The Menstruality Podcast

It’s world menopause awareness month and today we’re sharing a conversation that Alexandra and Sjanie had with the brilliant writer, international speaker and transformational coach Bethany Webster a couple of Octobers ago for the Wise Power retreat, all about healing the ‘Motherwound’ in menopause. 
At Red School we’re busy preparing our Spiritual Power of Menopause conversation series which is starting next week, as well as Alexandra and Sjanie’s popular free three-day menopause event: How to Awaken The Power of Menopause, which will also serve as an introduction to the Menopause: The Great Awakener course. It all starts on October 12th and you can register for free at redschoolmenopause.com.
Bethany sat down with me and very generously shared her story of perimenopause healing and transformation for the upcoming Spiritual Power of Menopause series, and her conversation is coming up on day five, called: Perimenopause - A Defiance in Service to Love… 
But for now, let’s hear from her about how her personal understanding of the Motherwound impacted her in the approach to menopause, how menopause can help us to make peace with our mothers, and how to cultivate a meaningful inner mothering practice.
We explore:
How Bethany's personal understanding of the Motherwound is impacting her in the approach to menopause, inspiring her to negotiate a new relationship with power and truth. 

How menopause can help us to make peace with our mothers and release the residues of the messages we unconsciously received from them.

How to start the work of healing the Motherwound at menopause, and cultivate a meaningful inner mothering practice.
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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
Bethany Webster: @themotherwound - https://www.instagram.com/themotherwound

It’s the first day of world menopause month, and we’re continuing to re-write the cultural narrative around menopause, by exploring the connection between psycho-spiritual initiation of menopause and leadership. Especially the kind of emergent, relational, responsive leadership that is needed in our world today. 
In Alexandra and Sjanie’s book, Wise Power, they share that menopause is a training ground in power, where we can learn how to lead from a place of vulnerable humility, holding the tension with complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity. What could be more needed in the coming decade which will demand new levels of creativity, courage and leadership from us all? 

We explore:
The menopause shadow work that enables us to fully face our inner critics, so that we can own our strengths and our blind spots. 

How to navigate the dark night of the soul that can come in menopause without getting lost to bitterness and resentment, and whilst staying open to life in all it’s messy fullness.

How menopause ultimately helps us to unashamedly love what we’re good at, recognize our limits and blind spots and liberate ourselves to live and share our unique gifts
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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
---
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 flipping the script and replaying an interview from a couple of years ago where Sjanie interviewed Sophie about her experience of bringing cycle awareness to the world of business. 
When she’s not hosting this podcast, Sophie is a business coach and strategist. She brings two decades of business experience as a Yoga teacher, filmmaker, non-profit communications director and women’s network founder to support business leaders to thrive. 
Today she shares how her own menstrual cycle awareness practice transformed all aspects of her life, including her approach to work, and how she weaves cyclical wisdom into her strategy work. She shares the three core challenges that she sees entrepreneurs facing, and cyclical approaches to experiencing more ease, confidence, creativity and aligned expansion in business.

We explore:
The wild night of pre-menstrual rage that changed everything for Sophie; her career, her country of residence and her relationship.
What late night breast-feeding dreaming taught Sophie about how to run a thriving, sustainable, impactful business.
Why we all need to connect more to the 99.9% of life on earth that is cyclical, rather than the 0.01% of human culture that is largely governed by an all-too-linear and rational  linear obsession with non-stop productivity. 
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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

Last week we gathered in person with twenty-eight of the graduates of the Menstruality Leadership Programme for an in-person retreat, where we focused on healing our experiences of menarche - our first periods. 
In today’s conversation I asked Alexandra and Sjanie to share one of the powerful teachings from the retreat, which is a new way of understanding menstrual cycle awareness as a spiritual life path, by seeing the different key experiences in the menstruality life arc as sacred sites.
We explore how the key initiatory experiences of menstruality - menarche, menstruation, matrescence (if we’re able to or choose to have children) and menopause - as sacred sites which have been desecrated by hundreds of years of the menstrual cycle being denigrated, ignored, dismissed and shamed. And we take a metaphorical walk through each site, dreaming into how we can each re-sanctify them in our own lives, and how this ripples out into the world.

We explore:
Menstrual cycle awareness as the key way to resanctify the sacred site of menstruation.
The conversation that each of us must have with our wise selves in menopause, as a way to declare the sacredness and meaning within our experience.
Healing your menarche experience, by finding the grit in the oyster shell of your experience around your first period, and tracking how it has become the pearl of your calling. 
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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

When Lella Sá was seven years old, she learned to meditate with her grandmother, which was the beginning of a spiritual journey that has guided her through multiple expressions of her calling; from modeling, to event management, to biographical counselling, to motherhood, to running a Waldorf school. She now serves  as a culture change and productivity consultant focused on what she calls Matrifocial Leadership. 
Today we explore how Lella’s in-depth practice of menstrual cycle awareness influences and inspires her work supporting women to lead through Maitrifocal practices that honour life. We chat about what could become possible if we all embodied this life-affirming form of leadership, personally and collectively, as well as some of the obstacles that get in the way. 
We explore:
How to work in sync with our biology, our biography and our responsibility as humans living in this epoch, by embodying the wisdom of ‘life before performance’.
How cycle awareness and aligning with natural rhythms helps us to cultivate a new, healthy relationship with time, by using our bodies as leadership infrastructure.
How indigenous cyclical wisdom can teach us about the practice of sufficiency, which is vital to putting life at the centre of our work, and to work through stewardship and collaboration instead of domination and competition. 
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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
Lella Sà: @lellasa - https://www.instagram.com/lellasa