The Menstruality Podcast

Today it’s our great pleasure to be joined by Chloé Zhao. Chloé is an academy award winning filmmaker, and amongst many accolades, Chloé is the first Woman of Colour to have won an academy award for best director for her film Nomadland.
In this conversation, Chloé chats with Alexandra and Sjanie about how menstrual cycle awareness has shaped her creative process, including how she worked with the wisdom of her menstrual cycle to create and direct her most recent film, Hamnet, which received eight Oscar nominations.
When Chloé turned thirty seven years old, she started to get menstrual cramps for the first time. Although it wasn’t comfortable, she felt something important was coming to life within her. This coincided with what she lovingly calls a ‘midlife crisis’ that ultimately led her to discover the practice of menstrual cycle awareness, which she says helped her to learn a language that her body had forgotten to speak.
We explore:
Intuition as our greatest currency, and how becoming more aware of our menstrual cycles prepares the body to be a vessel to receive deep intuitive knowing. 
The cyclical advice that Chloe has for all young filmmakers about the importance of wintering, and the power of seemingly non-productive work of rest, tending to your inner soil, and composting (even in the middle of a film set!).
How the premenstrual and menstrual phases of the cycle have taught Chloe to embody creative death and rebirth, and how this played out in the creation of Hamnet.
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Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love
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The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [email protected]
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Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Chloé Zhao: @chloezhao - https://www.instagram.com/chloezhao

As we enter our early forties, we step into a new life phase with a very different atmosphere and tone. We’re shifting into a new paradigm, often accompanied by changes in our menstrual cycles and ourselves, some of which may be startling or very tricky to manage.
Brain fog, memory issues, irregular cycles, heavy periods - the list goes on. You might notice that you have less tolerance for stress, tire more easily, and that your trusty sleep pattern isn’t quite so trusty anymore.
Today I’m chatting with Alexandra and Sjanie about how the practice of menstrual cycle awareness can be a vital source of support as we navigate these challenging years. 
Sjanie shares generously about her own experience of perimenopause, or as she calls it, the autumn of the menstruating years; from experiencing new levels of love, to reckoning with childhood trauma, and how her recommitment to the fundamentals of cycle awareness has supported her. 
Whether you’re experiencing the psycho‐spiritual shift in the years running up to menopause, or you’re supporting women and folks in the thick of it - perhaps your clients, family members. friends or colleagues - we hope this conversation helps to plug you into the practice of menstrual cycle awareness as a vital perimenopause resource.

We explore:
How to practice menstrual cycle awareness when your cycle is very irregular and how to claim your rest, even when you don’t know when your next period is coming.
What is at work on the psycho-spiritual level in the forties, and how the lens of the ‘quickening’ can help to make sense of the challenges of these years. 
How Sjanie has navigated her trauma healing process in perimenopause, and the importance of community support in this life phase. 
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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 [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

Today we’re replaying one of our most popular episodes -  a frank and feisty chat about one of the hot topics in our community - premenstrual and menopausal RAGE.
Have you ever been driving in your car and felt compelled to wind the windows up and actually roar because you felt so wildly angry on day 24? 
Or, if you’re navigating menopause, have you experienced your own ‘burn-the-house-down’ moment when your fury threatened to destroy everything you’ve built so far in your life?
What is going on with this rage? Why are so many of us feeling it? And what is it trying to tell us? 
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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 [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

This episode is the first of a four-part series exploring the common challenges of each of the four cycle phases or inner seasons of the menstrual cycle, and Alexandra and Sjanie are going to reframe these challenges as meaningful limits that support us to access the power of each phase.
This first episode in the series is the inner spring, preovulation cycle phase and we’re looking at the challenge of anxiety, overwhelm, and scattered focus. And as the outer seasons unfold here in the UK, we’ll we continue with an exploration of the limits and challenges of the inner summer, autumn and winter. 
Through our personal challenges, and stories from the community, we explore how the limits of inner spring help you to access the big powers of this cycle phase, including play, innocence and enthusiasm. 
Above all, this series is an exploration of how the challenges you experience in your menstrual cycle aren't necessarily problems to fix, but can also be seen as meaningful boundaries that actually enable the transformative work of each cycle phase.

We explore:
The key practice to support inner spring challenges: making space and time when you’re coming out of menstruation to cherish your sensitive nature. 
The deep river at work in the menstrual cycle each month as our energy rises towards ovulation and descends as we head towards menstruation, and how this gives rise to the limits of each cycle phase.

What the challenges and limits of inner spring can teach us about what we need at the beginning of everything; relationships, jobs, creative projects and anything new we’re embarking on.
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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 [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

Today we’re exploring how the practice of menstrual cycle awareness can help us to stay engaged, resilient and resourced as we meet the challenges of today’s world. 
Our guest is the brilliant Dr. Cre Dye who is the Menstruality Justice and Inclusion Educator at Red School. Cre has served her local, national, and international communities with heart, mind and body activism for over twenty-five years as a mental health therapist, yoga teacher/trainer and university professor.
Together we practiced deep listening to a now-famous speech from one of the most powerful voices of love in our world today, the Sikh activist and lawyer Valarie Kaur. In the speech she asks: what if this darkness isn’t the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? 
In the emergent and far-reaching conversation that followed, we chatted about what it means to sit within the generative darkness of the womb, Valarie’s birthing and labour analogies and how they can guide us in dark times, and how the different phases - especially the premenstrual phase - of the menstrual cycle can grow our capacity to be with discomfort.
We explore:
The importance of using our imagination to romanticise, and how the menstrual, inner winter cycle phase can support us to rest and restore ourselves, so that we can step back into action with renewed energy and vision.
How our premenstrual cycle phase shows us that we heal where we are loved, how to grow our capacity to be with discomfort, and how to hold the tension where there is challenge and difference. 
What we can learn from Black feminists like Toni Morrison, bell hooks and Audre Lourde about how to cultivate resilience in times of crisis, and how white women have a particular role to play in meeting the challenges at play in the world. 
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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 [email protected]
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Dr Cre Dye - @credyeyoga - https://www.instagram.com/credyeyoga