Welcome to the Carolina Sotomayor Podcast! In this episode, host Carolina Sotomayor sits down with Sarah Byrne, a menstrual cycle coach. Together they explore the importance of paying attention to your menstrual cycle.

The conversation starts with a discussion of what menstrual cycle awareness is and how it can benefit women. Sarah explains why it’s important to track your cycle and become familiar with the unique patterns and changes that occur throughout the month. Carolina and Sarah delve into the four distinct phases of the menstrual cycle and how understanding each one can lead to greater self-awareness, productivity, and overall well-being.

Join Carolina and Sarah as they dive deep into the world of menstrual cycle awareness and uncover the many benefits of paying attention to your body’s natural rhythms. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or just starting out on your menstrual journey, this episode has something for everyone.

What you’ll learn:
2:19 Know more about Sarah
3:13 Why Sarah does do the work she does
6:20 What menstrual awareness is?
7:50 Why you should pay attention to your cycle
11:45 4 phases of the menstrual cycle

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Professional bio
The Carolina Sotomayor Podcast is brought to you by Carolina Sotomayor and the Fertility Foundation.

Carolina Sotomayor is an Expert Womb Healer who helps women conceive by removing physiological blockages with Reiki. She is the host of the Carolina Sotomayor Podcast, a show that covers everything from fertility to postpartum to motherhood, and the creator of Fertility Foundation Collective, an online membership that helps women heal at their own pace to boost their fertility.

Carolina has served over 500 women from around the world to heal. She is passionate about helping women create their families. As a result, there are over 60 reiki babies in the world.

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Podcast Episode Transcript

Hi, I’m Carolina, your podcast host and expert wound healer. Over the past five years, I’ve served over 500 women to remove physical blockages in their bodies. We achieve this with Reiki. I believe healing doesn’t have to be done alone, nor should it be. We will hear stories of healing methods to heal with and guest speakers covering taboo topics you won’t hear anywhere else.

Let’s continue this journey of wound healing together.

Hello, LAAS. It’s me. I’m back. Welcome to another episode of the Carolina soor Podcast In today, you’re not going to wanna skip forward or miss out on this, why you should pay attention to your menstrual cycle. Ladies, what do you need to pay attention to with your periods with Sarah Burn? And we are so excited that your hair is Sarah.

Thank you for coming and. First of all, I’m obsessed with your energy. I want to bottle it up, and I want to keep you forever, your whole mood and a vibe. So thank you for coming here and being here and sharing your knowledge. I am so jazzed. Oh, thank you so much for having me. I think it’s pretty standard manifesting generator energy like.

I am a projector, so bring all the human designer shit. I am a self projected projector and I only have one friend that’s into human design, and we parent according to human design. It’s, and my son is the exact copy of my human design. Oh, wow. Well, as my, you know, surface level, he’s the same self projected projector.

I haven’t gone into all his gates and stuff, but like of course I think expect those to be different. But he mirrors me so much and once I decided to, I don’t even know his zodiac, but. Once I decided to look that up, he changed everything in our relationship. So I have to make sure he has an invested interest, like what’s in this for me because that’s, you know, and sleep is so important.

So, okay, tangents are real here. Let’s talk about our fucking periods. So Sarah, tell me a little bit about yourself. What do you do with periods? Who are you? Where are you in the world? Tell us your four 11. Yeah, so I basically guide women or educate women on this super central part of their life that we are never educated on.

So I guide them to create massive change by sinking their energy and their cycles. There is so much that you can learn and glean from your menstrual cycle if you just take the time to pay attention. So I am originally from Louisiana, but I have lived out of. The United States since 2005 and have been living in England since 2008, so a very long time.

Oh, cuz you’ve an English accent. I do. So again, I think that’s like the Open G Center in the human design, like. Changing and also equally, I pick up accents so quickly. I worked with a girl, so I lived in Japan before here. Really? I worked with a girl from Melbourne and I had her accent within three weeks of working together with her, like it’s pretty insane.

Oh my God. That just made me fall in love with you a little bit more

Why do you do this? Like why do you do the work that you do? Because I’m a pissed off female. No . I’m, I’m here for it. Be writing Dawn. Yeah. So I channel that. Yeah. I always have always suffered with really horrible menstrual cycles. I’ve had really bad cramps to the point where I’m throwing up. I always had like migraines around my cycle or around my bleed, and.

Birth control and coils just made me bat shit crazy for a lack of a better term. It made me insane, and so I knew, like I got so frustrated about. two or three years after my daughter was born, so she’s 11 now. I got so annoyed and pissed off at the fact that I couldn’t find something that I was told should be really easy.

I couldn’t find the birth control or that method that worked for me. It gave me all the side effects, and I just. Said, enough is enough. I’m done. Like I’ve never dealt very well with this kind of stuff. I’m just, I’m finished. And so I went home and I googled the shit out of it. and discovered menstrual cycle awareness.

And in true one line and line three as well, in true one line fashion, I learned all I could about it. So I deep dove into hormones and women’s health and menstrual cycle awareness, and I trialed an error. So much, and also trial and error with talking to other females about it. So it’s, it’s like my jam, my jive.

I love it. I can tell you all about your cycle. In like 15 minutes and you get it and you’re like, oh my God, that makes so much sense. How have I never known this? And also, I have a daughter and I do not want her to grow up with the negative connotations and the shame and the stigma and the taboo and the grossness, and the disgustingness and all of this that I grew up with from a kid in the south.

I don’t want her growing up with that. So I’m here to change that narrative. I am so grateful for you. The world needs this information and the world needs this information so that they can move forward and that they can feel empowered. And I have found through interviews how truly little I know about our period cycles and my biggest thing.

Providing that to women so they can make decisions like there’s so much information you can find about your overall health from your period. Okay, so can we start, can we back it up? Let’s back that train up. . Can you tell me what the menstrual awareness is like? What exactly is that? What’s the definition of that?

I mean, there’s probably a formal definition that the red school. Like gave, so the Red School is a period menstrual company here. They are in the States, but they are based, they were two, I wanna say one was English, one was South African. Anyway, two ladies that live in the uk, they wrote Wild Power and they also wrote that new menopause book, which I don’t have, but I’m not quite sure what it’s called.

But it’s Alexandra. Uh, Pope and Shani, Hugo Wurlitzer, they’re the authors. And my definition, which I think is just easy, is it’s just paying attention to your body. Like menstrual cycle awareness is simply that. It is awareness of your menstrual cycle, and your menstrual cycle is such an integral part of your life as a woman that just by taking five minutes every morning and putting your hand on your heart and asking yourself, Three simple questions.

Four simple questions. That is practicing menstrual cycle awareness. It’s not like this huge ritual that you’ve gotta do when go dance around a tree naked and pour out your menstrual blood. It’s none of that kind of stuff. It is simply the act of paying attention to your body and to yourself and to your menstrual cycle.

And that’s pretty much, that’s my definition. I love that. So we’ve touched upon this a little bit already of why you should pay attention to your cycle. So you’re saying that menstrual cycle, just so that I’m listening to you and I’m internalizing this, so you’re saying menstrual cycle awareness is much more than your temperature and the actual we that you menstruate.

It’s more also about your emotions and connecting to your body. Yeah. It’s a lifestyle, right? So, gotcha. I mean, touching on tracking, like taking your basal body temperature. A lot of women don’t come to that until they’re trying to conceive, have a baby. Yep. Yeah. And most women won’t come to a menstrual cycle awareness practice unless they’re trying to conceive and they’re struggling, or they have really bad periods, or they don’t do really well on birth control, or they just wanna do something a little bit more natural.

Right, right. So, They’ve heard me on my soapbox or whatever. So there is so much involved with your gut health and your mental state and how you feel physically and that energy, it’s all wrapped up in your menstrual cycle. There will be days in your cycle where you are like flying high, like this is amazing.

You can get so much work done. And then there are some days particularly around your bleed where you were literally crawling on the floor going, oh my God, where is the energy? Mm-hmm. . And that is normal. That is your ebbs and your flows. And we are not men who are s. You know, linear when it comes to their energy cycles, our cycles, well they don’t actually have c, well I guess they do, but they’re 24 hours cycle, isn’t their cycles a 24 hour cycle?

Yeah, it’s 24 hours and hours and hours is 28 to 30, if not more days. Yeah. So I wanna touch upon something that’s that I think that wasn’t in our notes, but I think it’s gonna be really. Really like an eye-opener cuz I, it just occurred to me is that a lot of women know when they think about menstrual cycle, they only think about the time when they’re bleeding.

That the menstrual cycle is the full multi-day, meaning like 28 to 32 is typically what people should be experiencing for a normal reoccurring. Healthy period. Your cycle is that timeframe. Week 1, 2, 3, 4. And we’re gonna dive into that next as like there are actual phases to your cycle. And I think when I talk to women, just as a consensus of my containers, there is this unspoken understanding or this unspoken belief that your menstrual cycles only when you’re, you have, when you’re bleeding.

And I think that that is something like, okay, as women we need to understand like our bleeding is one phase, is one part is one segment. Whatever word resonates for you. It’s just one portion of the full circle of your cycle. There’s three other parts to that cycle. and it’s not when you just bleed, that’s not your cycle.

It’s part of it. We’re talking about your entire existence is your menstrual cycle. Just all clicked for me, like the collection of like what I know, what conversations my audience and my containers are having and my client and versus like, okay, so this is a very much unspoken belief definition. That’s like an understanding.

I think that is very. Common across many, many cultures is like, oh, your menstrual cycle. Oh, that’s when I bleed. No, no, no, no, no, no. Your period, that’s when you bleed. But your menstrual cycle is, is this extended period of time that should be regular, and what is it telling us? And if it’s irregular, that’s also telling us something.

So can you dive into the four phases of our menstrual? Yes, so I call them the seasons. So this is, I love that so much terminology from the red school and if nothing else, like it makes sense, right? The seasons happen outside. You can take the cues from what’s going on outside and kind of figure out what your body is going through inside.

So they will call them like the inner autumn, or the inner winter, or the inner spring, that kind of thing. I just go with winter, spring, summer, autumn slash fall, depending on where you live. So winter is your bleed. Okay? So that’s from day one of your bleed until you finish. So typically five to seven days, right?

So day one of your bleed. , what do they do in the winter? Like what do the bears do? What does everything do You wanna hide, lay in bed and hibernate. Exactly. You wanna be warm, you wanna be snugly, you wanna be cozy, right? So that is what you wanna do in the winter. Now, obviously, if you wanna go run a half marathon, do it, mate.

That is fine. Like I am not telling you that you cannot do it. Lots of people are going to choose not to do it, but if you want to, fine. I like to rest. I like to have a hot water bottle. You know, those kinds of things. If I have to go into school, so I, I work in a primary school. If I have to go into there, I make sure that my clothes are a little bit looser, cuz you might find that you’re a little bit more bloated or you’ve got cramps, whatever.

After that, you move into your next season, which is spring. Now, I always. Like to make sure that people recognize that when you move from winter to spring, you are like the butterfly that is erupting from, is it the chrysalis? You know, you’re the caterpillar that went in and became a butterfly. So you wanna go softly, softly.

You could run straight out the gate like, you know, you’re a race horse at a, at a a race, you’re a horse at a race. You know, like out the gate. But you’re not gonna wanna do that because what you do in these seasons will affect your next bleed, your next winter. So you will want to have, you do have more energy, your hormones are rising, of course you’re gonna have more energy, but go slowly, go steady and don’t burn the candle at both ends, even though you could, you will have more energy at this point.

You then move in. To your ovulation. Now, this is where the tracking of your temperature really comes in because you don’t really know if you’ve hit ovulation unless you’ve tracked. your temperature, right? So that fertility awareness method or whatever method you want to follow, there’s so many. This is the Vava VM period.

What do you want to do in the spring? From the summer? I didn’t talk about the spring, but in the spring, going back just a little bit, you imagine the flowers are emerging, everything’s coming out of hybrid, starting to grow green. Everything’s. Yeah, exactly. Kind of like Bambi, right? Coming out like on those, you know, tendered little legs, trying to talk grass, starting to turn green from brown.

Yeah. They’re starting to be little buds of flowers. Exactly. So that is what you are, that’s where you’re emulating in your spring. Now, in your summer is the vava vu, right? So ovulation wanna make a baby. You might not wanna make a baby, but your body wants to make a baby. So what do you think? Happens when you want to be out.

You want to be social, you’ll put more makeup on, you’ll wanna get dressed up, you will want to be social. So these are times, and you’ll probably feel more turned on, right? Like if your body is wanting to create a baby or wants you to get pregnant, or wants you to have that, you know, sex effectively, you have to.

Or if you just want more pleasure. or you just want more pleasure, right? So this is a really great time. There’s that too. Self-pleasure is huge. Hello. So this is a real great time to play around with that, right? You don’t have to have a partner. No. And then we move into autumn or fall, and this is the longest period before you get to your winter again, or your bleed and your hormones are starting to.

They, so they’ve dropped a little after ovulation, they pick back up, and then depending on whether or not you have fertilized the egg, you’ll start to notice the ebbs and flows of this season. Now, this is a season where you are wanting to get things done right? Your idea is to get ready for your next.

Winter your hibernation. So what do the animals do in the autumn slash fall? They start to squirrel away all of their nuts, and they get their caves ready and all of that sort of stuff. So that might look like prepping food, asking for help. Tidying up loose ends at work, right? If you wanna declutter, declutter in your autumn, it is a fantastic time.

I’ve literally been going through, I’m in my autumn at the moment. I’ve literally been going through my downloads on my laptop and just getting read of so much stuff. Like if I’ve not looked at it since 2019, it’s gone. I don’t even care what it is. It’s gone. And it’s a great time to just Marie canto your house.

Like just do it and then you start to move back into your winter. So it’s pretty simple. Look out at the seasons, look in your own body and where those energy cycles are. and you can kind of tell when you’re gonna have more energy versus when you’re going to be lower energy. Right? Oh my God, I’m gonna use this in my marriage.

My husband’s . Yeah. My husband has taken charge of the household chores. When we first got married, I had the misconception. I was very well programmed, Latina, you take like my, I was raised by my dad in the latter part of my teen years, and he raised me to think like a man. But you also have to be a good wife.

So I was very masculine and I also was feminine, but like I led with my masculine, like, I need to be the breadwinner. I need to provide, da, da, da, da. But I also thought for me to be a good wife, I had to lay out his clothes. Like let literally lay out his clothes, cook clean work, and I made more money. Like I did everything because I thought that’s what I was supposed to do.

And then one day I broke and then I. Fuck this shit, and I’m such a progressive female, and I was like, why the fuck am I doing this? So lately when I left corporate and I leaned into entrepreneur life, he’s taken on this household stuff, but recently he’s developed like a strategy. So he, he has been assigning like big projects to me, but it makes sense that my cycle doesn’t allow.

I was like, I can’t do that right now. I don’t have capacity. So I actually can tell him, Hey, these projects you can schedule them in during this time. My husband’s probably gonna send you a personal thank you notes. And it’s like say like, because we’re all about expectations, level me up as to like, when can this get done for you?

Like, where do, where can you do this for our household? I think that’s a game changer. And also like knowing like if you have like certain goals in your marriage, like our goals are like, We want to have the most minimalist house cuz we’re just tired of clutter. So like, and we go through cycles and two years of consuming clutter before we were very lean.

So it’s time to be lean again. I think that this is really phenomenal cuz like, oh man, I don’t track my cycle at all. . So, So like I’m going to start doing that now cuz I, I think I’m probably in the ovulation. I’m in summer right now, probably. So I think that’s really important to think about is like, oh, how does this apply to my life?

Is like, well my husband, he’s on this kick of like, how can we partner together? And he’s leading this front and he has these massive projects for me to do. I can say like, well, the 17th through the 24th. This is the season that I’m gonna really be able to move some mountains for you. And that’s the beauty.

Think. Think that’s really cool. It’s you. And obviously life happens. You get stressed, your cycle gets a little bit out of whack. Fine. But the majority of the time you can start to plan your life around this. And I think it’s worth noting if we don’t need, it’s super powerful. Or you are on some sort of hormonal birth control.

So if you’re on hormonal birth control, that bleeds that you have at the end is not a true period. It’s a pill withdrawal bleed. So it’s not an actual cycle because your lining hasn’t actually been created in your unit. So how does a person address that then? Because I, the number one thing that I work with is women with P C O S.

Yeah, so you would use the moon cycles, right? So ovulation is when the full moon happens cuz we all get a little bit crazy and then your bleed would be when the new moon was happening. So you would just start to track it from that perspective. And the more you track, I say 30, 30 days, not 30 days, three months or 90 days.

You start to get a pattern, you start to see, oh, well on day 17 I always get a little bit more spicy. Right. And so you can guess that that’s around your ovulation time. Yeah. And whether it correlates. To the full moon or not, it doesn’t really matter. But if you don’t bleed or you have a pill bleed, you can use the moons to start to track.

And once you’ve tracked enough and you can understand those cues and that intuition of your body, you can start to see the seasons emerging. So if you don’t have a period, start to pay attention to some other bodily signs from your womb that are indicating. Maybe starters of these seasons or so you can start to see when, like what are those observations?

So. So what you’re saying is when we’re horny, yeah. That could be our summer. Yeah, I like that. Pretty much. So. Pretty much. Pretty much. That’s it. Baba boom. When you were saying baba boom, I was like, yeah, I also do that one. . So I love all of this. Can I ask you an unscripted question? Of course. All the questions sacral.

Responder. Ask me the questions. I’m dying over here, . Oh my gosh. Talk to me about human design in your period. Ooh, so I don’t dive that much in, I’m still in that trial and error phase, but I think that there is a huge correlation between our rest tactics and how much we rest and how we rest on our cycle or during our cycle, and especially in our winter.

And our human design. So whether you’re a projector or a reflector or a manifesting generator or a manifestor or a generator. So my hypothesis is that many gens are manifesting generators, and generators will struggle a lot to rest because we naturally have so much energy, like all time energy isn’t met.

My husband, he’s a mini fan, Energizer. Energize Energizer Bunny like constantly, and my daughter is a generator and she’s the same. Whereas I think projectors, reflectors, even manifestors to a certain extent, may find that they have well, projectors and reflectors, definitely find rest a lot easier manifesting generators.

I guess it depends on where they are in their wave, whether they would find it easy or difficult to rest. I think there’s a lot. I think there’s a lot with human design that we can dive into. I was following someone on Instagram and she was talking about, I think it was the sacl and the root and the connection with carbohydrates, fats and protein, and how we process these certain types of well macronutrients effectively.

So there’s so much in human design. There’s so much with human design, it’s just phenomenal. I have really decided I’m a projector. And for anyone that doesn’t know much about human designs, human design projectors, that’s just the energy type. There’s five energy types. Projectors require a lot of rest.

They’re only supposed to be, depending on who you ask the range from, from all the people I’ve consulted, and God knows, I’ve gotten a lot of chart readings between two and four hours of output a day. Ideally probably between two and three, and then. On average, that projector person is sleeping 10 hours a night for them to be their happiest self.

They also are the type of person that can fall asleep very easily and take naps, like naps are their love language. That’s not really an official love language, but it is mine. So for me, I require a lot of rest. I also have reprogrammed my beliefs around rest. Done a lot of inner working. The more rest I have, the happier my family is.

The more rest and the more I sleep, the more money I make. Things like that. So I feel like there is a lot of opportunity to. With your period and also the Sacred Plexus Chakra, understanding around emotions, worthiness, relationships, creativity, passion, worthiness of passion and pleasure that is so intertwined with human design, but also just like the biggest takeaway.

If you could do anything, just understand that there are four parts of your cycle. Understand. Start to observe yourself and your tendencies and patterns in each of those cycles, and then you can start to design your life and make decisions that are best for you based upon those patterns you observe in your own cycle.

Your period is just not when you bleed, so it’s so powerful. Everything in our wombs, our vaginas. You know, it’s not about just birthing babies. It’s about being your healthiest self and understanding that there’s so much to be found out from your womb, and we’re also unique. And so how do you know that what you’re going through is only you?

If you don’t talk about it, find me. I, I will happily talk about your period challenges till I’m blue in the face. I love it. But a lot of women have shame around their periods and their challenges, and they won’t talk about it. talk about it with your other female friends. They will happily, I’m guessing they will listen and you can talk about it because they are going through it too.

You don’t have to go through, your challenges are even figuring it out, like you don’t have to go through it alone. And women we need are villages again, and we don’t have them. And being able to connect to your cycle is an integral part of recreating that village. And if you don’t have besties for the Rusties, you can DM me or Sarah on Instagram.

We wanna hear your voice. We wanna know what you thought about this episode. Sarah, can you tell the world how they can reach out to you and how they can work with you? Yeah, so I am over on Instagram at I Am Sarah Burn. And you can DM me on there and we can chat until your heart’s content. I’m also over on the internet at Sarah Burn Wellness dot.

Com. Um, yeah, and that’s pretty much it. I’ve got a three month one-on-one program and I’ve got some other things in the pipeline as well, in particular with human design. So yeah, space, a human design fe keep us updated and we will want to share it with our audience. Sarah, thank you so much for being here.

You’re a gift to so many. I appreciate your time and again, have the best day. It was an honor to connect and serve you this week. If you were a spiritually curious person wanting to conceive, inhale blockages in your fertility, click the link in the episode description to learn more about the Fertility Foundation collective.

Until next time, my friend know you are love.