Welcome
With me, you'll find the body education you never got and absolutely deserve—better late than never. FACT: You don't need a medical degree to understand the daily happenings within your own body. I offer down-to-earth guidance for women ready to take control of their fertility and understand their natural, cyclical rhythms. Through my one-on-one consultations and small group classes, we’ll move beyond the basics you learned in school and into real, empowering body confidence.
Charting your menstrual cycles is one of the best methods to getting there. Want to learn how? Apply for my course.
Do you already chart but want to learn how to interpret this valuable information for your benefit? Let's meet!
some quick definitions to help you navigate...
Menstrual Cycle
"Menstrual" is derived from the Latin word mensis, meaning "month," and a cycle is something that repeats itself in a predictable way.
MENSTRUAL CYCLE refers to the nearly monthly pattern experienced by healthy women in their childbearing years: they'll bleed for 2 to 7 days, experience a few days of vibrant and flirtatious energy, ovulate, and then spend around two weeks making internal preparations for a potential pregnancy. When the body recognizes that a pregnancy has not occurred, it will signal the uterine lining to shed and the cycle begins anew.
Cycle Mapping
Cycle Mapping is a charting method taught by graduates of The Well: School of Body Literacy, an AFAP-accredited school. (You can read about AFAP here.)
Educators like me trained to teach Cycle Mapping​ demonstrate the following:
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in-depth understanding of a range of reproductive stages
client-centered care that recognizes principles of reproductive justice
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an ability to interpret the menstrual cycle chart as it relates to overall health
Period, AKA Menses
A period, or menses (a woman's "monthly"), includes all the days at the beginning of a cycle when a woman releases blood through the vagina. For healthy women, this should occur about every month and should last for 2 to 7 days. For women with a deficiency or excess or illness, menses can be absent, infrequent, extremely light, extremely heavy, or painful.
Our periods give us great insight into our overall health. If your periods are too short, too long, too heavy, or too light, this signifies a problem occurring in upstream systems or physiology.
Body Literacy
Body Literacy is a knowledge of the body and how it works, combined with a somatic understanding of the self through personal observation and learning. In other words, if you have some basic physiology and anatomy down, you can use that knowledge to understand your unique body better.
For example,
body literacy enables you to use Cycle Mapping for purposes like achieving a pregnancy, avoiding pregnancy while being sexually active, and eating a diet or exercising in a way that suits your needs and goals.
Cycle Charting
Cycle charting can be accomplished in many different ways, but what unites all cycle charting methods is an unveiling of overall health through daily observations of our body's unique responses.
You may use an app to chart, but I can only recommend one app that actually fulfills the amazing potential of cycle charting: Read Your Body.
If you're an old-fashioned soul and want to chart on paper like me, you can access Cycle Mapping charts by taking my course. For free charts from one of the founders of cycle charting, check out
Fertility Awareness
Fertility Awareness is like body literacy, but the focus is reproductive. We use the physiology and reactions of our physical fertility in order to understand and nurture our bodies better.
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Fertility Awareness can be applied through a method, like Cycle Mapping, or one of many other Fertility Awareness Based Methods (FABMs), to achieve personal reproductive goals, such as improving hormonal harmony, monitoring stress and immune function, getting pregnant, avoiding pregnancy, and preparing for a healthy pregnancy.