The Menstruality Podcast

When people hear about menstrual cycle awareness, they’re often surprised, confused and baffled by the idea that there could be a connection between the menstrual cycle and your creativity, power and wisdom. It’s no surprise given current cultural attitudes around the menstrual cycle and menopause, which are largely ignored or dismissed. So today’s episode is designed to both build a bridge for yo...

In many indigenous communities across the world, people have long honoured menstruation as a sacred time. Today we’re lucky to be exploring the beauty and wisdom of the ancestral moontime medicine of the Andean people, and our guest is Dr Cynthia Ingar, who is an anthropologist and Andean keeper of Woman Medicine wisdom living in the Sacred Valley in Peru.  In her late twenties, Cynthia was guided...

Befriending our menstrual cycles and wombs and coming home to the root of our body, and to our pelvic bowls often means negotiating any trauma that we’ve experienced in that part of our bodies, or other traumas that we hold in this part of our bodies. As our guest today, the brilliant Dr Jeevan Singh shares, the pelvic bowl is an organ of relationship that has the capacity to guide our personal an...

Spring is just beginning here where Alexandra, Sjanie and I are in the UK, and due to popular demand, this time two years ago we rode off the springtime momentum to create a couple of podcast episodes all about the inner spring - the preovulatory phase of the cycle. Many of you have been sharing questions about this pre-ovulatory phase of the cycle (which correlates to the waxing moon phase if you...

Today we’re exploring the immense capacities that open up to us as we move through menopause, and it’s a special episode as Alexandra, the co-founder of Red School is your host, and it’s our next Wise Power series conversation... The Wise Power series began with our Wise Power retreat when S+A’s book Wise Power was published and Alexandra is continuing to have sporadic conversations about what men...

In our 40s, many of us begin to experience a variety of health symptoms and challenges, as well as emotional and psychological shifts. Some call this perimenopause. At Red School, Alexandra and Sjanie call it, The Quickening…   So for today’s podcast episode - we’re re-sharing a conversation from a couple of years ago - one of the most listened to and shared episodes ever on the podcast. It was th...

As many of you will know, Uma Dinsmore Tuli has been a powerful force for good in many fields for decades, including Yoga, Menstruality, and women’s health. She describes herself as a writer, an educator, a Hyperactive Yoginī, a mother of three and a devotee to the Dark Mother. Today we chat about the cycles that guide Uma’s life, from the planets, to the moon, to her early relationship with her c...

Many of us feel more intuitive and connected to the mystical and the magical in the second half of the menstrual cycle and today I’m directly exploring the connection between menstrual cycle awareness, witchcraft and psychic capacities. Our guest is Mimi Young, a Taiwanese-Canadian, Daoist, animist, spirit worker and medium, who serves her community through ancient Chinese esoteric practices, drea...

When our guest today, Sarah Jenks was in her 20s, striving to get it all right, and be a good girl, she quickly found herself feeling exhausted, empty and struggling with emotional eating. One day, she stumbled upon sacred feminine ceremony and her life changed. She was inspired to dig into the history of sacred feminine ceremony, where she discovered how it has been branded by the oppressive patr...

We live in a world where we so often feel that we need to live like men, work like men, and push ourselves like men in order to be valued. When the truth is that we are more-or-less twenty eight different women each month, and there is immense power and magic in this innate ebb and flow. As our guest today, Usha Anandi, the Founder of Womben Wellness says that women and people with cycles have fou...

Happy New Year! Today we’re back with our first live episode of 2025, and we’re trying out something new and fun - we hope you love it: a ‘power card’ reading for the year to come.  Our theme for today is how menstrual cycle awareness can help us all to tap into our visions and dreams for the coming year, and how the daily practice of checking in with our cycle can help us to make them real. So we...

As we enter 2025, we explore what menstrual cycle awareness can teach us about how to begin things well. This is an episode we recorded a couple of years ago, when we were each navigating a bumpy beginning to the year, and we used this as a lens to explore how the deep intelligence within the cycle is guides us through life’s highs and lows. Whether you’re wanting to start the year with intention...

Today we’re sharing a conversation we had a couple of years back at the close of the year and it’s all about what cycle awareness can teach us about all of life’s endings ; the smaller, more surface level ones like the end of the year we have coming up, and the bigger more profound ones, like ending relationships, moving house, all the way to the deep grief of losing loved ones. For those of us wi...

Today we’re sharing one of our most popular episodes from the archives - to tune into the outer winter here in the northern hemisphere… it’s all about how the inner winter of the menstrual cycle awakens feminine leadership… So the thing that originally inspired this conversation was that Sjanie’s period came very early the month before we spoke. She suddenly found herself bleeding on day 12 and sh...

Guided by the wisdom of deep rest at menstruation, Alexandra and Sjanie do a 'Big Bleed' retreat for Red School every year, a kind of short sabbatical. Even though Red School is a big eco-system, with a community of 1000s of people and a whole team taking care of many different pieces, they take the bold leadership move of pressing pause on it all, to allow for deep rest, and new inspira...

In Chinese Medicine, life progresses in seven-year cycles for female bodies, and each of these phases correlates to one of the five elements; water, wood, fire, earth and metal. Today Chinese Medicine Practitioner, Kris Gonzalez describes what it means for us to move from the earth element in our 30s to the metal element in our 40s, and what this transition can teach us about how to create more he...

Today we’d love to invite you to dream with us for a moment… Imagine we could look ahead twenty years, to a world which fully honours the power and magic of the menstrual cycle and menopause… a world where the menstrual taboo has lifted fully, and the menstrual cycle is honoured as the sacred source of life for us humans. As you may well know, there’s a powerful menstrual revolution at work in the...

Menstrual cycle awareness has the capacity to create meaningful change in all areas of life, and today we’re exploring an aspect of our collective human experience which isn’t talked about enough... In a couple of days, it will be the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women , and today our guest is Tamsin Fagan who has been doing the difficult, courageous work of ending vio...

In a world that can overly prioritise the linear and rational, so many of us long to connect with and express our instinctive, intuitive knowing, and today we’re exploring how the practice of menstrual cycle awareness can help us to hone the art of intuitive living. Alexandra and Sjanie unpack how the first half of the cycle has an outer-focused thrust which takes you out into the world (it almost...

What do we do when we’re experiencing significant changes physically, emotionally and spiritually in the years running up to menopause, all we want to do is run far, far away, but we still have kids at home who need our care and support? This question is coming up a lot in our community and that’s why I’m so grateful to be talking with Matrescence expert, journalist and coach, Amy Taylor Kabbaz, w...

Through their decades of sitting with women and people undergoing the menopause initiation, Alexandra and Sjanie have seen that no part of your life remains untouched by menopause, including your relationships with your loved ones and community. Everything needs to undergo a shift, however subtle, as you move into a greater sense of authority with clearer parameters about yourself. As Alexandra sa...

Menopause, and the years running up to it, can be a time of real challenge and transformation. Without wise guidance and a framework to understand what’s happening, we can be left feeling lost, alone and crazy.  Luckily, there are those who can serve as guides, like our guest today, Dr Danielle Arabena, who brings her extensive experience as a medical doctor and a shamanic healer to stand at what...

It’s world menopause month, and we’re continuing the menopause conversation we began two weeks ago, where we explored how to navigate the dark night of the soul of the menopause process (it’s episode 166), and we’re continuing by looking at the powers that the menopause initiation can awaken in us, if we refuse to abandon ourselves during this betrayal phase of menopause. In their book, Wise Power...

Today on the podcast we’re exploring how menopause can be an initiation into greater self-love, self-compassion and self-mothering. This is our third conversation with  Chameli Gad, the founder of Awakening Women. Each year she’s come back here to generously share her menopause process, which unfolded throughout the pandemic and included the death of her son, and her divorce. In our chat today, sh...

Many of us are turning up at menopause stressed, exhausted, overworked and under-nourished, often managing multiple care and work roles simultaneously. And then we hit the “death” moment of the menopause initiatory death and rebirth process.  The challenges of the menopause initiation can often be compounded by key relationships ending, bereavement, or other extreme life changes. It can all form a...