The Menstruality Podcast - 10 (Surprising) Reasons to Practice Fertility Awareness (Jaspreet Kaur)

Episode Date: May 26, 2022

Today, we’re looking at menstrual cycle awareness through a different lens… we’re exploring 10 surprising reasons to practice fertility awareness.I’m talking with Health Coach and Natural Family Planning (NFP) teacher, Jaspreet Kaur who is a fresh, passionate voice in this field - she brings it down to earth and makes it accessible to everyone. We explore…What fertility awareness is, and the many surprising ways it can profoundly enhance our menstrual cycle awareness practice (whether you’re trying to prevent pregnancy or get pregnant, or neither), and how to get started today. We bust many myths, including the myth of the ‘late period’, and why knowing when you ovulate is such a game-changer for anyone who wants to plan their life and workflow around their cycle.The importance of decolonising menstrual health and unravelling the legacy of menstrual shame that colonisation has created. ---Registration is open for our Your Cyclical Business Programme. You can check it out here: https://www.yourcyclicalbusiness.com---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [e-mail]---Social media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolJaspreet Kaur: @kaurhealth - https://www.instagram.com/kaurhealth

Welcome to the Menstruality Podcast, where we share inspiring conversations about the power of menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause. This podcast is brought to you by Red School, where we're training the menstruality leaders of the future. I'm your host, Sophie Jane Hardy, and I'll be joined often by Red School's founders, Alexandra and Sharni, as well as an inspiring group of pioneers, activists, changemakers and creatives to explore 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. Hey there love, welcome back to the menstruality podcast. Thank you for tuning in and listening to us today. I hope you're doing well and I'm really excited to share this conversation with you because we're looking at menstrual cycle awareness through a different lens today, we're exploring 10 surprising reasons to practice fertility awareness. And this is for everyone,

whether you're trying actively not to get pregnant or trying to get pregnant or neither of those things. We're looking at the surprising ways that fertility awareness can deepen your connection to your cycle and the beneficial impacts this this can have so i'm talking with health coach and natural family planning teacher just pre-core who is this fresh vital passionate voice in the field she really brings this down to earth and she makes it accessible for everyone so we explore what fertility awareness is how it can enhance our mental cycle awareness practice and how we can actually get started today my favorite bit is that we bust lots of different myths including the myth of the late period and why knowing when you ovulate is such a game changer

for anyone who wants to plan their life and their workflow around their cycle in an intimate way. And we also look at the importance of decolonizing menstrual health. Jaspreet works with many Punjabi women and Punjabi families and she's been doing great work to understand how to unravel this legacy of menstrual shame that colonization has created. So let's get to it. 10 surprising reasons to practice fertility awareness with Just Breit Core. So good morning, Just Breit. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for taking the time to be with us. I think this is a long-awaited conversation on the menstruality podcast so how's it going for you today good listen I'm so excited to be here um I'm so grateful that you got in touch with me the people that have

been on this podcast before me are like giants in the fertility awareness game so for me to be a part of this conversation is just I'm really grateful thank you for having me. Let's get right into the conversation but starting with your cycle so can we do a cycle check-in where are you at today how are you feeling? I am on cycle day 27 so luteal phase for me but I'm not feeling very in autumn I'm actually feeling I feel like my summer has kind of come come with me here I feel like I'm still in that ovulatory phase um and I'm feeling good I'm feeling energetic and mood wise as well like no PMS I'm feeling good ah amazing is is PMS something that can tend to happen for you in in autumn like what does a inner autumn tend to look like it depends on what's going on um so if work or you know life with a little one is just a bit

stressful at that time um then yeah PMS you know stress really affects my PMS I think it does with a lot of people um we just put my little one into a nursery and that whole transition phase oh my god of like you know two months my PMS was just you know really it was a lot um but slowly coming out of that so it's like this is a nice surprise to have a nice luteal phase. Brilliant I would love to hear what inspires you so much about fertility awareness? Why is it that you have focused on this with your work? So the reason I started, so I, when I got married, I knew that I didn't want a child straight away because I still felt like a child myself. So I was like, I can't, you know, I can't be a mum. But going on the pill, I'm not anti-pill, but it just, I've heard so many scare stories. And I was like, I don't really want to take just I've heard so many scare stories and I was like

I don't really want to take a drug is there anything else and I was like there must be I don't know what it is I just had a feeling in in my heart so there must be something else like what did people do before the pill you know what did like as a Punjabi woman I always think like what did indigenous Punjabi community do in this situation right that's why that's you know I did that through my pregnancy through my birth and yeah so for contraception I was just like what do people do and then I stumbled across Tony Welsh's book Taking Charge of Your Fertility and I read that and I was just like oh my goodness like okay so I kind of read through that book applied it to myself for the first year of marriage and I was like you know this actually works I was stunned because I'd never you know my sisters my friends

um I'd never spoke no one had ever spoken about this no one had ever heard about this method of natural hormone free contraception and I'd never heard of this idea that I wasn't always fertile I didn't understand my menstrual cycle at the age of when did I get married 26 I had no clue I thought I was fertile all the time so this was revolutionary to me after a year of being married my husband and I family planning goals changed and we were like let's you know let's try for a baby so again fertility awareness came in great there because we were able to see the fertile window and get pregnant pretty quickly um i was pregnant in lockdown so i was like five months pregnant it was march 2020 five months pregnant and i was literally about to start my teacher training course for to become a natural family planning teacher um with the NFPTA here in the UK so I was five months pregnant I was like really excited

really ready I was like I want to bring this information to the Punjabi Sikh community um mostly because I was just like no one none of us know about this and when I looked on Instagram there was a lot of other communities talking about it um especially a lot of white women speaking about it and I was like you know I want I want my community to know about this too so I was super excited lockdown happened and then I was just like super scared but it gave me an opportunity to actually immerse myself into this teacher training course which you know looking back I'm really grateful gave birth in June 2020 in December 2020 I started to package up everything that I'd learned in my teacher training so I created this six-week course um and I started teaching it in February 2021 and yeah it's a space where otherized folk can feel comfortable talking about sex in the South Asian community the topic of sex is so low

key it's so awkward we've internalized western conservative norms um because before colonization our understanding and you know the way that we spoke about sex was really different even the way my grandparents and you know my great-grandparents spoke about things I can tell that they don't have the same reservations that maybe someone like me who's grown up in Britain has, you know, talking about sex. So just making space for those conversations. So that's why I do it. Making other eyes folk feel comfortable talking about sex, understanding their cycle and not feeling weirded out or cringed by it because even like when you learn sex education in school it's just rooted in shame and when you decent a shame from your period from sex it's so easy to talk about it and it's really empowering because you get to see like it's like a window to your body isn't it you get to know exactly what's going

on it's really cool. Exactly it's a window to your body I love the way get to know exactly what's going on it's really cool exactly it's a window to your body I love the way that you say that and that's why I wanted to have this conversation with you because I think we can really expand the understanding of what it means to practice fertility awareness so we've got these 10 surprising reasons and actually the first two aren't very surprising and you've pointed to them already, which is like the first reason to practice fertility awareness is to avoid pregnancy, I'd say. So can we go back to the basics? Like many people listening will know this, but I know for me, I, this was very to track my temperature and so can we get into the basics of if you don't want to get pregnant how can you use fertility awareness as a natural form of hormone free contraception yeah so with um the method that I learned so it's called natural family

planning but it is you know fertility awareness um it's not just for people who are trying a family plan um so with natural family planning we have something called the three biological signs so your basal body temperature your cervical fluid cervical positioning if you don't want to get pregnant your basal body temperature and your cervical fluid will kind of match up and they'll do something so once you've ovulated your temperature rises which i'm sure many of the listeners already know and have heard um and in the lead up to ovulation you see a certain type of cervical fluid and there's a range of like the kind of cervical

fluid it could be lotiony it could be brittle and tacky um and the most common one that correlates with the day of ovulation is that egg white kind of stretchy slippery transparent yes that's doing the finger thing where you pinch the fingers yeah pinch the fingers it stretches very far so once kind of you can see that cervical fluid it kind of means that you've entered your um fertile phase and again that fertile phase isn't just when you're seeing the egg white sticky that fertile phase is even when you're seeing that opaque white creamy thick kind of tacky maybe not so stretchy cervical fluid i think a lot of people get this you know a bit confused I've had a lot of messages from people saying that fertility awareness doesn't work because they got pregnant so it's really important to

understand your cervical fluid once you see any you are officially in your fertile window so if you want to get pregnant you have sex if you don't want to get pregnant you abstain brilliant and cervical position is also relevant here is that yeah so cervical positioning is actually an optional sign but i if if someone's down i always encourage it um because i think it's super important it's really difficult to find as well so you might not find it on the first or second time that you try but essentially there's something called the cervical os it's like the entrance to the cervix it's like a valve at the bottom of the cervix um the cervix sits at the top of the vagina so it's in between the uterus and the vagina it's like the little doorway between them this cervical os moves

up and down in response to your hormones changing so when you have that estrogen surge and that lh surge in the lead up to ovulation your cervical position is going to change and it's going to go higher. It's going to be softer and it's going to be open. So it's going to be closer to the uterus and it's going to allow sperm with cervical fluid to get through to the uterus and go to the fallopian tubes and do what it's got to do at that time when you're infertile when your lh and estrogen drops and your progesterone surges up your cervical os moves downwards in your vagina so it's further away from your uterus now it closes up and it becomes very hard almost at the tip of your nose so that's like a key that you can use um and it's not it's not going to really let any sperm or anything in. And also there's no cervical fluid. So, yeah, that's the cervical positioning.

If you do want to try it, try it. You know, I always say like in the shower is a good place because your hands are clean. Make sure, you know, you're not on your period. I mean, you can do it on your period, but you might not be able to feel anything. Make sure your bladder and your bowels are empty and also the bathroom is like you know in the shower by in the bath it's a private space and you kind of need to get into like a squatting position so that you've got that you know that the pelvis is kind of drawn down a little bit and you just insert two fingers and you try and feel your cervix and like I said before you might not be able to feel it um which is fine sometimes cervix you know your cervix is so high or it's like pointing in a

different direction or you don't really know what you're feeling for and that's okay try you know practice makes perfect so yeah if you're fertile and it's high up it's going to kind of feel like your earlobe nice and soft and if you're infertile and it's low down it's going to be hard kind of like the tip of your nose I've got a quite intimate relationship with my cervix because when I was 18 I went for a I think it was just a routine smear and the nurse that was doing it was like oh you know she put the speculum is it called a speculum yeah anyway she put the thing in she opened it and she and she looked in and she went oh and I was like that's not the sound you want to hear when someone's looking up your vagina

and she said I'm just gonna go and get my colleague oh my god is that okay she said is that okay and I said yeah fine and so she got a colleague and they were like oh and I was like okay someone stopped saying oh and someone told me what's going on and they said well we can see a little cyst on your cervix can we get our other colleague and by the end there were about I don't know six or seven of them just having a look because they hadn't seen it before but on my cervix there's in fact I'm not even sure if it's still there I haven't checked lately there's just a little cyst and it's benign and it's fine but you know it just it kind of changes shape throughout the cycle so it means I've had

this since I was 18 this intimate relationship with my with my cervix so there we go oh nice thanks for sharing so can you have you ever felt your cervical positioning and have you ever felt this cyst um yep I can feel the cyst and I can I felt that when I'm in my ovulatory phase it's like my cervix is puffier and bigger and further and further down and further forwards and then it like disappears and goes back upwards so yeah I can definitely feel it nice yeah and there we go so that's the first reason to practice have you ever heard this you've ever heard that before is that a new one no I just can't believe that so many people were looking at your settings I know no wonder I've got interventional cycle yeah this is my thing right there from the beginning so okay so then the second

reason which again probably won't be a surprise to most people is to that fertility awareness can help you achieve pregnancy and so I want to put a little call out now to anyone who like me experienced or is experiencing infertility or is childless and not by choice you know that this topic can be triggering so you might want to skip over this bit or yeah just want to put a call out and to point people to if anyone is experiencing infertility and having a hard time getting pregnant and wants some emotional support we have an episode with uh with infertility coach uh jennifer robertson so that's a really good episode to get some support but yes if you know that it is time and you would like to get pregnant can we speak about the best time to have sex or it like is it

true that there is like a best day or best time to have sex and how do you approach that so your fertile phase is super interesting because it's very absolute you are either fertile or infertile throughout your cycle there's not like a little bit fertile a little bit more fertile it's very absolute. You are either fertile or infertile throughout your cycle. There's not like a little bit fertile, a little bit more fertile. It's very, you know, it's yes or no, it's clear cut. So once you enter that fertile phase, even if you've got that thick, tacky cervical fluid in those first, you know, few ovulatory days, you are just as fertile that day as you are on the day that you have that egg white stretchy slippery cervical fluid so the thing with cervical fluid is that it communicates with sperm which is really cool so they speak to each other cervical fluid has these characteristics like um it's like a magnet

for sperm so if there's any genital contact during your um fertile window and there's sperm present um they'll literally latch onto each other like a magnet um yeah and then the the stretchiness of it even that thick tacky one is quite you know it's quite stretchy still it will latch onto it and then it will stretch it you know it will take it up the vagina through the cervix and, you know, to the fallopian tubes to meet the egg. Sperm can, you know, stay alive for about three hours on their own. But the cervical fluid stretches that three hour window to about five days, because of the characteristics. Incredible, isn't it? So wicked. So that is a good design. Brilliant, brilliant design. So that is where kind of that ovulatory phase comes from that is why it's usually you know between four and six days maybe less

depending on the person so once you see any cervical fluid you can have sex on any of those days that you see the different kind the reason that the egg white slippery one might be a bit better though still even though you're just as fertile is because it will have all of those sperm friendly qualities in higher in in more amounts because there is more of it um so it's just something to bear in mind but you are fertile on all of those days that you see cervical fluid brilliant and so do you have any I'm not sure if you can answer this question but I'll ask it and we'll see do you have any general advice for someone who has decided I want to try and get pregnant and I want to be as healthy as I possibly can be or to

to make lifestyle changes or diet changes or health changes to become more fertile do you have any guidance or advice generally this is something that comes up so much um even if the person doesn't feel particularly unhealthy I feel like you know we always feel like we could be better before we get pregnant or we can somehow like reach this pinnacle of health before we get pregnant. Cause the baby like, you know, it's going to affect the baby. Our bodies are really resilient. This pinnacle of health that we often try and reach is like usually based on diet culture, usually based on, I need to eat, you know, stop eating junk and I need to eat salad and I need to eat more vegetables.

And that stuff is all good, but you don't need to give up the quote unquote junk food, the chocolates, the crisps. That's fine as well. Everything in moderation. So I would say if you are looking to make changes, look at things like your sleep. Are you sleeping well? Are you moving with intention? Does your body feel like, you know, is there any crinks in your neck? You know, are your shoulders all right maybe you could try going for a walk or like find some movement if you're not doing

anything find some movement that feels good for you you don't need to join a gym you can go for a walk in the park you can join a pilates class like literally whatever you can do a youtube video um at home so thinking about these things in a really holistic way and not just putting all of your thought onto like oh my god i ate that chocolate yesterday is it going to affect my you know chance of getting pregnant am i going to be unhealthy because that one chocolate bar that i ate the probability is is that you're you know you're probably not going to be unhealthy because of that chocolate that you ate um we neglect things like sleep stress and those things really impact us as well screen time too it really affects your hormones so I would always say to people look at your sleep

look at your stress definitely um and also your screen time and try and manage those things before looking at food and diet yeah it is amazing like you can imagine with four years of infertility I did everything you could possibly imagine you know I was going to for womb massages and actually I went to this woman who she called herself the I it was either the womb whisperer or like the baby maker it was one of those juicy topics and on her wall was plastered with success stories of babies that she had made and you know this and I had a massage with her and it was great and I think you know who knows it was part of it but I tried everything acupuncture changing my diet and it's hard to know what actually worked but I do know that in the year running up to the IVF I had a

major focus on de-stressing and I think in many ways this is one of the like surprise gifts of infertility that it taught me how to calm my nervous system because I realized I'm just going to have to figure this out I'm going to have to stay calm so that I'm not like charged with cortisol all the time because I'm an ambitious person I'm like you know I want to do big things and it was good in that way it helped I learned how to settle and soothe my nervous system and yeah I've got my baby here now so yeah it's so difficult I feel like with fertility it's like the wedding industry like there's so much money pumped into this and I just feel like people sometimes market things in a way that isn't always truthful so like the baby you know the womb whisperer whoever this person was I'm sure she's

a great massage therapist but I think it's a bit unfair to say things like that because for some people you know there's lots of success stories from her and that's great but for some people there might not be so seeing that for me like if I was in that situation I might feel a bit of pressure like this has to work yeah and I feel like there's already a lot of like the psychology of failure because I'm a woman and society says that a woman should be fertile and have children then I already had this story of I'm a failure so then people can set up a it can set up a like well if this doesn't work then I fail anyway that's not the topic of this

conversation we could go on um so before we skip on to the more surprising reasons to practice facility awareness, I'd just love to hear how it's been for you to take those first two reasons to either avoid pregnancy or to achieve pregnancy to the South Asian community. Like, how has it been as you've been reaching out to the community and sharing? How's that been for you? It's been amazing. The feedback has been incredible so from February 2021 I started teaching this course one-to-one um like 98% of all my students have been Punjabi um and it's nice that they're able to you know have space to firstly speak about periods with someone that they feel comfortable with um and that's my kind of thoughts for me that happens to me all the time on day 27 like I cannot hold a thought in my head

seriously like day 26 until I bleed I'm like oh and I can dream and I can vision but thinking so dreamy yeah so dreamy right now what was the question sorry how has it been to bring fertility awareness to the south asian community okay so um so through this six-week course it's called your menstrual cycle demystified um i run it one-to-one or in also in a group i started my first group uh yesterday yesterday evening which is really cool um but through that course shame is completely de-centered so bringing this in a way like it completely flips the conversation because we're no longer speaking about sex and periods like you know really nervous and really awkward about it and really okay want to ask this question but don't know how it's like in that first session we literally speak about periods we speak about sex we speak about the inception of inovid and how disgusting that was um we you know i read a part of bell

hook's book feminism is for everybody like i really set the foundation for the course try and set the tone as best i can with as many resources as I can and just start speaking openly about you know saying the word vulva vagina clitoris cervical fluid cervical positioning ovulation period you know really introducing all of these shameful ideas into that first session that by the second set like even by the end of the first I've never had anyone that is a bit like oh you know this is a bit weird it completely sets the tone for the session for that whole hour and for the sessions that follow so just literally doing those little things using the correct terminology for anatomy and me myself I've had to do a lot of

work to even like say this stuff I say all of this stuff in these podcasts and you know on my courses if you take me outside of this space I'll be like period what's that it's still very you know nerve-wracking to me same I find the same for myself even though I host this podcast when I'm say talking to my mum friends a baby group and they say what do you do and I say I host a podcast about the menstrual cycle and the look of like on their faces and I'm like why don't I tell them about it you know and I just noticed still that shame is in me it's amazing it's very deep isn't it it's difficult like when people ask me what I do I'm like I'm a graphic designer how stupid I am a graphic designer I'm a freelance

graphic designer as well but that is not like my main job but I'm just still you know it is that internal shame but in those sessions with those Punjabi women and it's not just Punjabi women just with the people that I teach I completely decent a shame and I you know I take 10 to 15 minutes before each um session to ground myself root myself and be like cool this is the intention we need to speak about this authentically and that like it they can feel that, right? When you're around someone who's doing that, that sets the tone for a room. You automatically feel comfortable and you lean into it and you sit with it and it's like, ah, I can talk about this.

I'm here to learn this and I'm going to be able to learn this and ask all the questions. So many intimate things come up in these sessions and they're obviously 100 you know confidential so I would never say anything but it's just really I wish that I had this five ten years ago 15 years ago right yeah that's what I'm trying to do create a space that I wish I had when I was younger brilliant and you brought in around that you brought in the impact of colonisation on these communities. And I think it's an incredibly important conversation to speak about the decolonising of menstrual health. And so I've never heard it spoken about from the angle that you brought in there, that there wasn't this legacy of shame. And actually, the legacy of shame has come from colonization it's great like I think a lot of people don't know that so when we speak about um

periods and like shame around sex a lot of the time it's just like oh you know this community is backwards and they don't know and like oh you know whatever they're just backwards and we're the generation who are British and we're going to change it and it's just like no no honey did you know that a couple of generations ago you had the most radical ancestors who thought about this was just very normal and colonization did change that and it's just not something that's very well known um and I think because it's not well known it leads to people hating their own community and um you know like saying oh you know I had this really bad experience and don't get me wrong people do have bad experiences like I still would never speak to my mum about periods or you know

sex and that's okay but I now know that it's not her fault that she has these this shame attached to that it's really not her fault she comes from like a home that literally you know there was a genocide there like 30 years ago right and there was still ongoing like a war against a Punjabi Sikh people in India right it's not an easy landscape to paint it's not an easy landscape to understand I don't try and understand it anymore I just know that I don't need to hold her or her generation to account but what I can do is like do my ancestors a justice and decent a shame in these conversations but not put them down does that make sense it really does you speak about it so beautifully and I'm so glad that the people that you're working with have you doing this you know you

said you wanted it five or ten years ago this is yeah you're doing it it's amazing it's beautiful oh I've got tears oh dude thank you thank you so much yeah it's quite a radical act to just say the word vagina anywhere really isn't it still yeah it really is yeah can you remember the vagina monologues have you ever been to yeah yeah i didn't go to see it but i remember do you know what i remember thinking ew that's all weird yeah yeah look at you now yeah look at us now so let's get on to the third reason to practice visibility awareness which is connected to the first two which is to come off the pill so that you can have a natural cycle so you know you said

you're not anti-pill but let's talk about it because there's a lot of people who I know I'm not sure how many people who listen to this podcast are on the pill a lot of people I know are on the pill and they're interested in coming off but they're not sure how many people who listen to this podcast are on the pill. A lot of people I know are on the pill and they're interested in coming off, but they're not sure how, you know, if they want to get pregnant, how long do they need to be off the pill before they can get pregnant? Let's just look at that whole area. So interesting. I love, I love it when people come to me and they say, I'm on the pill. How do I do this? How does this work? And the amazing thing with natural family planning and fertility awareness is that it doesn't matter what situation you're in you could have irregular cycles you could have

polycystic ovary syndrome uh you could be you know coming up to menopause uh you could have a completely you know normal regular cycle it doesn't matter what your cycle is like you can use this method to track everything that's going on so coming off the pill I'm sure it comes with a lot of different emotions and feelings and worries as well especially when someone's coming off the pill to be like I want to get pregnant one day again there's probably a lot of pressure in that whole situation um so when people come to me the first thing I say is you can come off the pill like immediately and we will start learning but just don't start to implement this method as birth control until you know about until you're comfortable usually that's about two to three cycles of charting yeah so that first bit is like oh that's that's a long

time and it's like in the grand scheme of things two to three months you know even six months it's not a long time just let's try this out when it comes to natural family planning when you come off the pill like I said before it's a window to your menstrual health yeah it's literally like we can't see what's going on here but it's literally you get the chance to map this beautiful thing out and see exactly what's going on you can see um what your estrogen how estrogen is affecting you you can see how how progesterone is affecting you you can see if you've got an iron deficiency you can see you stress are you ovulating you're not ovulating all of this stuff and when you come off the pill there's no guarantee

that you're gonna go straight into a regular cycle well you may have a regular cycle then for three months you may not ovulate and then it might come back it's an up and down journey I've had people on both ends of the spectrum who have had you know regulated immediately you know and consistently and the other side who have regulated then you know it's taken a bit of time it's a journey the NHS website says uh you know give it 18 months to to see what's what's going on right because you might come off the pill um and it might take 18 months for your cycles to come back and that's okay it's so normal especially depending on how long you've taken it for depending on your body it's so normal for

your body to take time to to get back to ovulating to get your cycle back to where it was um so it can be difficult because 18 months sounds like a really long time right especially when you want a baby um and this isn't something that people take into consideration when they go on the pill because they're not told i don't think i don't think people are counseled properly when they go on the pill that look if you want to get pregnant you need to factor this timeline in of about 18 to maybe even 24 months so when people come off the pill and maybe the cycle doesn't regulate immediately or it does regulate and then it you know it goes a bit off balance it can be really disheartening but i always remind them that that 18 to 24 months is not over yet give it give your body that chance before you stop you know trying to get intervention trying to go for IVF trying to tell your doctor that something's wrong

trying to get the test trying to do this it takes time for your ovaries to come back to normal function could you explain I was watching one of your reels this morning and you talked about what actually happens biologically with the pill so just in case people don't know what happens with your cycle when you take the pill so much um I guess the crux of it is that it stops you from ovulating so it stops your hormones from doing that whole symphony of things um and ovulating because the point of the pill is to not get pregnant in most cases sometimes it's for you know managing period pain and stuff but once you shut down ovulation you shut down the rest of the the the hormone changes in your cycle

and that means that you you know the period that you get is actually you know some withdrawal bleed it's not actual period in response to um progesterone dropping and and stuff like that. There's lots of different things that the pill does, though. So the, you know, shuts down your ovaries. It shuts down your connection between your hypothalamus, pituitary gland and your ovaries. There's a connection between them. It cuts that completely off. Women and menstruating people produce a tiny little bit of testosterone but we rely on that tiny bit for things like sexual gratification and interest in sex and the pill actually

lowers that testosterone to be almost negligible so how does that affect your sex life now and it's quite ironic because if someone's using the pill for contraception a lot of the time their interest in sex actually goes away anyway so it's kind of like a catch-22 there's lots of different things that it does um and i would really encourage people to uh have a look at the side effects and how it actually works before taking it thank you so let's get on to the health reasons to practice fertility awareness because this is where it gets really fascinating for me so one of the things that you share is that fertility awareness helps you know what your normal is so can you speak about that understanding what our normal is yeah so this 28 day menstrual myth let's bust it because it doesn't you know you don't need a 28 day for you to have a healthy cycle. Your cycle can be 35 days long.

It can be 25 days long, like anywhere between like 23 to, you know, maybe 35, 36 days is, you know, is classed as a healthy, normal cycle. There's a parameter for this, right? A menstrual cycle is not a one glove fits all. There's parameters for when ovulation happens, for how long your cycle could be, for how long the luteal phase is, and things like that. So getting familiar with what looks normal for you could be, you know, a 31 day cycle and ovulation around the days of maybe 12 to 16, maybe, depending on what's going on um yeah does that make sense yeah totally makes sense and you talk about how ovulation is not just for pregnancy like that it's actually telling us something so if we're able to track our ovulation then we're learning about our overall health and

our hormonal health yeah so ovulation um you know i think a lot of people when they go to the doctors and they say i've got an irregular cycle the first question is do you want to get pregnant and then it's like no and then the doctor will say then come back to me at a later date when you want to get pregnant but ovulation is a marker it's a sign of good health is a sign of hormonal vitality and it's really important that we ovulate it's like um it's like any any function of any other organ. It needs to be functioning well for us to feel good mentally and physically. Yeah. And to have this summertime superwoman phase. You are in that phase.

OK, so now is a good time for us to segue to our advert for today which is actually for a program that I'm hosting I'm so excited about it I feel nervous I feel so proud of it it's called your cyclical business and it starts on June the 6th and it's been amazing to watch the circle of teachers artists creatives therapists coaches and other purpose-led business owners start to gather for the program. If you're intrigued there's a webinar that you can watch called How Your Menstrual Cycle Can Help You To Create A Thriving Business. You can find it at yourcyclicalbusiness.com and it explores how your cycle can help you to manage imposter syndrome in your business,

how it can help you with your marketing, how it can help you to create sustainable work rhythms so that you can do the work that you're here to do without burning out. So you can find out all about it at yourcyclicalbusiness.com and we start on June the 6th. So fertility awareness helps you know what your normal is but it could also help you get to the root of menstrual health challenges. Can you speak about that? So once you know what your normal is

you're going to know what your abnormal is so not only can you see if you're ovulating you can see the length of each cycle phase so I'm sure many of your listeners are quite familiar with the four cycle phases but for those who aren't the first size the first phase is your menstrual phase so your period the next phase is your follicular phase then we've got the ovulatory phase and the luteal phase you can see roughly the length of each of these phases when you're tracking your cycle so once you can see all of this stuff firstly like we said before you can see if you're ovulating or not if you're not ovulating get in touch with your healthcare provider right because something's going on

with your hormones um second thing is you can see how long your luteal phase is and this indicates two things so this indicates one thing it can tell you if you have enough progesterone in your body and progesterone is useful for firstly when you're trying to conceive but secondly it's an indicator of stress levels if that luteal phase is too short it probably means that you're quite stressed and it's something that i can see immediately in someone's chart um when we're stressed we release cortisol to cope with the stress right often what the body can do is it can take progesterone and estrogen turn it into cortisol to deal with the stress right often what the body can do is it can take progesterone and estrogen turn it into cortisol to deal with the stress as well because our main focus at that point the body

is just like okay stressed this person needs to deal with the stress um everything else can come after so the ovulation can come after the healthy luteal phase can come after this person just needs to cope with the stress in this moment we're like back to the basic like fundamental biology of if we were being chased by a saber-toothed tiger or or a woolly mammoth then you've got to run the heck out of there so who cares if you get pregnant or not let's just go it's back to that yeah but now it's like chronic right so it's like super long term so this is like months and months of this happening yeah so yeah you can see lots of little things like that. It's really cool. And even if your temperature is between a certain range, you can see, OK, maybe you're low in iron or maybe your thyroid is giving you a bit of issue.

So those are the key things that you can see, which is really cool. So amazing. It's such a map for our health on every level. And this brings us to the next reason you know we've spoken about this is women focusing more on the physical health but then fertility awareness can give us markers for like every aspect of our health and life so mental health and emotional health because it gives us body literacy so let's talk about why it's so important to be able to listen to our bodies and read these signals. So even if you are not sexually active, even if, you know, family planning is not on your horizon, you don't want contraception and you're not trying to conceive.

If you have a menstrual cycle, you should learn this stuff because it's telling you so much emotionally and physically we change through each phase yeah we're not designed in the same way as men and non-menstruators unfortunately the world is designed with them in mind but we don't always fit that so for me and I don't know if anyone's going to be able to relate to this maybe something else maybe something similar when I finished uni and I went into the workforce I found it really difficult to go to work just to have the same routine every single day I found it really challenging some days were easier than others when I look back now that's because my cycle didn't allow me to have the same day every single day because my phases affect me when I'm on my period I'm different to when I'm ovulating and I'm different

when I'm in my luteal phase um eventually I made the choice to go freelance um and that made it a lot easier because I was able to you know yes right it's just I had two years in an office going I I was exhausted by my bleed every month absolutely exhausted and now because I can manage my own psych my own schedule I know like a days like this and like last night I was up editing a podcast until 10 o'clock last night because I know I can because I'm on I can't remember what day I'm on because I'm in a summer and I always forget but somewhere around 13 so yeah it's um being able to manage your own schedule makes a massive difference doesn't it then you can adapt your life around it definitely even like the luxury of you know freelancing and if you're on your period you can work from bed you know you can get it done it's all good um so

things like that that's something that just really I just wish that I knew that when I was younger I wish I understood that I wasn't wrong that I wasn't you know these feelings weren't just because I'm lazy and they weren't just because I'm not motivated and I'm not committed to the job it's just because my cycle didn't allow me to work in that way and I didn't want to and now I'm so grateful that I'm able to understand when I'm ovulating and when I'm going to be in my luteal phase it means that I can literally manage my social schedule I can plan things with my other mum friends to be like okay let's go to the natural history museum let's hop on the train listen it's for me that's an ordeal when I'm like on my period and luteal failure hopping on the train packing snacks packing lunch a pram how am I going to do it but when I'm

ovulating I can do it all I'll carry all the kids on my back so true so this is where I feel that fertility awareness or natural family planning whatever we're calling it becomes this really exciting addition to menstrual cycle awareness it gives us like an extra level of knowing and understanding like this is the day that I'm ovulating or this is the period where I'm really fertile and that brings us to the inner seasons so fertility planning can give us more intel about our inner seasons so that we can as we've been talking about organize our schedules but also plan our self-care better around the seasons of the cycle so this takes us to reason eight which is what I'm really really excited about which is basically I think like I only learned this a year ago so I think there might be quite a few people listening who don't know this but if you know when you ovulate

then you know when you're going to bleed pretty much right unless there are quite fundamental health challenges going on so this myth of a late period is actually a myth because yeah so over to you yes this is something that is not very well known so this myth of a late period oh my period's late every time someone says that it's so bad but within me i'm just like i need to correct them i need to tell them about ovulation i need to tell them all these things it's just like you know what just relax they'll figure it out so with the late period it's not actually the period that's late as you said it's ovulation that is late so our luteal phase is generally super stable in length you're not going to know this unless you chart your cycle at all right you're not going to know that your luteal phase that last phase of your cycle is really stable in length once you ovulate to that

next period if it's 10 days it's going to be 10 days if it's 12 days it's usually you know always going to be 12 days this is where natural family planning is really useful for people who have polycystic ovary syndrome because they can't they don't always know when they're going to come on their period and it's the biggest it's just like it's so difficult to plan your life around when am I going to come on you don't know it's just going to be a sporadic thing and you don't know how it's going to be well that's especially relevant for people with PCOS because of the intensity of their period yeah for because of the intensity of the period because of just the the irregularity of it you just don't it could be 40 days 60 days 30 days like who knows right

but you can know because once you learn how to track ovulation you can count the days from that luteal phase and you can be like okay 12 days from now i'm gonna come on my period and that is such a it's an amazing thing when people with pcos learn this it's you feel like you're taking a bit of control back because there's a lack of control with an irregular cycle um it must be really difficult to be like i don't know what's going on like at all like most of us don't know what's going on with our cycle but to be in that situation where it's like on a month-to-month basis you're not going to have a period so there's not even that like awareness of like okay this is kind of normal it's just like

you're shooting in the dark so once you know how to track ovulation it's so cool you will see when your period's coming it's absolutely amazing and it has really far-reaching impact so I think there are loads of reasons why people have slightly irregular cycles aren't there like stress can cause it or for me still like how long is it since I stopped breastfeeding it's quite a while it's it's been a year but I'm noticing that sometimes I have a 24-day cycle and sometimes I have a 33-day cycle yeah that makes a massive difference for me because I'm planning my work life around my bleed I know what I'm good at when I'm in inner winter and for example it's not interviewing people so when I'm scheduling for the podcast I always try and put it in in a

summer or early in autumn and it's been challenging for me recently because I'm never quite sure when winter's going to happen it means I can't schedule but when I've when I clock this I went right I've got to be more aware of when I'm ovulating because then I know when I tested it last month I ovulated on day 10 and then I bled on day 24 so that's my 14 day window isn't it yeah yeah so I think this has a big impact for anyone who wants to plan a big bleed for example you know we talk about this often at Red School if you want to experience the power of inner winter like the capacity to vision and dream into your life and to sort of dock into your sense of purpose and your your calling then a great way to do it especially if you have a busy life with loads of responsibility is to plan a big bleed like go away for a day or a night and have some retreat time while you're bleeding if you

don't know when you're going to bleed that's really hard to do but if you're tracking your ovulation then you could plan that like even three or four months in advance probably that's so interesting i've never had this idea of a big bleed that's really cool i like that it's in wild power um it's it's one of the practices for like for someone who especially people who have a really hard time at menstruation because of pain or whatever health challenges they've got uh doing a big bleed can be a way into access because often we really need to just be able to let go of everything to be able to experience the good side of menstruation and that's not easy for lots of people so now we're on reason number nine but before that I wanted to ask you because I like to ask everyone this what do you do in your inner winter in your menstrual phase to take care

of yourself how do you tend to yourself in that part of your cycle so with a child it's really difficult um I'm not gonna lie during my inner winter I actually don't do anything to look after myself right now I don't put any expectation on that phase because I don't know if um my husband's going to be able to take the little one if you know any other family member is going to be able to take the little one they all have their own lives right I can't put my expectation there so I have a really low expectation for my inner winter and that's okay at first it really got to me I was like I've like lost my life to motherhood um but you know trying to lean into it as much as I can some months are easier than others but sometimes I do really miss that self-care that I was able to do just lying in bed with a hot water bottle no phone writing drawing um coming up with ideas you know to like

expand my business I'm not able to do that anymore um and that's okay and I'm sure lots of mums maybe feel like that I feel like when I scroll through Instagram there's a lot of stuff of like oh when you're on your bleed just lie down and take a hot bath and stuff and I'm just like honey if I can have a three minute shower without someone coming in and saying mommy mommy that's like a holiday for me um so if you are a mum and you're listening or you just don't have the you know you don't have the capacity to do this for whatever reason don't worry about it there will be a season in your life that you will be able to do this especially if you're a mum that kid's going to grow up and you're going to have your life back absolutely I feel like a skill that I've been working in this phase and it's

I think it's relevant for mums but I think it's probably relevant for anyone who's in a really busy phase of their life or might be like caring for elderly parents and that's taking over where there's there's adapting your life around your cycle so you know if you can't if you're able to going and having a long bubble bath when you're bleeding or there's adapting the way you're approaching your life according to your cycle. So what I notice I'm doing is when I get into my bleed, same, I often like just literally can't have two hours lying in bed, which is what I want. But instead I'll turn my attention inwards more when I'm taking care of Artie I'll like try and

get him set up with a game or like a toy that I know that he can focus on and I might just get one minute and I'll just put like a hand on my chest a hand on my belly and just take some deep breaths and that's like my one moment of calm and then an hour later I get like another moment of calm and I feel like I thread those moments together and that's how I take care of myself and in the winter now it's it looks different and I'm you know I'm saying this as if I know what I'm talking about but I'm literally just piecing this together in my mind I'm talking to you now like that's probably what I'm doing that's how I'm I'm adjusting my own inner world I guess it is I really like that like adjusting your approach to your phases as opposed

to putting that expectation on you know your phases are like this this is this is how you must be when you're in your inner winter you know I feel like there's a lot of that kind of that comes you know after you learn your inner phases there's a lot of this whimsical like oh once you're on your period you must do this it's just not feasible for everyone and if you're listening and it's not feasible for you it's okay I think what Sophie said about adjusting your approach is such a that's an amazing amazing thing that you said I'm definitely taking that away from this conversation yeah and it's it's one of the things I think we have to be careful with with menstrual cycle awareness is that we're not allowing our patriarchal uh capitalist consumerist culture to kind of hijack this very beautiful thing and

make it all about you need to rest in winter so that you can be really productive in summer like that's it's just another way that the internalized patriarchy is coming out yeah definitely super counterintuitive super still you know within this schedule of what you must do you know and it just gets a bit intense for sure yeah so I guess I'm slightly changing reason number nine now which was to plan your work and creative flow around your cycle which is really relevant if we know when we ovulate then we can you know schedule things a bit differently but also it's it's about being close to ourselves being able to read our own body signals so that we can adjust the way that we're we can adjust our inner world around our cycle as well yeah

which brings us to the last reason which I've called the spiritual side although like I'm not even sure about the word spiritual I think everything's spiritual everything's sacred yeah um and it's not but to practice mindfulness like this menstrual cycle awareness and then this next layer of fertility awareness is our own and for women and people with periods our own tailor-made version of mindfulness allows us to understand ourselves at a new level and understand our wounds and where we need to heal and our strengths and our vulnerabilities and yeah how does that look in your life since you've been more aware of your cycle in the last few years? I think it's been really nice just to do like be aware of my cycle days which is something I

haven't been aware for for very long maybe like two three years if that um so that's been really cool and in terms of mindfulness that's a nice thing to know throughout the day like if I am you know feeling a bit down or a bit low it's like okay this isn't me I'm on day you know 27 and there's a lot of things going on in my life and I'm stressed and you know I'm gonna ovulate in the next couple of weeks and it's gonna be okay so not holding on to that kind of stuff has been really useful for me because like I said before when I was like working I would really be like oh my god I'm lazy I'm not committed and then on those days I'd also be like I'm just you know I'm moody I don't know how to regulate myself I'm a brat you know I'm really emotional and it's like okay do you know what

just let go of that you're not any of these things it's just the day in your cycle your hormones are doing you know whatever they're doing tomorrow's a new day you'll figure it out let's look at like go right back to the basics again and can you walk us through if someone has never practiced fertility awareness before like where they would start and how to practice so what I usually do with my clients is get them to uh with a basal body thermometer start taking your temperature um because this is an added layer to your morning routine right it needs to be taken in a really specific way um and that's why i always encourage people to learn fertility awareness or natural family planning from a qualified teacher especially if you're using it for contraception

um because yeah you with perfect use it has a 99.8 99.4 effectiveness rate but if you're learning it by yourself i don't know what that looks like um so yeah that's just a little disclaimer so start by taking your temperature with a basal body thermometer got to take it first thing in the morning and before any other activity so it needs to be taken after three hours of sleep for most people that's first thing in the morning unless you're doing shift work so it might be a different time for you it needs to be done before any other activity so before you even take the duvet off before you go to the bathroom before you do any of that pop that thermometer in your mouth note down the temperature and the time and then go about your day and that's it and sometimes this can take a couple of weeks to get into the routine because

a lot of people myself included will just get out of bed and be like oh what's the monitor oh no you know i mean for like two three weeks even months and it's just like oh and then you go to the bathroom or you get to the bathroom door and look back and it's like my thermometer is on the bedside table I didn't take my temperature but at that point it is actually too late like there's you know your temperature slowly creeps up um quickly creeps up as you leave bed um so just trying to get into that I'd say that's like the the first thing and then introducing the cervical fluid readings and the cervical positioning if you want to but just taking it step by step in a way that makes sense for you you don't need to do all

the things at once it's not good everyone learns in a different way you might take three months to learn this method it might take you six months to learn and implement the method you might learn it in six weeks and implement it three years later um so just do whatever feels authentic and right to you but please always seek a qualified educator to teach you this method you're gonna get the best out of it it's an investment in you um i think often as women and menstruators we feel like we can't spend money or like invest in ourselves or carve time out for this kind of thing it's important and if this is the way that you're going to learn this method and this life skill and you want to learn it

take take the jump with someone with you know a teacher who feels right for you and onto that how can people connect with you if they're listening and think yes I need this uh instagram at core health um also corehealth.co.uk if you want to book a 15-20 minute chat with me about anything menstrual cycle fertility awareness related um I'd love to speak with you all I'd love to hear from you all um so yeah please do connect with me on those those two places and i'll drop those the link in the show notes so that you can find just pre and i i looked on your website this morning it looks like you've got a free um chart or a free guide to natural family planning could you tell us yeah there's a couple of freebies on there there's um some looking at the uh anatomy of the of the body so

we can see where the ovaries are and stuff because we all learned it in school but not many people remember it um and then yeah like a guide to charting your cycles and some benefits and disadvantages of maybe going through natural family planning because there is you know there's pros and cons to everything and i think it's important for people to know what the cons could be so yeah go to my website you can you can download those excellent is there anything else that you'd like to share in closing about the power and importance and magic of this practice if you want to learn please do it it will genuinely change the way that you interact with your menstrual cycle and not just the bleed the entire thing and there's so much self-knowledge to be gained from learning natural family planning so I just want to encourage everyone who is maybe even a little bit interested, Google it, read a book,

take that step because I really believe that it will benefit you. Thanks for tuning in and being with us today. I'd love to hear what you've learned about your cycle, about fertility awareness. We have a post on our Instagram, red.school. And yeah, I'd love to hear insights from this episode. I know it really changed my life when I understood how to track ovulation and then could plan my life around my bleed, it makes such a big difference. As always, we would so appreciate it

if you could leave a review on Apple Podcasts to help more people to find out about this podcast and about this work. And please do subscribe so that you can receive future episodes. So thank you again for listening, and I'll see you next time. And until then, keep living life

according to your own brilliant rhythm.