The Power of Periods with Hayley Anderson
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A beautiful conversation with fertility awareness educator, menstrual cycle mentor and birth story listener Hayley Anderson.
Hayley offers insights into menstrual cycles and post-birth experiences and we talk through many aspects of our menstrual cycles. Hayley’s cycle and fertility education is steeped in holistic awareness of our bodies and minds and understanding of our hormones.
Talking points include:
Listening to our bodies as we move through different cycles of menstruation
Patriarchal views of periods
Getting rid of the patriarchal PMS story - angry, discerning women are needed
Filling a gap in society of really seeing and hearing women
Ovulatory power and embracing powerful energy
Exploring ambiguous loss and the menstrual cycle
Cycle tracking
Bringing your hormones with you in what you’re doing
How each part of the cycle bleeds into another
The need to be witnessed and received post birth
Not losing yourself in motherhood and holding boundaries
Cultivating motherhood/parenthood
Lack of centring the mother’s experience in society and what we can do about it
Finding your village
Transcript
[0:00:32] Karla: This week, I spoke to Hayley Anderson, a fertility awareness educator, menstrual cycle mentor, and birth story listener. Talking about changes made me think about menstruation and the changes it brings throughout our lives. I've tracked my cycle for over a decade now, and I still found so much out about menstrual cycles and hormones in this episode. It's really not to be missed if you menstruate. What I loved is that Haley's practice is steeped in holistic awareness of our bodies and minds, but also huge understanding of hormones. I met Haley online through a course we both did while I was actually living in the Netherlands, and it turns out that she lives very near my home in Devon, in fact, about ten minutes away from my house.
It's a very small world, so when I came back, I couldn't wait to meet her in real life and have this conversation. Haley talks us through how we can listen to our bodies as we move through the different cycles of menstruation. What we need to let go of in terms of the patriarchal views of periods like that's still really significant in culture, definitely in the UK, we talk about this a lot throughout and how women like her are filling the gap in society.
What's missing a lot of the time is a place for women to share their stories and be heard. And a lot of Haley's practice really resonated with me as we both cultivate spaces for women to be heard. We recorded in Haley's polytunnel at dusk, and many birds joined us, one particularly noisy blackbird at 1.2. I didn't cut the bird noise. I decided to leave the bird song in the recording because I think it's beautiful, and I thought I would just give you a warning because they do get quite loud at dusk.
So I began by asking Haley about how she got into menstrual and fertility awareness from her career as an architect. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you. Why don't you start off by telling us a bit about yourself?
[0:02:24] Hayley: So I'm Hayley, and I live in South Devon, and we're right now sat in the polytunnel part of the herb garden that I tend and where I grow medicinal herbs, mostly for women's health. So I'm a sensory herbalist. I'm a fertility awareness method teacher. I'm a menstrual cycle awareness mentor, fertility empowerment mentor, and a birth story listener. Those are the official titles, and I'm a mummer to a newly three year old daughter.
This is the space where I offer my one-to-one work consultations with people, and they have dreams of holding group experiences here. That's where you can see that slightly in progress construction area. So the garden here was set up with the intention of supporting women through transitions connected to their menstrual cycle and fertility. That's broadly my field. Yeah, my field.
[0:03:35] Karla: And tell me a bit more about your background, like where you grew up and how you came to be in Devon.
[0:03:42] Hayley: That's quite a long story. A long bitty story because we moved around quite a lot. So I was born the first of five siblings. I was born in South Wales, and we lived there on and off. We lived there. Then we moved to Northamptonshire, then we moved back to Wales, and then we moved to Huntington, near Huntington in Cambridge, where I had my teenage years, like my secondary school years. And then as soon as I could, I moved to London.
When I was university age. Well, I went to what I call soft London. I went to Kingston upon Thames. I didn't going from a rural village. We always lived in villages similar to the village I live in now in Devon. Similar sort of size, on the edge of being rural, a flash of suburban mixed with rural. So London was a bit too much of a step for an 18 year old me. So I went to Kingston, where I studied architecture, and the architecture took me between London and Sheffield.
Finally, when I was 27, after a sort of fully committed career in architecture, I moved to Devon to do a course in Horticulture. And I didn't intend to stay here, but eight years, nearly nine years later, I'm still here. Very much here. Definitely very rooted here now. Too many plants to uproot!
[0:05:21] Karla: Okay, so you went from architecture to horticulture to herbalism, is that right? How did that come about? That sounds like a big change.
[0:05:35] Hayley: Yeah, in some ways it's a big change. From the outside, I can see how it looks like a big change, but for me, inside, it was actually more a sort of honing of the things that I was interested in. There were bits in between those jumps as well. So that's the sort of, I guess, the sort of vocational leaps that I made. But the personal journey probably links it up. So where to begin? Architecture and I were never a great fit. The profession of architecture and I talking about the profession of architecture, we were never a good fit.
[0:06:16] Karla: Why?
[0:06:18] Hayley: I'm incredibly intuitive, sensitive and spontaneous. I am very organized and I am creative and I can draw. So it worked for a while, but there are things about who I am and how I operate and how my body thrives the environment. And we talked in our preamble that architecture, I see it as the patriarchal heartland. It's such a power over culture, and it's such a production, heavy culture, and it's all about making better.
It's all about an idealistic idea of how it could be or should be. There's a lot of should be’s. There's a lot of white walls. There's a lot of square edges. And I fell in love with the study of architecture and as a form of expression, drawing as a form of expression. And really, architecture is a study of people and place. And I find what I'm doing now as a grower tending this piece of land very intimately.
I'm still working with body and place. It's not spatial. I'm not creating space in the same way, but I'm responding to the same nuances that I tried to do as an architect, but I couldn't express within that working culture. So I was really interested in this idea of the as found approach, which is where you come to a place and you allow the place to speak back to you. So you work with what's there and you shape with what's there. It's more of a philosophical response to a site that didn't really work when it came to working with actual clients in the real world who just wanted to flatten the thing and start again and maximize the profits and square meters.
There was a part of me that was repeatedly harmed in that process. And so I sort of see what I'm doing now, being in a reciprocal relationship with plants, with medicine, and a place, a physical place on the land, where there's the cycles and the seasons and the beings, and it feels like I'm still, at the root, doing the same thing. Okay, but interesting, got a very different outcome, one which is life sustaining rather than harmful to community place.
[0:09:07] Karla: All this makes you question the norms that we follow without thinking about them. So tell me what you do in terms of what you do now.
[0:09:19] Hayley: I hold space. I often hold space for the things that have no place in everyday life. I listen. I offer compassionate care. A big part of what I do is bringing the mother archetype into the way I am with my clients, unconditional, non judgmental spaces. I don't really use the description that a lot of other practitioners use of a safe space. I'm not really interested in creating a safe space. I'm interested in creating a brave space where people can show up and be honest in a way that they can't, maybe even in a safe space. So for me, stepping into archetypeally, when I work with people, I step into my mother archetype. Or sometimes I use the love warrior. Don't know if you've heard that one before, which is a sort of a deeply compassionate presence that has the best version, maybe not the best, the truest version of the person's best interests at heart.
So I'm not trying to improve them, I'm not trying to cure them. I'm trying to meet them as fully as I can in the moment. And usually that loving presence is enough for whatever needs to happen to happen. So I arrive half empty. There's a lot of room for what people bring into the space. So you could call all of that holistic health. I feel like I'm bringing something that's missing in the culture. I'm allowing something that's missing in the culture at large.
[0:11:14] Karla: Yes, hugely. Because when you have a baby, for instance, there's no one holding you. In a way, you know, the six week is it six week, you go to the doctors and I expected so much more. I don't know what I expected.
[0:11:33] Hayley: Yeah, me too.
[0:11:34] Karla: And I didn't get it.
[0:11:36] Hayley: Let's talk about what you expected.
[0:11:38] Karla: Yeah, okay. I don't know. I expected to be held maybe a bit more like I expected it to be more about me, to be honest. And it was nothing about me. It was all about my baby. Which is fair enough, but that could be a different appointment.
[0:11:52] Hayley: Yeah. And I think so often the reason I asked that question is I think so often, our innate expectations of what's needed are what we need. Is what we need. Maybe it sounds like we share this experience of becoming mothers in a culture that is so inept at looking after mothers that there's shock. There are these shocks and surprises to our system along the way. And one of them is the six week checkup.
[0:12:20] Hayley: I think there are just so many shocks along the way, so many that it becomes an exhaustion in itself. It's really exhausting. And it can be very belittling if our eyes aren't open to the messages that we get sent through each of these moments. The six week checkup is a good example. The message that we're sent by the culture is that we're not important, we're invisible. Your well being doesn't matter. It's all about the baby. You're just a sort of cog in some other wheel. And so it's a big work to think anything else than that.
[0:13:05] Karla: I think also, what kind of shocked me was it it was a woman doctor who'd had children, which also made me think, well, if you can't see it, when you've been here and there's no empathy. So that shocked me as well.
[0:13:29] Hayley: Yeah. The systemic conditioning, it runs deep and through the veins of the thing. And it's not anyone person's fault either. The stages of growth that are required to even see that, to see that she is like that despite being a mother herself, and why is she enabling that? Why is she participating in that? Is such a bigger story and an issue. A lot of the time in the birth story work that I do, there's a moment where mothers realize that they're getting something they didn't even realize they needed that's a really common epiphany.
I'm really aware of the birds. Big Daddy blackbird just came and yeah. It was like, I am here, this is my space now. It's time for you to go home.
[0:14:41] Karla: Then it felt like it did come and tell us off.
[0:14:45] Hayley: Yeah. I wonder whether some of the birds come inside the polytunnel at night, maybe. Don't worry, we'll be gone soon. What was they saying? Yeah, the need to be witnessed is a really huge one and the need to be received back to something, to some new place. Post birth is really huge. And sometimes that is the medicine in a burstary medicine session. There's more to it than that. But what you're describing, that six week checkup, it could be so different, it could be such an acknowledgment of the rite of passage that is becoming a mother and what you've done. It's huge. How is it not seem like that in society? Oh, you're a mum. Yeah, I'm a mum. It's like, how can you not treasure that? Yeah. It's astounding I think it's probably the biggest change I've ever had in my life in that it continues to change me. It wasn't one change. Yeah.
[0:16:11] Hayley: The baby doesn't appear and you're changed once because the babies appeared. Yeah. There's a beautiful saying that I always remember, and I can't quite remember who told me it. So the birth is when a baby is born and then the birth of the mother happens gradually over some undeniable, undefinable time. And that sort of speaks to what you're saying of this thing that's constantly shaping you. And I feel that very viscerally this week because my daughter turned three and revisiting that anniversary of the birth and feeling how much that experience of giving birth is still shaping who I am and I'm still drawing so much power and insight from that experience three years later.
[0:17:08] Karla: Yeah. Did you celebrate yourself that day?
[0:17:12] Hayley: I did, yeah. And it was hard to celebrate myself that day in terms of just the amount that I had to do as the mother of a child whose birthday. It was, especially a three year old. And all the I really noticed how much obligation I felt around making sure that she connected with certain members of the family or making sure that people were thanked for their offerings and gifts and making sure the pressure that she has a good day, which is kind of a ridiculous weight. And I was really aware of it on the lead up to it. I was like, I don't have to do any of this stuff. All she needs is presents from the people around presence. As in presents with C E. Not present as in boxes around you.
[0:18:11] Karla: I wondered where you were going with that!
[0:18:14] Hayley: All she needs is a room full of presents. That's the ultimate sort of thing. Not presents, presence. C E. All they ever need is our presence. Not our gifts, not our mandatory presents. Oh, it's difficult now to distinguish the two, but what I was really lucky to have was I go to a mother's movement class once every two weeks, which is gold dust for me. It's 2 hours of non linguistic communication. So just talking, it's expression through the body, and sometimes it means just laying on the ground doing nothing. Sometimes it means stamping and flailing and all of it. And that was on the morning of my daughter's birthday. And it was very beautiful to be in a space with other mothers all along the motherhood journey and to be received by them. And that's one of the missing pieces, I think, in the experience of being a mother, modern mother, is that group, that sort of little taste of village.
[0:19:39] Karla: Yeah, village, definitely. I remember my sister in law had her baby and I hadn't had a baby yet. I had no clue. You go round and when I think back, I was like, I didn't do any washing up, I didn't bring anything for her to eat. I literally walked in to see the baby and I look back and I'm like, wow.
[0:20:20] Hayley: I have done that as well.
[0:20:22] Karla: Looking back, I'm like, so when she had the second one, I've got this.
[0:20:30] Hayley: An image of you at the door with bags and bags of food, like home cooked food, chocolate, all the things.
Karla: And also, I just didn't pressure at all. I was like, I'll see you when I see you. But she was like, Bring chocolate.
[0:20:46] Hayley: That's so beautiful.
[0:20:48] Karla: So, yeah, you live and learn.
[0:20:52] Hayley: Yeah. And I feel like there is, in recent years, a bit more education out there around that I feel like it's a bit more accessible, the postpartum care conversation in a way that it wasn't maybe five or ten years ago.
[0:21:11] Karla: That's really true. And there's more, like, rawness, I feel, online.
[0:21:15] Hayley: Yes.
[0:21:15] Karla: Like, women actually are sharing the stories that I went through that I wouldn't have talked about breastfeeding journeys. There's just no way I would have put that online. But then you see other women really struggling and you think maybe my boobs weren’t wrong.
[0:21:37] Hayley: And there's so much isn't there in that time, in those first sort of six weeks, especially of so much that our bodies go through and so much to learn when we're first time mums. And it really is I nearly said frontline stuff. It's like survival. There's a sense of it being so raw. I have to survive. My baby has to survive. I have to do a good job of this to keep the baby alive. It's very vulnerable.
[0:22:11] Karla. The latch of the baby was like, but it looks fine, it's good. And I'm like, but it doesn't feel right. But the feelings weren't listened to. I feel like this is becoming about me, it’s supposed to be a podcast about you.
[0:22:31] Hayley: I love this. I love where this is going because it's cool. It's actually not about this is what I find more and more. It's about me, but it can't be about me as well, because being but.
[0:22:44] Karla: You’re obviously very good at your job.
[0:22:46] Hayley: Thank you. My job is to remove myself from the equation. I'm doing it very successfully. Yeah. That is one of my aims. And I think that's probably being in such an ego led, male dominated environment, I am liberated that I am not the most important thing in the room. Thank God I'm not the most important thing in the room.
The looks I used to get as an architect, standing up, ready to present, it was like my life was on the line. And it's so unhealthy being given being put on a pedestal like, that so damaging to so I'm very reassured to hear that and that this is you know, I'm really happy about having this conversation with you and and, you know, we're two women who've become mothers in the last five years.
[0:23:41] Hayley: That's true.
[0:23:42] Karla: And there's such shared common ground there. That's true.
[0:23:47] Hayley: But let's talk about you. Okay. Did you want to finish your thought.
[0:23:51] Karla: About the feelings and the health?
[0:23:53] Hayley: Yeah. Because that was quite nice.
[0:23:56] Karla: I just didn't want to take out 45 minutes of your time of me talking about my birth experience.
[0:24:01] Hayley: I'm totally happy with that.
[0:24:03] Karla: Okay, good.
[0:24:04] Hayley: Yeah.
[0:24:05] Karla: What were we saying, oh, yeah. They don't really listen to the feelings of a mother.
[0:24:10] Hayley: No.
[0:24:11] Karla: Like, the latch looks good, so it must be good, and he's weighing fine, but I was in, like, crippling pain.
[0:24:20] Hayley: Yeah.
[0:24:20] Karla: But there was this sort of well, that's just how it is. Kind of that's just how it is mentality, which I think, to a point there is. You have to break through that. Right. But at the same time, not being listened to is far more damaging.
[0:24:36] Hayley: Yeah.
[0:24:37] Karla: Not having that space, like you say, to be listened to.
[0:24:41] Hayley: And it is a core wound of most women in this society that we do so much of the time, feel unheard and unseen and that our feelings aren't important and we're conditioned to put other people's feelings above our own. And so that moment with the latch that you're remembering is like a microcosm of all of that stuff. And would you know of course it's not the most important. It's important, but also the way you feel as the mother is important.
And the lack of centering the mother's experience is the real pandemic. That's, like the huge yeah.
[0:25:31] Karla: I think what saved me was the radiant mama groups here where I sat in a room with fellow mothers and we could talk and be listened to. And there was a breastfeeding consultant there who said to me, you're right. I just needed someone to just confirm how I was feeling. And she said, sit down and hold him how you would like to hold him, not how you've been told to hold him.
[0:26:12] Hayley: Wow.
[0:26:13] Karla: And all that time I'd been holding him, how I had been instructed to hold a baby by the hospital. And as soon as I just relaxed my shoulders and just held him in a way that felt natural and instinctive. And instinctive, he latched and there was no pain.
[0:26:36] Hayley: That's incredible.
[0:26:38] Karla: But I had to be told. I had to have someone tell me I could do it to give you permission to give me permission to listen to me. And from that moment on, I listened to me.
[0:26:52] Hayley: And that reminds me of where we went a little while ago with the idea of the village and being surrounded by women. Because you may not have had someone telling you to do it in a certain way, but with a village around, with elders and elder mothers around, so much permission would be given to you and us periodically through the day. So much support and permission that none of these things would be an issue. A lot of these stories and experiences are only problematic because we don't have that support in place, the support that we evolved alongside.
[0:27:46] Hayley: One of the things that I'm always careful not to do is to sort of blame the medical system for being a medical system, because the medical system is only failing because the care system isn't in place. And the care system at the moment is women doing it voluntarily as and when they can, because the cultural structures that provide that innately have been broken down. Because all of the women that would be doing that are still at work themselves or are living in a different house.
So the reason that I'm bringing that, I suppose, is that I really hear how difficult that was and that there's nothing personal about it. And that sometimes there's a relief in understanding that there's nothing personal about it. And also just thank the goddess for Radiant Mother. Radiant Mama. That is one of those matriarchal spaces that reminding us that we have this instinct in us and really small things.
[0:28:58] Karla: Like they make you a cup of tea and a piece of toast. Yes. And you get to sit down, someone brings you nourishment, that's all you need. Like, these things, they don't cost millions. They're not big in the scheme of things. No, they're really not.
[0:29:25] Hayley: They're not big. They're everyday humane moments. Yeah. And they would hold your baby while you drank up a cup of tea. Like that was just the best.
[0:29:40] Hayley: I have a memory coming to me of I only made it to one Radiant Mama circle as a mother because Lockdown came in. But the one that I did go to and I was that mother on the floor with the screaming baby who wouldn't latch. And it was exactly the right place to have that experience, because Olivia, who runs it, who's an elder mother if I've ever met one, took Holly and held her in a way that I'd never seen a baby held before. In the tiger and the tree.
[0:30:18] Hayley: Have you seen the tiger and the tree thing?
[0:30:20] Karla: Tummy? Yeah.
[0:30:22] Hayley: And I remember thinking, like, oh, my little newborn baby is getting sort of twisted up and farts. But it instantly calmed her.
[0:30:33] Karla: Wow.
[0:30:34] Hayley: And it was such an education. And if I hadn't gone to that group and learned that, lockdown would have been a lot worse, because my partner, basically because she had colic oh, gosh. Between 04:00 p.m. And 06:00 P.m. Every day for the first two months of lockdown.
My partner did that while I sat on the sofa feeling completely overwhelmed, relieved. Wow. And that was just that one experience of being shown something that looked completely counterintuitive.
[0:31:13] Karla: Beautiful. I mean, it's just these tiny, tiny moments.
[0:31:19] Hayley: Tiny, yeah. That really just changed my entire motherhood experience.
[0:31:28] Karla: Do you still have them? Do you still experience those tiny moments.
[0:31:32] Hayley: Yeah. We've been staying with our in laws at the moment, and they'll be like, Jasper will have an almighty meltdown. And they'll be like, Just leave him, just leave him. Don't go in his face, just move away. And I'm always trying to fix, always trying to fix. And sometimes you can't. And then he will come to me and come for a cuddle.
[0:32:20] Karla: And communicate what he needs, communicate what you need. So he needs that space. And today he actually went off and went and sat in a cardboard box. So I stuck my head and he was like, I'm calming down.
[0:32:32] Hayley: Amazing. So he's he's worked out for himself that he needs that time alone to calm down.
[0:32:39] Karla: Yeah.
[0:32:40] Hayley: And he's three.
[0:32:42] Karla: Yeah.
[0:32:43] Hayley: Wow. But if I hadn't given him that space yes. There's a lot of wisdom often in just being with whatever's happening rather than altering or changing it. And even a three year old nervous system, even a newborn nervous system knows what it needs. And all of these feelings, tantrums, resistances. They all have a wisdom to re regulate, to come back to a sense of safety in themselves, and they do know what they need.
And one of the most challenging things I find being someone who has knowledge about the nervous system and knowing how to support my daughter, to move through a nervous system response, which sometimes can be very strong and in a public place, and having the strength in myself to be with that, despite everybody else's discomfort. And sometimes opinions that they voice to me about how they feel, because feelings are like these big, bad monsters, aliens that can't possibly be with that.
[0:34:10] Karla: But to learn.
[0:34:12] Hayley: Yeah. I think toddlers are really incredible teachers in that way of the rage and the joy and the expression that they move through so fluidly and then going and sitting in a box because that's what he needs right now. And then ten minutes later, throwing something and being their container or guide along that process is such a privilege. I find it a privilege. I didn't at first. I found it incredibly triggering and really difficult.
But then I think I've cultivated something in my own, in myself, to be able to be with whatever is there for her. And it's definitely made me a better herbalist as well, because I just know now that I can handle any tantrum that anyone throws and it's totally fine. And I'm here and I'm listening. Yeah.
[0:35:12] Karla: I have to say, it's made me a lot less stressed in other areas of my life because I'm like adults you can talk to and they don't generally throw themselves on the floor. Anything I come to at work now.
[0:35:27] Hayley: I'm like, yeah, I can handle this.
[0:35:31] Karla: I can handle this. Because generally, you know what an adult's about to do, it's fine.
[0:35:40] Hayley: Yeah. That's such a gift that mothers possess. I think there's something very perspective bringing about being a mother, isn't there?
[0:35:52] Karla: Definitely.
[0:35:54] Hayley: I really have a good sense of what is and isn't important these days. I didn't have before being a mother.
[0:36:06] Karla: That's so true. And I'm also much more in myself now. I know what I would like and I know what I do not like, and I'll voice it, whereas that really wasn't me before. I would have maybe pandered a lot to other people and just said yes, even to things like going on a holiday I didn't want to go on. I would have said yes and given up that money and that time. Whereas now I'm like, no.
[0:36:37] Hayley: That's not important to me. Why do you think that is? What do you think inspires that as a mother?
[0:36:45] Karla: Maybe I've had to hold more space for me to not lose myself. Because that's easy, I think, to do so easy.
[0:36:55] Hayley: Yeah. For your child. I think it's easy to do so to hold that boundary. I've had to hold that boundary in different areas as well, because I think that's easy slope.
And beneath that, there's maybe something about your energy and resources being so much more important now because there's someone relying on you. So all of those things that maybe took you away before, I could definitely say that about my life, and I think I was pretty boundaried before, and I think maybe sometimes now I go a bit too. But one thing that has changed for me, actually, is so I'd labeled myself pre motherhood. I'd labeled myself as a highly sensitive introvert who wasn't very sociable, even though I was I was, actually.
But there's something now that I don't have the time to. Be apologetic about that or to hide that, but in doing that, in becoming unapologetic about who I am, basically because I don't have the energy being a mother to hide who I am. I show up really fully when I am in a social situation or I show up so fully now. And so there's like I feel like motherhood's taken a mask off me or whatever shield or I was using to try and protect myself.
There's just nowhere to hide anymore because my heart is out there in Holly, in the world, and I have to show up to be out there with her. And that means bringing my whole self, which was very jarring for me in the first I would say in the first 18 months of motherhood. I found it very jarring being forced out of myself somehow. And now I just feel like I'm out there ready to protect her at any odds, not caring what people think or like. The story I was telling you earlier about her running around naked in the graveyard the other day in February, a naked little three year old running around having the most amazing time with her kite and getting these comments from people. Is that your daughter?
Yes, it is. I am the mother of that child and I'm very proud of her, very proud of myself. Do you know the decades of inner work I've had to do in order to enable her to run naked around a graveyard resonates a lot? Oh, that's a gorgeous, rich, yummy phrase. Ambiguous loss. Two of my favorite words actually put together, ambiguous loss. Because loss, the nature of loss is not any one way, is it? Loss is it? It reminds me of the little faceted diamond thing that Holly's playing with at the moment. It's like, you know, like a little plastic ball and it's got like hundreds of facets on it and then it reflects the light and it's like loss. I feel like loss is like that the more you look at it, the sort of more complex and nuanced and ambiguous it becomes.
There's not any one emotion, I think, that you can attach to loss. It's all of those things at different times and sometimes more at once.
[0:40:41] Karla: Yeah. And as women, maybe we go through a lot with loss in a lot of ways in the different stages of our lives. You still have the menopause and all of that that that brings with you and getting your period and then yeah. Menstruation throughout your life, like that cycle of loss.
You could talk about what you do with, did you say fertility tracking?
[0:41:10] Hayley: Yeah. That's a really beautiful lead in talking about loss and the menstrual cycle, because the way that I look at the cycle is that it's an initiatory pathway to becoming elders, becoming who we are to become through menopause. And when we finally stop cycling and the bleed in the cycle which is what gets the most press, is like a little death each cycle. It's where we're eliminating from the body.
And it's funny because there's a theory that we actually haven't evolved or our biology isn't set up to support as many periods as we get in modern life because historically, we would have been pregnant more. So modern women are experiencing this really fast paced physiological cycle. And tracking that and charting that can be a very practical tool for sort of knowing when you're fertile and you're not fertile.
But it's also this very inner process that we can traverse through the year twelve to 13 times of experiencing coming in and out of ourselves and also experiencing a sort of outer expression towards ovulation or birthing something creatively or in ourselves or in our life and then letting it go. But there's way more to it than that. That's just a sort of headline. But as soon as an invitation to see the period as a little death opens so many doors into our ability to be close, to be intimate with loss and to practice loss, to practice an active grieving with our menstrual cycle.
And I believe that women, our role, our collective role, is to grieve regularly, is to release and grieve regularly. And the womb, a lot of the menstrual health conditions that we see now, I believe, are to do with a block in that process. So because obviously, our modern world doesn't exactly allow us to stop and grieve once a month and grieve collectively as well, which is what grief really needs to sort of move that.
But the womb is not meant to hold anything for very long. But what I see with the women that I work with is that they are holding a lot in their womb. And of course they are, because they haven't been shown this other way of working with the cycle and tuning into the emotional nuances of each phase of the cycle. And I mean, it's not to say that every period we will experience grief and process loss. That's not necessarily it.
It's also a space of being emptied out, of dreaming, of visioning, of having come so close home to ourselves that the world around us isn't important anymore. It's about I don't know if you noticed that you may dream more. You might have more vivid dreams around the winter of your cycle, around your bleed. And so the dominant hormone at that point is progesterone.
When I think of progesterone, I think of a woman standing by herself with a sword, sort of drawing lines of fire around her, like, no, this is my space. It's all about me. This is who I am and this is me. Whereas Oestrogen is like a woman in a beautiful, flowing dress, like on a summer's day, with her arms open to the world saying, yes, come in. I can help you. I can do whatever you want. Oestrogen is like the connecting hormone that makes us want to connect with other people and also makes us want to help and support other people. So we experience this like coming out and then going in, coming out and going in. So there's so much maturation that can happen in that process over the course of our fertile life, which is 30 years, perhaps.
And this is what we have, this sort of elderless culture. And I think part of that for women is this losing touch with this innate inbuilt initiatory thing.
[0:46:17] Karla: Yeah, it is a lot. Each month, it's a lot. Yeah. And I don't think, again, like we were talking about motherhood, it's not seen in society as a lot.
[0:46:28] Hayley: No, it's something you put up with.
[0:46:32] Karla: And you power through, but yeah, there's no powering through that week for me anymore. I used to be able to just get up at 06:00 A.m. And do a hit workout mid flow. That's not happening anymore and I don't want to do that anymore. I feel like your body tells you to, I don't know, find peace in.
[0:46:57] Hayley: That's really beautiful.
[0:47:01] Karla: Whereas yeah, halfway through when you're Ovulating, I feel like I could rule the world. Come and get me, world.
[0:47:11] Hayley: Which is amazing as well. And that can also be something that's not welcomed in us as much as the bleed because we don't see many women really embracing their full Ovulatory power as well. Because that is powerful, that is ruling the world, energy that also can't be sustained. That's one thing to say which suggests that a matriarchal culture was more of a shared collective responsibility where maybe women were stepping forward at different times of their cycle. Maybe.
I think as much as welcoming rest and peace and restoration for our bleed, also welcoming the fullness of our expression and out there in the worldness in Ovulation and there's resistance in us, for sure, because we're daughters of the patriarchy. But there's a resistance out there, so much resistance out there to us doing that, because that's powerful, that's revolution, that's like, complete. Let's turn this shit upside down and do something that works for everyone.
All of the phases are valuable and so bringing there's a lot in the menstrual cycle awareness world about plan your life around your menstrual cycle, do your talks in the in your Ovulation, you know, do your dreaming and your visioning and your planning and your bleed. But the reality is that it's very difficult to achieve that. And so the other way of looking at it is bringing the energy of that hormone, whatever hormonal cocktail we're in on each day, bringing that to the stage.
For one example that I'll give in this is the Premenstrum is like our truth speaker. I always call my premenstrum. It's like I sit under the truth tree and falling from the truth tree are these apples, like these truth bombs? Left, right, and center. And it's this time for incredible discernment and a no shit approach. The PMS has patriarchal PMS of like, oh, are you premenstrual because you're like, being a bitch right now? Yeah, that whole story.
Let's just get rid of that right away because discerning women, angry discerning women are so needed and so getting up on a stage in that space can be equally as powerful. People might not like it. People might not like it, but we really need that premenstrum. We need that truth telling as well.
[0:50:06] Karla: Definitely.
[0:50:06] Hayley: As much as we need the sort of maiden of Spring, which is full of excitement and hope and wonder.
[0:50:14] Karla: It would also, going forward, like you were saying, have an awareness of when you would be speaking and what you could bring and actually bring it with you.
[0:50:24] Hayley: Yeah. And I think that's the big message that I want to say more than anything is that to bring wherever we are in our cycle, to bring it with us to what we're doing and even say at the beginning of meetings and things I used to do this at work. My colleagues, I don't know whether they used to get tired of it or my sense is that they were more fascinated than tired.
Because for men, it's like, oh, my God, I just don't know where she's going to be. Who is she going to be today? That's kind of fascinating. Yeah. And so I would give a preface, especially if I was premenstrual, because the impatience that can come can be quite upsetting. So it is helpful to let people know in a meeting situation, just so you know, I'm on day I'm on day 24. I just want to get shit done.
So I'm going to be that person in this meeting today or something, or if we're bleeding really heavily and we have to do something to say. I don't have a lot of physical energy, but I have a deep compassion, a deep, deep sort of innate ability right now to listen and be with whatever's here, bringing that presence into a space which can be really powerful, really powerful if there's lots of people in the room that just want to get shit done or yeah.
So it's and also, I guess it's also allowing each phase to seep into each other. Like when I'm premenstrual and I am seeing things very clearly that I want to change, not leaving it there.
And that speaks to this initiatory pathway that I was mentioning earlier, of that we can work with the cycle. Just like you say, there's a truth bomb that lands and then take it into your bleed with you and dream around it, and then take it into your spring and get excited about it, then take it into your summer and express something about it and yeah, that's exactly it.
[0:52:49] Karla: Wow. It's been very deep. I love it.
[0:52:51] Hayley: I love it. And it has got dark.
[0:52:52] Karla: It has got really dark.
[0:52:53] Hayley: Two candles. Feeling very grateful for you and having this space together because we had an online relationship and now we have a real one, a real relationship and to come. And it feels like a real honor to have to sort of host this in this space where I do all this work with people. And I'm, as we've been talking, feeling like the place the intention of setting up this place to support women and mothers and noticing how it happens outside of the light session time, noticing how more and more women come. Here for different reasons as well and just noticing that about this space and feeling really grateful for it and us being able to do this this weekend.
[0:53:51] Karla: Thank you so much.
[0:53:52] Hayley: Thank you.
[0:53:55] Karla: There you have it. A beautiful conversation. And one, I think, those of us who menstruate can learn a lot from. I have to say I'd always thought of parts of my cycle in a really negative light. I'm very much a doer. So the times of the month where I have very little energy really irritate me. But after this conversation, my thinking is changing to how I can work with rather than against my cycle. You can find Haley at www.pellampollen.com where she offers birth story listening and fertility awareness sessions. Thank you to Haley for coming on the podcast, and the next episode actually follows on from this, where I will be talking to my personal trainer, Debbie, from Fighting Fit Devon, about the menopause. See you then.