The Menstruality Podcast - 149. How to Move from Toxic Productivity to Honouring your Natural Rhythms (Tamu Thomas)

Episode Date: June 6, 2024

Do you catch yourself measuring your worth by how much you do, and how much what you do benefits others? If you do, you’re not alone. And, as our guest today, Tamu Thomas, says - it’s not your fault. In her groundbreaking new book, Women Who Work Too Much: Break Free from Toxic Productivity, Tamu challenges the societal norms that glorify relentless productivity and burnout, shedding light on the systemic, emotional and psychological factors that keep women trapped in a never-ending cycle of productivity.In our conversation today, she shares practical strategies for liberation, centering cycle awareness as a way to resist the drive to do-do-do, and instead reclaim and honour our natural rhythms.We explore:How cycle awareness has enabled Tamu to find freedom from her inner critic (whilst allowing her to channel the power of her premenstrual analysis to offer critique of the systems that oppress us).What Tamu learned from her Auntie Aminatta, a Sierra Leonian international business woman about how to create a life where - as Tracee Ellis Ross says - “my life is mine”.The profound spiritual, primal breakdown and breakthrough that happened in 2017, when Tamu’s body reclaimed her energy back from what she calls the ‘oppressive trinity’ of white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism.---Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [e-mail]---Social media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardyTamu Thomas: @tamu.thomas - https://www.instagram.com/tamu.thomas

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, thanks for joining me today. It's great to be with you. Do you catch yourself measuring your worth by how much you do and how much these activities benefit others? If you do,

you're not alone. I'm with you for one. And as our brilliant guest today Tamu Thomas says it's not our fault. In her groundbreaking new book Women Who Work Too Much Break Free From Toxic Productivity, Tamu challenges the societal norms that glorify relentless productivity to the point of burnout and she sheds light on the systemic emotional and psychological factors that keep us all and women particularly trapped in a never-ending cycle of productivity. In our conversation today she shares practical strategies for liberation centering cycle awareness as a way to resist the drive to do do do and instead reclaim and honor our natural rhythms we look at how cycle awareness has enabled tamu to find freedom from her inner critic

what tamu learned from her auntie amanata a sierra leonian international businesswoman about how to create a life where as tracy ellis r says, my life is mine. And also the story of the profound spiritual primal breakdown and breakthrough that happened for Tamu in 2017, when her body reclaimed her energy back from what she calls the oppressive trinity of white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism. So let's get started with how to move from toxic productivity to honouring your natural rhythms with Tamu Thomas. So Tamu, thank you so much. Thank you for making the time for this. As you'll have seen on Instagram, I've been crazy in love with this book. And I realized it was one

of those ones, but I was underlining more things than I wasn't. You know, there's just so much. Yeah. So thank you so much for making the time to be with us today. Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to our conversation. I'd love us to start with a cycle check-in if we can. I was so delighted when I saw that you brought cycle awareness right into the book, you know like the tracking of our menstrual cycles and I love this bit we're slowly repairing the rupture in our relationships with ourselves so how's that going for you how's your cycle yeah could we start with a cycle check-in well currently follicular phase or have you pronounced it. I am definitely on the rise and I can feel it. And my cycle is experiencing lots of change because I am very nearly 47 and perimenopausal. So I am experiencing subtle changes, I would say. And most of those changes are just unpredictability like I'm just not sure what

I'm gonna get but in saying that what I've noticed is that whatever I do around two months before has an impact on the um period so uh two months before this I was was in the throes of my book being published. And even though it was very challenging on my nervous system, because it would be, it's right and normal, like it's not a complaint or criticism about anything. I was choosing to make sure I had lots of moments of slowness in between the heightened periods of stuff. So I feel like I'm benefiting from that. And I'm really landing after this period, I've really landed, I mean, like literal bleed, I've really landed back in my body on this planet, after all of the up of my book being published. Yeah, it's a huge deal publishing a book in the world. And that's

so beautiful to hear how your cycle, your bleed has helped you to land back. That's gorgeous. One of the things you said in the book was cycle awareness helps you with the critic, your inner critic, and that since you've started tracking your cycle, you can kind of turn down the volume on the inner judgment. Yeah, absolutely. At the time when I really noticed it, I was coaching with my friend Ray Dodd. And I noticed that there were some coaching sessions that I was just really down on myself. Everything was terrible. I was the worst person in the world. Everything I was being and who I am and what I was doing was bad. I could never really articulate what the bad was. And I thought, hold on a minute, there's a rhythm to this. And I checked and it was

the coaching session that coincided with a few days before my period. So I said this to Ray and we changed our coaching pattern and the coaching sessions changed dramatically. And once I realized that, I was able to check my dates and say, no, this isn't the truth. This is my inner critic. It's not real. It's hormones. And then slowing down and paying attention to that, I was able to tell that my period was due because of the sound of my inner critic. So it became really helpful data. So now I'm just like, I just don't pay any attention. I don't believe that the critical narrative about myself, I don't believe it at all. But the critical analysis of stuff is gold during that time.

So I'm able to choose the critique I pay attention to. I love that from the critique to the critic. Yes, yes, yes. I just had that a couple of days ago because I'm on day 27 today. And I was in the car with my husband on the way back from three days with my three and a half year old me and him and his grandparents and they're very helpful but you know parents families dynamics love and I my head was just going at me and I was just able to go oh okay I'm struggling here I'm struggling here could you help me and he just put his hand on my back and said hey hey love

I'm here to protect you I've got you and. And then the tears come, you know, cause it's just like underneath all that critic is sadness and grief and exhaustion, you know, because I'd been toxically productive all weekend. So let's talk about this. So this is the core theme of the book, toxic productivity. Could we start with, I mean, I'd love to go into your journey with it and everything. You tell so many great stories in the book, but could we start with how you define it? How do you define toxic productivity? Yeah, it's the obsessive compulsive need, not desire, need to be productive all the time. So when I talk about toxic productivity, people immediately default to work. So there are many people that say, oh, I don't work too much. This isn't relevant to

me. And they're the same people that will tell me they're chronically exhausted. And they're the same people that do all of the domestic and emotional labor within their household. They're the same person that does all the organizing and the mother henning within their friendship group. So toxic productivity isn't just about productivity in the workplace. It's a need to be productive all the time. So it's that person who you are invited to their house for dinner, but you're not sure if they've even eaten because they're flapping around, they're busy. Before you've even finished drinking your drink, they've taken your glass, they've cleared it away. They're fussing around, they're making sure everybody's okay. And they

have this kind of like frenetic energy about them. They are the person who goes on holiday and they've got like a three-page bulletin of all the things that need to be done when they need to be done. They're waking up at the crack of dawn. They've got a full agenda for the day. They don't want to slow down. They don't want to miss anything. They don't want to miss an opportunity. It's that person who is dog tired, but it's a nice day. They don't want to waste the day. So they're up and they're out and they're knackered. And they are the person who is at the school play falling asleep. They're the person who is at the cinema falling asleep. They're the person who as soon as they are able to be still, the waves of exhaustion hit them and they quickly busy themselves to avoid that feeling of tiredness because they don't trust it. Because they picked

up messages that say that when you're tired, it actually means you're lazy, or it means you're unorganized, or it means you're not ambitious, or it means you're not committed, or it means you're unorganized, or it means you're not ambitious, or it means you're not committed, or it means you're not driven, or there are all of these things associated with it. And then in the online world, because we see messages over and over again, it's those people who describe themselves as type A. And I'm like, you know, that A stands for anxiety, right? Like you're driven by anxiety. And underneath it all is an anxious desire to please, to do things, to earn your value, to demonstrate that you are worthy because you have been programmed with a message that says your value, your worth, your importance is tethered to how much you do, how visible what you do is and how much it benefits others, especially men and corporations.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the things I loved about the book is how you've very close to the beginning you say, and hey hey this isn't your fault it's not it's not like that's the first sentence in the first chapter yeah yeah because it's not it really struck me I thought ah okay let's get into this it's not another book which is trying to tell us that if we can just perfect this and this and this or if we can just cultivate this different mindset so let's look at the systems that have created this and I do want to get into that but I just first I'd love to hear about your mum and your auntie Aminata yes yes exactly as like your two role models the two of your role

models growing up and what you learned from each of them. Could you share a bit about those two brilliant women? So my parents are from Sierra Leone. My mum came to England when she was 13 and my auntie Aminata also Sierra Leonean woman. And she has lived in Sierra Leone all her life. She had no desire to leave Sierra Leone. She's traveled, but she had no desire. She liked her life there. Thank you very much. And my mom, she can get things done. She can ride through utter depletion and do all the things she needs to do. And that's what I saw growing up. And that's what I thought was normal. And I saw many women like my mother, who were able to ride through all of the isms and archies and all of the stuff that was going on within their households. They were working full time in professions. All of them had at least a degree. They were doing further qualifications to hone their expertise and make them more appealing in a job market that was and still is inherently racist and sexist. powerful in their workplaces. And when they came home, they had to drop all of that to conform to traditional gender roles, usually with a man who was under-functioning. So the man under-functioning

meant they had to over-function and their over-functioning meant that they were able to contribute finance and status to a household, which meant moving to, whether it was like in my case, from a council estate, social housing, to a mortgaged house in a nicer area, to nicer cars, to holidays that weren't just about going back to your country of origin to sort things out and to see family members. But I know that Europe is only

across the road, but going on holiday to Europe was a big thing, even though it was cheaper than going to Sierra Leone or wherever else you came from, because you were going just for a holiday. You were not going for any other purpose than to enjoy yourself. So I saw all of those sorts of things. I saw my mum going up the corporate ladder I saw the certificates getting shinier the gold stamp becoming more golden and I thought that was normal uh she was always tired you know she was always like uh in our little bit of the community people would comment about how much stuff our mum does or did with us and there are many my mum will bump into adults now that will say, you're the first person to take me to a museum. You're the first person to have taken

me to this experience. My mum's a real community person. That's the type of person she was. So I thought it was normal. I thought that that's how it was. And then in comes my Auntie Aminata, the international business woman. So she spoke various languages and I don't know exactly what she did, but she did lots of work for massive organizations like the United Nations. And she would be going to places like Geneva. Oh my goodness. What is Geneva? She was going there. And she would stay sometimes with us in our cute social housing. And she would be having, you know, all the wonderful Sierra Leonean food my mum would be cooking. But most of the time she would stay in a luxurious apartment in Baker Street.

And for me, in my little five, six year old mind, it was the height of opulence. There was no orange and brown decor like we had. It was cream and gold and these bronzy metallic shades with chandeliers and chaise longue and all of these wonderful things. And she looked jolly. There was a radiance, there was a glow about her and the way people talked about her taught me she was somebody to be revered and feared simultaneously because of what she represented. And when I was writing this book, I was thinking about her and what came to mind. And I referenced it in the conclusion of the book was when Tracee Ellis Ross did a speech where she was talking about my life is mine. Auntie Aminata's life belonged to her. And I didn't know what international businesswoman was. I didn't know what it entailed. But I looked at the vibrance within her that I didn't see in my mum and the women in our little bit of the Sierra Leone community, regardless of how well they were doing on paper. I looked at Auntie Aminata with her

slick pencil skirt suit and Reeve Gauche perfume and her bouncy jerry curls. And I wanted to be an international businesswoman because I wanted to look like that. I wanted to feel like that. I wanted people to, I didn't have these words at the time, but I wanted people to talk about me with esteem, with a tinge of judgment, because that tinge of judgment was about what they weren't owning in themselves. And so I had these two paradoxes. I had somebody who was all about martyrdom and somebody who was choosing herself. Now I want to caveat, my mum's actions were due to her conditioning. It wasn't her fault. She wasn't choosing to be a corporate baddie and then come home and be this traditional, you know, trad wife, as they say on TikTok these days. She wasn't choosing that. That was

her norm. But what I will say about my mum is she recognised that that wasn't normal for her. And she was one of the first women in our bit of the Sierra Leone community to get divorced. All of the uncles didn't want their wives around my mum anymore, just in case she gave them ideas. She did anyway. Not that she gave them ideas she did anyway not she gave them ideas but she role modelled something different and I saw my mum's life and our lives become exponentially better once she was divorced because she was able to really go for it on her own terms but because she was a single parent because of all of the other systemic issues to do with her being a black woman, it was a lot of struggle. So then what I saw was my mum creates a center was in order for me to have the freedom I want to have it's going to cost a lot of sacrifice and that became my normal until I had a breakdown which is a breakthrough and I thought I don't

want that for me I don't want to role model that to my child I want to do something new I want joy to be my goal I want joy to be my barometer as to whether or not I'm living well. And I want my daughter to know that joy isn't a reward at the end of gruelling weeks and weeks at work that you go off and enjoy on holiday. I want it to be something that's woven throughout. Yeah. So many of us have that story that it has to be hard that we have to grind that it has to be hard work in order to get that joy at the end yeah there was a really meaningful part of the book where I think your daughter told someone that you were up in the night typing and that she heard you my mum she told my mum off me yes yeah and just sort of fast forward then to the to the breakdown moment so you were a social worker

um huge job hugely challenging job um with very toxic culture in there because it's so freaking hard that work yes yeah yes and you essentially had a panic attack yeah yeah so I had so I already began to have the signs of my wake up call in 2010 when I was crying in my boss's office. Cause I was like, this just isn't right. I'm exhausted. My daughter's having to work full time at three years old. For me, it felt like she was working full time because she was in nursery all day whilst I was working. But it took me a long time to trust that I could make the shift and to feel that it was safe enough for me to make the shift out of full-time employment and working for myself. And I just felt that I could be more,

my ailments because I wasn't being productive enough. So I tried to productivity my way out of overwhelm. I had these planners, I was doing these programs. It was about my mindset. It's because I wasn't ambitious enough. So I was trying to work more to get out of working too much in the first place. And I had lots and lots of subtle signs until I had that mammoth panic attack on my way to court. It was a contentious court case, but it was nothing out of my ordinary. That was my normal. And I had a panic attack. I didn't know it was a panic attack. I kept referring to them as heightened periods of anxiety. And I wasn't even necessarily letting myself believe I was experiencing anxiety because of the difficulties experienced by the

group of people I was working with. I just thought this can't be anxiety because I was high functioning. Unbeknown to me, it was high functioning anxiety. So I had a very strong panic attack where I literally thought I was going to die, somehow managed to pull it together, go to court, slay it, and then hot foot it to my GP surgery. I didn't even bother trying to make a phone call because we know what doctors, receptionists can be like. I went straight into the surgery to make an appointment to see a GP. And they explained that what I was referring to as heightened periods of anxiety were actually panic attacks. And they did the biomedical thing. They referred me for therapy,

which is what I wanted. I said, look, I'm a social worker. I know what CBT is. This isn't CBT. I need something more explorative, more psychodynamic, but I was still referred for CBT anyway. And they were recommending that I take anti-anxiety medication and an antidepressant because they said, basically, I had a severe level of moderate depression that I had left and I'd squished and squashed. So then it evolved into anxiety that I squished and squashed. And then my body said, excuse me, you're still not listening. So it became panic attacks. And for me, it felt very spiritual and primal. It literally felt like my body was trying to reclaim me. My body was tired of me giving myself away to everything and everyone. And my body said, all of this energy, you've been loaned to spread around

the place. We're calling it back. We're calling you back. We're calling that energy back. And I wanted something that was a lot more experiential, a lot more spiritual for lack of a better word. And I wanted something that was going to enable me to, as Tracey Ellis Ross said, experience my life as mine. I just felt like I was being dragged around by life rather than working in partnership with life. And I thought, OK, I saw somebody have a psychotic breakdown and I looked at her mother by not looking after myself. So initially, I was driven by a desire to be the mother I wanted my child to experience and the mother my child as she presented needed, as opposed to her getting the dregs of me. And in me prioritizing that, I was also able to prioritize me having me. I'm just so grateful for how you've taken this immensely challenging and shitty experience and just transmuted it into gold for all of us because the way that you explain and demystify and kind of untangle this like foggy area around productivity I hear my friends speak

about it all the time we know that we're allowed to rest but something in us like won't let us rest and we just keep beating ourselves up for not doing this this and this and we have these long to-do lists and we're like what are we doing and we know it's not how we want to live I just found in the book you just teased it apart so elegantly and so let's get to this it's not your fault because wow this is the game changer really so you speak about the oppressive trinity of white supremacy capitalism and patriarchy and the atmosphere that they've created the or the deliberate the deliberate um pushing and suppressing of our natural selves can we it's big but can we get into this? Can you walk us into this oppressive trinity? Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. So when I had my own kind of like dark night of the soul body say, you better come back here, right here, right now. I looked around me and I just saw my

experience in different shapes and forms reflected back at me in the women in my immediate circle, in the women I was observing online, in the women I was friends with outside of there, in workplaces. There wasn't one area of life where I wasn't seeing women reflecting some element, whether they were claiming it, whether they understood it. And I thought, well, it's not just me then. It's not that I'm defective. It's not as simple as time management and all of these things we are fed. So if it's not just me, so, you know, social work, we look at systems. When we're looking at an individual, we don't just look at the individual.

We look at the family system they exist within. We look at the social system that family exists within. So it's very systemic. And so I was able to say, well, this, if it's not individual, it's systemic because it's impacting everybody. goals and if our desires are aligned with who we are and what makes us feel good and what enables us to be in relationship with other people in a healthy way and therefore role model that to other people and have the ripple effect that it has because that's how human beings are designed it means that there is something deliberate happening here because the more we're suppressed and the more we're conditioned to commodify ourselves in exchange for wages to meet our needs, the more we're separated from our humanity and the things we would naturally do together, the more we would need to commodify ourselves to purchase things,

to fill in those gaps. And I just noticed things with people that were talking about wine o'clock. So you're commodifying yourself all day and then you're consuming alcohol to try to ameliorate that. Actually, no, it's because you spent the one that was coming up a lot, it was gin o'clock and that was coming up a lot with mummy bloggers. And I was like, well, no, you are drinking to numb your experience of looking after small kids all day. And then your husband or your, it was always male, your male partner coming home and him adding to the weight of childcare because he's now the man baby you've got to look after. So you're not getting any reprieve. So you give yourself a moment of psychological reprieve or a biochemical reprieve because when those first few sips of alcohol go in,

you get that little burst of a, ah, and you get momentary relief. Or you are working really hard and you don't get any break. You're not getting any respite. You've got all of these emotional things going on that you can't quite make sense of because you don't have the time to, and you don't want to give yourself the time to, because they feel so big. You feel like you're going to be flooded if you look at them. So you go and buy yourself an expensive handbag, or you go on that holiday, or you buy a bigger house. So we get so trapped in this cycle of commodifying ourselves so that we can get money, because that's the currency we use to meet our basic needs. And then we tell ourselves, well, we're earning all of this money, I'm worth it, so I'm going to go and buy this thing.

So it then creates a whole perpetuating cycle. The more you buy, the more you're valued, the more you're esteemed, the more you're worth, the more valuable you are, the more important you are. So I just remember looking at the barristers rocking up to court in their designer bags and their designer shoes. And that made up for the fact that they work from like 3am to goodness knows what time and whatever else. So we get trapped in this cycle and we're taught that's what we should aspire to. And if you work really, really hard all the time, you're able to buy all these material things. Periodically, you can go on holiday, which you're often too knackered to enjoy anyway. And we're so on, we're checking our emails, we're doing a little bit so that we can catch up. So we're not meeting all of this stuff when we get back. And then don't worry,

one day you're going to be able to retire, then you'll be able to relax and enjoy yourself. Well, that time never comes because we're so programmed to be wired for work. We can never let go because it doesn't feel safe. Hey, I'm going to pause this episode for a few moments to invite you to join us for our upcoming course, which is called Cycle Power. And we're going to be exploring the wisdom of the four inner seasons of the menstrual cycle. This evening we actually had a free intro event to share more about the course. You can listen to the recording if you missed it on the course web page at redschool.net forward slash cycle power. In the event we looked at three of the profound shifts

that can happen when we rebel against this culture of do dodo that we're talking about with Tamu today and instead lean into the cyclical intelligence of the inner seasons of the cycle. One of the shifts that we spoke about is moving from burnout to having sustainable energy and we actually asked the participants tonight if they had ever experienced burnout and so many people said yes. So these are some of the quotes yes I'm recovering from burnout now, yes as a mum in a caring NHS job, yes in the middle of trying to heal burnout and yes huge burnout summer 2023 still recovering menstrual cycle awareness has been a guide and an anchor out of the other side of it. And it's true, cycle awareness can be such a powerful gateway to healthy, vital, creative,

sustainable ways of living. I imagine you know this because you're here listening to this podcast. If you would like to counter the toxic productivity that is wreaking havoc on our bodies and the body of this beautiful world that we live in we invite you to join us for cycle power we're starting on june the 21st and you can find out all about it at redschool.net forward slash cycle power and i recognized in the women i was working with as a coach they were setting these arbitrary goals. I want to make 10K a month at least. I want to this, I want to that. Well, what does that mean? What does that mean for you? And there were so many women were like, well, that's what I thought I was supposed to do. Well, actually, if you look at your life and what brings you joy and a sense

of satisfaction, so you're actually able to enjoy yourself. If you're a parent, you're actually able to enjoy your children. If you're in a relationship, you're actually able to enjoy your relationship. A lot of the women were like, well, no, actually I don't need £10,000. I don't need to be posting content on social media all day long to be able to do that. In order for me to live a life that feels really satisfactory, bearing in mind the income that comes into my household it would be 5 000 for example or conversely so it's like it happens in a spectrum so people end up either over functioning or under functioning because of this pervasive programmed sense of not enoughness so then there were other people who similar to me maybe they were a single parent or for whatever reason they were the only income in their household it felt so big and it felt so strenuous to be able to earn this money they needed. They shied away from it. And so my work with them would be to understand why do you need

to create this amount of money? What does it mean for your life? And when women were able to break down, well, actually for me to live the life I want to, and for me to be able to live well, because we do live within a system that requires us to pay money for our needs to be met. And that's even, you know, like money doesn't buy you happiness, money doesn't buy you love. A lack of money absolutely interferes with your ability to access happiness and your ability to show up for love. So when these women were able to break down why they needed to make the 10K per month, it made so much more sense to them. The goal was their own. It was aligned with who they are and

their desire to live well, that creating that kind of income was so much more accessible and all of the resistance they had about showing up to create a business that allowed them to receive that kind of money changed. And also the relationship with receiving changed because a woman wanting to receive, we are told is selfish because we're supposed to be selfless. We're supposed to be martyrs. When you look at the narrative about a good mum, a good woman, a good friend, a good employee, it's always about how much they are able, willing and prepared to sacrifice themselves and what they need in service of the other. Which means we work in a system where we don't even get to understand what our needs are because we're told that having needs makes you needy as opposed to understanding that our needs are the way it's our needs are a bid for

connection I'm thirsty connect tamu connect you need to hydrate yourself and let's try not get to a point where you're thirsty in the first place, if possible, because that means you're already dehydrated. You're tired. Tamu, need for connection. You are tired. You're not lazy. You're not unorganized. You're not lacking ambition. You actually need rest. You need rest because you're entitled, not because you deserve it, because deserve sets the tone like you need to have done something to be able to deserve. No, you're entitled to rest as a human being. Rest is a fundamental need. Rest fuels everything we do everything we are and rest is a major sign of nervous system safety that enables us to have nervous system flexibility so we can show up for the life we want and i say that because especially as women and then if you add the intersections of being a woman of the global majority a woman with some kind of disability a woman who the global majority, a woman with some kind of disability, a woman who is not heterosexual and all of these other things. The need for safety, I mean, cultivating safety

enables us to show up for the life we want, as opposed to the life we've been conditioned to believe we are able to have. Yeah, because there are so many more obstacles to rest, to safety for women of colour. And I'll just say where the trinity of oppression comes in is that capitalism says you need to be producing, you need to create surplus for shareholders and everybody else. And you need to be grateful because at the end of the day, you're going to get wages. And those wages are going to enable you to buy things and purchase things so that you can be deemed as important. Patriarchy says your value as a woman is in what we have determined is femininity and womanhood. So you can absolutely go out there and do all of those things, but you

must still be a good woman. You must still be a good friend. You must still please. You must still try and make yourself attractive. You must try and fit in with the very narrow confines of what we say a woman's body should look like. You must do all of these things. Your hair must look a certain way and this, that, and the other. And then right supremacy says you must behave in a way that has been set by a able-bodied, heterosexual, wealthy, white, middle-class man. You have to fit into his ideal. And if you don't fit into his ideal, you've got to show him and the system represents him that you are willing to do whatever you can to assimilate into that way of being. So these systems, they are cousins, if you will. They work hand in hand and each of them

boosts the other one. Each of them benefits from the other one. And fundamentally, when I was looking at everything I was looking at and doing my research, underneath all of it is the need to create capital that is hoarded by a few. All of it is fueled by that need for a few people to hoard capital because that access to capital gives them access to power over us all. And that power is used to subjugate and dominate people and planet in service of profit of your brain so much it is the way you explain these things it blows our mind that is real flirting talk to somebody nerd flirting the so this brings us to the dance of capitalism versus the rhythms rhythms of nature

yes which um as i've shared with you when i was reading this in the garden having had too much to do the week before to read the book i was reading it while whilst artie was in the paddling pool and tying ropes on a tree which is his current favorite way to just have joy because three and a half year olds just oh I love that so much they just know how to rest and regulate their nervous systems and have joy mindfulness beautiful yes he just ties knots with rope on a tree it's great so he was doing that and I was reading a book and I got to this section which I'll read and I just I jumped out of my seat shouting yes and dancing around the garden and then he came and joined me because this is so good so you say if life were a dance floor capitalism would be dancing to the

words instead of the beat while nature vibes to the rhythm if we can collectively remember how to dance to the rhythm of nature rather than just the lyrics of capitalism we can achieve a more sustainable and harmonious pun intended future so this is a beautiful segue for us into cycle awareness as a way home and you know as a way back to our joy as a way back to our, yeah, our natural way of existing outside of these toxic productivity systems. The theme that was coming through in the book is just feeling, you know, the way out of this is feeling. And I love the way that when we have a menstrual cycle awareness practice we are practicing the art of feeling throughout the day each day okay what day am I on how do I feel emotionally how's

my energy what do I need coming back you know what do I need what's my body telling me and it's just growing these muscles and it's such a radical act of fu you to the systems. It's great. 100%. So I say life is Nessun Dorma. So Luciano Pavarotti's Nessun Dorma, one of the most beautiful songs ever. There was so much going on within that one song. And there are those like really soft, slow, dulcet tones that rise and fall and rise and fall. And you've got the instruments in the background, you've got his beautiful voice, you've got spaciousness, and then you've got that really beautiful crescendo at the end, which then falls.

We want to live in that crescendo all the time, all the time. If you isolate that crescendo and only listen to that bit, it's a bloody racket. And I've done it. I've listened to that section over and over again, because I like to test and experiment the things I talk about and the theories I come up with. Now, if we look at the rhythms of like everything in life works in a rhythm, right? Like the earth has a rhythm, everything has a rhythm that can be measured. So we have our menstrual cycles. We also have our own nervous system cycles. So in the book, I talk about the autonomic ladder where we've got the parasympathetic nervous system branch, we've got the sympathetic branch, and then we've got the dorsal kind of shut down like extreme parasympathetic branch of the nervous system.

And traditionally it is demonstrated in a hierarchy. They refer to it as the autonomic ladder with ventral, which is where like I say we feel like the Fonzie from Happy Days. Life is good. We're cool. We can do everything. Even if something really terrible happens, we're like, cool, I'm resourced. I can take care of this. And then we've got the fight or flight branch of the sympathetic nervous system when we are in struggle and then we've got the shut down dorsal part of the um sympathetic um of the uh survival uh part of our nervous system where it's too much we're overwhelmed we shut down we freeze or we totally shut down, often looks like depression. But we go through moments of those cycles all day. So I used waves to demonstrate that because when you have it as a ladder,

because we're conditioned for this hierarchical thinking, we feel like we need to be at the top of the ladder all the time, when in fact, it's normal for us to fluctuate up and down that ladder all day long. So in the book, I refer to us waxing and waning like the moon. But what we do in our society is that we want to be at full moon all the time when it goes through phases. So in addition to us having our menstrual cycle, if we have menstrual cycles and we have those different phases, we also go up and down the autonomic ladder all day long. So when we can start to recognize our patterns and our rhythms, and we start to dance with our rhythms, we are just so much more powerful and resourced. And where we need to change the beat,

because we've got something on, we recognize that usually at this part of my rhythm, I am down or I'm up. So I need to do something to help me navigate this. So for example, my dorsal shutdown time is around about now. So for those of you that are listening, it is quarter to three right now in the UK. This is around the time that I start to get really, really sleepy, regardless of whether or not my period is due. I know that. So at this time, I will schedule in forward facing work because I love working with people. I love things where I get to talk and share my passions. So naturally, my energy lifts, my sympathetic nervous system kicks in, adrenaline comes in, and I'm resourced to be able to do that. Had this been like day between day 26 and 28 of my cycle, I would have had a nap beforehand.

And yes, I work for myself, so I'm able to do that. But if I wasn't able to do that, if I was employed, I would have gone for a walk beforehand because I know that that would provide me with the healthy energy I need to be able to get through that. Yeah. I am on day 27, but there's a lot happening today. A silly amount. It's just one of those things where life has just gone, ha ha, like, let's see how you deal with this. And I didn't, I couldn't have a nap. I would do the same, but I could stand for five minutes, breathe with my one hand on my belly, one hand on my heart, breathe, feel my body shake ground. That was my version. So it's like, we can find

these little 1%s, can't we? And it makes a big difference. Exactly. And people think, especially people who are, you know, drinking from the cup of toxic productivity, when we talk about tracking our cycles and so on and so forth, people automatically assume we're saying, well understands and she's all up for the rest movement, but people need to work. And I'm like, we don't understand what rest is, which is why people automatically assume the rest means doing nothing, which is why in my book, I refer to Dr. Sondra Dalton-Smith's Seven Types of Rest, because rest isn't just about sleeping or doing nothing. There are restful things that we can do that give us enough resource and enough restfulness to be able to do the things we need to do. And what I'm saying in my book is get to know yourself, get to know your rhythms because they are kind of like the rules of you. And once you know the rules,

you know how you can get around the rules, you know the workarounds and you know how to, and what I really hope is that people don't learn their rules so they can just have loads of workarounds so they can continue to be toxically productive. It's about knowing the workarounds so that when you have those times where you have to bring it and trust and believe there are times when I'm doing projects and I need to work long hours. When I was writing my book, I allowed myself to do what I wanted, how I wanted, because sometimes the creativity would just strike and I had to roll with it. But there were other pockets of time where I had lots of slowness, lots of stillness, lots of times of contemplation. So it's about working with yourself rather than replicating these systems of domination and trying to dominate and coerce yourself.

I talk very often about working in partnership with yourself, working in partnership with time, working in partnership with your nervous system, etc. Because when you're working in partnership with yourself, working in partnership with time, working in partnership with your nervous system, et cetera, because when you're working in partnership with, you think to yourself, well, what do I need to bring to this partnership in order for it to be a partnership? Because of our conditioning, many of us find ourselves in situations where we too are trying to dominate and extract from ourselves and exploit ourselves. So I say our nervous system, like without conscious awareness, our nervous systems will just reflect the nervous system in which we live. But with conscious awareness, it's like that space between two breaths that give you a choice. Am I going to replicate and perpetuate systems of oppression and oppress

myself? Or am I going to make a choice that supports my liberation? Mic drop. Wow. There are these three core takeaways that you show in the book. Number one, it's not your fault thank you thank you thank you number two you need to become comfortable with uncertainty the answers that you seek are in the feelings you're trying to avoid yes so the feeling right when when we're conditioned to please which we are we're conditioned to be good girls good good boys, good children, we learn that when we behave in certain ways, authority figures, parents, teachers, so on and so forth, are really pleased with us. So it's okay for us to feel bad, but it's not okay for us to look bad. Feeling bad doesn't feel nice.

So we learn to squash that down really, really quickly. So feelings become the enemy. When we actually can be supported to befriend our feelings, regardless of how sticky and spiky and putrid they feel, what we will often find is what our gold is. So one of my thingies, like one of the things to suppress me was that my head is full of play. I like to play too much. When in fact, my ability to play and my affinity for play is where my creativity comes from. But a creative child, a playful creative child doesn't fit within an education system that wants you to sit down all day, regurgitate the same thing over and over and over again. It doesn't work very well with that. So that's why I want us to learn how to feel. And when we start to learn how to feel,

we get to understand that the feelings come from us. So they can never be bigger than us. We need to learn to give them space. They feel really big in the first place because they've been suppressed. Like if I think about like, if you've got feelings that have been suppressed since 1981, they are going to feel

like a roaring volcano. You need to let that out. And one of the other things, one of the other core thing of the book is we are the most pro-social creatures on this planet. We thrive in community. Therefore, we're not supposed to do this alone. We're supposed to do this work with people who can meet us where we are, who can be an empathetic witness and meet us with compassion. Because when people role model empathy and compassion for us, we can then turn that inward and be more empathetic witness and meet us with compassion. Because when people role model empathy and

compassion for us, we can then turn that inward and be more empathetic and compassionate towards ourselves. So instead of forever drawing up some kind of three-step program with a proven method, we can actually start to sit in the mess, sit in the mud and recognize that we need to be with this shit because it can become the most potent fertilizer if we allow ourselves to be with it rather than keep covering it over with glitter in the form of qualifications, new projects, serving other people, et cetera. So that's what I really want people to come away with. We're not designed to do this alone this hyper independence we're programmed for will be the undoing of us yeah totally I think this is the the core lesson for me from 12 years now of being with my premenstrual phase because my premenstrual phase is where for many of us too where everything we haven't felt throughout the month goes hi let's look at this now shall we

let's look at that shame that you felt let's look at how furious you are let's look at how you actually feel in the face of what you're seeing in the world right now the grief that you're feeling let's actually feel it and it's been yeah yeah it's messy it's uncomfortable it's full of paradox which is the one of the third takeaways. You know, multiple truths can be true at the same time. And it's one of the reasons why I love menstrual cycle awareness, because it keeps bringing me back to the mess, but so that I can be with myself rather than keep squashing things,

bending myself out of shape. Yes, yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. There's some third thing that multiple things can be true. It makes me think of back to what you said about the seven kinds of rest. I've heard you speak about rest, sorry, work as self-care. Yes. That, you know, we can do, we can do things in restful ways, or we can rest in active ways. And it's just good to, to get creative about that, to get playful, like you said. Yeah. And, you know, that came to me because I thought, well, we work to support how we live,

you know, in previous times, like a few thousand years ago, we worked to meet our needs and then we lounged around for as long as we possibly could. We weren't working for the sake of working so that we could meet these goals set by somebody over there. And I thought, well, actually I work, I enjoy the work that I do, don't get me wrong. And I would do it in very different ways if I knew that all of my needs would be met. And I just thought, oh, right. So work is actually part of our self-care. It's part of the way we care for ourselves. If I was to consider work as part of my self-care, how would I work? And so people often think about self-care like it's bubble

bars and all this kind of stuff. The most radical form of self-care I have and continue to employ and will constantly be working on is boundaries, healthy boundaries that enable me to live in healthy ways that honour who I am. So if I was going to take these self-caring boundaries and apply it to my work, how would I work? Would I be tapping my keyboard routinely at 3am so my daughter's saying to my mum, I'm always typing at whatever o'clock in the morning? No, I wouldn't. Would I be having a business and operating my business like I'm an uncaring employer and I have to work with all these people that don't really gel with what I'm doing and I'm having to contort myself in order to do

that? No, I wouldn't. So it's about considering what brings out the best in you and how can you weave that in? And for an employed person, it would be like we're looking at your rhythms and saying to your boss, I've noticed that I work best when. So I would like to discuss this with you and look at how I could bring this more into my role because it's going to make me a much more effective member of the team. People automatically assume you're going to be saying, I can't do this. I can't cope. No, we're going with like properly quantified data. And I can't think of many managers that would say, well, that might be the way that you work best. And that might be the way you can contribute the most to the team. And that might be the way that your role is more profitable, but I don't want that. I want you to deplete yourself and rinse yourself out because that's what we're used to. Not many employers will say that. And if they do say that, you've got really helpful data that's going to help you make a powerful decision about whether or not that's the type of organization you should continue to work for.

Yes, yes, yes. Tamu, how can people connect with you if they're loving what you're saying and they want to journey with you more? If you want to journey with me more, two places. Come on over to Instagram. I refer to that as the playground. That's where I play the most. My Instagram handle is tamu.thomas. And somewhere else I'm frequenting more and more is my sub stack,

which is called The Liberated Woman. So come and play there and very soon I will have a podcast of the same name I've rebranded upgraded my podcast so I'll be continuing the conversation there so come to Instagram because you'll find out all the places I'm playing via there thank you Tamu it's been so wonderful I really really appreciate you I really really appreciate this book and yeah thank, thank you. Thank you for being with us today. Thank you, Sophie. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining me and Tamu today. If you enjoyed this episode, if you found it

supportive, inspiring, please share it with a friend who's also looking for ways to step out of toxic productivity and to claim a life that is their own and if you long to surround yourself with a cycle aware community dedicated to honoring our natural rhythms please consider joining us for cycle power if you feel called. We begin on June the 21st and you can find out all about the course, the curriculum, how it all works at redschool.net forward slash Cycle Power. This is actually the one and only time that Alexandra and Sharni will be running the course live. So if you've been wanting to study with them live, to receive their guidance and feedback live, then this could be a good opportunity. So again, redschool.net forward slash cycle power.

All right, that's it for this week. I'll be with you again next week. And until then, keep living life according to your own brilliant rhythm.