The Menstruality Podcast

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 [http://www.redschool.net/love], Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love [https://www.redschool.net/love] --- The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net --- Social media: Red School: @redschool [https://www.instagram.com/red.school] - https://www.instagram.com/red.school [https://www.instagram.com/red.school]Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy [https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy] - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy [https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy]

Menstrual cycle awareness can guide us to create more rest in our lives, including a mini menstrual sabbatical each month to renew us and restore our connection to joy. Our guest today, author, poet and teacher Edveeje Fairchild has been a devotee to rest for her entire life, having been raised in a spiritual tradition that honoured the weekly sabbath. And this non-negotiable rhythm of rest has been one of the key practices that has formed her philosophy of joy as a compass for our lives. Edveeje’s first book, Joy as the Compass: Freeing Yourself from the Seven Activist Addictions has just been published. Today we’re exploring how menstrual cycle awareness is a vital ingredient to a joy-focused life, through the lens of our environmental activist work together, and how we applied menstrual cycle awareness and cyclical living within the reforestation non-profit TreeSisters to plant a million trees.  Edveeje also shares generously from the midst of her menopause transition, which has included the trauma of the sudden loss of her beloved twin sister, as well as the devastation of her small mountain town due to hurricane Helene. We explore how her connection to the ancient trees and wild nature in the ‘Mother Forest’ around her have held her in this sacred menopause territory, even when life feels like death.  We explore: * What it means to be the ‘dream of the earth’, how our menstrual cycles can help us to reconnect our inner nature with our outer nature and show up in our full glory, on behalf of Life itself. * How Edveeje used menstrual cycle awareness to create all the policies, procedures, internal operations and organisational planning tools at TreeSisters, and anchor the theory of menstruality in very practical ways inside an emerging international non-profit.  * How Edveeje’s discovered that her inner spring was her challenging hotspot in the menstrual cycle, and how this eventually led her to take a long sabbatical and follow the promptings of her menstrual cycle towards deeper joy.  --- Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle [http://www.redschool.net/love], Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love [https://www.redschool.net/love] --- The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net --- Social media: Red School: @redschool [https://www.instagram.com/red.school] - https://www.instagram.com/red.school [https://www.instagram.com/red.school]Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy [https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy] - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy [https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy]

When Toko-pa Turner first started to experience signs of perimenopause, she was simultaneously diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called rheumatoid arthritis, and the combination led to severe insomnia. Sleep deprivation is challenging for all of us, but in Toko-pa’s case it was especially disorientating because for over twenty-five years she has been working with dreams in a mythopoetic way to answer life’s deep soul questions. Sometimes called a Midwife of the Psyche, Toko-pa is the author of The Dreaming Way, and her work focuses on belonging, restoring the feminine, reconciling paradox, elevating grief, and facilitating ritual. She founded the Dream School in 2001 and has now grown a network of more than a hundred thousand dreamers worldwide. Toko-pa’s journey with her dreams as her guide began when she was orphaned in her teens and entered the care system, and in our conversation today we track Toko-pa’s personal dreaming journey, as well as how we can all take an intimate, deep-dive into the magical world of our dreams as a gateway to a different kind of intelligence. We explore: * Why our cultures often dismiss the power of our dreams and how to reclaim your dreaming capacities in a world that has been stuck in a centuries-long patriarchal phase of worshipping rationality and materialism. * How to ‘court’ our dreams, and why we don’t need to hire an expert to help us interpret our dreams, but rather to follow the wisdom of indigenous cultures and reclaim our dreaming as our mother tongue. * How to keep a dream journal, and the key practice to do when you wake up after a big dream to ensure you remember it and can connect to the power of the symbols and wisdom within it. --- Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle [http://www.redschool.net/love], Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love [https://www.redschool.net/love] --- The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net --- Social media: Red School: @redschool [https://www.instagram.com/red.school] - https://www.instagram.com/red.school [https://www.instagram.com/red.school]Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy [https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy] - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy [https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy]Toko-pa Turner: @tokopa [https://www.instagram.com/tokopa] - https://www.instagram.com/tokopa [https://www.instagram.com/tokopa]

Today we’re in conversation with the brilliant community gathered around this work and podcast in our part two episode about how to work with menstrual cycle awareness as our own in-built energy management system.  This conversation is for you if you struggle to follow the impulses of your cycle around the modern-life juggle of responsibilities, or if you’re dealing with low energy levels and you’re not sure why. It’s also for you if you’re feeling good, but want tips to work with your cycle to enahcen your vitality and feel even better. It’s for you if you’re new to cycle awareness - it will help you get set-up with the foundations for setting up your cyclical rhythm of sustainability. And it’s also for you if you’ve been practising for a good while as we get into many of the nuances of the practice, including how to get the limitations of your inner seasons working for you, how to navigate your energy through your crossover days in between the seasons, and how to set cyclical boundaries.   We explore: * How to do a ‘movement’ cycle check-in to get an honest, unfiltered information, directly from your body about how your energy levels are on any given day (without your mind getting involved telling you all the things you should be feeling and doing). * The core truth when it comes to managing your energy with cycle awareness: the way you bleed sets the tone for your whole cycle, and some tips for claiming menstrual rest (even in a world that is not at all interested in you claiming this).   * How slowing down is the secret to accessing the power of the premenstrual phase of the cycle, especially when we’re feeling exhausted and vulnerable.  --- Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle [http://www.redschool.net/love], Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love [https://www.redschool.net/love] --- The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net --- Social media: Red School: @redschool [https://www.instagram.com/red.school] - https://www.instagram.com/red.school [https://www.instagram.com/red.school]Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy [https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy] - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy [https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy]

We’re experiencing an epidemic of chronic fatigue and burnout, especially for women, and people with marginalised identities. It’s part of our modern day polycrisis, and in many ways the exhaustion we’re experiencing in our individual bodies mirrors the environmental challenges that are ravaging our earth, our larger body. We’re driving both to the very edges of their capacity.  Beautifully, the practice of menstrual cycle awareness can help us to live in alignment with our natural rhythms, to embrace rest and prevent overwhelm and burnout. We can connect with the four phases of the menstrual cycle as our own personal energy management system.  And when we listen for and cooperate with the natural ebb and flow of our inner seasons, we rebel against the subtle but pervasive messaging that we should be more, bigger, faster. We feel better, we’re more creative, more powerful and we model the much-needed art of sustainable living.  We explore: * What Sjanie learned about sustainable, cyclical living from a fierce lioness she encountered in a dream. * The creative power that opens up within us when we dare (and are able) to step out of hustle mode, stop producing and surrender into non-doing at menstruation.  * Alexandra’s personal story of discovering the power of stopping, through years of intense menstrual pain, which she was eventually able to heal through the power of rest and listening to her body.  --- Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle [http://www.redschool.net/love], Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love [https://www.redschool.net/love] --- The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email info@redschool.net --- Social media: Red School: @redschool [https://www.instagram.com/red.school] - https://www.instagram.com/red.school [https://www.instagram.com/red.school]Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy [https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy] - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy [https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy]