The Menstruality Podcast - 184. Our Wombs, Cycles & Menopause as Doorways to Spiritual Power (Uma Dinsmore Tuli)

Episode Date: February 6, 2025

As many of you will know, Uma Dinsmore Tuli has been a powerful force for good in many fields for decades, including Yoga, Menstruality, and women’s health. She describes herself as a writer, an educator, a Hyperactive Yoginī, a mother of three and a devotee to the Dark Mother. Today we chat about the cycles that guide Uma’s life, from the planets, to the moon, to her early relationship with her cycle and how it led her to develop Womb Yoga and write the best known of her six books, Yoni Shakti, a feminist retelling of yoga. All the way to Uma’s menopause process, which happened during the crucible of Covid and being silenced due to a legal battle, and the unstoppable flow of creativity power it awakened within her. The golden thread we track throughout the conversation is how we can experience our blood, our orgasms, our pregnancy and pregnancy losses, our lactation, and our menopause as extraordinary portals to power, but only if we’re conscious of them, and if we respect them. We explore:What happened when Uma showed up to her yoga sessions, as a new mother, with a postpartum body, how the practices - as they were being taught - didn’t meet the needs of her bleeding, lactating and how this inspired her to write the book that she needed: Yoni Shakti. The healing power of circling as women as a radical act of resistance to patriarchal and colonial oppression, and as a pathway to recultivating our trust in each other.Why we need to decolonise our sleep - as a way to recover our menstrual and menopause health - which is one of the reasons why Uma wrote her new book, Nidra Shakti: the Power of Rest - an illustrated, decolonial encyclopedia of Yoga Nidra. ---Receive Red School's 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.hardyUma Dinsmore Tuli: @umadinsmoretuli - https://www.instagram.com/umadinsmoretuli

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 tuning in today. It's great to be with you. I'm really excited about this conversation. I can't wait to share it with you. Many of you will know my guest, the amazing Uma

Dinsmore-Tooley. She's been a powerful force for good in many different fields for decades, including menstruality, yoga and women's health. She describes herself as a writer and educator, a hyperactive yogini, a mother of three life from the planets to the moon to her early relationship with her cycle and how it led her to develop womb yoga and write the best known of her six books Yoni Shakti which is a feminist retelling of yoga all the way to Uma's menopause process which happened during the crucible of Covid and being silenced due to a legal battle and how menopause unleashed this unstoppable flow of creativity through her and the golden thread that we're tracking throughout the whole conversation is how we can experience our blood our orgasms our pregnancies or pregnancy losses our lactation or our menopause as extraordinary portals to power,

but only if we're conscious of them and if we respect them. Let's get started with the amazing Uma. Uma, thank you so much for joining me today. I delighted delighted delighted to be talking to you your work your way of being you you have changed a lot for me and for my life and I imagine for a lot of those listening you have contributed profoundly to this field and many many different fields and I have 8 000 questions for you and we could talk for three years but we'll do what we can do in an hour and just thank you for being here thank you Uma. Thank you very much for inviting me I'm honoured I'm delighted and I love talking with you Sophie I've got a lot of deep respect and and love for you and your work and for all the the questions that you're asking I'm sure they're going to be brilliant so thank you for inviting me. I wanted to start by asking you why you're asking I'm sure they're going to be brilliant so thank you for inviting me I wanted to start by asking you why you're wearing that epic gorgeous outfit that you're wearing

you're absently covered almost had to toe in red yeah red okay so you I guess a lot of people listening are interested in cycles okay so there's menstrual cycles, menopausal cycles, gestational cycles, creative cycles, we can talk about all of these. But there's also we are living on a very small spinning globe surrounded by gigantic things like Saturn, and Mars, and Venus, and they're all spinning around, and we're all going around and every single aspect of those planetary influences has a color. And they also reflect in the days of the week so if you're truly into cosmic cycles which i am for about the last 20 years or so i changed the color of my clothing according to the day of the week a lot of people do this i

learned it in two different places from ayurveda and also within certain kinds of anthroposophical places people you know it's like propitiating the planets. It's an offering of love so the planets don't do anything worse. This is red for Mars. Today is Tuesday. Tuesday is Mardi, Martedì. It's the day of the red planet. Wednesday is green, Mercury.

Thursday is yellow. Friday is blue for Vontredì, for Venus. And each day, Saturn is black or purple or dark. Sunday, you can can guess would be the color of your sweater Sunday's yellow I'm a Sunday person you're a Sunday wearing a Sunday colors and Monday depending on what kind of phase of the moon it is is a moon's day you can see in the the in the romance languages and in other languages and also in Ayurveda they've got connections to the planets with the colors so in brief I'm honoring it's a it's an honoring an act of love and

propitiation to our planetary cosmic cycles in terms of you know the colors that I choose it also means I don't have to choose what colors to wear it's also an act of humility I just yeah I just know it's Tuesday and also it helps me remember what day of the week it is yeah which is very helpful these days yeah this definitely goes down as one of the most interesting cycle check-ins because that's how we always start this podcast. Oh, yes. And my cycle check-in is it's Tuesday. It's red.

It must be Tuesday. Yeah. Would you say that's, I mean, I don't know how you can answer this question, but in terms of the cycles that you feel most plugged into and connected to on a day-to-day basis is like the cycles of the planets the main one the moon yeah the moon is the big one so yeah which I and and I do I've got to the stage where I find it kind of extraordinary when people say oh gosh does the moon really affect you now we're talking to each other on a dark moon I don't usually do

meetings on a dark moon usually my calendar it says don't invite Uma for meetings but because it's you and because it's red school and because it's special i'm like but we're going to go deep into the dark stuff anyway and talk about all of that so it's okay so it's the moon cycle is the the single most profound impact on my multi-dimensional being you know on my psyche my emotions my physical being i was flat yesterday because we're in the dark moon right now so it's the moon and then the days of the week you can feel the energy of a Tuesday you start to notice it I think if you tune in I mean who am I to say I'm just doing things that seem to cause less trouble which is not my characteristic way of being it's to offset my characteristic to offset your natural like

sacred troublemaker I want I want to be yeah I want to be in sync with what really matters yeah so that I can challenge what people think really matters what humans think really matter basically money and their kind of power the mother knows that's that's that's not something that's real really so what really matters is the cosmic dance and the rhythm in Sanskrit and I want to be part of that so that I cause as least trouble as I can and do the best I can to be of service to the mother and the energy of life. So here we go, listeners. Uma's just poured her cup of tea.

I invite you to pour yourself a cup of tea. Let's get into the dark moon sacred magic that we're going to get into with Uma Dinsmatuli. I would love to hear some of your story because I really don't know a lot about it. I feel like I know a lot of your work and not so much about your, really your journey, like your early relationship with your cycle and with developing womb yoga, like whatever you feel like sharing with us of that oh bless um i feel very blessed i actually discovered some really old diaries and things recently from my 20s wow

and i was diligently tracking my cycles in a marvelous people might remember it i mean i'm i'm going to be 60 this year so like i i I was tracking cycles in my 20s principally for the purposes of contraception yeah I was obsessed with like not having children until it felt like I could actually possibly manage to do a half decent job so the women artists gallery used to have this lovely page in the back of their diary which was a very simple way of writing you know all the numbers of the months and you could circle them and you could see the pattern. And I loved the pattern that it made. And I felt it was important to notice, you know, I would notice things like I was traveling. So I was doing that in my really early 20s, like some freight, like 1980s, you know, and I didn't, I started menstruating

quite late. So I was kind of a bit excited about catching up with everyone. And my menstruation, I learned from the very beginning is deeply that cycle I'm sure a lot of people have figured this out is really an expression of our emotional state because my menache was triggered by grief by the death of a friend at school and I know that now I could look back and see that the intense grief triggered the onset of menstruation around the age of like 15 16. So yeah so it's been with me basically since I began menstruating it was always there and um mostly for the interests of like fertility management and um and also I was really aware in

terms of like cycles of sexual attraction and you know juiciness and all these kind of things because I also used um it's great with an interview you can get straight into using a diaphragm you know in the first five minutes you know you're talking to the right people so back in the day I think they're making a comeback those very shallow cups they weren't like menstrual cups like a long pointy thing they were very shallow saucer they looked like a flying saucer yeah but you have them fitted especially so I had one of those and I used to collect my blood and um I thought this was a marvelous thing I'm amazed

that they're not still but it's hard to get hold of these these days and I used to use that that was my main form of contraception because I was in a long-term relationship from when I was like in my early 20 21 for about 10 years and I was very diligently doing things like my PhD and my and I wanted to carry on studying and all that kind of thing so I didn't really want to have kids at that point so I was I was devoted but I did notice it had an impact on sexuality and creativity and I could also see important things like emotional impact grief anger loss and I'm a very keen cyclist I did lots of long distance cycling and I was a bike courier and I could see when I really pushed myself to a certain point then the menstruations would space out and disappear so I learned a lot of things just by doing it

but there wasn't really anything to read apart from this bit in the back of my diary it was one page in the women artists diary which I got every year and then even if I didn't get it I would make my own I found some little postcards there were no apps no apps no real books to read I mean there would have been if I'd hunted around I could have found the wise wound and things like this but but that was about it yeah yeah wow and then obviously lots of indigenous wisdom but that hasn't hadn't been communicated well I believe that's one of my real feelings that this doesn't it doesn't you don't really need to go to school to learn this stuff that the teacher is is your body and I was interested enough because I was interested in in yoga and you know swimming and cycling and all these things and they kind of all

the cycle was clearly part of of my capacity with any of that. How far could I cycle? Whether I wanted to swim in cold water, how creative I could be, how productive I could be. So I noticed those cycles and we learn more as we go along. You know, I didn't know at the time that, you know, I had the kind of neurobiology that now people would label as ADHD, but that had its own cycles. And the menstrual cycle was a real anchor and I think that's really helpful for people with this kind of neurobiology to understand that the menstrual cycle is is such an anchor for rhythm I'm wondering if I should put my sound up a little

bit because I have I turned it down a bit that might help that's so interesting I feel like we could have a whole hour-long conversation about that because there are a lot of connections that people are seeing between ADHD and PMDD as well. And yet, but to know that for people who have neuro spicy brains, as my friend Abby Denubiwik calls it. Definitely, we're the neuro spicy crew. I'm up for that. The neuro emergent crew. Everybody will be like us. We're just the emergent crew you're in red everybody will be like us we're just the emergent corona but yeah and also we can talk later about how when we were talking about menopause process later then then i think there's another layer of self-knowledge for people with their neurobiology whatever it might be that gets revealed because the oestrogen goes down and the oestrogen hides

quite a lot of things doesn't it like a great big tide of generosity and i'll bend over backwards and do anything you liken us when that goes interesting hey okay we'll get to that let's carry on with your journey so you're in your 20s you're very immersed in the yoga world at this point yeah well i was i mean i started doing yoga when i was a kid so i wasn't immersed in like i learned it as a school i learned it at home off the telly with my mom, who then stopped doing it. But I had the book of the TV series from about, I think it was the late 60s, could have been early 70s. It was called Yoga for Health. So I had this book and I used to do all this stuff and I thought it was great. And I was a vegetarian and I was reading about philosophy and I'd learned to meditate. And I was just into that

stuff. I always liked that stuff. So I was into that. And I had good teachers and I, I was, and I went and trained my first kind of formal training as a yoga teacher was when I was in doing my, my PhD actually, because I was, and I was funded. I think it's really important people, you know, to mention that all of this was happening because I grew up in the 1970s and no one in my family had ever like got past being at school until they were 16 you know so like I come from that kind of working class background where it wasn't usual for people to stick around at school so the fact that I was in the kind of girls school where you got a lot of O levels and A levels as they were called in those days meant that I got a fully funded I'm not like from money where they paid for that it was a fully funded Bucks County Council British Council British Humanities Council

everything that I did scholarships because I was taught all that nonsense that if you were clever and there was a meritocracy and you would get rewarded for being a nice little handmaiden of the patriarchy which is what I did for a long time i was in the academy so it was kind of the yoga was part of that and i was teaching and doing a yoga therapy diploma and all those kinds of things yeah in london yeah in london what was your phd in it's in communications yeah it was an audience study that ended up being about devotion that people had to them did their movies is it about video collections it was very right it wasn't right it was quite significant input in a very peculiar little world but it gave me very good transferable skills yeah i'm a professional educator like i know how to design courses and how to assess people and evidently i don't use any of those structures anymore because

those structures of schools and universities are not something i want to have anything to do with so i learn how to do that but that isn't the way I teach, but I can. That's why I write big fat books with lots of bibliographies because you can take the woman out of the academy, but you can't really extract every part of the academic training out of it. But it's useful. I feel I got transferable, useful skills for free because I was a fully funded pauper who got to educate themselves I'm annoyed with an education people really hate that kind of thing don't they back to the troublemaker yes back to troublemaking and you I mean you can tell when you read Yoni Shakti which is the book of yours that I've engaged with the most although you have written many books and we're going to talk about your your recent book later as well um that really feels like a phd in everything i'm obsessed with which is

this this body that i have that all of the my spiritual upbringing didn't tell me anything about or give me any education about and i couldn't understand why why not and then you know books like yours have had such a huge impact for so many of us so you talk about in Yoni Shakti that you you had a postpartum body and you were coming to your yoga trainings with this body and the practices you were being guided in weren't meeting your needs. And can you sort of walk us a bit from there to the writing of Yoni Shakti? I mean, in short, I ended up having to write the book that I needed to have. I was looking for it. And I say that all over the place. And I wanted a book that was properly researched with all all the spiritual background.

I'm, you know know I'm devoted to the mother I'm working with shakti tantra I'm devoted to to the dark mother I'm the white-faced servant of the blackest mother there is that's my job but it and the only shakti what I had to do was write the book that helped me as somebody in a postpartum body I mean I'd been looking for it when I was pregnant and I so I'd done a special yoga therapy project about yoga for pregnancy. And I'd benefited from like birth light yoga and yoga for active birth and all of these things. And at the same time, I was really rooted in this very traditional yoga school. And it was in the traditional yoga school that I wasn't getting anything that helped my postpartum healing.

Basically, it made everything worse. It also made me feel guilty for showing up with a baby and like even in the active birth center they didn't really believe my birth stories because they were they were extraordinarily powerful about pranayama so I wrote mother's breath first so I think that's important I wrote mother's breath in 2006 and you just need to see such a beautiful book mother's breath look at that beautiful book printed and designed in italy currently only available as an e-book and an audio book but it is there and so i wrote mother's breath and that was all the pranayama practices they're the magical vital breath and life force dances and i rewrote that book and kind people said it's one of the best books on pranayama that there is like people who knew what, because it looks at pranayama out of a fixed, you know, people think pranayama, the breath.

I mean, now everyone calls these things breath work and they've commodified it and extracted it and commercialized it. But basically, the ancient South Asian practices of pranayama are about dancing with your breath. And that's what Mother's Breath was all about. It was about how breath and meditation practices could help us during pregnancy during birth and during postnatal recovery and so everything that was in Mother's Breath needed the other context like it needed more and as I was like oh now I was as I was writing Yoni Shakti and I have to give huge thanks to the very first cohort before it was Red School when Alexandra and Shani were holding that, that circle held the final birth pangs of Yoni Shakti. Because by that time I was very ill with it.

But it's a long story. So what I did was I put together in Yoni Shakti all of the things that I wanted to know, like you said. And it ended up very fat like that. So Uma's holding up this book which I I and many others feel the bible it's quite big it's huge yeah it's like a telephone directory back in the days on the hand but what I brought together was like basically the publishers were like it's four books so there's the history of women in yoga because I was like how come

all the teachers with all the power of the blokes and all the people in the classes are the women yes how come so i explored that and then i kind of and there's a there's an element of like it's a sort of feminist retelling of some of the key aspects of of practices for women because basically in hatha yoga there aren't any women that in the traditional kind of 14th and 13th century text that women are just a polluting force who are to be avoided so i kind of reclaimed it and so the main theme of it is that if we really understand the initiatory powers of cyclical life in our bodies the blood the orgasms the lactation, the pregnancy losses, the death within our wombs, the menopause, all of these, they're like extraordinary initiations, portals into power, but only if we're conscious of them and only if we respect them.

And what I saw as a postpartum woman and what I saw around me when I looked at other people who'd gone through these journeys is that you have to fight quite hard to get dignity respect and honor for the awe of like what is this blood moving through me what i look life is coming through me when i gave birth to my third child that the child was singing on the way out i could hear a voice in my and i will say those words sorry to offend people it's the only english word we've got that does the job and so that's what yoni shakti was about so we brought together history politics philosophy practical technical stuff gazillions of pictures and all these yantras the wisdom goddesses basically took charge of the book and gave me because i'm very devoted to these 10 wisdom goddesses for all kinds of reasons,

but they gave me the structure of the book. So each one of these wisdom goddesses is a guardian for a different stage of life in these bodies that bleed and have menopauses and have all that sort of thing. So that's what the Yoni Shakti was about. I think that's what you were asking me, but that's why I wrote it because I couldn't find something that integrated all of those things. And without the devotional aspect of the mother, then there's no point of any of it. Without the history, you don't really understand the context. Without the politics, you can't understand why I needed to write the book in the first place, because people were getting hurt in yoga classes. And there's a whole other conversation we can have about the abuse that's endemic within structures of power and hierarchy that are fundamentally imperial capitalistic structures that are about colonizing people's life force stealing it off from them the way that colonizers

steal land from people it's the same process and i do believe that the female body is one of the first colonized territories in human history rape and pillage it's like what you do so if you're a colonizer and that's continued so we needed all those things and there's also poetry and amazing stories because half the book is written in red ink I mean and it's a beautiful piece of design and there's loads of illustrations that my husband did because he's also devoted to these goddesses and God bless him. He's the illustrator. And there's my it's just a gorgeous thing. So I had real help from the people who supported me in publishing it. And then it caused a lot of trouble when it came out. But that's why I wrote it, because I wanted to have all those things in one place.

All the menstruality consciousness stuff and the indigenous wisdoms about about the wisdom of the body and inspiring stories and then lots of other stories the stuff in red ink are other people's stories so I feel like part of my job is um is to carry stories and I and that's part of my heritage I mean my grandmother was an Irish midwife so my ancestors are all Irish and my children's ancestors are Indian. They're South Asian. So I've got this kind of incredible. And both of those traditions have a great, there's something quite magical in terms of the wisdom of in there and I'm still in touch. But I recently met someone in their 70s who was one of the contributors to the book who's like, yeah. And it was quite healing, not just for me to put all this useful information together and think, oh, I finally got a useful book for yoga practitioners. That doesn't look like the kind of yoga they tell us we should do, because some of those straight lines and rigid practices are just totally unhelpful and possibly injurious to postpartum bodies, to bleeding bodies, to premenstrual bodies, to menopausal bodies, to basically most bodies. If you happen to live in them and you've got a womb and you're like, well,

my breasts are a bit inconvenient and my bum doesn't fit into the shape that you want because most of those practices of yoga were designed not for us. So what was I going to say? That's it. So I'm really grateful to that tradition that i'm kind of part of and married into about really honoring the stories because i hold those stories and when i meet people they're like there was a healing process and people telling the stories and i held them with respect some if you've got a name for a person in those stories that's because they would have given the name and say i want i want to be identified I want people to know who I am and some people like no I don't

want to be identified some of the stories are mine but there's a lot of stories in there and that's how I I learn best and how I teach best so but I've interwoven it with a gigantic bibliography because I have those skills so it does seem a bit like a PhD and in fact I've been sent to a PhD supervisor I said it's actually it was twice as long as my PhD like that's what I knew how to do some people know how to make videos I know how to do research so I did the research yeah. There's an interesting intersection of our lives here too which I hadn't quite clocked I'm not sure how so in 2014 Claire Dakin then Dakin now Claire Dubois was creating Tree Sisters and I was there in 2016 at the beginning of that with her maybe 2015 maybe 2015 actually and and you talk about

I saw Claire's story and I hadn't seen it before so she was working with understanding how the desecration of the feminine and the desecration of Earth were connected. And you have this beautiful section in Yoni Shakti about what happens when the feminine is desecrated and the impact for our Earth and for all social justice on Earth. Absolutely. And that was the first part that I wrote. That in the original version of Yoni Shakti, that was upfront. It's world as womb, womb as world. And it's about deep ecology. And it's about re-matriation.

And I didn't have that word. I wrote Yoni Shakti in 2012. And what I was doing now, I understand, was a ritual ceremony of re-matriation, which is a decolonial act of like really offering our bodies to the earth and honoring our bodies as the earth so the first section that was written was a section where i interviewed claire i talked about talking to her on the phone or she said because i knew what

she was doing and i was like we need her voice and that was stood for the voices of all of stood for the voice of the earth and then some of the ancient and indigenous wisdom around honoring the earth and in in the juggle that the publishers wanted to get out like a yoga book that got put in the end and some pieces got taken out of that because i was actually very angry with the yoga industrial complex because by the time i was finishing yoni jacti and and the politics really that's what i am i mean i've been on picket lines and it and protests since I could talk. I mean, that's like, it's my thing. You know, I was always the union representative, the mouthy one who'd argue about stuff. So I've been doing that since I could remember. They were my first words, you know, dreaming about things not being fair and waking everyone in the house up by shouting, it's not fair,

stop. I'm still doing it. But the point is about what Claire was doing and Tree Sisters and so many other, like Navdanya, Vandana Shiva was a hero of mine, Vicky Noble, all these real like people. I mean, Claire's a different generation, but elders of the movement. And I tell you what I also felt was I wanted Yoni Shakti to be there

because like I grew up with like Feminism 101. And, you know, I was at high school in the United States for a year and I had a like kick ass feminist like tutor who was like, you need to read this, this and this. And Andrea Dworkin and Alice Walker and Audrey Lorde and Bell Hooks and Gloria Steinman, all of them. So I grew up with all of that and then when I speak to a lot of young women together I'm like where's you got there's none of that is there what happened to it so I felt like with Yoni Shakti I needed to I was making assumptions about people's level of understanding it with women's studies who does women's studies anymore but I came with that understanding and so that's like the the ethical principles

are rooted in intersectional feminism and rematriation like it's a social justice issue and and and it's also an ecological issue and it's a it's a it's about decolonial praxis which is like calling out what happens when we desecrate and steal the earth from people. And that includes their bodies and their intuition. Yeah. There you go.

Woo. Mars is burning. Yeah. Tuesday is a great day to have a, have a podcast where you need to get a little bit. Stay on the dark moon. Yes. Yeah.

No, sorry. It is a bit dark moony i love it let's go there our listeners will be cheering with you i can hear them i'm going to pause the chat with uma for a moment if you're keen to explore your menstrual cycle as a gateway to power alexandra and shani the co-founders of Red School, would love to invite you into the heart of the Red School community to understand how these powers are alive and awake in you. And a great place to start is their Cycle Power course, where you're guided to develop your own cycle-aware self-care practice as a foundation for living the full power of the cycle in your life you can find out more about the course and join at redschool.net forward slash

cycle power and here's a story from surya darshini one of the cycle power participants about her experience of the course. The six-week cycle power course work came at just the right time for me. I've read Shani's and Alexandra's Wild Power years ago and had the opportunity to meet them in person and even though I track my cycle regularly and feel in good connection with where I am in different seasons, there was a desire to go a bit deeper, to get in more connection with what those seasons

had to teach me. I felt like there was another layer that I knew I could access, but I needed a nudge, I needed some guidance to come into that relationship and I was not disappointed. So for me personally I took away a strong shift in the spring of my cycle. Spring used to be for years a period of real grief for me, grieving that it wasn't winter any longer and I didn't have access to that space and rest and coupled with a desire or a push to fast forward into summer so I could start getting stuff done and

through this course really tuned into a quality of pacing, of being able to be with where I am when I'm there and trusting in that space, not fast forwarding into the future or resting back for or grasping for the past. And that's allowed me to take some measured steps towards a creative goal that I've been pursuing for some time but haven't felt quite able to connect. And now that I've made these small shifts in how I engage with

my spring there is a greater confidence and courage in taking these next steps in all places in my life. So if you do have the opportunity to delve a little bit deeper into the power of the seasons and to how you can take them through into every moment of your life then sign up for cycle power okay let's get back to the conversation with Uma now next we're exploring a beautiful part of her yoni shakti book where she speaks about the different tantric goddesses that she associates with the different life phases of women and people with cycles. So when I spoke to her Uma was literally surrounded in her room by

images of these goddesses and as you'll hear she was pointing to them and showing them to me so you won't be able to see them but you can see the images in the in the yoni shakti book if you'd like to see them okay let's get back to the amazing conversation with uma i mean let's come to the wisdom goddesses you you named in yoni shakti each goddess is representing a stage of life and you speak about tara as the goddess that you associate with the power of menstruation i just wanted to read a piece the city could we define that as power a city in yoga is like an accomplished power it's a kind of a supernatural power but we can think of it as a way in a feminine way that power moves through you you don't get power over it yeah so

the city associated with tara is the city of trust in trust in change as a way to be carried through difficulty this is the central revelation of menstrual cycle awareness that if we honor and respect the forces of change that work within us through the menstrual cycle then what we learn about this cycle carries us through all the challenges of all other cycles absolute gosh that's good isn't it did i write that you wrote it that was it i wrote it because they i you know you get that there she is there's tara and um yeah and she's the the tantric tara so yeah i I kind of, I asked, I mean, I don't know how people like to talk about these things, but I asked her permission to be kind of, to stand as the patron saint of menstruality consciousness, which is the cyclical rhythm of, that is lifelong. I mean, it doesn't,

you know, not just the bleed. And her name means star. She's a guiding star, Tara. Yeah means star she's a guiding star tara yeah but she's quite a powerful figure yeah and in your she's only one there are nine others of the wisdom goddesses and i'd like us to meet another one when we get to your menopause journey in a little bit i just there she is you might want to see her i'd like to honor her that's tara she's not the tara sitting there you know ready to she's got a pair of scissors and a massive blade and she's carrying a pet, you know, she does have a Lotus, but she's also got a severed head. And hang on. Does it also say on the card, the goddess who guides through trouble?

Yeah. There we go. The goddess who guides through trouble and through, through, through guiding us through change, you know, we're nothing but change really, but you obviously are eternal souls, but there you go. Yeah. And she's right here. You can't't see her but the big one's here yeah this is khalima khalima i would just love to hear you speak whatever whatever comes for you from this um uma whatever this sparks in you but menstruation as a gateway to rooting ourselves into a different kind of consciousness or a,

well, here you put a potential doorway to spiritual power and heightened intuitive awareness. Heightened intuitive awareness is the key. And I think it's the training ground for things like menopause and birth and all these other things. But like menstruation, if you're tracking your cycle, I mean, not just like the way I was doing in the 20s, like with the numbers, like when am I going to ovulate and, you know, that kind of thing. But actually, it's the emotional, I think the emotional states that you can, that physical signs give you the key to the emotional states. They're working together. So in yoga, we've got five bodies and I'm tracking all five bodies through the menstrual cycle. It's like a, it's so clear. It's a roadmap. I mean, it's like a really clear path. You're like, oh, this is a difficult part of the path of this. And you start to notice it. And what I think is

really important, it's the act of being consciously aware of these changes that just helps you notice that there are evidently shifts in conscious awareness at these at the moment when you're entering even as you step into the pre-menstruum these kind of crossover points you know in the in the cycle and that you don't have to like them happen. They're already happening. Yes. All I'm calling for to render menstruality consciousness as a spiritual practice is awareness, to cultivate awareness, somatic awareness, emotional awareness,

and then you start to become aware of your your dreams i've i've been a long time writer of my dreams i i've you know a lot of work with lucid dream semi-lucid dream using dream as insight inspiration dream and tarot you basically i'm an advocate for intuition that's what my work is and with menstruality, you have the opportunity, if you cultivate awareness, and it doesn't matter where you start, whether you start with the physical pain or discomfort or joy or the orgasmic release of the blood, or whether you start with your emotional state. And I started with anger because that was the most key sign of my premenstrual. And it took me some time to figure that was just that

was my sign like absolutely i i was arrested a couple of times you know like rage i'm like okay so this is my sign different constitutions so i i really dance you know with ayurveda and ayurvedic but all these tools for self-awareness help us realize that there are evident shifts in consciousness and i think there is absolute reality of a shift in consciousness that opens you up to heightened what i said intuitive awareness where you get really clear guidance you get it when you're breastfeeding as well because you're in communion you get it with a certain kind of orgasmic connection or sexual engagement. You get it at menopause. You get it all sorts of ways. You know, the whole process of losing a child, you know, within the womb or those kinds of like ends of pregnancy.

There's a kind of threshold that you go to because it's a very intense process, all of these things. And the one that's easiest to see most is the one that you keep doing, which is bleeding. And just before then, depending on who you are, where that is, you'll get these shifts in consciousness that are literally like opening a door into your own psyche. And what is that? That's the workings of the universe. So the emotions are like the signs of the goddess moving through you. And she's got stuff to teach us. I call her the goddess. You might call her the intelligence of life or the great cosmic web of being or whatever you want to call it. But it's like a consciousness is palpably shifting. And intuition is like our doorway to connect with that. And once you know what your signs are. So I moved from anger to be like, there's a way that I work. Like a lot of intuitive people with tarot and when I'm working one-to-one I'll be like I'll feel into it so it's an embodied and emotional

tangible set of signs that are like ah that's the door of intuition and it's rhythmical it's cyclical it's not that it's a made-up piece of nonsense most people are trained out of noticing it that that's the problem yes so I feel that part of what cyclical awareness is a gift to do is to give people a really effective way to remember and reconnect with the things they've been separated from and this that's it's a tool of the colonizer so basically it's a we're reconnect with the things they've been separated from. And it's a tool of the colonizer. So basically, we're decolonizing. I've written a lot about colonizing sleep.

That's another cycle. I mean, that's a cycle that I'm really quite obsessed with. That's a key to wellness and a key to menstrual health. I actually believe that most of the menstrual health issues largely exist in tired bodies. And if people actually got enough fucking sleep sorry to swear they probably would find that things were much less bad than they thought they were just saying anyway which is why i'm devoted to yoga nidra because it helps people sleep and much other things but the intuitional thing is like we've been separated from that by colonial systems that of education and control.

And they're obviously patriarchy is only one of those systems, you know, and then there's a deep internalized misogyny that I see even in the most supposedly feminist places. Yes. People don't see what's inside them. And what's inside them is that school teacher beating yourself up, telling you, you can't do that. You can't trust this. How can you trust intuition? How you'd have a home birth. Oh my up, telling you you can't do that.

You can't trust this. How can you trust intuition? How you'd have a home birth? Oh, my God, wouldn't you be scared of that? All my children were born at home. So, you know, that's part of my awakening was like was given birth to all my kids at home on my own steam with a lot of midwives who didn't have any connect with those kinds of levels of indigenous wisdom, you have to stand as an accomplice with all of the people who are trying they are not normal they are inhuman and brutal and that's why people have so much just distress because they just can't reconnect so anything that gives people a reconnection back in reconnect into their sleep their dreams their menstrual cycle i'm all for that because we're whole then we're whole again and people like yeah now i'm creative I'm loving I'm in connection with my body I'm intuitive and I love the earth and I wouldn't want to desecrate

her and I'd stand put my life down someone came to take down these yew trees where I live the the piece around this isn't something that you have to make up this is inside your body guiding you for those of us who have wombs and cycles and menopause processes that's the piece that I just come back to again and again and again because from my own experience in abusive yoga structures in the in the name of the goddess and the feminine there was incredible misogyny and patriarchal oppression to the point where I was encouraged to practice in a way that stopped me from menstruating and um coming back to my cycle after that was it was a homecoming it was a rerouting in and it was all the things that you said it made me whole it made me love myself it made me reconnected to the earth because

from all these spiritual ideas that I've been taught concepts and ideas that I had to somehow believe in it was like that there's nothing I have to believe in or not my body is doing this process and if I listen I can follow her somewhere exactly that and anything that stops us from hearing that is not to be trusted yeah yeah and that includes you know certain kinds of yoga practices that claim to be reconnecting that's what yoga means to join us up there if they're disconnecting anyone from their intuitive knowing of what feels right in their body then that's not good you know yeah you're bringing a lot of post-menopause wisdom today let's go there your menopause process and let's go to um by ravi who in yoni shakti you in this is a quote from you you invited her to stand guardian

over the chapter on menopause and he said the essence of bhairavi's wisdom is more closely related to the time of life after the cessation of menstrual cycles when steadiness and clarity give women and i'll we can add those of us who those who have cycles and the perspective and understanding to become fierce guardians not only of their own children but all of life this is perichrone or enchantress energy at its fiercest and wildest putting wisdom and power in the service of those vulnerable beings who need it most tell us about this tell us about your menopause process and who you are on the other side of it well here's pyra just so people can see her look isn't that beautiful and the thing about Pairavi as a wisdom goddess is she's one of the few who doesn't wield big weapons.

She's actually sitting quietly meditating. And her power is the power of Vak. Vak is speech. So when you actually look at Pairavi, and I'll find a little picture of her in a minute to show you, you see her sitting with her mala. It looks like she's going through her prayer beads you know or her rosary or however you like to think of it and for me the odd thing about my menopause experience was being silenced I had to live as a very mouthy

person with being silenced and and because my book was like the subject of an enormous court case that meant that i couldn't speak about my work and it was well my book i say but i've written six we can talk about them at the end but yoni shakti the one that most people knew i couldn't print it and i was also um at that time trapped by various covidian policies in um a a colonist entity that's known as canada which went quite interestingly odd and let me just point out here that if anyone wants to hear more about that story i was listening to some of an interview you did with kimberly ann johnson who's also been on the menstruality podcast yes went into a lot of detail about that I did because we talked about speaking out and rage and and again it was about the power of

in menopause so yes all the details in a four mentioned podcast it happens to be this organization that was suing Uma happens to be the abusive yoga school that I was in so yes yeah we we connected through that process there she is there's Bhairavi so she's sitting with meditating with her her book you know it's her sacred book so my encounter with that Bhairavi energy was um was very painful because I was not only for the actual menopause year when I'd stopped that year I stopped bleeding because I do think it's really important to mention that if you're clued into cyclical awareness you can see that all the standard western medical models for oh well if you haven't bled in a year or two

then you've done it's not true so I'd been through I'd already been through a perimenopausal period with with Baglamuki who's another goddess of perimenopause, where I'd stopped bleeding for a year. And through a process of like rejuvenation and rest and devotion, I started again. It's quite an interesting story, but that's another story. It also happened in Yoni Shakti. I'd had like three goes at menopause because during Yoni Shakti, I was adrenally fatigued because I was looking after three children, running two jobs and trying to write this book at four o'clock in the morning in a house infested with ghosts it was quite extraordinary so that's how Yoni Shakti was

written imagine how glad I was to have the circle of women around me to make sure I finished it so I thought I'd gone into menopause at 42 I had my daughter at 42 and I was breastfeeding I was like I'm never going to bleed again I was actually around that time I'd met Alexandra so I thought perimenopause had started then but it didn't and I got another 10 that time I'd met Alexandra. So I thought perimenopause had started then, but it didn't. And I got another 10 years, then I had this experience of stopping bleeding around 57. And then it started again. So I was like, oh, okay, this isn't, this is a 15 year process. Physiological menopause is such an immense, this is immense, this is the big one, right? Not everyone is going to do the other cities, not everyone's going to get pregnant,

or have babies, or lactate, or you know, not everyone's even going to have an orgasm in their life, I don't know, you know, all these things happen, but anyone who's been menstruating, you're going to get menopause, so and it's such, I feel it's the most immense portal for connecting with cosmic wisdom. It's huge. The wisdom of the women who I really looked to to support me through that were all post-menopausal women. And the third time, actually, I was like, oh, this is menopause. How did I know? I lost a tooth.

I lost all my hair. When it grew back, I said I'd never cut it again. So there we go. That's how long that's been going on. But it all fell out. And I was in a very difficult position in a country where I was a very much unwanted guest because I had fought my way in against the desires of the Canadian COVID policy on a mother's journey to look after a family member, my son, who was very, very ill. And I ended up staying for a year. I came in to help for two months and I couldn't get out. I prayed to the mother to let me in. And so my menopause, Bernie, was very much in this

crucible of a terrible legal position where I was silenced for two years, completely adrift from everything that anchored me in a land where my only friend was a river and my son who was very ill. So I really reconnected with the earth. That's when I started cold water swimming. I mean, I've always liked cold water swimming, but I made friends with the River Marmquam, which is a glacial river in British Columbia. I was in a place of immense beauty.

I met bears and raccoons. So I was truly like, I had nothing that I could do except make prayers and rituals for the seasons and light fires and hang out with bears and be up the mountains and look after this. And I couldn't really work. So what happened was, and I'm interested to explore this over the, if I get to live long enough, is to see that very often when the blood flow stops, another flow comes. So my flow was words. And what started to happen was when I was recording dreams as a creativity cycle, when I was recording my dreams,

and everything started to come in poetry. And the second edition of Yoni Shakti had indicated that because a lot of the rage was channeled into poetry. It's kind of like a middle aged rap form, actually, to be honest. And when I hear the rhythm of the mother speaking through me, I know that it's not me because it's her who wants to be heard. And it goes on like this, you know, so it started. And I was like, what the fuck is that? And everything started to be in poetry. And that was my experience.

And I was like, this is a different kind of flow. The blood has stopped so words can come. This is a different kind of flow. So I wrote this poem halfway through this journey of my life. I cracked. And from the crack that opened out, a shoal of words came swimming out. These word fish are not mine. They come through.

They literally came through. So that was my experience of menopause. And I was very fortunate in that I had good guides who were like, do ritual, Uma. It's all about ritual. Reconnect to the air. So I was burying stuff and eggs and you know and I'd actually taken my final bleeds and I knew they were the last few before I went to

and they're planted in roses that are exquisite so now I drink the rose tea from my rose plants that had my last bloods in them and almost about the same kind of time that I was stopping my youngest child was starting to bleed so that's my and I really I'm I really think that depending on what skills you've cultivated in the pre-menopausal journey and what cyclical wisdom you have those are the skills they kind of come together so the cyclical wisdom shifted from the little moon inside to the big moon upside you know and I became absolutely you know I was following the Nityas the Nityas are goddesses one for each phase of the moon so and I and they're they're from two different traditions in South Asia so

yes so I and they come together the Kali Nityas and Dalita Nityas and so I was because I shifted my cyclical awareness to moon cycles and to this flow of dreams that was absolutely connected to the moon. And I became in the, you know, there's people often talk about it. And I really like to flag it up as a big life cycle process, like partly like growing the pig tails. I always had these pivy lock stocking pig tails when I was a kid. And the people were like, why don't you get your haircut get a cool haircut it's 1980s you want a little buzz cut and I'm like no I want my pigtails so it was like I think a lot of post-menopausal women have this tender relationship with the

pre-monarchial girl and she was like unstoppable this pre-monarchial girl of mine and she was always writing poetry and stuff so I feel like there was this huge cycle of like mothering and looking and I'm still doing all of that stuff and then all my else so it's like a lot of menopausal women have if you've had kids later like I was doing perimenopause and postnatal recovery at the same time no fucking joke those of you who know what I'm talking about so do lots of people so that was happening got through that and then I'm in this kind of place with adolescent kids, very ailing elders in their 90s and 80s, me stranded in this home, it wasn't mine in this land that's not mine, doing menopause, losing my teeth and my hair. But what I gained was this incredible, unstoppable flow that actually has always been there. But I was

connecting with that. So I wrote more book and I was writing this unfinishable book. So that was it. So I was really stuck. And I couldn't speak about any of it, A, because I was an unwanted visitor who wasn't supposed to be working. So I wasn't allowed to, I was doing a bit on this, you know, I wasn't allowed to work because I was on a tourist visa because I was a family member. And because of this court case, I was silenced. I do want to say that guy is now in prison. So that's a good thing.

Yeah, let's just name just if you can. It's so hard to do this succinctly, but can you just what the court case was so that people understand? Because it's so. What happened with the second edition of Yoni Shakti? And I think it's helpful for people to know that there were two. So the first edition looks like that. And it's got a red spine. And the second edition of Yoni Shakti, and I think it's helpful for people to know that there were two. So the first edition looks like that and it's got a red spine. And the second edition looks like that and it's got a yellow spine. And the second edition has additional pages that explored all the things that have been censored and removed from this book.

And they also included new evidence of some pretty horrific abuses within a very particular yoga school and i called those out by publishing the survivor's testimonies and because of that i was sued by the organization on two fronts one was loss of income because i set up a campaign which is still running an educational campaign it will be revisited at some point. But it was an educational campaign that's first 10, it was disinvest from any organizations that harm women. So because they said, look, you've clearly said that and look, our profits have gone down. So we're going to sue you. Appalling. They also sued me for defamation of someone who was a wanted criminal wanted by Interpol and who is currently in prison

in France but during the time they were suing me he wasn't in prison so they go figure and even my lawyers bless them said that they'd gone into law for justice and this was not justice I think our defamation courts are full of whistle I was a whistleblower basically yes yeah and I was punished for it so careful whistleblowers get back up I And I had to pay all my, and there's a whole story, you can read the story elsewhere. It was a financially disastrous experience, but it was also very, very emotionally terrifying. Hugely terrifying for you.

And just on behalf of everyone listening, thank you. I wish it wouldn't have been so horrendous for you. And thank you for what you did, for the warrior work you did. Yeah, I did it. I did it for't have been so horrendous for you. And thank you for what you did for the warrior work you did. Yeah, I did it. I did it for us all really. And I'm grateful I did have support, amazing support of people in the background. Well, including yourself and other people who just stood with me. And since that time, what I feel very pleased about is not only is the perpetrator of some of those worst abuses in prison, but the fact that I persisted because they tried to frighten other people into silence

and they couldn't, in the end, they couldn't silence me because we won the court case. Other survivors have since come forward and there have been more podcasts and articles because now that one person somehow survives, it emboldens the others who are too scared to speak. And that's what matters. And I think that process is true with your own cyclical awareness. Like you might be the only person you know who's doing this and everything's your bonkers. But if you persist, you will find the other people to support you. So that's kind of how it works. And that is a deep wound that we can heal through sisterhood and through the circles. I'm absolutely continually devoted and amazed and healed by women's circles.

Circling as women is a radical act of resistance to patriarchal and colonial oppression because in every place where that happened, that was destroyed. So recultivating our trust in each other and seeing the apps, and I've held thousands of women's circles and every single one magic happens yes every healing always always always everywhere I could keep talking to you about that for another three hours and I really love to hear you speak about your new book oh yes can you tell us is this what wouldn't wouldn't be couldn't be finished yes this is a book that can be finished i do like to say when people say oh

yeah um i know your book i have actually written people just for the record six books you know this is the little bit that goes with the only shakti that has all the cards in but the book that i've just finished that took nine years is this book which is bigger than yoni shakti i didn't realize it was so big it's bigger it's bigger than yoni shakti it's called nidra shakti the power of rest and it is an illustrated look at these beautiful it's an illustrated decolonial encyclopedia of yoga nidra that includes incredible illustrations i don't know if you can see all these beautiful illustrations here and like proper some of the wisdom goddesses are in there look at these all these beautiful illustrations so yes and it's got an a to z

and it's got 108 transcripts of yoga nidra yoga nidra is a practice of a cosmic nap that's from the south african tradition and i did a global survey of indigenous practices of chance and dream and honored because this practice like most yoga has been commodified extracted and and colonized by people who who for whom it's not their indigenous tradition and so we get very warped ideas of trademarked versions of Yoni Shakti. So as you can see, compared to Yoni Shakti, it's actually bigger. Wow. Now I can see why it couldn't be finished. It's a big deal. It took nine. Well, I mean, it's 27 years work because I've been doing this practice for that long.

But it's and I collaborated with a lot of people. There were seven artists, all amazing women artists in here. Interviews, incredible science. I've reviewed 87 research papers and everybody who has anything useful to say about Yoga Nidra is either interviewed or I spoke. And in the meantime, I put out this little tiny book, which is called Yoga Nidra Made Easy. So Hay House published that and that sort of snuck out as the baby of the other one. But there you go. And there are three others others just so people know there's one a brilliant one about pregnancy and birth that's been in print consistently for 13 years there's mother's breath we talked about and then there's the Celtic school of yoga which I did in 2016 so I have written a lot of books and that big blue one is the latest

one and it has amazing audio with it it's got 108 sound scripts of yoga ninja practices from very kind people who've contributed them so so that was a kind of like a menopausal project i was like it's also a very adhd project because in it everything is everything it's got a fantastic index so it's cross-referenced with an a to z a historical section a pre-historical section an indigenous reclamation section an illustrated section and a yoga nidra's medicine section plus it's all underpinned by ethics of practice because it's really important if you're guiding people into a restful state of trance and dream to be knowing what you're doing and keep your freaking eyes open when you do it anyway i've got lots to say about that but that's's sort of, but it's a, as a creative cycle, sometimes things take a while.

So I think I had to get all the way through menopause and through these trials to realize that the only thing really at bottom that saved me from going up in total smoke was the practice of yoga nidra. So I am deeply devoted to Dumavati, who's the wisdom goddess, whose wisdom is forgetting. I'm very good at forgetting. And she is the patron saint of Yoganidra. And she is the one and she's the crone energy. So I'm heading for that place. I'm in the spring of my autumn years. And that's Dhumavati.

And thank you for letting me talk about her. I can't get her on amazon she's a completely decolonial community project and every copy is being sent through stroud post office so you can only get it from our website or from made in stroud okay so how so can you name your website so people know yoga nidra network dot org okay that's where you can get it we ship it to you all over the world there you go let's it's got some fantastic pieces about menstrual and menopausal wisdom and yoga nidra is a key practice when people look at yoga for menopause what does it look like it looks like

five yoga nidras a day people doesn't look like handy asanas and nice t-shirts it looks like a blanket from rest creativity there you everybody listening let's go to the yoga nidra network.org and let's all go and buy a copy of nidra shakti let's support uma's amazing work that she's been doing for so many years and will continue to do with our support decolonial doing it her way I'm so grateful to you I'm so inspired by you and yeah thank you from my heart and from on behalf of many listening thank you thank you thank you so much Sophie it's been a total joy to talk about all these many things and thank you for making space and thank you for listening everybody thank you let's get on with tuesday marz let's get on with tuesday we always have our team meetings on tuesday and people are like

like we the accountants need that we need that's. We always have a team meeting on a Tuesday morning. I will show up in a red beret. Thank you, Uma, love. Enjoy your day. I'll speak to you soon. Bye bye. Thank you, love. Bye bye, love.

Have a nice day. Oh, wow. I loved everything about that conversation. I hope you enjoyed it too thank you so much for being with us both all the way through to the end if you know someone that would benefit from this conversation please forward this podcast to them and please do come and subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts it really does help the podcast to reach more people and we really appreciate it 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