The Menstruality Podcast

Red School
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How can menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause enhance your health, creativity and leadership? That's the question we'll explore together in the Menstruality Podcast, brought to you by Red School, where we’re training the menstruality leaders of the future. Your host, Sophie Jane Hardy will be joined often by Red School’s founders, Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer, as well as pioneering thought leaders, troublemakers and culture-shifters to discover 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.

  1. 1 DAY AGO

    233. How Menstrual Cycle Awareness has Shaped my Creative Process (Chloé Zhao)

    Today it’s our great pleasure to be joined by Chloé Zhao. Chloé is an academy award winning filmmaker, and amongst many accolades, Chloé is the first Woman of Colour to have won an academy award for best director for her film Nomadland. In this conversation, Chloé chats with Alexandra and Sjanie about how menstrual cycle awareness has shaped her creative process, including how she worked with the wisdom of her menstrual cycle to create and direct her most recent film, Hamnet, which received eight Oscar nominations. When Chloé turned thirty seven years old, she started to get menstrual cramps for the first time. Although it wasn’t comfortable, she felt something important was coming to life within her. This coincided with what she lovingly calls a ‘midlife crisis’ that ultimately led her to discover the practice of menstrual cycle awareness, which she says helped her to learn a language that her body had forgotten to speak. We explore: Intuition as our greatest currency, and how becoming more aware of our menstrual cycles prepares the body to be a vessel to receive deep intuitive knowing. The cyclical advice that Chloe has for all young filmmakers about the importance of wintering, and the power of seemingly non-productive work of rest, tending to your inner soil, and composting (even in the middle of a film set!).How the premenstrual and menstrual phases of the cycle have taught Chloe to embody creative death and rebirth, and how this played out in the creation of Hamnet. --- 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 info@redschool.net --- Social media: Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy Chloé Zhao: @chloezhao - https://www.instagram.com/chloezhao

    1hr 5min

  2. 2 APR

    232. How Menstrual Cycle Awareness Can Support You in Perimenopause (Alexandra and Sjanie)

    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. --- 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 info@redschool.net --- Social media: Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

    1hr 2min

  3. 26 MAR

    231. REPLAY: What’s Going on with Pre-Menstrual and Menopause Rage? (Alexandra & Sjanie)

    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?  --- 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 info@redschool.net --- Social media: Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

    58 min

  4. 19 MAR

    230: How to Manage Anxiety and Overwhelm in Inner Spring (Alexandra & Sjanie)

    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. --- 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 info@redschool.net --- Social media: Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

    1hr 3min

  5. 5 MAR

    229. How Menstrual Cycle Awareness Can Help us Stay Engaged, Resilient and Resourced (Dr Cre Dye)

    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. --- 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 info@redschool.net --- 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

    1hr 1min

  6. 19 FEB

    228: The Menstrual Cycle and the Female Nervous System (Veronica Rottman)

    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. --- 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 info@redschool.net --- 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

    59 min

  7. 5 FEB

    227. The Connection Between Breathwork and Your Menstrual Cycle (Harriette Wight)

    After being guided by her doctor to take the pill for twenty years to manage painful periods, breathwork practitioner Harriette Wight was still dealing with challenging bleeds and decided to try something different. She was guided by a friend to try seed cycling, then learned how to track her menstrual cycle and then - via her Yoga teacher - she discovered breathwork. The combination of breathwork and cycle awareness changed everything for her.  Breathwork, as Harriette defines it, is the practice of using the breath to consciously change how we feel physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. And today in our conversation we explore the ancient roots of breathwork and the modern day expression, and why it is such a powerful tool for health and wellbeing, particularly when it’s used in combination with menstrual cycle awareness.  Harriette is a graduate of Red School’s Menstruality Leadership Programme, and through her own intimacy with her cycle, she’s created a body of work designed around specific breathwork practices to support each of the inner seasons of the menstrual cycle. In our chat today, she shares her MLP experience including how it changed how she sees herself, how she wants to show up in the world, and how she delivers her work.  We explore: How the inhale and exhale correspond to the two movements of energy within the menstrual cycle, which Alexandra and Sjanie have named: the via positiva and the via negativa. Simple breathwork practices to support you to rest when you bleed, manage the rising energy in your inner spring, to help you feel confident in your inner summerA ‘recovery breath’ practice to manage premenstrual emotional reactivity.--- 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 info@redschool.net --- Social media: Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy Harriette Wight: @yourfriendlybreathingcoach - https://www.instagram.com/yourfriendlybreathingcoach/

    58 min

  8. 22 JAN

    226. The Power of No: Menstrual Cycle Awareness and Boundaries (Alexandra & Sjanie)

    One of the most beautiful and practical gifts of menstrual cycle awareness is how it awakens a newfound capacity to know and assert our boundaries.  As we track our shifting emotions, mental state and energy levels through the cycle month, we get to know our unique strengths and our limits. This helps to build confidence in ourselves and our nature, so that when we become aware of a boundary that has been crossed, we’re more able to find a skillful way to use the power of NO.  So today we’re exploring the power of menstrual cycle awareness for setting boundaries, especially when you’re highly sensitive, in the premenstrual phase of your cycle, and in the years running up to and during menopause, and how this is potentially a life-changing and even world-changing act. We explore: How to work with the inner critic voice that invariably wakes up when we decide to claim a boundary and take care of ourselves. How the initiatory times in our menstruality life arc; like matressense, perimenopause, menopause, illness, loss require even stronger boundaries to hold ourselves through liminal times.Why we all need to re-write the story of the emotional messages of inner autumn as boundary signals rather than irrational outbursts.--- 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 info@redschool.net --- Social media: Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

    1 hr
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About

How can menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause enhance your health, creativity and leadership? That's the question we'll explore together in the Menstruality Podcast, brought to you by Red School, where we’re training the menstruality leaders of the future. Your host, Sophie Jane Hardy will be joined often by Red School’s founders, Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer, as well as pioneering thought leaders, troublemakers and culture-shifters to discover 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.

Information

  • Creator
    Red School
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    234
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Red School
  • Show Website
    The Menstruality Podcast

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