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
Six years ago dedicated imperfectionist and mushroom-foraging witch of business, Lucy AitkenRead moved her family from South London, UK to a yurt in the middle of nowhere in New Zealand where they share their off grid farm with another family and are all unschooling their kids. She now writes and teaches about sustainable living, attachment parenting and living a life without school on her blog, youtube channel and in her courses.
Lucy is also passionate about cycle awareness and today we’re talking about how intimacy to our cycles is the best possible foundational for anything we’re creating, why we all need to be more mammal, and how to free ourselves from the structures that hold us back from creatively expressing ourselves - aka how we can each unschool our creativity.
(This is the second in our summer creativity series where Sophie will be interviewing Alexandra & Sjanie as well as a group of special guests about a cyclical approach to creativity, in the run up to the launch of our brand new course, Your Creative Power, starting in September. Find out more here: www.redschool.net/creativity)
Today I’m back with Alexandra & Sjanie and we’re kicking off a series which will unfold all the way through the summer - our Creativity series. Because these two powerhouse creative mavens have finally landed their teachings on creativity - born from the menstrual cycle and relevant to us all, whether you currently have a menstrual cycle or not.
They’ll be sharing these teachings around what they call ‘The Creative Cycle’ for the first time ever this September in our new creativity course, and you can join us for our free webinar on July 12th to learn all about both The Creative Cycle and the course.
In today’s conversation we explore how we’re all innately creative, how The Creative Cycle can free us up from self doubt, shame, procrastination and every other creative block we face, and how Alexandra and Sjanie have worked with these teachings to make everything they’ve created at Red School…
Join our free webinar: How menstruality can teach you to live a wildly creative life on July 12th - www.redschool.net/creativity
“You cannot say how many cubic metres make up courage, or what kind of wires you need to construct freedom. What kind of lab do you go into to measure relationships between people?” ~ Minna Salami
When Minna, my guest today, said this, I got shivers up and down my spine (as I did many times, reading her brilliant book, Sensuous Knowledge) as a deeply intuitive woman raised in a hyper-rational world… or as Minna calls it, a world rooted in euro-patriarchal knowledge.
Minna Salami is a Nigerian, Finnish, and Swedish feminist author and social critic. Her research focuses on Black feminist theory, contemporary African thought, and the politics of knowledge production, and today we’re exploring Sensuous Knowledge is a model of knowledge rooted in the dynamic landscape of Black feminist thought - one that empowers, enlivens, and liberates, through embodied insight.
When I first dreamed into the Menstruality Podcast, my guest today was one of the first people I knew I wanted to interview, and it’s taken a while, but boy, is it worth the wait!
Tami Lynn Kent is the author of Wild Feminine and the creator of Holistic Pelvic Care, and I’ve been lucky to study with her several times over the past decade - the results have been transformative for me. Today's far-reaching conversation explores the power and medicine we hold in our pelvic bowls and how we can resource ourselves as we 'work on the frontlines of the feminine'.
Understanding how to dismantle racism is a charged and complex topic. So today we’re exploring how menstrual cycle awareness can be a profound ally as we work to unravel our own unconscious bias, and find our way of deconstructing oppressive systems.
My guest is Dr Sunshine Kamaloni who has a PhD in cultural studies and a deep cycle awareness practice. She shares from her own personal journey working with her inner seasons in her equity, inclusion, diversity and belonging work to unpack how the muscles that cycle awareness grow in us can help us to uncover our own personal race story.
Kim McCabe, the founder of Rites for Girls says that without puberty rites of passage, young people self-initiate. The media tells them how they should be and our youngsters create their own ways of proving their adulthood through feats, dares, and adventures. They try to appear like adults in what they do and how they look: using clothes, make-up, drink, cigarettes, cars, and sex.
According to Kim, we grown-ups can take back the role of initiating our children into adulthood, and “the children welcome it, we are fulfilled by it, and a transition that has become defined by its difficulty can become a joyous one.”
In our conversation today we explore how to take back the role of initiating our girls and young people into their menstruating lives.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Claire Baker released her first book, and went into a hyper-productive mode, galvanised by the new world we were all suddenly pushed into.
At the end of 2020 she was depleted, suffering from critic attacks and her ambition completely dissolved. It’s only now in early 2023 that her creative energy is returning.
In our conversation today we speak about the many ways that intimacy with our cycles manage our creative flow, our energy levels, our sense of confidence and purpose and our overall health.
How has your intimacy with your cycle (or your menopause process) changed you, and your life?
It’s an important question to ask, in quiet moments, perhaps in your inner winter. Cycle awareness offers many fruits, and they can easily be missed in a linear world that rarely—if ever—shines a spotlight on your cyclicity and what it is awakening in you.
On the podcast today, the tables are turned as Sjanie asks our host, Sophie this question and they explore what menstrual cycle awareness has taught Sophie over the past decade, particularly when it comes to living her calling and creating things of beauty in the world.
Hinewai Waitoa is doing powerful work to reclaim Maori menstrual wisdom. In her words: “Colonisation took so much of what was magic about Maori culture when it came to things like menstruation practices. We are still reclaiming our sacred ways here in Aotearoa”.
Hinewai is a māmā to two unschooled mini beings and the creator of Waikuranuku Indigenous devoted to wholistic womb wellness, reclamation & womb sovereignty.
Her reclamation journey has unfolded over the past 15 years and she now lives her life purpose holding space for kōhine - girls, wāhine - women, tāne - men and whānau - families, to reconnect to and understand the natural rhythms and cycles of the womb, heal inter-generational trauma and create a more nourishing connected loving earth for all living beings.
- How Hinewai is currently preparing her tamahine - her daughter - for her menarche rite of passage.
- What it means to “speak aroha” - love - into the centre of our beings, and how to work with it as a powerful menstrual practice, and an act of rebellion which creates deep, inner alignment.
- What is inside Hinewai’s ‘kete ikura” - her menstrual cycle basket - and how she uses it to keep her anchored into a real, lived honouring of her cycle.
How do you experience the pre-ovulation phase of your cycle - your inner spring? Is it a time of ease and flow, or perhaps anxiety and insecurity? Maybe a mixture of both?
Whatever your experience, we hope that today's episode will shed some light on the powers of inner spring for you. It's our first Q+A episode where Red School founders Alexandra and Sjanie will answer your questions about how to work with your cycle in the pre-ovulation phase.
We explore questions like:
- What to do if your experience of inner spring is different to many people, due to health challenges, and how to handle the shame that can arise?
- How to hold yourself when emotional vulnerabilities and wounds come up in inner spring
- How to emerge tenderly from your bleed in a world that often doesn’t support that, and how to meet the rising energy of spring in a generative way, especially when it appears as anxiety and insecurity.
Today we’re welcoming back Ruby May to the podcast, who is the new community leader here at Red School. Ruby is the founder of the Know Your Flow cycle awareness course and community - she’s 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.
I’ve been loving working with Ruby lately to co-create our new MLP grads community, The Hive, we’ve been riffing a lot about the power of cycle-aware friendship and community, and today Sjanie is joining us. So, if you ever feel lonely in your cycle awareness practice, or like you’re swimming upstream and would love some like-minded allies by your side, this one’s for you. I invite you to make a cup of something lovely and nestle into this conversation with us…
Wild Power is five this month!
We love watching this book work its magic, and hearing what it’s waking up in readers across the globe. (We’re thrilled that it’s now available in 8 languages—French, Italian, Spanish, German, Korean, Dutch, Czech, Russian—with a couple more in the pipeline).
Thank you to everyone who has been writing in or tagging us with your greatest takeaway from the book.
Here is one we adored:
“My greatest learning from Wild Power has been that my intuition will always be by my side and guide me whenever I need her. She lies within and when listening, she gives me all the answers I could ever ask for. Through practising deep cycle awareness I have regained the connection with her and ability to be true to myself.”
- Luna
In today’s episode Alexandra and Sjanie share five things they learned from writing Wild Power, including:
We’re having an important, needed, hard conversation today about endometriosis. Luckily we are guided by an amazing guest who seems to be able to bring lightness and humour to even the darkest topics, author Emma Bolden. So we invite you to laugh, and cry with us.
Emma’s memoir, The Tiger and The Cage exploring her decades-long rollercoaster with endometriosis was recently featured by the brilliant production company, Shondaland who describe her as a “compelling voice” and her book as: “an outstretched hand inviting us to accompany her through the most intimate and important experiences of her life, and women’s collective experiences.”
Our guest today, Shereen Oberg draws from a unique and rich mix of influences in her women’s empowerment work.
She is the author of The Law of Positivism, she’s a yoga teacher and acupuncturist, and alongside this she holds a business and economics degree, and has recently completed a Master's degree in Global Sexual and Reproductive health and rights.
She comes from a long lineage of strong, Kurdish matriarchs and political, social rights activists who shared their natural birth stories with her, this inspired her to train both as a nurse and a doula. Today we chat about how all of these influences wove together in her recent thesis about how we need to change the way we approach infertility across the globe.
Alexandra is your host today as this is the next in our Wise Power Retreat series, where she is having conversations with thought leaders, teachers and change-makers about what menopause revealed and awakened in them.
Her guest is Lynne McTaggart - who is regularly voted in the top 100 of spiritual teachers for her work around the power of intention.
The arrival of Lynne's children birthed the first great work of her life, her magazine, What Doctors Don’t Tell You, and menopause heralded the birth of the work she is devoting the rest of her life to - exploring the human energy field and why spiritual healing works.
The menstrual cycle is encoded with wisdom that can support us through life’s greatest challenges.
Learning to read and receive this wisdom is a lifelong process - and in today’s conversation with psychotherapist and author, Carly Mountain, we explore what one of our oldest goddess myths can teach us about embodying cyclical wisdom as we face all that life throws our way.
Carly has worked in a cycle-inspired way for many years as a women’s initiatory guide. She has channelled her learnings into her new book Decent and Rising, which explores the ancient goddess myth of Innana and her descent into the underworld as a framework for how to manage grief, loss, illness and other dark night’s of the soul.
In today’s conversations we look at each part of the myth through the lens of the inner seasons of the menstrual cycle, and how each cycle phase makes us more resilient, strong and wise
What are the gifts of the inner spring? How can inner spring help us step into leadership? What is needed to access the power of the inner spring? And how can we manages the challenges of this inner season?
So many of you have asked for an episode about inner spring and how we can harness it's strengths and manage its challenges, and here it is - the first of two episodes dedicated to pre-ovulatory phase of the cycle.
Join our Menstruality Leadership Programme: www.menstrualityleadership.com
What does it really take to be a visionary leader? And how can menstrual cycle awareness support us to face the challenges and stretch that leadership always brings?
In today's episode we share excerpts from our Menstruality Leadership Lab - a free, four-day online leadership training exploring how the hidden powers of the menstrual cycle and menopause can help us lead sustainably, with heart, integrity and wisdom.
Red School co-founder Alexandra shares her biggest leadership challenge and how cycle awareness has helped her to cultivate one of many menstruality leadership skills to meet it: the art of pacing.
We also hear clips from Alexandra and Sjanie's conversations with our special guests, four women who have boldly stepped forward to live their Calling; medicine woman Asha Frost, author and activist Amisha Ghadiali, folk singer and period preacher Lucy Peach and School of Movement Medicine co-founder Susannah Darling Khan.
- How Asha handled critical feedback when her work went viral.
- How Amisha faces the faces the challenge of making a steady living as a visionary.
- What made Lucy become a period preacher
- How Susannah handled an embarrassing moment in her leadership journey.
Register for the Menstruality Leadership lab for free at: www.redschool.net/lab
Registration is now open for our 2023 Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can take your seat here: www.menstrualityleadership.com
After giving birth to her son Fulano in 2003, Latham Thomas set out on a mission to help women reclaim birth. A graduate of Columbia University & The Institute for Integrative Nutrition, Latham is a maternity lifestyle maven, world renown wellness leader and master birth doula on the vanguard of transforming the wellness movement. She has been named one of Oprah’s Super Soul 100.
I experienced Latham as a weaver of profound threads of wisdom… we journeyed from her sacred menstrual practices, to exploring radical self care as a cultural act of resistance in a world that aims to turn us away from our bodies, to how she is supporting her doula students to reclaim their ancient, ancestral technologies and birth wisdom, and so much more.
In today's episode Red School's founders, Sjanie and Alexandra reveal intimate stories about their current leadership edges and how their menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause is skilling them up to face them in a sustainable way.
How to manage a sensitive nervous system when you have a demanding to do list.
How to navigate the inner critic attacks that inevitable come when you have both big visions and human limitations.
We also share about our upcoming free, online Menstruality Leadership Lab from March 7-10 - join us at: www.redschool.net/lab
We’re welcoming back Bethany Webster, the author of “Discovering The Inner Mother”. She’s considered to be the global expert on healing the “Mother Wound” - something we all inherit to varying degrees living in a patriarchal society.
Bethany was a guest at our Wise Power Retreat, where she spoke about healing the Mother Wound during menopause.
In our conversation today, we look at the Mother Wound through a menstrual cycle awareness lens, exploring how it shows up throughout our inner seasons, and how each phase of the cycle can support specific aspects of healing.
Menstruation and menopause awaken us to our deep selves, but to do that, they ask that we pull away from the world, stop and rest. The trouble is that rest can be a great challenge for most if us given the momentum at work in our world today.
If you struggle to ‘just let go’ and rest when you bleed, or during the unfolding of your menopause process, this episode is for you.
This conversation moved me deeply. Teacher and writer Krista O’Reilly Davi-Digui explores what it is to be a brave and beautiful human in progress, particularly in the messy middle of life, and especially living inside a grief and trauma illiterate culture.
In 2019, when Krista was in the midst of menopause she lost her son Jairus to suicide.
In this conversation, she shares generously about the inner winter of her grief journey, how it intersected with her menopause experience, and how she is now moving into the second spring of menopause, choosing to say yes to life in it’s fullness, not knowing what tomorrow holds…
This bonus episode is the next in our ‘Wise Power Retreat’ series where Alexandra is interviewing people about what menopause revealed and awakened in them.
Alexandra and Lara have been working alongside each other in this field for over 30 years. Lara is an author, teacher, researcher, consultant, mentor and an expert on the culture, politics and organisation of the menstrual cycle and menopause.
She wrote one of the first books to be published about the power of the menstrual cycle, Her Blood is Gold, and is one of the leading lights in the field of menstrual and menopause education, sharing from an incredible wealth of personal experience, as well as academic research.
Lara Owen: www.laraowen.com
Sjanie’s period came very early last month. She suddenly found herself bleeding on day 12 and the experience was akin to a zen meditation master slapping their student on the back when they’ve momentarily gone unconscious.
She was reminded that there is a wild intelligence within her that was outside of her control, and was invited to dance with the mystery and yield to something bigger.
This is one way that the menstrual cycle offers us a way into a radical kind of leadership. The reality that we don’t control it reminds us that we belong to something greater. If we can receive this belonging, our bleed can fill us with goodness, love, and rightness - a source of great power.
That’s why giving time to yourself at menstruation is positively dangerous! It will change your consciousness. It will awaken you to what life wants from you…
Our guest today is someone we’ve been wanting to interview for a while. She has inspired 1000s of people to find their way of doing less inside a culture that so often pushes us to do more.
Kate Northrup is an entrepreneur, mother and bestselling author of Do Less: A Revolutionary Approach to Time Management for Ambitious Women. Her book centers menstrual cycle awareness as a secret productivity superpower that’s always been there, but you just didn’t know you had...
After giving birth to her first child, Kate felt profoundly out of control for the first time in her life. Her period came back when she was 13 months old and she felt safe for the first time since her birth. It held her through post-partum anxiety and insomnia and her menstrual cycle served her as a life-raft that healed her in a profound way.
For many years Karen, the founder of ‘Daring to Rest’ had many years of severe panic attacks. It wasn’t until she started a deep rest practice that she learned how to meet her anxiety with grace and she hasn’t had a panic attack since.
During her menopause process, this devoted practice of rest enabled her to clearly feel her ‘no’ and ‘yes’ in her body, process the rage arising and listen for what she needed to navigate this almighty transition.
As we enter 2023, we explore what menstrual cycle awareness can teach us about how to begin things well. We each share a bumpy beginning that we’re currently navigating, and how the deep intelligence within the cycle is guiding us through the highs and lows.
Whether you’re wanting to start the year with intention and a clear vision, you’re in the midst of a new beginning such as a new job, a new relationship or creative project or you’d like to learn how to work with your cycle as an ally for all the beginnings of your life, this episode has both deep insight and practical advice.
Today we explore how menstrual cycle awareness schools us in endings.
Each month we have an opportunity to practice ending the cycle well, aligning with the deep intelligences at work within us. ..
In this episode we break down the different processes at work as we descend towards menstruation and what they can teach us about how to navigate all of life’s endings; the smaller, more surface level ones like the end of the year we have coming up, and the bigger more profound ones, like ending relationships, moving house, all the way to the deep grief of losing loved ones or miscarriage.
Today we’re continuing our inner autumn premenstrual theme by sharing the last in a three-part series exploring the powers of the premenstruum, how to awaken these powers, and now a conversation about what this looks like in real life.
(And we’re excited to be trying something new today - weaving in comments and insights from you, he community of podcast listeners about your premenstrual experiences.)
Our guest Natalie K Martin is a Menstrual Cycle and Feminine Embodiment Coach and author who made a powerful transition from corporate career in London to a career in yoga and now menstruality.
Natalie graduated from our Menstruality Leadership Programme this year and is now contributing to the global menstruality movement with her FemmePowered podcast which she hosts alongside Guilietta Durante.
In this electrifying conversation, visionary activist and author Lynne Twist tells a new story about the potency and power we can hold in post-menopause life.
Lynne shares the story of how, when she was 50, she received a series of visions which profoundly altered the direction of her career - ultimately inspiring her transition from her life work of ending world hunger, to a new calling to steward the health of the rainforests alongside indigenous people.
She hadn’t realised, until we did this interview for our Wise Power series, that she was in menopause at this time and that it was the menopause process that opened her up to receive these visions!
Have you ever “lost it” in the days running up to your bleed? Of course you have! We all have. Today we break down Sophie’s latest premenstrual losing it episode to find the gold inside it - the power that the premenstruum is awakening within us.
’With awareness, the autumn alchemises powerlessness, victimhood, unconsciousness into responsibility, self awareness, self discipline and the ability to really stand in your authority and be wise with your power, with how you use it.‘
- Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer and Alexandra Pope, Wild Power.
Asha Frost is an indigenous healer and author. She is an Anishinaabe, Ojibwe woman who was raised in a menstrually positive culture and in today’s episode we explore how her menstrual cycle inspires her work, her new book, ‘You are The Medicine: 13 Moons of Indigenous Wisdom, Ancestral Connection, and Animal Spirit Guidance’, and the connection she sees between cycle wisdom and the unique medicine we each hold.
‘You are The Medicine’ explores a lunar year of the 13 moons of the Ojibwe people, each moon aligned to particular powers and animal wisdom, and each one has profound and practical keys about how we can work to access more of a medicine.
Clare Dubois has given her life to reforesting the topics as the founder of the not-for-profit, TreeSisters, but her menopause experience is demanding that she take a profound pause.
In this conversation Clare breaks down her real-time death and rebirth initiatory process of menopause, from the place she is currently in - the deeply uncomfortable, uncompromisingly thorough, ‘ego-death’ part of the initiation.
She likens it to being carried downstream very fast - you either struggle against the flow or you let go and trust that the river knows where it’s taking you. She’s choosing trust, and hard as it may be, she is loving the ride.
Trigger warning: Clare talks in-depth about healing her childhood physical and sexual abuse.
We explore:
Our menstrual cycles can be a profound ally in work and leadership. Today we do a deep dive on how to channel our cyclical wisdom as it shifts and changes throughout the cycle month, with someone who has an extraordinary amount of personal and professional experience in this realm.
Dr Joanna Martin is a renowned visionary, coach and catalyst. As the founder of One of many, her organisation has supported over 60,000 women leaders to greater impact without burnout. grassroots women leaders is a force of nature - massively positive impact for me personally… Personally, she’s widely recognized as the secret weapon advisor behind the success of hundreds of change makers and entrepreneurial leaders…
The cycle is at the centre of her life and work, she’s overlaid the five archetypes over the phases of the cycle to harness their power and meet the challenges they present: The Lover, The Queen, The Warrioress, The Sorceress, The Mother.
Today’s episode is about what it’s like when our experience is actually supported, honoured and dignified through menopause, and it’s also about relationship, and how to take care of ourselves through - and make sense of - times of great transformation.
Alexandra is your host today, because this is a continuation of our Wise Power Retreat series, which was an incredible journey, over 3500 of us gathered to explore the power of menopause. If you didn’t tune in, you can find all the episodes at wisepowerretreat.com… and we’re going to continue this conversation on the podcast, over the coming year.
She's talking with Susannah Darling Khan, a teacher, dancer, music maker, trainee pony whisperer, the co-director of The School of Movement Medicine, alongside her husband Ya'Acov Darling Khan.
Dr Sonia Wright - aka The Midlife Sex Coach for Women - combines her natural ability to talk about uncomfortable topics with her medical knowledge, sexual counseling skills and life coaching tools to create a unique brand of sex coaching. In this conversation about sex in midlife and during menopause, we discuss sensitive issues with humour and heart.
The premenstrual phase of the menstrual cycle - or ‘inner autumn’ as we lovingly call it - is often the most uncomfortable phase emotionally, and it is definitely the most misunderstood. The symptoms that show up for many in this phase and the critical, disruptive fire that burns through us premenstrually are demonised in our world and inside ourselves.
In this conversation we want to deshame and dignify the gifts of the premenstruum; the heightened sensitivity, the permeability, the way we show up as a disruptor of the peace. We want to transform the premenstrual script which so often makes us question “what’s wrong with me?” to “how can I hold myself through this?” and “what’s powers are at work here?”.
Once you’re in menopause, you appear to be off all the usual maps. You're cast off from a familiar shoreline onto a dark ocean of unknownness, with only the stars and the moon – your instincts, feelings and intuitions – to guide you.
However, there is a map of sorts for the menopausal journey, a timeless archetypal pattern for transitioning this world between worlds, and it has an implicit order in five phases: Betrayal, Repair, Revelation, Visioning and Emergence.
In today's episode, we look at the meaning and purpose of each phase, including all that you may experience and what it means, as well as stories from some of the many people we’ve worked with over the years (and a good dose of humour to see you through).
Today we’re talking about a much misunderstood part of the body… the cervix.
Olivia Bryant is the founder of Self:Cervix, an organisation dedicated to revolutionising the way the cervix is viewed by the medical profession, by science and sex educators. She says:
“As a sexologist and sex nerd, I know the cervix to be a powerful place of pleasure… For us, cervical orgasm is a thing worth exploring, just like Mars is for NASA”
Today’s conversation follows a powerful idea that woke Alexandra up in the early hours a few days ago. It’s the idea that drives our new menopause book, Wise Power, and it’s an idea that’s almost totally missing in the global menopause conversation: we need to dignify menopause as a process of spiritual awakening.
And it’s a very special episode, because it also marks the official release of Wise Power, which is now available wherever books are sold - you can get your copy at wisepowerbook.com.
If you’d like to explore menopause as a process of homecoming and awakening, in this episode we share some of the ways we’re expanding this conversation at Red School, firstly, with our upcoming, free ‘Wise Power Retreat’ in October, where we’ll share conversations with incredible people such as Lynne Twist, the founder of the Pachamama Alliance, and Sharon Blackie, the author of Hagitude, and secondly with our live menopause online course, Menopause: The Great Awakener, starting on Nov 2nd.
The menstruality journey begins at menarche with our first bleed, and ends as we go through the great initiation of menopause. For some, pregnancy, birth, and motherhood are a key part of their menstruating years, but for some people, parenting doesn’t happen, despite a deep desire to have children.
It's World Childless Week this week, and we've invited the brilliant Jody Day to share about the challenges of involuntary childlessness, her work to honour and dignify childless women, and explore how to how to find meaning and hope when looking towards a future without children.
Jody Day is the founder of Gateway Women, the support & advocacy network for childless women. She’s a psychotherapist, a global thought leader on female involuntary childlessness, and the author of what many professionals consider to be the ‘go-to’ book on the topic, ‘Living the Life Unexpected: How to Find Hope, Meaning and a Fulfilling Future Without Children’.
When teacher and activist Jewels Wingfield felt menopause calling, through intense physical symptoms, she knew she needed to take a deep retreat. In this conversation, we explore her 13 moon ‘conscious menopause sabbatical’ and how it transformed her health, her relationship to herself, her work in the world, and even her sex life.
Jewels is the founder of the EarthHeart project and on the other side of her sabbatical she is focusing on guiding women to explore their ‘nature-based feminine leadership’, with a particular focus on an ancient, Celtic approach to menstruality, and how the natural world can support our menopause death-and-rebirth process.
There are a handful of trailblazers who have paved the way for the positive menstrual culture we’re beginning to see today, and Dr Lara Owen is one of them. She was researching and writing her book about the power of the menstrual cycle, Her Blood is Gold in the 1990’s, and it has been a game changer for thousands of women and menstruators.
She’s now an expert on the culture, politics and organization of menstruation and menopause. She consults with global and local organizations; teaches in academic and general contexts and has created a first year masters level programme called Contemporary Menstrual Studies.
When you explore old European myths, it’s the elder women and grandmothers who run the world. In Greek mythology, there are the Fates - three elder women who make the world go round. In Easterm European mythology, the crone Baba Yaga initiates young people and facilitates transformation. In ancient Gallic mythology it is the Cailleach who created and shaped the land, from the beginning of time.
In today’s episode we explore the gold that these myths and archetypes hold for us as we navigate the initiation of menopause and enter the second half of our lives as elders, with the brilliant writer, psychologist and mythologist, Dr Sharon Blackie.
Sharon illuminates the magic and potential of menopause as a shape-shifting crucible, which strips away all that isn’t essential - so we may know ourselves, and our Calling in a new way. She shares how she envisioned herself inside an alchemical process at menopause, how the natural world served as an ally through this initiatory time, and why the world needs more feisty, older women now more than ever…
We want to create a world where everyone is in love with the menstrual cycle - not a perfect version of the cycle - but exactly the cycle you have. Because this love affair revolutionises our lives (and the world!).
That’s why we’ve created our new free online course: Love Your Cycle: Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life where we explore the four phases or inner seasons of your cycle as a gateway to vitality, creativity, power and purpose.
Love Your Cycle is our invitation to you to get to know your cycle in more depth, to fall in love with your cycle, and to grow an intimacy with it that will transform your life - by amplifying your vitality, enhancing your creativity and activating your leadership.
What is the connection between trauma, the nervous system and menstrual health?
This week we’re speaking with Lisa De Jong, who shares in depth about her experience with a decade of chronic pain, an eventual endometriosis diagnosis, and her experience of trauma healing and nervous system regulation.
Lisa is a graduate of our Menstruality Leadership programme and has infused the teachings with ground-breaking science and created a brilliant body of work around trauma, pain, healing and the nervous system.
In our 40s, many women and people with periods begin to experience a variety of health symptoms and challenges, as well as emotional and psychological shifts. Some call this perimenopause. At Red School we like to call it, The Quickening
In this episode - which is the fourth in our menopause summer series - we look at how this life phase in the run up to our menopause process is slowly awakening new levels of power within us, and how to navigate this and Sjanie shares how she is negotiating this transition personally.
Across the ages women and birthing people have been invited by midwives and doulas to relax their jaw and throat to support the opening of the cervix in labour.
In today’s conversation we explore why this is so important, we explore the connection between our throats, our voices, and the emotional and physical health of our wombs.
I’m talking with Shakirah Sabira who is a doula, African womb healing practitioner, and the founder of Barakha’s Doula. Shakirah began her career as a doula serving women in the Middle East and West Africa, including seven months working in a rural clinic supporting the local midwife in the Mauritanian desert, a trip which profoundly changed her life, and guided her to her calling.
Through Shakirah’s story, and the experiences with her teachers and clients, as well as Sophie's own womb healing experience, we look at what it means to give your womb a voice, how release stagnant energy, express yourself and find a profound source of healing within us.
In today’s conversation, we get practical, down-to-earth and real about the initiation of menopause and how on earth do we actually get through to the other side. Though, as we explore, it’s much less about doing and much more about being. And we have five alchemical powers that can help us along the way.
This is the in third our Wise Power series where Alexandra and Sjanie have been waxing lyrical, sometimes crying, and often laughing their way through the teachings of their new book Wise Power: Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause to Awaken Authority, Purpose and Belonging, coming out on September 20th.
There’s a line in our new book, Wise Power: “Remember, it’s your birthright to have a dignifying and empowering menopause. Let’s begin to make that so.”
Let’s begin to make it so, together, here, right now…
Do you suffer from menstrual pain, or other cycle challenges such as PMS, PMDD or managing irregular cycles?
In this episode we explore how the practice of menstrual cycle awareness creates a ground for healing, helps us to take stand for what we need, and supports us to create a new relationship with the challenges we face, and to trust that something meaningful is at work.
Alexandra shares her personal story with a decade of menstrual pain, and what supported her to heal and eventually become pain-free. Sophie describes what supported her to transform chronic pain and pre-menstrual rage into a new relationship with her power.
When you find yourself in the thick of the menopause transition, there’s no maintaining life as normal. How can we support ourselves to manage the day to day realities of life amidst the huge initiation of menopause?
In this episode we explore the six steps of our ‘menopause triage’ and how they help you to dignify and honour what you’re experiencing.
Pre-order your copy of Wise Power: Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause to awaken authority, purpose and belonging here: https://www.wisepowerbook.com
One of the big initiatory moments along the menstruality journey from menarche (our first period) to menopause is pregnancy and childbirth, if that is our path in life.
In a world which has a lot to learn about how to support mothers and birthing people through this profound initiation, we need all the help we can get to prepare for and create a positive birth, or heal from a challenging or traumatic one. Enter menstrual cycle awareness - as a powerful tool to cultivate body sovereignty, guide us in the art of surrender, and teach us how to advocate for our needs.
Our guest today is pregnancy yoga teacher and mother of two, Tessa Sanderson. She’s a graduate of the Menstruality Leadership programme, as well as our Menstruality Medicine Circle training, and her insights today are based on hundreds of birth stories that she has received from her clients.
This is a big conversation, with lots of potentially triggering or stirring topics, so we invite you to take care of yourself as you listen, especially if you’re currently pregnant.
It’s time to re-write the story of menopause.
What if the critical, provocative energy of menopause is actually a sign that you’re coming to your senses?
What if menopause isn’t a health condition we suffer from, but that people in menopause you’re actually suffering from is a lack of recognition, respect and support for the profound initiation you’re going through.
What if, post-menopause, you are more needed than ever.
This is the first of our menopause summer series, in the run up to the launch of our new book, Wise Power.
One of the beautifully challenging things about cultivating an intimacy with our menstrual cycles, or menopause process, is that it opens us up to the world.
To the beauty of life, and to the pain.
This quality of tender, unarmoured presence is real medicine for a world that can feel full of conflict, pretense, injustice and a lack of capacity to be with difference.
A devoted practice of cycle awareness helps us to see that we all belong; to ourselves, to the rhythm and flow of the natural world, and to each other.
Today we’re marking Pride Month, with a podcast episode about how menstrual cycle awareness can help us to be with difference, and create true cultures of belonging.
Our guest is Abi Denyer-Bewick, a queer menstuality educator and member of the Red School faculty. We chat about the menstruality learning session she recently offered our Menstruality Leadership Programme graduates on 'Inclusive menstruality', including:
How to create a culture of belonging for women and everyone who menstruates.
What life might look like for a trans, non-binary or gender expansive menstruator.
How to work with the fear, trauma or other big emotions that may arise as we explore how to be with difference, together.
We also share some guidance for how to take this belonging and inclusion work deeper, from a range of brilliant LGBTQ+ educators.
Have you ever wondered what foods can support your cycle health as you move through the different inner seasons of the cycle month?
In this interview with menstrual Cycle Coach, and food-lover Naam Bachmeyer, we explore her ‘Cyclical Nourishment Principles’ and how they help us to welcome in hormonal health, more pleasure, less stress and a deeper intimacy with our cycle process.
This isn’t a ‘how-to’ episode or a set of rules. Naam is very aware of how food can be complex for many of us, as well as the harm that diet culture causes. Instead, Naam shares a wealth of ideas which you can adapt for you and your body, including a delicious recipe for each inner season. Bon appetit!
Menopause is an immense life event, a great initiation. Not only is it a complete hormonal shift in the landscape of your overall health, it’s also a psychological and emotional transformation.
In today’s episode, we explore this incredible, initiatory power of menopause, and the great potential it awakens in us.
This power has been an obsession for Alexandra and Sjanie for most of the past couple of years as they wrote their long-awaited menopause book, and today we have an exciting announcement - we’re revealing the title of the book!
Today, we’re looking at menstrual cycle awareness through a different lens… we’re exploring 10 surprising reasons to practice fertility awareness.
I’m talking with Health Coach and Natural Family Planning (NFP) teacher, Jaspreet Kaur who is a fresh, passionate voice in this field - she brings it down to earth and makes it accessible to everyone. We explore…
The hidden agenda of the menstrual cycle is to help us become more fully ourselves. As we deepen our cycle awareness practice, it plugs us into our calling, our vision, our unique way of expressing our genius. The realising of this calling often requires an our structure, which often looks like a business. The beautiful thing is that the menstrual cycle can resource us along the way.
We’re in the middle of launching our brand new programme, Your Cyclical Business which is designed to support you if you’re a teacher, healer or creative, a freelancer, or a purpose-led entrepreneur to channel the wisdom of your menstrual cycle to create a thriving business.
So in our conversation today we want to invite you behind-the-scenes of Red School to see how we work with our cycles (and for Alexandra her post-menopause process) to run our cycle-aware business.
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.
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