Ep.13 with Ruby May - My Nervous System needs Pleasure
What happens when the practice that taught you to trust your body turns out to be the one thing your body takes away?
Before most of her friends had bled, Ruby May was already fascinated by the thing nobody in her house would name. That thread ran for decades. A yoga teacher in her twenties who did not yet know how far she lived from her own body. Then seven years of charting a single cycle, day by day, on paper, until she could read herself the way you read weather.
Two and a half years ago it stopped. Not quietly. Three weeks of bleeding, nearly a hospital, and then the map she had spent a decade learning was simply gone.
This is a conversation about what a woman does when the territory she was walking disappears, and about the world she is trying to feel her way through - a world with good language for emotion and nowhere to put any of it. Rage with no schedule to appear in. Community that stops being agreeable. And the question she has started asking herself instead, which is harder than the one she began with.
Storykeeper: Ruby May is a mentor, facilitator and writer, and a devoted student of the Feminine, having been initiated into embodied feminine spirituality through her own body and menstruality practice. Among those things, she serves as community lead for the alumni of Red School, a global school of embodied feminine spirituality.
Connect with Ruby: https://rubymay.co/ | Substack: https://rubymay.substack.com/ | IG: @.ruby.may.
Resources mentioned:
- Red School, and Wild Power - Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer: https://www.redschool.net/
- Book: The map of the inner seasons, and the practice of cycle tracking on Amazon
- Article: Yang is the midwife, Yin is the mother - Ruby's Substack essay, June 2026
Chapters:
(0:00) Welcome · (4:20) There's gold in here · (12:41) A threshold you cross · (18:54) Just do it, and you'll activate something · (30:42) What does healthy rage look like · (40:03) I wish it was just a given · (57:11) Yang is midwife and Yin is the mother · (1:04:13) A Sicilian ice cream, ten minutes from the door
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Anna Teresa is an anthropologist, experience designer, somatic trauma-informed facilitator, and storykeeper based in Geneva, Switzerland. She works with women leaders navigating the midlife crunch — supporting them back into the intelligence of their bodies, their cycles, and their stories. YINtentions is where those stories are held.
Related Course + Workshops at Yin Rhythms
- Womb Shakti - 8 week course on conscious presence in your own body, and the discovery of your inner pleasure. (in Polish & in English)
- Fire Festival, Samhain - seasonal celebration of the changing of seasons, online for women-only
- Rhythmic Movement - library of practices to deepen the experience with and in your body, just as she is. Coming Soon
- YINtentions Field Notes - Cyclical newsletter decoding the tensions and intentions that live in our body.
