The Menstruality Podcast - 93. The Menstrual Cycle as a Source of Sensuous Knowledge (Minna Salami)

Episode Date: June 22, 2023

“You cannot say how many cubic metres make up courage, or what kind of wires you need to construct freedom. What kind of lab do you go into to measure relationships between people?” ~ Minna SalamiWhen Minna, my guest today, said this, I got shivers up and down my spine (as I did many times, reading her brilliant book, Sensuous Knowledge) as a deeply intuitive woman raised in a hyper-rational world… or as Minna calls it, a world rooted in euro-patriarchal knowledge. Minna Salami is a Nigerian, Finnish, and Swedish feminist author and social critic. Her research focuses on Black feminist theory, contemporary African thought, and the politics of knowledge production, and today we’re exploring Sensuous Knowledge is a model of knowledge rooted in the dynamic landscape of Black feminist thought - one that empowers, enlivens, and liberates, through embodied insight.We explore:How the menstrual cycle is a source of profound, disruptive different ways of knowing. What happens in a world which only values that which can be quantified, measured and put into hierarchies, rather than honouring the knowledge that emerges from within our bodies and ourselves. The “kaleidoscopic method” and what rivers, trees and placentas can teach us about power and the nature of reality. ---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.hardyMinna Salami: @minnasalami_ - https://www.instagram.com/minnasalami_

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. Hi there, thank you so much for being with me today, for tuning in and welcome to the Menstruality Podcast. I want to open us up in a different way today with a quote from my guest. So she said, you cannot say how many cubic meters make up courage or what kind of wires you

need to construct freedom. What kind of lab do you go into to measure relationships between people? And when Mina Salami, my guest today, said this, I got shivers up and down my spine, as I did several times reading her brilliant book Sensuous Knowledge. As a deeply intuitive woman raised in a hyper rational world and culture or as Minna calls it a world rooted in euro patriarchal knowledge knowledge. Mina Salami is a Nigerian, Finnish and Swedish feminist author and social critic. Her research focuses on black feminist theory, contemporary African thought and the politics of knowledge production. And today we're exploring sensuous knowledge, a model of knowledge rooted in the dynamic

landscape of black feminist thought, one that empowers and enlivens and liberates through embodied insight. So in the conversation we look at how the menstrual cycle can be a source of profound disruptive ways of knowing what happens in a world which only values that which can be quantified and measured and put into hierarchies rather than honoring the knowledge that emerges from within us and from within our bodies and what Mina calls the kaleidoscopic method, what rivers, trees and placentas can teach us about power and the nature of reality. So welcome to the Menstruality Podcast, Mina. It's such a delight to have you, especially because I've really been immersing myself in your work and there was a hunger in me for the story that you're telling and I can imagine it's similar for many people in our audience this new story of sensuous knowledge and as I said in my email to

you I literally have hundreds of questions for you but I'm going to trust that we'll find our way to a really rich conversation today. I know we will. And yeah, I'd just love to start by asking you how you are in your cycle experience today. Where are you at in your cycle and how is it influencing you? Thank you, Sophie. It's such a pleasure to be here and to be sharing this space with you. I have just finished my cycle, my period today. So I'm in the beginning of my probably my favorite phase in my cycle where, yeah, where you start to feel a bit more active again lovely I feel like it would be great to start the conversation by hearing a bit about your story and how your identities and how you were raised and where you were raised have helped to create a foundation for the work that you're

bringing into the world yeah could you walk walk us into the beginning of your life? Okay, I'll take you even a little bit further back than that to actually where I'm living at the moment, which is in Hamburg in Germany, which also coincidentally is a city where these two people who are my mother and my father met in the 1960s. They were both students at the University of Hamburg. And my mother had come to Hamburg from Finland and my father had come to Hamburg from Nigeria.

And they met here and they fell in love and they lived here for many years. And so therefore, it is it has been quite special for me to be here now. and they met here and they fell in love and they lived here for many years. And so therefore it is, it has been quite special for me to be here now. But in any case, they, that's where the story starts. And they then moved to Nigeria where they had me or my, I was born in Finland, you you know because of the world order that you get better medical care in in the west and so my mom decided to go to Finland to give birth to me but we went back to Nigeria when I was a few months old and so I grew up in Lagos in Nigeria, which was, I had a really colorful and dynamic and exciting childhood. Quite crazy, I have to say. I had quite a crazy childhood. A lot of, I had a lot of near-death

experiences, for instance, very many. I, you know, there was always something happening in my childhood so I was I was instantly born into an eventful kind of atmosphere um but I I lived in Lagos until I was 13 and and I lived in a a big sort of a family compound of sorts so there were many flats in this big house and they were all occupied by different family members. And so even though I was growing up as an only child, I had, you know, the children of my aunties and uncles growing up in the same house with me. So I always felt like I was part of this huge family. And it was here in Nigeria in these formative years that I came to understand that I was a feminist. And I say this retrospectively. I didn't use that word as a child.

But I was kind of an old soul. I was very much of an observer as a child. And I was like my very earliest memory when I was about four is of me being upset and angry because I had realized that there was something that boys were allowed to do and girls were not allowed to do. I can't remember what it was, but I remember the feeling of rage about it. And so, and yeah, and throughout my childhood, I noticed those things, the gendered inequalities and patterns of oppression. I noticed it everywhere in Nigerian society, in the family, in my school, in society at large, in politics. And so I really was developing already this person who I am today, this persona even.

At 13, at the in in the early 90s Nigeria there was a terrible dictatorship and so my mother and I uh or my mother decided that because of me she would relocate uh and we moved to Sweden rather than Finland where she's from because we had family there and so I moved to Sweden and I ended up living in Sweden for over a decade and it was very very difficult because I was this patriotic Nigerian child despite the the patriarchal nature of Nigeria there were also so many things obviously that I loved about living there. And so moving to Sweden was difficult because I didn't want to, for one. And secondly, because my first years in Sweden were years in which I was bullied and I experienced a lot of racism. and maybe to tie into the podcast,

but this is actually the genuine truth that about a week after I had moved to Sweden, I started my period. So I got my period for the very first time, literally, I think it was seven days after we had moved there. Wow. And that was huge that really because as I said I'd been this child who was a feminist and who who was observing

what it meant basically to be a man or a woman in society and the moment I got my period I went into a kind of depression. I was already sad about having moved from Nigeria, but that added to it because it made me realize that I had now become a woman. And I didn't want to become a woman only because I had seen that it was a difficult predicament. And so, yeah, it was a, you know, I don't feel that way anymore. But at the time, it was a really difficult thing and not really being able to talk about it with people because, you know, we live in this kind of world where there's so much shame and stigma and taboos around periods um so I was going through this phase of like being in a new country

being experiencing negative things and then also uh just having to behave like I would change my pad you know once an hour or something because I didn't know what do you do like is it am I going to bleed all over the place uh yeah just absurd things that you know no no young woman should have to go through um yes oh yeah so so and then to to just close off in terms of my my so listeners know that I no longer live in Sweden. I then moved in my 20s. I moved first to New York, spent some time in Spain, but eventually ended up in London where I've been living for almost two decades. But I'm now in Hamburg, as I said. Yeah. And can you speak to how, so growing up in Nigeria and then moving to Sweden and how, what sparked or what drove this African centric feminism that you write about and write from? And our listeners sensuous knowledge the book is an absolute must read and Mina goes into a lot of detail in this in the first couple of chapters

but yeah could you just give us a couple of yeah thoughts to walk us into that piece as well yeah uh so I uh you know having arrived in spent, as I said, there were many years of experiencing discrimination. I learned in Sweden that I was, I learned, I guess, what it means to be a black person. It wasn't something that I had really given much thought in terms of my own identity when I lived in Nigeria. So I definitely had a really strong awareness of Blackness in a global context. Like, you know, my family was on the left and spoke a lot about the radical politics of their youth and in also what was happening in Nigeria at the time so I I knew that there were a lot of injustices that were racially based but I'd never thought about

what that meant for me as a human in the world and then in Sweden I you know this label was applied to me that i was black um or mixed race depending um and so i started to to contend with that and what that meant um and and i guess i discovered actually a sort of uh a treasure trove because it connected me to things that I had felt as a child, but I hadn't had the language for in a sense. And I started to, you know, to read more books about Black identity. I engaged a lot with, I was really into hip hop in my teens and particularly conscious hip hop and sort of neo-soul music and reggae

and all of these musical genres that actually were very much dealing with the issues that come with blackness. And so in retrospect, you know, it was a kind of a gift, even if it was difficult because it came to me from feeling a sense of alienation. It actually gave me, you know, this treasure trove of ancestral knowledge and cultural insight and writing, you know, both fiction and nonfiction. And so when I then realized that I was a feminist, when the first time that I kind of came to this word that had shaped my character my entire life, but I didn't yet articulate, it was first, actually, it was a white man who made me uh who gave me this word in a sense because he was a lecturer at my university and we were talking about the female gaze and then he he

mentioned the work that feminists had done uh in terms of the female gaze. And for the rest of that lecture, I didn't hear a word he said. All I could think about was this F word. How at home I felt. And yeah, and so I started on this journey then of being a feminist and what it meant. And I very soon then realized that what I could find in the school library and just in society around me still wasn't fully addressing something that for me was

important. And it was not just that it wasn't addressing race. It's a particular kind of worldview, or maybe I should say several worldviews, that come from having an identity that intersects with different, with experiences that have been formed by oppression of different natures. And so I sort of intuitively gravitated toward a knowing that I needed to read Black feminist work. And then I really felt at home for perhaps the first time in my life when I started to engage with those writers. And that's where, you know, my path as a Black feminist began. Listening to you speak, one of the ways you describe sensuous knowledge is kaleidoscopic and listening to you speak it does the same thing as when i read your words

stories start to unfold and lots of different avenues and ways of thinking start to open up and as i'm listening to you there's sort of like 20 questions just appear in front of me but the one that I moved to ask first or to speak about first is this first period moment because one of the things we explore at Red School and in this menstruality way of seeing the world and seeing life is that the first period is such a pivotal moment in terms of our soul awakening or our first sense of our unique nature showing itself or meeting the world and in that place where our deep self meets the world then we start to find our our calling or our purpose or you know he'd give it lots of different words and I just find it

really striking that that happened for you right when you made this huge move from where you'd always lived to across the other side of the world a completely different culture and yeah I'm very moved by that. I also find it quite not quite coincidental I should say I think I mean of course you know your period is going to start sooner or later if you are a female but I see there being a correlation of there was like a a lot of big shifts for me at the time and I think that that has very much uh sort of it it set forth a relationship that I would have to my period uh moving forward um and and how I've you know it's it's always been a bit of a difficult thing for me uh with periods and yeah, just finding that it's maybe one of the facets of life in which I really feel how much beauty there is in the female cycle

and being a woman, how much beauty and power and sensuality on the one hand, but it's also something that represents for me pain, difficult transformations, shame, all of those kinds of things. And also, interestingly, that first period of mine was happening in a time when I was for the first time experiencing racism. Well, not for the first time. I hadn't experienced it as a child, but like, individual period exists in the world. You know, the journey that I've been on with it, and I can talk a bit more about the sort of actual, like, issues that I've had and how that's been dealt with, you know by by doctors and so on

in society yeah let's go there and then I'd love to bring us back to sensuous knowledge but yeah let's I'd love to hear about this you you said that you've experienced fibroids and this was navigating this is one of the things that taught you about the kind of medical, medicalized racism that there is in the world. Yes, sadly, and I think this is maybe an experience that others also have had. I mean, certainly many Black women have, but probably, you know, women generally, to some extent as well. But yeah, a few years ago, I started to have extremely heavy periods to the point that I could not leave my house when I was menstruating. And for much of my life, I have been somebody who experiences a lot of difficulty with pain.

So I have a lot of cramps and pains. And so my periods are typically a time for me when I have to slow down, which is something that I've come to appreciate, actually. But I say this just to preface that I've always had difficult periods. But anyway, some years ago, they became extreme. And, you know, and I was clotting a lot and it was just really terrible. And around the same time, I walk a lot.

I see that as part of the writing process for me is to walk and be in nature and so I can walk for hours and hours and hours and I was doing that especially around that time and I was finding it increasingly difficult to to go for to walk for a long time I would just like lose my breath after half an hour, and literally need to sit down because I felt like I couldn't breathe. And so eventually, I went to see a doctor. And I mean, you may guess where this is going. I was told all kinds of things, you know, the first one was that it was a mental health issue, that maybe I was suffering from anxiety. And at the time, I had no reason to be suffering from anxiety, things felt quite easy

for me. So I questioned it, but I thought, okay, maybe I'll look into this and so on. Anyway, it took months of seeing different doctors in London, all were saying the same thing or just dismissing it. And eventually, one doctor said, let's do a blood test. And it turns out that I had hardly any red blood cells. And you know, I had terrible anemia because of these heavy periods. And only then, when they discovered that I had anemia, did they think that, okay, now we should look into what's causing it. And therein began this process that eventually culminated in me finding out that I had some really big fibroids.

And this really is the, that was all just a preface to getting, although even that was like gendered and racialized healthcare to a max. And still so many people listening will relate to that months and months and months and months to get any kind of diagnosis. Yeah. Don't accept that. Please people, when you hear this, if you're going through anything that your body's telling you something's wrong and professional uh medical professionals are saying that it's nothing don't listen to them um until you feel that you've got a satisfactory answer um because yeah then I uh we found the fibroids and then began this process of you know uh I was advised to have a hysterectomy um which I didn't really want to have um I didn't feel ready to

you know difficult as my periods have been I I guess I wasn't yet ready to to let go of them and to have such a big surgery surgical procedure um but but what was really awful during all this time was that the tests that I were having that I was having done um most especially uh hysteros hysteroscopy um I always confuse the two hysterectomy and hysteroscopy so hysteroscopy. I always confuse the two, hysterectomy and hysteroscopy. So hysteroscopy is, you know, when they insert a sort of metal rod-like instrument in order to look inside you into your womb. And it's an extremely painful procedure, which I have later learned that you were supposed to have under anesthetics, or at least with some very strong painkillers. Um, I was not given either of those.

Um, and it was one of the most painful things that I've ever been through. And as I mentioned earlier, I've had a lot of near death experiences, but that was, um, that was, that was awful. So, yeah, it really opened my eyes to, like, how we are expected to just deal with pain as Black women, as women, as black people, you know, it's just crazy that, you know, if I were a man, if men were dealing with fibroids, there would definitely be all the accurate pain prevention would be in place. And I just left the hospital feeling like I'd been violated because I thought, surely I wasn't supposed to feel so much pain for an examination. And yeah, and then I started to sort of look into it and speak to other women who had

had this procedure, speak to my friends in Sweden who work in healthcare and they were shocked. They said, you know, that could not happen in Sweden. And then I found out that it's actually also not supposed to happen in the UK. So, you know, it really was one of those, I live in an area where, you know, you have a big constituency of black people and it makes you wonder how these, how these things come to bear. The other thing that happened and what I did change,

I changed my diet. I have been meditating for a long time, but I started to take that even more seriously. I just basically kind of de-stressed my life as much as I could and I and I feel like that made some difference um I still have painful periods um so yeah it was just quite an quite an ordeal yeah thank you so much for sharing that I'm so sorry for what you experienced and also so glad to hear that you found yourself in the place that you are now. And I totally agree.

It's deeply important for us to share these stories. And I think back to your sensuous knowledge that there's like a body of knowledge that we still need to build together around menstrual cycles. And it's through normally in our work, what we see is through story after story after story we're weaving this tapestry of menstruality together and there's

something so magical about it because I think with every story that gets told the fog of shame that patriarchy has shrouded the menstrual cycle with just just moves aside a little you know there's a little more clarity and a little more opportunity to to feel the power of the cyclic you know the cyclicity within us as well thank you so much for sharing that thank you I love what you're doing I think it's it's so beautiful to like be sort of collecting these stories and it goes back I mean as you said the tapestry of menstrual stories uh it goes back to uh as you mentioned before what I refer to as the the kaleidoscopic nature of sensuous knowledge you know there's a there's a correlation there um and I think, yeah, particularly with menstruality, it's,

we need that kaleidoscope, you know, where we can, we see that, you know, in a kaleidoscope, everything is, is happening in that one object. And yet, it's like this whole universe, this pluriverse that opens up if you look into it. You know, our menstrual stories are one story, in a sense, one story of power, of oppression, of repression, of sexuality, of life and birth, really. And it is particularly because it is that one story that patriarchy has for so long tried to silence it. post pictures about it, you know, to really undo all of the harm that has been created in our psyches due to this awful, awful denomination of women's menstruation. I want to pause this conversation with Minna to share this reading from her book Sensuous Knowledge because it connects so many topics that come up in our communities at Red School

and also around my kitchen table with my friends. How to infuse soul and cyclicity into our all too linear rational worlds, how to honour the wisdom and knowledge that's born from our wombs, you know, as many would say, to live from and with the feminine, all the way to how we can build a new world which values this different kind of knowledge within every aspect of life, from our relationships to our education systems to even our economies. As Minna calls it, sensuous knowledge. So here's a excerpt from the book. Europatriarchal knowledge also devalues the erotic, the feminine and the poetic because they are connected to the natural world. What the Euro-patriarchal narrative essentially vilifies

is interiority. Poetry is the language of the interior or the soul. Nature inhabits the interior of earth and women's sexual organs which carry poiesis, I think that's how you pronounce that, life, pleasure and creation or interior. Not only is the vagina a wet, warm and dark place like the enclave of a forest, it leads to an even more hidden yet life-bearing location, the womb. Surrounding all of this sexual interiority, like an ozone layer, is the clitoris, a poetic organ if ever there were one. Humans are the only species that are distinctly poetic and erotic and to degrade these qualities in knowledge production is to deprive knowledge of its humaneness and render it robotic. Poetry explains a feeling such as longing in the way the scientific method can't. Dance describes freedom in a way that mathematics cannot. Inner stillness explains existence in a way that technology cannot. The acceptance of the

raw, pure quality of interiority is essential to meaningful change. If we applied sensuous knowledge to the economy, it would produce an erotic economy of sorts in which reciprocity and sustenance rather than surplus and scarcity would thrive. If we applied it to education, children would take classes in subjects like empathy and dialogue, as well as maths and science. Okay a quick note before we get back into the conversation with Mina. I want to invite you to save the date for a live online gathering that we're hosting at Red School around the cyclical nature of creativity. We'll tell you more soon but for now please save the date. It's July the 15th, that's a Wednesday and it's happening at 11am New York time, 4pm UK time. That's Wednesday

the 15th of July at 11am New York, 4pm UK. Okay back to the conversation with Mina. I think it was one of the things that made me feel freedom and joy in me when I read this term Euro-patriarchal knowledge not because I'm excited about Euro-patriarchal knowledge, not because I'm excited about Euro-patriarchal knowledge, but because to hear it named in that way and to hear you spell out, and it give voice to this structure that I felt like a vice around my soul throughout my life, but no one was talking about it.

And I've always felt there's a different way to be there's a different way that we could be speaking and could you could you walk us into it's a big term but could you sort of walk us into Euro-patriarchal knowledge and particularly also like there's a part of the book where you say you know bell hooks speaks about this as white suprematist capitalist patriarchy like is an incredibly powerful important term too but why you decided to differentiate in sensuous knowledge so your patriarchal knowledge uh is in a nutshell, an approach to knowledge, so to understanding reality, which prioritizes, obsesses, and endorses a rationalist, technical, and materialist worldview.

And so what that means is that we are living in an understanding of reality where we think that reality all of reality is something that can be quantified measured and of course consequently then put into hierarchies because we can only put, we can only create hierarchies once we can have something material and tangible that we say, Oh yeah, this makes a better than B. Because we've measured it in a lab, you know, and, and so your patriarchal knowledge, firstly, is about this. You know, it's a kind of an ontology, which means, you know, a way of seeing reality. And it's completely false because, you know, there are so many things that we cannot measure. You cannot say how many cubic meters is courage.

What kind of wires do you need to construct freedom? What kind of lab do you go into to measure relationships between people and these are very real things we're talking about the nature of reality we experience emotions, we experience relationships they exist, we experience thoughts but because there's no way of measuring these things within your patriarchal knowledge, what we do is that we either, you know, we just ignore them, or even worse, we try to force them

into a box. We try to, you know, we force some kind of nonsensical measurement upon these things. And so my criticism, and in using this term, your patriarchal knowledge, is firstly, coming from me as a social critic, broadly speaking, who cares about the truth, and who cares about, you know, actual sense making in a way. And the second reason, and it's, you know, very, very important, the second reason is that because I criticize and I coined this term because this way of knowing knowing lies at the root of oppression. You know, it's about power. And wherever there is an abuse of power, there is going to be a crisis, there is going to be suffering. And, you know, if we were now, if we go back to the image of the kaleidoscope, if reality were a kaleidoscope and we were looking into it, every five seconds, we would see something rather than the beautiful images we typically see in a kaleidoscope, we would see something dark, painful, dystopian, and that would be a kind of

synapse of the abuse of power and how that creates this darkness this obstruction in reality um and so you know we the the connection between um to bell return to what bell hooks uh you know because what bell hooks is talking about when she says militarist capitalist white supremacist sexist society is uh the structures of this society um she also talks about the psychology of these societies the the culture has touched upon all of the facets of oppression more than any other thinker and philosopher but in this particular phrase she's she's looking uh she's aiming her criticism directly at the structures and what i was doing in Sensuous Knowledge is aiming my criticism at the narrative, at the root origin of the structures of oppression. understand, you know, what kind of attitude creates sexism and racism and patriarchy and imperialism. And it is the one in which we think technically, in which we think everything is technical, everything is measurable. It starts from, you know, thinking that the human species

is better than non-human species. And we measure that how? Oh, because we are rational beings and other species are not. Rivers are not rational. Elephants are not rational, allegedly. So that's why it's so important to name it as Euro-patriarchal and to combine the epistemology and the ways of knowing with our systems and structures

of power. And then you bring forth sensuous knowledge as an antidote or an alternative, or in fact, you're very careful to say it's you don't want it to be something in contrast to your patriarchal knowledge. This is its own. Yeah. Could you speak to that? Thank you. Yeah. In my book, I am careful to say that I'm not offering sensuous knowledge as a contrast to your patriarchal knowledge. It's it I mean, it is a contrast in many ways, and we'll speak about that shortly. But the reason that I say that is because the point of my book and of my work, Absentious Knowledge at Large, is not to merely to criticize Euro-patriarchal knowledge, because what that does is centre your patriarchal knowledge. You know, the moment you are creating something in opposition to another thing, you are actually centring that other thing. And what I'm driven by is more so so to unearth this other way of knowing. In that process, there is a criticism that happens,

of course, because the thing that is being unearthed is a response, in a sense, you know, it's a counter to what exists, to the delusion and the deception that exists. But yes, at the same time, it purely, you know, in terms of what it is purely ontologically, it is a contrast. Sensuous knowledge is a contrast to Euro-patriarchal knowledge because where Euro-patriarchal knowledge is, as I've explained, obsessed with what can be measured and what can be categorized and ranked, I think sensuous knowledge is about the integration of those things, of material reality. You know, like our periods are material.

We can see them. We can touch them. We can smell them. They exist materially and biologically and biophysically but and i'll stick with the period example it's a really good one to explain sensuous knowledge with they're also a phenomenon that can be felt and lived and experienced and sensed. You know, we started this podcast with a question of where in my cycle I was. Not everybody is as in tune, and some people are more in tune than others,

but, you know, I definitely can tell you that there's a pattern to how I am every month, depending on where I am in my cycle. And they are a phenomenon that give us a tremendous understanding of the world we live in. Our periods, our menstrual cycles are a source of knowledge. They are a deep source of knowledge. You know, they teach us so many things, for one, about the cyclical nature of life and death, which is something that your patriarchal knowledge will do everything to try to control, because it's so disturbing to the idea that everything can be neat and packaged you know and we can play god um with our you know technological advancements

um but our our menstrual cycles really disrupt that and so this is also a good example of how it's not just the disruption that is important it's not just as i was saying it's not just the disruption that is important. It's not just, as I was saying, it's not just the criticism that is important. It is the fact that it gives us insight into the nature of the deception, because we know what is happening in our bodies in all of these multifaceted sensuous ways. We know it. And yet we can clearly see that the conventional dominant knowledge production about our menstrual cycles is it's diluted so that that in that space of dissonance there's a tremendous like body of knowledge to to glean um and so it's it it empowers us immensely to to become aware of that you know that word on earth that you you used feels really relevant here

because i've really been intimately with my cycle for 12 or 13 years and it just goes deeper and deeper and deeper into this walking home to myself from all of these structures and masks that I've worn because of this patriarchal world that I've grown up in it's this just turning back towards myself again and again and again and there's a feeling that I am slowly unearthing the truth of myself and the truth of the world, and it's more a clearing away of the crap that's been in the way to get to the truth, and that's what I felt when I was reading Sensuous Knowledge, and I wanted to ask you a question about, because this really feels like Sensuous knowledge in action you did an interview with um um amicia gadiali who we've interviewed for at red school too and you were talking about how you had this question with you for a long time which was what can rivers teach us about power

and just something in me sang when I heard that, because I have a river close to my house. I walk it every day. And it's incredibly important part of knowing who I am. But I can't quite tell you why. It's like there's all of this knowledge that is in me and in my body and in my being that doesn't fit into the languages

that we have currently in the world. And so when I wanted to ask you what what have rivers taught you about power and and how does this of inquiry in itself embody sensuous knowledge rivers taught me so much about powers and and I will tell you that I have been obsessed with power my whole life, like not with having power in the way that we understand it anyway, but with the question of power, what it is, who has it, why do they have it? And in fact, I co-authored a children's book with that precise title, Power, Who Has It and Why.

I, yeah, I even did my dissertation on power. And I still had so many questions about it and I still do but after writing about power and sensuous knowledge and coining a term exusions I have much more clarity about it and that clarity and that word exusions came to me from observing rivers and what was going on for my physical body was that I would, I was traveling a lot at the time that I was writing the book. And wherever I would travel, I would always make sure to go to a river if one existed. And if not, then a lake or the sea or, you know, as close as I could get to water. So I would go to water bodies in many parts, different parts of the world. And the reason that I was doing that is because I, so in Yoruba spirituality,

there are something called orishas, which are deities. And every person has a deity whom their spirit, whom their ancestry kind of belongs to, you could say. And my deity is called Yemoja or Yamanya. Sometimes in Brazil, she's called Yamaya. And she's the goddess of water bodies, of the sea, of the ocean. And so I have had this relationship with water forever. So wherever I go, I want to go to water. If I'm going through something difficult in life, then I seek water.

But around this time, as I was doing that, I was also writing my chapter on power. And because I was doing that, I had been researching the sort of etymology of power. And I'd come across this ancient Greek term for power, which was exousia. And then I was watching rivers and I was also watching YouTube videos of rivers, which was a wonderful way to spend my time. I would just watch like hours of rivers on YouTube. And so there was a moment where I saw that the way that rivers move through obstacles, through dominance, whether it's man-made wares or, you know, pollution, which of course is also man-made, all the many obstacles that we have created for rivers

was with this kind of force, with the, I mean, scientifically it would be gravity, you know, they're moving with gravity but in this sort of psychosocial uh linguistic cultural space that I work in uh it was exusions it just the word was just what I was looking for to describe um so yeah that's how that's how I came to to kind of redefine power and it's this branching out that the rivers do that you're pointing to right yeah so you know it's really interesting because as you know um there are patterns in everything in in the universe, including in our bodies, and these sort of fractal dendritic patterns that exist like in lightning or in our lungs, our neurons, are also, of course, the patterns of a river,

if you were to zoom out, you know, and you look at how a river branches into many tributaries. But what is unique with rivers in terms of these fractal patterns is that all of these branches and tributaries and streams are all kind of ultimately moving the river from its source to the mouth. So there's like a destination. And at some points in a river's journey, it is journeying on its own for a long stretch of time. There are no tributaries seemingly that are feeding into it. And then again there are periods in its journey where there are you know millions of small streams and tributaries and lakes all feeding into it so that it can move towards its destination and that again really taught me about the power of the collective versus the individual um or i don't even want to use the word versus because it's just it's just the natural progression

of of life of movements of of time and space I was also reflecting that if you look at a placenta that's exactly what happens the the main vein spreads out into this beautiful sort of tree that's inside the center it's it can't be completely coincidental can it that we find this pattern so much no especially in the initiatory journey from being a non-mother to a mother like nothing has taught me more about the collective than that experience and interesting that the placenta contains that within it yeah i hadn't thought of that in the placenta that's that's really really powerful because what I think that that pattern represents and what

what exusions also is about is basically aliveness you know it's the the desire to live and so to have that in the placenta already, you know, it's, yeah, that's very beautiful. Could you share a couple of words for those of us listening who really feel what you're saying and want to embody this more in the world? What can we do? How can we be to connect to this sensuous knowledge? I would say be present, cultivate clarity and beauty. You know, in the book I say do beauty, you know, rather than be beautiful or whatever that may mean um and by do a beauty it's going to be different from individual to individual but it is about being present that's

one thing that is required um and by being present i don't mean only from an individualist perspective, but trying to understand whatever it is one is trying to understand from a multi-perspectival view, again, from that sort of kaleidoscopic view. So maybe I will leave listeners with what I call the kaleidoscopic method. And it is in contrast to the scientific method. So if you're going through, I mean, even if it's a personal issue, personal decision, we have been so influenced by your patriarchal knowledge that we try to think of it in this deductive way, that if A equals B, then C. But try to think of things with the kaleidoscopic method, look at it from the point of view of a river or a flower, I don't know,

you know, whatever it might be, to really bring in that multi-perspectival and simultaneously also critical view, which is inevitable because the moment you start to look at things multi-perspectivally, holistically, if you're really doing that, then you will also see that there is a politic that is embedded in almost everything. And so this cultivation of doing beauty, but also doing the critical work would be a way of expressing sensuous knowledge. And aside from that, you can join me in my further journeys of exploration, of dissemination and expression of sensuous knowledge,

which I do interviews like this in the book, of course. I'm also teaching a course on sensuous knowledge, which I am super excited about. And you can join that if you hear this before the 31st of July when the course starts. Otherwise, it will still be available afterwards. So for those listening then, you can also probably still go and find the course online. But yeah, those are the examples.

Thank you. Thank you so much so much mina thank you for this incredible body of work and body it is you know it connects me to my body it connects me to the body of the world and i'm so so grateful and look forward to connecting more thank you so much thank you sophie it's been a pleasure thank you wow i'm sure you can tell how much i loved that conversation um i'm really looking forward to joining minna for her course on sensuous knowledge starting at the end of july and i'll put the link in the show notes at redschool.net forward slash podcast for you if you're interested in reading the book or joining me for the course and before we go I just want to remind you again that we have a brand new exciting free live online gathering and conversation that we'll be having on Wednesday the 15th of July about cyclical creativity and the menstrual cycle as a blueprint

for a wildly fulfilling creative life in all aspects. I'm so so looking forward to this. It's Wednesday 15th of July at 11am New York time, 4pm UK time. So for now it's just a save the date notice and we'll tell you much more about the event soon. Okay, thank you so much for listening today. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the podcast and also if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, that's the best possible way that you can support our work excuse me that was my watch I hope you have a beautiful rest of your morning day evening and I look forward to being with you again next week and until then keep living life according to your own brilliant rhythm