Body Literacy Is Your Birth Right

Knowledge is power, especially when it comes to menstrual health. With everything going on in the world these days, it's easy to feel powerless. Are you afraid to come off of birth control because you don't want to get pregnant. Is the overturn of Roe vs. Wade changing how you're thinking about your dating life.

In this episode, I talk about the power that comes with knowing your body and how a healthy period is your ticket to the freedom and autonomy you want in your life.

Not Your Momma's Menstrual Course
Proper Period Care

Transcript

0:00

Knowledge is power, especially when it comes to menstrual health. With everything going on in the world these days, it's easy to feel powerless. Are you afraid to come off of birth control because you don't wanna get pregnant? Is the overturn of Roe versus Wade changing how you're thinking about your dating life? In this episode, I talk about the power that comes with knowing your body and how a healthy period is your ticket to the freedom and autonomy you want in your. Hi, I'm Adrian Iza. I'm an eastern medicine practitioner who is passionate about women's health and helping women live their best lives. My goal is to put you in the driver's seat of your menstrual health offering period solutions for a symptom free life.

Adrienne 0:47

Statements made in this program are for educational purposes only, and not intended as a substitution for medical consultation or advice. We do not claim to diagnose, treat, or cure any diseases. This podcast is inclusive and welcomes all gender identities. The focus of the program is on biological function, and we will use the term women throughout, but it is referencing physiological and social challenges for biology. Not identity. Come as you are. I am happy you are here and welcome all performances of identity. I hope you find something helpful in this show. Welcome back to another episode of the Reproductive Rebel Podcast. I am your hostess, Adrian. I Sari. And today I want to talk about body literacy. I have had this episode kicking around in my head for a while and. Thinking about all of the different ways that it could show up. And honestly, with the elections because this is being recorded right around the November elections I thought it would be a very fitting time to talk about body literacy.

1:59

There have been some really excellent TikTok tos and reels that have been out there about How little people know. I saw a really awesome one, one of my clients shared with me yesterday actually, where this woman is going around and she is doing it like game show style and she's asking questions of men who are of voting age and registered to vote, right? So people who have a say in your reproductive health decision making and one of the questions she was asking is, can you pee with a tamp? And for any of you who are eliciting, you're probably chuckling at that. But I was horrified and shocked by the number of people who literally didn't know the answer to that question. And it made me think I have had this episode kind of simmering in my mind for a little while. It, it started to birth as a little seed right around the time. The Supreme Court overturned the Roe versus Wade decision, and I figured it was a little too explosive a time to talk about it. Plus everyone was talking about it right then. And this is one of those threads that we need to keep. Talking about now, fast forward a little bit. I am realizing just how little everyone collectively knows about their body. Now, none of what I'm saying is to shame anyone who is listening. If you are listening to this and you are going. Yep. Nope. I had somebody shove a box of tampons through the door and say, figure it out. And that was about all I learned about my body. This is not to shame your experience at all, so please don't feel that way. This is to bring to light a larger problem of body literacy, in particular the United States and the fact. Our lack of knowledge around simple body function impairs our ability to take care of our reproductive health, impairs our ability to make reproductive related decisions. It impairs our ability really to have a meaningful relationship with a partner. And just how disabling that is all together for the collective, right? So if your male partner does not know that you can pee with a tampon because you have two exit holes there, that's a. Issue of education and if those same people are the ones making decisions about what you can and cannot do for making choices about whether you want to step into motherhood or not, and if that is an aligned decision for your body, like that is a big problem. There are a lot of women who don't know what they don't know either. So I ran a little Survey, if you will, on my Instagram page, and just asked people like, where did you learn information about your body? Only one person responded that they learned any of the biology of this in health class. Everyone else responded with comments like I learned from a friend or, I was handed a book and no additional knowledge, but I didn't read the book or between Google and my experience, I learned or I only learned because I was having issues with infertility, and that's how I know what I know. So all of those are your voices. And it is a theme that I see in the people that I work with, the people that come into my experience through educational classes and things like that. And I really just felt compelled to bring it to light that body literacy is power. If you know the rules of the road, you know how to drive the car. And it comes back to the fact that we have this. Insidious subtext in our culture that because we preach from an abstinence only place, that if we teach them how to use it, they will. Which honestly, Isn't a very responsible way to engage with people because human nature is, if you tell me, no, I'm going to do it because you told me no. Anyone who has teenagers knows that anyone who was a teenager at one point knows that. We laugh, and I say we being my generation of people who were like, Pre cell phones taking videos of literally every aspect of our waking day. But I've heard like fellow parents be like, thank God there were no cell phones recording some of the dumb stuff that we did when we were kids. And. It just makes me think about the fact that we have more information out there than ever, and yet we still are completely out of touch with our body, with how it's supposed to move through the world. And we learn what we learn from sources that may not be authoritative sources on a particular issue. Body literacy is power folks, and coming at it from an abstinence only place really does a disservice because it mutes the conversation around basic biological function. You can have a body literacy conversation. That is age appropriate with a young person. Sex doesn't even have to enter the picture, and you can still teach them that there are going to be some days of the month that they're going to have a lot of energy and that's when they should be doing competitive sports. Or maybe they could do a little extra socially or whatever, and there are going to be days out of the month that they're going to go to. Fill in the blank class. I look at my own daughters and I see like martial arts class, for example. And I can tell just by watching my daughter that it's almost time for her period to arrive because her energy level is lower, her stamina, she gets more winded, more easily. And the thing is in our culture, we. We look at that as a weakness instead of normalizing it as a basic function of our body. Our body goes through a 28 to 30 day hormone cadence. This is different than men. Men experience their hormones in a 24 hour window. We experience ours in a 28 to 30 day window. Okay, so there are going to be days of the month you're exhausted and that's normal. Now, how deep that exhaustion is may speak to an imbalance, but there are gonna be days where you're gonna be tired. There's gonna be days where you feel like you can multitask like a boss, and you are the queen of the universe. You are going to have days where you don't feel like socializing that much. You have energy, you just feel less social. All of those things are normal, and we do not talk about that in our culture. We don't even teach people what day one is of their cycle. Like what I always spend a large chunk of the time that I start working with clients. Sharing with them basic biological function. Now, there are some that were very blessed to have people in their life that gave them a really good foundation to leap off into adulthood. From, but for the vast majority of people, it was either uncomfortable for the parents, so they didn't wanna talk about it, a taboo subject for cultural or religious purposes. Whatever it was, the conversation didn't happen. So I had a woman in my practice. I'm just gonna give you a great example. I had a woman in my practice a little while back who had come to me for infertility. Because she and her husband, they had been married for a while, decided they wanted to have a child, right? They they decided that they were going to get started and then three years later they still weren't successful. Now they had just started looking into reproductive assistive technology and going the infertility route in the western medical model and the part that made my heart. For this couple was when I was asking her about her cycle length and all of these things and was talking about the fertile window. She was under the impression that the fertile window was the five days before your period starts. Let that sink in for a second, three years. Probably the inner critic getting progressively louder because she had negative pregnancy tests after negative pregnancy test. They were starting to invest money in getting fertility support, so there was already cash coming out of their pocket and not a single practitioner in that model thought to ask her. When they were trying during the month, not a single one. How does that happen? So they very successfully conceived. We worked on her cycle to get her in a nice, healthy place because, her body was saying that there were certain things that were, headed in the right direction, but could use a little bit of extra love and support. Couple three months of work on her cycle and boom, they were pregnant, they had a healthy baby and they are considering. Trying for another one. And her body was set up for success. But the takeaway from this for me was that nobody had taught this poor woman about where her fertile window was. So now let's look at it in terms of the larger context. Here we are talking about government and. Government making decisions about whether we can keep or not keep or have to keep babies that come into this experience in willing or unwilling ways, it doesn't matter, but with a female population who is subject to this legislation, but haven't been taught how to drive the. Doesn't that make you crazy? It makes me crazy. Like I just, my heart aches to think that there are women who are terrified about getting pregnant out there. And maybe some of you listening are some of those people, but I, it. How can you prevent something from happening and take responsibility and have your body sovereignty if you don't know how to prevent what you don't want? Because condoms break birth control fails. Rape happens. Those things are the reality for lots and lots of people that may not be ready to have their entire life change and have their and physically go through a pregnancy for whatever reason. That's their decision to make. If there's risk, there must be choice. And it doesn't matter what it is that's creating the risk. Pregnancy has risk. You should be able to make that decision. But baseline, if you don't know how to minimize the chances of getting pregnant, you can't even mitigate your risk. So body literacy becomes your superpower. Knowing what day one is of your cycle, how to count that so that then you can identify where you should be. Seeing your fertile markers is incredible power. Now, if you are not comfortable moving into a fertility awareness method model to prevent pregnancy, I, that is your decision to make. There are lots of very capable fertility awareness practitioners that would totally greet you with open arms. And if you are interested in something like that, please email the show. I would be happy to share some of those resources with you. But just knowing. Where you are on a given day in your cycle changes your entire experience with it minimizes the symptoms of your cycle, improves your immune system, improves your health. Like there are, there's just a huge list of things that it does for you. So day one of your cycle is the first day of fresh red blood only. And I know I've mentioned this in a previous podcast, but I think it definitely bears mentioning again because we, this is basic information that we don't have. A lot of health classes will cover basic anatomy. Like here's a uterus, here's a cervix, here's a vagina. But what it won't tell you is what your fertile window looks like when it should be showing up. There might be classes out there that do that, but for the vast majority of people, that is not their experience. Their health class level experience is, here are the anatomical parts that biologically make these two genders different. And no rules of the road in terms of what to do about it. Some classes don't even give you birth control options. Some will give you a brief overview, but that is it. So think about how the frame changes if you know that you start seeing a different kind of mucus. Just as you enter your fertile window, your body literally gives you a flag and says, Hey girl, egg's gonna be coming within the next week. Take precautions, right? Or game on, depending on what your goals are, right? If you know this, then you know when you should be making sure there's a barrier there. If pregnancy prevention is your. If getting pregnant is your goal, you know when to start trying, and then nobody is left with unwanted heartache because you are putting the appropriate effort in for your goals at the appropriate time of month. So your bleed should only last four to six days. On average, it's four to five. Fresh red blood only, no clots, no cramps, no emotional symptoms going into it. One of the memes that I shared, because I thought memes were funny talking about some of these issues that we have as bleeding bodies and. There's a meme that I think it has been shared probably 300 times since I have put it out there. And it's a block of four. I think the character's called Power Puff Girl. But she goes from normal to her hair is on fire to, and it like, goes through the different like emotional things that can happen. During the period from Rage to fatigue, and people share it and go, this is me right now. Or they'll share it and they'll tag a friend and go, yep. And what I had written above it, is this doesn't have to be your experience because when your body is properly supported and you are not trying to move through the world like your hormones happen in 24 hours, but honor and actually move with the fact that your energy levels change, your body needs change all throughout the. I've been yelled at in forums, like exercise forums on Facebook before. I am an athletic person. I am an active person, but I also honor where I am in my cycle and I move with my cycle appropriately. And if you want a little more deeper dive in that, please check out. The Move with Your Cycle episode that I did with rock Hancock because it, it's a great one, and we talk about exactly what you should be doing in each phase of your cycle. But but just looking at The fact that you cannot personal record your entire month. There are people in weightlifting forums that are, that will put a message out there and they'll say something to the effect of, help psych me up today, ladies I'm wicked tired, but I'm dragging myself to the gym. Right? Which I get that from a motivational and community based experience, but I am the jerk that puts a note underneath and goes, What day of your cycle are you? And inevitably they write back to me and they are in their period oftentimes day three, no joke. There is a reason why you are dragging yourself to the gym today, because you're not supposed to be in that energy at that time. Let your body bleed, let it get it over with, and then start upping your activity level. Really and truly. If you have blood deficiency, you are not gonna feel like doing a hell of a lot more than just walking or light exercise until like day. Of your cycle because when you bleed, you have to put resources back in. This is no different than fueling and making sure that you have the right amount of carbohydrates before you lift or replenishing them after you lift, right? It's no different than that, except we as a culture, totally do not look at the fact that the bleeding days are exhausting. They are exhausting. It does not mean that an employee is any less effective. It doesn't make them less smart. It doesn't mean that they are trying to cop out on their job. Women have massive amounts of pain. Women have debilitating. Symptoms like at large before their periods because we push them and drive them through their month in a way that doesn't work with how their hormones function in their body. And it creates dysregulation in the system. It creates. These period problems, folks like I created, not Your Mama's Menstrual course, because I wanted people to know what it feels like to actually move through your month in a harmonious way. You are more quiet during your period. You get more rest during your period, why you're bleeding. You are losing resources like you need to conserve your energy. This is a paced race through the month, folks, when you are a bleeding body and that energy changes when you go through and cross the threshold of menopause and you are now a postmenopausal woman and you've come into your second spring, your energy's d. Your engagement with the world is different because your hormone cadence is different. But while you are a bleeding body, there is an ebb and flow to the hormones and the energetic cadence of the month. You are more quiet during your bleed. You wanna rest. You wanna conserve your energy because you're bleeding. That takes a lot of energy in and of itself. The follicular phase, your energy level starts to pick up. Culturally, we are told that we need to stay in spring and summer energy all the damn time, and that is bullshit. It's bullshit because our bodies cannot sustain that. That's how we get period symptoms. That's how we have immune system related issues because we are constantly drawing on a bank account that we're never putting money back. That's the nuts and bolts of it. That's why living in a cyclical way as a bleeding body is so damn important because you have to put money in the bank account to have money to spend. Anyone who has a job knows that. Anyone who doesn't have a job recognizes that too. Like you have to be able to put resources back in the account in order to be able to spend anything. And when we're trying to hit personal records with deadlifting on day three of our period, when we are spending out of our account, and now we. Overdrafting the account, you have to pay the fricking overdraft fee, then put money back in the account in order to have anything to spend. But that's not how we look at it. And so it compromises those fertility markers that I was talking about. So when we overspend, we have period problems when we overspend. We don't create the proper mucus pattern to know when we're fertil. So learning to live in a cyclical way actually helps you to get pregnant or prevent pregnancy. It helps you to reduce your experience with PMs, pmm, d, cramping during the period, bleeding it, inappropriate times, all of those things that be, that really do wreak havoc on our ability to move through the world the way that we want. When you are in your late follicular ovulatory phase, you can multitask like a boss or you do anyway when you're in balance. If you are having PMs like symptoms around ovulation, which some people do, it shows that there wasn't enough put into the bank account in order to be able to do the ovulatory function. There is not enough chi to make that. Process happen without disharmony. So it's already showing that your body is tired in some way and you need to put more resources back in the account. So this all plays, and I know that I've spent a lot of time focusing on the phases of the cycle again and how we reduce symptoms, but it really does play into body literacy and how powerful body literacy is. For any gender, it doesn't matter, like whether you are the bleeding body or you are the partner of someone who is a bleeding body. Recognizing that there are energy highs and energy lows throughout the month, helps you help them, helps you communicate with them, helps you support them in a meaningful way because, N when we're talking about biological men, they have a very different experience of their energetic flow throughout the day. They go to bed, they get up in the morning, testosterone's highest in the morning, and then they go about their day. They don't understand at the same level. It doesn't mean they can't have understanding, but they don't understand at the same level that you're going to have several days in a row where you're tired and then you're gonna have a couple days gonna take you to get up out of it. And maybe we need to plan our social schedule around the fact. Girlfriend needs to sleep, I shared on TikTok there was this really nice video. Where you can see that it, it's a male partner. And he, all the things that he does to support his wife when she's having period problems during the month. And I thought it was really beautiful and important to share because our partners. Help us to be successful or hinder our success. And if we understand what is going on in our bodies, and when I say we, I'm talking assigned at birth, female, right? And we're the bleeding body. So when we understand what is going on inside of our body, we can advocate for what we need. That comes to fertility that comes, like my whole family knows that if I say I'm coming into my moon time like. I need you to make sure that all of your laundry gets through the washing machine because I'm not doing it during my period. Like they get it and my family makes sure that all the laundry baskets are lined up in the laundry room and I get it all through the machine. They're responsible for putting it away, but that all happens in advance of my period starting so I don't have to be lifting baskets, carrying things. I ask for extra help with the groceries. Like it sounds like little things, but it helps me in little ways to conserve my resources so that I'm not constantly pulling. On my checking account, but I can actually conserve so that I can I can monitor my spending so that when I come out of my period, I'm not paying back an overdraft, then putting money into the account for the month. I'm literally just, I spent in a measured way, and then I can grow the resources that are in that account for the next month. When we understand how our bodies work, we can communicate those needs to our partners and our families in order to get the support we need when we need it. There's a reason. There used to be red tents and those women would spend that time resting and caring for themselves when they were in their red. And so we've lost that at a cultural level, and we are seeing epidemic levels of infertility issues, cycle problems. The fact that 300 people shared that meme about period symptoms and feeling like a crazy person before their cycle speaks volume. About how many people suffer with emotional stuff before their periods start physical problems, before their periods start. That disrupts life. But if we just live in harmony with the natural flow, no pun intended we reduce those symptoms, we improve our immune system, we're able to appropriately protect our fertility. Or utilize it in whatever way that is, is important, meaningful, and our goals at the time. So body literacy is critically important, folks, for you and anyone around you, because if you are not a bleeding body, you love someone who. And if we can start having these conversations and normalizing these kinds of body functions, we're not going to have to worry about government legislation telling us what we can and cannot do with our bodies. Now, I don't agree with some of the narrative that's out there right now, but part of your ability to. Control the narrative and how these larger conversations affect your body is not only through your vote, but also through your education and the education of your children. Like all of my kids have had body literacy, age appropriate conversations. Everyone who has preteen and teenage people in their homes need to do. Because we're seeing girls starting their periods at much younger than they used to, and for a long list of reasons that I'm not gonna bore you with here. But girls are starting their periods way too young and it's happening for a variety of reasons, but a lot of it has to do with depletion and. If they are coming to these checking accounts, spending years of being a bleeding body from a an overdrafted account, just think 20 years down the road what that's gonna mean for them. Just think of what it's gonna mean when they try to have a baby of their own, if that's a goal for them, at some point in the future, it matters. All of this matters. And. I invite you to really step into learning, and this may feel like you're going back to grade school menstrual 1 0 1 and I get it, but make sure that what you know isn't what you learned from a girl in the bathroom when you were in seventh grade. Make sure what you know. Is not what your friend's mom told you because who taught her, right? Learn from people like fertility awareness educators like Perry Steam Hydrotherapist people who know. how your cycle is supposed to go. And the reason why I pause there for a second is, yes, doctors can give you this information, but they don't talk about the energetic changes. Not unless you get somebody who is an integrative practitioner or a natural path. I have seen a couple of osteopaths. Be able to share that kind of information. But like in general, they, even the, I'm talking like they being the Western medical model, generally talk about biological function from. The place that you learned in high school health, where here is a uterus, here are the ovaries, right? They don't use, Hey, we're doing this test on your fsh. Because of this reason, FSH is the hormone that rises, that starts the process towards ovulation, right? Not a lot of doctors take the. To educate that way. It's an awesome opportunity for education. Some doctors do, but in general, they only have 15 minutes with you. So they don't take that extra step for education generally. Now, if there's somebody out there that says, I'm gonna make a liar out of you, I totally welcome that. But in general, People who walk into a Western medical office feel like a number. They don't feel seen, and they don't feel heard because all the practitioner has time for, and this isn't demonizing the practitioner because I truly believe that people go to medical school because they wanna make a difference for people. So this is not demonizing the practitioner, this is the model, this is the problem with the model is, Because it's a business and they're trying to crank so many people through in such a short period of time. Meaningful conversations like that provide education or bridge the gaps in education because not everybody's experience learning about their body and that their body literacy conversations have been the same. There's a lot of assumption that's made that when you walk in, you already know these basic facts about your body, and nine times outta 10 people don't. And it's no fault of their own. It is a broken part of our system that really needs fixing, and it's something I'm super, super passionate about. Not your mama's menstrual course and Empowered Fertility were my first two attempts at helping people help themselves because people didn't know that. Their energy levels rose and fell throughout the course of the month and that that affected whether they had massive period cramps or whether their cramps started to go away, whether they started with brown blood or if it started fresh red, like little changes in your lifestyle that through, tho through that course, not your mama's menstrual course, you can literally start today. Little changes like that. Alter the experience for people, make you feel stronger. In your body make you feel like you are in the driver's seat of your bus instead of your body calling all the shots. When you're having extreme like emotional up and down, it affects your relationship or in relationships with people around you. I had one client who used to lovingly call them her fire breathing dragon. And as we work together, those dragon days, as she called them, went away. That doesn't have to be your experience with your period. You don't have to be like bedridden for two days. Miss work, miss life, like you're already scheduling around the fact that your cycle is taking you out of your life for however many days every. What if you were just carving out that time to care for yourself and put resources into that checking account instead? So yes, in some ways I guess your body is still calling the shots, but instead you're doing it from a self care, self love kind of way. Instead of I'm at the mercy of these symptoms that are going to knock me down and out. When we move through the world, that way we can tell when we're fertile, our libido will naturally rise. You will start to secrete a different type of moisture and you'll know what you're looking for. You'll know that you can only get pregnant seven to eight days out of the month. That's. That is it. I'm gonna say that again. You have one week out of the month folks that you can get pregnant. That is it. And the reason for that is you are acidic and sperm is alkaline, and you are a sperm killing machine most of the month. The change in that mucus that I was talking about actually is a signal that your body is coming out of being in an acidic place into a more alkaline place so it doesn't kill the sperm. And that mucus also keeps the sperm alive until ovulation happens. Sperm can live in your body up to five days because it's waiting for the. So if we know that and then the egg is viable for 24 hours, it, your window slams shut. At the end of that, you go back to not having that fertile mucus anymore and being acidic and sperm can't survive in that. Really and truly, if you know your body, what it's telling you, and you are supporting all of the phases of the cycle in an appropriate way, you know when you can get pregnant and when you can't, and then you can take steps accordingly, depending on your goals. And I know that sounds very cut and dry and basic, but it really should be that basic because this is what we should have been taught when we were. We should have been taught this stuff at the beginning and it breaks my heart that we weren't, but that changes. Now. What's going on at a government level is forcing that conversation. Everyone, regardless of what their biological parts are, should be. Of how this works for themselves and for their partners, because it helps you be a more understanding partner. It helps you support the health of your partner so you both can thrive. Male bodies go through hormonal changes too, as they go through their eight year cycles. So I'm speaking Chinese medicine now, right? So men move through the world in eight year cycles. They have hormonal transitions in eight year cycles. Women do it in seven year cycles. Okay. And understanding of one another that we are going to hit hormonal shifts and they're gonna be in slightly different places. It allows for more appropriate communication. It allows for you to hold space for your partner. There's plenty of memes out there about, Gladys lay down on the front steps because your next hot flash will melt the ice off the front steps. We joke about stuff like this, but. Men go through their own transition too. It's called Andrew Pause. And let me tell you, there are a lot of people who are later on in their lives really having communication struggles because nobody's ever talked about that with them. And it's not that they don't love the person, but they don't understand why this person is acting differe. It has to do with hormones. We are guided through our life's journey by hormones and hormone transitions happening at certain times, and that does affect our communication and our behavior and the way our bodies show up in the world, whether we like it or not. So if we have an understanding, Of what each other is going through. It helps you to hold space for your partner. It improves your communication. It helps you to support them in the ways that they need. Because people don't go around looking for fights, not generally, and when they're in a romantic relationship, they want to be in an understanding partnership. That's the goal. And it's hard to do that and be that and have that if somebody's going through a life transition and the other person is being retaliatory because they don't understand. They just think this person's being mean to them. But it might be that everything just feels really awful in the body of the person who is perceived as being retaliatory. Maybe that's not the case. Maybe they're just so inward and they feel so yucky inside, but if their partner goes, Hey, like I, I see that this is what's happening. Is there a way that I can support you? How can I love you best? That totally changes the conversation. And I've had lots of conversations with women who have done the menopausal transition and then they're with their partner who's starting to the Interposal transition and they're like, I don't know who this person is, Why is it that? Like we used to be able to talk about everything and now they bite my head off all the time this doesn't feel good at all. And when we talk about the fact that these hormone transitions happen, it totally changes the. It allows that partner to step in and support the person they love in a more meaningful way. So all of this is to say body literacy is fucking important. It is so important in our interpersonal relationships, in our relationships with self. Because I know I used to be a product of the system where I believed falsely and my dad that I could work like a man. And because I can do as much as a man, just putting that out there. But I was literally killing myself. My cycles kept getting shorter and shorter. They became more erratic. I had more and more symptoms because I was not allowing myself to rest when I needed to so that I could put the pedal to the metal when I could. And so not being understanding of that. I became sicker and sicker as a person. My relationship with myself suffered because I spent a lot of time, and the person inside of your head, that little self critic that lives inside of your head, is the loudest voice you listen to because you are stuck in your head with that person. And I kept telling myself, Come on, suck it up. Adrian. You're tired, but you can push through this. Suck it up buttercup. There's no, no reason to be lazy. Like I was raised with this. You work hard and you're defined by working hard kind of mentality, and I know that there's a lot of us out there, but the issue. That it was affecting my health. And so not only was I trash talking myself inside my head because I'm like, I should be able to do this. Why do I feel so tired? I'm being lazy because I'm tired. Get moving Adrian. And because I kept telling myself all of this garbage. I really internalized that message for myself. So not only was I experiencing this body function, which started to feel more and more like my body was betraying me, but then I was talking shit inside of my head at the same time. I am not alone in that. There are so many of us that really have this feeling ingrained inside of us that. There's something wrong with us if we can't be 500 miles an hour all the fucking time, and it's not sustainable. It is not realistic. And the older that we get, once we cross that 35 threshold, man, we have to protect ourt. We have to balance periods of busy with periods of rest and I don't know any of you that are listening that have come through that 35 transition, but it is rude, It is rude because all of a sudden it is very apparent that you can't go like a house of fire anymore and you have to slow down. You have to pace yourself. And I now have to balance extremely busy periods. A day to three days to recharge my battery before I can, go really hard again, and that is normal. But if you're not aware of that, this is where when people get to perimenopause, they're like, am I going through perimenopause? Am I having psycho problems? What is going on here? And it's because they're in that zone where they need to balance go hard and rest in a much more intentional way. And their body is telling them that, but they're trying to ignore the message because culturally, We either haven't been taught it or we haven't created it as a socially acceptable experience. And that's a narrative that I want to displace, get rid of, make people mindful of, because it affects your health and how your body shows up for you. And without your health, you don't have. There is nothing that makes me angrier than when I get a little bit sick because slowing down makes me crazy and it disrupts my cadence in terms of I plan my work around my cycle when I am articulate. I am recording podcasts for lovely people like you. When I am not articulate, I spend that time writing. I spend that time doing more. Introspective introverted type of work because that's biochemically how I am programmed. I am running a business and can still do that very successfully because I'm working with the natural flow of my hormones instead of against them. I don't get sick nearly as often. I am a person with endometriosis and celiac disease who has a 28 to 30 day. It is possible. I used to, my endo symptoms used to freaking wipe me out and I used to feel like I was dying and Alien was going to emerge from my low belly when my period came, just before my period came trying to have a bowel movement. Like any of those things, like I used to just be absolutely cripp. with the pain and it started like right out of the gate once I started menstruating, and that is not my experience anymore. Because I manage the way that I spend my checking account in an appropriate way with how my body flows through the month. I know when I'm fertile. I know when I'm not. I can plan around that for fertility purposes or to protect myself from getting pregnant. That's power. That's power over your body sovereignty. That is power over the trajectory of your life that is meaningful. And I really hope that this has inspired you to maybe question some of the things that you were taught growing up. Do a deeper dive into some of the things that you thought you. I invite you to check out not your mama's menstrual course. If you are thinking about fertility, empowered fertility has a part for the male partner and the female partner, because I think you're gonna find some gens in there that are gonna make you really question what you've been taught, what you thought you knew. At the very least, you'll be able to pull some tools out of it. You can start using today to move you in the direction of whatever your goals are and protect you and help you maintain your body sovereignty. Thank you for joining me for another episode of Reproductive Rebel Reproductive. Rebel is recorded by certified per steam hydrotherapist, herbalist, sound healer, and Chinese nutritional therapist, Adrian Irizari of Moon Essence, llc. If you are interested in setting up an appointment with Adrian for one-on-one support, ordering from our store or checking out our course offerings, visit our website at Moon essence dot. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter to get insider information on upcoming events and offerings. 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