Cosmopolitan named 2015 as “the year the period went public”.
Newsweek declared 2016 as “the year of menstrual change”.
In 2019, a film about periods won an Oscar.
Taboos are being healed, shame is dissolving. A new movement, the menstruality movement is going global…
Whether you’re new to cycle awareness or you’re a leader in this field, our new weekly podcast will inspire you to activate your vitality, creativity and leadership through the magic of menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause.
Whether you’re new to cycle awareness or you’re a leader in this field, our *brand new* weekly podcast will inspire you to activate your vitality, creativity and leadership through the magic of menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause.
to develop a radical new approach to health, creativity, leadership and spiritual life. And the best bit? It’s rooted in the bloody, wild, radical power of the menstrual cycle.
We warmly welcome you to join us as we speak with the pioneers, troublemakers and culture-shifters who are leading the menstruality movement.
We’ll release a new episode every Thursday and you can subscribe today wherever you listen to podcasts.
Recent Episodes
Are you currently working on a creative project that you’d love to infuse with your cyclical wisdom? Whether you’re writing a book, growing a garden, launching a business or making art, your cycle can be a profound anchor and resource.
In today’s episode, we talk with someone who knows a thing or two about the menstrual cycles and creativity. Lucy Peach is a period preacher, author, and folksinger. She’s a graduate of the Red School Menstruality Leadership Programme and she has written a book, created songs, produced an award-winning theatre show, delivered educational programmes for teens and even created a TED talk, all about the menstrual cycle.
We explore how she has worked with her cycle to cultivate this epic creativity and shift the period narrative in our culture from one of shame to one of pride, including:
Why do we need to adapt the way we move and exercise throughout the menstrual cycle? In today’s conversation we explore the physical and mental health benefits of cycle-aware movement, and how to adjust the way we exercise throughout the cycle month.
Our guest, Le’Nise Brothers shares her own experience of using diet, exercise and lifestyle changes to improve painful and heavy periods, anxiety, depression and irritable bowel syndrome.
Le’Nise is a yoga teacher, and Nutritionist, specialising in women's health, hormones and the menstrual cycle. She’s the host of the Period Story podcast, and the author of the new book, You Can Have a Better Period which came out in March - a practical guide to understanding your cycle and balancing your hormones with nutrition and yoga, for a calm and pain-free period.
Becoming a mother is a profound initiatory journey. Journalist and coach, Amy Taylor Kabbaz remembers exactly the moment when she split in two. Fifteen minutes after her child was born, she went from independent, ambitious, ABC journalist, career woman, to completely surrendered mother who would do anything for her child.
That moment changed everything for her, and took her on her own personal pilgrimage to understand how motherhood initiates us.
She’s interviewed hundreds of authors, maternal health experts, and teachers. She’s been the anthropologist, in the trenches of early motherhood, trying to decipher why so many of us feel burnt out, overwhelmed, and addicted to being busy. And she’s emerged from that time knowing that Matrescence is the missing link for truly understanding why women feel the way they do, and how we can revolutionise the way we think about and value motherhood.
Your first period is a big event. Today we’re exploring why it’s so important to support girls and young menstruators through this transition, as well as how we can resource ourselves as parents, aunties and carers so we can meet our kids where they are at and celebrate them.
I’m talking with Emily Stewart, the founder of The Real Period Project, and a Celebration Day for Girls facilitator, and the creator of the Red School Mothering Your Daughter Through Menarche programme. Her dream is to see a world where the menstrual cycle is seen as an ally and teacher, and talking about it is a normal part of life.
When author, Chloé Caldwell turned 31, her experience of her menstrual cycle changed. Her monthly outbursts of pre-menstrual rage and anxiety began to dominate her life and compromise her relationship.
Compelled to understand the truth of what was happening to her, Chloé researched menstruation throughout history, read everything she could about PMS and was eventually diagnosed with premenstrual dysphoric disorder, PMDD.
In this episode Chloé shares honestly, generously and vulnerably about her journey through PMDD, and how —along with proper treatment— the medicine of self-acceptance, self-compassion, and transcending shame were the ultimate keys to relief.
Ruby May, the founder of Know Your Flow is an earth-lover, a truth-seeker, an edge-dweller and a mischief-maker passionate about how we can each midwife a culture of deeper connection – to our bodies, each other and our planet through menstrual cycle awareness.
She writes: “We’re tired of living in a culture in which our worth is measured around how productive we are and nothing ever feels like enough. Where stress, numbing ourselves and bypassing our body’s symptoms are so normalized, and creativity and play feel like elusive luxuries.
And where intelligence is seen as something abstract in our heads, removed from the deep feeling, sensitivity and wisdom of our hearts and bellies. We don’t want to be bystanders and continue the status quo. And we’re ready to be part of the solution.”
Period poverty has a huge impact on women, girls and people who menstruate all over the world. Too many people don’t have access to menstrual products, safe, hygienic spaces in which to use them. This isn’t just a potential health risk - it can also affect their education, well-being, and sometimes entire lives.
One in 10 girls in Africa miss school because they don’t have access to menstrual products, or because there aren’t safe, private toilets to use at school. In India, approximately 12 percent of its 355 million menstruating women cannot afford menstrual products. In the US 23% of college students can’t afford to buy period products.
Thankfully, brilliant, passionate people like Chelsea Von Chaz, the founder of Happy Period are working to end period Poverty. Happy Periods distributes free period products to support 100,000 periods a year, through over 40 cities in the US.
At the start of 2022, we invited you all to join us for a Year of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to enhance your vitality, creativity and leadership.
To inspire you on your journey, today we're sharing this story from Fertility Awareness Coach and Menstruality Leadership Programme graduate, Louise Ryder about how a year of menstrual cycle awareness transformed her love life, her work life... her ENTIRE life.
This is a deeply personal episode and we're grateful to Louise for sharing so openly about her relationship breakdown, how her cycle awareness supported her grief journey, and how she came to understand her Calling - to bring cycle awareness into the workplace, globally.
It’s incredible to witness the stigma around menstruation shifting in our world, with period policies in workplaces, powerful work happening to alleviate period poverty and more and more people practising menstrual cycle awareness.
This de-shaming of the cycle, and especially our bleed, is opening up a gateway for an appreciation of the power of menstruation.
In this episode, Alexandra and Sjanie share stories, insight and teachings drawn from their map of the five chambers of menstruation, which are a kind of guidebook for people wanting to access and discover and embody the power of our period.
Menopause is often portrayed as a disaster waiting to happen. Omisade Burney-Scott is a leading voice in the movement to change the conversation about this powerful initiatory phase of life.
Omisade is the creator of the Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause, a multimedia project seeking to curate and share the stories and realities of Black women and femmes over 50. In today’s conversation, she discusses the menopause ‘remedies’ she’s learned through creating the guide; including the medicine of self-forgiveness, vision, self-acceptance, and living your passion.
Infertility can be heart-breaking, anxiety-inducing and full of grief. Research has shown that people experiencing infertility have the same levels of anxiety and depression as those with cancer, heart disease and HIV. In this episode, Fertility coach Jennifer Robertson offers solace and guidance drawn from her own seven-year journey to motherhood.
This episode's for you if you’re looking for support, inspiration and friendship as you navigate infertility yourself, or if you’re working with people experiencing infertility, or since 1 in 6 people experience fertility challenges, if you’d like to play a supportive role for friends or family.
In this episode, Red School founders Alexandra and Sjanie get real, honest and vulnerable about the inner critic: what it is, how it shows up, its deeper purpose, and how to handle this challenging force in our lives.
Learning how to manage and harness the power of the inner critic is almost always a real game-changer for our Menstruality Leadership Programme participants. This powerful, inevitable character has the potential to paralyse us into inaction, whilst also being a key catalyst for profound growth and transformation… if we know how to negotiate it.
And the good news is we’ve got the menstrual cycle on our side here. A key teaching we share today is how to restore your critic to its natural home - the pre menstruum, so you can get in on your side, receive it’s feedback and use it to live your calling.
What is the connection between your menstrual cycle and your purpose in life? Today we’re talking about the hidden agenda within the menstrual cycle. Each cycle month - if we’re paying attention - our cycles are bringing each of us home to our uniqueness, to our genius, to a life full of meaning.
Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer
"Think of Wild Power as a living presence that’s seeking expression through you. It’s your Calling, and it longs to be embodied and expressed through the singularity of who you are. It’s an unnameable, unknowable mystery at the heart of your being. It’s on your side; it’s your individual way in the ocean of possibility."
What if we already know what will help us through menopause? What if it’s the self care we overlook, or don’t do enough off? What if we don’t need an expert to give us a top ten list to surviving menopause?
Instead of perpetuating the myth that we need to give our power to an outside authority in order to feel better, author Kate Codrington, wants to place the power firmly back in our hands as we enter the often disorientating, challenging menopause journey.
Kate is a menopause mentor, facilitator and writer and has been a therapist for almost 30 years. A pioneering spirit, Kate was the first to graduate as a Red School Menstruality Medicine Circle facilitator, and in this liberating, culture-shifting conversation we explore her first book Second Spring: the guide to self-care for menopause is being published by HarperCollins, today, February 17th 2022!
Whether you’re a coach or educator who is working in the menstruality field, or you’re guiding a young one in your life as they experience their first period, or you simply want to deepen your connection to your own cycle, you’re likely to encounter menstrual shame in yourself and others…
In today’s episode, we speak with one of the original pioneers in the menstruality field, founder of the Chalice Foundation and a celebration Day for Girls, Jane Bennett about how to navigate this shame, so we can dignify the cycle and work together to create a menstrually positive world.
A major transition happens in our bodies in the years that lead up to menopause, a kind of ‘second puberty’. Many people are left wondering if they’re going crazy as they experience a vast range of physical and neurological symptoms which can seem to come out of nowhere; including anxiety, depression, irregular or heavier cycles, heart palpitations, insomnia, night sweats, hot flushes, migraines, and breast pain.
Today the “Period Revolutionary” Lara Briden joins us to demystify perimenopause. Lara is a naturopathic doctor and the author of The Hormone Repair Manual, Every Woman's Guide to Healthy Hormones After 40, a practical guide to navigating the change of perimenopause and relieve symptoms with natural treatments such as diet, nutritional supplements, and bioidentical hormone therapy.
In today’s fifth Wild Power Retreat special we explore how to work in a trauma-informed way as you track your cycle, so you can harness the healing potential of the practice safely.
In the world of self development and healing, there can be a tendency to push ourselves too hard and too fast, in our desire to grow, expand our understanding and heal. Cycle awareness allows us to tap into the natural evolutionary impulse within us, which keeps us tuned into a pace that is truly healing for each of us.
Our guest today is trauma-informed yoga expert and menstruality mentor, Kitty Maguire. Kitty is a graduate of the Red School Menstruality Leadership Programme and is currently studying the Red School Menstruality Medicine Circle training.
Today’s conversation is about how to honour your cycle at work, manage stress and set yourself up to lead, in our non-cyclical world.
Our guest is Nicole Jardim, a Certified Women’s Health Coach, writer, speaker, mentor, and the creator of Fix Your Period, a series of programs that empower women and menstruators to reclaim their hormonal health. Nicole shares personal stories and tips for how to stay true to the energy of your cycle day in the world of work and how our cycles can help us to manage the stress that can arise when the world doesn’t play ball.
This special episode is session four of our free, online Wild Power Retreat, where we’re inviting you to make 2022 your year of menstrual cycle awareness.
Cycle awareness can be a powerful key turner when it comes to menstrual health as well as overall health. The menstrual cycle is a stress sensitive system, which means it can show us how and where we can course correct in order to feel more vital and healthy.
In this episode we speak with Lisa Hendrickson Jack, Holistic Reproductive Health Practitioner and author of The Fifth Vital Sign about how to translate the powerful feedback we receive from our cycle.
This is session two of our special Wild Power Retreat series, where we’re sharing inspiring conversations about how menstrual cycle awareness can help you enhance your vitality, creativity and leadership in 2022.
Today’s episode of The Menstruality Podcast is session three of our free, online Wild Power retreat, where we’re exploring how to make 2022 your year of creativity, vitality and leadership, through the power of menstrual cycle awareness.
Period and Menstrual Cycle Coach Natalie K Martin guides us through the four cycle phases, inner season by inner season, exploring how to track the wisdom of your body through cycle awareness, and how to move in a cycle-inspired way that honours the energy of your current phase.
Today we’re exploring how menstrual cycle awareness can serve your creativity, whether you’re writing a book, creating art, growing a garden, building a business, creating a family or bringing your creativity to any other aspect of your life.
This is episode six of our special series, The Wild Power Retreat, where we want to inspire you to enhance your vitality, creativity and leadership in 2022, through the power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness.
Would you love to feel more healthy, more creative and more confident in your leadership in 2022?
Today’s episode is part one of a special series - the Wild Power retreat - where we’ll share six 30-minute interviews over the coming 10 days, all to inspire you to enhance your vitality, creativity and leadership this year, through the power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness.
You can register to be part of the retreat, and receive our emails, watch videos, download our Wild Power Creative Journal, which includes 12 cycle charts at redschool.net/wild-power-retreat.
At Red School our mission is to activate the vitality, creativity and leadership of a million people through the power of menstrual cycle awareness and consciousness menopause. And, this year we want to invite you to make this your year of cycle awareness. To inspire and uplift and encourage you, today’s conversation is a deep dive into the many layers of this life affirming and life-altering practice...
In a world where rest is seen as laziness, one of the most radical and daring things we can do is lie down and do nothing. And in doing so, we can wake up and bring to consciousness all that is hidden under our busyness.
Our guest today is Karen Brody - a mother, writer and author of the book “Daring To Rest”. She is one of the leaders in this movement to be radically well-rested, through her Daring to Rest leadership programme, where she teaches Yoga Nidra for the modern world.
This conversation explores the quietly transformative healing power that rest brings to our lives.
This epsiode explores themes that are right at the heart of the emerging menstrality movement; love, belonging and an invitation for each of our experiences to be dignified, and honoured, exactly as we are.
I’m talking with LGBTQ+ inclusion consultant, Adele Bates, whose day job is as an education and behavior specialist - just release her first book “Miss I don’t give a sh*t: engaging with challenging behaviour within schools” - we’re celebrating you Adele!
Adele is a graduate of our Menstruality Leadership Programme and has been a profound resource as an LGBTQ+ educator in the Red School community. Today we ask how we can move towards more genuine inclusion in our work as Menstruality pioneers, looking at the questions such as...
Are you a menstrualist? Do you want to create a world where we all prioritise the menstrual cycle? Would you like to know how to work with your cycle to enhance your work as a changemaker?
Today’s guest is spear-heading the menstrualism movement. Kate Shepherd Cohen is a menstrual health pioneer, an author, activist, climate campaigner and CEO of a health tech start up. Since graduating from the Red School Menstruality Leadership Programme, she’s revolutionising menstrual healthcare in the UK, and is the first person in the world to offer a Menstrual Cycle Support programme on social prescription through the NHS.
Our conversation moves from the practical details of how to create change as a menstrual health advocate, to the visionary exploration of menstrual dreaming as a key tool for all social and environmental change work.
No one else sees it.
No one else wants to
Only she can see
The beauty in her blood.
- Nikki Tajiri
This week we meet The Period Poet herself, Nikki Tajiri who is the author of “She Dreams When She Bleeds” which weaves original menstrual art with cycle-inspired, rebellious poetry and has reached women and menstruators all over the world, as well as “Murmur, rumble, roar”, an emotional exploration of the space where climate change meets inner transformation.
Nikki gracefully translates her intimate cycle awareness into artistic expression, and this episode is a soothing, gentle, lyrical exploration of how we can each express the magic of our cycles and activate our creativity, in our own unique way.
The inner seasons of the menstrual cycle are often mirrored in pregnancy, and in this episode with doula and Red School Leadership Mentor Jady Mountjoy, we walk through the three trimesters of pregnancy, learning how to harvest your cycle awareness experience to hold yourself through all the huge changes happening in your body and psyche.
Drawing on her experience of guiding women and pregnant and birthing people over decades, Jady shares how cycle awareness prepares you for the initiation of pregnancy and birth, how the deep intelligence of the trimesters builds the skill base we’ll need for parenthood, and how to move from your forebrain to your more primitive, instinctive brain as the energy of birth begins to court you.
In this conversation, Alexandra and Sjanie take us behind the scenes of their menopause book writing process to explore how menstrual cycle awareness can help each of us cultivate intimate connection to our own unique creative process, whether you’re bringing your creativity to work, art, healing, parenting, nurturing, activism or any other form of expression.
They share how they’ve each been tutored by their cycles as well as Alexandra’s menopause process to navigate a wide array of creative challenges, harness the powers of each cycle phase and fully express their Calling.
Towards the middle of 2020, Cycle Alignment Guide and Red School MLP student, Vianney Leigh saw the extent of the burnout in her community, and decided to take action.
In the weeks following the Black Lives Matter uprising, she used her own cycle awareness practice to create Period Power Activism, a coaching program that supports advocates and activists to align with the cycle and create sustainable change whilst making room for rest and sustained energy levels.
We celebrate the many passionate activists in our community. Whether you’re working to dismantle systemic racism, make the Menstruality field more LGBTQ+ inclusive, decolonise yoga, end period poverty, fight for climate justice, or advocate for another cause we hope these groundbreaking teachings about cycles and activism support you to speak truth and stand for your values without burning out.
Order Alexandra and Sjanie’s book Wild Power: Discover the Magic of Your Menstrual Cycle and Awaken the Feminine Path to Power.
Many men were raised to believe that the menstrual cycle was something exclusively owned by women and people with periods. As taboos around menstruation shift ever more rapidly (yes!), so too is men’s role in the global conversation about menstruality.
Dominick Quartuccio and Bryan Stacy - the hosts of The Great Man Within podcast - are a breath of fresh air in a world which can feel full of toxic masculinity. Brave and vulnerable in their desire to break new ground for men and masculinity, they’ve interviewed Red School’s co-founders Alexandra and Sjanie not once, but TWICE. And to everyone’s surprise, their first interview “A Man’s Guide to the Menstrual Cycle”, actually became their most downloaded episode ever!
Period Coach and Red School MLP graduate, Claire Baker has built a wildly successful, impactful, vision-led business as an author, teacher and leader in the menstruality field. In this episode we go behind the scenes of her business, exploring how she works with the superpowers and vulnerabilities of her menstrual cycle to create potent programmes, manage her team skillfully, lead with integrity and find the pleasure in her creative process.
Karen Arthur lives her life in full colour, and her rebellious spirit is catching. A fashion designer, host of the ground-breaking Menopause Whilst Black Podcast, and a leading voice in the global conversation to rewrite menopause, she busts menopause myths and shares refreshing ideas to manage menopause challenges with a rare kind of honesty, fire and wit.
In this episode we explore:
Do you feel passionate about rewriting the story of menopause?
Come and explore our Menstruality Leadership Programme. Registration is now open for 2022 - we’d love to have you with us.
Our cycle has a built-in imperative to deliver us home to our deep, holy selves. Over centuries, the consistent denial and overriding of this knowledge has caused a subtle insult to the integrity of our beings as women, and menstruators.
As we each begin to restore the power of the cycle, we reshape our experience of ourselves, soothe our systems and release menstrual trauma.
In today’s episode, wise author, grandmother and revolutionary Jane Hardwicke Collings is passionate, provocative and also funny - even as she busts through these long-held taboos, and heals collective menstrual wounds.
Jane is the founder of The School of Shamanic Womancraft and was a homebirth midwife for 30 years. She says; ‘My own births have taught me who I am and what I am capable of. My menopausal experience has taught me to focus on preparing for the great, great grandchildren.”
This episode re-writes the collective story of menopause from a looming disaster to an initiatory pathway into your unique way of leading; in your family, community, and work in the world.
If you’re entering menopause, or find yourself in the midst of this initiation, this conversation with Red School’s co-founders, Alexandra and Sjanie will dignify you, affirm your experience and give you insight into the deep process at work in you. (It’s also a resource for any person who menstruates who wants to prepare for the transformational power of menopause.)
Alexandra and Sjanie have devoted over 10,000 hours researching and refining our radical new approach to women’s health, creativity, leadership and spiritual life. They are passionate about inviting women, and all menstruators, into the heart of the inner intelligence that is activated at the first bleed, deepened through the menstruating years and culminated in the great awakening of menopause.
In this tender, honest and intimate conversation Red School’s founders, Alexandra and Sjanie reveal how the menstrual cycle activates a fresh kind of relational, creative leadership within each of us, and the possibility that holds for the future of our global community.
This is for you if you’re a pioneer or activist wanting to create change, a nurturer guiding your family or community or a creative birthing new ideas, beauty and wisdom into the world.
Alexandra and Sjanie have devoted a collective 45 years of research to dignifying the power of the menstrual cycle and menopause. Their mission is to activate the vitality, creativity and leadership of a million people, through the magic of menstrual cycle awareness.
to develop a radical new approach to health, creativity, leadership and spiritual life. And the best bit? It’s rooted in the bloody, wild, radical power of the menstrual cycle.
For this podcast, we’ve sought out the ground-breaking pioneers and creatives who are changing the conversation about the menstrual cycle and menopause, and modelling a new way that is cyclical, relational and organic.
We’ll also be joined often by Red School’s founders, and the authors of Wild Power, Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer.
Together we’ll 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.
has been in love with her cycle since her inner critic guided her to change country, relationship and career a decade ago. She’s currently channelling her cycle wisdom into the white-knuckle ride of new motherhood.
Sophie is the Communications Director at Red School brings a decade of experience in the field of women’s activism and leadership to her podcast conversations with Alexandra, Sjanie and our incredible guests.
Subscribe today!