The Menstruality Podcast

As we enter our early forties, we step into a new life phase with a very different atmosphere and tone. We’re shifting into a new paradigm, often accompanied by changes in our menstrual cycles and ourselves, some of which may be startling or very tricky to manage.
Brain fog, memory issues, irregular cycles, heavy periods - the list goes on. You might notice that you have less tolerance for stress, tire more easily, and that your trusty sleep pattern isn’t quite so trusty anymore.
Today I’m chatting with Alexandra and Sjanie about how the practice of menstrual cycle awareness can be a vital source of support as we navigate these challenging years. 
Sjanie shares generously about her own experience of perimenopause, or as she calls it, the autumn of the menstruating years; from experiencing new levels of love, to reckoning with childhood trauma, and how her recommitment to the fundamentals of cycle awareness has supported her. 
Whether you’re experiencing the psycho‐spiritual shift in the years running up to menopause, or you’re supporting women and folks in the thick of it - perhaps your clients, family members. friends or colleagues - we hope this conversation helps to plug you into the practice of menstrual cycle awareness as a vital perimenopause resource.

We explore:
How to practice menstrual cycle awareness when your cycle is very irregular and how to claim your rest, even when you don’t know when your next period is coming.
What is at work on the psycho-spiritual level in the forties, and how the lens of the ‘quickening’ can help to make sense of the challenges of these years. 
How Sjanie has navigated her trauma healing process in perimenopause, and the importance of community support in this life phase. 
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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

Today we’re replaying one of our most popular episodes -  a frank and feisty chat about one of the hot topics in our community - premenstrual and menopausal RAGE.
Have you ever been driving in your car and felt compelled to wind the windows up and actually roar because you felt so wildly angry on day 24? 
Or, if you’re navigating menopause, have you experienced your own ‘burn-the-house-down’ moment when your fury threatened to destroy everything you’ve built so far in your life?
What is going on with this rage? Why are so many of us feeling it? And what is it trying to tell us? 
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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

This episode is the first of a four-part series exploring the common challenges of each of the four cycle phases or inner seasons of the menstrual cycle, and Alexandra and Sjanie are going to reframe these challenges as meaningful limits that support us to access the power of each phase.
This first episode in the series is the inner spring, preovulation cycle phase and we’re looking at the challenge of anxiety, overwhelm, and scattered focus. And as the outer seasons unfold here in the UK, we’ll we continue with an exploration of the limits and challenges of the inner summer, autumn and winter. 
Through our personal challenges, and stories from the community, we explore how the limits of inner spring help you to access the big powers of this cycle phase, including play, innocence and enthusiasm. 
Above all, this series is an exploration of how the challenges you experience in your menstrual cycle aren't necessarily problems to fix, but can also be seen as meaningful boundaries that actually enable the transformative work of each cycle phase.

We explore:
The key practice to support inner spring challenges: making space and time when you’re coming out of menstruation to cherish your sensitive nature. 
The deep river at work in the menstrual cycle each month as our energy rises towards ovulation and descends as we head towards menstruation, and how this gives rise to the limits of each cycle phase.

What the challenges and limits of inner spring can teach us about what we need at the beginning of everything; relationships, jobs, creative projects and anything new we’re embarking on.
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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

Today we’re exploring how the practice of menstrual cycle awareness can help us to stay engaged, resilient and resourced as we meet the challenges of today’s world. 
Our guest is the brilliant Dr. Cre Dye who is the Menstruality Justice and Inclusion Educator at Red School. Cre has served her local, national, and international communities with heart, mind and body activism for over twenty-five years as a mental health therapist, yoga teacher/trainer and university professor.
Together we practiced deep listening to a now-famous speech from one of the most powerful voices of love in our world today, the Sikh activist and lawyer Valarie Kaur. In the speech she asks: what if this darkness isn’t the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? 
In the emergent and far-reaching conversation that followed, we chatted about what it means to sit within the generative darkness of the womb, Valarie’s birthing and labour analogies and how they can guide us in dark times, and how the different phases - especially the premenstrual phase - of the menstrual cycle can grow our capacity to be with discomfort.
We explore:
The importance of using our imagination to romanticise, and how the menstrual, inner winter cycle phase can support us to rest and restore ourselves, so that we can step back into action with renewed energy and vision.
How our premenstrual cycle phase shows us that we heal where we are loved, how to grow our capacity to be with discomfort, and how to hold the tension where there is challenge and difference. 
What we can learn from Black feminists like Toni Morrison, bell hooks and Audre Lourde about how to cultivate resilience in times of crisis, and how white women have a particular role to play in meeting the challenges at play in the world. 
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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Dr Cre Dye - @credyeyoga - https://www.instagram.com/credyeyoga

Historically, trauma research has been done primarily on men, and then applied to women’s bodies as if it’s going to work in the same way. But as our guest today, Somatic Emotional Processing facilitator Veronica Rottman, shares, women currently suffer from twice the rate of anxiety and depression, make up 80% of the population with autoimmune disease and are much more likely to experience burnout. 
Veronica is the founder of Soma School and has devoted over 40,000 hours over the past seventeen years to trauma resolution. In the conversation today she explores the female nervous systems; including how women and those socialised as female experience trauma differently inside a patriarchal culture, why the female nervous system is more prone to the freeze response and and why it’s important to think carefully about how we use the term ‘regulation’ when it comes to trauma resolution and our nervous systems. 
Veronica also has her own personal trauma healing journey from complex post-traumatic stress and in her earlier life, she experienced PMDD, menstrual pain and other symptoms, which she describes as her body revolting against the patriarchy. After practicing menstrual cycle awareness for many years, she now no longer has pelvic pain and today she shares how the practice has helped her to have a more embodied relationship to her pelvis, and to understand her cycle through sensations.

We explore:
The fact that Veronica hasn’t encountered a woman or person experiencing PMDD who doesn’t have a history of trauma whether it’s more subtle, low-level and chronic, or more extreme experiences.

Why somatics and wellness need to be less focused on regulation for women, and more about being with and softening into what’s happening in our cyclical bodies.

The role of oxytocin in the trauma response, why women experience trauma relationally, and the importance of cuddle puddles. 
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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
---
The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Veronica Rottman: @wakingwomb - https://www.instagram.com/wakingwomb