TONTS. - Matrescence Festival with Jane Hardwicke-Collings & Mietta

Episode Date: November 2, 2025

Welcome to first episode of TONTS Season 5 Matrescence Festival edition, join us as we look back through our Melbourne festival from March 2025. In this episode, we experience both Maidenhood and Sagescence, as we relish in the wisdom of Jane Hardwick-Collings and the music of Mietta.Jane Hardwicke-Collings Jane Hardwicke Collings is a post menopausal grandmother. She was an intensive care and operating theatre nurse, and then a homebirth midwife for 30 years. Now her work focuses on teaching the Women’s Mysteries and writing about them. She gives workshops on mother and daughter preparation for menstruation, the spiritual practice of menstruation, and the sacred and shamanic dimensions of pregnancy, birth and menopause. Jane founded and runs The School of Shamanic Womancraft, an international Women’s Mystery School.Mietta is a soulful indie folk singer songwriter and in a season of emergence. With deep connection to her home roots and her community she is also an education researcher, learning skills mentor, facilitator and designer of youth wellbeing and expressive writing workshops.For more from Jane, you can head to: https://www.janehardwickecollings.com where you can find her many publications.For more of Mietta's music, you can find her on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1SHQyvwWBmN2EU2jg9O53uFor more from Claire, you can head to: https://www.clairetonti.com/ or her instagram @clairetontiFor more from Lizzy, you can head to: https://www.lizzyhumber.com/ or her instagram @lizzyhumberAnd to keep up to date with past and upcoming Matrescence festivals you can follow @matrescencefestival on instagram or go to https://www.matrescencefestival.co.ukOriginal theme music: Free by Claire TontiEditing: Maisie JGSocial Media: Surabhi Pradhan Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which I create, speak and write today. There are Wondry people of the Kulin Nation and pay my respect to their elders past, present and merging, acknowledging that the sovereignty of this land has never been seeded. I want to acknowledge the people who have given birth on this land, raised children on this land for generations connected to country and spirit. Hello, welcome back to Tontz, a very special edition this time round of season five. I'm Claire Tonti. And I'm Lizzie Humper and we are the co-founders of Metrescent's Festival.

Listen along with us as we share live episodes from the Metrescent Festival in Australia that took place across two days in March 2025. So in this episode, we're going to introduce you to the amazing Jane Hardwick Collins. We were so honoured to welcome Jane to the Metressants Festival. Jane is a proud grandmother, mother and passionate advocate for reclaiming feminine wisdom and rights of passage. She is the founder of the School of Shamanic Womancraft and the carrier of the shamanic midwifery lineage. Jane's works spans menstruation, birth, menopause and the sacred cycles of life. She is an agent of the goddess, devoted to healing birth, empowering women,

and reconnecting us to the mysteries of the feminine. So we're going to dive straight in, and it's going to be followed by a really beautiful song by a musician and storyteller called Mieta. And then join us at the end, and we'll have a little bit more chat about the wonderful Jane. So enjoy. Thank you for that introduction, and wow to Natasha.

What a blessing, what an amazing gathering. Thank you all for being here, and thank you for welcoming me. I have a story, and my story is to remind us where metrescence fits in the context of our lives. Many of you know this, including those of you who are at my workshop about rites of passage yesterday, and you all know this, so if this is the first time you've heard it, it's simply a remembering. So take yourself back to your maternal grandmother. Maybe you can visualize her, maybe you never knew her, but she's in you and you were in her. When you arrived into the ecosystem of your red thread, your mother line, you did so via your grandmother's womb, where you spent the second half of your grandmother's pregnancy of your mother.

In your mother, her baby girls, ovary. We were there in our mother's body body. in our most primer material, our premature egg self. Likely for decades, we absorbed the strengths and the traumas of our mother line until we were the egg that ripened, ovulated and was conceived, and then we gestated in our mother's womb, a garden in the red thread ecosystem, and finally we left her body when we were born. and then suckling at her breast or fed in her arms, absorbing everything from her. And that completes our first rite of passage.

And that becomes our birth imprint. Our birth imprint includes our conception, the pregnancy our mother had of us, our birth and our postnatal experience. And our birth imprint stays with us forever, affecting us every day. And this begins the first season of our lives, the spring season of our lives, our maidenhood. Next, we develop our attachment style,

and that informs every relationship we experience forever. And the family we arrive into creates the environment that we learn as the way. Our childhood experiences teach us the tactics we will use, for the rest of our lives to get our needs met. And then comes puberty. Adolescence. And for girls, Menarch, the first period.

A most informative rite of passage that teaches us how our family and culture values womanhood and therefore how we need to behave to be accepted as a woman in our family and in our culture. Our menstrual cycle begins, and we learn about how to live as a cyclical being, or we don't learn that. At some point, we experience our rite of passage into our sexuality,

and this teaches us how to be a sexual being. The menstrual cycle teaches us how to live in a sustainable, healthy way, letting go of all that no longer serves us every bleeding part of the cycle, and growing a new version of ourselves, healing and growing every cycle. Or maybe we take the pill and turn it all off and put ourselves into a limbo land where we may or may not notice that we feel different.

Sometimes we meet our mate when we're on the pill and when we go off the pill we realize he's not the right man. But we likely think there's something wrong with us again or still. When we're on the pill, we are attracted to a different kind of man than we would be when we would be when we were not on the pill. When you're on the pill, it's like a pseudo-pregnant state,

and we are attracted to a man, if you're heterosexual, obviously, that's like family, who will look after us. And when we're not on the pill, we are attracted to a man as different as possible to family because that increases the likelihood of survival of the egg plus sperm, the concepsis. At 25, we move from our spring, maiden season, into our summer, mother, creatrix life season, regardless of whether we have

babies or not. In our mother, creatrix years, we conceive, gestate, birth, and need to look after all manner of things besides humans, such as careers, businesses, projects, etc. And we are well and truly under the influence of estrogen and progesterone. our dominant sex hormones that with our other hormones enable our fertility. These hormones have us prioritise other people's needs over our own, especially our babies and children. Estrogen is known as the hormone of accommodation and self-sacrifice.

And progesterone is a mild sedative. So we are primed for ignoring our own needs and looking after or nurturing others and the things we've created that are important to us like careers and businesses, etc. And so this is where matrescence sits. After years of the menstrual cycle and figuring out how to behave to be accepted as a woman. And so metrescence, our becoming a mother, is influenced by everything that came before us, including our red thread, our mother line, our female generations, our birth, our childhood, our menarch, our first sexual experience, and our relationship with our menstrual cycle and our body, and of course, the culture.

So there are many things that experience, our experience of matressants. So of the culture, birth in a patriarchal culture in the modern Western world is dominated by fear, risk and driven by efficiency of time and money. The maternity care system is pretty much a monoculture with some strong weeds growing on the edges. Weeds like midwife group practices, birth centers, home births and the ultimate disruptor of obstetrics free birth. How we navigate and become a mother affects our baby,

our partner, our family, our community, and this can be joyful and often isn't. And our experiences of matressants actually prepare us with the teachings and self-awareness and experience we need to navigate our next rite of passage, the end of the summer life season and the beginning of our autumn life season at menopause, or as I have renamed it, sage essence,

the becoming a wise woman. Seagessence or menopause, which like adolescence and metrescence, involves neural pruning and increased neuroplasticity. And it transforms us into the next version of ourselves, where we are no longer fertile and our inclination shifts from looking after others to looking after ourselves, possibly for the first time in a our adult life. And this has a tendency to change everything. We spend our autumn years with our new hormone profile, which interestingly is very similar to our prepubescent levels of hormones. And our dominant sex hormone is testosterone, which has us grow whiskers, be outspoken, be primed for leadership and we have a tendency to care way less about what other people think of us and we have longer and stronger orgasms.

In our autumn life season we experience the harvest of our lives so far and find our mission. And then at 70 we move into our crone years, our winter life season, where we go slower and move more inward and become the wisdom keeper and the storyteller until we meet our final right of passage of death and there are seasons within each life season and this can be very helpful

in understanding where we are and giving us deeper meaning and understanding so divide each season by four however long it is to find the inner spring summer, autumn and winter of each life season. So, for example, I'm 66 and a half, and I'm in the winter of my autumn, and we'll shift into the spring of my winter at 70. So there are four phases within each of the life seasons that can help

you know where you're at. So in summary, metrescence is in the summer, our summer life season, the season of full bloom and fruiting when we get ripe. We are ripe and we are juicy and we are hot and we are very busy. Our experiences of metrescence are actually both a read-out of our mindset, our beliefs, attitudes and fears

and the culmination of our life thus far. I believe we have the birth we need to have to teach us what we need to learn about ourselves to take us to the next place on our life journey. And we can't get birth wrong. Our births are our teachers each time. And through our experience of matrescence, we become the mother we become,

one of the many faces of the goddess. Thank you. Next, I have someone to introduce to you, a very, very dear friend of mine, Oh, good, she's there backstage. Mieta. A musician and storyteller. Beautiful met, weaves together, music, narrative, and the landscapes that shape us.

I met her, and I met her mum first in the showers at Seven Sisters. And she said, you've got to meet my daughter. And she walked into the tent like a rainbow of sunshine. And we've just been such dear friends ever since. She is an intimate storyteller. her latest project when the water stills is going to be magical

not yet a mother but deeply connected to the wisdom and strength of women as a maiden meetta's presence is one of emergence leaning into the energy of those around her

let's give her a big round of applause before I sing this song which I think fits quite beautifully within the weave of this morning. This is a song called Eden and it's about the wisdom that my beautiful grandmother

shared with me ever since I was a little one. And that's the beautiful thing about metrescence in many ways is that we can learn from metrescence, we can learn among and with metrescence at any age, at any stage. And it's so amazing to see so many young women who are young women and young womb holders

who are before that stage of matressants, but also the little little ones who will learn so, so much just by being here in this space. So thank you, brave ones, for bringing your little little ones in here too so that they can learn, because we do. And this is a song of what I learned from my grandmother,

and it's called Eden, and it's about how in life there are many things that we can learn, and one of the deepest is that in life. There are seeds you can sow, or you can let weeds grow. it's up to you to choose how you wish to tend to that garden. taught me seeds you so take patience in the moments when you wait for life to grow well i waited crowded hours and i slept through lonely nights and i washed away this feeling with saltwater hope and time well i

I stood there at the altar. This is human fashion bowl. My heat is on fire. Oh, I've still got much to learn. Oh, I still got much to learn, oh. Oh, I still got much to learn, oh. Oh, I've still got much to learn, oh. It took harvest in her beauty

And in crops of hers you hoped That some seedling of her kindness And you would find a home An imitation, it sounds so simple But it's such a poor man's game To be grounded in your goodness It takes far than just a name Well, I stood there at me off

This is human's flesh and full And my heat is on fire Oh, I've still got much to learn Oh, I'm still dead, much too bad. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Ooh. And when birds home, welcome springtime, and winter's summer's counterpast,

Will you still be in your garden When your mind is laid to rest Will you still be in your garden Will you still be in your garden Will you still be in your garden When your mind is laid to rest When your mind is laid to rest Well, my grandma loves her garden

And she taught me Seeds you so Take patience in the moments When you wait below to grow. That was so moving. Her voice is incredible. Why did you feel cool to invite me Esther into this space?

Oh, that is such a great question, Lizzie. One, because her mere presence and the sound of her voice is connecting. So you immediately, just in witnessing her art, feel a deep sense of magic and community. I also really wanted to bring her in because I think it's important to see a maiden. And you could feel in the room that sense of people reflecting on who they were before they became a mother. So just in case people weren't aware, and I know Jane does talk about this,

like there's the maiden mother, Maga and Crone, those four archetypes of womanhood. and I'd never heard of them until a few years ago that it makes so much sense that we're kind of grieving our maiden when we move into motherhood in matressants and it's a normal rite of passage. So there was something so powerful about that. What did it make you think about when you're watching?

Oh, I love what you just said about craving maidenhood. And I also think culturally, I think we're taught that we're supposed to try and maintain our maidenhood and our like attractiveness and our, you know, this freedom and it feels like it's in direct conflict with these new responsibilities of being a mother and actually like jane and meetta made me think about stepping into motherhood as this next rite of passage and that all that i've learned through maidenhood can carry me through into motherhood and that i don't have to leave it behind it's about becoming something new emerging this sort

of spreading your wings as a butterfly emerging from the, you know, cocoon. The cocoon, I was going to say, keep that. Well, I think it starts the pewmer, doesn't it? And then it comes to the cocoon. This is a science podcast now, I'll agree with you, though. I mean, that's not so beautiful when Mietta writes her bio, she talks about emergence. And I actually, I wouldn't go back.

Would you go back to being madden if you could? No, I actually have a lot of shame. around myself as pre-motherhood. I feel like I've stepped into myself in a way that's very beautiful and I feel like I look back on myself with some shame and naivety. And I find it reassuring, I feel very in admiration of Mietta for like where she's standing at the moment. She has a lot of wisdom on her shoulders. And I loved what she said at the beginning around that it's so important for the maidens and also the children in the space to, to witness the Matressants Festival and the conversations that we shouldn't be doing that in isolation.

We shouldn't just be talking to each other as mothers. And I think possibly motherhood was missing from my trajectory in my maidenhood and understanding what it might mean to become a mother. I think I was looking forward and imagining it meant self-sacrifice, losing sense of identity, and I wasn't really looking forward to the responsibility of motherhood. and I know now that that's just some of the story. That's not all of the story.

I didn't see women who are mothers being spoken about in an empowering way. And I think, I hope metressence vessel is doing that better, showing us what motherhood can be, that we are complex beings. And yes, there is self-sacrifice. And Jane talking about the relationship to hormones was absolutely fascinating. I literally had a mind-blowing moment when she was talking about hormones and that estrogen is this self-sacrificing hormones and I look back to my 20s and I go, gosh, I just gave so much of everything to myself and my 30s. And I think now I'm starting to enter perimenopause.

I'm seeing how my hormones are shifting and how I'm making more time for myself, how I'm stepping into myself more. I'm excited about the next phase now that Jane talks about it with such positivity, you know, that sage essence is the next rite of passage. And I'm like, that's so cool that, you know, the longer, stronger orgasms. Yes, please. Stepping into our feminine power. Yes, please. The leadership. In the afternoon session that day, we had a workshop with Jane, and she spoke a lot about perimenopause and menopause. And I found it so refreshing. Because metrescence is one thing, but perimenopause and menopause is another thing. thing that we just are not talking enough about with each other early on in our maidenhood,

motherhood journeys. And they're so impactful. Jane spoke about women having babies into their 40s is not a new thing. But culturally, having our first babies in our late 30s, early 40s, is a new thing. And so we are experiencing perimenopause alongside our metressants, also alongside postnatal fatigue and we might be hitting menopause when our children are going through adolescence or even hitting menopause before they're in adolescence. So it's absolutely fascinating this massive combustion of emotion and hormones that are going on within each family microcosm. I just think it's absolutely fascinating and understanding our hormones and the impact it has on our relationships, on our relationships to the world, our feelings about

ourself is really empowering that we can make empowered, educated choices about that. Oh, completely. I really resonate with that idea of the veil of estrogen coming down when we hit perimenopause and that sense that when you have menarch, so your period, it kind of rises. And so you're just in this lovely giving phase where you're kind of, yeah, what is the word? You're almost kind of not numb. you're seeing the world through these rosy-colored glasses. Jane talks about being sedated, right?

That's the word I was looking for, sedated, yeah. In a mild sedative, progesterone's a mild sedative, and when the veil of estrogen rises, we wake up. Oh, no, when it lowers. She talks about the veil of estrogen lifting. Oh, I thought she was like, it rises over your eye. Maybe we should ask Jane on the show. It rises and covers your eyes when it's up.

And then doesn't it, like, the veil of it? estrogen slowly comes back down again. You can't see because this is an audio medium and I'm using my hand tapes. But it comes back down and then you suddenly see the world as it is. Yeah, I think both are true. That like your estrogen declines when you're entering perimenopause and menopause. So you are not controlled so much by that self-sacrificing hormone. So, but yeah, whether the veil is being lifted off your eyes or being removed down from your eyes,

Whichever image works for you. Yeah, go with whatever it's right for you at the time. But yeah, I totally agree. I was actually reflecting so much on the beauty. Yes, of Mieta and her music and the sense of wisdom that she sings about her grandmother in that song. Like that her grandmother has taught her so much in that garden. So I asked her to sing that song.

Because I think the wisdom of the grandmother is the magic of menopause. It's why we menopause. And I'm fascinated by how there's only five creatures on the planet that menopause. And they're all in the ocean, aren't they? Do you remember what they are? Yeah, let me see what Jane said. Let me see if I get them right. Orcas, gna whales.

So Jane said five creatures other than humans. So the whales, the beluga, the pilots, the orca, the narwhals and the tooth whales, all go through menopoles. and I think the theory around menopause is to do with, you know, what's your usefulness once you've passed your reproductive phase? Why are women kept around longer? Because menopause allows us to continue functioning longer. Women live longer. And it's around the grandmothers being the storykeepers, the generational wisdom. And Jane gives the example in the workshop that she was holding in the afternoon around pods of Wales and she says when there's a grandmother in the pod she is the leader of the pod and she kind of keeps everyone in line and passes on this generational

wisdom and she says when there is not a grandfather in the pod the pod goes to shit and they start tipping boats and the boys get a bit rambunctious and they're not very together as a family and when there's a grandmother in the pod, they thrive. And I just think that's absolutely fascinating that we should look to nature to understand our own matrilineal line. And one thing Jane said was like, what if the grandmothers were the leaders in human societies,

like, which I just think is a very beautiful, beautiful image. Although, with the caveat of, I don't feel our mothers and our grandmother's generations have been fully supported. So there's a lot of tension, I think, between the generations about what motherhood should look like, what feminism should look like. We're still working within this patriarchal confines of how we've educated women. So I think we have a responsibility as the current mothers to be supporting the generations

that come behind us, to stay in connection with their experiences, to keep learning and being porous but also to embrace our sage essence and our next years and hopefully we will be the grandmothers who lead oh that's so beautiful lizzie i totally agree it made me think that one of the reasons i love jane hardwick calling so much is that she embodies the kind of elder woman that i would want to be one day and you know that phrase you can't be or you can't see and that idea of being totally embodied, grounded in the earth, really present in the way that you live, in the way you articulate things when you speak to Jane. She says it exactly how she means it to come out.

There's no apology in her voice. There's this sense of this is who I am and I know this because of the years that I've spent working with my cycle. And I think that that is a really crucial piece. She's also a menstrual educator and she teaches, and this blew my mind too, that idea that every cycle we are meeting each version of ourselves over and over and over again until eventually at menopause we become ourselves fully ourselves and that i think only comes as you said often there's been generations previously who haven't had that education or opportunity

and instead have kind of been well not kind of have been shamed for their period and carry a lot of stigma, a sense that femininity is something to hide, which is not their fault. It's the patriarchal system we live in. So seeing women in their 70s and 80s who are embodied in that way is so inspiring to me. And yeah, I would, yeah, she's who I want to be when I grow up. I totally, like, I just can't stop talking about her. Whenever I'm sharing information, I'm like, I met this person, Jane Hardwick-Wallens, and she said this. And I I just have all these gorgeous nuggets of things that have really left me thinking. At one point she said, menopause is the first conscious rice of passage that we have in

womanhood. And I think back to getting my first period, I have very little recollection of that. I felt quite embarrassed by it. Motherhood, I didn't know the word matressants when I became a mother. That's why when I found it, I was like, this is such an empowering word. this makes so much sense, and if only I had understood that before. And so I think with entering perimenopause, and menopause, I completely agree. It's the first conscious rites of passage, and maybe that will always be the case.

But maybe if we educate and talk about it throughout the generations, if we hold more events like Matresson's Festival and we have a group of women in the room and children, of all ages and experiences, maybe that shared wisdom will support us better through those transitions. I think it just makes me really grateful every day that I get to work in this space and meet all kinds of different women and learn from them in the way that I've learnt from Yeda, from you, from Jane, from all of the amazing guests that we've had come to Matrescent's Festival.

I just, I feel like every time I hear any of them speak, I gain this sense of, of the different shades and colors of womanhood. And I have so many different models for the way I could grow into myself more. And I understand myself more because I'm seeing that there are so many different ways of being a woman or a person in the world and that the knowledge that was lost is being rekindled. So it's not that we're reinventing the wheel. It's that for a lot of reasons.

that knowledge has been covered over, hidden away, and the more that we uncover it, it's like for opening up present after present. It's so fascinating and teaches you so much. And then ultimately, we both have daughters. For me, so much of that is wanting her to grow up in a world where she doesn't have to go to therapy and undo an enormous amount of shame and stigma around her cycles. And I'm sure there'll be things she'll go to therapy about. that wanting her to know that her body isn't broken,

that it's doing what it needs to do to bring her fully into her sage essence at the end where she can lead. Yeah. All right. Well, we've talked for ages. We could keep talking and fangirling for a very long time. We have so much we could say about Jane. Yeah, let us know.

We'll have a coffee sometime and tell you more. Actually, I played this episode to my creative journaling group recently, and it was so interesting watching them listen to Jane's talk and you could see their mind's opening and particularly around we choose a different kind of man when we're on the pill, but you can see a lot of people going, huh.

Jane was talking about, later she spoke about 40% of divorces happen when women hit 50 and go through menopause or around menopause. And that's often because, you know, The breakdown in, like, you know, self-sacrifice stops being such a thing and you start empowering yourself to what you actually want. So, yeah, I just thought that was absolutely fascinating and I've really enjoyed sharing some of these episodes with people and seeing their reactions to some of the knowledge that's being shared.

All right, we should go. We've got another podcast to record. We'll see you back for episode 10, where we're going to be coming back with Dr. Winning Orchard. And I'll just remind you, for more from Metresson's Festival, you can head to matressancetable.com and matressensestable.co.com for the UK for the UK version. I'm clairetonte.com on the website or at Clairetonty on Instagram. And Lizzie Humber is at lizziehumber.com and at Lizzie Humber on Instagram. All right. We'll talk to you in episode 10. Bye.