The Menstruality Podcast - 198. The Connection between Your Menstrual Cycle and Your Mental & Emotional Health (Alexandra & Sjanie)

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

As part of our ongoing series about the connection between menstrual cycle awareness and our health & wellbeing today we’re exploring how getting to know your cycle can be a vital foundation for mental and emotional health.Alexandra and Sjanie are both retired therapists, and today they share their learnings from their own personal cycle awareness practice, as well as working with thousands of students over several decades about how mental and emotional health rests on us knowing ourselves, feeling our value and worth, and understanding the nature of cyclicity - all of which are skills we learn from connecting to our cycles. We also explore how the root of much of our collective menstrual and emotional turmoil as women and people who have, or have had cycles is the cultural denial, shutting down, ignoring, belittling, and suppression of our cyclical nature. We explore:Alexandra’s personal journey with dissolving the shame of her early years and claiming her worth through cycle awareness and menopause, so that now she is emotionally resilient to the extent that she is immune to toxic shame.The two stable poles of the menstrual cycle, and the two transitional phases and how to work with them all to understand ourselves better and create emotional and psychological wellbeing. How following the call to stop and rest at menstruation is medicinal for us emotionally and psychologically. ---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.hardy

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, welcome back to the Menstruality Podcast. Thank you for being part of this community. Thank you for tuning in today. So good to be with you in this way. So as part of our ongoing series about the connection between menstrual cycle awareness

and our health and well-being, today we're exploring how getting to know your cycle can be a vital foundation for mental and emotional health. So Alexander and Shani are both retired therapists and today they share their learnings from their own personal cycle awareness practice as well as with working with thousands of students over several decades about how mental and emotional health rests on us knowing ourselves and feeling our value and our worth and understanding the nature of cyclicity, all of which are skills we learn in bucket loads from connecting to our cycles. We also look at how the root of much of our collective mental and emotional struggle and suffering and turmoil as women and people who have or have had cycles is the

cultural denial, shutting down, ignoring, belittling and suppression of our cyclical nature. It's a good one. Let's get started with the connection between your menstrual cycle and your mental and emotional health with Alexandra and Sharni. Well let's start with a cycle check-in. Let's do it through the lens of our mental and emotional health and how the cycle day that we're on is impacting that I can kick us off yes don't you okay so I'm on day four of my menstrual cycle and my bleed is actually really short these days it's just like two days and two nights so there's no more blood but I'm still definitely very much in inner winter mode and I can tell because I'm feeling everything, feeling everything.

I'm way more permeable. I'm way more vulnerable. And I guess my definition of menstrual, mental and emotional health really is my capacity to be with what I'm feeling and be relating to it and to be with what I'm thinking, like the delightful thoughts and the shitty challenging thoughts and to be with what I'm thinking like the delightful thoughts and the shitty challenging thoughts and to be to be with them and something that I notice at this phase of my cycle is my capacity to stay sort of regulated in a nervous system way with the big feelings with the thoughts is I have to work harder with it because I'm just so wide open, really. So I was wide open to Artie's rebellion when putting on his shoes, I'm putting on his clothes, I'm leaving the door,

I'm getting to nursery this morning. So that took a lot to stay sort of with myself and regulated. And yeah, I'm just, I'm, you know, more wide open to the things that are happening in the world and they're breaking my heart today. And I just know I need to kind of wrap a metaphorical blanket around myself today and be very gentle with myself. Sophie, I really love your description of how you describe mental and emotional health. And I have to 100 second that in a way that's how I

um do my mental and emotional health and and there's this deep work of valuing going on in there so interestingly I am day 10 today and I have this I felt the shift from the sort of dark moon, new moon phase. I felt that shift being really out of the world, you know, in a lovely little sort of poetic bubble and mystical bubble. And I felt the shift into kind of the real world in inverted commas, you know, a few days back. It was very distinct. But in this moment, I am feeling very open, very permeable.

And it's very hard to define the quality of feeling in me, except that it is deep feeling. And there is, because I'm so permeable, I'm present to everything, a bit like you, you know, the high and the low, the, you know, the complexity of the world. And I have to move in a way, to all that is moving in me. And especially not to lose my own goodness, not to lose my own value. I think that's quite a high art can i just say as an aside kudos and is this a this permeability that you often speak about is it like a quality of your post-menopause life like is it always there now yes it is it is because it's i think it's the

nature of the place you come to in cyclical consciousness postmenopause just that increasing permeability but i also connect it in a very practical way to you know not having the same kind of physical chi and you have to find another kind of chi because physical chi just gives you buffering full stop you know yes and how's day 11 feeling for you, Sian Banan? Day 11. Well, there's two one ones next to each other. Look a little like a runway in my mind right now. Yeah. So I'm in my inner summer because I usually ovulate around day 12. So there's a very expanding, peaking energy in my system. And my life is really fast right now. There is so much going on and it's all moving really really quickly um you know parenting life is fast and full work life is fast and full my inner life is fast and full so there's a huge amount of

speed and actually on some level I'm really with that and enjoying it like I feel this sort of sports woman kind of energy in me really that like sports woman quality which is like right eye on the game let's do this it has a bit of a rah rah motivational like stay positive stay focused like let go, let's go kind of energy about it. Remember what we're doing, why we're doing this. It's a very rah-rah. And if I only stay with that aspect of my experience, I realize that it has an emptiness to it because there's much more complexity actually as well going on in my system. And this is what I so appreciate about cycle

awareness and a cycle check-in, which I did with myself this morning. So I can feel that sportswoman rah-rah energy. But also if I really stay with myself and pay attention, I notice there are these sort of contradictions happening where I'm aware of tiredness. I'm also aware of a lot of tenderness and depth. Yeah. So there's something about like noticing the complexity of my experience, which is something I'm very with in the season of my life, you know, 48, I'm in the autumn of my menstruating years. There is more complexity and contradiction in my experience just overall. And if I don't expand to include those parts of myself, I'm not really here. So yeah, in terms of mental and

emotional health, you know what you were both saying about what that means to you for me it's about oh as I agree with everything you said and this thing I'm noticing today is the more aware I can be of the diversity of experience in myself then the more capacity I have to meet my multi-faceted needs and therefore the more I can kind of relax into the place I'm in and feel held you know feel that it's okay and I'm okay so yeah I really appreciate the increased self-awareness that cycle awareness gives me before I knew that I was 28 different women every month I thought I was crazy yeah yeah and I had that reflected to me in the world you know the cycle has been dismissed, belittled, you're just premenstrual, she's PMSing. It's like there's so many stories we have about the cycle and it's been demonized, it's been shut down, we don't embrace our cyclical nature. And actually, maybe the best way to get into this, Alexandra,

is for you to share your story about what you know about how your cyclical nature being shut down and suppressed what that did to you in terms of your mental and emotional health earlier in your life and then what discovering cycle awareness did for you i'd love to uh sophie yeah um as you were asking me that question I was interestingly reflecting on the fact that um I um never had a problem with the menstrual cycle you know in the sense that my monarchy experience was very beautiful and I just feel that anointed me for my life. And so I felt very kind of cool about, you know, cool is the wrong word, but, you know, just, yeah, I've never felt ashamed of talking about my menstrual cycle. did not understand about valuing the rhythm and energy of it. And in my 20s, I had some energy. I am by nature very kind of proactive and if not a little pushy, you know, blah, blah, blah.

But, you know, just I didn't show up as someone with mental health problems, but also because I had learned to behave in inverted commas. You know, I went to a good school and, you know, it's very interesting. So that kind of conditioning that I lived with, that kind of middle class English. But there was a certain, you know, joie de vivre in me and an engagement with life. But I was not, you know, acknowledging the fact, I did not know about my shadow, but also,

and of course I didn't understand about my cyclical nature. And so the shit hits the fan at 31 when I get outrageous menstrual pain. But what also becomes increasingly obvious, and this is the kind of doorway into my inner life, and the shame that I carried in me is my health that, you know, was revealing itself to me as not great over time or coming to terms with the fact that I actually did have health problems, which were evident in my 20s but the fatigue the profound fatigue that kicked in um through my 30s

and in my 40s I mean so profound um that I would just lie there and think this is you know I might as well be dead you know I mean I was not someone who would ever have thoughts of killing myself, but taking my life. But, you know, it just felt so bleak and the despair that came up and it just made me very vulnerable and um and it's exposed me more and more to my shadow side and the awareness of shame in me and my self-consciousness by the way that self-consciousness had been there from i became so aware of it at the age of 13 i could barely walk out of the school hall i didn't know how in front of everybody i didn't know how to put one foot in front of the other but um and because I didn't have energy to go out and doing stuff in the world and because I mean I did some things because you know I was able to work a little bit I was not able to you know identity I think initially comes from the things you, you know, identity, I think, initially comes from the things you do, you know, like,

I'm a this, I'm a that, and that gives you a sense of something. And I didn't have that. But I had ambition, you see, and that was deeply distressing not to be able to say, Oh, well, I'm a somebody, you know, I'm a something. I mean, yes, I became a psychotherapist and all that. And I did have some identities. But the truth was, I could not, I was not getting thatist and all that. And I did have some identities, but the truth was I could not, I was not getting that kind of affirmation. And of course the kind of affirmation of just knowing my own goodness just wasn't there. You know, what was there was shame.

And this is where menstrual cycle awareness comes to the rescue. I don't know how I would have found myself without this. So my menstrual pain, I think people probably know the story, that I chose to, it was shattering, and I chose to turn towards it and say, you're talking to me and I'm going to listen. And I chose to give myself space at menstruation so there could be space for the pain. You know, it sounds very simple.

And it took place over a number of years, this healing journey. But what happened was I did start to heal the pain. And what happened then was I started to get the gold of menstruation. It was like the pain was teaching me to stop. And then menstruation could deliver the goodies to me. So what happened at menstruation was I would feel these incredible spiritual feelings, this affirmation of my being, this profound sense of meaning to my life and love and ecstasy and ideas. And I felt then that beingness space of my own goodness was being filled up by menstruation. It wasn't coming from anywhere else.

I mean, I could almost weep now telling you this story because I just want everyone to have this experience. Because if you're not getting it, you know, coming from the world, it's about what you do, you know. And judgment from not getting it, you know, coming from the world, it's about what you do, you know, and judgment from my beloved mother, you know, it was, you know, you had to be a somebody, otherwise, you were a nobody. Bless my mother. But I, you know, was getting it from menstruation. So yeah, I would come out of menstruation and, and be back in the world and go, what was that all about? Was I making that up? Because I would go back to kind of the old story. But month after month, I'd come back and it was like menstruation was talking to me and guiding me. Truly, truly, truly, truly, truly. And I began the menstrual work. And of course, then I had a something as well. You know, I wasn't, you know, I was becoming a psychotherapist, but now there was a sort of something special.

That's a great cosmic joke. You had to become a nothing to become a something. Yes, to find the something. Because I want to be a something as well. Well, you have a big calling that has been pushing through you. Yes, exactly. It's been coming through. But it sounds dramatic to say it, but I want to say that, you know,

menstruation saved my life because it became the antidote to shame. And I would be lying if I said, you know, that I don't feel shame anymore because shame is everywhere. And I would be lying if I said, you know, that I don't feel shame anymore. Because shame is everywhere. It's in the field. And I'm a highly sensitive person. So whether it's my shame or into the dark side, you know, the toxic kind of shame, you know, that toxic energy that shame is, I can observe it, I can feel it wash through me. And I can stabilize myself and remember. And, you so i feel you know challenged at times i can feel that

critical energy in me um you know it's alive and well and strong um but honestly honestly honestly my mental sanity my emotional resilience has grown out of a dedicated care of my menstrual cycle it brought me back to health it brought me to myself and it's given me a language and a framing for meeting life's challenges for meeting the provocations that come to me. I have the wherewithal within me, yeah, to meet her. So it sounds like what you're saying is at the root of much of our mental and emotional turmoil is this shame and that your experience, your spiritual sacred experience of menstruation has become like a tonic or a balm that has restored your sense of goodness and worth to to meet that shame

and maybe to dissolve that shame to um to give you a different way to to be with it or yeah and that menopause then then did its great big work with you so that now you're in a place mentally and emotionally where there is a lot of health. And that is so beautiful to hear. It's so beautiful to hear. Yes, absolutely, Sophie-Jane. And it's a story that we've heard in different ways

from different members of our community when Sharni posted a message in the Circle Hub saying, we're doing this podcast about mental and emotional health. Do you have any stories to share? And one of the ones that came in is from Katia and she says, I feel that bringing this work to therapists is fundamentally important. I used to struggle so much with self-doubt and often felt out of place and deeply distressed during my inner autumn and winter. I worked with a therapist for several years and later trained as a gestalt therapist, which was valuable in many ways. But no one in those circles ever pointed me towards my cyclical nature. It wasn't until a somatic therapist friend mentioned coming across your work, the Red School work, that something clicked.

Although therapy is always about change, it was only when I began practicing menstrual cycle awareness that I could truly embody change on a deep level. Recovering a sense of belonging in this world, feeling that I'm normal in my changing moods in my need to leave it all behind sometimes and rest has been fundamental it felt as though I was finally granted the big permission to simply be myself and that in itself has been deeply healing on every level yeah it's everything it's it's just the foundation podcast over and then she closes it by saying becoming part of a community of cyclical beings women who honor and cherish their nature is profoundly healing too that's been 100 my my experience too, Katja. I needed to be around others who also had had this experience of

there's nothing wrong with me because I'm changing throughout my cycle month. It's natural. I am cyclical. I feel like we can't say this enough. Yeah, and Sharni, it was something you were talking about when we were chatting before this conversation, that the fact that the menstrual, we've demonized cyclical life, and we've created a culture where the norm is to be the same. And as you've both been talking, you know, through this conversation, I've really been with this thing of how there is an assumption actually that mental and emotional health is to do with kind of feeling good and being okay. And what you've both named and what the cycle really brings us back to in a very embodied way is that actually uh staying the same and being the same is not health you know rhythm is life movement is life and life is health giving so if we're all trying to kind of hold ourselves in one way of being um in order to be acceptable in order to be valued and have that outer affirmation

um yeah we are going to find ourselves being corroded at a very, very deep level. So there is definitely the shame piece that comes from denying the cycle, which corrodes our sense of innate value and worth. And then there's the loss of connection to ourself that comes from denying the cycle and really mental and emotional health, as you so beautifully said right at the start, Sophie, has everything to do with being connected to yourself, you recognize what you need. And when you recognize what you need, you can take care of yourself. And when you take care of yourself, you're going to feel better. It's very, very, very generative.

So yeah, I think the things we've named here of connection to yourself and connection to value and worth are really really bedrocks for mental and emotional health yeah thank you shani we just can't underestimate the importance of knowing ourselves as cyclical beings when it comes to feeling emotionally and mentally healthy and also for anyone who is supporting others with their mental and emotional health cycle awareness is so vital like there were other therapists who came in as well as katya

in the community and shared their experience including jenny and she said i'm a clinical psychologist and had zero training so zero is in capital letters, zilch, nada, none, zero training in the cyclical nature of emotions and human life more generally. Now I've discovered menstrual cycle awareness through Red School. It's transformed my work with my clients so positively. I now can't believe any mental health training doesn't involve this teaching. It's just incomplete in a massive way without it. So I'm also passionate about therapists knowing about menstrual cycle awareness and integrating it into their work gosh yes we are so passionate as well Jenny this is something that Alexandra and I are really

holding that this work is integrated into therapeutic training. We're both retired therapists, and I can see how inherently valuable having this knowledge is, both for you as a therapist, if you're a cycling therapist, to be able to have that layer of connection with yourself and your own cyclical experience what that means for you as a therapist but also then to bring this education and information to those you're working with and there are you know one of the reasons we created our cycle awareness course is really for therapists, because it's the one place where we teach this foundational layer of the work, which we where we talk about the cycle as a means of healing and creating health and wellness. So yeah, I'd love

therapists who are interested to come and dive in and start working with it. We've got people on our programs, actually. I'm thinking of MC Decker, who's currently doing our postgraduate program, and she's a psychologist working in the Canadian health care system. And she's researching, working with cycle awareness in therapy and really researching this area. So there are people in our community who are spearheading this and taking it forward and I think it's just a matter of time before yeah it becomes a movement yeah and back to another thing that Katia said the other great thing about being on the cycle power course is that you are surrounded by others who are embracing their cyclical nature and working with it for their mental and emotional health so you're in a community

of others who get it you know part in the online community you can be connecting sharing your cycle check-ins how you're feeling emotionally and mentally and it's you know you'll receive a cyclical kind of support it's making me think back to know, I was privileged to be able to have a year of psychotherapy when I was in my biggest mental and emotional health crisis of my life, which was in the last year of my infertility, four years of infertility. And although my therapist was amazing and helped me and helped me so much, if she'd had that cycle awareness lens of death and rebirth, really, you know, and that I was going through a profound, a profound process of death, really, and but then cycle awareness, you all helped me. Thank you. I laugh now, but it was terrible at the time. But yeah, yeah. Okay,

so more therapists with cycle awareness, please. Yes, that's the quest um and I think it's important to recognize that in a world where our cyclical nature is denied belittled suppressed being with the emotional changes is not easy you know I have a wonderful husband who I talk about all the time on the podcast and he would love me to be an inner summer all month long he loves it it's I'm so easy to get on with I don't criticize I've got endless energy I can parent till the cows come home and I'm not tired and all good things and then suddenly day 21 comes around he sees it in the diary and he goes, oh shit. And then he knows that life's going to change and everything gets harder in our family. But it also gets more rich and beautiful and I can be with the challenges of life and all the gorgeous gifts that come with the via negativa, the second half of the cycle. So that's all to say, like there are times in the cycle where we feel more

stable and there are times in the cycle that are more emotionally and mentally turbulent and can you can you walk us into your teachings around that around the two stable poles and the two transitional phases yes sophie so um the cycle is a process of sort of being and becoming. There are these two poles to the cycle. Menstruation is one. I used to talk about them as the north and south pole of the cycle. And the other pole is ovulation. And at these two poles, something happens. You know, menstruation, you bleed. At ovulation, you these two poles something happens you know menstruation you bleed that ovulation you release an egg and um they and and then in between that you are moving you know you

are in movement between one or other poles so your body is either building up to ovulation and then you know something happens that's so there's a place of arrival that's uh the ovulatory pal and then um if can if um there hasn't been a conception you know if an egg hasn't met a sperm and got together and then the second half of the cycle is a journey to menstruation. And there's a different kind of energetic quality to that. So you're in the, you know, the inner spring of yourself, of your cycle, the pre-ovulatory time. You're in a sort of expand, in a becoming, becoming up to, you know, ovulation. And then in the autumn or premenstrual, you are in a movement of, you know,

coming to an event called menstruation. So at menstruation, we say that at menstruation and ovulation, you are your most kind of stable. There's a something that happens there's a kind of let go in the system so you arrive at a place and then you have to leave the place you see and you have to travel and that is that traveling time uh is the sort of becoming so if I leave ovulation then I'm in a becoming phase becoming into the beingness of menstruation and so and of course you know our pre-ovulatory phase and pre-menstrual phase the transitional times and transitional times just by their nature have more disturbance in them.

I don't mean that in a negative way, but they are less solid or less stable. And they can, so understanding that just helps you to sort of understand your nature. They also have their own very distinct worlds within them. They're not just passing through territories. When I say they're transitional, you're definitely not just passing through something. It's not very interesting. On the contrary, there is something, of course, that happens there, psychologically speaking, that, you know, it's a real world. There's a real experience going on there.

But it is less stable. And I think that just understanding that helps us to understand ourselves mainly i think it's with the pre-menstruum because the energy is decreasing in the second half of the cycle so in the first half of the cycle you do have this expansion of energy this filling out and that has a certain kind of um buffering to it that gives you a substance um but of course some people do struggle with that. It can be one of the hardest times in the cycle for some, especially when you start to become more sensitive and aware of your cycle. You will become aware of a sort of tenderness there.

But the second half of the cycle generally, of course, is the one that's noted for its problematic and inverted commas, because it's not really, it's not at all. But it's a problem for others because we're just more outspoken and antsy and won't take shit and have opinions. And we've dropped our nice socialized self. self but in the premenstruum when the the energy retreating it's it's more exposing and it kind of reveals the underbelly of ourselves so there's quite a lot of shadow that can come up that can make that challenging i'm going to pause us just for a moment to share a couple of invitations firstly if you'd like to work with your cycle to support your mental and emotional health then the free red school cycle tracking chart could help you you can receive it for free at redschool.net forward slash chart

and as Sharni and Alexandra mentioned earlier their cycle power course can support you to get to know how you ebb and flow through the inner seasons of your cycle and what can best support you to create emotional and mental health as you go through that journey you can find out more about this self-paced course at redschool.net forward slash cycle power and here's a story from mc decker who's a therapist who shani actually spoke about earlier in the conversation about her experience with the cycle power course so she says as is always the case when i listen to alexander and shani speak there were new learnings and takeaways I really enjoyed how each season was broken down into the sections of limits and powers and what it really takes to access the power. It really clicked for me in a

deep way. The information felt so transferable to real life. I feel like I heard the call to rest at menstruation more deeply in this course. If you're searching for a way to deepen self-care practices and for something that could give you full permission to be yourself, this course. If you're searching for a way to deepen self-care practices and for something that could give you full permission to be yourself, this course will set the foundation for that. We have a story actually from Grace about her experience of her premenstrual, of her inner autumn. I think I'll bring that in now and we can look through the lens of that at these the instability of this time so this is actually from Grace's bio on our website because Grace is a mentor on the cycle power course yeah Grace's journey into menstrual cycle awareness started at home when she was growing up she witnessed her mum going

through turbulent emotions every few weeks irrit Irritability would turn into anger, rising to peak rage, release, followed by tears and an apology. Sorry, I'm premenstrual, her mum would say. Grace found this scary and intimidating, being on the receiving end of hormonal rage, and wondered, is this going to happen to me? And in short short yes it did. It was an emotional roller coaster cycling through feelings of anger, rage, suicidal ideation and guilt through much of her 20s and early 30s. It was draining and confusing to be overtaken by this vitriolic force every month and although her love of partying certainly didn't help, I relate to that phenomenon, she noticed that this wasn't a shared experience among her peers. Around the age of 28 Grace reached

a tipping point. Her partner at the time paid for a private consultation with a hormone specialist. She received a diagnosis of PCOS as well as useful information on the negative impacts that sugar and an overproduction of insulin has on PCOS. Start by cutting down information on the negative impacts that sugar and an overproduction of insulin has on PCOS, start by cutting down alcohol and get plenty of sleep. So that was the beginning of the end of her partying days. But the physical diagnosis wasn't enough. There was a complex emotional layer to Grace's experience that wasn't being addressed. And that's when she found the magical work of Red School and its community. She started to feel understood. I think this is a journey that so many in our community can relate to.

It was exactly the same for me on my own version of that. And it's the physical diagnoses aren't enough, are they? We need to tend to this complex emotional layer in us. So much of the kind of mental and emotional distress shows up, as Alexandra said, in the premenstruum or actually in any of the transitional times in the cycle, which is why it's so important to have cyclical understanding. So I feel like I want to give another layer of context to this because what's going on psychologically is really helpful to understand you know in the first half of the cycle you've got this sort of ocean of expansion happening and in the second half this

ocean of contraction and these stable poles that alexandra described are the places where these two oceans meet and at these times of stability it's like the weave in our consciousness is much tighter. And because of that, we are able to function really well in the world. But when we move between the poles this weave in our consciousness begins to thin and you can hear in that thinning the cracks start to show and what happens is stress that's in the system starts to surface and we know that stress creates reactivity and yeah like disturbance in how we feel and how we think it affects our brain function and so in our capacity to communicate and so many things stress surfaces but also trauma that hasn't been integrated surfaces. So this could be developmental trauma, social trauma, situational trauma. Any trauma that you've experienced in your life now is being aerated.

It's like the dirty laundry of your life gets like pulled out into public view. And this sounds really not good at all except this is the um health giving um healing capacity of the cycle because in this revealing of what is unconscious, what is undigested in us, we have this incredible opportunity to forge more connection with ourselves, become more aware of ourselves, forge more connection with ourselves, and actually integrate these parts of ourselves and these parts of our experience and healing is really ultimately about becoming a whole and about connection with ourselves and all aspects of ourselves and that I think in turn allows us to have this capacity to connect with life more fully you know connect with humanity connect with the spiritual facets of life more deeply so when I hear stories like Grace's I on some level

grieve because in a way the huge outrage that's happening there premenstrually is a kind of ptsd you know it's what happens when we don't understand what is going on and so we're in the reactivity of it we don't feel held in the experience you know there's like a whole loss of ground loss of safety um a loss of context and dignity i mean you know you just feel like you're going like you're going mad like there's something wrong with you like you're out of control as opposed to you know what if you knew that actually this is a time of healing and you can get the right support, the right holding, the right resources, you can learn the right skills to be able to meet the experience that's happening so that the cycle

can do what the cycle does so beautifully, which is heal. It's a healing cycle. The menstrual cycle is a process of healing. But when we aren't practicing cycle awareness, we don't understand cyclicity. The cycle actually is destructive and symptomatic, you know, symptomatic. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with symptoms, but if we can come into relationship with them that really changes our the process that we're in into one that is generative and healing ah that is just so good and i just kind of want to capture now the kind of headline statements although you're just doing it there um so this is where my liminal mind is going to have fun trying to be focused and do it you can do it i can do it i can do it um so the first thing is just understanding cyclicity we're naming that that i'm a cyclical

being and understanding that the dynamic that's at work within that that there are times of kind of firmness where the weave is tight I love that image Shani and there are times where the weave then gets more um uh open it's more open weave and things can come through and so the cycle is uh it's like uh it's almost like uh this kind of exercising us yes that's the word we like to use it's exercising us you know it gives us uh it gives you this moment of kind of stability then it sort of tests your resilience by opening the weave up more. And so what helps you to meet that process of being exercised? The key thing here is you've got to learn how to ride the bicycle, folks. Learn how to ride the cycle, menstrual cycle awareness. So firstly, just this simple act of knowing where you are in each each day of your cycle and knowing the context of that day knowing that it's your inner spring and or you know your

inner autumn or whatever it is and and the fact that the weave is more open there and things will come up just knowing that makes a difference but also I mean on our cycle pal we of course we go into a lot of detail on all the kind of elements that really support each of those inner seasons yeah because actually Alexandra the cycle is very precise in terms of what it's asking of us and it's you know, turning towards that and honoring the precision of what our needs are that puts us in this healing cycle. That's the cyclical self-care, you know, the cycle, the cycle is asking us to care for ourselves in very particular ways. And we can only connect with that if we're practicing cycle awareness and we can only really

find ways to bring that into our experience each day if we're paying attention to where we are and how we are there's such a good point you're elucidating there shani and the thing i just really want to catch here is, this is just something we've noticed. It's not like a scientific fact, you know, that has been researched. But what we have noticed is the very act of doing menstrual cycle awareness, just every day in a very low key way, and just learning to contextualize and just knowing about the precision of the self-care that's required builds inner kindness. It's just magic. It's like watering the earth.

And then the earth magically starts to give you, you know, the seeds germinate. Something starts to show itself. It's extraordinary, this inner kindness and that inner kindness is like the forerunner of growing confidence yeah i think we need to read alexis's story because she speaks to exactly this alexandra yeah so alexis says the practice of menstrual cycle awareness has helped me to be kinder to myself and make more space in my psyche to embrace all the many and various facets of being a cycling human i felt a lot of pressure to present myself to the world as an infinite summer lady which led to massive burnouts and it does. I'm now learning to really inhabit the more autumnal

and wintry expressions of my innate energy without pushing myself as hard. Inner spring presents an ongoing emotional challenge as I get socially anxious and my critic tends to pop up. It's a work in progress but bottom line I am more able to stay close to myself and on my own side more of the time. Yeah. When I responded to Alexis in to that comment, I said, it sounds like you feel you're more liberated to be your full self. And that's the confidence, Alexandra Alexandra that you're talking about it's this it kind of creates this liberation to live into the different facets of ourselves and there comes

that theme of wholeness again and that theme of the necessity of change and being different each day and really allowing for that it's such deep permission isn't it yeah and the awareness she's holding now of herself that she wasn't aware of before yeah since around her inner spring there is just there's one other element i want to add into this healing brew that we're describing of you know the menstrual cycle is a healing process. And there's just one other magic element, which has already been named, but at the beginning in my story, which I want to put in here, which is the medicine of menstruation itself. So when we're practicing cycle awareness and learning to honor the quality

and character and tone of our inner seasons and, you know, feeling how the each inner season asks something different of us and a different kind of pace and so on and and if we're able to follow the um call of menstruation which is of course to retreat and to stop um menstruation gifts us with this love this affirmation of ourselves this this possibility of belonging i mean it's it's such real medicine it's extraordinary and i mean without that i'd have been stuffed basically you know um and uh so i just want to add that as another name that as another piece in our healing um potion we're building here describing the cycle and the real like you

mentioned trauma shani a real trauma integration piece that's happening at menstruation too at least that's what I noticed for myself is something being rewoven into me back to that weave and I'm just to give a practical example of this um the weave being open and the trauma presenting itself more I'm thinking about when I'm in my premenstrual phase and I'm parenting Artie and he is expressing his emotions very loudly in a way that I wasn't able to do because generally the parenting of the time when I was growing up was shut up, be quiet, shush, go and play somewhere else. That was the kind of parenting vibe. Sometimes I wish that was still a parenting vibe.

That's fantastic. It's's very attractive isn't it we all just used to run you know go off and play together a parenting approach that suits the parents but it did create a certain kind of subtle developmental trauma in me and now when I'm premenstrual and I'm with Artie and he is being very vocal and I'm doing my parenting work of the times which is does feel right to me which is listening to his feelings supporting him to regulate I feel the inner four-year-old in me who didn't get to express and she is very loud and when I'm premenstrual she wants to shout and scream so I've I'm learning thanks to cycle awareness and my recognition of what what's going on in the this open weave of the premenstrual I'm learning to practice regulating my nervous system in a way that I never would have known about if I'd not been cycle aware you know and that's the main practice so like for those for you listening now whatever sort of traumas that you notice come

up in the premenstruum it's like how how can you be more aware of the weave and what's opening up and how you can tend to that what's being what's needed yeah listening to your story Sophie makes me really hear how what's happening in liminal times is that our wounding our wounded parts are much more on the surface which means we get triggered more easily we get triggered more easily. We get hurt more easily. We tend to feel things more deeply. And even just knowing that is really, really helpful because the self-awareness means that you are holding yourself in the experience rather than acting out of the experience. So you can be feeling and having all that going on and you can create more presence with yourself. And that is what starts to help this process of integration to happen,

is presencing yourself with that reactivity with that pain with that part of yourself that you know never got heard and connecting with that part of yourself and hearing that part of yourself so you can hear there's really so much potential for integration that can happen when we have cyclical awareness and then of course when we're practicing cyclical self-care because that's really important in terms of meeting our needs so we can create inner safety so that we can reduce stress regulate our nervous system and so on and so forth yeah that's vital and you use the word liminal times there and we won't be able to get into this fully in this conversation maybe we need to have a part two but we always feel like we need to have a part two and three and four of

all of our topics in this series they're so big but there are liminal times longer liminal times throughout the menstruality life arc where there is more mental and emotional instability could you name those times um because especially people who are in them right now it might help to make sense of why there's a lot of turbulence going on yeah it's very helpful to take this map of understanding of the menstrual cycle and see how it plays out over the arc of menstruating life. So very briefly, just to give this context, coming into your menstruating life, so that's adolescence and your first bleed, that is of course a huge transitional time as is coming towards and coming into menopause and making that transition from your menstruating years

into your post-menopause life so those are two key places where the weave thins really in a big way also because it's not happening over a day or two it's happening over a number of years so there's a much deeper negotiation going on and you know my daughter's in this place right age 14, and I see in her and I see in all her friends, the amplification of feeling, the heightened sensitivity, the unknownness, the instability. Really, they're neither one thing nor the other and in terms of like psychological health um not feeling a sense of one's identity is hugely destabilizing and that's where i want to come to community again where we need others holding that stability for us so that we can go through all that flux and change and you know with with menarche it's the parents role and i think with menopause it's the the role of i think the elders in our world well the menstruality aware elders in our world.

And then the other transitional time that I want to name in this arc is, of course, the transition or initiation into motherhood, which again also happens over a number of years, but is stepping out of the holding of your menstruating years. And your body goes through such a huge flux and change. Your entire life gets overhauled. It's immense in terms of transition and identity shift and change. And all of that is then delivering you into a whole new season of your life where you are a mother and then living in that new consciousness new life new you

you can hear with all these places these are the times when we are most vulnerable to mental and emotional health challenges we see it with adolescence there's so much suffering that goes on because they aren't being held in the right of passages and acknowledged motherhood you know postnatal depression is rife rife rife rife and i think if we understood cyclicity and the you know all the teachings we give on menstruality that whole experience would have a context and a holding that is very very absent now and then the same is true with menopause and it's such a fallout of distress and suffering and mental health things going on for all the same reasons so those hot spots which mostly in our culture now are times of great distress and suffering i feel like i want to end what i've said uh with the with the

new story which is that actually these hot spots these powerfully transitional times are power hotspots actually and when menstruality is restored and when menstrual cycle awareness is the way of life is commonplace and we are all you know holding this understanding these transitional times will become times of big power, of awakening, of evolution, because that's what they actually are. Yeah, they're initiatory. Each is an initiatory. And they're awakening us to a new level of consciousness. And when you are inducted into

cyclical consciousness when you are practicing cycle awareness you discover how your body prepares you for that initiation so you get a mini round each month at menstruation where you die to your identity and then you re-find yourself again and head off into a new cycle and you get a little, you know, two to five days of initiation. And it's like you're being titrated into something you're being titrated so that you are you have a degree of readiness in your being a knowingness it's just like a knowingness that you are building so i mean i remember feeling that so strongly with menopause that i i felt a dignifying process at work, even as I met all this shadow stuff, et cetera, et cetera.

There was a template in me that was holding and guiding me. Yeah, because, I mean, there's no avoiding meeting the shadow. And that's not, like you said back at the beginning of the conversation, mental and emotional health isn't about feeling great all the time yes like I I remember having a health assessment from the health visitor when I was when I was a few weeks old and she said well look you've got all the markers of postnatal depression but you seem fine so we'll leave it for now really that's what you said to me but I think I had a context for it because of cycle awareness so so although I was suffering and it was hard there was an okayness and like

you said Alexandra in your menopause yes you had to negotiate the shadow but you had the holding and the context and that's what that's what we're restoring here and interestingly I mean I did have an understanding in my head or something but it wasn't actually about my head there was a sort of yeah it was in my beingness it's so interesting actually because in many ways the head was the problem you know the head sets the wheels spinning you know but there was this i was building this knowingness within me you know yeah yeah yeah yeah i often think that understanding menstruality helps duplicate the mind but practicing menstrual cycle awareness is what creates the embodied trust and the capacity to care for ourselves through these places.

So, yeah, it's not enough to know, really. It's the practice that brings it home and puts us inside the healing power of transitions. Yes, always comes back to the practice. And I'm going to work my muscles that I don't really have much contact with right now, because I'm on day four, and I could literally just carry on talking for all day about this, but it's time for us to wrap up. Do you two have any final pieces to share maybe to someone who is in a period of real emotional and mental turmoil for how cyclonus can support them i think i want to in a way do a little summary which is to say that i think underlying mental and emotional health challenges is stress

which can lead of course to burnout exhaustion, which I think is really important to name as an underlying factor, and trauma and menstrual cycle awareness, the practice of cycle awareness really helps with both of those things in a very um meticulous and gentle accessible way so anybody who's in a place of great distress now um to to really turn towards your cycle and practice your daily cycle check-in because I know it can feel small in the face of huge distress but it's the mustard seed that is going to become something great in time and yes of course get professional support therapy all the the having support and help is really really important but empowering yourself with this create forging this connection to yourself through cycle awareness and growing this inner kindness

and permission is it feels like the long game that's really worth playing yeah and to add to that um community community joining a cycle aware community and we have a free community here at red school that you can join so that you are held with others and you hear others stories and experiences of the cycle and you discover that you are not alone there's something about belonging that can really start to, it's like a balm. It can be a balm. It can be, it's a really important medicine. Yes, connection, having connection, not going it alone.

It's everything. Beautifully said. Thank you so much, you two. See you next time. Bye-bye. Hey, thanks for being with us today. If you know someone who would benefit from this conversation, please forward it to them. Please send it to them, please share it with them. And it's always so helpful if you can go and leave us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It helps the podcast to reach more people. And we're really, really grateful for every review that we get. And that's it for this week now. I'll be with you again next week.

And until then, keep living life according to your own brilliant rhythm.