Episode 192. Part Two: Beginner’s Guide to Menstrual Cycle Awareness (Q+A with Alexandra & Sjanie)

Sophie:
Welcome to the Menstruality Podcast, where we share inspiring conversations about the power of menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause. This podcast is brought to you by Red School, where we are training the menstruality leaders of the future. I’m your host, Sophie Jane Hardy, and I’m often joined by Red School’s founders, Alexandra and Sjanie, as well as an inspiring group of pioneers, activists, changemakers, and creatives. Together, we explore 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.

Hey, how’s it going? Thank you so much for tuning in today. In today’s episode, we’re continuing our exploration of the fundamentals of menstrual cycle awareness through some brilliant questions that have come in from our community—questions like:

• What to do if your menstrual cycle doesn’t look like the archetypal cycle?
• How to track your cycle if you have menstrual health challenges or irregular cycles?
• How to talk about cycle awareness with your loved ones?

The golden thread running through every response from Sjanie and Alexandra today is what they call the big red rule of menstrual cycle awareness: your own unique experience of your cycle is the most important thing—with all its quirks, strangeness, and challenges.

As Alexandra shares in the conversation, your job as a student of your cycle is to stay loyal to exactly what you are experiencing. In other words, there are no shoulds with menstrual cycle awareness. There’s no perfect cycle to achieve. The practice is a homecoming to yourself in a world that conditions us to look outside ourselves for answers. The power of the cycle rests in your experience of your own body and trusting that experience.

So, let’s get started with this Q&A with Alexandra and Sjanie.

Good morning, loves. It’s great to be with you. I’m really excited for part two of our Beginner’s Guide to Menstrual Cycle Awareness. We’ll be answering lots of questions that have come in today. But before we dive in, let’s start as we always do—with a cycle check-in. We could even do a quick demonstration of the check-in, like we did in the first episode in this series.

Sjanje, do you want to kick us off?

Sjanje:
I can do that!
So, looking at the four facets of our experience in the present moment: physical sensations, emotional landscape, state of mind, and energy levels... I’m with you—it’s day 12 for me. I feel so alive, like a lightness and rushing sensations through my core. My breathing is fast. Emotionally, I notice a mix of excitement and an emotional charge, which I’d describe as a creative surge.

My mind feels very wide, very expansive—almost altered—and I feel quite high on this energy. There’s a real expansion and a fast-moving surge of energy today.

Sophie:
Hmm, that’s so funny. We’re on the same cycle day, and my check-in feels very similar. Physically, I feel zingy—there’s energy coming out through my eyes; they feel really wide. Emotionally, I feel robust, very happy and joyful—effortlessly joyful. My mind is moving fast, and I have loads of energy.

I’m really enjoying the feeling of my feet on the ground. That’s what I want to stay focused on during this conversation—bum on the seat, feet on the ground. We’re not rockets blasting off into space; we’re humans having a conversation.

Alexandra:
Oh Sophie, I love that image. I’m not a rocket—I’m a little human sitting here. It’s day 27, the day of the moon, and I’m moving into the dark of the moon over the next couple of days. This is where I go into the ecstasy of the void.

Physically, I feel some wellness, but I’m weary and sleepy—there’s a kind of sweet tiredness. I’m expansive, stepping into lunar liminality, which makes me feel ecstatic and less boundaried. I’m laughing because we choose power cards before these calls, and I got Contain. It feels like the universe is saying, “Just contain yourself. Come in, discern.”

I feel like a stern taskmaster has taken me in hand, telling me to ground myself, gather myself, be present, and hold it. Otherwise, I might float off—though there’s a kind of wickedness in that floating-off because, as you know, I have this playful spirit. I could just rocket off on totally random things and riff and play. I don’t have boundaries around that, really.

I even had a sudden thought I could end up corpsing—which is when actors laugh so hard they break character. I’m supposed to be a serious teacher of menstruality, but honestly, anything could set off that wicked muscle in me!

Sophie: Now this is why cycle awareness is so helpful when you're working together as a team, because when one of you is on one side of the cycle, the other one's on another side of the cycle and you can help each other and support each other.
So I'm gonna bring my day 12 energy to contain you Alexandra Pope and put some boundaries around you as much as I would like us to corpse. That does sound fun. And just for anyone that doesn't know about the power cards that Alexandra was mentioning, we have at Red school these, uh, beautiful set of round cards that you can use as a kind of oracle deck, which speak to the different powers of the different phases of the cycle.
So that's what she's referring to. And, but just to walk us into this conversation, I want to share a bit about [00:09:00] what we spoke about in part one, to set the stage here. So. In part one of our beginner's guide to menstrual cycle awareness, we explored what menstrual cycle awareness is and how it differs from tracking your cycle for fertility awareness.
We went through step by step how to do a cycle check-in, and then we demonstrated it like we just did. Now, it's quite helpful to hear someone, you know, do it and see how it's practically applied. And then we also looked at how to chart what you are finding from your daily cycle check-ins, how your physical self, your emotions, your um, mind and your energy are shifting throughout the cycle month.
And our focus today is to go deeper into this through the lens of questions that have come in from the community about practicing cycle awareness. And the first one that we're gonna look at is from Grace. [00:10:00] So we have loads of questions. Let's see how many we get through. But the first one is from Grace and she asks a series of three questions that I'm gonna bring all of them together 'cause I think they're all kind of needed and I can't wait to hear what you say.
So she says, what is the archetypal cycle and how does it work? How is the archetypal cycle different to the menstrual cycle? And how does my menstrual cycle fit into this archetypal pattern and what happens if it doesn't?

Sjanie: What a great lineup of questions. Yeah. So maybe to start to answer this, I'm going to, um, take a little step back and just pick up the thread from our last conversation. For people who don't know what Grace is referring to when she talks about the archetypal cycle. [00:11:00] So in our last conversation, as you said Sophie, we spoke about the practice of menstrual cycle awareness, which is about you connecting to your very unique, very individual experience of the menstrual cycle day by day and tracking that over time.
And we spoke about how when you do this present moment, check-in with yourself and how when you gather that data by charting it, you build this body of self-knowledge. You start to get to know your rhythm of power, how the cycle, um, influences changes, um, through the menstrual month. And that accumulation of self knowledge is, oh, it's so [00:12:00] precious.
And we touched briefly on how you can, um, begin to use that new awareness of yourself and that new layer of understanding of yourself as a cyclical being. We touched on how you can start to use that. We mentioned, um, this thing about it potentially becoming like your own personal weather forecast system.

Sophie: Mm-hmm.

Sjanie: Where you can predict, uh, to, you know, a greater or lesser degree what your inner atmospherics are gonna be like. In the coming month, um, in different days or different weeks of your cycle. So in other words, what your, um, strengths are likely to be, what you might find more difficult, um, what your needs might be and so on.
And then with that information, you can start to organize your life. You know, when you're scheduling things in, you can do it in accordance [00:13:00] with that information so that you start to plan things that really suit the place you're in, in your cycle. And this, um, is a beautiful way of just taking care of yourself, but it's also a great way to capitalize on the different powers and strengths and capacities that you have in the different places in your cycle.
So this is really, um, useful. Now there's another layer that you can go to with this self knowledge that you've built up. And, um, this is where the archetypal cycle teachings come into it because they are a means of, um, even deeper understanding into what's happening for you through the menstrual month.
These archetypal [00:14:00] teachings of the menstrual cycle in a way, give you insight into yourself. They give context for what's going on, and they become this, um, kind of big sister, like a guide you can, uh, call on and lean on and, um, get kind of guidance from. So, really, really. Useful, and I almost want to say essential when you're practicing cycle awareness is to, um, grow your understanding of this, of these archetypal teachings and these archetypal teachings, um, are what Alexandra and I have been doing together over the last, uh, ever many years. 40, right? For 40 ish. It keeps, it keeps growing. Would you know, as time passes [00:15:00] several decades.

Sophie: Yeah.

Sjanie: Yeah. Several decades. So what we've been doing is actually restoring this archetypal story of menstruality through, um, doing exactly what we're suggesting. You know, you all do through practicing menstrual cycle awareness.

Sophie: That's how we have. Recovered and restored this information. So listening to our own experience and being informed by that, but also through listening to hundreds of women's stories, listening to people who have a menstrual cycle and their experience. And then we've pieced together this timeless archetypal patterning that is within menstruality, and that's allowed us to be able to create these maps, these charts, these descriptions of the full power and possibility of this spiritual path and practice of menstruality. Um, and, [00:16:00] and we've called this the menstruality canon. It's sort of the, you know, the holding of all these archetypal teachings.

Alexandra: It's also been informed by the great archetypal cyclic round that is present in all of life. And, you know, it's this undeniable pattern that we see in everything of, uh, moving from nothingness, death, birth, and the, uh, expansion of energy in the first half of the cycle. So I'm thinking of the seasons of the year. So we borrowed those words, seasons to talk about the inner seasons of our cycle. So there is this pattern of, um, birth or rebirth, uh, with each cycle and a rising of energy and [00:17:00] expansion of energy. A pinnacle coming to a pinnacle at high summer. And then. Uh, the withdrawing of that energy slowly, that brings us into autumn and into winter again. And, um, we have that same pattern played out in a day. So this is kind of the timeless pattern that is organizing our lives at all levels that actually is keeping us alive. Uh, it is, uh, this, it's a cycle of sustainability. It's, it's the cycle of life we're describing here, and we have that same patterning. Uh, uh, we, we've sort of articulated that same patterning, um, within our description of the menstrual cycle, our menstrual, our archetypal menstrual cycle map. Um, so. We have let ourselves be informed [00:18:00] by the, uh, timeless archetypal cycle and then our own deep embodied experience and the deep listening to others. And it's like, the best way I can describe it, it is like listening. I'll just say listening to the listening. It's like there's a, um, as as, as I listened, when I think back, way back, before I met Sjanie, but then when as Sjanie and I together as we reflected together and took in together, it was as though, um, we got to see through. To this archetypal menstrual cycle pattern. It was like that was hidden behind what women were experiencing. And it's something as simple as, I'll never forget this rule came to one of my very first workshops in Sydney Menstrual health workshops around those days. And she had traveled about two and a half, [00:19:00] three hours to be there. And, um, and her, her symptom, her problem was that she lied to her family every month that she had a migraine so she could step away from them when she bled. Now she did not know why she did that. And basically she came to this workshop to find out why do I do that? You know, I, I invent a migraine headache so I can just go off on my own. She had a husband and I think two sons and. I mean, it makes me almost want to tear up now thinking about that, you know, there, I heard the archetypal imperative in her lived experience. And this is what happened over and over again through the apparent symptom people were experiencing the trouble they were experiencing Sjanie, and I could hear the archetypal, uh, patterning that was trying to happen, [00:20:00] that wasn't being recognized. That wasn't being supported. And that's, you know, that's a a,a very profound level of the work for us, isn't it, Sjanie? And so the archetypal patterning has risen through all our experiences, and that's what we've named. So we have, there is an archetypal pattern, and of course we all have our version of it.

Sjanie: Yeah. Archetypal energies, as you've described, Alexandra, are um, universal. They're perennial, they're in everything and, and through the menstrual cycle and through many other means. But through the menstrual cycle specifically, we have the possibility of a very personal connection to this archetypal patterning and certain aspects of it will be very accessible, relatable to us. And [00:21:00] other aspects of it will be more of an enigma and less. We, we've, we've got less sort of experience or connection with. Um, and that is, um, really where the kind of inner work of menstruality begins. And what I love about these archetypal teachings. Is they describe the full power and possibility of the menstrual cycle. And so they give you a way of understanding what you are being invited into each month. And more than that, they, um, help you to kind of know how to access that. They're, they're both the kind of guide and, and the means. So it's very, very beautiful and, and, and also understanding how that then [00:22:00] plays out through the whole journey from menarche to menopause and beyond. Yeah. Really, really helpful.

Sophie: Okay, thank you. So to Grace's third question then, how do our menstrual cycles fit into this archetypal pattern? And what if they don't?

Alexandra: It's not about fitting into the pattern. It is about having the experience you are having of the cycle. So you are discovering how you, you are discovering your experience of your menstrual cycle, how, uh, it's showing up for you. And that's the very, very first step. So we have this one big red rule, which is your experience trumps everything we might say now, your menstrual cycle, your experience of your menstrual cycle is governed by many things, your overall [00:23:00] health, um, your nature, kind of nature. You have your levels of sensitivity, the state of your nervous system, uh, the physical environment you live in, you know, the environmental toxins you're exposed to, um, your personal history and the kind of perhaps trauma you're holding in your body. Um, all sorts of things. So the menstrual cycle is this exquisite system of, uh, sens sensitivity system, sensing system where it's giving you. Feed- insight and feedback on yourself, but you're also equally responding. It's, it's responding to what's happening around you. It's, in other words, it's a stress sensitive system.

So in practicing menstrual cycle awareness, following our big red rule, you keep an utter fidelity to what you are experiencing. You’re not trying to fit into the archetypal cycle. You’re not looking at our map and going, Hey, I should be feeling rising energy right now, and actually I’m not, or I’m supposed to be feeling on top of the world, but I just feel as flat as a pancake.

You are not supposed to be doing anything. You are simply experiencing — having the experience you are having — and you are getting data about yourself, about your own nature and your energy levels and so on. So it’s so important, first of all, to root into your experience. Absolute, non-negotiable. That’s number one.

And where you find yourself deviating from the archetypal cycle — this is not a reason to judge yourself. The archetypal cycle is not a judgment on how you should experience it. There are no shoulds here. There is only this glorious information system, if you like, that you’re getting about yourself.

Sjanie: Yeah. Back to the big sister idea, the archetypal cycle is this cycle kind of surrounding you like this big, unconditionally loving sister that is holding you. And so I really — I like to give the example of one of the archetypal teachings, which is a map. We teach three maps, and one of them is called the Map of the Inner Seasons, which I would say is the most popular. It’s very accessible.

And this map of the inner seasons, as with all the maps, you can think of them as giving you a really good lay of the land — understanding the kind of contours that you can expect. They point you to where there are treasures that can be had, and also the map reveals where there are potential pitfalls and places where you could get lost or run into trouble.

So these maps are really, really good guidance for helping you understand yourself and to really get feedback on what you are needing to care for, what will support you to deepen into who you are ultimately. Because that’s what menstrual cycle awareness is about. It’s about you becoming more yourself.

Sophie: And the best place, I would say, to learn about these maps is the Cycle Power course that you’ve created. It’s the most comprehensive menstrual cycle awareness course that you’ve ever created. And it walks you through the Map of the Inner Seasons and guides you to understand your own experience of it.

So that’s the place to go to. And I’ll drop a link to that in the show notes and I’ll share more about it in the middle of the episode as well.

A question came in from Becca, which is also relevant. Cycle Power is actually the only place that you teach about the crossover days as well. And this was one of the questions that came in from Becca.

She said, How can I tap more into the nuances and the subtleties of the crossover days? These I’m finding to be key, but also really difficult to notice. Could you say a little bit about the crossover days?

Alexandra: Yes. The crossover days are the name we’ve given to the shift from one season to another. Now, sometimes that shift is smooth and you don’t really notice it, and other times there can be quite a distinct something that happens in your being as it’s often a kind of wobble or disturbance.

You know, you were just doing fine, cruising along, and then suddenly the ground goes from underneath you and you feel, oof. I mean, that’s pretty classic for the crossover from your season of inner summer — which is the ovulatory phase of the cycle — into the premenstruum, the inner autumn. That’s a classic sort of clunk moment, isn’t it?

So some crossovers can be very distinctive for us, and other crossovers much more subtle. And there’s a whole kind of teaching held within each of these crossovers, which we unpack in great detail in Cycle Power. And when you learn to sense, feel, and meet those crossovers, it just brings another layer or level of coherence to your experience of the cycle — of insight, actually — and ultimately greater coherence, healing, and flow when you can catch them.

Coming to Becca’s question, when I first read it, I just wanted to say slow down, but of course we can’t always do that all the time — otherwise, you’re going at a snail’s pace through the whole cycle when you’ve got stuff to do in the world. But I imagine you’re noticing some crossovers and there are some you’re not noticing. So I would prioritize those by going, Okay, I never really clocked that crossover from the inner spring to the inner summer, really. I want to see if there is something there. And it may be very subtle. Then I’d make that the focus of your cycle awareness practice for that month. I’d take one crossover a month to focus on, if there’s one that’s caught your attention, and try to create more spaciousness around that time in the cycle.

Of course, this is predicated on having some degree of regularity in your cycle so you can roughly know those crossover days. You can estimate, It might be around day 9 or 10 of my cycle, and just ring-fence those days in your diary. So when you look at your diary, you think, Ah, we’re coming up on those days, I’m going to pace myself. So really it’s about bringing more presence, more awareness, and that means just slowing down a bit to bring in another level of sight. I want to say we have our kind of everyday sight and knowing, but you can drop into another level of sensing.When I say sight, I mean if you go a little more slowly, you may start to catch that clunk — you’re changing gear. Sometimes we change gears smoothly, other times we’re a bit clunky when we change gears.

Sophie: Okay, I am just gonna pause the conversation for a moment to share a couple of invitations. Firstly, if you'd like a copy of the Red School menstrual tracking chart, you can download it for free at redschool.net/chart. And if you'd like to create a meaningful menstrual cycle awareness practice, or recommit to your existing practice, or simply be immersed in, surrounded in a cycle-aware community as you continue to deepen your connection to your cycle, you can join the self-paced Cycle Power course. As I mentioned earlier, you can find out all about the course, the curriculum, see some reviews and testimonials at redschool.net/cyclepower, and here’s some feedback from Rebecca who recently completed the course. She says, "It was really great to be able to do it at my own pace and in sync with my own cycle. I had some really strong visualizations come to me during each of the inner season medicine circles, gifting me with some incredibly helpful insights about my relationship with each of my inner seasons, and I felt a real intimacy grow. I'm blown away by the power of menstrual cycle awareness and how it's already transformed my life so much." Thank you for that feedback, Rebecca. Okay, let's get back to the conversation with Alexandra and Sjanie.

One of the things you said earlier, Alexandra, was that there are no shoulds with this practice of menstrual cycle awareness. But one question I hear a lot, and that came in from Donna, who’s one of the graduates in our community, but she hears this from her students, which is, should I bleed on the full moon or the new moon?

Alexandra: Uh, there are no shoulds. I think, uh, do you know, once upon a time before there were electric lights, way back when we lived very, very, very, very, very, very simply and we were governed by the moon and the sun. And I think it’s quite possible that there was a rhythm to how women bled when they were living very close to the land, very simple lifestyle. However, we do not live in that world. Um, no, you should not bleed. Or do anything at any time you, it happens when it happens in your cycle. And what’s really interesting to note is where the moon is at. It’s quite fun to pace the moon with your menstrual cycle because you’ll notice perhaps how the moon affects your experience. So I vividly remember my experience of bleeding on a dark moon and then bleeding on a full moon. Oh my god. Mark. Talk about rockets wanting to take off.

Sophie: Yeah, I’m noticing it now. ’Cause now I am, uh, my inner summer peak, well, about to peak on day 12, but the moon is going dark and I’m noticing, well, that’s evoking in me. Yeah, it’s fascinating that clocking them both.

Alexandra: Yeah, exactly. Um, so y again, I just want to say the big red rule: you chart your experience. So the power of the cycle rests in you experiencing your own cycle. It does not rest in trying to be something you are not.

Sjanie: And to take that one step further, the power rests in you trusting in the rightness of the cycle experience you are having.

Sophie: Yes. And this is from Sally. It’s not really a question, but it’s a beautiful underlining. So I feel moved to bring it in. Um, she says, although you emphasize the big red rule, I still got caught up in believing the archetypes were oughts, as I didn’t understand my own authority at that point and had always looked outside of myself for the answers. Therefore, for the overwhelmed, non-archetypal beginner, I’d say you can’t emphasize the big red rule enough.

Sjanie: Yeah. Yeah, great. She’s another one of our graduates. She is getting it.

Sophie: Okay, so next question. This is another one from Grace. She says, are my menstrual symptoms welcome here? And who can help me fix them?

Sjanie: Yeah, that is a very good and sort of honest question. ’Cause I, I realize that when we’re struggling with some aspect of our health, um, it’s very easy to feel that we are somehow wrong. And I know it’s very easy to fall into this idea that unless I’m experiencing a perfect menstrual cycle or, um, you know, not having menstrual pain or so on, then I can’t do this practice. I’m sort of not good enough. Or, um, I’m outside of what’s possible. Yeah, so I think the big red rule is a really good thing to come back to here because, so directly to answer your question, your menstrual symptoms and suffering are very, very welcome. And in fact, they belong here. They are very integral to this practice of menstrual cycle awareness. And we believe menstrual cycle awareness is very integral to the healing that can happen with these menstrual symptoms.

Alexandra: I really, I feel very strongly about this. I feel quite moved, stirred, actually, um, because I really want to revision how we look at symptoms. There’s, uh, you, you, you know what we have been taught for centuries to deny the reality of the cycle. And I, I, and this is how I viewed my own pain, it felt like the cycle was, um, screaming out about the lost power. The loss of this extraordinary power. So when I encounter symptoms, what I’m hearing is, um, power that is and, and, and bear with me because people will personalize this and make it about, oh, I’m not in touch with the power. No, no, no, no, no. Your experience is illuminating the cost of us not valuing. Not just the menstrual cycle folks. Actually cyclical consciousness. Now really hear me on this. I feel very fierce about it. ’Cause remember, yes, we are getting feedback about our personal overall health and I got lots of great feedback about my body through my symptoms. But I very joyfully and deliberately decided to see, and I see this for every person, that our symptoms are the powers of the cycle wanting to be known, but are coming out symptoms. So they are alerting us to what is missing in the field. They’re a great warning sign for all of us on all sorts of levels, not just about the power of the menstrual cycle itself, but also because our hormonal system is feedback about the levels of toxicity in the environment. And I, I always saw the healing of my body and my determination to be sort of very loud about its toxicity in the environment. That’s in fact affecting me here as well. That my actions were, uh, I saw all our individual actions of healing as activism for the world, not just my own body, because for me to be well. Um, I was the canary in the mineshaft alerting us on to this power in all sorts of levels. And, and you know, my wellness is dependent also on the world changing as well. So my healing is activism for the world. So all your symptoms. I want everyone who’s suffering with menstrual cycle awareness to feel like they have a deep home at Red School. And that in your meeting of your symptoms and, you know, regardless of whether you can heal that pain or not, isn’t that radical, regardless of whether you heal it or not, that your act of claiming your menstrual experience is serving us all.

Sophie: Thanks Alexandra. Yeah, so for anyone listening who is dealing with menstrual pain, endometriosis, PCOS, PMS, PMDD, irregular cycles, infertility challenges, any menstrual challenges, you are a hundred percent welcome here in this practice. It is for you. And these healing journeys can take time. I know this personally, we’ve spoken about it in our episode, which I’ll link to in the show notes, about how menstrual cycle awareness can help with health challenges. Alexandra, we had a good yak about it, didn’t we? Our decade-long journeys.

There’s a question from Mercy, which is a bit of an extension of this, but it feels important to bring in. She says, a question I find myself asking, what happens if I believe in the power of the cycle, rest during menstruation, try my best to nourish myself, but still have menstrual troubles? On one hand, when I go to the doctors, they don’t find anything wrong. On the other hand, part of me gets tired with the subtle suggestion that these things happen because I don’t love my cycle.

‍Alexandra:
Ah, I remember versions of that for myself—mercy, or having that loaded on me and my healing journey. Not just with menstrual problems, but with other health issues I was dealing with. When I spoke earlier about the many influences on our menstrual experience—environmental pollution, diet, nature, etc.—all these elements matter.

Yes, dealing with having an impeccable diet or reducing all the environmental pollutants in your life is essential for healing, and will make some difference. My hope is that they did for me—they made a profound difference. But I also want to say there is, along with all those things, an element of mystery. The unknown. Mercy here.

So, I have always chosen not to take my symptoms personally, but still take personal responsibility as best I can for them. I have chosen deliberately not to see them as a failure in any way, but rather as an invitation into connection with myself. Also, as activism. As I said earlier, through the healing of my body, I'm serving something in the world.

If you're still struggling, I want to say that your healing depends on all of us healing. It's a collective project. It's so important not to carry the burden of everything on yourself. Of course, this personal inner work has helped me grow and learn so much about my shadow side through confronting my symptoms. But I will never, ever pathologize myself or say that I am a failure or not enough. I want to share that message with you.

Sophie:
Hmm. Helpful words, thank you Alexandra. I’m really excited because I get the privilege of having several conversations with you in the coming weeks about different menstrual health challenges people face, and how menstrual cycle awareness can support healing.

So, stay tuned! We’ll be talking a lot more over the coming weeks about different health challenges.

A really cool question came in from Manu, which I feel we could talk about for hours: How can I talk to my partner about my menstrual cycle awareness practice?

Sjanje:
I love that question because we’ve been talking about menstrual cycle awareness as somewhat private—something you do in your inner life. But sharing it with others deepens and expands the practice, creating amazing connection and understanding between people.

There are lots of ways to approach this. One helpful way is using the “map” of the inner seasons to explain how you shift and change through the menstrual month. It’s a relatable way to give your partner a window into your world, letting them draw on their own experience of cycles and seasons to get a sense of what you’re going through.

You can use the shorthand of the seasons to let them know where you are and when you’re moving from one season to another. This becomes part of your way of checking in with each other, asking how you both are doing.

This isn’t a one-time conversation, but an ongoing unfolding dialogue over time. It’s you getting to know your cycle alongside your partner, and they start to observe you externally as you observe yourself internally. They’ll notice little habits or indicators that tell them which season you’re in.

Sophie:
Yeah, I’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but what really helped me bring my cycle awareness into life with Ade—and now with our family—is putting my crossover days into our shared calendar.

So on days one or two of my bleed, I put day 7, day 14, day 21, and day 28. It’s a shorthand for Ade to know roughly where I’ll be—between day 7 and 21 I’ll be fairly robust, and by day 21 we know to shift gears.

No offense, Ade, not rudimentary at all—you’ve been super supportive! But this shorthand works.

And this idea extends beyond partners—workplace colleagues, close friends. My best friend, a gay man who doesn’t menstruate, is fascinated by mine. He and his partner always ask what day I’m on and how I’m feeling. He really cares for me at this next level because of that.

Alexandra:
I actually remember a friend of mine who had no shame about menstruating and used to walk into her workplace and say, “I’m menstruating today,” because she saw it as a celebration. She saw menstruation as this wonderful, celebratory moment.

She worked for a counseling organization, so maybe that helped, but it was such a radical way of breaking the ice.

There are more low-key ways to bring this into the workplace, too.

Sophie:
Yeah, like just telling your supervisor or manager so they can be tracking it and supporting you.

‍AAlexandra:
Or your work buddy, or, you know—

Sophie:
Yeah, yeah. We did a great conversation with Dr. Lara Owen about the menstrual cycle and menopause in the workplace, actually, that people can look up. And I’m also thinking of a couple of episodes if you are really interested in exploring how to practice menstrual cycle awareness with your partner.

We had a conversation with one of our graduates, Lucy Peach, and her partner Richard. They went into it very generously; they shared so generously and it was so funny as well. And actually, we all cried. So there were a lot of emotions going on in that episode, but they spoke about their sort of cycle of life together.

Then I did an interview with two women, Sophia and Gemma, who are in a lesbian relationship, and they spoke about their practice of tracking—actually their menopause process together. So just a couple of resources there.

Sjanje:
Really good. And just back to the workplace thing, if you are somebody who wants to bring cycle awareness into your workplace, that’s something we offer at Red School—bringing cycle awareness education to the workplace. Because having everyone in the workplace taught about the cycle and understanding it will immediately make space for these kinds of conversations to happen more easily. So that’s also a way to introduce it.

Sophie:
Yeah. I want a world where every single workplace is menstrual cycle aware—yes, please.

Okay, next question. Are you ready for the next one, you two?

Alexandra:
Mm-hmm.

Sophie:
Quick fire. So this is from Libe and she says, “I’m a pre- and postnatal personal trainer and I think it could benefit my profession and the many women I work with. I’d specifically like to know ways women could change their strength training and cardiovascular training around their cycles and ways women can change their eating styles around different phases of their cycle.”

Sjanje:
Yeah, good question. I love it, and I love that there has been some research that’s actually gone into this, which is really interesting. What we would say is it’s ultimately a very personal and individual thing, and this is where the practice of menstrual cycle awareness comes into it.

So I would encourage you as a personal trainer to have the women you’re working with track their menstrual cycle and track it in relation to the kind of training they’re doing, how it feels on their body, the effect it has, how they feel afterwards, and to also really note how they feel before the training that they do and what they feel they’re needing before the training. This helps really plug them into their own body awareness and self-understanding, to gather their own very personal data on this so that you can help them create a very customized, personalized health and fitness program.

And the same applies to eating. What menstrual cycle awareness does is give us or helps us develop this capacity of deep listening to ourselves, which then connects us with what we’re needing and actually noticing the effect that food is having on our body.

So, yeah, a bit like the cycle awareness in the workplace. I mean, I would find it very hard to exercise in a way that was really kind, supportive, and effective for my body if I wasn’t practicing cycle awareness. I changed the way I move throughout the menstrual month to really lean into the cycle and its guidance.

Alexandra:
I, um, at a more impersonal level, there are actually people—and this is not our expertise—who teach nutrition and the cycle very specifically, tending to the hormones of the different parts of the cycle and how to support them.

So yes, there is research that’s been done and people who teach that. Equally, there’s research on exercise. Actually, just the simple thing of having high-intensity exercise but then taking a break—athletes have very tough rigorous programs, but they’re also finding that taking a beat, like stopping not doing it at that high pace, is essential for maintaining their levels.

I’m reminded of someone who came to a workshop of mine years ago in Sydney who ran a training center and she loathed the menstrual cycle. It was a long story. Anyway, she came to my workshop and fell in love with this, thought, “Oh my God, I have to,” and she changed her whole relationship with her understanding of cycles in herself and her body.

She was a real “power over” person and she took this back, lock, stock, and barrel, into her training organization. She had a lot of male trainers—going to big Australian folks, just cracked me up—and she basically gave them instructions to find out when a woman came for training, there was a phrase they used like “I’m in my red tent,” and the trainer would go, “Okay, got it,” and organize slightly different training for that day.

So it can be just as simple as that to start with. Because it takes time to build up your relationship with your clients and to know where they are—that’s what Sjanie described as kind of the ideal, because we are all quite unique in that sense throughout the whole cycle.

But as a rule of thumb, menstruation? No, no push. Just something very chill like yin yoga, frankly.

Sophie:
I think there were a couple of articles a few years ago about different women’s football teams really taking menstrual cycle awareness seriously to see how things are shifting. Okay. Amazing. I feel like we've covered so much. There are a couple of other questions. One of them is what does the practice look like if you're post-menopausal—from Anne-Marie—and another one from Manu who said, what happens to my inner seasons when I'm pregnant? And does pregnancy also correspond to a season? And although we don't have chance to explore those two now, we do, we are planning to have conversations about both of those topics, right?

Sjanie: Mm-hmm. Yeah, they deserve their own entire episode minimum.

Sophie: And for now, around the pregnancy one, I did a great conversation with one of our faculty, Jady Mountjoy, where she guided me through my pregnancy through the lens of the inner seasons, and it was fantastic. And she shared so much, a wealth of information in that one. So I'll drop that link in the show notes.

Well, thanks you two. This has been amazing. Do you have any closing words for people who are like at the beginning of the practice of menstrual cycle awareness or really wanting to go deeper?

Alexandra: Oh, it is always for me, just do, just do it. Just try. Just do each day, just play with noticing. Just see what happens. I would really encourage you to stick with it for at least three months, so that you might get a sense of a pattern. Because once you start, the magic kicks in.

Sjanie: And I want to add to that and encourage you as you do it, to not do it alone, to come and join our community. Because there's something about doing this alongside others who are practicing with you and learning with you that really holds you in the practice. And there's such a mutual support and understanding, also being able to share your experiences with like-minded people who get it is so significant in terms of having the resilience to keep going and the stamina when you hit roadblocks and challenges or fall by the wayside. It'll really hold you in something. So I want to encourage you to come and join our community for that level of support.

Sophie: Yeah. If no one else in your world currently gets this, there are a whole world of people who do get it over here. And yeah, come and play.

Oh, thanks you two. It's been brilliant. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much for being with us today. Thank you for being part of the community gathered around this podcast, and if you love this podcast and want to support it, we would love it if you could give it a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It really is the best way to support the podcast and we would be so, so grateful.

I loved this review from Louise Rogers—wonderful, heartfelt wisdom. I love this podcast. Somehow the conversations always settle me and I feel a deep sense of truth. I came to menstrual cycle awareness towards the end of my menstruating years, but the wisdom shared offers a nourishing perspective in navigating any transition which we all encounter through the whole of life. From my heart, thank you Red School for this beautiful resource. Thank you so much, Louise. We really appreciate that review.

Okay, that's it for this week. I'll be with you again next week, and until then, keep living life according to your own brilliant rhythm.

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