The Menstruality Podcast

Today we’re having a fascinating conversation with the woman who pioneered the role of intimacy co-ordinator in TV, film, opera and theatre. Ita O’Brien has worked on numerous high-profile productions including Sex Education on Netflix, and I May Destroy You on the BBC, and is the founder of the Intimacy on Set guidelines which have been widely adopted across the industry, advocating for safe, fai...

Although the inner summer of the menstrual cycle has a reputation for being easy-breezy, for some of us, this can be a real hotspot in the cycle month.  So, this episode is for you if the ovulatory cycle phase is intense or overwhelming, or you feel a sense of pressure to show up and ‘get shit done’ inside an already over-full life. It’s also for you if inner summer brings a sense of being all dre...

The spiritual power of the cycle and the womb is core to Red School’s teachings and offerings, and we’ve explored this topic on the podcast through the lens of many different faith, spiritual, traditional and indigenous traditions including; Maori womb wisdom with Hinewai Waitoa, Andean womb wisdom teachings with Dr Cynthia Ingar, Anishinabe cyclical wisdom with Asha Frost, and ancient African wom...

The Menstruality podcast is devoted to restoring cyclical intelligence at the heart of our world, and we center our conversation on the menstrual cycle as a teacher, guide and ally in this quest. But what do you do if you encounter this work after you’ve been through menopause and no longer have a menstrual cycle?  We receive many questions from post-menopause women and folks in our community who...

Today we’re exploring how to bring cycle awareness to psychotherapy and mental healthcare.  Our guest is MaryClaire Decker (known as MC) who is a Registered Psychologist. MC created Mindful Cycles after seeing a gap in mental health care, and after her own struggles with chronic menstrual migraines reinforced the need for an approach that works with our cycles, not against them.  At Mindful Cycles...

1 in 2 girls in the U.S. say they feel embarrassed or ashamed about their period and only 22% of U.S parents feel “very comfortable” talking to their kids about puberty. We need to rewrite this script, and our guest today, menstrual educator Amy Wilding, has written a book to do just that.  Amy has supported hundreds of families through her Period of Change programs, helping them reclaim menarche...

Today we’re sharing a replay of one of our most listened to podcasts ever - and it’s all about how getting to know your cycle can be a vital foundation for mental and emotional health. Alexandra and Sjanie, the co-founders of Red School 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 o...

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...

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,...

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’ momen...

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 challen...

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 yea...

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...

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...

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...

To help you ease into 2026 purposefully, we’re talking about how the cycle helps you to live in your zone of genius today, which is to say, how practising menstrual cycle awareness helps you to know your own nature and stay close to what you’re really great at.  We go through the inner seasons of the cycle one by one, sharing how each one can help us to do the courageous, radical act of claiming o...

Happy New Year! We have a gift for you to help you start your 2026 infused in cyclical wisdom. Everything that Alexandra and Sjanie create at Red School is focused on inspiring us to connect to the power that lives within our cyclical nature, so that we can know and claim our own leadership roles in our lives. So, in service of this, today Alexandra and Sjanie do a power card reading with the Red...

The moon is a big topic of conversation within the Red School community. Many who aren’t menstruating practice lunar tracking in place of menstrual cycle awareness, and those who have a menstrual cycle often bring moon-inspired questions, such as: ‘should I bleed on the full moon or the new moon?’ And ‘what to do when I’m bleeding but the moon is full and I feel pulled in two directions?’.  So tod...

When you practice menstrual cycle awareness, you start to feel more connected to yourself. This process of remembering and embodying more of who you truly are means that you may come into contact with parts of yourself that have been disowned, or that you’ve been shamed out of claiming. Our conversation today is especially designed to support you if you’ve been encountering or unearthing memories...

Whether it’s at work, in our relationships, as parents or carers, or in our interaction with our community, life regularly invites us to summon up the courage to have difficult conversations. Today we’re chatting about how cultivating an intimacy with our cyclical nature can support us to show up with skillful expression and heart. Our guest today is Sarah Rozenthuler is a world-renowned speaker,...

One of the questions that comes up again and again in the Red School community is this: how can I free up my voice and share my truth? So many of us, particularly women and those socialised as female feel stuck, silenced or disconnected from our true expression, so today we’re exploring how the practice of checking in every day with your menstrual cycle and how it’s influencing your energy and moo...

For many of us menopause announces itself in our lives through some kind of betrayal. For today’s podcast guest, that betrayal came in the form of a dismantling of identity that provoked one particular emotion on a whole new level - rage.  Our guest today is the brilliant trauma-informed embodiment guide, facilitator, and heart activist Tanya Forgan. She explores menopause as a series of portals w...

As we enter our forties, many of us start to experience signals from our body that show us that we can’t override ourselves anymore. We become more permeable, our energy levels shift, and we tend to have less capacity. If we don’t clock these changes and find ways to adapt our lives, we’ll start to experience trouble inside ourselves often in the form of stress, overwhelm and other physical, emoti...

Our guest today is Tamu Mosley, who is a student of Alexandra and Sjanie’s Menopause: The Great Awakener course, and is an initiated Sacred Woman, wholistic wellness facilitator, teacher, and mama. Tamu was guided by her mum to track her cycles from her very first bleed, and now, a few years post menopause, she sees how cycle awareness guided her through her menopause initiation. When Tamu was ent...

Menopause is an immense life event, a great initiation. Not only is it a complete hormonal shift in the landscape of your overall health, it’s also a psycho-spiritual transformation, which can bring with it a huge emotional rollercoaster. Rage, grief, emptiness, exposure, hurt, anxiety - they can all create a sense of groundlessness in menopause, to the extent that many of us feel that we simply d...