The Menstruality Podcast

Today we’re continuing our journey into traditional and indigenous womb wisdom, by exploring African earth-based teachings about the womb as a temple. Our guest and guide is Chanana McGarry, who is a Medicine Woman as well as a certified Fertility Awareness & Sexual Health Educator. She’s been exploring how to bridge ancient wisdom and modern science for two decades, helping people to navigate their sexual health with clarity, sovereignty, and reverence for their body’s innate wisdom and power.
Chanana is a direct descendant of South African Mujaji Rain Queens, and her ground-breaking work is also inspired by her paternal lineage of medicine women in Botswana. In our conversation she shares what she has learned from sitting with her elders, tracing her lineage back over hundreds of years to matrilineal communities who understood women’s bodies as holders of magic.
The womb wisdom teachings that have long existed across the globe, transcending culture and location, including the traditional feminine wisdom technology of mothers giving their daughters river stones, when they came of age, so they could track their own fertility.

We explore:
How two unplanned pregnancies initiated Chanana into fertility awareness and connecting to ancestral womb wisdom. 
Cervical fluid as the secret language of your womb and the importance of learning your own patterns.
The womb as a portal - the place where invisible things come into existence; ideas, desires, and visions; the place where we create everything, from babies, to businesses to the lives we dream of. 
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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 info@redschool.net
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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
Chanana McGarry: @wombliteracynow - https://www.instagram.com/wombliteracynow/

Just like our physical, emotional and mental energy, our erotic energy also ebbs and flows through the menstrual cycle month. Today we’ve invited the brilliant psychotherapist and somatic sex therapist Carly Mountain back to the podcast to explore the connection between the womb and our erotic cycles. Today Carly guides us on a journey through the inner seasons of the menstrual cycle to explore the erotic challenges and gifts of each phase. 
Carly has recently released a new book called Untamed Pleasure, which is a treasure trove for anyone wanting to experience more sexual freedom and pleasure. 
We chat about many of the beautiful teachings from the book, including; how to manage protective parts that come up around around sex, how we can’t produce sex hormones and stress hormones at the same time, the power and sensitivity of the cervix, perimenopause sex, untamed aging and how to access more pleasure in every stage of life.

We explore:
Why it can really help to take orgasm off the table, and focus instead on sensation and pleasure to relieve pressure and change the erotic landscape we’re exploring.
How to cultivate your connection to your cervix, to deepen the sensation, move through numbness, and awaken more pleasure, and why it’s vital to move slowly and take our time.
How the experience of eros can shift as we enter midlife.
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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 info@redschool.net
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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
Carly Mountain: @carly_mountain - https://www.instagram.com/carly_mountain

Today we’re having a fascinating conversation with the woman who pioneered the role of intimacy co-ordinator in TV, film, opera and theatre. Ita O’Brien has worked on numerous high-profile productions including Sex Education on Netflix, and I May Destroy You on the BBC, and is the founder of the Intimacy on Set guidelines which have been widely adopted across the industry, advocating for safe, fair and dignified work.
Ita recently took all of her learnings and experience, and she’s shared them in her brilliant book, Intimacy: A field guide to finding connection and feeling your deep desires. Today we explore the vital role that an intimacy co-ordinator plays, and why safe, honouring and real-life depictions of sex on screen are so vital. 
We also draw on Ita’s wisdom around listening to our bodies in order to create deeper intimacy with ourselves and others, the need for all of us to understand the cyclical anatomy of female arousal and why we need more women writers creating truthful intimate scenes for women and people who menstruate.
We explore:
Ita’s experience of being an intimacy co-ordinator on trailblazing scenes involving period sex in Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You.

The importance of true consent, and how to access the power of no in intimacy, so that we can find our true yes.

The archetype of the enchantress and how she can support our intimacy explorations as we approach, move through and enter our third act post menopause.
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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 info@redschool.net
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Ita O’Brien: @itaobrien_intimacycoordinator: https://www.instagram.com/itaobrien_intimacycoordinator/

Although the inner summer of the menstrual cycle has a reputation for being easy-breezy, for some of us, this can be a real hotspot in the cycle month. 
So, this episode is for you if the ovulatory cycle phase is intense or overwhelming, or you feel a sense of pressure to show up and ‘get shit done’ inside an already over-full life. It’s also for you if inner summer brings a sense of being all dressed up for the party, with nowhere to go if you have lots of creative, sexual or social energy but you don’t know where to direct it, or if ovulation brings disconnection and grief due to challenges with trying to conceive.
Through our personal stories as well as generous shares from the Red School community, we explore the challenges of inner summer, and how to reframe them as meaningful limits that support us to access the power of the ovulatory phase. We also explore the cyclical self care practice which can support us to claim and show ourselves exactly as we are in inner summer. 

We explore:
Sjanie’s ongoing journey with visibility in inner summer
What Alexandra has discovered about the libratory power of limits, as a post-menopausal women.
How to grow the emotional muscles of allowing more and more of yourself to exist and be seen in the world, as you truely are.

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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 info@redschool.net
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

The spiritual power of the cycle and the womb is core to Red School’s teachings and offerings, and we’ve explored this topic on the podcast through the lens of many different faith, spiritual, traditional and indigenous traditions including; Maori womb wisdom with Hinewai Waitoa, Andean womb wisdom teachings with Dr Cynthia Ingar, Anishinabe cyclical wisdom with Asha Frost, and ancient African womb and birth technologies with Latham Thomas, as well as a conversation with Meggan Watterson about relevant mystical christian texts. 
Today we’re exploring how the Islamic faith reveres the womb, with Holistic Menstrual Health Educator, Womb Steaming Therapist, and author of ‘Peaceful Periods: Holistic Womb Care for Teens’, Chantal Blake.
Chantal recently gave a learning session in Red School’s graduate community, The Hive, and at the start of this session, she asked a question which moved me deeply; “how does your womb impact your spiritual reality and practice?” Many of the community said that no one had ever asked them that before, and perhaps the same is true for you? So, as an extension of Chantal’s beautiful question, this conversation is an invitation to you and participants of all faith and cultural backgrounds to contemplate the wisdom of the womb as sacred. 
We explore: 
The ancient, worldwide history of womb steaming and how it can support womb and pelvic health. 

The Arabic word raḥim—meaning womb—shares its root with raḥma, or mercy, and in Islam, the womb is honored not only as a physical center of creation, but as a symbol of divine compassion and relationality and a vessel of divine mystery. 

How our wombs support us to gestate our creative ideas, and Chantal’s experience of working with her womb to birth her work projects, including her book. 
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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 info@redschool.net
---
Social media:
Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.school
Sophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy
Chantal Blake: @honouredwomb - https://www.instagram.com/honoredwomb