Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause

Welcome to our 6th iteration of the ⁠Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause⁠ podcast: the Season of Orisii. Building on our international diasporic tour from last year, this season's theme is Orisii, or 'pairs' in the Afric language of Yoruba. We've invited different types of pairs to explore the through-line between menarche and menopause. You will hear parent/child, partner/lovers and sibling...

Welcome to our 6th iteration of the ⁠Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause⁠ podcast: the Season of Orisii.  Building on our international diasporic tour from last year, this season's theme is Orisii, or 'pairs' in the Afric language of Yoruba. We've invited different types of pairs to explore the through-line between menarche and menopause. You will hear parent/child, partn...

Welcome to our 6th iteration of the ⁠Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause⁠ podcast: the Season of Orisii.  Building on our international diasporic tour from last year, this season's theme is Orisii, or 'pairs' in the Afric language of Yoruba. We've invited different types of pairs to explore the through-line between menarche and menopause. You will hear parent/child, partn...

Welcome to our 6th iteration of the ⁠Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause⁠ podcast: the Season of Orisii. Building on our international diasporic tour from last year, this season's theme is Orisii, or 'pairs' in the Afric language of Yoruba. We've invited different types of pairs to explore the through-line between menarche and menopause. You will hear parent/child, partne...

Welcome to our 6th iteration of the Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause podcast: the Season of Orisii. Building on our international diasporic tour from last year, this season's theme is Orisii, or 'pairs' in the Afric language of Yoruba . We've invited different types of pairs to explore the through-line between menarche and menopause. You will hear parent/child, partner...

During 2023, the Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause continued to bushwack a maroon path for those menopause stories left at the margins by launching a diasporic tour that took our team to the UK, Harlem, Toronto, and Puerto Rico. Our intergenerational team has learned to hold the “both/and” dynamic tension of curating storytelling spaces more deeply. We are infinitely grateful for the l...

Happy World Menopause Month! This year, the Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause has been deepening our intergenerational narrative shift work by co-creating peer learning exchanges to normalize the menopause experience of Black people in the UK, New York, Toronto, and Puerto Rico. We are also co-hosting intergenerational menopause storytelling events called "Orisii" ( "pai...

This year, the Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause plans to deepen our intergenerational narrative shift work by co-creating peer learning exchanges to normalize the menopause experience of Black people in the UK, New York, Toronto, and Puerto Rico. We are also co-hosting intergenerational menopause storytelling events called "Orisii" ( "pairs" in Yoruba). The peer le...

This year, the Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause plans to deepen our intergenerational narrative shift work by co-creating peer learning exchanges to normalize the menopause experience of Black people in the  UK, New York, Toronto, and Puerto Rico .  We want to take you all along with us on our Magical Menopausal Multiverse School Bus tour! In each location, we will also co-host curate...

Welcome to the O. Estelle Butler Intragalactic Train Station, where all of our Milky Way is always within your reach. Please follow the illuminated paths to the ticket kiosk, your train line, and other needs you may have about the station. This is Omisade Burney-Scott and welcome to ‘Black Technologies of the Menopausal Multiverse.’ The voices and stories featured in this exhibition include our gu...

Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause measures our impact by the continuation of expanding and normalizing the conversations and understanding around menopause to be inclusive and centering all Black people---all gender identities, sexual expression, and ages. There is a growing ecosystem of Black people talking about menopause and aging. Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause has played a...

There is a growing ecosystem of people talking about menopause and aging. The Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause sees ourselves as menopausal alchemists, doulas, cartographers, and advocates and has taken up an intentional role in ushering in intergenerational Black voices and narratives into the menopausal landscape.   We see our intergenerational work, healing, and storytelling as an...

"Above all else, Our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s may because of our need as human persons for autonomy... We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves,...

There is much we can learn-- or maybe unlearn about menopause and aging if we apply a Speculative Fiction lens. Our current understanding of Speculative Fiction is tethered to science fiction and fantasy, and the way this genre broadens the story or narratives begging shared to include the potent age-old question of “what if.” This question that has been posed by poets, folklorists, writers, and p...

Since we launched the Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause, I have learned quite a bit about how Murphy's Law plays a role in what we produce. We are all familiar with Murphy's first law; if anything can go wrong, it will. However, I don't think many of us know that there are two other laws; nothing is as easy as it looks, and everything takes longer than you think it will. If I were to offer...

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”  -- Toni Morrison When I was a kid in the 1970s, School House Rock, short educational cartoon vignettes put to music, were ubiquitous on Saturday mornings. We learned about grammar, math and how the government work (kind of) all with a catchy tune. There was a particular School House Rock titled...

"This body does not bare destruction well. This body likes warm drops of rain and bare feet. Toes grounding in rich soil, and having my scalp greased. To move and to stretch just a little beyond reach, There is glory over there, a hallelujah in my feet. This body likes hot sun on bare shoulders, summer rain and not running inside. This body likes first morning light in her arms, new day sun stream...

At the end of each podcast episode, I close by saying, "we will see you again on the dark side of the moon". I chose this language because of the way moon phases have been divinely associated with menstruation throughout antiquity. The dark side of the moon is under the dominion of the crone, the wise one, the astrological sign of Scorpio, the goddess Hecate, and Orisa Oya.  It is a place of...

"Often, when people talk about going through “the change”, it brings up all the images of a tearful, rageful, sweaty and emotional woman. This journey is not seen or held up as a positive transformation with a spectrum of stages and manifestations, but an ending to be cloaked in fear. Another, more potent way to frame the menopausal experience is to see it as actually another powerful representati...

Last year, in the middle of the pandemic, I was perusing through social media when something caught my eye. It was a post of the Original Bad Girl of Comedy, Luenell, modeling Savage x Fenty lingerie. BE STILL MY BEATING HEART! When I tell you our big sis/auntie Luenell was giving us something we could feel, that is an understatement! Right then and there I knew I had to interview her for the podc...

“There is no face of menopause. Why are there no celebrities and personalities out there really promoting menopause? It's not a one comment conversation. It is not a one-time acknowledgement issue. It's not a fad. This is a fact of life. And there's nobody willing to take it on because frankly, I think they, it makes them feel old past their prime. Unfuckable. I don't care about that. Someone who...

The doctors are in the house!  You have asked for it and here it is! Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause is so excited to bring you all this fantastic interview with OB/GYNs Dr. Cindy Duke and Dr. Arianna Sholes-Douglas. We talked about what menopause is and what it is not, sex and menopause, menopause health/support and health disparities experience by Black women, femmes and non binar...

"Transformation doesn't happen in a linear way, at least not one we can always track. It happens in cycles, convergences, explosions. If we release the framyework of failure, we can realize that we are in iterative cycles, and we can keep asking ourselves----- how do I learn from this? Emotional growth is nonlinerar." adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategies: Shaping Change, Changing World s To n...

"The calabash is a domesticated plant that depends on us for its survival, like wheat or almonds. Its closest wild relatives grow in Africa. When people domesticated the gourd, they bred a rugged, light-weight shell that could hold up for years. Archaeologists have found pieces of calabash dating back 11,000 in East Asia. In the New World, people were using calabashes at least 10,000 years ago. Fo...

Before we jump in: a note on our content for this episode.  "The Sweetest Taboo" episode is a candid conversation with Sexologist Goody Howard about sexuality and sexual expression. It is created for adult audiences only. We advise listener discretion for graphic conversation about sexual expression, frank portrayal of sexuality, discussion of sex toys and products; and some strong language....