The Menstruality Podcast - 79. How Inner Spring Evolves our Leadership Skills (Alexandra & Sjanie)

Episode Date: March 16, 2023

What are the gifts of the inner spring? How can inner spring help us step into leadership? What is needed to access the power of the inner spring? And how can we manages the challenges of this inner season?So many of you have asked for an episode about inner spring and how we can harness it's strengths and manage its challenges, and here it is - the first of two episodes dedicated to pre-ovulatory phase of the cycle. We explore:How to hold the charge of inner spring, manage the sense of overwhelm this inner season can bring, and stay in touch with ourselves.What inner spring can teach us about how to manage the stretch of leadership,  through the dark art of pacing and trust our own timingHow inner spring can help us to stay grounded in the face of urgency and bring us back to our medicine - our unique way of contributing to the world---Registration is now open for our Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can take your seat here: www.menstrualityleadership.com---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [e-mail]---Social media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school

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 Mentor Charity Podcast. Thank you so much for coming back and welcome if this is your first time listening. It's spring here in the Northern Hemisphere and we're continuing our inner seasonal theme in alignment with the outer seasons around us.

And so many of you have asked for an inner spring pre-ovulation episode, and this is the first of two of them that are coming out this spring. Before we start, I want to remind you, if you don't know, that this is the last week to apply for our menstruality leadership program. So in this episode we are going to explore how the inner spring supports us to step into leadership in our lives, in our work, in our relationships. So if you, like me, find it challenging to enter back into the world after your bleed, if you can tend to feel overwhelmed here as you enter into your inner spring stretched you might maybe you start to feel like you lose touch with yourself as you feel the rising energy of inner spring then this one is definitely an episode for you

and if you're feeling the call of the menstruality leadership program we really welcome you to join us you can apply at menstrualityleadership.com i'm loving watching the circle of brilliant people that is forming for this great adventure that we're about to begin we have a webinar at menstrualityleadership.com which walks you through all of the different ways that this program can support you to come home to yourself to your cyclical wisdom to your power so head on over to menstrualityleadership.com if you want to check that out. And let's get started with our first Inner Spring episode. I always find starting the podcast so hard. It's like jumping into a cold lake I just never know what to say at the beginning so I just fumbled then and you were laughing at me and you said something

really good Sharni say it again well actually I'm going to say something different now which is that it's okay to fumble at the beginning you don't always have to start with like a shebang Alexandra taught me that she's the queen of like fumbled macy beginnings she does so well so that's the one thing but also the way we feel about beginnings gives us such insight into our relationship with the inner spring but particularly our experience of crossing over from the inner winter to the inner spring and the very kind of early stages of inner spring which I believe is where you also struggle Sophie Jane these days and we'll get into this later on in the podcast this is so my hot spot in the cycle and clearly in life at the moment right at the beginning and I do want to point people back to our episode about beginnings if anyone else like me fumbles

at the beginning of things because that would had such good advice in it I need to listen back to that but we're in now I've jumped into the lake we're swimming around my body's adjusted to the cold and we can start with our cycle check-in and when I saw you this morning Sharni I thought you looked a bit like a lord of the sith from Star Wars because you've got your hood up and I couldn't tell it was because you'd started bleeding or you're still in the void but I hear that you're in the void yeah I mean my this is my my uh makeshift cave it's the best the best I can do as I go about my life is get hooded and you know ideally I'd have my dark glasses on but I forgot them I've just just thought of them right now. Yes, I'm day 27. And it's interesting, I actually have a lot of energy. But it's not like the kind of energy that I have at other places in my cycle.

Like I often feel a really big surge of energy in my inner spring it's not that kind of energy um it feels like i'm plugged into a different power source um so you know all month long i've been cycling away on my bicycle this is like a meal on my menstrual bicycle my menstru menstrual cycle. I mean, cycling away. And, you know, in the first half of the month, it was all pedal power. But now it feels like my bicycle has suddenly got this sort of electric mode that it's just shifted into where it's suddenly plugged into this other source.

And I don't need to be applying effort but I am really in the stream of something and it feels like such clean white energy it has such a still quality to it and and in that way it's quite delicate like i'm aware that if i don't stay really present my bicycle will could just suddenly kind of lift off the earth and um you know it could be a bit like it's seen in the movie E.T., the bicycles flying off into the sky across the full moonscape. That could be me if I don't really stay present. So there's a real discipline of attention required. But yeah, it's a sweet old place and it's really full of magic. It sounds beautiful. I want to see how many sci-fi movies

we can reference today because we've already done two and we've only been going for five minutes how are you doing alexandra well i i'm just really relishing what shani has just described i remember it so exquisitely that just the way you describe the energy it's of a different order it's so amazing so how am I well I'm I'm not sure quite what the day of the moon is but it is coming you know we're heading towards full moon in a few days. And I'm in good spirits, you know, I'm happy. And I'm, you know, this morning I was really dreaming into this podcast and getting really good insight into that power of pacing that's needed, the dark art of pacing with our inner spring.

So, you know, I'm just really digging ideas, things coming to me. So there's that kind of energy going on. But I'm also very, very sleepy. And honestly, I feel like, you know, the dormouse in the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. You know, I'm just going to head on the desk. You might hear some gentle snoring at some point. So just keep going. Just leave me sleeping, okay?

I think a well-timed nap in the middle of this podcast would be exemplary, Alexandra. Possibly the best service we could do for all our listeners is just to have a 10-minute nap together in the middle of this podcast in terms of tending to our uniqueness and pacing ourselves. Yes. So a lot of people have asked for us to speak about Inner Spring recently, I think in the wake of our Inner Winter episodes. And so this is the first of two episodes that we're going to do. And in this one, we're specifically going to focus on leadership because the doors are open for our menstruality leadership program this year and they'll be closing soon so we wanted to look at how Inner Spring can support us

as leaders as people who are taking a stand for something or bringing something new into the world and to how to work with Inner Spring as we're doing this and also it'll give us a good taste of how you teach about and work with in a spring on the mlp so i wondered if we could start by could you walk us into in a spring briefly you know what tends to happen in an archetypal cycle what's the kind of energy signature of this phase? So the archetypal process, Sophie, is so we're emerging out of the inner winter. And the inner winter is a time of stasis, of stillness of stability it's it's also um it's deeply inner and uh you know your menstrual cycle uh at menstruation takes you into this deep interiority into yourself this is at the archetypal level you know the high if we're if we're able to really follow our cycles and not be shadowboxing all our jobs in the world, but following it, we can go into a place of deep intimacy and kind of inner holiness.

And it's like this protective bubble. It's like this skein comes around you. It's like a wound. And moving from the inner winter into the inner spring, you're having to break that skein, you know, that skin that's been around you, metaphorically speaking, and you're going from a very tender innerness into a steady expansion back into what I like to call more normal time space reality. You've been sort of in cosmic timing. And now, in a way, it's a bit it's a bit of a sort of crash to the earth moment as you come out of winter and the bubbles popped and it's like oh no you've been protected from seeing the email list or the dirty washing piling up or all the responsibilities you've had you've had a little halcyon moment of protection from it all and suddenly it's all there so you're stepping out of this protected space but the thing is to get you into the holy space of menstruation you had to be de-armored and as you're coming out of the inner winter you are still de-armored you're not you haven't armored up yet you haven't

kind of buffered up to meet well these so you're a little bit, you know, you're a newly hatched chook, basically, and you haven't quite got all your feathers going yet. So there's this vulnerability as you come out. And there is this impulse of life in you, of a movement of expansion out. It's a very precious, it's a very vulnerable moment. It's a very potent moment. And it's just filled with potentiality, isn't it, Charlie? It's just expansion starts to happen.

And curiously, I can feel that with the moon, actually, that it doesn't happen until about day three of the moon, because, of course, yeah, three or four, I can suddenly start to feel something, ah, yeah, life is returning. And there's this kind of natural energy coming back in and a feeling of possibility going out into the world, optimism about things.

It's like you are, of course, newborn. Yeah, it's lovely to hear you describe that kind of organic birthing and that stepping into the kind of new and coming out into the world um and you know all those qualities that we see in nature with spring the you know the the new life the the beginning of the you know the return uh the hope and all of that so gorgeous and um and it's interesting because this you know one of the reasons people were asking us to talk about this inner season is because that all sounds so lovely and yet so many people find this season so difficult and in fact in our work I would say people are often surprised when after some time of practicing cycle awareness they sort of realize that actually the inner spring is their most tricky season um because you can think you're okay with the

inner spring but as you pay more and more attention you realize that you're not it's interesting so there is yeah there's a lot of um challenge to the season it's actually very underestimated because the qualities of the inner spring are very sort of positive we assume it's all easy but this is not the case at all there's a lot of very kind of tricky stuff going on here so Sophie why don't I share some of like the the kind of underpinning trickiness that's at work that might shed some light as to why people um you know I'll find this to be a difficult season yeah yeah let's definitely go there I mean that really speaks for me because I always thought my inner autumn was my hot spot and it really was it's what brought me into cycle awareness these huge fits of rage that I'd have and then over the

last decade I've really tended to my inner autumn and now it feels like home I feel relaxed in myself I mean I have fiery moments but I know how to negotiate them and it's like the spring was a little bit numb yeah and as I've tended to my autumn and freed up or come to know my power and understand it and how to wield it in that season it's like the spring is defrosting and all of this tangle of messy kind of undergrowth is being revealed and um yeah we can get into it the story of how it shows up for me but it's it's very tricky time for me most tricky for sure yeah yeah yeah walk us into it shani yeah thank you for sharing that and that image of the numbness and uh the kind of frostedness and how now something's starting to defrost. We'll come back to that in a moment.

So there are really three main things that make the season tricky. The one is, as Alexandra said, you know, you're moving from this place of stability in the inner winter. The inner winter is a time of let go and arrival. So it's this place of wonderful stability and holding. And you're moving into this place in the inner spring of instability. So you're going from stability to instability. And instability by its nature is very precarious when things are unstable they tend to provoke us more they require much more mindfulness and attention

and if we aren't giving them that they tend to um we tend to we tend to come undone or get unstuck. So that's the one thing. And the other thing is we're also moving from this sort of cocoon, this privacy of menstruation, to the exposure of spring and the safety of that cocoon in a winter starts to wane and with that exposure there is it gets more complex actually suddenly you're dealing with the worldly forces so there's this kind of complexity that comes into your system and then the other thing is during the inner spring so the inner winter is being quiet and still during the into spring you know in a, there's this gradual expansion and particularly this rise of energy, this rise of energy. So you're being filled with chi.

And that is a wonderful thing. It is an absolutely wonderful thing. It's actually a really challenging thing to negotiate that rise of energy, to be able to firstly allow it through your system. It's hard to allow that kind of surge, that positivity, that affirmation. And it's hard to contain it because if we just kind of splurge it out um we overshoot ourselves so there's this real negotiation that has to happen with allowing the rising energy without letting it um spin us off the planet i mean i've often felt that in my spring, like I'm just spinning. Yeah. My system recognizes it as anxiety. Yeah. I think there are very deep grooves in me of anxiety.

Yeah. And what I'm what I'm hearing in you now is I if I can learn to recognize, oh, this is simply rising energy. It's such a great point you're making Sophie. Yeah. Learning to hold that charge if there's vulnerability in our system in any way if there also if there's any history of trauma this rising energy can feel too much it's we've often had to shut down to manage ourselves in the world and as you say you're defrosting your spring now so uh your system is um acclimatizing itself to this new life yeah yeah what what's so interesting about this rising energy sophie is that it requires enormous amounts of containment in order for it to feel safe in our bodies um so what we're learning is how to in a way this isn't we have to practice holding the tension in the inner spring

there's a quality of restraint that's needed to allow the rise without it overwhelming us or you know without us feeling anxious so the the containment and the building of safety is really important and just enough of that that we're not thwarting our own growth right so it's enough safety and containment while still allowing ourselves to expand and grow so it's a very delicate very delicate negotiation we're in with ourselves and especially you know as in your case where um i know from what you've said that there's trauma being re-triggered with that rising energy yeah i have so many questions right now but one of them is so in terms of leadership this is really exciting news isn't it to have that there is this natural surge of rising energy because, boy, do we need energy to take a stand, to bring something new into the world, to gather people together or whatever our leadership looks like. seeing how this capacity to create riverbanks for this big energy that's coming through us is such a

leadership skill because if we don't have those riverbanks that chi can just go off in any old direction like in me into overwhelm and self-doubt and questioning and doubting my own power blah blah yeah and running out of energy you use it it all up. Yeah. Too fast. You burn out too quickly. So this is major leadership skill stuff, this, isn't it? When I look at other people that are really thriving in leadership, they do, they are contained. Yeah. And the other reason this is majorly exciting for our leadership, Sophie, is because for us to do what we do in the world we need to have a strong line to ourselves and this negotiation that we go through throughout in the spring is helping us to maintain that line to ourselves and when I say the line to ourselves. And when I say the line to ourselves, I'm actually really talking about

the line to our vulnerability. We need to be able to bring all of ourselves with us. So that often means slowing down enough, going as slow as our most vulnerable part. Yeah. Yeah. And if we can do that, we're actually staying with our uniqueness, with something of our essence can, you know, stay intact, which is really, really important because that's a singularity that's what you know your um all your quirks and so-called glitches and vulnerabilities and all of that stuff is actually critical for your power in the world it's not like an obstacle or a problem it's necessary for you to be somebody who leads with humanity with heart with wisdom so the inner spring is really helping us to stay connected to that that's very important we have too many leaders you know who are

too quick to armor up so I was just thinking about we're so sick of these people that stand on pedestal and pulpits and pretend that they're not human that just put on layer upon layer of armor and concept and idea and strategy and we can't even feel they can't feel their own humanity anymore and we can't feel them dehumanizes everything in our world yeah so they need the inner spring you know what i you know what i find so beautiful about the inner spring Sophie is I and I'll show you some of my story in a minute about this but it teaches us that we can't go from zero to hero I actually love that phrase zero to hero because I think it's so how our culture operates and I certainly this is what I've had to kind of navigate in myself you know

you can't go from never having done it before to being brilliant. It doesn't work like that. There is like a process of, you know, learning. And with that, a lot of mistakes and trial and error and experimentation and all of that stuff along the way in order to, you know, come to a place of mastery. And the inner spring really teaches us that.

So what we're learning is rather than stepping into our coping mechanisms when we come from the inner winter into the inner spring rather than just like oh we're out in the world let's put our armor our armor on we're getting these days to build stability with something more authentic and real and true that is very kind of human and fallible and vulnerable and all of those things it strikes me that what that looks like in practice is if you need to stand up in front of people and speak do it with a shaking voice and with a flush of blush like rising up your neck and onto your face do it don't let that stop you don't let the feeling stop you let it all

come out let the world see how much you care yes yes what I've been thinking about this morning in preparation for this convo is how my inner spring reminds me of what I felt like when I was between about the ages of 15 and 22 something like that where I was coming into the world and there were sort of two two parts of me that I'm in touch with there one is um the part that was conditioned to want everyone to like her to feel safe that had social anxiety lots of self-doubt questioning myself and the other part is all of the positive like I don't want to say positive or negative but all of the power I had I played football and I used to run around like a wild thing like full of wild energy confident free

I knew who I was I knew what I was about so there were these sort of two two sides and I really feel them in me in my leadership these days it's like if I can be with the energy that's coming up and in the spring I can tap into that maiden power the the confidence before it's hit all of the world's stuff you know just that that innate sense of of who I am uh and yeah it just feels really relevant to think about how things were in that in the maiden phase of life when we're looking at how to work with inner spring and leadership yes it's that first half of the cycle the inner spring um can echo the vulnerabilities of that time if there are vulnerabilities there for us we'll get echoes we'll get um memories we'll uh our vulnerabilities around our developmental journey will show up so in transitional times

um we are more permeable and we talk about the inner spring as a transitional time and the inner autumn as a transitional time and we think of i just want to name that ovulation we've spoken about menstruation as this sort of time of arrival you bleed stability and the summer is the time of arrival you ovulate something happens there's a stability and in transitional times you're moving between one thing to another so in that time of movement the ground is not so stable and so there are cracks and things will come through and in the inner spring as you've just described you'll get echoes of things from um that have not been the vulnerabilities of your uh innocent self your teenage self your young woman self your young

person self and what's really interesting about cycle awareness is as you bring consciousness more and more consciousness and presence to the process of your cycle each day and learn to what's the word I want to say occupy that day it all claim that you know claim who you are in each moment the more you bring presence and awareness we think of it almost as um subtly starting to repair that childhood disjuncture struggle whatever it is it's it's a lovely way of the developmental task that was kind of skipped over in our early years, in a sense, can be recovered through our cycle awareness practice. That's probably the best way I can put it. Am I making sense to you, Sophie, in what I'm saying? Well, I'm going to jump in here and say yes Alexandra you are more than

making sense you are as usual blowing my little mind and I know that I'm personally so grateful for house cycle awareness and especially the inner spring is supporting exactly this kind of healing and repair in me. Later on in the conversation, Sharni's going to speak about how Alexandra and Sharni guide this inner spring healing work during our Meditatorial Leadership Programme to give you a taste of the kind of magic that's possible when you do this deep work in a safe, generative container of community and support as i mentioned at the beginning of the podcast we'll be closing the doors for the mlp for another year in five days at midnight on tuesday the 21st of march and you can apply at menstrualityleadership.com I'm wondering in terms of leadership there so as we are choosing to make ourselves

more vulnerable and exposed and public in the world which which often leadership calls for, not always, but usually there's a stretch. There's a stretch. Yes. What does that look like? So how can we hold ourselves through that stretch, recognising these developmental vulnerabilities can come up? Well, that's where our wonderful dark art of pacing comes in. Gosh, pacing, I think of myself i think of this i'm pretty good at this dark art i'm gonna pat myself on the back with a short i've done it for lifetimes

holding my nerve waiting pacing the spirit of the work that I'm doing. But yes, pacing. It is this capacity to stay present to who you are in the moment and to care for that, to care for, to move at the pace of what you can manage, basically. Yes. Now I will come to the stretch bit in a moment, because of course, leadership often, a lot of the time, takes us out of what we're comfortable with, and it stretches us. But I want to just stay with just this initial bit, and then I'll address that. So really, the more you can practice daring to just move at the pace that you can manage without your nervous system being triggered

or overriding your energy and then just grabbing cups of coffee to stimulate your system to keep going, to crank yourself up, the more you can avoid that and actually dare to move to careful who you are in the moment and the way I'm just describing, the more you are strengthening something in yourself. I was thinking about it this morning. It's a huge act of trust in oneself, in the integrity of who we are, to dare to go, I'm not going to rush here, I'm actually going to move at a pace I can manage, even though the world says I should be faster, I've got to do this, I've got to do

that, I've got to do all these posts on whatever it is, you know, to go, I can't, I just can't do all that. I just, it's going to blow my fuses to dare to lean back. God, such a radical thing. Pacing is daring to lean back into the timing that you can manage. And this builds this, it requires trust, but it builds trust. It builds trust. You actually strengthen something in yourself. And you're really trusting the integrity of your own being, of who you are, and that this is enough.

I mean, this is subtle work that builds over time, Sophie. So in the moment, it may not feel very great, but it is building. No. It doesn't feel great. Trust me, Sophie. I do. I do trust you. With me on this one.

I've really got such clarity about it this morning, actually. I'm going to try and track what I was thinking this morning around it. So you're building, as you're doing it, you're building greater and greater trust in yourself. Then you're building as you're doing it, you're building greater and greater trust in yourself and you're building your capacity. And what you're doing is the thing about pacing. I had to trust my own timing, but I also had to trust this other freaking timing that drove me nuts at times, which was the timing. I can only call it the timing of the universe. You know, it feels like I was being paced as well around my leadership work.

You know, I thought, yeah, yeah, I should be doing more, you know, blah, blah, blah. But no, no, no. I'd always felt like I was restrained, you know, that I was having to go at a slower pace, that something, I was being slowed down you know, that I was having to go at a slower pace, that something, I was being slowed down, kept paced by something else. And so pacing is both pacing your own capacities, but also pacing the timing of your work, and you're being paced by the universe in that as well and all of that requires this huge radical trust and the more you start to do it you'll see evidence because i used to get evidence come back to me i it's interesting i never used the word procrastination with myself. I never saw myself as a procrastinator. And yet I would not do things. I would not. I would hold off. I would know it was a job I had to do. I know. And I'd be avoiding it and I'm ducking and weaving around it.

And then finally, one day I'd get back. Yeah. And then I just go and do it. And the timing was staggering. Without going into the detail. The feedback I got from the universe was kind of instant. And yes, it just affirmed to me. Oh, again and again, it affirmed to me. Oh, my God. Yes, I wasn't procrastinating in inverted commas.

I was being paced. I knew something. My psyche knew this was not the timing. It's bigger than your psyche though, isn't it? It's your psyche in communion with the intelligences that are, that knows. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So you've got all these different levels going on. Now, I want to come to this point of sometimes the thing that, you know, we're standing for in the world demands much more.

You know, we set off thinking, oh, yeah, yeah, I'll try this. I'll do this. I'll stand for this in the world. And we start to do it. And then suddenly, you know, it takes off. It gets bigger. There are certain demands that happen the moment you step up and take responsibility for something in the world. There are demands that stretch you. And they stretch you out of what you think you can do, you know, in terms of your physical energy and so on.

And, you know, we get challenged a lot like this. I mean, the demands of what we're doing are just huge. And what's interesting is if you've really practiced the art of pacing, and as I said, you build capacity, it's almost like you have some stretch in you to meet it. So what I'm actually saying is that when things feel like they are just too much, they are too much. Yes, you are being stretched, but actually you're ready for it. You've built up something within your being that allows you to be stretched because we are being evolved. I mean,

Shani and I feel ourselves being evolved daily almost sometimes in what we have to step up to. And we meet it and we discover we're okay. Oh, my God, we did it. And that worked. And we're okay. And then we come back down into a slower rhythm again and we recover ourselves.

I think it's if you're constantly in the go go go the stretch stretch stretch stretch when that doesn't break and there there is a limit to me i will even you know as you know we've talked about this on here we might be right up against things and i go sorry folks i'm stopping yeah there's so much discipline here isn't there discipline and service to love holding holding ourselves holding boundaries around ourselves Shani what does this look like for you with your leadership edges at the moment this pacing in a spring I um it's interesting it really stretches my I find, because as I was listening to you talk, Alexandra, I thought, what's so challenging with leadership is we're lot of importance in what we're doing. But there is a difference, which I have learned, between things being important and things being urgent.

And so often we are dealing with many competing priorities. There are so many important things I want to do in the world. There are so many things I care about that I want to stand for and speak for and give my creative energy to and my time to. There are so many. There are so many. And I have to keep remembering that I can hold things as important, but that doesn't mean I have to act on them now. So for me, there's been a big process of, you know, our culture is all about now, and I've really had to learn that we're dealing with a different time frame.

And what's important is for me to hold my values, to hold my vision, whether I can or can't act on them now. What's more important is that I am doing what's within my capacity so that what I am doing, I can do really bloody well. So I do my best not to spread myself thin. I'm very, very focused on what I give my time and energy to. And I don't do many, many things. I do one thing and really give myself to it. So that thing of focus has really helped me with pacing and the thing of turning urgency upside down. One of our favorite phrases, which we like to say to ourselves to pull ourselves back is, dare to believe that nothing is urgent. And that daring to believe that nothing is urgent just puts me back in a place of trusting life and trusting life's timing. Like Alexandra was saying, you know, trusting that I'm being paced as well.

So, yeah, there are lots of things that I'm sad that I can't do or that I don't get to give my attention to that I really care about. So there's a lot of letting go that has to happen for me with pacing yeah I'm hearing it I'm so inspired you said it stretches your heart Sharni what do you do with the urgency that arises in you when you've encountered the suffering in the world because this is my big edge it's like the planet is being devastated. And I spent five years as an activist at Tree Sisters urgently responding to this. And I'm not sure I know now that that urgency isn't the way.

So what do you do when you encounter the suffering and you feel that, oh my God, something needs to happen now? I don't want to give a glib answer here. So hold on. It it's complicated isn't it i'm back to what cycle awareness has taught me again and again which is to really stay true to who i am to what my gifts are, and to what my part is to play, and really deeply trusting that. Because the seduction for me is to kind of fall into the trap of thinking I must do something about the suffering in the world. And that actually pulls me out of myself and pulls me out of my river,

my calling, my creative flow into action, which I have to say for me could be a bit of a distraction, a disbursement of my energy. It's not where I'm most potent. And so I come back to my medicine, really, my way, which, as you know, is menstruality. And on the surface, it may not look like activism, or it may not look like action. It may not look like it's instant or immediate enough, but I really trust that if I hold true to this, that it is going to profoundly change the way we humans inhabit ourselves, the way we relate to each other and the way we relate to the natural world and this beautiful planet of ours so I just keep coming back to my trust in that Alexandra you mentioned enoughness and I'm thinking of that word sufficiency that Lynn Twist teaches about so much and it feels really connected here to this tending to our uniqueness

in inner spring and exactly what you're saying Sharni that when we allow inner spring to bring us closer to exactly who we are and stay true to that and contain that then we're aligned with this beautiful natural law you could even call it of sufficiency well the trees aren't like I need to be a different kind of tree I need to make a different kind of fruit they're not they're just doing their tree thing and oh that sufficiency that enoughness there's this quote actually from wild power that I wanted to bring in which feels like it kind of rounds everything up that you've been saying the challenge is to learn how to hold and pace that vulnerability in a culture that is so driven to midwife your tender

self back into the world graciously awareness of your cycle is everything this attention brings a containing safety and the presence of love so it's this the cycle awareness itself is our container and our teacher and our school for this for this holding i feel quite wordless almost listening to this it feels what i'm getting from this conversation and the importance of the inner spring is just what you've said, Sophie. Well, that quote, good piece of writing. I wonder who wrote that. This bringing ourselves, and Shani was saying, it's all the same thing, bringing ourselves into the precision of who we are

and then the potency that is unleashed through that. I am not effective if I am doing a hundred different things, but when I am in the joy stream of myself and really able to hold that line, there's such a potency that's unleashed. And it has less to do with physical chi then. And of course, as a post-menopause woman it's very graphic to me now what i've just said this alignment with who i am and what that's unleashing in me it's so much

more alive and powerful than it ever was in my menstruating years. My menstruating years have contributed, of course, brought me rather not contributed, brought me to this. Ah, the inner spring. It's everything in our leadership journey. It's setting the line. And if you can take the time and not get caught up in life's urgencies and just dare to allow yourself to feel the unfolding of the spring

within your being day by menstrual day and to have more and more experience of that, you are building something so enduring in yourself that is going to pay enormous dividends down the line so helpful to think in terms of the long game you know every month with cycle awareness is another layer that's building towards something it's part of the long game not just the long game of our lives but the long game of for the generations to come yeah so with the new way that you're envisaging the menstruality leadership program where you're

really focusing on these 12 dark arts one of them being pacing what's what's going to be happening around inner spring on the MLP can you walk us into that what can people expect oh yes you know I realize everyone has a different relationship with inner spring but regardless of what your relationship with your inner spring is, there is an invitation to all of us to kind of tap into more of our singularity and uniqueness. And that, you know how you described, Sophie, when you recall that time in your life and that sort of liberated spirit of you that hadn't quite become jaded by the world yet. Yeah, there's an invitation by the inner spring from the inner spring for all of us to kind of really tap into more of our essence and to find greater and greater

stability within that so that we can hold who we are in the world with increasing safety. On the MLP, we're going to really deep dive into the season and we've got some juicy processes that we take people on which will reveal the layer behind what you might be aware of in your cycle awareness experience. We love doing this where you sort of peel back the curtains and you see a deeper layer of your experience and get insight into what's actually at work and what's actually going on for you and then how you can care for that that's really important how you can care for the kind of vulnerable tender places in you the preciousness of you really how you can care for the precious of preciousness of you and feel your own value more and more

so the inner spring um if we can find this way of caring we get to feel more and more of our value actually our specialness yes we've got we've got some very practical suggestions we're giving people but ultimately it's about people finding their own kind of care package, isn't it, Alexandra? Everyone's kind of worth finding their own, the medicine that they're needing to be able to deepen into more of the power that's available in the spring and just said there, Shani, because whilst we're giving teachings, goodness, I mean, we have so much we can share, you know, all the time. It's actually the processes that we've developed that help people, as Shani said, get behind the scenes of their lived experience. And it's then they're tapping into their own knowing of what's required.

They're finding their own knowledge, their own wisdom, their own what's actually needed for them. That's the beauty of the way we approach this work. I always say the impulse for me of all our work, actually, and it's really amplified in the MLP, is this act of really restoring people back to their connection, to their cycle, to really leaning into it. And that's the focus all the time is so that they can receive

the power of the cycle what it can give yeah there's something so meaningful about the containment of the program itself because it enables us to clear the decks a little bit because we have to to show up for the sessions and to actually believe in practice that there is magic here and that there is power here so that when during those processes important news is revealed about who we are and how we can take care of ourselves and what our calling is and how to tend to it we can actually give that the time and space it needs to then become more of itself and we can develop a relationship with with it so that it can keep speaking to us because we can the the world is noisy and it will just talk over it otherwise you know the social media the telly the

family responsibilities the community whatever's going on will just rush in to fill the space so it's that carving open of space and time to go no I am I'm getting excited for it coming it's coming and just to wrap us up today I think it could be really great to close with some practical practical isn't quite the word but just something that that we can do from this episode in inner spring to support this tending to our uniqueness and this holding of ourselves and this containment what could that look like in our day-to-day all right i've got one this is it's really helped me is um to protect your own innocence during your inner spring and so that could mean many things for people but i'll give you some examples of what that might mean

it might mean that you are wrapping a little energetic sheath around yourself and not letting criticism in for a little while so that you can kind of stay in a little bubble of innocence for a while um it might mean that you have got to move a bit more slowly to kind of hold that protection for yourself or have more time alone or um just not put yourself in situations that are too exposing or too overwhelming too soon so yeah protect your innocence in a way as you would a young child like be a bit of a mama bear for yourself and and with that take really good care of yourself. I really like to remember gentleness in my inner spring, to really remember to be gentle with myself and tender and kind so that I give myself a lot of sort of space and permission

and really drop the pressure. It's also all part of protecting one's innocence just kind of dropping the pressure on oneself as much as possible a breathing really helps me with that yeah just normal everyday breathing which is important i hear but just doing you know if i feel the buzzy anxiety energy rising just doing a lot of nervous system regulating breathings long deep breathing helps me make a bit of space so that i can remember to tend to myself to move gently and take care of myself any wise words from the pope um you've said pretty much what i would say but i the thought that has come to me now is just

something eminently practical you know how we say um note in your diary when menstruation is due so every time you're booking something in your diary you go oh i'm bleeding then right do I really want to be I don't know having that big meeting partying maybe not and to actually sort of shade in somehow just note in your diary the early part of the cycle so that you're really thinking about what you're putting into your days. And I know this may be sort of unrealistic when you look at, you know, when I think of your life, Sophie, right now, I'm thinking, oh, Jesus. And I almost want to say, just choose one month where you go, okay, okay, I'm really, like a bit like I'm going to give myself a big bleed,

give yourself a big spring, give yourself a really like, okay, this spring I'm going to, I'm just, you know, I'm just going to have experiment, you know, maybe you have to wait till the summer holidays to do it. I don't know, but really make it a focus, make it a thing. But anyway, even if your days are hectic, why don't you just note in your diary? So when you're just booking things in, you just know, oh yeah, that's day six, that's day seven, that's day eight. Yeah. And we would actually love to receive questions from our

listeners about their inner spring, because we can speak to them in part two, which is coming out in about a month. So if anyone has questions about inner spring, can you email them to sophie at red school.net? And we will bring some of your questions into the next episode so we can get into the nitty gritty of how to do this in the real world thanks you too this has been really soothing and lovely thank you thank you sophie thank you so much for joining us for this inner spring exploration that's all for this week i look forward to being with you next week and until then keep living life according to your own

brilliant rhythm