The Menstruality Podcast - 199. How to Use Energy Work for Menstrual, Menopause and Womb Health (Prune Harris)

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

Our guest today, energy expert Prune Harris sees the womb as the deepest house of wisdom that we have, and today we explore how to work energetically to cultivate womb health, as well as menstrual and menopause health. Since birth, Prune has been able to see energy - the energy of humans, animals, trees and the Earth, and she sees this energy as vibrations, colours, and connective patterns. She has trained with healers, elders, and wisdom holders throughout the world and for the past fifty years, she’s been tracking, understanding, and now translating this world of energy for us all to experience, as a consciousness educator, soul activist and author of her book, Your Radiant Soul - Understand Your Energy to Transform Your World.Today we explore how to work with energy for menstrual, menopause and womb health, why pain tends to stem from congested energy, and practical energy work tools to help you to increase flow in your energy system to ease menstrual or menopause challenges you’re facing, starting today. We explore:The spiralling energy of the womb, how to have a “wombgasm”, and how it can open us up to a tender, vulnerable kind of power.How to work energetically to help with the symptoms that can come with hormonal fluctuations, such as hormonal headaches.How Prune worked with her menopause hot flushes by guiding the heat to move horizontally through her energy system. ---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.hardyPrune Harris: @pruneharris - https://www.instagram.com/pruneharris

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. Today we're welcoming back energy expert Prune Harris, who sees the womb as the deepest house of wisdom that we have. And today we're exploring how to

work energetically to cultivate womb health, as well as menstrual and menopause health. So since she was born Prune has been able to see energy, the energy of humans and animals and trees and the earth and she sees this energy as vibrations and colours and connective patterns. Since then she's trained with healers, elders and wisdom holders throughout the world and for the past 50 years she's been translating this world of energy as a consciousness educator, a soul activist and the author of the book Your Radiant Soul, Understand Your Energy to Transform Your World and we cover so much in our conversation today including why pain tends to stem from congested energy and lots of practical energy work tools to help you increase flow in your energy system to ease any menstrual or menopause challenges

you might be facing starting today. So let's get going with the wonderful Prune Harris. you you you well prune harris thank you so much for being with us it's wonderful wonderful to be sitting with you Sophie I'm delighted to be here too we always start with a check-in around cycles and you had this gorgeous conversation with Alexandra for our wise power series where you went into a lot of depth around what menopause has awakened in you and you shared a bit about how you loved your bleed but you're now three years post bleed. And I'm just curious about the cycles that you're with now today and how they're influencing you and impacting you. Yeah. Well, it's a very, very pertinent question because yesterday morning I woke up and since moving through the menopause, I really enjoy a, well, I could say enjoy, I'm going to actually say need, I need a slower morning. Whereas before

I could wake up and kind of be pinging at six o'clock in the morning and ready for the day. Now I don't do that. And I woke up yesterday morning and in that sort of slowness, in that depth, in that, oh, let's see what the day brings, kind of I tend to do some very supportive energy medicine practices when I first wake up while I'm just connecting in with myself. And as I was doing that, I thought, oh, things are moving a bit slow today. It wasn't brain fog. It didn't feel wrong in any way. It was just that awareness that, oh, there's a thickness, there's a slowness. of deep hormonal calling into the depth. So that's where I am still today. And it's interesting because this week is a very, very busy one for me. So then it's that question of kind of,

all right, how do I hold that really tenderly? How do I go into the meetings that I have and the course planning and everything else that I've got planned for this week? How do I meet it in that way where actually I can show up a hundred percent of however I am in that moment. And as a recovering perfectionist, that's something that I really had to work with definitely in the latter part of my life, but more especially as I've come in to this menopause stage of bringing that tenderness and willingness to say,

well, you're not getting full fire me today. You're getting a slower, deeper, and to really enjoy that process as well. And I find it even in my food choices, it's different when I can meet that place. Yeah, everything about my day shifts slightly when I'm able to recognize, oh, we're in a deep place now. Beautifully said. What food choices do you lean towards on days like this?

Well, there are two different two differences one is light and one is deeply nourishing so when I was um in our chat before we started recording we mentioned our children and when I was pregnant with my son who's now nearly 25 um it was a standing joke between my husband and I, because he'd say, okay, what, you know, what, what do you want for dinner? And I'd say, baked beans, mashed potato and gravy. Maybe I'd be radical and have a little bit of cheese as well. You know, it was my absolutely deep comfort food. And needless to say, that's not the only thing I ate during pregnancy, but when we want that kind of really deep nourishing for my body system. So stews, soups, I've been having a lot of soups recently. And of course we're in this turn, aren't we? From winter into spring, interesting transitions. So some days I just want much lighter foods. I'm really reaching for the foods that nurture my liver energy, those

bitters. We're lucky enough to grow our vegetables and we've got a lot of rocket around at the moment and I'm just like chowing down on that because I really want to have that bitterness in my system. So moving between kind of light and especially liver supporting um to the rich deep vegetable stews or soups because i'm totally with you yeah you maybe want to go and get those carrots in my with some warming spices as well that's right yesterday we had carrot and ginger and it was a soup it was so good that's exactly what i like. And although I could speak to you about food literally all day, you know, one of the things we focus on in this podcast, well, and with everything that happens at Red School, is how the menstrual cycle and menopause support us to do what we're here to do, to be who we're here to be and I know you mentioned in your conversation with Alexandra that you've seen energy patterns since you were born and I imagine it's a long story but I wondered if you could give us you know a short history of Prune Harris like how how did you discover that you could see things that

other people can't and where did it go from there to bring you to the place that you're in today short history yes um I was I was I mean one of the things that's really really difficult isn't it is to understand that maybe we see the world slightly different from the person to our left to our right in front of us and of course we all do we all have our own lens through which we see the world um as someone who didn't know that that wasn't normal, it took me a long while, really into my late 30s, before I really understood the fullness of that. And I don't suppose that I still do now, because again, we can't know how other people see the world or perceive it. I think let's use the word perceive. For me, Claire Cognizant is definitely one of my primary perception senses, which means that, you know, I've always been able

to perceive the subtle realms and have that understanding that those subtle realms, whether we're talking about people who have transitioned and their energy is in that place of the land of the dead, whether it's the nature spirits that we share this world with, whether it's the great luminous beings that help guide us, whether it's all of the different forms of this amazing ecology that we live within. So I think that's the first thing that's important. That place of clear cognizance and clear sentience, feeling. So, so, so many of us are empaths and feelers, aren't we? We feel other people's emotions or that sense when you walk into a room and you think, oh oh like something pretty heavy happened in here

maybe there was a big argument or tension and we think oh we're going to open the window we just need to kind of clear that out for the moment so we all perceive energy in our own way um and for me that sense of always being able to see the energy fields. So that as a human being, obviously, we're a energy field, a tree is an energy field, everything, this table, this computer, they all have their own energy fields. So I've always been able to see that in in shapes and patterns and meeting points. When I was young, I very much saw all of that in the same way that we would see an x-ray in grayscale. That's my total natural. And even now, if I'm tracking something really, really complex, I shift lenses, as it were, and I drop the color spectrum so I can look at the incredible subtlety of that gray scale.

So as a young person growing, communing, chatting with the beings that we share this world with, human and other, grew up on a little farm in a very, very loving, supportive family. I was the last of several children. And so, you know, I think they looked at me and thought, she's pretty responsible, we'll just let her do whatever she wants to do. I had all of this freedom, all of this support, an incredible amount of love and and that deep witnessing that everything is connected you can't perceive energy without understanding that we can never be alone never ever be alone we're always in exchange and that exchange means that we are always in formation if we think about color as simply a vibration, vibration is energy, energy is information. Then we understand that we are exchanging information all the time, which means we are being created all the time and we're creating everything that we're informing. So from that place, sounds amazing, is amazing,

and was really difficult to process as I was young. And there had been some, by the time I was 16, there had been many significant losses in my life that really hit my system hard. And my body system began to spiral out of balance, this incredible sensitivity, the way in which there was a lot to metabolize and process energetically, just as there is for all of us. With these kind of big emotional hits that my body system took, I struggled to find my way in balance, in health. And in my later teenage years, I was ill for two years with chronic fatigue while I didn't get out of bed for two years. So that for me was really that kind of, now I'm trained in shamanism, I would definitely call it that initiation period

where we're really taken into the very, very depth of ourselves to fall apart, to crack it all open, to dismember. So that actually from that very raw, very desperate, very unknown place, I was able to, in a way, reform slightly differently. And at that point that I could really say that that was the point that began to lead more and more to me, understanding how working with our body's energies can support our physical health, our emotional health, and perhaps even more importantly, as I've got older, the capacity for us to be part of that big connective energy in the world for us to really shine our soul light forward. And in doing so help everybody else shine their

soul light. So gradually, I went on to train with some amazing healers in the world, had a private practice, and then moved more and more into teaching and writing. And that's, that brings us up to date. Fast forward 51 years and here we are. Well done for encapsulating that. And thank you for all you shared. And it seems like you've taken this natural gift and then studied with these different ancient systems, like the chakra system of ancient India and the Dantians and the Meridians and ancient china and norse and celtic shamanism it seems that you've woven together a tapestry of attack i'm calling it a tapestry of teachings i don't know how you would call it but that that are now guiding thousands of people all over the world well that's a beautiful phrase and i love that yes i have been taught by a tapestry of wisdoms. And

it's really, really beautiful, beautiful image there, Sophie. Yes, I think it's fascinating, isn't it? One of the things that connecting into our cycles, connecting into our depth, bringing it out into the daily, back into the depth, finding this flow, we are encouraged more and more to both ask the question, dance with the question, explore, live the question of who are we? Who are we? And how do we show up? Why are we here? How do we show up in our day, every day, for whatever reason, our soul sings forward in the world. They would be my words around that. So I really struggled at the point at which I would sort of put this hat on with energy medicine and do energy medicine work.

And then I'd take that hat off and put another one on that was like, okay, well, now I'm doing shamanic work. And then I'd take that one off and like, okay, now I'm teaching. And I'd put that one on. And oh my goodness. I mean, it was like a mild, it was a mild form of schizophrenia that I was experiencing with these dislocated parts of myself that I was trying to hold sort of rigidly within the disciplines. And then realizing, hang on, what's the common denominator in all of this? Me. Ah, well, how am I going to house these?

How am I going to house them? And essentially, that's what we do every one of us every day, isn't it? Whether the hat is the mom, the businesswoman, the partner, the sister, the whatever. We're housing all of these different components, work life, home life. And when we try and keep them separate, I mean, I did that for years. I tried to get more and more boundaried about what I do in this time or how I am with these people. And gradually, as I explored those deeper questions more and more inside me of who am I, then able to say, oh, I've kind of got to find the meat point. I've kind of got to be willing to say, this is something new emerging within myself in this instance. And maybe I'm going to get it wrong. And maybe it's not going to be perfect. But in my realness, in my rawness, in my joy, in my desire to bring forward whatever needs to come forward from me this is kind of what I can offer

and that really lights me up really lights me up and it's a joy to bring that synthesis of the ancient and the modern I mean my goodness we we're working and living in times where we deep questions are being asked of us aren't they and it feels like if I can help support people in answering their own deep questions in their own ways beautiful I really appreciate your focus on helping people to find their own answers in their own ways. One challenge I have around energy work is that in my 20s, I was actually really harmed by a yoga school. I mean, a lot of us have these experiences of sort of the spiritual honeymoon phase of our 20s. It led to my dark night, you know, my version of what you were describing. But the energy practices that, it's very toxic patriarchal leadership I've spoken about it before

on the podcast and the energy practices that I were taught were really forceful and it pushed my body to the limits and eventually broke me and I was ill for a long time it took me a long time to recover and it left me with you know on on like the good side a healthy skepticism and discernment and on the bad side just feeling wary of anyone telling me anything about how my body worked but what I notice in you is there's this permission openness um invitational energy with everything that you bring um a creativity and a focus on us being close to ourselves and our own experiences yeah thank you sophie and first i'm sorry that you had that experience and it's sad how many times i hear of that as well um it is part of that legacy of the rigidity of a discipline, of the rigidity of giving up your autonomy

for someone else's dogma or purpose or beliefs. I should add, actually, that I meant to say, Prune, that it was actually a Western white teacher who had appropriated those teachings and taken them out of out of the context of the beautiful practices you know ancient practices of india i meant to say that i should name that they've been they've been taken out of context and really misused yeah yeah and what's kind of coming into my awareness here is that that deep shadow in the healing field yeah the deep deep shadow um and the way that it never was acceptable but with every passing day it's less and less acceptable because we're really moving into a different level of collective consciousness aren't we? And thank you for your words. It feels for me that the single

biggest importance in anything I can bring forward from my understandings and my wisdoms from the many, many lineages and amazing teachers that I've been privileged to be with and learn from is that we, each of us, know energy, we are energy, we can explore it, we can play with it, we can be curious. Every thought is energy, every feeling is energy. If I move my finger right now to make these words, I'm using energy patterns in my body to create them. So every one of us is a profoundly wise, energetic being. And when we're raised in mainstream cultures with that more reductionist worldview of health, we can be incredibly disempowered in recognizing our huge capacity to live that really magnificent life. And so by, for me, I mean, the title of my book was Your Radiant Soul. And the subtitle was Understand Your Energy to Transform Your Life, transform your world, sorry. And I feel that that is exactly, that

states my belief. When we can understand a little, even concepts like grounding, which of your energy systems help you be grounded? That may be different, Sophie, than the ones that help me be grounded. Where are the places that my energy system goes in its habitual or default mode? If I know that, I can tend to that. As simply as I would brush my hair to tend to my hair in the morning or clean my teeth, I can think, ah, okay, this is happening hormonally right now. Oh, I'm just going to support by placing my hands on my body in this simple way or doing this stretch or maybe bringing in a movement to connect some meridians or chakras. I can just give my body the balance

it needs. And so those simple tweaks, simple adjustments that we can make to our own energy, different for you, different for me, different from everyone in the room, then, ah, suddenly we come back to ourselves, we return home, we have that potential. And that is, yeah, absolutely my fundamental belief. Because if I bring anything, if anyone brings anything prescriptive forward, we're immediately disappearing the individual. Yeah. And that for me holds no interest. I mean, it would pull the rug from under the entire foundation

of what I'm trying to help bring forward in the world because we need that deep discernment nowadays, don't we? I feel safe in my body hearing you speak. It's beautiful. And it's beautiful and it's also making me think of leadership it's another theme that we focus on a lot leading in our own way whatever roles we're playing in our life how we can more full more fully embody ourselves and embody these roles and these tweaks that you're talking about are really important you know in terms of what gives us the capacity to be able to bring forward what we're here to do.

So I'm excited to learn more with you and I will absorb some of your amazing YouTube channel,al challenges different menopause challenges today especially for those listening who are dealing with tough things with their cycle about maybe some tweaks they could make but just before we get there can we speak about the energy of the womb you wrote something so beautiful there's a link to it in the show notes it's a a blog about the energy of the womb and you were saying that it holds an energy unlike anything else in the body there's connections between the heart the kidneys the breasts filaments of golden light like can you just speak a little bit about how you yeah how you see the energy of the womb I could speak a lot about that speak a little about a little about it. It's, it's, all right, let me just really find the words.

If we think about our life force, and I think that's a easy and okay word to use. If we think about our, that core vitality that enervates every cell of ours, it's connected into every part of our individual system and the cosmos itself. And so they meet through very specific energy systems in our body, especially the energetic core, this amazing, well, when I'm teaching,

I often call it a hose pipe at the center of your body system. I know it's not glamorous, but my goodness, it works. Sometimes you have to, depending on the group, change it to some beautiful crystalline hose pipe. But let's think of that hose pipe. That is absolutely alive with billions, trillions of filaments of light, light, energy, information, wisdom. light energy information wisdom so we have the amazing sun star above our heads which connects

out into the cosmos we have the earth star beneath our feet so this is the bottom and top of the energetic core or at least how it's housed in our human form and these filaments of information of connectivity moving all the time from above to below, from below to above. So that's the foundation that I want us to think of the womb in, because the womb is fed with that energy, that energy of creation. And so it's something quite unlike any other physicality in the body system. The only place that even comes vaguely close to it, and it doesn't for reasons I'll explain, but the closest is your cerebral spinal fluid. And that cerebral spinal fluid, which of course goes into every single one of our nerves, so maps the entire body system, has this same enervating life force that is something bigger than just human.

It's cosmic. But of course, in the cerebral spinal fluid, it's not a great big, thick housed bloody organ, like the womb is. So the womb has this incredible, incredible wisdom to it. If I think of the womb, if I see the way it informs a body system, it's the deepest house of wisdom that we have. And it informs the heart continually. There's a direct channel between your beautiful womb. And I want to say, if someone has had a womb removed, if they've had a hysterectomy for any reason, the energy of it is exactly the same. Okay. There's still that incredible energy of your womb, where your womb used to be. There are still the channels that come up to the heart, that feed into the breast, that work with all of your amazing stomach system, that work with these

extraordinary channels. Many people listening will be familiar with these extraordinary channels. Many people listening will be familiar with meridians. Maybe they've been to acupuncturists. Meridians are one form of energy channel in your body. But you've also called what the Chinese called the extraordinary channel. Donna Eden, amazing healer and teacher of mine called them the radiant circuits. So these deep, deep, deep energy channels are formed in the very first separation of cells. As you, as that egg becomes fertilized and it begins to split and multiply, that's where these extraordinary channels are created. So they're holding the blueprint,

not just of your life, your soul, but the cosmic life, the world soul. And so all of this incredible wisdom is dancing through those channels at any point. And maybe as a kind of practical example here, let's think of a time when you have seen a sunrise, or you've seen a painting, or something that has utterly transformed you in that moment. You felt that incredible bigness of connection, that huge wow factor. That's the energy that those extraordinary channels carry. But now think perhaps of a time where you saw a sunrise and you simply thought, oh yeah, sun's rising. And you didn't experience anything like that, even if it was as beautiful as the one that moved you. So that's when those extraordinary channels aren't active aren't

carrying that incredible soul wisdom womb wisdom through your body system so this incredible womb energy which looks everything if we think of the vibration of it it's everything from sometimes a womb can look like it's a um the image that's coming to mind is like an inverted rainbow think of the rainbow colors but now make that rainbow black filled with colors this incredible deep deep deep juiciness of that creative principle that life force that shot through with a rainbow of every color that is and yet has this deep beautiful throbbing thickness um or chocolate if you if you love deep dark rich chocolate think of fluid chocolate um and then all the time this golden energy so it's i've worked um with hundreds thousands of women with womb health and um in the wisdom womb classes and retreats that i i used to i haven't done them for a couple of years because things got busy in a different way but my goodness

reconnecting ourselves to the deep wisdom the huge power the empowerment that comes forward in our life when we're able to connect into that womb energy is it's a it's an incredibly deep friendship. And I think that's a lot of what your work and the Red School work is doing. It's helping women, maybe not in exactly the words I'm using here, but helping women rediscover and reconnect into that incredible wisdom womb energy. Yeah.

I'm going to pause the conversation with prune just for a moment i'm curious to hear if you've heard about red school's cycle power course it's alexandra and sharni's most comprehensive menstrual cycle awareness course where they teach about the powers of the four inner seasons of the menstrual cycle how to navigate your crossover days and the cyclical self-care practices that can transform your experience of menstrual pain or emotionally turbulent premenstrual phases or whatever menstrual challenges you're facing, as well as help you to live the wisdom of your cycle in your daily life. You can find out all about the course at redschool.net forward slash cycle power. Here's a story from one of the women in our community who's really benefited from cycle power. She's also a graduate of our menstruality leadership program. And I did a whole episode

with her actually, you can hear more about it in episode 164 of the menstruality podcast. But here is Grace with her story. So yeah my journey into menstrual cycle awareness started at home when I was growing up and I would witness my mum going through turbulent emotions every few weeks. I would notice irritability kind of turning into anger rising to what I would class as a peak rage and then a release followed by tears and then often an apology either a few hours or like a day later just saying I'm sorry I'm just premenstrual and obviously this was quite scary and intimidating being on the receiving end of hormonal rage and I wondered if this was going to happen to me and in short yes it did and so it was a bit of an emotional roller coaster just cycling through those feelings of anger and rage

and suicidal ideation and then the guilt that would kind of come from all of that and lashing out at people and that was through most of my 20s and 30s. So around the age of 28 I'd reached a tipping point and it was a partner at the time who offered to pay for me to get a private consultation with a hormone specialist. And I received a diagnosis of PCOS. And so the doctor at the time just said, you know, start by cutting down on alcohol and get plenty of sleep. But that physical diagnosis, it just wasn't enough. So, yeah, then when I found the work of Red School the magical work of Red School and its community that was when I really started to feel understood and I'm super grateful for that thank you

well you are speaking my language because I've never heard a better description of the magic I experience in my room other than like deep, dark, molten chocolate, rainbow, golden light. I'm like, yes, that's what I feel. And yeah, it is, it is what we're about, but your language is so poetic. And this might be obvious to those listening, but I just wanted just to clarify it. Is the reason why this womb is such a, why the womb is such a home of wisdom is because that's where life begins? Yes, absolutely. It's where, if we call it the creative principle or that innovating, I guess one thing that's important for me to say is that in my understanding of the energy of the universe, it is a deeply loving and sentient energy. So when I'm talking about life force, I'm kind of putting it inside that context. So let's take that incredible, incredible magic of when the egg and the sperm, when that egg says, you, I'll choose you out of all of those

millions of sperm, and you're the one that I'm going to choose. And the egg momentarily opens, accepts that sperm, and then closes around it. That moment of accepting life, of co-creating life. I mean, that is, I got goosebumps thinking about that. That is a miracle right there. And no matter what the circumstances of our conception, no matter, and of course, on a human level, there can be horrific circumstances of conception, and there can be magical and beautiful and loving ones. And interesting scientific ones as well yeah very yeah yeah so no matter what at that moment the light of your soul came into being

so a contract is created at that point now on the on your body system if you were to take your hands to your belly button, if you leave one hand on your belly button and then take that the Chinese call the Mingmen point. And that Mingmen point, if we look at the, it's very difficult to put it into an English understanding, but that point would translate approximately as the gateway of destiny. And if we break destiny down in the Chinese understanding, it would be the contract between heaven, earth, and the human. So we've got this one point on that spine on the waist, which is the gateway of the contract between heaven, earth, and human. That point feeds directly into your womb energy. Yeah. And that means that your womb is continually holding the deepest and most powerful template for your destiny, for your soul expression, for your creativity of how you're here in this life

right now. And then all of these channels, all of these amazing ways that that womb energy gets moved through to inform every part of you. Can you come back and we could just have a whole womb conversation? That's right. When whole womb conversation that's right when you first asked that question could you just I thought oh I don't know if I can just but that would be a good conversation anyway you did really well you spoke in a different place on your website about womb gasms and I was so excited by this because like you said in your article so many of us women and people with wombs we don't really understand how many levels of orgasm we can experience and having had tastes of wombgasm myself it's like I can I my experience anyway is that that all of that life love potential that's

in my womb explodes through my body and it feels like one of the healthiest things I could ever do but also I can't make it happen it's sort of like life has to just I have to surrender like with all so many of the most important things in life like with my birth of my son it's like it was surrender or like resting when we menstruate you know we we have there's there's an element of yielding and surrender to allow it to happen yeah yeah absolutely there's the most profound and tender vulnerability in that level of power isn't there and i think when we're talking about wombgasms um there is we need to be aligned with that tenderness and power you know power is a word that we are all learning to reclaim isn't it um redefine it as being power over into that deepest of empowerment, both personally and collectively. And when we're able to spiral down, you know, the womb has a spiraling energy, it's always spiraling up and down. And even when we think

about the amazing contractions that our womb moves within, that's all in this spiraling vortex. So we ourselves in that process of lovemaking, of moving towards that orgasm, we have to have been able to spiral into ourselves, spiral into that depth of the womb in order to engage that incredible tender vulnerable and magnificent power beautifully said coming to menstrual symptoms i was asking alessandra what she'd like to ask you in this conversation and one of the things that she shared was she'd love to hear how you understand menstrual pain like intense menstrual pain like endometriosis pain and yeah approaches to support someone who's living with that I would love to if we think about pain and energy it's actually very simple. Now, this is where we can think of the three energetic vibrations of the physical, so the body,

the emotional, the mind, and then the sacred or the soul. We can think of them as separate vibrations because they are. And also, each experience we have holds all of those three vibrations. So as you so, so, so well know and teach and experience in Red School, as we work on the mind and the soul, as we work on connection, as we work on being able to connect deeper and deeper in ourselves, which isn't a physical process, is it? It's a mind and soul process. Then that informs the body system. It actually informs the cells because the cells are governed by your energy. Every part of you is this amazing, interconnected, cohesive, magnificent energy field. crippling cramps yeah those places where the muscles the ligaments are being so the word i want to say is tautened i don't think it's a real word but everything's getting taught everything's finding its um its deep place place of stagnation. So does that mean as we approach those times that we're able to support

the energy systems that support the body systems? Yes. What does that mean as a, can I give you one practice that will be a miracle for every single woman no because the question becomes where is it that we're our energy system's getting stuck where how why how do we go to the roots but there are ways there are practices that i can share that will have a very very good go at inviting overall much bigger connectivity and from that place then we get those fresh impetus in the body the energy can move I think one thing that's really important to say is that every energy system knows exactly how to be healthy every every person no matter what we're experiencing on any one of those three vibrations, your energy system is always looking for balance. So that means when we give it those bridges, yeah, energy work for me is a bridge. When we give your energy, the bridge it needs to connect, suddenly it's like a friend that

says, oh, thank you so much for that phone call. Or thank you so much for that one whatever it was. I've got it now. I'm able to do it. So often when we hold positions with the hands or we move in certain ways, and it could be a one-minute practice, a three-breath practice. It could be a one minute practice, a three breath practice. It could be a 20 minute practice. It's literally, we're providing the bridge for your energy to get in and create movement. And that usually means a huge dissolving of pain. So let me share what I would,

what I would most do if I was in pain, or if I was working with a woman who was currently in pain because of a menstrual cycle, no matter whether that was pain really high up in the abdomen, really low down anywhere, everywhere, the hips, the inner thighs, the legs, um, I often even impacts the chest, doesn't it? The upper back, I mean, whole body system. One of the things I would most say, have a go at, it's very simple. One of the, I said to you, I often do practices in the morning. This would be one that I'll do. You can take your two middle fingers or the middle finger on each hand and place it. If you find your pubic bone, what we want to do is tuck those middle fingers right on top of the pubic bone in the groin

crease. Now, if I think of my pubic bone as a straight line, if you're watching the video, this is easy. If you're only listening to it, then I'm going to try and use words to find it. And Sophie, you can help me too. If I think of the bone, what I'm wanting to do right in that groin crease is press my fingers down as if I'm pressing towards the back body, but I want to be also just behind the pubic bone. So I'm on a point that is the 30th point on the stomach meridian, but it's an incredibly powerful point for that connection between the Mingmen that I was explaining about and how it wraps down into the womb, wraps all through with this incredible vortex energy, and then gets carried, especially through one of your primary extraordinary channels. It's called the vital

vessel. And that point, that stomach 30 point, let's just do it together. Even let's just pop into that point. You might want to just lie yourself back a little bit or lean back in the chair so that you can find it. This one, I call this practice anchor the flow because you're really anchoring the flow, the flow of every part of your energy in your body system. And you can simply take a few breaths here, but even more, if you're actively working with pain, hold it for three minutes, five minutes, go tuck up in bed and clock into these points and hold it for 20 minutes. The more you do this practice, the doesn't have to necessarily be daily, but regularly between now and your next cycle, deep womb wisdom connection that we talked about for aligning that energetic core that we talked about it's a really fundamental and transformative practice thank you you also had a great article about hormonal headaches and in it you shared and I imagine the advice that you shared in it is good for other symptoms that are coming from imbalances or surges of hormones.

So I wondered if you could speak to that energy medicine for hormonal headaches. Yeah. Yeah, because that's such a. When we think about the womb, when we think about that whole creative reproductive life force, and my goodness, isn't it a force? I mean, the power of it in our systems. Anytime a woman is ovulating or in her bleed time, it's like you mentioned that beautiful concept of the tapestry of teachings, right? So let's go back to that concept of a tapestry, that your energy field is an incredibly woven, interwoven tapestry, right from your skin, which of course itself is an interwoven tapestry, out to your auric membrane, right at the edge of your aura, which for most people would be about an arm's length away. And that beautiful tapestry is the way that your energy field communicates in and out through all that you are. So when we're

thinking about the place of hormonal thickness, which would be my word, when someone is menstruating or ovulating, that tapestry is denser, bouncier. It's like, well, think of usually if someone has got a knitted sweater on and that it's a lovely knit, you know, there's no holes, it's all woven really well. And now someone has felted that woolen sweater it's thicker everything has to move through with more force with and and the force is there it's not more effort it's more force there's this kind of pulsing throbbing thickness and we know that. We've all experienced it hundreds, if not thousands of times. So in that thick, throbbing, pulsing form, where there have been energy patterns that have been created often out of learnt ways of being.

Yeah, we could also use the word trauma, but ways that we do what we do, which aren't in our best interest in our life. Yeah, they're not serving us. And yet we can't bring them into healing for whatever reason. They're stuck a bit too deeply. So now we've got this incredible pulsing thickness happening in our energy field. And it comes up against one of those areas of either congested and stuck energy or very depleted energy. As all of that's happening, often, what will occur is the flow of energy from the deeper parts of our body system, those lower, you mentioned the dantians, yeah, so this lower dantian, this great big creative energy where the womb also informs, and it moves up into our

middle dantian with this incredible heart energy, our connective energy is in its bigness. But what if that amazing pilot light of our lower dantian, this place of our lower body system can't activate up? What if it's got to the heart and it's got stuck there? What it means is that there will be incredible congestion in our head. And that is what a headache is when it's a hormonal headache. Many simple, beautiful ways that you can work with that. But it is important.

People think headaches are because of a problem with the head. And I have almost never seen that energetically. Headaches are almost always a problem with the root chakra into the womb, into the lower dantian area. And just knowing that is interesting because if one day we've got a headache and we think, oh, that funny woman I listened to said it was to do with my root chakra. Oh, well, in that case, I'm going to have a little stretch. I'm going to go for a walk. I'm going to do some funky dancing. I'm going to connect into those more physical realms

in my body system. Oh, the headache's gone. And often we don't want to touch the head, do we? But a beautiful way to help clear hormone headaches would be to just put, if we put all of our fingers on our forehead and you can sort of interlace your fingers a little bit or line them up side by side. So you've got most of the fingers on the forehead. So my left, the heel of my left palm is touching my left temple. The heel of my right palm is touching my right temple. Just leave your fingers flat on the forehead. Take a good breath here. And relax that breath out. And this time, we're going to press our fingers flat against the forehead

and just ease them right through until the fingers go through the temple. So you're smoothing, drawing your fingers across your forehead and through your temple. You can just keep doing that a few times and then come up. So now you're placing your fingers flat over the hairline interlace them and then draw back. So you're really moving all of that energy and you can just keep going back. So you're always crossing over the midline. This is a variation of what Donna Eden calls the crown pull. Ah, but you can just begin to open the energy there so that energy can move as it needs to up and down. Beautiful. Would this connect also to the more emotional side of menstrual symptoms?

Like I'm thinking in the premenstrual phase when there is extreme rage, self-criticism, which was really debilitating for me for a long time, particularly in that phase when I was healing from the breakdown. Yeah, is this connected to the sort of hormonal thickness and the pathways or other things at work there that you see? Yeah, I'd say it's definitely connected. Anything that's out of balance is going to be increased through that thickening. So for you, it was that rage or self-criticism. For somebody else, it may be despair. For somebody else, it may be an absence of emotion.

The overwhelm is such that essentially the back heart, the energy of the back of the heart, just I think of it as putting its arms around all of those overwhelming places of trying to process and it just tucks them down. But in doing so, it can mean that there's this incredible emptiness. See that especially as people move through menopause sometimes. So how do we, how do we activate balance? That becomes the really key question for any of those emotional extremes. And also recognizing, as you teach so well in the Red School, that those emotions are messengers.

They're messengers of something within us that's really looking for balance. I've been thinking about that a lot, especially with what's going on in the world and we're seeing unfold day by day. One of my teachers, Imelda Almquist, she's an amazing Norse shamanic teacher and practitioner, and she would always teach us that the forces of chaos are in service to the forces of order. I've really been sitting with that a lot, because there's a lot of chaos in our world right now. That place of being and becoming is helped by, in this case, the messenger of rage or the messenger of self-criticism. And then it's about having the energy, the desire, but a lot of it, the energy to actually turn your attention there, isn't it?

Energy always follows your thought intention. So when we can house that rage and think, wow, this is a power inside me that I don't usually access. Amazing. A little bit out of balance right now. Okay. They want to be, they want to be in my full destructive goddess mode right now. These are people I love, but wow, how do I tap into that power in other ways every day? And so we begin to bring into this bundle of the living every part of ourselves. Thank you. In your conversation with Alexandra, you said that you really loved the hot flushes that you had in menopause because you've been cold your whole life. And I wondered if you could share

a small piece around those of us who, women and people who are dealing with hot flushes and how to manage that in their energy system. Yeah. you know, one of the very, very biggest things I understood when I first started having hot flushes was that my body system was working with remembered emotions and experiences that were nothing to do with a hot flush. And that's really important. When I would, when I think about how I have experienced flushes before, it was because of shame, embarrassment, humiliation, panic. Those would be the big easy. So when I had these first few experiences of the hot flush, I watched my energy fields and I saw shame, humiliation, panic, embarrassment. And I thought, huh, well, what is going on here?

Because none of this is the reality of the situation. And I had to really consciously recognize that and then deprogram it in my body system. Just so I could say, hey, this is about hormones. And this is about me making that incredible threshold journey. What is going to be the other side of this menopause journey? Wow, I can't wait. And I can't wait to experience the process. So then when a hot flush came, it didn't have any of those old programs and it was just heat. Well, I love the sun. I love saunas. I could just meet it as this is just heat.

And that brought no reactivity in my body system. And I firmly, firmly believe that for most people, the negative experience of a hot flush is because their body system has gone into reactivity at that moment. It's not the hormonal process of the hot flush. And for those of you who are listening, who think, oh, maybe that has some truth for me. One simple way that we can work to help deprogram that is to, and I wouldn't do this while you had a hot flush. This would be more in those times when you were taking your attention to it. You might put one hand on your main stress repatterning points. So one hand right across the forehead, one hand on the very, very top of your head and just bring your attention, really think about, even talk about out loud if it's easier to, topics like shame, embarrassment. You might

be holding those points and say, right, let me think about all the times I've flushed because I've been embarrassed. Oh my goodness, I remember at school when X, Y, Z said said this or and you just bring your conscious mind while holding those main stress repatterning points. And it will begin to take the energetic charge out of the experience of flushing. Very simple in that respect. There are many other ways we could work with it. And maybe for whomever's listening, you already have ways that you deprogram stress in your body system. But that was really important for me to understand. And also, let's say, well, one, I'm very open about it. Oh, hot flush and I feel okay about it that's really important so it stops that social awkwardness um maybe this is too much information here Sophie

but my husband my husband and I were laughing because he said hey we've redefined the definition of a blow job because now a blow job means him blowing on me on my face. Anytime I have a hot flush, they're like, okay, this is middle age blow jobs. But energetically, one of the things I also do and have seen it be very effective, it takes a little bit of concentration. And, and so again, it's something to practice all of these energy patterns. The more we practice them, the more they get remembered into our body system. So when we need them in extreme circumstances, the bridge is there and we can bring them in. But one of the things I recognized is when people have hot flushes, the fire in the system activates from the womb because it's got that incredible power

and it moves all of your energy up. It ungrounds you and it, wow, it's a raging torrent at that point. So I started exploring what if I open my foundation much, much deeper, welcome the hot flush. Don't try and resist it. Welcome it. But at the same time, think of that space beneath my feet, that earth star that I mentioned before. Think of it instead of as being the size of a melon, two or three feet beneath my feet, half a meter, something like that. Instead of thinking of it as this incredible, powerful energy hub about the size of a melon, what if I expanded it? So think of

pizza dough being made, that you've got this kind of round and then it's being stretched. What if I expanded it and then invited it to return and then expanded it and invited it to return. And what happens is our grounding systems stay in place, even as the fire moves up. And so one, we feel safe. Two, we're being nourished by that continual flow of energy rather than it only being in one direction. And all of that just helped the hot flush mediate through my body system horizontally as well as vertically. So it felt like, oh yeah, this is really manageable. In fact, this is spacious. And I don't think many people would think of a hot flush as being spacious because it's so directional. It's so vertical, isn't it?

And instead, we've brought in the horizontal. We've expanded the energy sphere. We've said, yeah, we can house this. And we're really welcoming it. Whole different place of experiencing then, Sophie. Beautiful. As you're speaking, I'm thinking of a volcano and how wide the base of the volcano is the earth of that volcano wow thank you Prune this has been like such a wonderful

mixture of a very practical and gorgeously cosmic and soulful and I'm so grateful I'm going to put links to all the different pieces that we've mentioned is there anywhere you'd like to send people for to find out more about you and how to be connected with you in your work well thank you sophie i think you've done an amazing job of pulling out some really really juicy nuggets as well um mostly my website so pruneharris.com is where there's so much information there um about energy how you can um learn more about it and how you can really become empowered so that yeah so each of us each of us can show up not just in the way that this world needs right now but in the way that we need we have this incredible capacity

for joy and it's a deep privilege to be here and sharing that with you Sophie it does feel like a privilege thank you so much Prune hope you have a beautiful day take care thank you all right bye-bye thank you so much for being with us today if you love this episode please send it on to one of your friends who you think might benefit from it or enjoy it. It really helps to spread the word about this podcast and this work and we appreciate it so much every time you share. And 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.