The Menstruality Podcast - How to Fall in Love with Your Menstrual Cycle (Alexandra & Sjanie)

Episode Date: August 18, 2022

We want to create a world where everyone is in love with the menstrual cycle - not a perfect version of the cycle - but exactly the cycle you have.  Because this love affair revolutionises our lives (and the world!).That’s why we’ve created our new FREE online course: Love Your Cycle: Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life where we explore the four phases or inner seasons of your cycle as a gateway to vitality, creativity, power and purpose.Love Your Cycle is our invitation to you to get to know your cycle in more depth, to fall in love with your cycle, and to grow an intimacy with it that will transform your life - by amplifying your vitality, enhancing your creativity and activating your leadership.In this episode we explore:- Why falling in love with your cycle isn’t about having a ‘perfect’ menstrual cycle, but rather coming into relationship with the cycle you have (and how to actually do that.) - How to make sense of cycle disturbances and hold ourselves as we heal menstrual pain and other health challenges. ‍- Four specific cycle awareness practices to harness the power of each inner season of your cycle.You can register for Love Your Cycle for FREE here: https://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.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. Welcome back. Welcome back to the Menstruality Podcast. Love is in the air today. In this conversation with Alexandra and Sharni, we're talking about why we're in love with the menstrual cycle, why we want to create a world where everyone is in love with the menstrual cycle, why we want to create a world where everyone is in love with the menstrual

cycle and how we want to invite you into a deeper love affair with your menstrual cycle, not some perfect version of your menstrual cycle but exactly the cycle you have because this love affair has the capacity to totally revolutionize our lives and the world. We talk about all kinds of things, the new course that we've created called Love Your Cycle, a whistle-stop tour through the inner seasons and the practices that can help you fall in love with the powers that can be awakened in these different inner seasons. We look at how to make sense of cycle disturbances, how to hold ourselves as we heal menstrual pain and other health challenges and we even talk about what could have happened if Elvis had had a menstrual cycle. We really do. So I hope you enjoy this one

How to Fall in Love with Your Menstrualal cycle with Alexandra and Shani. Good morning, you two. It's so nice to be with you both today. And you've just come away from a period of time of being together in person. How was that? So good. So good. Fun. I think life was smart, ensuring that Alexandra and I live far apart, because whenever we come together, it is so charged and creative and it's dangerous. I mean, luckily we had a focus. We were putting good work because we were recording the audio book for Wise Power.

And so we couldn't get up to too much trouble. We sort of had to just get on with the task in front of us. But we did do some good creative inventing and developing of our ideas whilst on a lovely walk the one morning. And in our long car drives. Yeah. Back and forth every day as well. Yeah, yeah. What was it like to be actually reading out Wise Power?

That must have been amazing. It was, Sophie. reading out wise power that must have been amazing uh it was certainly it was incredibly um it was incredibly moving but it was also it was view and I start to get creative and I start and I mustn't look at the next slide right I was thinking that like do you accidentally start rewriting the book sometimes as you're reading it occasionally i'd say to myself shiny don't edit it just read the book i would one of us would be reading the book and the other would be um just following outside the booth and occasionally we'd be going, you improvised a little something there and, you know, skipped a word there and occasional things we let pass because it didn't

sort of shift the meaning. But also what you're hearing is the cadence and I'd go, no, no, that word's not right. The cadence, don don't improvise and she would be doing the same to me and um and then there were one or two times where we nearly corpsed because there were words that are quite difficult to pronounce and shani i i've one word i've conquered now which is specificity i'm so proud of myself i nearly when did. When we read Wild Power, honestly, it nearly did me in. But Sharni got that word, and she hadn't quite conquered it. And really, it's a title fucker. It doesn't matter.

You see it written on the page. Try to get out. I can say it now because I learnt it. Specificity. Yeah, it's the killer. We actually had a pack that you were going to read the word and then it just fell on my reading time the way we divided it up yeah yeah it i mean it was hard work it was hard work but what was really beautiful was to be bathed in the book in its entirety from start to finish over the course of three days and just to to receive all the words we had written and to really digest them at a deeper level we both

came out of there saying right like oh I get what we were saying there it's like we suddenly got something more about what we'd written and said so it was this lovely experience of receiving and digesting as we went through it which was very beautiful that's so true i got a real sense of the gestalt of the book in a way i hadn't before it was so interesting that so yeah do we know when it's coming out the audio book we don't have an exact date but it will be around the time that the written copy comes out which is September the 20th I can't wait I can't wait to be walking down the river and having you two reading it to me so so Shardy you must have

been in your in a summer when you're reading it because I think you're out now no no no I'm day uh 11 today so I was the first day was day three and can I recommend you don't read an audiobook on day three the the first day was particularly challenging for some of the reasons Alexandra spoke about, which is the liminality and vastness of my day three experience and coming into a situation that required such focus and such specificity was, it was, I was drawing on the art of cycle awareness, shall we say. But what's amazing, and this is in a way what this conversation is about, is although it was challenging and uncomfortable and demanding, and by the end of the day I had given absolutely everything I had to give. I could feel the rightness of beginning the book in that place. There was something about the vulnerability I was feeling and the openness that I was in

that added a flavor or texture to the book that I could never have brought if I was in a different place yeah yeah well I can really feel the trust in you you know when you say practicing the art of cycle awareness do you mean knowing the beauty and power of each part of it and bringing that to whatever you're doing is that what you mean when you say that um kind of yes but it's more that the art of cycle awareness is really the appreciation of the uncontrollableness of our cycle and how it doesn't match our life it doesn't you know it doesn't line up with the outer world and how sort of agenda really yeah yeah yeah so there's a sort of seeming contradiction or challenge between the place we're in and what our life situation or circumstances are asking of us and you know the science of cycle awareness is

manage your schedule according to your cycle and then which is great and we do that in the art of cycle awareness and the bigger intelligence that's at work that knows something more than your scheduling mind knows that delivers you into this creative tension that ultimately serves the situation way beyond what you ever thought was possible and that is where your cycle awareness asks you to lean into something bigger than yourself and trust that exactly that's the point that's very very very very powerful what you just summed up there I need to bring that to the group that are going through your cyclical business at the moment because we're really talking a lot about what do you do when you've

got a big webinar that you're hosting or you've got a really important meeting that you're needing and you're on day one or day two you know we're talking about it a lot we're looking at all the practicalities of running a business whilst being a cycling person. And I'm going to bring that, the art and the science. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, that question really takes us very deeply into what this practice of cycle awareness is, Sophie, because to answer that, there isn't, I mean, there's the short explanation I gave, which is, you know,

appreciate the place you're in and trust it, which is the punchline. But then, you know, how? How do we actually come to that awareness? And how do we actually come to that trust? Really takes us into a very deep exploration of cycle awareness. And, you know, just reflecting on my own experience with this audio book, because it was, you know, seemingly very, very bad timing. The thing that made all the difference was knowing myself in that place, in my cycle, you know, being, coming to that day three, firstly, having been connected to myself on day two, on day one and all the days prior, but also knowing my nature, knowing what I need to actually turn up to do something like that on day three.

And really taking the steps and making the choices to create the conditions that could serve me and support me as best as humanly possible so I think there's so much you know to really answer that question it's so much about how we know ourselves and how we can feel into what our needs are and then of course how we can advocate for our needs that's the other piece so yeah it's a very big and beautiful question that one and it is the topic of this conversation today falling in love with the cycle so we're going to get into it and we're going to look at each season and and how to be in love with that and yes we'll get there but first Alexandra how how are you in your cyclicity yeah I'm a cycle chicken I am uh well it's new moon today and um and I'm also so there's a slight uh there's always more

vulnerability for me there's more kind of sweetness and more vulnerability and sort of I'm more with myself and because I'm also at the end of a great enormous cycle with this book and delivering the audiobook, the amount of attention I've had to hold to meet all these deadlines and to turn up to a lot of other things we're doing at Red School. So, and it's dark moon, new moon. and just slightly off separate somewhere and in in the kind of just being in the unknown feeling the huge noise of the world going on and and all the strong feelings that are happening out there you know this whole Roe versus Wade. Appalling situation and feeling this sort of distance from everything and it's interesting to just stay with the blank slate and it's not good or bad so there's no good or bad about it so there's a neutrality i'm just feeling very neutral yeah it's not it's not unpleasant

and i'm really glad that you're both about to do something that i respect so much as business owners which is you're about to take time off not just in the old time, like days and weeks of time. The whole of August. The whole of August. And it's such a bold move because you could obviously, there are like 10 things you could do every day in August. And, you know, 2030, you could work 24 hours a day

and you're choosing not to. And it's freaking beautiful and I'm amazed and and it works I'm abandoning the ship I just hope it's a self-steering ship it's all I hope I'll keep my eye on it while you're away I'll just turn the wheel every now and then and so I'm knowing that it's a new moon today makes sense of the contradictions I'm holding because I'm on day 15 and I know I ovulated yesterday because I got my little pain and symptoms that I get when that happens and I do feel really tender this morning I feel uncomfortable awkward just like a newborn fawn you know with all wobbly legs and at the same time as being having a lot of energy so when this happens it seems to often happen for me in my life and people I hear people in our

community talk about it a lot of what do you do when your cycle has got this totally out of sync with the moon you know I mean again oh I love that question well I mean I'm fascinated by the fact that the question is what do you do because it's less about what one does and also more about dropping the idea that one ought to be in sync with the moon um like you sophie because i'm day 11 and i'm feeling the complexity of you know the new moon and my day 11 also very tender heart achy and that's held within a bigger capacity in me i I feel this bigger holding in me, a sort of capability and, you know, I feel like I can handle things even as there's this incredible heartache that I'm feeling and very strong emotions. And the thing about, you know, where we're at in our cycle in relation to the moon or the seasons of the year or the

circumstances of our lives, those are the complexities of awareness that we're attuning ourselves to. We're learning to sense more and more of the subtlety of our experience, which is less time, as our awareness expands to hold, you you know these different cycles that we're in alexandra spoke about the creative cycle we're in at red school and um you know the seasonal cycle the moon side as we expand our awareness to include those we become more aware of our complexity and the layers of our being and that's the practice of cycle awareness is growing our awareness to to hold more and more of what we're feeling so yeah it's a good thing to notice you know where the moon is versus where your cycle is versus where your family is versus yeah and it's it's

so practical to have this information because I know there's an edge I need to walk today day 15 on a new moon which is don't let all of this creative energy get hijacked by the inner critic and all this kind of vulnerability and tenderness I'm feeling and derail me from the important stuff I'm doing today which is a lot of writing for red school and taking care of my son you know they're two very important tasks and I could be derailed by this. This surge of ovulatory energy could just totally take me down if I let it. Or I can note, oh, I feel tender. Let's pour some of that attention into holding myself.

Yeah, that's it, Sophie. And it's because of your awareness that you're able to do it. That that act of holding as you say shani um there's another facility that is growing within you in that act of holding it there's some sort of alchemical thing that goes on i can't be too i can't be very precise about this, but the act of presence with all these layers within us and one's attention to it and not making it good or bad or right or wrong, but navigating it within the context of your life and all the things you have to turn up for and do and all the responsibilities you have to meet there's some sort of magic that's that grows within that process it's almost like you well i always talk about your inner world how that like your inner being is expanding outwards more so you have more inner spaciousness within yourself and that inner spaciousness becomes this huge creative resource it's like you're pushing back the pressure of the world coming in or you're pushing it at back and now you have this kind of growing sacred space within yourself that becomes this incredible well of creativity but also um spiritual

the word spiritual muscle maybe capacity or muscle but also spiritual energies you know there's a kind of goodness that can fill that space yeah yeah this key thing that Shani sort of knew both of you said about just the presence you don't have to do anything it's just oh wow I'm walking the ground of instability was I've got a charge going through me that just wants to nail all the jobs today whoa and it's this creative tension I love this idea of tension creative tension and what and how generative that is so what you have then is this generative space that's probably the word I'm looking for yeah that starts to grow within you just

becomes more and more generative and you trust it more and that's what happens when Shani and I get together you kind of step into this arena together and this arena is huge and the pair of us turn up and it's like we become these lightning conductors charge that comes through us and then this chair and you there's this tension between us in a creative tension, not bad, you know, like, and, and then things spark thing. One thing does. It's just amazing. Yeah.

And it has everything to do that. We, but with the fact that we both hold our own positions, we both hold our own opinions, our own positions, our own thread. And in that difference and in that complexity because we're able to stick with it something emerges and and the reason this story is interesting is because this is exactly as alexandra described what's happening in our being when we practice cycle awareness we aware of the polarities in ourselves or between us and us the situation we're in and because we can be with that and hold the awareness of that it opens us to this creative source this you know

vitality this revelation often yeah i mean my first question here to walk us into this conversation was why does the world need to fall in love with the menstrual cycle and I think a lot of what you've said has really described that but is there anything else you'd want to share right now in response to that question why does the world need to fall in love with the menstrual cycle well i have some answers it is this extraordinary untapped resource i mean the moment you start to practice cycle awareness a whole world opens up for you of resources and i mean we could spend hours naming all those things but at some fundamental level you the cycle is it's your personal inner process it's your it's tailor-made for you this process it's yours's yours. It's not, you know, the seasons of the year, the moon. They're outside of us.

Of course, they affect us and they echo the menstrual cycle. But your menstrual cycle is inside you. And the moment you step onto the path of cycle awareness, you come into the flow of you. And that awakens you so you feel this alignment and coherence come into your being and that releases so much more energy aliveness and and then as you get in the groove of all that there's all these other things that awaken the sort of creative and spiritual forces that are at work it is this extraordinary journey to find yourself to find home in yourself to find

this deep sense of belonging to yourself but in that act of finding yourself you find your meaning your place in the world what you're here to serve i mean it's mind-blowing what cycle can awaken us to and that's why we call it a spiritual path and practice we don't just say those words glibly. It's incredibly real, incredibly potent and it is, and I am going to swear, a fucking outrage that that is not known and recognized. That question, Sophie, is one I feel I have a million answers for. Why does the world need to fall in love with the menstrual cycle? I could probably write a book on it. But the answer that came to me, which is where Alexandra finished,

I thought, why does the world need to fall in love with the menstrual cycle because one of the most painful human experiences is to feel disconnected lost without meaning to feel that one doesn't know one's place and that one doesn't have value and that one doesn't belong is one of the most painful human experiences and so many people experience that and this seemingly benign thing of paying attention to where you're at in your menstrual cycle brings first and foremost this very intimate deep strong real connection to yourself so you get plugged into you and once you're plugged into yourself once you're inhabiting yourself once you know yourself once you feel your own boundaries and you're inside your own experience, then you open up to your connection to other people, your connection to community,

your connection to the natural world, your connection to the spiritual forces. And so it is this profound means of intimacy and connection and belonging, as Alexandra said. And it doesn't cost anything. It's not hard to do. No one can take it away from you no one can take it away from you and no one can tell you how it is it's yours and all yours alone it's your absolute authority and autonomy i bloody love that about menstrual cycle awareness as a spiritual practice it's not an outer thing imposed on you it's coming from deeply inside yourself and in that way it is so empowering so enabling yeah this might sound like seem like a really strange tangent I'm about to bring in right now but I went to see Elvis the film last night yeah it was so good so Baz Luhrmann incredible film director we did Moulin Rouge, Romeo and Juliet I mean it's a feast for the senses yeah it's like an imagine oh gorgeous

it's so good but this morning I was thinking geez if Elvis had had cycle awareness it would have gone so differently seriously because there's this beautiful man, and he's gorgeous to look at. But he has so much power, which is why he became such an icon. He's got this huge freedom and wildness in him that comes through his voice and the way he moves. But he doesn't know how to be with that power. Yes. And then people around him took that power and abused and, you know, what happened in his life. It's so tragic. But if he'd had this rhythm, this cyclicity holding him, showing him how to hold himself, showing him how to be with the power that was streaming through him showing him bound how to have boundaries I was just like oh Elvis if you just had a menstrual cycle and menstrual cycle awareness

yeah yeah I mean basically I'm just so happy that you watched the film and that's the thought you have I mean are you rocking are you cheerleading cycle awareness or what, Sophie-Jane? You're in the right job, can we just say? It's clearly a passion of yours. And I agree. And yes, like how, I mean, this is so much of, you know, what stirred Alexandra and i with this work is how the cycle is a channel for our power and and and how it tutors us in how to be wise with our power how

to contain it how to um align with it how to really own it so that we don't abuse it or, you know, become victims with it. And you're right, you know, bring Elvis back and let's give him a menstrual cycle next time round, shall we? Well, we might not be able to get elvis on board with menstrual cycle awareness sadly but we would like to invite every single woman every single person with a menstrual cycle to know the power of this practice which is why we've created our new free course love your cycle it's a short yet power-packed exploration of the four inner seasons of your cycle as your gateway to vitality creativity power and purpose it's our invitation to you to get to know your cycle in more depth and to fall in love with your cycle. So you can find out more about this free course at redschool.net forward slash love redschool.net forward slash love.

So clearly there's a huge amount of passion for this topic here. And it's one of the reasons why we've created this new course, which we've been trying to create or wanting to create for a very long time. And it's finally here. It's our invitation to for you to get to know your cycle, to grow this intimacy with it that will revolutionize your life. And if you've been wanting to invite the people around you into this, you know, friends, colleagues, family, partners, then this, we hope, is a good starting place. Love your cycle for people to understand. Why do we even need to be interested in the menstrual cycle? Yeah, we wanted to create something that was really accessible and gave enough of a framework so that if you're a newcomer to this, you can really get stuck in. But equally, if you're an old timer, the framework will open you into a deeper level of access and a deeper level of awareness of your cycle practice so um yes it's

a great thing to invite people to who are maybe cycle curious or or cynical or or who are really open to it and wanting a good kind of place to start yeah yeah and speaking of cynical there can be a lot of things that get in the way of people being interested in the menstrual cycle it's not just the shame and the taboo around it but you know people have obviously real obstacles menstrual pain pms pmdd irregular cycles challenging cycles in lots of different ways. So I wanted to ask you if someone is listening to this or has a friend who they'd like to introduce to it who has challenges with their cycle, how to approach this process of falling in love with your cycle if your cycle is actually something that currently feels very challenging in your life. I think I'd love Alexandra to answer this question, but there's just a piece I want

to say first, which is really to everyone, how to fall in love with your menstrual cycle is absolutely categorically not about creating the perfect menstrual cycle, having the perfect menstrual cycle or being completely and utterly healed. It's absolutely not about that. So this brings us back to what we were speaking about right at the beginning of this conversation, Sophie, which is the art of cycle awareness. Rather than trying to control or manage our cycle it's about coming into relationship with the cycle we do have so for everyone there'll be places in the cycle that are difficult or there'll be symptoms that we experience or challenges we face and so for everyone, really, this course is about how to get to know our cycle and how to build the awareness of what we're needing at any given time, how to get to know our own nature and then how to advocate for our needs so that we can bring more kindness to ourselves in whatever place we're in, because that really is the remedy. And that is the thing that helps us to lean into and trust the place we're in,

you know, with our health or with our cycle, because the place we're in is our gateway into deeper connection. So that really is, is you know that's really the key for everyone um alexandra maybe you want to say something more specific to those people who are struggling um i see a cycle awareness you know as in awareness of the cycle that you are having and starting to find your ways to honor the different the changes the different changes of mood and energy and so on within the context of the cycle you're having as as medicine it's the foundational medicine cyclical consciousness is foundational medicine for us all the health of the planet cyclicity is a remedy that's missing so depending on the level of your symptoms sometimes just starting to really honor your cycle changes and pacing your mood and energy and so on

and starting to organize your life around that rather than expecting yourself to be the same all the time and to deliver in the same way what to to start to honor where you're at and make changes accordingly is to reduce stress your stress levels will ease any way that you can start to reduce stress is going to be medicinal so it's a cycle awareness is like a baseline soothing and also then you're bringing more presence and attention to yourself so cycle awareness brings you into yourself more deeply so you're more alive to yourself and your needs and you will get insight about what you need insight you'll get insight about your symptoms for instance often things like pms and ppmdd when you place them within the context of you know that model of the inner seasons you know

you're practicing cycle awareness you get to see it can potentially open you up to hidden powers that you have and that you're suffering because you're not supported by these times to cherish and value those kind of powers i don't want to just simply reduce it to that because also there's a whole health component you know physical health component around diet and so on and etc etc as well but you can go a long way to recontextualizing things by placing your symptoms within the context of seasons model and it can change your relationship to what you're experiencing at that time and and they're equally too with pain the same thing and people that we've often gotten emails from people saying either that their pain has been reduced radically almost altogether or that the

pain has certainly eased but their relationship to the pain is it has changed and here's the bizarre thing they don't mind the pain so much it's like it's not so traumatic for them so it's so interesting how things shift I mean honestly we almost get and this is melodramatic but almost get sort of miracle cures but even where you know it's not you know the body isn't quite so bitter boy I think still working comes every month our whole kind of relationship with it has shifted and we are holding ourselves in a different way to meet it in a different way and be kinder to ourselves and it's extraordinary the shift that can take place mm-hmm when when you bring cycle awareness to your you know menstrual symptoms yes that's so interesting you're making me look at my experience of PMS or premenstrual rage in a new way because I'm

asking myself in this moment am I any less angry in my premenstruum than I was 10 years ago when that anger and rage was very crippling and it was it was getting in the way of my capacity to work to do what I was doing to have my relationship it was it was very very difficult and messy I don't think I am any less angry I think I'm still angry because there's lots to be angry about but my relationship to that anger like that anger has schooled me and my cycle has schooled me and how to be with that anger and that charge and that rage and that you know if the ferocity that rises in me at what's happening in our world and the love in my heart and it meets what's happening in the world and it just roars you know like so many of us but there's there are channels for that anger I can contain that anger I can I know how to work

with the anger in my body la la la la you know it goes on so it's yeah that's really fascinating thank you Alexandra that's giving me a different take on it I was thinking I was calmer and more at ease and it's not that at all I'm still angry yeah yeah what you're talking about um I love I love this conversation because in a way what we're saying is part of the beauty of getting to know the inner seasons of our cycle is that we go from feeling wrong about what how we're experiencing ourselves and how we're behaving and what we're thinking and to realizing the rightness of what's happening in us in each season and and more than that this is the other piece is that often as alexandra said you know the disturbances that we experience just don't have a home in us yeah like yeah we we we have um we've somehow shamed ourselves or we've been shamed for those things.

Or we're somehow fighting ourselves or fighting our own nature. And the inner seasons helps us to appreciate our own nature and make peace with our own nature and come into this sort of rhythm and flow with ourselves. And that eases stress and it eases shame and with that now you know we're dealing more with kind of raw creative force than a problem yes and there and what is happening now is we have more choice yeah about what we do with those feelings absolutely instead of reacting yeah so that's probably what's different as well sophie you might be feeling as much rage but you're holding yourself differently and so you aren't causing as much destruction or devastation or hurt to yourself or other people because you have more awareness you have more dignity you trust it and I have I have better

friendships that can hold me I've got my I've chosen to live in a house which is by a river that roars and I can go and roar with it you know I'm I know how to take care of my body I know the foods to eat and it's being with my cycle it's very practical this is what I always come back to it's not floofy what we're talking about I've learned how to take care of myself and how to be with this anger because I've been with my cycle yeah exactly can we take a whistle stop tour through the seasons because I thought we might have more time for this but you know it's the cycle so it's got a mind of its own let's just take a whistle-stop tone and name each season and share an approach or a practice that can help us to enjoy this season to love this season to access the powers of this season recognizing that

love your cycle goes more deeply into this and actually offers a guided practice for you to get a taste of the power of each season and then wild power you can read wild power for more you can come on the wild power immersion you can join the menstrual leadership program there's a whole pathway but let's take a a little look at inner winter what can happen if we rest in inner winter magic freaking magic occurs it's just magic in surrendering at menstruation and feeling safe to do so this kind of soothing comes over it's almost like this we call it the oxytocin wash and love you feel love you go oh my god love love and there's this re you find yourself again because we lose ourselves a bit you know when we go out in the world and we forget things about ourselves.

And we come back and we go, oh, I used to remember it every month. I'm okay. I'm okay. Isn't that radical? It's radical. Yeah, when we rest, we can receive. And that can come in all shapes and guises and the love alexandra is describing or physical renewal or inspiration or any number of things but we get to receive

which is we receive ourselves yeah it's deeply necessary what I'm loving about in a winter at the moment is it gives me an opportunity an excuse an invitation to allow the momentum of the month to slow down it's like the hamster wheel that's been going of all the things that are happening it can slow down and it's like I can pop my head up like a periscope out of the water and I can see okay okay this is what's happening in my life okay we're okay okay let's go again because life is so full for me at the moment and it's that it's the slowing down of the momentum it creates this rhythm of sanity which Elvis didn't have back to Elvis it was just go go go he never stopped it's that sanity of the slowing down and the rest and then yeah up again from a different place it is just this it just relief and release and it interrupts it just

interrupts the huge ongoing persistent momentum that is you know it's just constantly there and you just get to step off it and check back with yourself yeah and and there's just all this kind of goodness that can come to you uh as you let go it's like it's reparation you repair so this process that goes on huge stop well yeah it's a pit stop it's a pit stop so menstruation's the pit stop and then we move into inner springs at this period before ovulation pre-ovulation the practice that we point people to is in love your cycle is to pace the surge of the energy at your pre-ovulation there's so much to say so i will speak from my own experience it's uh that's what's immediate is i was saying to alexandra because we were of course together during my bleed and coming out of my bleed and I think it was on day five I

was just like don't want to do anything ever again nothing no more everything was just like uh-uh and then on day six I woke up and it was like bing the the bulb the the system was on and I just felt like my whole system had turned to face the world and I was up for it and what I love about this kind of practice of pacing which really is the practice of you know all cycle awareness is a practice of pacing, but particularly in the spring, because there's this, you know, ready, steady, go feeling that can come, is that, you know, I experience stamina, actually. I, you know, what I have done in the last week is phenomenal you know in terms of parenting work myself you know it's phenomenal what I've done and I don't feel burnt out or overwrought or I feel you know I can keep going I've got more you know I've got days in the tank um and that's because I I't shoot my load all at once. There's a nice pre-ovulatory expression for you.

It is that incredible, I want to say magic again, of, you know, you've been in this place of stillness. It's like, man, I'm never going to move again because you're probably so knackered from the previous like jesus i got nothing and shadi was like that and um this is the magic of cycles that you know you don't have to worry about it because actually they deliver they do deliver and i i can feel it with the mood cycle. It's very funny, because I feel this tenderness and a vulnerability, a more permeable.

And there isn't a kind of push in me. And believe you me, I have push. I've got a will to die for, let me say. But it gets decommissioned at that time. And it's so funny, just like Sharni did with the menstrual cycle, I have a ping moment with the moon cycle where I go, it's not quite so strong because it's outside of me, but there is a moment where i go yeah yeah okay what have

we got to do at red school you know it's like i'm back in business yeah you can give me jobs i'll get on with them you know uh it's very distinct and then and then again around full moon this kind of driving you know i've got i've got and then it builds and it builds in a summer into the and then we come into the inner summer this surge that i'm really inside of and i do i feel like a juggernaut you know i feel like a space rocket just shooting into space and like i could i feel like i can do anything today and the practice that we point to in love your cycle is saying yes to yourself say yes to who you are to this is this rising energy is this extraordinary um you know it's filling us up with physicality but it's filling us up with a kind of affirmation of ourselves.

It's like this inner force. We talk about, yeah, we talk about this rising, it's just kind of a rising yes to ourselves that's happening through that first half of the cycle. And in the summer of our cycle, it kind of really breaks the surface.'s like i am so great you know to dare to totally go i you know i love it with shani when she's kind of on it and she's swaggering away and she's just nailing things and and it's so good to just feel your own greatness and like I could freaking conquer the world do not get in my path I just feel like we should all experience that gorgeous yeah yeah we all again I come back to a human need which is we all long to be seen we all long to shine and you know part of part of what's happening with the

summer energy is we actually have a possibility of showing ourselves in a way that we can be seen and their way you know in a way that we can be received and acknowledged and it's so easy if you're unaware to be operating in the restrictions of your own unworthiness and self-doubt and questioning. You know, it's so easy to live in that consciousness. And especially when the summer energy hits, there's a lot of charge in your system. So you can find yourself really conflicted if you're like, no, I can't, I mustn't, I shouldn't, I mustn't be too big, I mustn't be too much. You know, if you can let yourself, if you let yourself get trapped by that. So this practice of saying yes is really about elbowing your inner critic out of the way for a while to create some room for yourself to just bloody be you you know to just to give to say to give yourself permission and say go for it like you know go for it and um so it's it's it's really uh my my experience is the more I let myself be seen, the more courage I have to show myself.

And it's this incremental yes to myself that gets met in the world. And then next time round, there's a little more yes in me and on and on we go. But the joy, I mean, who doesn't love being appreciated for who we are? So it's worth, you know, and only you can give that to yourself by showing yourself, really. Yeah. And showing yourself how you are, not some version that you think you should be in comparison with whatever else is happening around you and in the rest of the world. You know, we've spoken about being a juggernaut and conquering the world yeah it might be your quietness your sensitivity your creativity whatever interesting nuances and one of the things I'm loving at the moment about inner summer is it it's making space in me to to see other people exactly as they are and allow them to be exactly as they are.

Yeah, I love what you're saying, Sophie, because the inner summer really teaches us how to be individual and how to appreciate people's individuality. A real generosity of spirit that blossoms when we say yes to ourselves. Yeah, as you say, we can say yes to others it's beautiful and the thing i'm really conscious of is how each season builds on the one before so you know it's this integrated process you know we're building this rest in winter then allows you to be able to pace the surge that's happening in the spring and so and you come into alignment with yourself and so you're more present to yourself and so the summer yes can sort of flow more there's this lovely um ordering that's going on yeah and then next we from this yes place, we have the changing of the momentum.

The metaphorical leaves start to turn as we enter into the inner autumn. And the practice that you speak about in Love Your Cycle is to sit in the stew, to let yourself be cooked and to hold yourself as you as you face yourself in in autumn I really loved this season because I felt more in myself because you know the summer energy I think that was the hardest one for me because I felt too yeah took me a long time to embody that but the autumn energy I there is a disturbance because you're coming off a high and you're coming off a sort of I can conquer the world and then suddenly there's a moment where you go maybe I can't conquer the world after all. It's just a vulnerability. It's just punctured a

little, which is very healthy. And it pulls you into yourself. And that pulling into myself and coming into the sort of depth of me, what we're calling sitting in the stew of myself, I felt as a kind of drop into a deeper gear. Like I found a deeper gear in myself and that gear gave me more sort of, I want to say, grunt in the system, like determination and focus that would come in. Those are my personal experiences of dropping into that because the autumn opens you to way more complexity. You really feel more of yourself. You're just kind of simpler in the summer because you're not, you simpler in the solar because you're

not in you know you can't your focus is out of the world and suddenly your focus is with yourself and you start to sort of really sense more of your needs and your feelings and there's just more complexity also you're becoming more sensitive again to the world in a different way. And, but yeah, so there's that complexity. But it was this thing of dropping into myself that I used to felt it always brought this feeling of determination. Yeah, and that I could take on difficult things yeah if you want to grow up and become wise

hang out in your inner autumn just hang out there you know sit in the stew I'll share an experience of my recent autumnal affairs which illustrate what's a little bit of what's possible with this is so I was in a conflict in a relationship with someone and I was feeling very strong feelings about it. And had I been moving at pace, what I probably would have done is said some really hurtful things to this person, and probably broken the relationship or at least put a darn good dent in it and found, you know, that relationship could have been really badly ruined. And this practice of sitting in the stew, you know, which is very much connected to cycle awareness, because I was practicing cycle awareness, I was really aware of the strength of the feelings I was having. And I could catch myself between the feeling and the action

and hold myself right there, kind of pause in that place and just let myself feel what I was feeling and I didn't do this for a moment, I did this on and off over a number of days through my inner autumn. Instead of acting and saying things, I just felt what I was feeling. And what's happened is I have, firstly, I'm inside myself. So I'm very connected to what I'm feeling. That's one of the gifts it's given me. I'm not like whisked off in the story and the drama of it. I'm actually feeling the impact of this conflict in my being, which is, although painful, a very good thing that I'm with myself.

I haven't abandoned myself, and the other thing that's happening is I'm getting all kinds of insights into, oh, that's interesting, that's, that's what's coming up for me in response to that, and oh, that's what's, you know, I'm seeing my patterns, I'm seeing my beliefs, you, creating destruction, playing out the old story, we actually pause at the fork in the road and we hang out in the stew long enough that we can actually make a choice, you know, which way am I going to go with this? And so then it becomes very creative. Yeah, I'm just thinking how generative sitting in the stew is it is uh extraordinary that image of finding yourself at the fork and you have a choice to go down the historical route or there's another path show itself but you've got to hold the tension, yeah, holding the tension, that's it.

And it might be that the course you take is just one percent different to the one you would have done, and then maybe the next cycle it's one percent more, and the next cycle is one percent more, and before you know it your life is in a, moving in a different direction, but it's not, they're not necessarily big moments these are they like they can be like do you know what I'm I'm gonna wait two minutes before I say that and then you say it slightly differently yeah it's over time how it works you over time I think that's such a good point Sophie it is these incremental changes yeah great whistle stop tour I enjoyed that obviously to hear more about these practices and the powers of the inner seasons and how to love them I really recommend exploring this new

course so you can access love your cycle at redschool.net forward slash love and you'll also be guided through a practice by alexandra and sharni to take your own journey through your inner seasons so go for it love your cycle thank you so much you two this has been amazing i've had so much fun today and i've talked about elvis more than i thought i ever would so pretty great elvis in the menstrual cycle it's a new thing it's the title of this podcast oh Sophie it was a pure delight talking today really actually very deeply satisfying. Yeah, it has just reminded me once again how much I love the menstrual cycle and how much I long for other people to feel the richness and the resource of knowing their cycle and living cyclically. quickly yeah thank you for listening thanks for joining us as always get in touch with me if there are any themes you'd love us to explore anything to do with the menstrual cycle or menopause you can

get in touch with me at sophie at redschool.net. And if you'd like to explore our new course, Love Your Cycle, that's available at redschool.net forward slash love. All right, see you next time. And until then, keep living life according to your own brilliant rhythm.