroids, including a simple switch with her dairy consumption, reducing inflammatory foods and increasing green leafy vegetables.
  
  
• Why balancing our macronutrients (protein, fat and carbohydrates) is key to hormonal health, and how the calorie counting, breakfast-skipping culture hasn’t done any of us any favours.
  
  
• The foods to include, eat more of, or go easy on if you’re experiencing intense mood changes in the premenstrual phase (hint: a real game changer for PMS is ensuring you’re having enough protein). 

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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
Lisa Hendrickson Jack: @fertilityfriday - https://www.instagram.com/fertilityfriday

Have you ever noticed that your intuitive sense of knowing is heightened when you are premenstrual? Today we’re exploring the radical honesty that can be invoked in inner autumn, asking the question: what if our unadulterated, fierce, premenstrual truth speaking is actually exactly the medicine our world needs at this time? 

My guest is Maya Luna, an artist, channel and creator of The Venus Path™, a modern adaptation of an ancient Fertility Goddess Spiritual Path that works with Sensuality, The Body, The Deep Heart, Passionate Energy and the Incarnate Human Experience. 

Today she shares how she navigates what she calls the 'dark goddess truth serum' that pulses through her in her premenstrual phase, and how she is learning to skillfully and artfully share it in the world. 

We explore:

• How we can feel truth or untruth in our bodies and somehow “smell dishonesty” when we’re in premenstrual truth-telling mode.
  
  
• The 40s as the inner autumn of our menstruating years, where our premenstrual powers can come online even more, and how the world can react when women stop playing nice and being “good girls” and start bringing the power of our sacred truth in this life phase
  
  
• The toxic femininity we see in our culture and ourselves today; the fawning, people pleasing, being a doormat, not speaking up, letting people use and abuse us, and how our premenstrual capacity to see through bullshit is a powerful antidote.

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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
Maya Luna: @thevenuspath - https://www.instagram.com/thevenuspath

Today we’re exploring Black cyclical wisdom through the lens of the life story of an extraordinary woman who left a profound legacy of cyclical heart and body intelligence, with Dr Cre Dye, who serves as the Menstruality Justice and Inclusion Educator at Red School. 

Dr. Cre has served her local, national, and international communities with heart, mind and body activism for over 25 years as a mental health therapist, yoga teacher/trainer and university professor.

This is part two of a series of conversations with Cre about the cyclical wisdom she received from her Grandmothers. In episode 138: Indigenous Cycle Wisdom and Menstrual Rituals, we heard the story of Cre’s first nations Granny, and today we’re hearing what she received from Mama, her Black grandmother.

We hear how Mama grew up picking cotton in Mississippi, was widowed young, then left an abusive relationship and travelled alone in the 1960s with her eight children all the way to Missouri, to go on to foster over 60 children and become a force of love in her community. And how, through every single moment of adversity she faced as a Black woman, she found her way to claim rest, rise up and embody hope in the face of hate. 

We explore:

• Menstrual Cycle Awareness as the “sacred study of me”, how we are all sacred texts, and our cyclical wisdom is the words on the page.
  
  
• What Cre learned from her interviews series with Black women and their menstrual cycles, about how we can all reclaim the cyclical wisdom that we’ve known all along.
  
  
• The ongoing medical racism that Black women and Women of Colour face, including the myth that Black women have higher pain thresholds, why Black women are two to three times more likely to develop fibroids, and 50% less likely to be diagnosed with endometriosis than white women, and what we can all do about it. 

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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
Dr Cre Dye: @credyeyoga - https://www.instagram.com/credyeyoga

How do you feel about inner summer, or the ovulatory phase of the cycle? For many in our community, it’s the easiest and most joyful part of the cycle, but many also find it to be challenging and confronting.  

Today Alexandra and Sjnaie respond to your questions about inner summer and ovulation, including; how to approach physical symptoms around ovulation, such as headaches / migraines, acne and nausea, how to stay grounded and focused amidst the big energy of ovulation and why you should never put your inner summer self in charge of your schedule! 

We explore:

• How to know when you’re in inner summer, how long ‘should’ it last (and why there are no shoulds when it comes to cycle tracking).
  
  
• The connection between rest at menstruation and fulfillment at ovulation, and how inner winter restedness unlocks inner summer powers.
  
  
• How to manage a sense of disconnection from yourself in inner summer, particularly if you’re doing a lot of caring roles or mothering in your life. 

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Receive Red School's 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

For a decade, our guest, birth doula, menstrual coach Jules Alma has been mapping her Yoni. It’s soothed and regulated her nervous system, healed her pain during sex and brings her back to her centre. She even uses it after she has attended a birth to regulate after all the beauty and intensity of the experience. 

Yoni is the sanskrit word referring to our vaginas and vulvas, and in our conversation we track the history of the practice of yoni mapping, from Taoism in ancient China, to Tantra in ancient India to modern day pelvic physiotherapy. 

Jules explains how healing it can be, on all levels, to create an intimate relationship with this part of our bodies and live what Jules calls a 'yoni-led' life. 

She’s also a graduate of the Red School Menstruality Leadership Programme and it was wonderful to hear how the course has supported her to live into her calling to guide women to find healing and joy through the way they bleed, birth, pleasure, and nourish their bodies.

We explore:

• The shame, trauma and collective wounding that prevents many of us from cultivating a relationship with our vulvas and vaginas, and the powerful healing that can take place when we reconnect to this sacred part of our bodies.
  
  
• How Jules was at war with her body and her yoni for years, blowing past boundaries, experiencing health symptoms and feeling pain during sex, before she began to reclaim her rites of passage as a woman, and learned how to map her yoni.
  
  
• A step-by-step guide to beginning your own yoni mapping practice, as well as how Jules used the practice to soothe menstrual cramps. 

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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
Jules Alma: @jules____alma - https://www.instagram.com/jules____alma