The Menstruality Podcast

• 202. How Menstrual Cycle Awareness Can Transform PMS and PMDD (Alexandra & Sjanie)

  Did you know that 3-8% of women and people with cycles experience PMDD, which stands for premenstrual dysphoric disorder? If you are one of these people, or you are close to or work with someone with PMDD, this episode is especially for you. It’s also for you, if you - like me - have experienced intense, debilitating, dark and challenging emotional disturbance in the premenstrual phase of your cycle, often known as PMS or premenstrual syndrome. Today Alexandra and Sjanie explore the inner autumn of the cycle as a gateway to our power. As they share, our premenstrual symptoms aren’t a design flaw, but can be better understood as a truth-telling signal or a warning sign from the deepest part of ourselves about all that needs to be healed within us, and all that needs to be healed in our world. Part of the challenge we all face here is that we live in a world that dismisses and denies our cyclical experience, which creates a disconnect with our cyclical wisdom. In other words, what if it’s not the menstrual cycle that is the problem, but rather it’s a culture that pathologises, shames and denies the power and value of our cycles, and especially the power of the premenstrual phase? We explore:How the premenstrual phase of the cycle gives you feedback about your sensitivity and how to tend to it, so it can be in service to your power - because the world needs your depth of feeling.The emotional spirals that PMDD can evoke, where intense feelings arise, attack becomes your best defense, you lash out at others, and then, a couple of days later, often once your period has arrived, you have to pick up the pieces and negotiate the aftermath of self-hatred and shame.Why we all need to take what we feel in inner autumn more seriously. The premenstrual phase of the cycle is the emotional ‘novocaine’ wearing off, a time where you come to your senses, and you have heightened intuition and insight. ---Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected] media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

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• 201. Healing Grief, Fear and Loneliness after Pregnancy Loss (Iris Josephina Verstappen)

  A few months ago, our guest today, the founder of Cycle Seeds Iris Josephina Verstappen, was hosting a retreat in a goddess temple in Malta when she began to miscarry. Having accompanied many women through pregnancy loss, both as a doula and a holistic hormone and cycle coach, she’s witnessed the storm of emotions that can arise with miscarriage, as well as the taboo surrounding it. So she decided to publicly share about her experience with her 60,000 followers, to be a permission slip for others, so that they don’t have to suffer in silence. In our conversation Iris shares generously and vulnerably about how she has navigated the grief, loneliness, confusion and earth-shaking fear that it could all happen again, as well as the paradoxical feelings of love, possibility, and gratitude for how the experience of pregnancy opened her up. Our hope is that if you’re one of the one in four women and people who experience pregnancy loss, this conversation helps you to feel less alone with whatever you’re feeling. We explore:The imposter syndrome that arose for Iris when she tried to go back to work, and found herself questioning how this could have happened to her when she was doing everything “right”, especially as an educator in the field of cyclical living and women’s health, and how the antidote was simply to lie with her belly flat on the earth. The lack of community support around grief and loss, but especially in the post-partum window after miscarriage where the body is still recovering from the pregnancy, and Iris offers some great ideas for how to support a friend going through this. How Iris is navigating the identity crisis that comes with inhabiting the liminal space between maiden and mother, between becoming and unbecoming, as well as being in a body that looks and feels different after her pregnancy loss.---Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected] media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardyIris Josephina Verstappen: @cycleseeds - https://www.instagram.com/cycleseeds

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• 200. How to Recover Your Health in Menopause with Herbal Medicine (Melinda McDougall)

  If you’re curious to explore natural approaches to support menopause health symptoms today’s episode is for you. Our guest, Melinda McDougall, is a registered Medical Herbalist specialising in women's health and menopause. She combines the latest scientific research into botanical medicines with the traditional knowledge women have used for centuries to manage their health.Melinda shares a treasure trove of herbal information about how to improve sleep and brain function, reduce stress, and help your body to feel better, as well as how herbal medicine supported her own healing process with erratic and incredibly heavy cycles in the years running up to menopause. One of my favourite parts was when Melinda described how our brains get totally re-shaped and remolded during menopause, as we wake up from the fog of estrogen people-pleasing hormone, drop into a different way of seeing the world, and become less inclined to put everyone else first. We explore:A powerful ayurvedic herb that helps your body adapt to stress and is very supportive for insomnia and sleep disturbances, as well as herbal medicine for night sweats and hot flushes. A variety of useful herbs for mental focus and brain function, if you’re experiencing brain fog, or feel like your brain isn’t working like it used to, as well as herbs to support you through the intense rage that we can experience during menopause,How to use herbal medicine as a viable alternative to HRT or as a way to support your body alongside HRT, like adaptogenic herbs, and herbs that support gut and liver health and can help to reduce side effects like headaches, weight gain and breakthrough bleeding. ---Order our menopause book - Wise Power: Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause to Awaken Authority, Purpose and Belonging here: https://www.wisepowerbook.com---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected] media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardyMelinda McDougall: @melinda_mcdougall_herbalist - https://www.instagram.com/melinda_mcdougall_herbalist/

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• 199. How to Use Energy Work for Menstrual, Menopause and Womb Health (Prune Harris)

  Our guest today, energy expert Prune Harris sees the womb as the deepest house of wisdom that we have, and today we explore how to work energetically to cultivate womb health, as well as menstrual and menopause health. Since birth, Prune has been able to see energy - the energy of humans, animals, trees and the Earth, and she sees this energy as vibrations, colours, and connective patterns. She has trained with healers, elders, and wisdom holders throughout the world and for the past fifty years, she’s been tracking, understanding, and now translating this world of energy for us all to experience, as a consciousness educator, soul activist and author of her book, Your Radiant Soul - Understand Your Energy to Transform Your World.Today we explore how to work with energy for menstrual, menopause and womb health, why pain tends to stem from congested energy, and practical energy work tools to help you to increase flow in your energy system to ease menstrual or menopause challenges you’re facing, starting today. We explore:The spiralling energy of the womb, how to have a “wombgasm”, and how it can open us up to a tender, vulnerable kind of power.How to work energetically to help with the symptoms that can come with hormonal fluctuations, such as hormonal headaches.How Prune worked with her menopause hot flushes by guiding the heat to move horizontally through her energy system. ---Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected] media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardyPrune Harris: @pruneharris - https://www.instagram.com/pruneharris

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• 198. The Connection between Your Menstrual Cycle and Your Mental & Emotional Health (Alexandra & Sjanie)

  As part of our ongoing series about the connection between menstrual cycle awareness and our health & wellbeing today we’re exploring how getting to know your cycle can be a vital foundation for mental and emotional health.Alexandra and Sjanie are both retired therapists, and today they share their learnings from their own personal cycle awareness practice, as well as working with thousands of students over several decades about how mental and emotional health rests on us knowing ourselves, feeling our value and worth, and understanding the nature of cyclicity - all of which are skills we learn from connecting to our cycles. We also explore how the root of much of our collective menstrual and emotional turmoil as women and people who have, or have had cycles is the cultural denial, shutting down, ignoring, belittling, and suppression of our cyclical nature. We explore:Alexandra’s personal journey with dissolving the shame of her early years and claiming her worth through cycle awareness and menopause, so that now she is emotionally resilient to the extent that she is immune to toxic shame.The two stable poles of the menstrual cycle, and the two transitional phases and how to work with them all to understand ourselves better and create emotional and psychological wellbeing. How following the call to stop and rest at menstruation is medicinal for us emotionally and psychologically. ---Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected] media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

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